Jewish Parenting: Bulldozer Parents and Accepting Parents©Parashat Toledot 2019/5780
A Jewish mother is walking down the street with her two young sons.
A passerby asks her how old the boys are.
"The doctor is three," the mother answers, "and the lawyer is two."
There are so many Jewish mother jokes, and most of them involve the same theme: Jewish mothers have high expectations for their children, and sometimes, even if they achieve great things, they still aren’t happy.
This week’s parashah, Toledot, is such a rich parashah - we are introduced to Jacob and Esau who become the fathers of two peoples - Jacob becomes the father of the Jews - the only forefather whose children all follow his path. Esau becomes the father of Edom, which later becomes Rome, and Christianity.
When Rebecca is pregnant with these two boys, God tells her the following (Genesis 25:23)
שְׁנֵי גיים [גוֹיִם] בְּבִטְנֵךְ וּשְׁנֵי לְאֻמִּים מִמֵּעַיִךְ יִפָּרֵדוּ וּלְאֹם מִלְאֹם יֶאֱמָץ וְרַב יַעֲבֹד צָעִיר׃
“Two nations are in your womb, Two separate peoples shall issue from your body; One people shall be mightier than the other, And the older shall serve the younger.”
These two peoples have been linked together for thousands of years for better or for worse. But the beauty of the Torah is that it tells this story of conflict as a story about a family. Siblings have parents, and while it is so tempting to jump into the story of these two iconic forefathers, its important to see how they became forefathers - through their parents; a couple Isaac and Rebecca who had very different thoughts on how to raise children.
I can see this most powerfully in the following lines (Genesis 25:28):
וַיֶּאֱהַב יִצְחָק אֶת־עֵשָׂו כִּי־צַיִד בְּפִיו וְרִבְקָה אֹהֶבֶת אֶת־יַעֲקֹב׃
Isaac favored Esau because he had a taste for game; but Rebekah favored Jacob.
But it’s not just favored - it uses the word, love, Ahav. The question is, how did they love them, and what can we learn from their successes, and their failures.
First, I want us to look at Rebecca. Rebecca was given a revelation from God, the older shall serve the younger, Esau will serve Jacob, and yet, as she sees the boys growing up, she doesn’t see Jacob fulfilling his destiny. Jacob is described as אִישׁ תָּם יֹשֵׁב אֹהָלִים׃, a simple man who stayed in the camp. He’s a quiet boy who keeps to himself. The rabbis view him as a yeshiva bocher who was more interested in books than people. But Esau was the opposite; he’s described as אִישׁ יֹדֵעַ צַיִד אִישׁ שָׂדֶה, a skillful hunter, a man of the outdoors. I’m sure Rebecca thought to herself every day, how is Esau who is so physically powerful ever serve my nebbishy son. There comes a moment in the parashah when Rebecca has hit her breaking point. She sees Esau marries Basemath, who is a Hittite, and the text says, וַתִּהְיֶיןָ מֹרַת רוּחַ לְיִצְחָק וּלְרִבְקָה׃ (ס)
and they were a source of bitterness to Isaac and Rebekah.
Immediately after, Rebecca overhears Isaac tell his beloved son Esau that he is about to die, and wants him to prepare a meal for him so he can give him a blessing. This is the moment where she feels she must act, and so Rebecca hatches a scheme. She instructs Jacob what to do, to a tee, precise instructions. When he shares his concerns about deceiving his father she says, “Your curse, my son, be upon me! Just do as I say and go fetch them for me.” She even cooks the food for Jacob. All Jacob has to do is show up, hand Isaac the food, and receive the blessing. We look at this story and see how strong Rebecca is. It is from this incident when she takes Jacob’s destiny in her hands, where many look at Rebecca as the hero of the story, the stronger parent. But I started looking at this story differently after some recent events.
Have you ever heard the term helicopter parent? It’s when a parent hovers over their children, dropping a ladder to protect them from any dangers they might encounter. But there’s a new term: bulldozer parenting - when a parent will remove any and all obstacles that face their children, seemingly ensuring their success.
 |
| Photo by gaspar manuel zaldo on Unsplash |
For a modern example, we can look at the college admissions scandal, when parents bribed university officials and test-takers so their children would be admitted to the top schools that their parents always dreamed of. One parent even photoshopped their child’s head on another person’s body so they could be given a water polo scholarship and admission to justify their poor grades and scores.
But, psychological studies have shown, that over protecting our children can actually hurt them. Imagine if we protected our children so much from falling; would they ever walk, or learn how to ride a bike? What is behind the college admission scandal is something that we all face - the high expectations we have for our children. Remember that joke I shared at the beginning: this one’s going to be a doctor, and this one a lawyer. There is some truth to it.
