Teaching Our Children in Unsteady Times |
There are moments when children ask questions much larger than the words they use. It may be something they heard in school, saw online, or overheard between adults. A headline may have reached them before we had the chance to explain it. Sometimes they ask directly, and sometimes the question is hidden inside a look, a change in mood, or a silence we recognize but cannot quite name.
As parents, our first instinct is to protect them from the weight of it. We want childhood to stay as untouched as possible by fear, by antisemitism, by conflict, and by the knowledge that Jewish life has never been entirely simple. That instinct is natural. But our children are not growing up outside the world. They are growing up inside it, and it reaches them in ways we cannot always control.
That is why what we teach them matters. Not only in the explanations we give when they ask, but in everything quieter than that. Children notice how we react and what we avoid. They notice whether we speak about being Jewish with anxiety or with confidence, and whether Israel enters the........