There is Not Enough Time to Raise Jewish Children - Kol Nidrei 5786
Our future as Jews depends on investing time in our children. The third installment in the "Holiness in Time" series.
(If you have not read the first two installments, you may want to do so first: Judaism Gives You More Time, Jewish Time Travel)
Many of you know that my daughter headed off to university about a month-and-a-half ago, and that it was a very emotional time. In fact, the song that had been echoing through my head for most of July and August was, “Sunrise, Sunset,” from Fiddler on the Roof:
Is this the little girl I carried
Is this the little boy at play.
I don’t remember growing older
When did they?
Now, I have always been a big fan of Fiddler. One of the first records (remember vinyl?) I had was the original Broadway cast, with Zero Mostel, and I played it over and over on a cheap, plastic record-player with decidedly low-fi sound. But the melodies of this musical, nostalgic to the nth degree, have continued to reverberate through my head. So as I was reflecting in July and August on Hannah’s upcoming departure, it was inevitable that this would be the song on seemingly permanent repeat on my own internal music-streaming service.
Something that is particularly resonant about the song is the fact that it frames our lives based on the rising and setting of the sun. And – get this! – so does Judaism! And as I spoke about on the second day of Rosh HaShanah, everything that we do as Jews is reflected through the dimension of time: what we do right now, and how it connects us to discrete events and people in our past, to our story, to our Torah, and at the same time anchors us to our future.
But all the more so, “Sunrise, Sunset” reminds us of how little time we have with our children, how quickly the days fly as they turn into months and years, and very soon our children leave us.
And of course it was probably as true in the shtetlekh of the Pale of Settlement in Eastern Europe as it is today. But there is something that is very different about today’s world that our ancestors did not have, that children leave us much earlier than they used to.
And I am not speaking about leaving home – I’m talking about how they leave our care and are delivered to the gods of YouTube and Instagram and TikTok and technology which is intentionally designed to be as addictive as possible. This is not good for humanity at large, but poses an extra challenge for Jews and our Jewish future.
What do we aim for when we raise our children? What characteristics are we trying to impart? (Solicit reactions from the congregation)
Respect
Kindness
Commitment to tzedakah
Success in school
Do we want our children to be Jewish? And what does that mean, exactly? To be Jewish like we are, or to be some sort of new adaptation that suits their generation? Does it mean knowing what we do in synagogue from day to day, from week to week? Does it mean being fluent in Hebrew? Identifying key figures from the Jewish bookshelf? Learning Talmud? Loving the State of Israel? Does it mean knowing our history? Does it mean feeling connected to Jewish people all over the world?
The Talmud (BT Qiddushin 29a) teaches us that as parents, we are obligated to teach our children Torah, to teach them a trade, and to teach them to swim.
Now, I think that the Talmud meant that third item literally. Teaching your child to swim could potentially save her life, and all the more so in the ancient world, where there were probably no lifeguards and hospital emergency rooms.
But taken metaphorically, this might mean something else entirely. Swimming suggests being able to navigate the currents of life, to stay afloat when there are forces dragging you down, to push onward even when you are not sure you can make it, and of course always to keep breathing.
And even more so, it is an acknowledgment that life carries with it some danger. “Swimming” is ultimately about a parent letting go of a child into potentially dangerous waters and allowing them to make their own choices, and in doing so we hope they will uphold the values and customs and rituals and wisdom we have taught them.
In Rabbi Brad Hirschfield’s book, You Don’t Have to Be Wrong For Me to Be Right, he tells the story of how he grew up in a household that kept kosher at home, but ate whatever they wanted to eat outside the house. (This was, by the way, not an unusual scenario in many Jewish homes in the middle of the 20th century. Many American Jews kept kosher homes so that their guests could always be comfortable. My maternal grandmother, for example, kept a kosher kitchen in her Boston-area apartment, and when they wanted to eat clams, they would cook them in the neighbors’ apartment.)
So when Brad was in 5th grade at his Jewish day school, and his teacher was instructing them on the various berakhot / blessings over different foods, he asked quite innocently, “What is the blessing for shrimp?” The teacher sends him to see the principal, Mr. Kessler.
