Jewish Families

Rabbi Bradley Bleifeld
Reform Congregation Keneseth Israel, Elkins Park, PA

There they are, past generations of my family, seated side by side, in a photograph that hangs on my living room wall. Uncles Jacob, Samuel, Benjamin, Moses, Duviditzik and my grandfather Harry are joined by aunts Yetta, Sara, Ruth, Miriam, Rachel, Malka and my grandmother Celia—all stern faced in black and white turned sepia with age. The absence of color makes them appear the same in age, thought and background. You may have a photograph such as this buried in your family archives; what a treasure is this captured moment of a distant place and time!

Modern Treasures

What a different photograph our families would take today! The contemporary Jewish family is alive with a variety of faces, ages and expressions—all vivid testimony to Jewish life in America today. No single snapshot could capture the infinite variety of what makes up today’s Jewish family. We are so different; some single parents, some blended, some intermarried, some older, some younger. Diversity is both our challenge and our strength. And yet, we are so much the same.

Whatever our family pictures look like today, we still share our 3,000-year-old tradition. As one people, we strive to make this world a better place (tikkun olam), to find some personal contentment through doing good deeds (mitzvot), and ultimately to contribute to the progress of our people and humanity by living good lives as Jews.

Discovering the Link

I believe that what makes a Jewish family today is what has sustained the Jewish family not only for the last 100 years but for over 3,000 years. We cannot see these commonalities in a photograph, for it is not evident in any visual form.

Yet if we listen closely to the echoes of time we discover the link. The link is to listen! Listen, closely: "Sh’ma Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad." Listen again: "Hear O Israel, the Lord is Our God, the Lord is One."

Listening to Echoes

Is it a miracle? A monument to the test of time? No, it is a whisper of the generations, an echo of 3,000 years of hope, laughter and tears. Somehow, as Jews moved through life and throughout every corner of the globe, we took with us the belief that God can make a difference in our lives.

Whose God? What God? Why God? Where God? These questions may be res-ponded to by another question, but the answer is always the same. It is our God and it is our struggle to find God in day to day life.

And so we pray (some of us), and we study (many of us), and we grow (all of us), into the family roles we have always had. We listen, we choose, and then we act. And in the act is the hope that our example will awaken in the next generation the desire to do the same.

There they are, family pictures on a wall, all welcoming us into the people who always make new progress, one generation following another, one family at a time.

Just listen!

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Daydreaming about My Daughters

Lori Lefkovitz
Director of KOLOT: The Center for Jewish Women’s and Gender Studies at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, Wyncote, PA

A baby girl is born. She is welcomed into her Jewish community in a naming ceremony that includes liturgy and rituals that situate her among the great heroines of history and that celebrate her presence and her promise.

When she is weaned, at the havdalah ceremony that separates the Sabbath from the work week, she is given her first kiddush cup, with the wish that her life overflow with sweetness, and that she find her own sources of sustenance.

She reaches maturity; she stands before a full house in a synagogue and demonstrates her skills; she offers a clever and funny interpretive talk, and she speaks her mind forcefully before the congregation. Her bat mitzvah makes her feel proud of her achievements.

Defining New Traditions

It is true that until recently only boys were welcomed into the covenant with a brit ceremony, and even the bat mitzvah did not take hold until the middle of the twentieth century. Jewish tradition, like Western tradition, has objectified women. Women in our texts are honored for their beauty or their fertility. Historically, sons have been valued and girls demeaned.

To this day, women and girls too often feel particularly alienated from Jewish texts and practices. They also feel the impossible pressures of competing demands that they become both brilliant career women and homemakers and mothers, available to their families and Nobel laureates, a baby in each arm, and president of the PTO. Little wonder that Jewish girls are at high risk for eating disorders and other disturbances of the middle and upper middle-classes.

At the same time, Judaism is a deep, rich resource from which to address the problems of our moment, and women are finding ways to mine this resource. The bat mitzvah can serve as an antidote to the crisis of self-esteem common in teenaged girls. Girls are empowered by and valued for sharing their learning.

As this growing daughter lights the Sabbath candles and recites time-honored formulas, she may develop the habit of using this weekly time to articulate quietly—to herself, to God—her fondest, most secret wishes. It is a therapeutic practice, and it links her to her great grandmothers, who may have had a similar habit.

Fighting the Barbie Ideal

At Hebrew school, by encountering the world of Jewish books and languages—Bible, Talmud, mysticism, short stories, and poetry—she expands her horizons and identity. Her friends learn that Rosh Hodesh, the ancient festival of the new moon, was classically a woman’s holiday and that in recent decades women have formed Rosh Hodesh groups. With the help of their college-aged teacher, they form an adolescent Rosh Hodesh group, and once a month they meet, study a Jewish text that is relevant to their most urgent concern, talk about peer pressure, body image, grades, parents, sexuality. They munch carrots and raisins and they laugh, lounge around, and play music. They come to rely on each other, and in community they find the strength to resist the culture that glorifies an empty Barbie ideal. They appreciate themselves and each other as they are.

