There’s No Such Thing as Raising Jew-ish Children
When Jon and I started talking about marriage, before we were officially engaged, I told him that I wanted my children to receive a Jewish education. Jon had an Anglican background but was pretty anti-organized religion at the time, so I was careful not to say I wanted them “to be Jewish.” We agreed that we’d practice Judaism as the primary religion in our home and send our kids to Hebrew School but that we’d teach them that Judaism was one religion of many and that it wasn’t necessarily the only right or true religion; it was just the one that my family and I believed in (to varying degrees) and it was the one they’d have to learn about until they celebrated their Bar/Bat Mitzvahs.
The pandemic meant that we got started on this path a little later than planned. From 2012, when I moved back to DC from London, until 2020, we were involved with a wonderful synagogue here in Washington that focused its programming on the 20s and 30s crowd. It married its participants and helped them set up Jewish households, but it was clear that its mission didn’t extend to the life stage on which most embarked next: having children.
That synagogue was where Jon first explored Judaism in an institutional context. I won’t - can’t - speak to Jon’s deeper experience here, but the welcome he received only made me love the community more and I was in no rush to go elsewhere despite knowing that they didn’t provide programming for families with young kids. “When Robbie’s old enough to need services tailored for him,” I told myself, chasing him around the back of the sanctuary alongside the other parents of crawling infants and newly-walking toddlers who couldn’t quite let go, either.
Robbie was a few months past two years old when the pandemic came to DC and all activities moved online. Our Jewish experiences shrunk to what I could provide in our home; we said Shabbat prayers before dinner on Friday nights, sang the songs I could remember from my childhood, and celebrated holidays (mostly gastronomically) with my parents. In 2021, when in-person gatherings resumed, we started shul-shopping. I took Robbie to a few family services and Tot Shabbats at different synagogues around town to see what they were like, had lots of conversations with other local Jews in similar situations, and talked through options with the beloved rabbi from the synagogue we’d be leaving.
In the end, we found an incredible synagogue home at a Reform synagogue in DC. (I was raised Conservative, so Reform was kind of a compromise between what I grew up with and how Jon was raised. You can read more about the different denominations here.) We signed up as members just in time to enroll Robbie in Hebrew School, which starts in kindergarten, and have been to a few services and community events since registering over the summer.
One thing I really like about the synagogue’s approach to providing a Jewish education is that it’s not just for children. Hebrew School starts every Sunday with Boker Tov (which means “good morning” in Hebrew) for all children and their parents; we sing songs, say some prayers, and discuss whatever holiday or Torah portion is relevant that weekend. Once the kids disperse to their classes, the parents are invited to stay for a discussion group with one of the rabbis. At the first discussion group, we talked about what it means to each of us to be part of a Jewish community. The memory of the Holocaust came up a few times, as did the topic of Israel.
Just prior to that, we’d closed out Boker Tov by all singing Hatikvah, Israel’s national anthem, together. To be honest, it made me a little uncomfortable. While I absolutely believed in Israel’s right to exist and to defend itself, I didn’t feel like my Judaism was tied to Israeli patriotism and I wasn’t sure I wanted my kids’ to be, either.
A few weeks later, though, Hamas attacked southern Israel and I was grateful that I’d memorized Hatikvah at Hebrew School when I was a child.
I can swear up and down that I won’t mind if my kids end up not being Jewish but, at the end of the day, raising them in a Jewish household and sending them to Hebrew School walks them just up to the door of indoctrination - and I’m realizing I’m glad of it.
Of course I want them to apply critical thinking to everything they hear, especially when it comes to religion and politics. And I truly will be fine if they end up not believing in God as long as they hold fast to the values we and, yes, Judaism are teaching them. But I also want them to soak up everything that my faith and my culture and my people’s history have to offer without even realizing that they’re learning. I want them to just internalize the Shema through osmosis like I did. I want my mom’s matzah ball soup and my grandfather’s brisket to always be among their favorite foods. I want them to recognize their family in Fiddler on the Roof and An American Tail. If they’re not Jewish, I at least want them to be Jew-ish.
However, over the last few days, I’ve realized that’s not possible. If we raise our kids with a Jewish education, they will always be Jewish regardless of what religion they profess. They’re not old enough to remember this war, but something will happen in five or ten years that they’ll never forget, like how the image of my Hebrew School’s principal’s face, streaked with tears as she led an assembly a few days after Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, is seared into my mind. They’ll always know what tikkun olam means - gemilut chasidim and tzedakah and tzedek - and feel called to practice it. And they’ll always know the tunes, at least, of Hatikvah and Yerushalayim Shel Zahav.
I’m not sure how to reconcile that with what I promised Jon a decade ago. We’ll encourage intellectual debate and spiritual exploration as our kids grow up. But I don’t actually think it’s possible to raise Jew-ish children. They either are or they aren’t - and ours are.
