This is the d’var Torah I delivered at Congregation Neveh Shalom on Saturday, August 29, 2026.
There’s something extraordinary about giving a child a book. You hand them a stack of paper covered in words and pictures, and somehow you also hand them a world. A book can become a memory, a question, an identity, even a piece of who that child eventually becomes. And the remarkable thing is, the person who gives the book may never know the impact it had.
When Dolly Parton departed our world this week, much was and will continue to be said about her music, her personality, and her enormous cultural legacy. But there’s another piece of her legacy that has had an unexpected and enormous impact on Jewish life. In 1995, inspired by her father, who could not read or write, Parton created the Imagination Library in her home county in Tennessee. The idea was wonderfully simple: every month, send a free book directly to young children, building not only literacy, but a culture of reading in their homes.
When Imagination Library spread to other parts of the country, it was a Jewish philanthropist by the name of Harold Grinspoon who helped bring it to Western Massachusetts. Years later, Harold was at Pesach seder with his family and saw the joy on his grandchildren’s faces when they were handed gifts for finding the afikomen: Jewish picture books. Harold then had a very Jewish thought: What if we did what Imagination Library does, but with Jewish picture books? What if Jewish stories simply showed up in Jewish homes? In 2005, that inspiration became PJ Library. What began with a few hundred families in Western Massachusetts has grown into a worldwide Jewish literacy program, sending books filled with Jewish stories, values, holidays, traditions, and questions into hundreds of thousands of homes in 40 countries and 7 languages.
In other words, Dolly Parton planted a seed. Harold Grinspoon recognized what might grow from it. And generations of Jewish children have been shaped by the fruit.
Which makes it particularly fitting that we read Parshat Ki Tavo this week.
As the Israelites prepare to enter the Promised Land, Moses gives them instructions for a future he himself will never experience. When they settle the land and bring their first fruits, they are commanded not simply to offer the fruit, but to tell the story: “Arami oved avi.” “My ancestor was a wandering Aramean.” They recount where they came from, what their ancestors endured, and how they arrived at this moment.
Notice what Torah asks them to bring: fruit and story. Judaism understands that neither is enough by itself. What sustains a people is not simply what we grow, build, or accumulate. We survive because we tell the next generation where they came from and invite them to see themselves inside the story.
There is a wonderful Talmudic story about Honi HaMe’agel, who sees an old man planting a carob tree that will not bear fruit for seventy years. Honi asks why he would plant something whose fruit he may never eat. The man responds that just as his ancestors planted for him, he plants for those who will come after him. In fact, there’s even a beautifully interpreted picture book version of this story in PJ Library’s lineup, written by Laurel Snyder called The Forever Garden.
This is Ki Tavo. And perhaps that is the unexpected connection between Imagination Library and PJ Library too. We rarely know which seeds will take root. A book mailed to a child in East Tennessee inspires a Jewish philanthropist in Massachusetts. A Jewish book arrives in a home, sparks a question at bedtime, becomes a family ritual, and perhaps decades later that child reads a Jewish story to a child of their own.
Our charge is to keep planting. Put the book in the child’s hands. Tell the family story. Sing the melody. Teach the blessing. Answer the question. Because Judaism has never survived merely by remembering the generations before us. Judaism survives when we give the next generation enough stories, enough roots, and enough imagination to write the next chapter themselves.
Rabbi Eve Posen 