Six months before her bat mitzvah, my daughter asked me why she was doing this. Not defiantly. She wanted to know. I remember thinking it was the most Jewish question she could have asked.

The answer I gave her was a launching pad. My job was to give her enough that the foundation would hold. Enough tradition, enough ritual, enough debate, enough bagels. Then to let her take it wherever she wants, without my needing to control where.

What I didn’t say, because I hadn’t fully worked it out yet, is that it had always been in motion for me too. As a teenager I would have called it identity. At 25 I would have called it culture. Somewhere in my forties I started calling it “fabric,” and I keep finding it runs deeper than last time I checked. I’d been lending it out the whole time without calling it that: into a company, into a marriage, into two kids. I just hadn’t noticed where I learned it.

My grandfather grew up Jewish in South Africa, learned firsthand what antisemitism was at school, and spent his life lending his fabric out: dropping the racial barriers in his factory before the law required it, building a boarding school for Zulu kids, working quietly to bring adversaries to one table before the first free election. When I was 17 I ran a basketball camp at that school. It was my own launching pad. I didn’t trace the line from it to now until this year.

This past year, our children’s school finished something it had begun long before: its own definition of antisemitism. Two other parents and I were the bridge between the administration and the Jewish families. We didn’t write the words. We played Moses, carrying them back and forth, helping shape both sides, until they were adopted, taught, and published. Everything we continue to build there stands on it. It was the first time I lent my fabric out as a Jew, in public, on purpose.

The school’s definition of antisemitism was published weeks before Anya’s bat mitzvah. My grandfather died last June, and his yahrzeit fell that same week. His name was read here, the same day his great-granddaughter stood up on our bimah.

Her questioning had already taken her past Sara and me, to the rabbis, to her class, to BJ congregants. From the bimah she named her responsibilities here: to remember the stories, to bring warmth to whoever walks through our doors, to sing with the toddlers who will one day stand where she stood.

So that is how I am growing: from lending it out without noticing to lending it because I mean to. What I want this Elul is to keep going that way, further out than the definition took me, toward the coalition my grandfather built, Jews alongside other communities, for everyone’s benefit. And to be one of the people someone else’s kid finds when her asking takes her past her parents. To help her weave her fabric, and to keep quietly weaving mine.