My former rabbi’s weekly Shabbat email message:
Too many Jewish parents seek to offer their children a ‘multiple-choice’ culture, by placing the Menorah alongside a tree. They say, “we should offer our children the options; let them make their choices when they grow up.” As happens with many other plans and dreams, it looks good on paper but it never pans out in real life.
A healthy identity must be comprised of boundaries. We must know who we are. We must equally know who we aren’t. The latter may be negative but it serves to protect and to ensure the stability of individuality. The walls around a cup serve as boundaries which also retain the water from spilling away and losing its form. It’s crucial for children to be nurtured with an identity in which they know who they are and who they are not.
Our children must certainly be taught to respect all religions. But that doesn’t mean that they must also celebrate them. Giving them multiple cultures is the equivalent of giving them no culture. Education must be a resolute transmission of a single message which carries the values to which our children belong. Otherwise they will enter into a maze from which they may take years to figure their way out. Give your children the tools that will always allow them to say, “I know who I am!”
Here we see “benign” religion: a good person of some authority telling his congregants to hold onto orthodoxy. My friend is wrong, however.
My wife and I agonized years ago because we believed that our children needed to have a pre-set religious identity. They needed to be either Catholic first or Jewish first. They could not be both, and they could not be neither.
Bullshit. They could have been both, or they could have been neither. They wouldn’t have been lost or confused. They would have known who they are. It was other people and institutions that needed us to make a one or the other choice. We didn’t need it. The kids didn’t need it.
Giving multiple cultures is not equivalent to giving none. It’s a lie to say otherwise. It’s a lie designed to get the religious registers filled, and to prevent the kids from noticing that neither religion is based on anything but stories and interpretation.
