Join us Sisters as we go back to school — as adults. See you on the school bus! (Photos: Shutterstock)

I

was driving my daughter’s carpool of seventh and eighth graders and somebody mentioned Cleveland. Ooh… good time for some parent/student conversation:

“Okay girls what state isClevelandin?” “Uh…California?” “Oy. Let’s try an easier one: How about Los Angeles?”  “Uh…New York?”

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “What! Your parents pay thousands in tuition and you don’t know New York from California?” The rest of the ride became an entertaining geography lesson in US cities and states. I teased them they laughed at their ignorance (actually they reveled in it!) and they even learned a fact or two.

I tried to think back about a zillion years. Was I so geographically challenged at their age? Short answer: yes. Growing up in the cloistered shtetl of New York I thought of the Big Apple as the center of the universe. Little else existed out there. So how did I become such a geo-genius? How does anyone really learn about the world? Simple. By experiencing geography.

Take Delaware. Did I have any clue as to where it was located? Not until we moved to Maryland and had to drive through that tiny but traffic-congested state during our many trips to and from New York.

And Boca Raton? Who knew it even existed… until my son and his family moved there! And don’t even get me started onLas Vegas! When I was in Bais Yaakov sitting next to Chany in seventh grade did I in my wildest dreams imagine that someday we’d have grandchildren in the same classes in that rowdy city? (Don’t worry they live in the suburbs.) We’d probably never even heard of the place back then.

So what you ask? Does it really matter?

I get that. At heart I’m really a homebody. If I didn’t have to visit my family at the far reaches of the planet would I have been any worse off? If my job hadn’t schlepped me to dozens of cities across the US and Europe would I have known what I was missing? Would my life have been incomplete?

Well… yes. In the Talmud Yerushalmi (Kiddushin 4:12) the Sages state that a person will be judged in Shamayim for all the benefits of This World he did not enjoy.  Similarly the Midrash asks: How did the Avos come to recognize Hashem? The answer: By observing the world and nature they found the limitations of all the false gods of their times and came to recognize the true Creator.