I had forgotten: I used to be the parent who cooed over the way my kid made an E.

Of course, it’s quite possible that the way children make a scribble or a spiky E is both mundane and miraculous. Our spawn go from little globs of protoplasm to actual people trying to communicate and express themselves through art. It doesn’t mean all their creations are special. Or rather, it sort of does. It does if it’s your kid and you’re watching his world expand exponentially every day.

The art critic Clement Greenberg (from whom I cribbed the title of this essay) once wrote, “Verdicts are the warp and woof of esthetic experience.” It’s natural to judge. Taste happens. But it doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Artists have to strive for what’s new, not rest on past laurels or do what’s easy. Then again, Greenberg was known for contradicting himself. On the one hand, he acknowledged that different people could come to different verdicts, but on the other he insisted that there was one correct answer: “You like it, that’s all, whether it’s a landscape or abstract,” he wrote. “You like it. It hits you. You don’t have to read it. The work of art—sculpture or painting—forces your eye.” But he also said, “We have differences but we’re not made different. If you don’t agree with me, you’re wrong.” Hmm.

Nowadays, we recognize that people come to art from a variety of experiences, perspectives, and identities and that it is human nature to believe that one’s own child’s art is brilliant and other kids’ art blows. But what I find interesting in parental art appreciation is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still be able to function. On some level, most of us know our own kid’s art really isn’t paradigm-shattering, but we also know that it symbolizes a wad of cells becoming a sentient artist. Even as you come to realize that every kid first draws a person by making a circle for a head and two vertical lines for legs, you still find that globule breathtaking when it’s hung up with a deli magnet on your own refrigerator. You love the artist and you love her output, and you know it’s mundane and you know it’s brilliant.

All that said, it is delightful to mock parents who discuss their children’s work in the hushed voices that convey being in the presence of genius. That is why I enjoyed “Is That a Picasso on Your Fridge?” by Dan Consiglio, auteur of the blog What My Kid’s Art Says. Unlike, say, I Am Better Than Your Kids—which makes fun of children’s art by pointing out their lack of fine motor skills—Consiglio’s book makes fun of art criticism more than bad kid pictures. We rave about our children’s artwork, even when we know it’s mediocre. But maybe that’s a good thing?

Critiquing a drawing by Alice, age 8, depicting Barbie shopping at a mall, Consiglio opines that it is a damning critique of consumerism; he compares the artist’s flat, one-dimensional style to Mayan wall painting. (“But there is no sacrifice to be had here,” he observes. “Barbie has bought everything, as evidenced by the multitude of bags surrounding her.”) Consiglio then moves on to the efforts of 5-year-old Sally, who made lines of dots on lined paper with the dot-paint markers found in every nursery-school classroom from here to eternity. Consiglio gushes: “If paradigm-shattering composer Philip Glass could paint, this is the masterpiece he would create. Sally’s gorgeous symmetry conceals blooming buds of chaos in much the same way that Glass’s repetitive notes conspire to create wholly other rhythms. Both artists display an otherworldly grasp of this simple human condition: repetition does not remove opportunity; it creates opportunity.” (True. But you missed the opportunity for a Damien Hirst joke.) And of the installation art created by Ty, age 3, of Rockford, Il.,—a yoga mat covered with toy cars—Consiglio writes: “Ty has managed to coalesce the chaos of the playroom with the serenity of nap time. Trucks, cars, planes—those symbols of male toddler aggression—line a yoga mat with rock garden precision. The result is oddly satisfying, a vision of delicate balance. Seconds after this photo was taken, Ty smashed the entire setup with a toy hockey stick before spilling his juice and soiling himself.”

It’s amusing, but it also makes us ask: Is our kid’s art great or derivative? Is art truly everywhere we look, or is criticism truly absurd? (The answer to all is yes.)

