Parenting

Considering that I am just under one month shy of my oldest daughter’s Bat Mitzvah, it may strike you (as it does me) as a bit presumptuous for me to deliver a sermon about parenting. The returns, as they say, are not yet in. Proud as I am of each of my children, caution, common sense and a bit of humility would counsel me to wait a few more years before weighing in on matters on which, I readily concede, so many in this room have spent many more years – and tears – than I have.

But then again, were it the case that a rabbi must have definitive knowledge of a subject in order to preach on that subject, the archives of Jewish preaching would be a lot smaller. The problem of evil, the meaning of life, whether God hears our prayers, the Middle East – the most impenetrable and imponderable issues – these are the subjects about which we are asked to speak week in and week out. And what imponderable is more imponderable than child rearing? Nevertheless, if the qualification to weigh in on a subject is to have engaged with the question with sincerity and persistence, then by this count, I have earned the right to share a word or two this morning.

When it comes to parenting, it is not as if our ancestors were any better at it than we are! Adam raised a Cain; Noah faired little better with his children. Abraham and Sarah: one child, Ishmael, cast into the wilderness, and the other, Isaac, bound on the altar. Would it have been too much to ask of God to provide parenting classes for the progenitors of an entire people?

Of all the biblical couples whose parenting model serves as an example of what not to do, none stand out more than the patriarch and matriarch of this week’s parashah: Isaac and Rebecca. The father of modern Orthodoxy, Shimshon Raphael Hirsch, plainly stated that the take-home of this week’s family saga of the fraternal strife between Jacob and Esau is actually a counterexample, a signpost for parents of what not to do in their own households! So many blunders: Isaac’s favoring of Esau; Rebecca’s showering her love on Jacob. Hirsch points to how Isaac and Rebecca broke the golden rule of parenting, hanokh l’naar al pi darkho, bring up each child in accordance with its own way. Not only did Isaac and Rebecca foist their own foibles and insecurities upon their children, but they stifled their children’s individual natures by prematurely telegraphing the trajectory of their lives. And if this was not enough, the text provides no indication whatsoever that Isaac and Rebecca communicated or collaborated in raising their children. As parents they were “siloed” off from one another, with the children never receiving a coherent or consistent message. Is it at all surprising that with parents like them, the children grew up individually confused, fraternally at cross purposes and collectively – as a family unit – totally dysfunctional.

The particular parenting flaws of Isaac and Rebecca are as numerous as they are deep. But were I to single out the foundational problem, it would be that the two of them represent two very different parenting modalities, each one problematic, and all the more so when working at cross purposes. On the all-important question of how much or how little a parent structures, intervenes and participates in a child’s development, Isaac and Rebecca are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Consider Isaac. From the very first scene when Rebecca pleads with him to address the agony of her pregnancy to the final scene, when Isaac is duped into giving the wrong blessing, there is something totally passive and removed about Isaac’s relationship with his children. “Fetch me some game, prepare for me a dish,” Isaac directs Esau. Yes, Isaac is old, but one senses that it is not only a diminished physicality limiting Isaac’s movement, but a withdrawn nature at the core of his being, an emotionally sequestered aspect of his being that we know will have weighty consequences in the chapters to come.

And then there is Rebecca, who – with her white knuckle grip on the affairs of her household – is at the opposite end of the spectrum. She choreographs the entire family drama with precision, manipulating her husband, inducing Jacob to betray his brother and then, seeing Esau’s rage, engineering Jacob’s safe flight from home. Rebecca gives new meaning to William Wallace’s notion that “the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world.” Scripting and executing without a hiccup, she directs every aspect of her children’s life.

