(Courtesy of Ramaz Upper School) This year, the Ramaz Upper School was excited to gift graduates with a book uniquely chosen for them. Below is the letter each of them received with their books:

Dear Seniors,

You are the inaugural recipients of what we hope will become a revered Ramaz tradition: “ספרים לבוגרים”/“Books for Graduates”—or, to alliteratively play with our two school languages, “Sefarim for Seniors,” “Books for Bogrim.”

As we send the Class of 2025 off into the wide world, the Upper School faculty wishes to gift each graduate with a most valuable piece of merchandise: a book. And not just any book, or a common book, but rather one specifically and uniquely chosen for the student by a teacher. This year’s “reading list” encompasses a range of genres and topics befitting the diversity of the class for which it has been prepared. From “The Physics of Wall Street” to “The Madwoman in the Rabbi’s Attic: Rereading the Women of the Talmud,” from “Growth Through Tehillim” and “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” to “Transit Maps of the World” and beyond—Judaica, fiction, feminism, business, sports, self-help, and design are all amply represented.

Books offer company; they provoke and inform, excite and comfort. And in tempestuous times like these, books furnish tried and true sustenance for the soul.

But books are also more than mere repositories of the stories and ideas of others. Books—physical books—are a key medium through which our very lives take shape. Parents and children bond over bedtime books, those subsequently read alone mark newfound independence and emerging individuality, and ones read together in class form and become centerpieces of community. Most especially, the Book of Books marks the link between us as Jews and the Holy One, Blessed be He, who chose us both to receive that book and to be its protagonists.

Frederick Douglass famously declared that “once you learn to read you will be forever free.” Provided, we might add, you continue to read. Rashi’s interpretation of the famous injunction from Pirkei Avot (1:6) “קנה לך חבר” (“acquire for yourself a friend”) is telling. He first assumes “friend” here refers to books, only afterward adding that it could refer to an actual person (haver mamash). And just as you are what you eat, so says the famous adage, we might just as well insist that you are what you read. So we should read widely, and for pleasure, but also wisely, pushing ourselves out of our comfort zones. That’s certainly our goal with “ספרים לבוגרים.”

And so, to each new Ramaz alum, we say:

Take your book with you: on your summer vacation, to Israel, to college, and beyond. Read it, treasure it, add it to your library, and ensure that that library—that is, the library that only you can compile—continues ever to grow, thereby ensuring that you, too, always grow.

May your book be but the first of many more to come.