At Rosh Hashanah, she will think about how God birthed the world, and at Passover she will remember that the prophet Miriam led the people in dance after the parting of the Red Sea. She will marvel that when her people had no time to bake bread they nevertheless did not forget to bring their timbrels. She will look at the bread of affliction and be mindful that she is part of a people with a strong history of commitment to social justice. Sometimes when she puts food to her lips, she will remember a blessing that invites her to be grateful for all that she has. She will not be afraid to be different because being Jewish has taught her to take pride in her special heritage. And where she finds this heritage to be intolerant—sexist, racist, militaristic—or otherwise offensive to her sensibilities, she will work from within the tradition to revise it, asserting herself as a creative force in the ongoing creation of Judaism.

Reclaiming Judaism

I used to worry that helping our daughters find places of importance in Judaism would feel artificial and that the gestures would seem inauthentic. When I first attended a baby naming for a girl, I remember thinking that no one would ever really take this "girl" ritual as seriously as the brit. By the time we named our first daughter in a small community in rural Ohio, it seemed to all present that this ritual had been ordained at Sinai. Years later, when this pre-schooler was asked by her teacher to draw a picture about the Passover story, she drew two women in a river lifting a baby from a basket, with a little girl hiding and watching in the tall grasses at the bank. This image of women’s community and heroism would never have come to my mind when I was five years old.

Judaism offers sources of self-esteem and pride, opportunities for developing human relationships in the family and with friends, values education to teach our children to care for the environment, human life everywhere, and themselves. Raising daughters in Judaism can teach them to be at once critical and loving, to take the best of their heritage and reclaim it for themselves by meaningfully incorporating Jewish practices into their lives.

May your daughters and mine grow from strength to strength; may they find each other, learn together, laugh together, and work together. May they know how to love and be loved, and may their smiling, active participation in life bring redemption.

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Blessing Our Sons

Rabbi Seymour Rosenbloom
Congregation Adath Jeshurun, Elkins Park, PA

A popular Israeli song begins, "How shall I bless this lad?" asks an angel, "What is the blessing that he needs?" What is the special "blessing" we have to give our boys? What "blessing" do they need from us?

Our attitude towards boys is strangely contradictory. Studies have shown that most parents want their first child to be a boy—even today! On the other hand, while girls are "sugar and spice and everything nice," boy are "snakes and snails and puppy dogs’ tails." Not exactly elevating!

How do we lovingly raise these curious creatures? What do we want of them? What do we want them to become as men?

Old Stereotypes

In another generation, this would not even have been a question. We knew what we expected of men. A man was supposed to be a paradigm of strength, someone the whole family could lean on. Men were to be physically strong to defend against aggressors and emotionally strong to be a rock of support. The worldly turmoil was not supposed to phase the resolute man who turned his face to the storm without blinking as his family clung to him.

We knew that men didn’t cry. Early on we taught our boys not to cry when they were hurt. Boys were socialized to carry the world on their shoulders and suppress their emotions. They became men who believed that they were valued only when they achieved, provided and protected. They constantly had to prove themselves. They ended up accepting as normal an emotional distance from others, and an alienation from their inner selves.

When they had trouble living up to this model, they had no tools to deal with all the emotions inside. Often, it came out as anger, violence and substance abuse. No wonder we are suspicious of boys and men!

So what do boys, and the men they will become, need from us? What special blessing do we have to give them today?

New Paradigms

I believe that boys need to have the traditional male expectations toned down, and the opportunity for recognizing and expressing their emotions and feelings turned up. Boys generally are held less, and get less physical contact from their parents as they grow up. We need to hold them, hug them, and kiss them. We need to make them feel secure and loved for who they are, not for what they do. We need to avoid imposing our notions on them with such expressions as "Big boys don’t..." or "Big boys do...."

Boys need this from their fathers even more than they need it from their mothers. The fact is that our boys are raised mostly by women. In the early years, they spend most of their time with their mothers, or female mother surrogates at home, in day care or in nursery school. When they get to elementary school, virtually all of their teachers are women. In high school they may have a few male instructors.

Moreover, a boy doesn’t see a man most of his day. Many fathers leave before the kids wake up and return home when shortly before bedtime. How are boys supposed to learn how to be male when they never see one in action? And when Dad gets home, how much emotional energy does he have left to give to his son?

Jewish Men as Role Models

If a boy is to grow up as a man who can honor his own emotional life and express it, he needs to see men who practice it— men who can hug and kiss them for no reason at all except love. A boy needs to know that it is acceptable for men to have feelings and express them. While women can tell him, only men can demonstrate it.