With enough time, we could probably pinpoint the moment in Isaac’s youth that resulted in his nature as a parent. So too, I imagine that Rebecca, having been brought up in Laban’s household, had good reason to take such a hands-on approach to her family. But regardless of the causes, it is evident that the consequences of their disparate approaches were devastating. Removed from the affairs of his children, Isaac abdicates control of his boys, and not surprisingly, things go off the rails, leaving him with one son fuming and one son who has left home altogether. And while Rebecca’s plan proves effective in the short term, in the medium and long term, her shadow looms heavily over the rest of Jacob’s life. We know that in the following chapter, Jacob will be duped by his father in law, and then, tragically, show himself to be totally ineffective in facing the subsequent trials of his own children: first the rape of Dinah and then the sale of Joseph to Egypt. For the rest of his life, Jacob lacked the tools to confront the challenges that awaited him. In the weeks ahead, it will be the events of this week’s parashah that we will reference to understand Jacob’s recurring flaw. Jacob never developed the coping tools he would need in the years ahead. Why should he and how could he? His mother always did everything for him.

From this initial paradigm of parenting in the Bible right up to today, not much has changed. The world is divided into tiger mothers and duct tape parents. There are those who believe that we must take a Rebecca-like, aggressive, interventionist approach to raising our children – serving as their advocates, cheerleaders, coddlers and disciplinarians – helicoptering in to defend them at every turn. And there are those who counsel just the opposite – that we must let things play out, allow our children to skin their knees – as one book counsels, we must duct tape our mouths shut and our feet to the ground, restrain ourselves, control our urge to intervene. To do otherwise – as with Jacob under Rebecca – denies our children the tools to solve problems on their own, which they will one day, inevitably, be called on to do.

Whether it is Isaac and Rebecca, or the current literature on the subject, neither extreme, we know, is acceptable. The Talmud in Tractate Kiddushin enumerates the mitzvot that every parent is obligated to perform for children. For boys, a bris at eight days; for firstborns, a pidyon haben at thirty days. We are obligated to teach our children Torah or pay for their Jewish education. As the list goes on, it gets more interesting, including the obligation to teach your child a trade, find your child a mate and teach your child to swim. Our world is different than the one of the Talmud, the issues and intervals of our day are different, but the guiding ethic must be the same. Parenting calls on us to perform those acts which generational, financial or moral considerations obligate us to provide, but also to recognize an equal obligation to create self-reliant, self-starting and self-sufficient autonomous human beings. It is not either/or. There is a time for the tactic of Isaac, just as there may be a time for that of Rebecca, but good parenting is not one or the other. Good parenting is having the wisdom to differentiate one muscle group from the other, and having the courage to “look long” in deciding which one we choose, understanding that our present decisions will have ramifications well beyond this moment.

As I am sure is true for every parent in this room, there is nothing in this world – nothing – that I care more about, or love more deeply than my children. As their parent, I make no apologies for insisting that so long as they live in our house, they abide by our value system. But I also know that at the end of the day, my goal as a parent is that they will have the self-esteem and self-efficacy to navigate this world once I have, so to speak, left the room. If we want our boys to be good husbands, our girls to be good wives, our children to be good Jews, the next generation to establish lives and families of meaning and purpose, not only will they have to stumble a few times along the way, but each one of us will have to loosen our grip to enable them to arrive at their full potential. And when all else fails, we must remember that the most important and enduring impact any of us have on our children is not what we tell them to do, but what they see us do. It is the unfolding model of our own lives that is actually the curriculum from which our children learn the most.

In reference to this week’s Torah reading, Rabbi Art Green cites the eighteenth-century Hasidic sage, Rabbi Dov Baer, the Maggid of Mezerich, who explains that there are two kinds of love a parent has for a child. The first love, biological or physiological in nature, is a byproduct of the bond between parent and child. This is the bullet we take for our children, the lengths we would go to ensure their safety, security and well-being. But there is also a second love, a greater love, and that is the love a parent experiences upon seeing a child find his or her stride, go on the right path, live righteously and wisely. (Speaking Torah, p. 116) The exquisite feeling of seeing our children find their way, informed by our model even if their path veers from the one we have chosen in our own lives. It is not either/or. Our hearts must be sufficiently capacious, supple and textured to house both loves. May we all be wise enough to appreciate both, draw on both, and please God – enjoy both into the years ahead.