The Blessing of a Skinned Knee Read online

  At work Becky and Jeff were both effective leaders, but at home they had little authority over time, space, or actions. The house was filled with toys, not just in the children’s bedrooms but in the family room, the bathroom, the kitchen, even between the sheets in Jeff and Becky’s bed. In this home the children’s interests ruled. No place was sacred.

  Although I did not expect to get insight into a therapeutic problem from a sermon, this idea of bigdei kodesh—the need to reinforce valid authority with signs or symbols—fit the situation Becky and Jeff were struggling with. When I told them that they needed to become the “high priests in the Holy Temple of their home,” they laughed, but later it began to make sense to them. They realized that they had been so kind and democratic with their children that there was no order in the universe of their home. The children were tuned in to their own desires but not to their obligations. Becky and Jeff began to make changes. They declared their bedroom off-limits except with explicit permission. They told their children that they needed to say “Yes, please” or “No, thank you” when they were offered something. Most important, they stopped giving the children so much attention for every emotional and physical ache and pain. Their home life improved immeasurably. I was surprised and pleased.

  ONE TOE AT A TIME

  At my suggestion, our family began going to temple once a month. Later I discovered that many nonpracticing Jewish husbands have a lot of resistance to attending services; it’s a common issue in the parenting groups I teach. In many households, the woman is more attracted to spirituality while the husband holds back, usually citing childhood experiences that prove the hypocrisy of religion (I’ve heard this is true for Catholic and Protestant husbands as well as Jewish ones). Like most couples, my husband, Michael, and I have a “mixed marriage”—we don’t always agree when it comes to matters of religious practice. But in our case, it’s Michael who would prefer our family to be more strictly observant than I’m comfortable with. Ten years ago, however, we were pretty much at the same place: he had had a bar mitzvah and been confirmed but neither of us had been involved with Judaism as adults, and we were both curious.

  At synagogue I felt like an utter novice. I didn’t know the name or shape of aleph, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. I didn’t know any of the liturgy beyond what I thought was pronounced “burruch ha taw” and later learned was baruch atah, “blessed are you.” I was embarrassed about my lack of synagogue skill and my general ignorance of Judaism. But we persisted. During the spring of our first year going to services, we went to a weekend retreat where we had our first real experience with Shabbat, the day set aside for rest and reflection. After that we began to go to temple every week.

  I bought a blessing tape and stayed up late memorizing prayers. I took a Torah study class and made small changes at home. At first, we simply lit some candles on Friday nights at dinnertime, stumbled through the blessings in transliteration, said “Good Shabbos,” and went to a Thai restaurant for shrimp dinner. Later we added kiddush (the blessing over wine) and had dinner at home. After about a year, we graduated to staying home every Friday night for a full Shabbat dinner with all the traditional blessings. We stopped eating shellfish and pork or mixing meat and dairy products at meals.

  At the start of the dinner we mixed the prescribed blessings with our family rituals. We lit the candles in honor of specific family members who were ill that week or needed a blessing for some other kind of suffering. For example, Susanna might say, “I’m lighting this candle tonight to bring a blessing to my friend Jessica, who has the flu.” We then whispered a traditional blessing to each child, “May the divine face shine upon you in the coming week.” We went around the table and took turns describing the best things that happened during the week and catching up on one another’s good news. We discussed ethical dilemmas from the news or from our daily lives using principles from Jewish law. We ended the meal with song. Occasionally the formal meal and rituals seemed trite and self-serving, but mostly these were the least hurried, most tender moments of the week, and they brought us closer together.

  Another year passed and I considered taking a year’s leave of absence from my practice. I was longing to study Judaism fulltime and see if there might be some way to integrate what I learned into my practice. My longtime officemate, a child psychiatrist who loves his work, was skeptical. “This is not a job,” he said, “it’s a calling. Think about what it means to leave your patients.”

  Rabbi Daniel was just as adamant in his advice: “Read the prophet Isaiah, Chapter 6, where he gets the prophetic call,” he urged me in a long letter. “Ultimately the decision you’re making is a personal one, if not an intensely private one. I’m never certain of anything as a matter of principle, but I’m pretty sure of two things: if you do make the leap into Judaism, you will have the chance to do a great service to the Jewish community and to serve God.” That letter had a huge effect on me. While I was dubious about Rabbi Daniel’s prediction that I would do a great service for the Jewish community, his words gave me the courage to close my practice.

  Although Rabbi Daniel is a Reform rabbi, he advised me to do some of my studies with the Orthodox. They have a lifelong familiarity with biblical texts and teachings that enables them to introduce others to Jewish thought in an utterly familiar yet nonacademic way. I dressed in frum (pious) garb, with sleeves covering my elbows, a long skirt, and a hat, and I studied difficult texts and the laws of making a Jewish home with Orthodox teachers. In the beginning I spent most of my time with the Hassids, who had a combination of traits that impressed me: joy in their faith and blazing intellect. But when I went to their homes for Shabbat dinner, I saw another side. The lively debate at the table featured the men and boys—the wives and daughters stayed in the background. I could not make this sort of home, and I wasn’t going to subordinate my daughters this way. But I continued to study with these pious men and women and with other inspiring teachers from each branch of Judaism.

