by Johanna Ginsberg
NJJN Staff Writer

April 2, 2009

Shabbat and holidays do not have to be perfect in order to be meaningful Jewish experiences. That was the thrust of Anita Diamant’s keynote address at a Jewish parenting conference at the Aidekman Jewish Community Campus in Whippany. “You can have a very powerful spiritual Shabbat dinner over takeout pizza, I promise — especially if there’s chocolate for dessert,” she said.

Diamant is a freelance journalist and author of six guidebooks to Jewish life — including How To Raise a Jewish Child (with coauthor Karen Kushner, updated in 2008) — as well as the best-selling fiction work The Red Tent. She spoke to an audience of about 60 people, mostly women, who were attending “Parenting for the 21st Century,” a program presented by the Morris County Connection on March 29.

Throughout her talk, Diamant, who spent her early childhood in Newark, and now lives in the Boston area, stressed that Jewish parenting is participatory and goes far beyond dropping children off at religious school. “Only a Jewish home life and Jewish family can provide our children with a Jewish childhood. Jewish parenting isn’t something you provide for your children; it means sharing a Jewish life with your children.”

She framed her talk around the three goals set for Jewish parents at a baby naming or brit: Torah, huppa (marriage), and ma’asim tovim (good deeds).

She offered a variety of examples of each: for Torah, she reminded the audience, “you don’t have to know anything to be a good Jewish parent.” Her point was that it’s all about modeling Jewish learning. So, for example, when a child asks a question the parent doesn’t know the answer to, you look it up together. “You demonstrate that Jewish learning is something you do as a grownup…and that it is a joy to be a Jewish learner.”

Regarding huppa, which she interprets loosely as loving relationships (huppa is literally the marriage canopy), she said children learn about love by watching how their parents model their relationship. “Judaism provides us with a whole lot of settings and celebrations that give us a context for modeling love, family love within a Jewish framework. The holidays, life-cycle events, in particular Shabbat — these are stages upon which the lessons of huppa can be taught.”

Demonstrating ma’asim tovim includes doing good deeds in the world around us, according to Diamant. “Providing our children with models and age-appropriate experiences of charitable giving, of kindness and volunteering, teaches them not only about the problems in the world around them but teaches them that it is in their power to make a difference. It teaches them a fundamental optimism about the world, which is really what Judaism is about.”

Diamant offered Shabbat as “the building block” for all three pillars. Anticipating participants’ fears about preparing for Shabbat, she said that many people grew up with the notion that a Shabbat meal “has to be a home-cooked, chicken, six-course, put-out-the-china meal that becomes an obstacle to too many people’s practice of Friday night dinner rituals.”

Rather, Shabbat “is all about being in the dining room, lighting candles, and having grape juice, and hallah, and warming it in the oven and having the house smell like heaven…. It’s about saying yes to dessert, saying yes to soda if that’s what you’re not allowed to do all week long…. It’s about giving yourself permission as a parent to enjoy time with family.”

On Shabbat the Torah pillar can be found in singing blessings in Hebrew, she said. Ma’asim tovim can be modeled through the giving of tzedaka before lighting candles. And huppa is demonstrated “through the interactions around the table, kissing family and friends, and looking at your children one by one and say[ing], ‘I love you, you’re special, you’re important.’

“I know people who whisper a special blessing in each child’s ear every Friday night. It’s a way of modeling love in a Jewish context, to acknowledge that we care for each other and we take care of each other.”

Parents had some pressing questions of their own, some raising issues more complicated than those raised by Diamant, such as: How do you talk about God with your children? What do you tell your child who says year in and year out that he or she hates going to Hebrew school? What do you do when Shabbat isn’t working in your family? And what’s your take on interfaith dating?

Diamant’s answers were varied and personal; ranging from, essentially, “everyone’s theology is different” and “focus on the rituals” to “get involved” and “find out why the child hates Hebrew school as you would in regular school.” Her response about Shabbat was to say that it may not work every week, but her family does it every week anyway. And on interfaith dating: She told the group that she fell in love and married a non-Jewish man who converted and now her 23-year-old daughter is dating a non-Jew.

She concluded her talk by calling children “an experience of creation” but acknowledging that “playing God includes some very humbling lessons.”

“We have to watch as our children make their own choices regardless of what we have told them. There are no guarantees. As parents and grandparents, the best we can do is to give them our most precious gifts, including Judaism, and then step back and see what happens next.”

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