But take
utmost care and watch yourselves scrupulously, so that you do not forget the
things that you saw with your own eyes and so that they do not fade from your
mind as long as you live. And make them
known to your children and to your children’s children.” (Deuteronomy 4:9)
I find this
sentence very interesting. In the Shema
we are told to “Impress these instructions which G-d gives us upon your
children.” No where does it say to
impress these words upon your children’s children as well.” Yet if you look at the commentary cited from
the Babylonian Talmud, it states, “When
a child is taught Torah by a grandparent, it is as if that child received it at
Sinai.”
Teaching
Torah is not just a matter of sitting down and learning text together, teaching
Torah is done through example, how you live your life according to Torah
values, how you express yourself as a Jew. For those of you who grew up with a
connection to Judaism at an early age, perhaps you have a sense of the
importance your grandparents played in your earliest Jewish memories. I
remember from a very early age, that whenever I visited my grandfather in West
Virginia, he could be seen davening in front of his fireplace with his tefillin
wrapped around his arm and placed strategically on his forehead. He was not just a once a year Jew nor a once
a week Jew, his practice of Judaism was part of his every breath and shaped his
life. I remember sitting on his lap at
age 4 or 5 as he started teaching me the aleph bet. I saw him serving the small Jewish community
in which he lived as a Hebrew teacher, spiritual leader, and shochet. That
modeling had great impact on me.
In our household,
which is a multi-generational home, grandparenting and modeling Jewish living purposefully
go hand in hand. When we put up the
Sukkah we do it together. Learning to read kosher labels in the grocery store
started as soon as Jemma could discriminate letters of the alphabet. Traveling to and touring Israel together has been a shared experience
as well. All of these things seem
natural, but I think the underlying message is that this a part of our identity
that we hope to pass on from generation to generation.
This week we received an
invitation to an Israeli wedding that will take place in August. One thing that surprised me was to see a
grandparent’s name listed under the names of both sets of parents who were
issuing the invitation. I have since
learned that “in Israel the custom started of including the names of
grandparents on wedding invitations, even though they were deceased. This may
be related to the Shoah, as an effort to keep their memory alive. It also shows
that the family came from somewhere and is rooted.” In the United States, this custom is not
followed, but we do often see the names of grandparents listed in wedding
booklets that are handed out at the wedding ceremony, attesting to the
importance of intergenerational connections.
There were
two studies done recently that speak to the impact a grandparent can have on a
child’s Jewish identity. “One, based
on surveys of Birthright Israel alumni, reveals that, in general, “connection
to Jewish grandparents is an important predictor of a wide variety of
[positive] Jewish attitudes and practices” in later years. A second study of
1,150 Jewish college students, conducted in 2014 by Barry Kosmin and Ariella
Keysar, and focusing on the respondents’ middle-school years, likewise finds
that those whose grandparents accompanied them to synagogue and other Jewish
settings are likeliest to feel strong attachments to Israel and the Jewish
people. In religious life, too, both studies underline the extent to which
grandparents, as Lisa Miller puts it in The Spiritual Child,
are “key coordinates” on a child’s “spiritual map.” (Mosaic magazine, Jack
Wertheimer, American Jewry’s Great Untapped Resource: Grandparents)
Jack
Wertheimer, a professor of American Jewish History at JTS, studied a small
population of Jewish grandparents across a broad range of Jewish denominations and
his results showed that “Many grandparents are indeed
eager to play an active role in the lives of their grandchildren, including as
role models and as guides in the art of Jewish living. While some Jewish
institutions, for their part, are alert to the rich possibilities offered by
this undervalued resource, a great deal more could be done to mobilize it as an
active partner in the socialization of the next Jewish generation.”
Baby boomer
grandparents have opportunities to interact with their grandchildren even when
they live far away from them. They use
technology to connect. “Email, social media, and video chats, help them maintain a
close and continuing relationship. Exemplars of what one business consultant
has termed today’s “grandparent economy,” they are also more inclined to spend
money in the here and now than to have assets transferred only after their
deaths. Many provide their children with financial assistance, especially for
education, and also expend considerable sums on travel, visiting regularly
and/or taking their grandchildren on trips to broaden their horizons.” (Mosaic Magazine, Jack Wertheimer)
Other ways
today’s Jewish grandparents stay involved in the lives of their grandchildren
when they are present in the same community is to observe holidays and Shabbat
together, to help foot the bill for Jewish learning experiences like camp and
day-school education, and traveling to Israel with their grandchildren.
Many Jewish
grandparents in this day and age find themselves in a special role because of
the high rate of interfaith marriages. When we were in Hawaii for the birth of
our grandson recently, I found myself sitting down with our son-in-law to
explain the whole concept of brit milah, from the details of what happens to
the significance of what happens. When
Charlie blessed our daughter at our first Shabbat dinner in the home of the new
parents, that action then modeled for her what she then wanted to do for her
son and I observed that she wanted to do so the following week that I was there
as well. Perhaps if we hadn’t been
present during these early days, the effort to ensure the continuation of what
was learned at home as a child would have seemed too difficult to pursue.
Obviously, Moses
didn’t have an idea about the role of grandparenting in the 21st
century as it pertains to the religious development of grandchildren, but he
did have an understanding of the importance of continuity and passing one’s
heritage on from generation to generation.
Never underestimate the power of these intergenerational bonds for
preserving our customs, traditions, and heritage. If you are in a situation of having no
children or no grandchildren, but you’ve gained the status of being a senior in
the community, you can serve as a model for others’ children in a similar
manner.
The one
thing grandparents should not do is feel that they taught their children when
they were younger, and now it is up to their children to teach the younger
generation because they’ve already done their job! Torah teaches us that our job of modeling
Jewish life and values never ends. As
the text we cited today states, “And make them known to your children and to
your children’s children.”
No comments:
Post a Comment