Several years ago, while pregnant with my first child, I gave myself a project: I would assemble a cookbook of my grandmother’s recipes.
I gathered dishes I remembered from childhood, including Jewish holiday favorites that appeared on our family table year after year. I called relatives, compared memories, deciphered handwritten recipe cards, and tried to capture recipes my grandmother rarely made from precise instructions. Then I self-published the cookbook and distributed copies to my parents, siblings, aunt, uncle, and cousins.
I was thinking about the family I was about to begin. I wanted my children to have these recipes someday. But I also wanted our family to have a record of something we shared, an inheritance that could travel forward. I hope my two daughters will someday pass their copy to their children, my nieces and nephews will do the same, and another generation will inherit not only the recipes, but some sense of the family and traditions from which they came.
As I worked on the cookbook, I realized I was documenting much more than food. Each dish opened up memories of the people, traditions, conversations, and rituals surrounding it. The recipes were part of what my grandparents passed down to us. But so was everything that happened around the table. In many ways, that table was one of my first classrooms.
Jewish holidays in my childhood were full of rituals I came to understand gradually. There were familiar foods and prayers, people squeezing around the table, and stories retold often enough that everyone knew when to laugh. At Rosh Hashanah, there were apples and honey and the wish for a sweet new year.
No one announced that we were about to receive a lesson in Jewish tradition. We learned by participating. We tasted the food, heard the prayers, listened to the stories, and watched our parents and grandparents return to the same rituals year after year. Before we could explain why these traditions mattered, we knew they mattered because the people we loved made time for them and invited us to be a part of them.
And there was also what happened under the table. After dinner, while our parents and grandparents lingered over coffee and pastries, my siblings, cousins, and I gathered beneath the dining room table. We played, whispered, giggled, and tied the adults’ shoelaces together, waiting to see what would happen when someone tried to stand up.
But we also listened. Above us, the adults talked about family and work, but also politics, elections, and what was happening in the country and world. We caught fragments of conversations we did not yet fully understand. We heard people agree and disagree. We began to learn what the adults in our lives cared about, what questions they wrestled with, and how they made sense of the world.
Looking back, I see that the learning above and below the table was connected. In the same place where my grandparents taught us what it meant to inherit a religious and family tradition, they were giving us our earliest glimpse into what it meant to participate in a larger civic like.
None of it looked much like a lesson, and that was precisely the point. So much of what one generation passes to another happens through ordinary experiences: meals shared, stories repeated, questions asked, conversations overheard. Children learn what matters by noticing what the adults around them choose to remember, discuss, celebrate, question, and pass along. That is also how much of our earliest civic learning happens.
And, importantly, the exchange does not travel in only one direction. Children ask questions adults have stopped asking. Their curiosity can send parents and grandparents searching for answers themselves. Intergenerational learning is not simply knowledge transferred from old to young. At its best, it is a habit of learning together across generations.
That is why I keep returning to the cookbook, especially this Rosh Hashanah as my beloved grandmother, now 90, faces serious health challenges.
A recipe itself is an act of intergenerational learning. Someone teaching you how to make something. You learn it, perhaps change it, and eventually teach someone else. The recipe survives not because it sits untouched on a shelf, but because each generation picks it up, engages with it, and passes it along. Traditions work much the same way and so does civic life.
Now another generation is gathering around our family tables. My children and nieces and nephews are forming their own memories and asking their own questions. Someday, I hope our cookbooks travel another generation further, their pages stained from use, some recipes followed faithfully, others adapted, and perhaps new ones added alongside the old.
The most important thing my grandmother passed along, however, cannot be measured in teaspoons or cups. The essential ingredient running through every recipe is love: love of family expressed through gathering, feeding, teaching, and remembering, and love of learning, questioning, and exploring together.
Perhaps that is the most important lesson for intergenerational civic learning too. We do not teach children to value their traditions, communities, or country simply by telling them what they should know. We invite them into something we value. We make room for their questions. We explore alongside them. And eventually, we trust them to carry it forward.
That is how traditions endure. It is how families pass along what matters, and it is how each generation begins to find its place in our civic life.