Parashat Emor, 5772, Dr. Nurit Novis-Deutsch
Parashat Emor
May 12, 2012 / 20 Iyar, 5772
Dr. Nurit Novis-Deutsch
Shabbat Shalom,
As I am a shul and Gan parent speaking to you on Shabbat Yeladeinu I wanted to address a question in the field of Jewish education: How do we answer children’s questions about God? We’ll get to Parashat Emor too, but we’ll be taking a somewhat indirect route to get there, because I’m afraid parashat Emor found it more important to talk about priestly sacrifices than about children’s questions about God. What a pity.
So I’d like to begin by sharing with you some of the more challenging questions my children have asked me:
“Mommy, Where did God hatch from?” Asks 3 year old Yarden after learning in Gan that all living things are born. A few weeks later he brings home a “stuffy” which he made. This was a lovely Gan project - some kids made pets, some made dolls and Yarden decided to make a stuffy of God. If you’re wondering how Yarden envisioned God, it was rather reminiscent of an amoeba - an orange stuffed blob (orange, being, understandably, his favorite color) and I wondered if for the sake of his Jewish education I should be saying something about the formlessness of God who is everywhere at the same time, or if I should just welcome the little God idol into our stuffy collection, which of course I did.
Noga my 6 year old, comes home from school one day very upset. She says: “I had a fight with Aya. (her best friend). She said God didn’t make people at all. Her daddy told her people came from monkeys and became people by chance. I said maybe she came from a monkey but I sure didn’t. Mommy, who was right?” – Should I tell her that I am with Aya on this? Is a six year old capable of both believing in the random evolution of life forms and of keeping an open space for God in her life?
And the most challenging of all, coming from Ma’ayan my ten year old: “Mommy, do you believe in God?” – What do I say? I’m 40 years old and I still don’t know if I do or don’t?
I know there are many other questions like these because in speaking to Lauren, Ofra and the other teachers at Nevonim and Nachshonim preschools, I heard of various perceptive and challenging questions and comments, from “is God Jewish?” to “If God made everything then God also made God. How could God make himself?”
What makes me so perplexed about these questions is that my usual unerring compass which guides me when trying to answer questions – namely, the search for truth – is not so helpful here. For one, I don’t know the truth myself. For another, I’m not sure if in this case, it really is all about truth.
Because when we answer our children’s God questions, the answer is clearly a function of several variables rather than only one. There is the aspect of what we believe to be the truth but there is also the question of the child’s age and our assessment of his cognitive capacity at that stage in his life. There is the potential conflict our answer might have with what the teacher is telling him, or his father, or the Bible and how that conflict may influence him, but mostly, we try to take into account our child’s motivation in asking the question, and ours in answering it. This is less relevant when scientific or other factual questions are asked. The motivation is usually a thirst for knowledge on the part of the child, and a wish to pour knowledge into the child, on the part of the parent.
Here it is different. So I’d like to focus on these last two variables – children’s motivations and parents’ motivations in thinking about God.
It’s easier to figure the first one out. Sometimes children really want to understand, and we can tell when that’s the case because a perfunctory reassurance just won’t satisfy them. But other times, they are looking for a reassurance from us that the theories which they devised to explain their world are acceptable. Psychologists have shown that all children are “theory builders” and this is something they need in order to make sense of all the information they are processing. A theory of God is what we call a “framework theory” – it can be used to put together many smaller domain-specific theories. When a child shares the way he thinks of God with an adult that he loves, he is probably not asking to be contradicted and corrected, but rather to be encouraged in developing his own constructs and then refining them as he grow older.
Other times children ask about God out of a motivation of gaining comfort. This may happen especially if the child is experiencing stress. I remember one heartbreaking conversation I had when serving as a camp psychologist with a nine year old whose mother was dying of cancer. To compound the tragedy, the mother was a single mother and the child wanted to know what happens to people after they die. This was not the place or time for offering a complex theology. The child needed a source of comfort for the tribulations lying ahead, such as knowing that her mother will find the way to love her and look over her after death, and most of all she needed to know that she wouldn’t be left alone in the world. Family and friends, but also God, could provide that reassurance and comfort.
So figuring out why our child is asking the question would be the first part of providing an answer. The harder part though is figuring out our own motivations in answering and I’d like to suggest that sometimes they are not about providing knowledge to our kids. When we tell our kids: “God always listens to your prayers”, or “God gave us the Torah to teach us how to behave” what are we actually doing?
In our Parasha the following two words appear: lirtsonchem - tamid – According to your wishes it shall be unspoilt (or flawless). Although the original meaning has to do entirely with choice-driven sacrifices of a whole sheep or goat, I find another meaning in it for our own purposes: Tamim in Hebrew means unspoilt, whole, but it also means innocent, naïve - childlike. In the Passover Haggadah the third son who is usually drawn with a thumb in his mouth and wide eyes, is the Tam – the simpleton - from the same root. For many of us, the further we move away from childhood – the more we yearn for innocence, for that unspoilt state of trust in the world. And since many of us have lost that option for ourselves, we sometimes try to find it through our children. This can mean that we sometimes willingly teach them things we know to be untrue just because we want so badly to see that sweet innocence at work. We want to experience unquestioning faith, if only by proxy. lirtsonchem - tamid. We wish for innocence. If you don’t believe me think of the tooth fairy. Or of Santa Clause, or of Elijah drinking from the cup on Seder night. Of course, one could raise an additional and perhaps more narcissistic motivation of actually getting to play God in all of these, but I’ll leave that one aside.
I’ll never forget how excited I was the first time Ma’ayan my eldest lost a tooth. In my eagerness to provide the full-blown tooth-fairy experience I not only put money under her pillow, but wrote a long letter, covered with glitter, from that elusive fairy, assuring Ma’ayan what a special little girl she was. Evidently I did my job too well because the next day Maa’yan showed me the letter she’d written back for the fairy, complete with a list of questions about her life and a fervent request for a pair of wings. Now what? I found myself embroiled in an ongoing correspondence with my daughter under my fairy alias – getting more and more uncomfortable as we went along. The question that was bugging me was: Why on earth am I lying to my daughter? I try so hard not lie to her about anything else, why do I feel not only a license to lie but almost a sacred duty to make her believe in something I know very well to be nonsense? Something that one day she’ll have to become disillusioned from? This question has been bothering me ever since, and the aspect of it that troubles me the most is, Is it the same with God? I’m going to share one of my innermost concerns with you: Is God a sort of cultural tooth fairy that adults pass on to their children once they no longer can hold on to him?
I don’t want to end on such a dismal note. Our conversations with children about God can also be reframed in a more positive way. But for that, we need to relinquish the title of “how to answer children about God” for this topic. Because when it comes to God, we are all children – our years count for little in face of infinity, and the older we grow, the more we realize how little we know. Children’s questions, often wise and perceptive, help us put our knowledge and lack of it into perspective. They help us understand what we don’t know. And sometimes, just sometimes, they also help us highlight the few certainties about life which we have arrived at, through hard-earned experience.
I’ll end with a question which Noga recently told me she’d like to ask God if she could. Although it was a difficult question, I found to my surprise that for a change - I knew the answer.
Noga said: “I’d like to ask God if in the whole world there is someone who is only good”. Then she paused a little and added: “and if in the whole world there is anybody who is only bad”.
I told Noga that was a beautiful question. Then I thought some more and shared my own answer. I don’t think there is, I told her. The first fact - that no one is wholly good – makes us human. The second fact - that no one is wholly bad – makes us Godly.
Shabbat Shalom.