Referring to his question, Mr. Kessler asks him, “Where did you learn this practice?”
“From my father.”
Mr. Kessler says, “Do you know what the rabbis teach us about the lessons we learn from our parents and grandparents? They teach us that those lessons are like learning from Moses on Mount Sinai.” And he sends little Brad back to class. Rabbi Hirschfield continues:
It amazes me to this day that Mr. Kessler wanted to understand who I was before he resorted to doctrine or dogma. Is this the definition of compassion? It could be. It’s my definition based on my life experience. Compassion … is about noticing the person in front of you before the ideology inside of you. It’s about making choices to privilege that person.
The lesson the principal Mr. Kessler taught was not about kashrut, but rather about understanding. He did not want to admonish the father and shame the son, thereby undermining parental influence. In honoring that relationship, he knew that there would be time for Brad to learn more, about shrimp and so much more.
The important feature in Jewish education is time, and with a dose of patience and compassion, Brad Hirschfield became Rabbi Brad Hirschfield.
But time is finite, and as I spoke about on the first day of Rosh Hashanah, our devices are stealing our time. So how will we have enough time for parents, grandparents, and teachers to inculcate our values, our wisdom, our rituals in our children?
I am afraid that we are about to lose our children. Our story is being replaced by God-knows-what.
First, there is the sheer amount of time that we are all staring at screens, which is displacing time spent learning, and making it harder for kids to absorb essential material from the teachers standing in front of them. A Gallup poll from 2023 indicates that American teens, on average, are spending 4.8 hours per day using their smartphones. How many of our children are even spending that per month on Jewish learning of any kind?
And even the most wonderful, talented Jewish educators cannot compete with the hundreds or even thousands of notifications that kids are receiving throughout the day.
Second, all that time spent staring at a screen is time that they are not socializing with other kids. As interconnected as they may feel through Insta and TikTok and Snapchat, they are finding it harder to communicate with each other in person. One of the essential features of Jewish life is community; how can you be in community with people with whom you are not able to socialize?
Additionally, what do our children observe when they see us with OUR devices? They see that we are also distracted, that we are not socializing, that our time is being taken up with nonsense.
And they also see the toxicity of disrespect, coarse language, and dismissive, reductive thinking that online “discourse” produces.
What our children may not see is that when we have difficult conversations with real people in real time, not mediated by digital communication, our perspectives soften, our certainty wanes, our inclination to put out bold, black-and-white bumper-sticker pronouncements to the world subsides, and we learn to compromise, to work together with patience and compassion.
One reason American politics is so broken is that politicians do not have to reach across the aisle any more - they only have to play to the subset of their constituents who support them. Much of what our leaders put out today is performative bunk that gets our hearts racing, but does not actually do the job of governing.
And our children are watching.
In his recent critique of the contemporary Jewish world, Tablets Shattered, Joshua Leifer mentions a young woman whose only connection to Judaism is through political action. This makes me deeply sad; it is a shameful diminution of the great, deep value and richness of our tradition. And yet this contemporary trend has been aided and abetted by the algorithmic bubble effect: everything is reduced to the simplest idea which gets your adrenaline flowing.
And while I want people to be passionate about creating a just world, I want that passion to be driven by the values that our tradition teaches us: understanding the power of words, knowing how to parse an argument and seek to understand the other side, the Talmudic idea of partnership across disagreement, and the idea that it is our daily responsibility to highlight the holiness in human relationships.
When we reduce religious engagement to being merely about politics, we lose sight of the great depth and wisdom of our tradition. And once again our children lose out. What may be gained in knowledge of contemporary issues displaces the relational wisdom of Torah.
Combining these realities, I am afraid that we will see a dramatic dropoff in commitment to Jewish life in the coming years. As our digital creations play a greater role in our lives, doing Jewish things with other Jewish people will seem more and more difficult, less compelling and will become more rare. And the Jewish people will lose out, but so too will our wider society.
