I'm raising a person. A little one. I'm raising a human being from the ground up. He started as an embryo inside my wife's uterus. Now he's showing wants and needs, squawking and cooing, having fun, crying when he needs something, laughing when he's happy, and he's crawling and grabbing stuff and putting everything in his mouth.
He's just getting to the point in his life where I need to set limits for him. He needs to be free and explore in order to be happy and develop, but sometimes (often) he reaches out to play with things that can hurt him, or that will break if he plays with it. I'm thinking that raising a child when he's older is just a more sophisticated version of that. I'll want him to explore, have a social life, date, fall in love, experiment, learn what he wants to, and be strong and independent and happy. I'll also have to sometimes set limits on his freedom in order to make sure he doesn't hurt himself or others.
When he was a newborn, all I had to do was change his diaper (diapers aren't for babies, they're for the adults who don't want poop on everything. Babies don't want their pelvic regions all bound up like that, or to get their waste all over themselves), talk to him, sing to him, carry him, and love him. That was it. No disciplining, no saying "no" to him. Just try to figure out his needs, and give him love. That newborn stage sets the foundation of the relationship. It's no accident that the stage of pure love and care comes before the educational stage of parenting.
I'm seeing that the best thing I can do for him is not to stress out over him, and just let him be himself, and when he grabs something he shouldn't be playing with, give him something as an alternative. He knows that. He cries if I just take stuff away from him. If I give him something else to explore and play with, he's fine. I just got to let him explore, play, be himself, and use my adult perspective to keep him safe. And play with him, love him, and have fun with him.
People get screwed up when they're forced to conform to a bunch of stupid rules. Kids and adults become snobbish when they feel the need to conform to other people's expectations, and their sense of identity and self-worth is tied up with what their parents, peers, and leaders tell them to do and be. People need real meaning, not socially imposed bullshitty ideals.
I originally rejected Judaism as a kid because it seemed empty. Jewish communities I knew were the epitome of snobbery and bullshit values. Adults wanted me to get the best grades and to do the conventional thing. Kids wanted me to dress, talk, and listen to music like them, and to like the same people that they did. Shuls were stuffy and formal.
But still, it was ingrained in me early on that Judaism at least symbolized something highly and deeply meaningful. Even if I didn't really know Judaism well or believe in what I did know of it, it was still the symbol of ultimate meaning.
I guess that made it inevitable that I rejected everything I was taught as a kid, went wild in my early twenties, found real spirituality and meaning and self-definition for myself, and then translated all that back into what was for me the symbol of ultimate meaning. I guess that's why I ended up being a traditionally observant Jew who's got some odd ideas of his own....
Friday, June 13, 2008
Thursday, June 12, 2008
True Jewish Diversity
Lately, I've been meeting lots of people in the non-Orthodox Jewish world who know next to no Hebrew (they can, with difficulty, pronounce the letters), don't celebrate the Jewish holidays, and of course, don't practice halachah in any way, and have no Torah education. Moreover, these people are often not halachically Jewish either. So why do they insist on claiming Jewish identity?
I'm not talking from the perspective of a right-wing yeshivish chnyuk who doesn't recognize the conversions of sincere gerim when they did it through the wrong rabbis. I'm talking about no conversion, no Jewish mother, and in the case of many adoptees, no Jewish descent or conversion of any kind. But nevertheless, these people claim their Jewish identity and get horribly offended when told that they're not Jewish. Or when Ashkenazi, but 100% secular and Jewishly uneducated parents, adopt African-American, latino, or Asian kids, but get offended at the idea that for their kids (who will be raised without a real Jewish education or Jewishly active home) need a conversion to be Jewish, I get really frustrated about the state of affairs in the Jewish people.
I've got no problem at all with sincere (key word, sincere) Reform, Reconstructionist, Renewal, Conservative, or post-denominational Jews. I've got no problem with secular cultural Jews, either. Everyone was created with their own individual soul, their own perspective that is blessed by God with total uniqueness, and everyone must be true to their natures and their consciences. And as a traditionally observant Jew who goes to an Orthodox yeshiva, I'd love to be able to celebrate the diversity of Am Yisrael, and engage in loving and respectful machlokot leshem shamayim (disagreements for the sake of Heaven). But when the bulk of the non-Orthodox Jews are Jewishly uneducated, not acculturated as Jews, and half the time not even Jewish by heritage, that becomes very difficult.