It seems to me that the parenting problem herein comes when we lose, um, perspective. What are the effects of overpraising a child’s artistic gifts, whether to ourselves (hello, ego) or to the child (hello, unrealistic overblown highly fragile self-esteem)? While I don’t agree with everything the educational theorist Alfie Kohn writes, I do like his approach to talking to kids about their work. Instead of praising it to the skies, he suggests, ask about the kid’s process or choices. (This is for when they’re past the miraculous globule-drawing stage, obviously.) Why’d they pick the colors they did? What’s happening in this part of the picture? Kohn would argue that we shouldn’t offer praise at all, but other educators tell us to praise effort, if it’s clear that the kid worked hard. (If it’s just another freaking rainbow fairy, feel free to smile politely as if you’re at a boring cocktail party.)

My kid Josie had the entertaining experience recently of being on a reality TV show about the making of art. (Adult artists were paired with children in the Studio in a School art program; the adults had to make a piece inspired by the child’s artwork.) Josie’s appearance pretty much consisted of her clutching her head and muttering, “We’re doomed.” (That’s my sunny little goth-to-be!) Later, when she saw the episode on TV, she was devastated to hear the artist she’d been paired with, whom she adored, tell the camera she wasn’t inspired by Josie’s work. But Josie got over it. Her takeaway: Reality TV is not real, and real artists should just make the art they want to make because most people won’t get it anyway. Works for me.

For parents, the challenge is nurturing our kids’ explorations in art without needing them to be kitchen-appliance Picassos. Josie loves to draw, paint, and sculpt. Who can say whether she’s “good” or not, and does it really matter? (Sorry, Clement Greenberg.) Art education is worthwhile for all kids, regardless of whether they’re actually gifted (a word you know I hate). An in-depth review of research on the value of art education, conducted by the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities last year, confirmed what arts educators already know: Studying art helps kids feel engaged in school, is associated with improvements in reading and math, improves problem-solving skills, and encourages flexible thinking.

But it does more than that, I believe: One thing many testing-obsessed parents and governments forget is that it’s worthwhile for its own sake, not just because it makes kids do better on tests. (I’d add that the kids who already ace tests become more open-minded and reflective by taking art and by seeing that a classmate who may not kick butt on tests may have other gifts.) The arts are essential because they help kids see the world and themselves in a richer, more reflective way—whether or not they’re the next Helen Frankenthalers and Marc Chagalls.

And I loathe myself for worrying. I have a kid who doesn’t want to be less than perfect. I see it as my job to get her to chill. I don’t want her to pick up on my anxiety. But I am plenty anxious.

I am also a hypocrite. I was so freaking self-congratulatory about her admission to a lovely, warm, diverse, progressive, mixed-age-classroom-having elementary school in our neighborhood. Admission was by lottery, and her admission was by no means assured. So, I’d had her do giftedness testing, in case we needed more options. She spent a year in a middling public pre-K program, where she was punched in the face by a 5-year-old and where an inexperienced classroom teacher had a temper tantrum so severe I watched her kick a door, repeatedly, as hard as she could. When I talked to the school’s parent coordinator about the chaos in the classroom, she blamed other kids in the class. By name.

In any case, Josie was admitted to the lovely little progressive school, so I had the delicious luxury of not having to send her back to the unimpressive school and getting to turn down the gifted program. I used to joke about being the only Jewish mother who didn’t want her kid in a G&T program. “No G&T unless it includes Bombay Sapphire!” I’d joke. Reading some of my early columns, I want to travel back in time to punch myself in the face.

Because if Josie hadn’t gotten in to this school, which I know is an unusual, special place, she’d be in a gifted program.

You see, I had two choices: the gifted program, or a lovely progressive school in another district that she could have attended if I’d lied about where we lived. Tons of New Yorkers do that. An administrator at that school encouraged me to get a friend in that neighborhood to put my name on her ConEd bill to “prove” I lived there. “We’ll never check,” the administrator assured me. “We want families like yours! If we didn’t admit kids from Brooklyn and the East Village we’d have no economic diversity at all!” I decided I wasn’t up for the moral lesson of telling a 5-year-old that rules are for other people, or the reminders that she shouldn’t tell her classmates where she lived lest someone else’s mommy rat us out to the Department of Education. Such manipulation and deception don’t seem very Jewish. So, if Jo hadn’t been admitted, by sheer luck, to her wonderful school, well, I most likely would have sent her to the gifted program. So, I can shut up with mystical fake-chill I don’t-care-about-test-scores self. And believe me, other parents, I really do have sympathy for the hard decisions you have to make as well.