OK, so this phenomenon is not entirely new. There is even a Hebrew term for it in Jewish life: yeridat hadorot, the decline of generations. Rabbeinu Nissim of Girona, who lived in the 14th century in Catalonia, wrote the following (Derashot HaRan 8:9):
And this is the crucial reason, in my view, for the progressive diminution in prophecy and wisdom generation after generation, as is universally acknowledged and as is testified to by our sages of blessed memory, viz. (BT Eruvin 53a): “The minds of the early sages were as broad as entrance halls…”, (BT Shabbat 112b): “If the early sages were angels, we are men…” (BT Eruvin 53a): “Our minds absorb as much as a finger in hard wax.”
The reason for this, as I see it, is that from the time of Moses our teacher until the present all of the prophets and sages have been in a progressive cause and effect relationship. And just as with conventional cause and effect, the further the distance from the original cause, the weaker the effect, so with the sages and the prophets.
And what would Rabbeinu Nissim say about us today, if he were here to survey the Jewish world? Consider how much farther we have fallen since the 14th century, and how the specific technologically-enhanced challenges of today have made our situation much worse.
And here is a great point of concern, one which I know many of us share. Even greater than the challenge of endowing our children with the knowledge of Jewish ritual and text and wisdom is the decline in the sense of Jewish peoplehood, perhaps the most serious challenge to the Jewish future. We are already seeing evidence of this decline in a phenomenon which has become quite visible in the last two years, that of anti-Zionist Jews.
Never mind the non-Jewish Israel-haters out there - they have been fomenting their bile for many years now. But the rise in the number of particularly young Jewish women and men, people who came through our educational system and learned Tanakh and Hebrew and history and were called to the Torah as benei mitzvah and attended Jewish summer camps and traveled to Israel with community support, and now stand before crowds of Palestinian-flag-waving activists in America and say, “As a Jew, I’m opposed to the existence of the State of Israel,” this is to me the most disturbing feature of today’s Jewish world. It is a sign that we have lost control over the transmission of our heritage.
As a brief reminder, Zionism is the principle that Jews can exercise self-determination in our historical homeland, the land from which we were exiled and dispersed. Being a Zionist does not mean that we cannot criticize the Israeli government or that we must deny the Palestinians their own right to self-determination; all it means is that we acknowledge that the majority of Jews who live on that tiny strip of land are allowed to live there in our own country.
Anti-Zionism is simply turning away. It is saying, those people who followed the dream of Herzl and Pinsker and Ahad Ha’am and Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, those who acted on the ancient Jewish yearnings for return of the last 2,000 years, they were wrong to do so, and what they built should be torn down. Those refugees of the Nazi killing machine should have all gone to the US and Canada, or remained in Poland and Germany.
The Jews who have bought into this ill-conceived notion are a danger to the Jews who live in the State of Israel, if not to all the rest of us. And to me, the greatest sign that we have failed in inculcating our values into our children is to hear those “As a Jew” statements.
And while I think that there is a good case to be made that the presence of anti-Zionist Jews in our families, our synagogues, our schools and so forth has been hastened by social media, which elevates the extremes, it is also due to the fact that we simply do not have enough time to teach our kids everything that they need to know to understand our history, the facts behind Israel’s creation, and of course the very real need for a Jewish homeland.
To be sure, this phenomenon is also the result of a decades-long campaign by Israel’s enemies to malign the idea of Zionism, to lay anti-Zionist groundwork on college campuses and so forth. But the fact that this campaign has succeeded so gloriously is our fault. And we must respond by making sure that our children have adequate time to learn our tradition and to foster the sense of peoplehood.
In this season of teshuvah, one of the greatest areas where we need to seek teshuvah as a community is where we have failed in adequately relaying to our children our heritage, our responsibilities as Jews, our wisdom, our Torah, our sense of peoplehood, and of course our understanding of the history and importance of the State of Israel in today’s world. That we have failed so dramatically in this regard is truly shameful. That we have lost so many of our children to the lies of those who hate the very idea of a Jewish state is devastating, and the ripples of this failure will play out through the Jewish world and in international politics for decades to come.
To that end, we need to commit to a few things that might help us with all of these challenges.
