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Family

Are You There, God? It’s Us.

Little people, big questions

By Marjorie Ingall|March 1, 2010 7:00 AM|15comments
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We asked Lila, 7, Josie, 8, and Noemi, almost 5, a few questions: how do you picture God? Why does God allow evil in the world? Is God all-powerful?

You know, the little questions.

These imponderables may stump rabbis and philosophers, but children have their own ideas.

Marjorie Ingall, a Life & Religion columnist for Tablet Magazine, is the author of The Field Guide to North American Males and the co-author of Hungry.
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  • rosmar

    That was amazing. Those girls are smart and have fascinating minds.

    I agree that sweet is good, too.

  • Allie

    Wonderful! Except for the cheeseburgers. If G-d eats food, it’s probably not treif.

  • http://frumesarah.com Rivster

    I loved watching them share their thoughts and then react to one another. So great!!

  • esthermiriam

    He…. It?…. They almost got to She! but father question was set-up to keep that possibility pretty well hidden.

    What was really nice here was that girls weren’t being patronized or their answers made fun of.

  • David

    I doubt I was this articulate as a child! Truly amazing the mind of a child is.

  • Carny Asada

    But it’s a GODLY cheeseburger, so how can it be treyf? Maybe he uses soy cheese.

  • http://www.tabletmag.com/author/mingall/ marjorie

    carny asada! you funny, whoever you are.

  • janice

    I’m concerned that kids of such intelligent & progressive parents have obviously been taught to think of God as a person, and most often (apparently) as a male person. I suspect this is a significant cause of so many Jewish kids’ discarding religion altogether, until and UNLESS they come to a more sophisticated conception later in life that makes sense to them. I don’t think it’s a developmental necessity to talk to kids about God in this simplistic/infantile way that they are almost sure to find absurd within a few years.

  • Linda

    Why would you ask about God’s capacity as a father instead of or in addition to God’s capacity as a mother?

    That notwithstanding, these kids are fabulous. You can see hints of the wonderful women they will become.

  • http://www.tabletmag.com/author/mingall/ marjorie

    in my family we actually do talk about God as being without gender. i know it doesn’t sound that way in the piece!

  • Linda

    Society is powerful. Remember this riddle from the 1970s: An ER surgeon sees the accident victim on the operating table and says: “I can’t operate on this child–he is my son!” The surgeon is not the boy’s father. Who is the surgeon?” Imagine my distress not even 10 years ago when my raised-in-a-feminist-household daughter heard the riddle never considered that the surgeon is simply the boy’s mother. She did, however, express surprise when learning that boys, too, could become dentists. She is now almost 18 and has taken to refering to God as the Kadosha Baruch Hee :)

  • http://www.fixiones.com/health-fitness/beauty-health/the-benefits-of-sleeping-naked/ Maryjo Kruel

    I came across your blog’s link put up by a friend on Facebook. Thanks for putting useful information on the world wide web. It’s hard to come by these things these days.

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    I saw this really good post today.

  • http://sztejki.eu Jedzenie

    Its like you read my mind! You seem to know a lot about this, like you wrote the book in it or something. I think that you could do with some pics to drive the message home a bit, but other than that, this is excellent blog. A great read. I’ll definitely be back.

  • http://theecigskillsblog.yolasite.com/ Echo Stelle

    fantastic points altogether, you just gained a brand new reader. What would you suggest about your post that you made some days ago? Any positive?

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Are You There, God? It’s Us.

Little people, big questions

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