Far from the Tree

Every parent, at one time or another, has observed the personal attributes or outward behaviors of their child and reflected either silently or out loud, “Oh, that’s me!” We bear witness to our children’s qualities and character, and whether biological or adopted, by nature or nurture, we know them to be extensions of our own selves. How they laugh, how they fight, how they sleep, how they study, how they do, well, pretty much anything, we see ourselves reflected back. Sometimes to our delight and sometimes to our horror, we see ourselves in them, and in that moment, out slips, “Oh, that’s me.” Alternatively, if your home is anything like mine, the “Oh, that’s me” is intermingled with spousal declarations of “Oh, that is all you!” or more often, “Oh, that is all your side!” Our children’s inability to clean up their rooms, offer an apology, do their homework before midnight, or do just about anything that any self-respecting human being knows to be civilized behavior, must – according to the rules of marriage – find its pedigree on the other strand of the children’s genetic constitution. Whether our children’s behavior is a source of great pride or cause for alarm or consternation, whether from our side or from that of our spouse, to parent is to ride an inter-generational rollercoaster by which the essence of who we are, is – or is not – transmitted to those young people who have, by some cosmic happenstance, woken up to find themselves called our children.

A few years ago, and to much critical acclaim, Andrew Solomon published an important and deeply moving book called Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity. His thesis is that a person possesses two kinds of identity: vertical and horizontal. Vertical identities are those attributes or values that, either through DNA or cultural norms, are passed down from one generation to another. Ethnicity, skin color, oftentimes language or religion – these are things that are reproduced and passed down from one generation to the next. Solomon’s book, however, is really about the other kind of identity, the horizontal kind: the traits, preferences, or values of one generation that are not shared with the prior generation. Being gay, Solomon explains, is a horizontal identity, in that “most gay kids are born to straight parents.” Deafness, dwarfism, autism, being a child prodigy, or perhaps being a Mets fan if your parents are Dodger fans, these are all forms of horizontal identities. If vertical identities find expression in “Oh, that’s me,” then horizontal identities elicit an almost opposite response along the lines of “Where did that come from?” As the title of the book Far from the Tree indicates, in these instances parents must grapple with what it means when our children, the very ones bearing all our future hopes and dreams, have fallen far from where we are - sometimes very far afield. Our children, after all, are not just anyone’s children; they are ours. They bear the potential and promise of giving expression to our highest values. And precisely because we love them more than anything, because we know that in our children lies the secret to our immortality, when their identities prove to be a departure from our own, to be other than what we planned or expected, our universe is radically and often uncomfortably reoriented. How do we accommodate ourselves to the reality that our children are different from how we imagined they would be – different from us? Solomon’s book examines how families “learn to tolerate, accept and finally celebrate children who are not what they originally had in mind.” (p. 5)

It is this shared intergenerational struggle – sometimes tragic, sometimes redemptive – by which we reconcile our vertical and horizontal selves, which sits at the core of not just Solomon’s book, but the book we open up today: Genesis. Yes, the book of Genesis is about sibling rivalry; yes, it is about husbands and wives and in-laws and concubines and complex family dynamics and dysfunction that make our own families seem positively well-adjusted. At its core, however, this book about biology, blessings, and birthrights is really a book about the anxiety of one generation over the ability to see themselves – or not – in the next generation.

Let’s start at the end and work backwards. The penultimate scene of Genesis is that of Joseph bringing his sons to Jacob for a blessing, children who are unrecognizable to Jacob because they have been raised in a foreign land, as Egyptians. Jacob must reconcile the fact that his grandchildren are anything but what he imagined they would be. For that matter, Joseph’s entire life can be read as both an extension of and a reaction to the story of his father Jacob. Yes, Joseph was sold into Egypt against his will, but as so many have noted, in his years as vizier to Pharaoh, Joseph had more than ample opportunity to tell his father that he was alive. That he did not signals that on some level, in order for Joseph to fulfill his destiny and personhood, there needed to be a break of some sort: Joseph needed the space not to be his father’s son. Ironically, but understandably, only by hiding himself in Egyptian garb could Joseph prove to the world and himself who he really was.

Let’s keep going. What about Jacob and Esau and the battle for the birthright? When we read these narratives as children, we understand stories about bowls of soup and angelic wrestling matches in the midnight hour. But as adults we know them to be about so much more. The tale of Jacob and Esau is, in a nutshell, the story of how these two boys figure out how to assert their own identities, regardless of the hopes and dreams of their father Jacob and mother Rebecca and, for that matter, the divine foretelling of their destiny. Lest we forget, it was only by wrestling with the demons of his youth that Jacob would become Israel – the forefather of our people. For that matter, it was only when both Jacob and Esau were able to let their horizontal identities take precedence over the vertical expectations of their parents that they could reconcile and become what they couldn’t be earlier: brothers.

