Teaching Culture

I was reading an article the other day on Kveller (an online Jewish parenting site where various people blog) about the writer’s decision to send her youngest child to a Jewish day school after her two older children had gone to a non-Jewish private school. (The non-Jewish school was for boys only, and her youngest is a girl so she had to look elsewhere.) She spoke about all the incredible, advanced learning her boys have gotten that made her never question that decision, and then how she felt watching her daughter completely comfortable with songs, prayers, and rituals in the synagogue that her sons were awkward with or disengaged from.

This led to an interesting discussion in the comments among parents who have chosen to send their children to Jewish day schools and those who chose not to. One parent said that she resented the implication that kids couldn’t be raised to be comfortably observant Jews if they are in public school (or a non-Jewish private school). Another responded and said that this is true if you are able to maintain a strong Jewish home, but that she was not raised very observantly and her husband is not Jewish, so while she feels comfortable with the culture of Judaism that is a part of her family’s everyday life, she didn’t feel so comfortable with teaching the faith and religion and DID feel the need for the help of a Jewish day school for that. She stated that when you are not able to teach your kids much about religion at home, two hours of Hebrew school twice a week just doesn’t cut it to help your kids be grounded in their faith.

This whole conversation fascinated me (and there were many other people involved in it), but this in particular resonated with me in that I am kind of the opposite. I read so much about people having the “culture” of Judaism but not the religion, while I feel I have more of the religion and have to be taught the culture.

Right before my conversion in April, my mother-in-law revealed to me that while her grandmother was very observant, her mother wasn’t, so she was not raised with the religion of Judaism. She eventually felt the need for her children to have what she didn’t, and that is when she attempted to start involving them in a local synagogue. However, my wife and her brother were teenagers and felt uncomfortable with this and were just never interested in participating. My wife’s sister, however, who was seven years younger, immediately gravitated toward it and began attending Hebrew school and became a bat mitzvah. When my mother-in-law attended events at the synagogue for her youngest child, she says she felt an immediate connection. She felt that despite not feeling so familiar with the religion, she immediately felt like she was with her people: the way they looked, the way they acted, their mannerisms, the traditions, the sayings, the superstitions. This is what made her feel like a Jew for the first time, to realize that she IS a Jew no matter what.

THIS is what I feel the need to teach and pass on to my children. I feel 100% comfortable with the religion of Judaism. It’s not so different from the faith I grew up with, after all, and no different from what I have believed for the past ten years of my life. That part of conversion was nearly seamless for me. It is the culture that I have had to become accustomed to. It is the culture that I crave, that I want to be at home with. I am an eager immigrant who received my citizenship but will still always feel like an outsider in a way. This is not in a bad way – I don’t feel ostracized or isolated or left out. I just feel an eagerness to have what I can’t, because my love and sense of belonging is so strong.

I want my kids to grow up identifying with their Jewish heritage not just in their faith and religious practices, but in the way we communicate as a family that matches what they see in other Jewish families, patterns of relating that Jews can affectionately joke about because they know it about themselves and see how it sets them apart. And this is yet another (if newly realized) reason that I want to raise our family with an active temple life. They will get some of the culture at home; some of it has rubbed off on Nicole from her upbringing by a Jewish mother (certainly her way of communicating, which is very different from mine!), some of it has rubbed off on both of us from our exposure to our own Jewish community at our temple, and some of it we learn piece by piece and incorporate into our lives as we go along without even meaning to or realizing it. But what we miss, I hope they are able to pick up elsewhere. And if not…then they will grow up with their mixed culture of being an observant Jew raised by a convert and a former agnostic, and that’s okay too. It will all be part of their story and will make them the beautiful people that they will be.

Edit: I was talking to my friend Allyson about this over lunch yesterday, and she said that because I chose Judaism and because of my passion for it and the way I am already practicing it, my kids will have much more of a culture than unfortunately most American born Jews are giving their kids. Hearing that perspective put me a bit more at ease too.