Senior Gift from our PTA: "A Maimonides Reader"

One of my afternoon activities today is wrapping the gift from our PTA to the graduating high school seniors. We're giving them "A Maimonides Reader" by Rabbi Isadore Twersky ztz"l, which is an excellent and extremely lucid translation (to English) by Rabbi Twersky, of what he determined to be some of Rambam (Maimonides)'s most important works. (Rabbi Twersky was the son-in-law of our school's founder.)

At a shiur (lecture) given by our school's Rosh Yeshiva, he recommended this book so highly that I ordered a copy from Amazon that night. This book is worth owning for the introduction, alone. (By the way, Amazon ROCKS. They got me 45 copies in under two weeks, and the shipping was free because I use Amazon Prime.)

It's such a valuable book that I chose it, despite it only having a paperback edition available. It would have been nicer, I suppose, to have bought something in hardback as a gift to the seniors. I can only hope that if the spines crack over time, it will be from constant use.

For the attaching of the nameplates, I've fallen in love with my friend Martha's tape runner. This device has saved wear and tear on my fingernails and a ton of my time.

If I have any hope of finding the dining room table before dinner tonight, each book needs to have its personalized bookplate (with the graduate's name written in beautiful calligraphy by Unique Simchas) inserted, gift wrap applied, and name label attached to the outside of the gift, all while keeping the challah crumbs (and Gretta's curious fingers) away from them and alphabetical order maintained within the NEXT HOUR. OY.

All the best, (Shabbat Shalom!)
CLKL

(In the past couple of years, we've given the seniors Rabbi Shapiro's excellent bookon Rabbi Soloveitchik on Pesach, Sefirat HaOmer and Shavuot. Since it had been a couple of years of the same book, we decided to mix it up a bit with a new title. The amazon link says Rabbi J.J. Schacter is the author, but I think that's a misprint. Rabbi Schacter was the dean of the former Rav Soloveitchik institute, which was housed at our school and hosted (edited?) this series, but Rabbi Shapiro is the book's author.)