Is it not clear that this system is broken? Test scores are a moronic way to dictate the future of 4-year-olds. I remember a friend’s child, a very bright, very cat-obsessed little girl, who bombed her Stanford-Binet test—the standard intelligence test for children—for Hunter College Elementary because the psychologist administering the test had a home office with a cat closed in the bedroom. The cat yowled to be let out during the entire test, and instead of thinking about triangles and cause-and-effect, the child could only think KITTYKITTYKITTYKITTYKITTYKITTYKITTY. Tests for four-year olds privilege savvy, well-connected parents with plenty of books and plenty of disposable income. Some very smart little kids simply can’t sit still for a two-hour test, or have separation anxiety or shyness around strange adults. One study found that only 45 percent of the kids who scored 130 or higher on the Stanford-Binet would do so again if tested on another day. That is not surprising.

But here’s the thing: Josie isn’t 4 anymore. We have to decide what happens next. There is a progressive public middle school in my district that doesn’t require a minimum test score, but it’s so popular there is no guarantee she’ll be admitted. So the question returns: Do we also apply for gifted programs? I am embarrassed of how quickly I looked at her standardized test scores when they were available online, and how quickly I looked to see if her scores were high enough for the possibility. I don’t want to be this person.

As I’ve discussed elsewhere, people who think standardized tests are a necessary evil, and that they measure what they’re supposed to measure, are not looking at the actual standardized tests our kids are taking. They are crap. On the English sections there are questions that are semi-coherent. There are huge problems with scoring and with tests being used for purposes for which they weren’t devised. If you read Todd Farley’s Making the Grade: Adventures in the Standardized Testing Industry, written by a guy who both constructed and graded tests (sometimes while massively hung over), it will curl your hair. Then we have the issue of schools being financially rewarded or punished for higher test scores, leading teachers and principals to change the kids scores—to cheat. And most distressingly of all, schools are teaching to the tests, sacrificing deep, wide-ranging, multidisciplinary, multifaceted education to train kids how to fill in little bubbles.

And you know whose responsibility it is to fix this? The Jews. We’re the ones who are better-educated than most Americans; we’re the ones whose parents and grandparents and great-grandparents came to this country and relied on public education to learn the language and climb the ladder toward the American Dream. Using our privilege to gain a place in a decent program within a broken system doesn’t let us off the hook. (And now that you’ve asked, yes, I do ponder my decision not to send the kids to Jewish Day School—all the time. But that’s another column.) All our school systems should emphasize good citizenship, multilevel instructional approaches, appreciation of diversity in all its forms, empathy, collaboration, individualized education, and professional development to help teachers teach to different levels in one classroom and handle discipline and classroom management. Because that could help all students.

But my kid is really good at filling in the little bubbles. And that’s what I’m angsting about as school starts this year.

Phineas and Ferb, as I will endeavor to explain to those of you without a 6-to-12-year-old kid or an adult hipster in your home, is a cartoon about two young stepbrothers who spend their summer vacation coming up with insanely creative activities. They design a backyard roller coaster, create a circus, build a model of Angkor Wat out of playing cards, organize a public-awareness campaign for the shoelace aglet, take cows to the moon in a homemade rocket to discover whether low gravity produces better-tasting ice cream, help the 1980s hair band Love Händel reunite, and miniaturize a submarine for a Fantastic Voyage-esque journey into a Chihuahua. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the boys, Phineas’ pet platypus, Perry, who seems to be a typically passive, malodorous mammal, is actually a brilliant secret agent for O.W.C.A., the Organization Without a Cool Acronym. Agent P’s assignment: to thwart the evil schemes of Dr. Doofenshmirtz, who is perpetually plotting to rule the entire tri-state area.

Every episode has at least one lyrically complex musical number referencing any of a myriad musical styles: Bollywood musical, 16th-century madrigal, Yiddish folk song, ABBA, Broadway, lounge, funk, dancehall, doo-wop, ska, sea shanty, girl-group pop-punk, rap (as in one unforgettable bit titled “S.I.M.P. Squirrels in My Pants”), and Japanese pop.

