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School: Jewish Day School of Metropolitan Seattle
Year of Graduation: 2012
How has your day school education shaped your life, values, and your involvement in the Jewish community?
When I look back at my day school time, I don’t think about it in the terms of education. While yes, I learned, and in the most technical sense it was an education, what I gained from day school was a holistic experience. In the same way that your parents do not educate you, JDS did not educate me. Rather, JDS instilled values in me, entrusted me with an agency to act, and sparked an interest in knowledge deep within my essence. Since I have left JDS, I can trace nearly every choice I have made to what I experienced there.
Traveling to China and exploring other cultures was a spark of curiosity and adventure that HaMorah Margret delivered in Humanities courses; serving in the IDF clearly attributable to the annual Yom HaAtzmaut field days, Israel curriculum, all culminating in the 2-week Israel trip; my interest in software engineering thanks to the JAG program. As my involvement in the Jewish community has grown, particularly at Dartmouth, I’ve tried to bring what JDS gave to me: a sense of Jewish unity around shared core values. That is why I’ve hosted Shabbat dinners when Hillel and Chabad staff were out of town, why we’ve started Talmud courses to enable further Jewish learning, or why our student board at Chabad is filled with first-years who yearn to be “Upstanders” and take action in the community. The JDS community, the teachers, the parents, and the administrators all had faith in me as a mere child to be an Upstander, it was up to me to prove them right.
More about Benjamin
Benjamin Cape graduated from JDS in 2012. After JDS, he attended The Bush School, where he graduated in 2016. After graduation, Benjamin deferred his admission to Dartmouth College and moved to Israel where he served in the Paratrooper Unit of the IDF for 18 months. Upon his return to the US, Benjamin began his studies at Dartmouth, where he is currently a Computer Science major in his junior year. During the 2020-2021 school year, rather than take remote classes, Benjamin took the school year off and worked as a data-, web-, and backend-engineer at 98point6. At Dartmouth, Benjamin is active in the Jewish and pro-Israel communities. He serves on the board of Chabad and the local Ski Patrol as Executive Training Officer. Benjamin is the eldest son of Bonnie and Robbie Cape, both graduates of JPPS and Bialik High School in Montreal.