  During the course of the year I absorbed every bit of Jewish knowledge I could find, especially if it pertained to child-rearing. I discovered the many fine Jewish parenting books written by liberal rabbis and teachers. The books raised issues that were new and interesting to me: how to solve the “December dilemma” (resisting the allure of Christmas for Jewish children without building Hanukkah up into a high-stature holiday it was never meant to be), how to decorate and enjoy a sukkah, how to approach children’s questions about God. Designed to help parents guide children in building a positive Jewish identity within our contemporary culture, these books existed comfortably shoulder to shoulder with secular society.

  In my neighborhood, there were three or four Orthodox Jewish bookstores. I wandered in and discovered tables covered with stacks of parenting books I’d never seen before. When I started reading them I was thrilled. They painted a vivid picture of the dangers and seductiveness of the materialistic, anxious, oversexed, highly competitive world around me. They elevated practical, everyday parenting concerns—how much television children were allowed to watch, their attitude toward helping out at home, what kinds of clothes they were permitted to wear—to questions of holiness. These books knew their enemy and offered ways to protect children from it. They were well written, psychologically sound, and filled with traditional Jewish wisdom in the form of parables and lessons in Jewish law and theology. But these Orthodox parenting guides all prescribed strict observance as the only possible path for raising wholesome, moral children. So, along with the teachings and rich insights into living came the mehitzah (the divider that separates women from men in the sanctuary), plus many other strictures and an insistence on separation from the wider community that neither I nor my clients were willing to embrace. I welcomed the diagnosis but not the cure.

  I began to wonder if I could be a bridge. Psychology provides powerful theories for understanding children’s emotional problems, but the theories shift too frequently to be an anchor and give short shrift to pro
blems of character. In the time-tested lessons of Judaism, I discovered insights and practical tools that spoke directly to both psychological and spiritual problems. Maybe I could find a way to bring those insights to the very modern families I counseled; maybe I could integrate psychology and Jewish teachings.

  A WORD OF TORAH

  Not long after I started my year of study, John Rosove, the senior rabbi at Temple Israel asked me to give a talk on parenting on Yom Kippur afternoon at the synagogue. The little that I knew unfolded in me, and I spoke for an hour without notes. After the lecture, a group of women who had been studying Judaism informally together asked if I would be their teacher. I was taken aback, but I gladly agreed and ended up teaching their group for two years. Often I felt that I was only a day ahead of them, but I sustained myself against my fear of being discovered as a fraud with a saying Rabbi Daniel told me: “Whoever knows a word of Torah is obliged to teach it.” The classes became the model for all my Jewish parenting classes.

  Each week in my parents’ group I would take an upcoming holiday, a Bible story, or a teaching from the Talmud, and tie it to a modern parenting problem. From the teaching I would extract an intervention or approach to the dilemma. The participants in the classes would go home and apply the principle and report in the next week about what worked and what didn’t. The classes led to lectures, and I found that I was indeed bridging two worlds. I had two sets of lectures: one on Jewish spirituality and parenting, which I gave at religious schools and synagogues, and an identical one with just a sprinkling of Jewish references that I gave at secular schools and churches.

  The lectures and parenting groups exposed me to many more types of parents than I had seen in private practice. Instead of focusing on the specific problems of individual children, I was now hearing about more general issues. Many parents told me they felt adrift after Mommy and Me. They found themselves raising young children in a world that was changing at a dazzling pace, one that was very different from the one they had grown up in. They didn’t have a tradition to follow or a community to join. The community of their child’s school, even if it was close-knit and supportive, was not adequate as a moral and spiritual centerpiece of the family. The parents told me that my classes filled their need for parent guidance during the elementary school years and provided a way for them to learn basic Judaism without having to commit themselves to “studying religion.” Many of the participants joined synagogues and continued their study and home observance.

  I never returned to practicing psychology the way I had before my crisis of faith. Instead, I have shifted my focus from diagnosis and treatment to prevention; from private therapy sessions to lecturing, teaching parenting classes, and consulting with parents and schools. For many years now, I have taught a course called “Homework, Food, Bedtime, Sex, Death, and the Holy: Jewish Wisdom for Parents.” My purpose in that course—as in this book—is to help mothers and fathers develop a spiritually based parenting philosophy that will enable them to handle the rough spots in their children’s development themselves rather than feel they must turn to an expert every time a child veers off track.

  ANGUISHED PARENTS, ANXIOUS CHILDREN

  What have I learned from my years of leading parenting groups? The hidden secret in the community of abundance in which I live is its anguish. Unsure how to find grace and security in the complex world we’ve inherited, we try to fill up the spaces in our children’s lives with stuff: birthday entertainments, lessons, rooms full of toys and equipment, tutors and therapists. But material pleasures can’t buy peace of mind, and all the excess leads to more anxiety—parents fear that their children will not be able to sustain this rarefied lifestyle and will fall off the mountain the parents have built for them.

