Question

This is a column that Rachel Malk-Boda wrote a few years ago, and you’ve probably seen it. But I only started reading you in the last month, so I don’t know whether you responded to this column in the past. If so, I’d be happy if you could point me there. In any case, the reason I’m sending you the column is that you constantly argue against conservatism, and here she points to many failures of open/liberal education. I’d be glad if you would respond to her claims.
For several good hours now, a text message from the synagogue committee has been waiting on my smartphone. “How are you,” it says, “would you like to give a class on Shavuot? This year’s theme is ‘water’; you can take it in any direction you want.”
Once, I would have answered a request like that with an automatic “yes.” What’s the big deal about putting together a class for a former midrasha student? A few glances at Maimonides and Rabbenu Tam, a nice anecdote from an Agnon story, and there you have it: a source sheet with a brilliant line of thought you’ll never forget.
But instead I was struck by anxiety, which very quickly gave way to shame. I didn’t know how to tell them that… well… I’ve forgotten how to study Torah. I abandoned that muscle. And now, suddenly, when I’m asked to activate it again, I cramp up.
The truth is, it had already caught up with me earlier, on Friday night in the community, when I heard Sabbath songs drifting out of one of the houses. It was a rare event. I assume the neighbors were hosting a really, really Hardal family if they allowed themselves, just like that, in the middle of the night, to sing Sabbath songs, because among our crowd, those songs have long since stopped being part of the Sabbath table.
Where did the songs disappear to from our lives? I suddenly asked myself. We eat together, make kiddush together, Sabbath is Sabbath. But the melodies gradually evaporated over the years and were replaced by lively conversation or political arguments. From a natural ritual without which you simply couldn’t spend a Sabbath, they became a nuisance. What, suddenly stop the laughing and break into some “Dror Yikra”? That’s the kind of thing that officially puts you at risk of becoming a party pooper.
When my son wanted to get into a religious high school, they announced there would be an exam in Judaism. “Tell me,” I asked him on the way to the exam, “do you even know the Al HaMichya blessing by heart?” Of course he didn’t remember. In the exemplary light-religious home where he was raised, we no longer make children say blessings.
And last Sabbath, when the boys refused to go to synagogue and I found myself pleading with them in forced gentleness (“I don’t want to force you, but maybe go to honor me?”), it hit me hard: I had failed educationally. All those years I told myself it was possible to raise children with a folkloristic religiosity. That if we just sent them to a mixed school and didn’t pressure them on matters of Judaism, we’d produce the perfect progressive religious kid. Knows Torah but is skeptical about it. Knows Jewish law but isn’t necessarily committed to it.
I wonder whether my children will remain religious. I once thought it wouldn’t matter to me, but in recent years the thought has started to hurt a little. I remember how one day I discovered that my cousin, who had gone secular many years earlier, had suddenly started putting on tefillin again. “My son’s bar mitzvah is coming up soon,” he explained to me. “I used to know how to read from the Torah. I thought I’d be able to teach him, and I forgot everything. Suddenly I asked myself: what am I going to leave him? What heritage?”
“What am I going to leave my children?” That is the alarm clock that began ringing in my life. The religious post-trauma that runs me, the thing that makes me afraid to get angry at my daughter when she draws on Sabbath lest I look in her eyes like some seminary guard, managed to scrape from the walls of my home even the element every average light-religious person wants in life — Jewishness.
Slowly, gradually, I feel Torah being forgotten. I feel complete prayers that I once knew by heart growing dim in my mind. Rituals that were the delight of my childhood have become a hazy memory. I thought I would succeed in teaching my children to be religious in theory. To know blessings but not say them. To get to synagogue but not pray with devotion. And I didn’t succeed in the experiment.
And now, I can only admit it — if my children remain religious, it will be thanks to their grandfather, who insists that they make kiddush. Thanks to their grandmother, who refuses to buy them ice cream from a stand without a kosher certificate. Thanks to the pushy educators that we ourselves were afraid to be.
All our lives we tried to avoid being those parents, the ones who shove their children to synagogue by force and get angry at them when they play outside instead of praying, and now all we want is that they know something of those prayers, even just a little.
I was born on Shavuot. There’s no small amount of irony in that. The girl who was born on the day of the giving of the Torah and ran away from it as long as she had breath in her — receives it back like a slap in the face. And suddenly I understand my father a little, the one who insisted that we sit by the table during the songs and that no one be absent. He understood what I am only now beginning to understand — that you can’t instill a way of life without deliberate, repeated inculcation. You can’t raise a continuing generation through episodes of folklore. As annoying as it sounds, there is no way to educate toward meaningful religiosity without a pinch of coercion or a demand for some degree of sacrifice. We wanted to raise a generation of sophisticated religious people free of halakhic trauma, and without noticing, we ended up with a generation of ignoramuses.

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