Okay, fine. You don't believe that the Torah was literally dictated to Moshe at Sinai. You don't believe that the halachah has Divine authority. I can respect that. You have ethical objections to a lot of what Torah literature says. Great. So do I. As long as you know Hebrew (or some other Jewish language) and have studied Torah and claimed it as your heritage, and Judaism doesn't just mean matzah ball soup a couple times a year (I eat homemade tofu and kimchi in my home, all kosher), I can respect your claim to a place in the Jewish people.
Laying false claim to a Jewish identity hurts the struggle for recognition among genuine converts or other non-Ashkenazi Jews. Openly proclaiming the values of some non-Orthodox Jewish philosophy without actually taking the time to learn and live Torah in any depth according to that particular philosophy undermines the claim to legitimacy of non-Orthodox movements, and turns the serious few in the Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist circles into minorities who champion a cause not taken up by their supposed supporters.
When non-Orthodox Jews neglect to make day schools and yeshivot for their denominations a priority, the only ones left doing Torah education in the lay communities are the Orthodox; especially the ultra-Orthodox. When modern Jews neglect to make yeshiva learning a priority, they concede the whole of the Torah to the fundamentalists.
When English is the only spoken language among American Jews, then there is no cultural Jewish community; only a religious one that some people are more a part of than others.
When parents of adopted children do not convert them as infants, and don't raise in an actively Jewish home, but still instill in them the idea that they're Jews, they're setting those kids up for rejection, confusion, and unnecessary identity crisis.
I'm not talking from the perspective of a right-wing yeshivish chnyuk who doesn't recognize the conversions of sincere gerim when they did it through the wrong rabbis. I'm talking about no conversion, no Jewish mother, and in the case of many adoptees, no Jewish descent or conversion of any kind. But nevertheless, these people claim their Jewish identity and get horribly offended when told that they're not Jewish. Or when Ashkenazi, but 100% secular and Jewishly uneducated parents, adopt African-American, latino, or Asian kids, but get offended at the idea that for their kids (who will be raised without a real Jewish education or Jewishly active home) need a conversion to be Jewish, I get really frustrated about the state of affairs in the Jewish people.
I've got no problem at all with sincere (key word, sincere) Reform, Reconstructionist, Renewal, Conservative, or post-denominational Jews. I've got no problem with secular cultural Jews, either. Everyone was created with their own individual soul, their own perspective that is blessed by God with total uniqueness, and everyone must be true to their natures and their consciences. And as a traditionally observant Jew who goes to an Orthodox yeshiva, I'd love to be able to celebrate the diversity of Am Yisrael, and engage in loving and respectful machlokot leshem shamayim (disagreements for the sake of Heaven). But when the bulk of the non-Orthodox Jews are Jewishly uneducated, not acculturated as Jews, and half the time not even Jewish by heritage, that becomes very difficult.
Okay, fine. You don't believe that the Torah was literally dictated to Moshe at Sinai. You don't believe that the halachah has Divine authority. I can respect that. You have ethical objections to a lot of what Torah literature says. Great. So do I. As long as you know Hebrew (or some other Jewish language) and have studied Torah and claimed it as your heritage, and Judaism doesn't just mean matzah ball soup a couple times a year (I eat homemade tofu and kimchi in my home, all kosher), I can respect your claim to a place in the Jewish people.
Laying false claim to a Jewish identity hurts the struggle for recognition among genuine converts or other non-Ashkenazi Jews. Openly proclaiming the values of some non-Orthodox Jewish philosophy without actually taking the time to learn and live Torah in any depth according to that particular philosophy undermines the claim to legitimacy of non-Orthodox movements, and turns the serious few in the Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist circles into minorities who champion a cause not taken up by their supposed supporters.
When non-Orthodox Jews neglect to make day schools and yeshivot for their denominations a priority, the only ones left doing Torah education in the lay communities are the Orthodox; especially the ultra-Orthodox. When modern Jews neglect to make yeshiva learning a priority, they concede the whole of the Torah to the fundamentalists.
When English is the only spoken language among American Jews, then there is no cultural Jewish community; only a religious one that some people are more a part of than others.
When parents of adopted children do not convert them as infants, and don't raise in an actively Jewish home, but still instill in them the idea that they're Jews, they're setting those kids up for rejection, confusion, and unnecessary identity crisis.
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