  In their eagerness to do right by their children, parents not only overindulge them materially, they also spoil them emotionally. Many parents have unhappy memories of their own childhoods, memories of not being allowed to express their feelings or participate in decisions. In trying to undo these past violations, they move too far in the other direction—they overvalue their children’s need for self-expression and turn their households into little democracies. But the equality they maintain at home does not give their children a sense of self-esteem. Instead, it frightens them by sending the message that their parents are not firmly in charge. By refusing to be authority figures, these parents don’t empower their children, they make them insecure.

  An especially troubling aspect of modern child-rearing is the way parents fetishize their children’s achievements and feelings and neglect to help them develop a sense of duty to others. I saw an example of this when a child died at a secular high school where I lecture. The day after the tragedy, adults were stationed around the campus so the children would have someone to talk to if they felt bad. There were no mitzvot (sacred good deeds) to be done on behalf of the dead child, no organized lessons in social obligation. In the religious community the students might help to prepare and deliver dinners to the family or escort the younger brother home from school. The emphasis in this purely secular community was to keep the children’s self-regard intact and their mood elevated.

  The current trend in parenting is to shield children from emotional or physical discomfort. I can’t blame parents for reacting with horror to nightly news reports about our violent, dangerous society, but many of them overprotect their sons and daughters. They don’t give them a chance to learn how to maneuver on their own outside of home or school. It’s not only violence these parents fear; they are also alarmed by what they perceive to be a wildly uncertain future. Wishing to prepare their children for this unknown territory, they try to armor them with a thick layer of skills by giving them lots of lessons and pressuring them to compete and excel.

  In this hothouse environment, children receive plenty of attention and worldly goods, but they pay a price for it. They learn very quickly that they are not to show too much unhappiness, frustration, or disappointment. They must be good at everything and cheerful all the time because they are emblems of their parents’ success.

  I’ve come to believe that many of the problems in the children I counseled arose from two sources: the heavy pressure in a competitive world and their unconscious recognition of how preternaturally important they were to their parents. I recalled the children’s chronic complaints, their social woes, their learning disabilities and problems paying attention in school. What better way for children to rebel against their parents’ unrealistic expectations, take back some control, and resist being worshiped like an idol than to get sick or fail to excel?

  THE JEWISH WAY: MODERATION, CELEBRATION, SANCTIFICATION

  Through the study and practice of Judaism, I learned that the parents I counseled had fallen into a trap created out of their own good intentions. Determined to give their children everything they needed to become “winners” in this highly competitive culture, they missed out on God’s most sacred gift to us: the power and holiness of the present moment and of each child’s individuality.

  Judaism provides a very different kind of perspective on parenting. By sanctifying the most mundane aspects of the here and now, it teaches us that there is greatness not just in grand and glorious achievements but in our small, everyday efforts and deeds. Judaism shows us that we don’t have to be swallowed up by our frenzied, materialistic world—we can take what is valuable from it without being wholly consumed.

  Three cornerstone principles of Jewish living are moderation, celebration, and sanctification. Through these principles we can achieve a balanced life, no matter what culture we happen to inhabit. The Jewish way is to continually study, learn, question, and teach these principles. By applying them to our family life, my husband, my children, and I have found some mooring and meaning in an unsteady world. In my professional life, I’ve seen families transformed by this new perspective on their problems in living.

  The principle of moderation teaches us to do two seemingly incompatible things at once:
to passionately embrace the material world that God has created—“And God saw that it was good”—while exercising self-discipline. Judaism clarifies our proper perspective on engagement with the world. We are not to emulate animals, who act on instinct; the pagans, who worship nature and the senses for their own sake; the angels, who don’t struggle with longing; or the ascetics, who shun earthly pleasures. God created us with intense desire and free will on purpose, and it is up to us to use this endowment for good or ill.

  Moderation leads to the second principle, celebration. We are obliged to embrace God’s gifts moderately but enthusiastically; in other words, we are obliged to give thanks and to party. Celebration takes hundreds of forms: the Jewish liturgy contains blessings over food, rainbows, new clothes, a narrow escape from danger, a day of rest, doing something for the first time, and even earthquakes (this last prayer can be loosely translated as “Wow, God, you are one powerful being!”). The requirement to party is easily fulfilled by a nonstop, year-round cycle of major and minor holidays.

  The Jewish concept of celebration is beautifully illustrated in a story related by the leading rabbi of nineteenth-century Germany, Sampson Raphael Hirsch: “A rabbi told his congregation that he was planning a trip to Switzerland. ‘Why Switzerland?’ they asked him. ‘There is hardly any Jewish community there. What reason could you have for traveling so far?’ The rabbi replied, ‘I don’t want to meet my maker and have Him say to me, “What? You never saw My Alps?”’ ”