Male modeling is important in every aspect of a boy’s character development. If he doesn’t have a model, he’ll find one. It may be his peers, a gang of "men wannabees" who try to imitate what they think guys are supposed to be. Usually they get it wrong, latching on to some man he thinks is "cool" from the movies or sports.

Blessings for Boys

For the Jewish people, our boys need models of men who love Judaism and want to make it a cherished part of their life, enough to be competent and sincere about it. This is a tough challenge. As the synagogue becomes more feminized, men are not as involved as they once were. So what are the blessings we have to give our boys? What blessings do they need for us?

• They need us to love them. As they are.

• They need us to teach them how to be in touch with their emotions and not be strangers to themselves or others.

• They need us to give them accessible male models who validate an expansive ideal of what it is to be a man.

• Most of all, they need us to let them know that they have our blessing to discover who they are, and what they want out of life. Even if it is different from who we are, and what we want for them.

• They need to know that they can grow up and be free from us without our being resentful.

A Blessing of Freedom

I have three sons. Because I am a rabbi, many people think that they know what I want for my children. They would expect me to say that I want them to marry Jewish women and have Jewish children. They would expect me to say that I want them to be personally observant and contribute to the community. And they would be right. These are things I want for my children. But I also know that the only chance I have of getting any of these is that they choose it for themselves. Not only that—freely choosing these things is the only way I want them to do it! And so, more than anything, I have to bless them with the freedom to choose, knowing they are not risking the loss of my love.

Rabbi Menahem Mendel of Kotzk was approached by Hasid of his who was troubled by a vexing problem.

"Rebbe," he said, "my son isn’t following the way of Torah. I did the best I could. I showed him the way. But he doesn’t want to take it. What shall I do?"

"Do you love your son?" asked the rebbe.

"What a question! Of course I do."

"Then love him more."

We have so much to teach our children. But nothing is more valuable than teaching them that we love, respect, and trust them. And should they chose a path different from our own, we will love them more. Only then can we have any hope that the specific teachings we give them could become their own.

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A Jewish Home Has an Open Door

Harry Brod
University of Delaware

When I was growing up, my parents took pride in the fact that the front door to our house was left open during the day whenever someone was at home. The extent of this pride is reflected in my having noted in the eulogy I delivered as my father’s funeral, in which I spoke of how "an unlocked front door symbolized our home for us."

What it symbolized was not primarily security, for this was not of such great concern then. Rather, it symbolized the idea that friends and neighbors should always have access to us and to what was ours. What was important was the positive statement that the door was open, not the negative fact that I was unlocked. It symbolized a deep attachment to the "open door policy" at the core of the Jewish ethic of hospitality, the precept that one’s tent should always be open and inviting, a moral code proclaimed ages ago by a desert people.

To Open or Not to Open

This came to my mind recently when I looked out through the glass in my front door to see three young Black men approaching. The clothes and demeanor of the three youths bespoke the urban streets. While the neighborhood in which I live is not what one would call a high crime area, and I am pleased to live in an economically and racially mixed section of the city, the area does have enough crime to be worrisome, and certainly enough to make one cautious. Unlike that of my parents’ home, my front door is locked.

As they came up to the door and rang the bell I felt my gut constrict, and I felt a strong urge not to open the door. I became aware that my fears were being further aroused when they did not step back from the doorbell after ringing it, as I have seen many Black men do, having apparently learned that their mere presence frightens whites, that they are "born suspects" and they must meet the burden of proof of first demonstrating that they are not a threat, as opposed to the presumption of innocence that comes with white privilege. (I have taken up the same practice of stepping back from a door myself, both because I have learned that my large size can also be intimidating to others, and as an act of solidarity to keep the facts of racism at the forefront of my consciousness).

But a stronger voice within me immediately reacted. I found myself saying to myself: "No! I refuse. I shall not let my fears overwhelm my basic human obligation to open the door to another human being." I opened the door. All was well—they were selling candy.

I identify the voice impelling me to open the door as the Jewish voice within me. It is what makes my home a Jewish home. The mezuzah beside my door points and beckons inward. Keeping the door locked against others violates the principles it houses.

Though some may not be aware of the facts of its authorship, a sonnet, part of which is very well known, was written by a Jewish woman who became an immigrant to the United States when she fled the pogroms of her native Russia. Emma Lazarus wrote "The New Colossus" in response to a contest in 1883. The poem, now inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, refers to the statue as the "Mother of Exiles," and famously attributes to it the following words: "Give me your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,/Send these, the homeless tempest-tost, to me,/I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

These words welcomed many of our ancestors to their new land of promise. In addition to the significance they already carry, perhaps it will add further poignancy to their meaning if we also remember to hear then as Emma Lazarus’s proclamation that the United States of America is imbued with the ethics of the Jewish home.

Adapted and reprinted with permission of Sh’ma: a Journal of Jewish Responsibility, published by CLAL: The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership. For information about CLAL or to subscribe to Sh’ma, call (212) 779-3300.

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