The pattern continues and is there for the discerning eye to see: for Jacob and his children, for Isaac and Rebecca and theirs, for Abraham and Sarah with Isaac and Ishmael. Every narrative of Genesis, from the binding of Isaac onwards, recounts our ancestors’ desire to pass down identity vertically, from one generation to the next, and their having to confront the possibility that for one reason or another, it may just not happen. Again and again it occurs: the arrival of a long desired child positioned to fulfill a historic destiny; the individuation of that child in ways nobody could predict; and the process of integration whereby parent and child come to terms with their respective points of sameness and difference. The only thing missing is Harry Chapin singing “Cat’s in the Cradle” in the background. The parent-child combinations of Genesis and of much of the rest of the Bible document the pleasure and pain of that process whereby our children one day grow up to be just like us . . . and nothing like us.

Nowhere do we see this play out more than in this morning’s Torah reading. The story of Cain and Abel and Cain’s search for validation falls squarely in this structure. Like so many other fraternal pairs, the two boys seek to live both under and out of their parents’ shadow. But the real story of individuation – the one upon which arguably the entire biblical narrative follows – is the one between humanity and the parent of us all: God. The text could not be clearer: “Let us make Adam in our image, after our likeness.” (1:26) Embedded in this single verse is the key to so much of biblical theology. Namely, that humanity is created with equal and infinite dignity, each one of us possessing a spark of the divine waiting to be discovered. And while this is true, we should not miss the more basic relational dynamic being established. To say that we are all created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God, means that there is a vertical identity inextricably linking us to God and God to us. To be created in God’s image means not only that we see some of God in each one of us; it also means that God, like every parent, sees some of God’s self in each and every human being.

If this is the case, if God sees us as extensions of God’s self, then I have to imagine that God must at times get very frustrated. After all, no differently than in the stories of Genesis, no differently than in the stories in Andrew Solomon’s book, sometimes the apple falls close to the tree, but often – perhaps more often than not – it does not. From the very first bite of that very first fruit in the Garden, to the strife between Cain and Abel, to the wickedness of the Flood generation, and all the way through human history, God has had to contend with that roller coaster ride of being invested in a humanity which, despite being a reflection of the divine, is also in possession of horizontal identities that stand at odds with that very image. Granted the gift of free will, there never was and never will be a guarantee that our behavior will at all reflect God’s wishes. In God’s eyes, we are thus caught betwixt and between. God sees a bit of the divine in us, but has to tolerate, acclimate, and accommodate the divine self to the reality that we are not quite what God expected. God loves us, celebrates us, but also, like a parent, cringes and perhaps even mourns at what we have become. The story of Genesis, the story of the Bible, the story of humanity is a never-ending struggle for God to come to terms with an individuated humanity. As for us, we wrestle, too. We seek to assert the truest version of our selves, all the while sensitive to the opportunity and obligation to live and act according the divine image in which we have been created.

If this is the case between God and humanity then how much more so for us, in our own families. Our people’s literary love affair with Genesis is not merely that the text provides a window into the lives of our founding families, but that it is a prism by which to understand and guide our own lives. All of us intuitively understand that we are extensions of and reactions to those who came before us. If blessed with children, we also know that there are elements of our children’s identities that are not quite what we may have initially expected or wanted. And while there is nothing wrong with the impulse of wanting to see something of ourselves in our children, the wise of heart know that our children must never be reduced to mere vessels by which we live out our own vicarious hopes. We dare not insist that our children’s lives fit on the procrustean bed of our own expectations. Every child, as the text states, must at some point separate themselves. No differently than we would ask of our own parents, in due time our own children must be granted the opportunity for individuation, for self-expression, and for difference. It is not easy, it wasn’t easy for God. But we must learn, as did God, to celebrate and integrate our children’s identities with our abiding and unending love for them.

L’dor va-dor, from generation to generation. Not just a melody or a mantra of Jewish continuity, the words represent a very tricky balancing act – easier said and sung than done. From the very beginning, throughout the book of Genesis, all the way through our people’s wanderings – nobody stays in the Garden forever. Our story is the liberating and tortured tale of how one people – aptly named the “Children of Israel” – learn to grow up and stand on their own two feet as adults, in order to arrive in the Promised Land where it all began. But I get ahead of myself; that is a story and book for another day. For the moment, let us appreciate the Gardens in which we stand, the gift of being created in the image of God with whom we share much but not everything, and grant our children the right and opportunity to fully express the complex and beautiful individuals that they are.