Our children live under tremendous pressure - the pressure to be perfect:
Dr. Madeline Levine, a clinical psychologist who worked in Marin County, California, one of the richest and most prestigious areas in the country, wrote a book called the “The Price of Privilege”. In her book, Dr. Levine speaks about the children she treated in her community. You would think that kids who grow up in Marin County would have no serious medical or psychological problems. After all, they go to first-rate schools, they live in lovely homes, and they have highly educated and very successful parents. But she says, these children have serious problems. She writes that these children have “epidemic rates of depression, anxiety disorders, and substance abuse – at rates higher than that of any other socioeconomic group of young people in this country.”
Dr. Levine gives a name to this spiritual illness that she has diagnosed. She calls it: “The Poison of Perfectionism”. This is how she describes it: “Affluent communities are full of people who are very talented, determined, skilled, ambitious, and successful – and who expect their children to be as successful as they are – whether they can be or not.”
And I wonder what would have happened to Jacob if he never ran away and gotten away from his parents, and their expectations for him. Would he have grown into the man he became?
And, in our parashah, we read another paradigm of parenting that we often overlook: the relationship between Isaac and Esau.
The commentators could not understand why Isaac loved Esau, the exact opposite of Jacob. Esau the hunter, the outdoors man; why would he choose him over the Torah scholar Jacob?
The rabbis went to great lengths to try and make sense of it all. Rashi, citing a Midrash, suggests that the phrase translated as, “who had a taste for wild game,” and referring to Isaac, in fact refers to Esau, and should be read “there was hunting in his mouth,” meaning that he used to entrap and deceive his father by his words. Esau deceived Isaac into thinking that he was more pious and spiritual than in fact he was.
But perhaps the relationship between Isaac and Esau is not as complicated as that. How could Isaac love his child even though he’s not the ‘typical’ child.
I think the answer to why Isaac loved his son Esau so much can teach us something about how we love our children.
Let’s go back to that line that set everything up, Genesis 25:28
וַיֶּאֱהַב יִצְחָק אֶת־עֵשָׂו כִּי־צַיִד בְּפִיו וְרִבְקָה אֹהֶבֶת אֶת־יַעֲקֹב׃
Isaac favored Esau because he had a taste for game; but Rebekah favored Jacob.
The text tells us why Isaac loved Esau - he had a taste for game. Isaac knew who his son was, and instead of trying to change him, he embraced his identity.
 |
| Photo by Dimitri de Vries on Unsplash |
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks gave the following teaching about Isaac’s relationship to Esau:
“Isaac, who loved Esau, was not deceived as to the nature of his elder son. He knew what he was and what he wasn’t. He knew he was a man of the field, a hunter, mercurial in temperament, a man who could easily give way to violence, quickly aroused to anger, but equally quickly, capable of being distracted and forgetting. He also knew that Esau was not the child to continue the covenant. That is manifest in the difference between the blessing Isaac gave Jacob in Genesis 27 (believing him to be Esau), and the blessing in Genesis 28 that he gave Jacob, knowing him to be Jacob.”
When Isaac blesses Jacob, thinking it is Esau, he says: “May God give you of the dew of heaven and the fat of the earth” – and power, “Let peoples serve you, and nations bow to you.” The second blessing, intended for Jacob as he was leaving home, is about children – “May God Almighty bless you and make you fruitful and increase your numbers until you become a community of peoples” – and a land – “May He give you and your descendants the blessing given to Abraham, so that you may take possession of … the land God gave to Abraham.” The patriarchal blessings are not about wealth and power; they are about children and the land. He blessed each child according to who they really were.
Wendy Mogel, the author of the famous Jewish parenting book, Blessings of a Skinned Knee, wrote:
“A Hasidic teaching says, "If your child has a talent to be a baker, don't tell him to be a doctor." Judaism holds that every child is made in the divine image. When we ignore a child's intrinsic strengths in an effort to push him toward our notion of extraordinary achievement, we are undermining God's plan.”
And as I dug deeper into how Isaac must have looked at Esau, I think he saw his brother Ishmael in him. Ishmael shared some of the same qualities with Esau, a boy who didn’t fit the mold of the firstborn who was to take on his father’s legacy. In last week’s parashah, after being separated by their parents as children when Ishmael was cast out of the house, they come together as brothers to bury their father. And perhaps it was at this point when he made a promise to himself: I will not cast my son away; I will love my child not despite, but because of his or her unique qualities.
And this is our challenge, not just for parenting, but for life - loving the people that are close to us, not for who we want them to be, but who they are.
And I would like to conclude with the words of another famous sage of our time, Fred Rogers, who sang the following song often to children, and to the parents who were watching with their precious children.
I like you as you are
Exactly and precisely
I think you turned out nicely
And I like you as you are
I like you as you are
Without a doubt or question
Or even a suggestion
Cause I like you as you are
I like your disposition
Your facial composition
And with your kind permission
I'll shout it to a star
I like you as you are
I wouldn't want to change you
Or even rearrange you
Not by far
I like you
I-L-I-K-E-Y-O-U
I like you, yes I do
I like you, Y-O-U
I like you, like you as you are
Comments