Joy is a Boonshoft!

In honor of our guests from Dayton Ohio, I’d like to share a family travel life-hack that we learned from their town. Not sure this still works, but it certainly helped us for a few years visit many more museums and zoos and aquariums that we could otherwise afford.

Many of you know that we love a road-trip. It’s a more affordable way to travel as a larger family and you get to experience all types of stops and experiences and memories along the way. It makes the trip not only about the destination but about the journey itself. We’ve become quite adept at finding family-friendly and wallet-friendly random stops and activities, small detours along the way, where we can find lessons and connections, backstories and histories, or even just a good laugh. Many of them make for great photo-ops. Some of these end up being a bust (ask my kids about Whirligigs and the Rose Garden) but even that becomes a beloved memory.

Museums, zoos and aquariums are natural fits for our family. We love places like that. But doing a number of them can add up and be quite pricey. One year we discovered a hack. Most such institutions have something called “Reciprocal Membership”. Once you are a member of one – all institutions of the same genre (i.e. all children’s museums, or all science museums, or all zoos etc) will accept that other place’s membership for a free or reduced-fee entrance. To get the most our of that you’d need to be a member of multiple such institutions.

Then we discovered The Boonshoft. It’s a museum out in Dayton Ohio, a place we’ve never been, that has several components or sections. It has a children’s museum, it also has a science museum, it is also a small zoo, and also has a small aquarium. Eureka! All it takes is one $100 membership to the Boonshoft (which we purchased online) and presto – you now have free or reduced-fee access to all these types of museums and zoos!!

We joined the Boonshoft and enjoyed reciprocal membership entry in Rochester, Toronto, Detroit, and even here in Albany. Other cities, too. I kinda felt bad that we never made it to the Boonshoft itself. It didn’t feel right. But then our Israeli cousin ended up in Shriner’s Hospital in Cincinnati and we made a road trip to visit them. Dayton was right on the way, so we felt we had no choice but to stop there. And it turned out to be a wonderful, well-done museum that the kids really enjoyed.

So why is this a Simchat Torah Weekend message?

Spiritually, every mitzvah has its reciprocal, a cosmic effect that reaches far beyond that time and place. Each mitzvah has its own meaning, an individualized message, a specific spiritual effect.

But some mitzvahs are broader than that. They are not specific in nature and in message, instead they impact everything. Their effect is everywhere and in a great spectrum and variety of ways.

Joy is a Boonshoft! Happiness isn’t only a reciprocal with cosmic joy, but as the Baal Shem Tov teaches, joy uplifts and affects and changes everything.