I have been singing the same song for 33 years. 

I sing it at JCC preschools across San Francisco. I sang it at synagogues and day schools and family education programs before that. I sang it over Zoom during the COVID-19 pandemic years when we couldn’t be together in person. I have sung it to babies who are now parents themselves, bringing their own children to my programs. 

The song is called “There’s A Dinosaur Knocking at My Door.” I adapted it 1991 from an original Linda Arnold song; I made the dinosaur Jewish, and adapted the lyrics into a Shabbat song. I was looking for something joyful and surprising to give to young children, something that made Shabbat feel like an adventure rather than an obligation. A dinosaur who shows up at your door because he wants to celebrate Shabbat — why not? 

I had no idea what I had started. 

Today, versions of the Shabbat song have been viewed more than one million times on YouTube. It has been recorded by synagogues in London and Los Angeles. By day camps in the Midwest. By cantors. By Jewish educators. By families sitting around kitchen tables.

Most of these people had no idea I existed; for years, many did not know who wrote the Shabbat lyrics. Like traditional folk songs, “There’s A Dinosaur Knocking at My Door” was passed along from person to person, and it ultimately traveled around the country and around the world. 

This is what Jewish early childhood education does when it works: it plants something that grows underground for years before you see it bloom. I’ve watched this happen more times than I can count. A two-year-old who barely speaks full sentences will sing a Hebrew word perfectly because they have heard it in a song 50 times. A family with no Jewish background will tear up at a Shabbat candle-lighting because it is the first Jewish ritual that has ever felt warm and welcoming to them. A child who graduates from preschool will carry a melody into their bar or bat mitzvah, into their own home, into the Shabbat table they eventually set for their own children. 

Music does this. Repetition does this. And, Jewish early childhood education does this. And yet we have made it extraordinarily difficult to be that educator. 

We ask the teachers who meet families at the door of Jewish life, who form a child’s first impressions of what being Jewish feels like, to work for wages that make it nearly impossible to sustain a career in the field. We lose talented, committed people constantly. They love the work. They cannot afford to stay.

This is not just an economic injustice, though it is that. It is a strategic failure. We talk endlessly in the Jewish philanthropic world about engagement, about retention, about reaching the unaffiliated. And then we underpay the people who are doing that work every day, in classrooms, on the floor, with the youngest and most impressionable members of our community. 

There is an urgency to this conversation that I feel acutely in San Francisco, where I work, but I suspect is true in Jewish communities across North America. 

Many of the families who walk into our preschools are young, mobile and geographically isolated. They have moved away from the cities and towns where they grew up. They have no grandparents nearby to transmit tradition. They are very isolated. They need friends, an extended family and, most importantly, a community. 

The preschool is that entry point. 

When a family brings their child to a Jewish early childhood program, they are not just arranging childcare. They are, often without knowing it, making a decision about belonging. They are sitting in on Shabbat celebrations and holiday programs and music circles. They are meeting other young Jewish parents. They are beginning to feel, perhaps for the first time, that being Jewish is something warm and communal and alive. 

If we welcome them with gusto, we get them — not just the child, but the whole family. The parent who volunteers at the Purim carnival becomes the board member. The toddler who learns a Shabbat song grows up knowing that Friday evening has a feeling to it, a sound, a smell. These things do not happen automatically. They happen because talented, dedicated people show up every week and make them happen. 

We need to invest in those people. 

This September, Dinosaur Press is releasing a board book based on my song: a Shabbat picture book for toddlers that brings the dinosaur to life on the page, illustrated by Maureen Arnow, my machatanim (in-law) and a great artist. It is a small thing in the grand scheme of Jewish continuity, but it is also a 33-year argument made physical: that joy is a legitimate Jewish value; that a child’s first encounter with Shabbat can involve a dinosaur and a song and a classroom full of laughing two-year-olds; and that this matters. 

The dinosaur has been knocking at the door for a long time. I hope we keep opening it.

Mimi Greisman is a children’s author, musician and Jewish early childhood and family educator based in San Francisco. Her board book There’s A Dinosaur Knocking at My Door is available this fall from Dinosaur Press.