If it all sounds a bit frenetic, well, it is. It’s also very brainy. The show’s creators, Dan Povenmire and Jeff “Swampy” Marsh (who play Doofenshmirtz and Perry’s boss, Major Monogram, respectively), claim to be influenced by both Tex Avery and Woody Allen, and it shows. When my 6-year-old, Maxine, roams around the house singing about shark anatomy (“though technically vertebrates, they’re cartilaginous!”), I know she’s been watching Phineas and Ferb.

“We want to celebrate being smart,” Povenmire told me in a recent telephone interview. “A lot of media and society for kids is more interested in being cool than in anything else.”

“To us, being knowledgeable is being cool,” Marsh chimed in (the two interrupted each other and finished each other’s sentences throughout the interview). Perhaps the show’s complexity—there are multiple plot threads per episode, as in a show made for adults—and atypical sensibility explain why it took Povenmire and Marsh 16 years of steady pitching to sell the idea.

Phineas and Ferb celebrates creativity, but it also gets a kick out of pure, crystalline nerdiness, as embodied by the boys’ friend Baljeet. When Baljeet accidentally enrolls in a summertime rock camp, thinking it’s about geology, he is distressed to learn that he’s expected to shred. Though the brothers try to help him channel his inner headbanger, he’s terrified he’ll flunk. It’s not until he learns he’s not getting graded at all that he can really cut loose, screaming in fury about not being graded:

I have been burned by vague lesson plans and a free-floating curriculum!
I like my rules, baby, etched in stone, ‘cause you know I am going to stick to them!
Can I get a syllabus? A little discipline?
Judge me on a scale from A to F!
You wasted all my time learning how to rhyme, then left me hangin’ from a treble clef!

Somebody give me a grade!
I need the man keeping me down!
Somebody give me a grade!
Is there a red pen in this town?
Somebody give me a grade!
I already said it! I need that extra credit today!
And make it an A!

Oh, I am so upset!
I am stone cold honor roll!
I won’t be told how to vent!
I won’t cry or sigh; I’m here to testify,
Up with the establishment!

Phineas and Ferb never mock Baljeet. They just try to help him chill. It occurs to me that Phineas and Ferb are just the sort of kids that parents like me—Jewish, educated, progressive, upper-middle-class, anxious—dream of having. They’re curious, self-motivated, polite, kind, resourceful, productive. They’re menschy. They want to help others. They are not snide.

They also have a great deal of freedom. Unlike our over-programmed kids, they’re not spending their summer in a high-priced sleep-away camp or a Mandarin-immersion robotics program. Yet they’re never bored; every day they come up with some astonishing project. (One of the show’s taglines is “Ferb! I know what we’re gonna do today!”) While we want our kids to be sweet self-starters like these boys, we’re also freaked out by the notion of allowing them unstructured time. We live in a morass of Tiger Mom talk, “dangerized” perceptions of childhood, and anxiety about letting kids be free-range. Heart-rending stories about abducted children don’t seem the tragic aberrations they are but rather like part and parcel of growing up. The national crime rate is actually significantly lower than it was in the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s, when we grew up, but our level of anxiety seems about a million times greater than that of our own parents.

And we sort of want our kids to heed Ms. Frizzle, the teacher in the Magic School Bus books who cries, “Take chances! Make mistakes! Get messy!” But we also sort of don’t. Messiness is messy. Mistakes and chances sound OK in theory, but not if they don’t work out. What if, God forbid, you get hurt or look stupid or torpedo your chances of getting into a good college? Phineas and Ferb are the antidote to that overthink-y angst. As Marsh said, “Phineas is my parenting role model: relax, be creative.”

I asked Marsh and Povenmire about the show’s lack of snippy snark—the tone is so different from most tween TV. “It’s easier to write comedy when you go to the mean place,” Povenmire said. “But it’s more rewarding when you keep it nice. I have a good friend who said he wouldn’t let his daughter watch anything on the Disney channel. She was too young to get the positive messages at the end; she was just aping the way the characters talked. I thought OK, how do I write a show my friend would let his daughter watch?”

