How do you wake up in the morning? Rabbi Yosef Karo suggests in the Shulchan Aruch: "Be strong like a lion to stand up in the morning to serve your creator - you must wake up the dawn." Do you imagine yourself waking up like a lion? More like another animal? Or some other way? Why does it matter?

This Shabbat, we are launching a new learning theme with our Iyunim children: birkot hashachar, the very earliest blessings of our morning services (literally blessings of the dawn). Our children will begin their learning with the question: How do you know when night is over and morning has arrived? This new question links to their calendar explorations from before the break, when they were learning about the connections between our physical world, that they can notice with their senses, and our Jewish calendar - the phases of the moon giving us the months, the darkest part of the darkest month of the year giving us the chance to spread light through Hanukkah. In the weeks ahead, the Iyunim children will explore their own ideas about how they notice that it is morning, and they'll investigate the ideas of the Talmudic rabbis and their implications - maybe morning is when you can see the difference between blue and green, or between a dog and a wolf, or when you can recognize the face of a friend. As our children launch these explorations, we can wonder along with them: how do we discern that morning has arrived? And why does that matter to us?

We think that it matters how we enter our mornings, that the intentions we bring to the earliest part of our day have an impact on how we are in the world. And so we will invite our Iyunim children in this theme of birkot hashachar to pay attention to how they wake up in the morning, to the actions they take in the earliest part of the day. We will invite them to consider how they hope to greet the day. We will work with the children to create reminders around them, a practice of birkot hashachar, that help them enter their day to be the kind of people they want to be in the world.

At our faculty learning to prepare for this theme with our children, all of us said we wished that someone had taken us into the ideas of prayer and blessings this way - that birkot hashachar could really be about why it matters how we enter our day. Does this pique your curiosity too? Get you thinking about your own mornings? Watch for our children's invitations to you to explore along with them!