We need to find a way, as the American Jewish community, to make Jewish day school free, or at least highly subsidized to make it an attractive option, for all who want it, and to try to get as many of our kids into it as possible. Now, I know this would require a huge effort that goes far beyond what Beth Shalom can do. But if we are serious about the Jewish future, I think this is the only way we might be able to guarantee that our children will have enough time spent learning Torah, midrash, halakhah, tefillah, history, ethics, Hebrew, and of course Zionism. Our children cannot be left with the sense that the sum total of Judaism is political engagement or “tikkun olam.” They need depth and breadth.
That does not mean that your children will all become rabbis, God forbid. I assure you that they will still go on to become doctors and lawyers and pursue careers that you can kvell about. But they will be better prepared for everything that they will face in life by understanding our people’s story and our customs and language. And the time spent in learning the ideas and rituals of our tradition will strengthen their connection to Judaism and bolster the future of non-Orthodox Jewry around the world.
Making Jewish education available and free will not be enough. We must also train good teachers, and that will require that we subsidize university educations that will produce the teachers to teach our children to be the well-educated Jews that they need to be to guarantee a Jewish future.
We must do everything we can to counteract the false narratives that have been promulgated about Israel, her foundation, her ideology, her raison d’etre. There are days when it seems that the whole world is telling lies about Israel, and this is not good for the Jews. This will require money, of course, and it will also require the State of Israel to do a better job in the PR trenches in counteracting these lies. We cannot be afraid to challenge the anti-Zionists.
And in particular, we have to learn to call out anti-Zionism ourselves when we see it. Boaz Munro, who grew up at Beth Shalom and has recently returned home with his family to Pittsburgh, has been teaching about this as an extra-curricular project. His work correctly identifies the anti-Zionist slander as a distinct phenomenon from classical antisemitism, yet very much rooted in it. And the way that we must respond to anti-Zionism is not by defending Israel, but rather by denouncing anti-Zionism as an attack on Jews.
His suggestion, in brief, is not to argue with anti-Zionists, but rather to respond to their accusations by labeling them as libelous, as conspiratorial, as stigmatizing, and as denying the suffering that anti-Zionist activists have caused to the Jewish people.
In an ideal world, we should be able to bring everybody around to understanding the need for the State of Israel based on Jewish history. But attention spans are short, and libel spreads more easily, so we must be forthright about naming anti-Zionism as an anti-Jewish libel which is dangerous to us and to Jews everywhere.Finally, and perhaps this should be top of the list: We as parents and grandparents and members of the Jewish people need to double down on Jewish living. Even if all Jewish education were free and comprehensive, we cannot rely on outsourcing the formation of our children’s Jewish identity. We must rather actively model the value of our traditions and rituals and wisdom, and that requires time: time in making your home a Jewish home, time spent in synagogue with your people, time spent learning, time observing holidays, time devoted to volunteering for Jewish organizations. If you want your children and grandchildren to be Jewish, then you have to show them by doing Judaism.
At home, recite the Shema at bedtime with your kids. Have them help you prepare for holidays in the kitchen, and build a sukkah, and search for hametz before Passover, and throw your sins away on Rosh HaShanah, and so forth. Make Shabbat dinner special every Friday night. And don’t say, we can’t do those things now, but we’ll get to them some day. Some day IS now.
If the last Jewish thing you learned was when you became bar/bat mitzvah, maybe it’s time to brush up – ours is a tradition that is actually made by and for adults. Refresh your own knowledge of our tradition and the worthiness of passing it on down to the next generation. Read a book about a Jewish topic. Take a trip to Israel. (We will have opportunities for that coming up soon!)
Get involved in your Jewish community with your family: volunteer, support and attend Beth Shalom. Demonstrate your commitment for your children and grandchildren.
We may not be able to solve entirely the conundrum of how to ensure that our children get the time they deserve to devote to Jewish living and Jewish education, but the more time we spend on this project, the greater our returns, and the more resilient we will be to whatever the future brings us.
There will surely be enough time to raise Jewish children, who are proud and knowledgeable, if we set aside and protect the time dedicated to teaching them.
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The fourth and final installment in the “Holiness in Time” series:
Holding On To The Particular - Yom Kippur 5786