Marsh, who met Povenmire when both were working as layout artists on The Simpsons, continued: “We had to bring in a team of writers and storyboard artists and retrain them, because they’d been writing mean-based comedy for so long. Not making fun of people just means using different comedic tools.”

Typical of the show’s humor is a song called “The Mexican-Jewish Cultural Festival“:

There is kreplach on tostadas
A pupik on our pinata
We kibbitz when we lambada
How are things in Ensenada?
We put bottles on cabezas
We do mitzvahs up on mesas
And we’re coming to your places
With big smiles upon our faces!
Oy-lé!

Oy-lé! 
Maxine’s idol, the character Isabella Garcia-Shapiro, is Jewish, but her creators aren’t. Still, the show’s super-verbal yet super-schtick-y Borscht Belt sensibility feels Jewish. Povenmire says that’s because unlike most cartoons, which create scripts first and then do storyboards, he and Marsh do both simultaneously. “That way there are more visual gags going on, but we can also go over the words really carefully.” Suddenly remembering he’s talking to a Jewish journalist, he exclaimed: “We futz over the words until we’re shpritzing!”

An indication of the show’s—and its creators—love of words: Dr. Doofenshmirtz’s name was originally Mittelshmerz, the abdominal pain women experience when an egg is released from the ovaries. Disney put the kibosh on that. Provenmire recalled: “I said, ‘It’s not a dirty word!’ But they said, ‘If it has to do with procreation, you stay away from it.’ ”

Another thing I love about the show is its casual, warm treatment of blended families—Phineas and Ferb are stepbrothers. “I am really passionate about this subject,” Marsh said. “All my brothers are half- or stepbrothers, and growing up, I always felt that being in a state of divorce or a blended family was never spoken about or had to come with a big elaborate explanation—it wasn’t just treated as the state of things. But 50 percent of American kids are growing up in blended families; they should see their experience represented.” Povenmire added: “I’m told we were the first people on the Disney Channel to say the words ‘divorce’ or ‘alimony.’ ” Marsh summed up: “I told Disney that hearing the word ‘divorce’ will make kids feel more normal; it won’t make them start crying. And to their credit, they said OK.” Povenmire added: “It just took five meetings.”

Not everyone loves the show. Common Sense Media, a family-oriented watchdog, loathes the boys’ sister, Candace, calling her “a screechy, whiny stereotype of a girl.” This is sort of true. But Maxie’s beloved Isabella Garcia-Shapiro is a fine counterpoint to Candace. She leads her own troop of Fireside Girls and is as creative and self-motivated as Phineas and Ferb. (Povenmire and Marsh both have daughters.)

For those who do love the show, next week is a big one: Friday, August 5 marks the premiere of “Phineas and Ferb, The Movie: Across the 2nd Dimension,” a film-length super-episode. The Disney Channel is promoting this milestone with a customized 27-foot Airstream trailer called “Perry the Platy-bus,” designed to look like the boys’ pet. It’s currently traveling cross-country, making stops to do song-and-dance performances at landmark sites. (Much like Sarah Palin, only mammalian.)

In the movie, the alternate-dimension Doofenshmirtz succeeds in his evil plots. I hope new viewers will familiarize themselves with the usual nebbishy Doofenshmirtz first. His more typical attempts at evil: plotting to release termites to eat all the wood in the area so he can launch an aluminum-siding business; hovering over his girlfriend’s house with a huge magnet so he can erase embarrassing messages he’s left on her voicemail; inventing a device to make people’s voices higher so his own voice will sound more manly; trying to rid the area of mimes; and planning to shrink national monuments to use with his model train set.

Doofenshmirtz’s hilariously schlemiel-esque approach to wrongdoing is just one more element that makes this show great. A program the whole family can laugh at, one that applauds inventiveness and resourcefulness and offers up clever music and lyrics? Only a doof would resist.

The skinny young guy sitting next to me says, “It’s me. I did it. When we got on the plane, I talked to my wife on my cell, remember? She told me she was on the way to the beach with our daughter and the baby. I’m sitting here with my safety belt buckled, and all I can think about is, why the hell am I going to Italy? Instead of spending Saturday with my wife and daughters, why am I flying six hours, including a connecting flight, for some hour-long meeting my boss said was important? I hope the plane breaks down. I swear, that’s what I thought; I hope the plane breaks down, and look what happened.”

As we re-enter the terminal, a big woman wearing a flowered dress and dragging a suitcase the size of coffin goes up to the skinny guy and asks him where we’re coming from. “Who cares where we’re coming from,” he winks at me, “the main thing is that we’re on our way home.”

A few hours later, when I get on the small, crowded replacement plane that will take me to Rome on my way to Sicily, I’ll walk down the aisle and notice that the skinny guy isn’t there. Throughout the flight, I’ll picture him on the beach in Tel Aviv building sandcastles with his wife and daughter, and I’ll be jealous.

I also have a wife and little boy waiting for me in Tel Aviv. From the start, this trip was really inconvenient for me too, and it’s becoming less desirable with every minute of delay. On Saturday evening I’m supposed to take part in an event at the small Sicilian book festival in the town of Taormina. When the organizers invited me, I agreed to go because I thought I could take my family with me, but a few weeks ago, my wife realized that she had a prior work commitment, and I was stuck with my own promise to attend the festival. The trip, originally planned for a week, would be shortened to two days, and now it turns out that, due to the supernatural powers of a skinny young guy who wanted to play in the sand with his kid, half of those two days would be wasted in airports.

Because of the delay, I miss my connecting flight from Rome to Catania, in Sicily. When I finally make it to the island, it’s another long ride to Taormina, and by the time I arrive at the hotel, it’s already dark. A mustached reception clerk gives me the key to my room. Lying asleep on a small couch in the lobby is a cute little boy, about 7, who looks just like the reception clerk, minus the mustache. I climb into bed with all my clothes on and fall asleep.

The night goes by in a long, dark, dreamless instant, but the morning makes up for it. I open the window to find that I’m in a dream: Stretched out before me is a gorgeous landscape of beach and stone houses. A long walk and a few conversations in broken English punctuated with a lot of enthusiastic arm-waving reinforce the unreal feel of the place. After all, I know this sea very well: It’s the same Mediterranean that’s only a five-minute walk from my house in Tel Aviv, but the peace and tranquility projected by the locals here is something I have never encountered before. The same sea, but without the frightening, black, existential cloud I’m used to seeing hanging over it. Maybe this is what Shimon Peres meant back in those innocent days when he talked about “the new Middle East.”

This is Taormina’s first book festival. The people on the organizing team are extremely nice, and the atmosphere is relaxed; this festival seems to have everything but an audience at the events. Not that I’m passing judgment on the city’s residents: When you’re in the heart of a paradise like this, in the middle of a hot July, would you rather spend the day at one of the most beautiful beaches in the world or in a mosquito-riddled public garden having your mind numbed by a wild-haired writer speaking strangely accented English?

But in the harmonious atmosphere of Taormina, even a small audience isn’t considered a failure. I think that these pleasant people, who speak such a lovely, melodious Italian and live in such gorgeous surroundings, would accept even boils and plagues with an understanding smile. After the event, the mild-mannered English translator points to the dark sea and tells me that during the day you can see the Italian mainland from here. “You see those lights there?” he asks, pointing toward a few flickering pinpoints. “That’s Reggio Calabria, the southernmost city in Italy.”

When I was a kid, my parents used to tell me bedtime stories. They’re both Holocaust survivors, and during the war, the stories they were told by their parents were never read from books because there were no books to be had, so they made up stories. As parents themselves, they continued that tradition and, from a very young age, I felt a special pride because the bedtime stories I heard every night couldn’t be bought in any store; they were mine alone. My mother’s stories were always about dwarves and fairies, while my father’s were about the time he lived in southern Italy, from 1946 to 1948.

His fellow members of the Irgun wanted him to try to buy weapons for them, and after asking around and pulling a few strings, my father found himself at the southernmost tip of Italy, from which you can see the Sicilian coast—Reggio Calabria. There he rubbed shoulders with the local Mafia and, in the end, persuaded them to sell him rifles for the Irgun to use to fight the British. Since he had no money to rent an apartment, the local Mafia offered him free lodgings in a whorehouse they owned there, and that, it seems, was the best time of his life.

The heroes of my father’s bedtime stories were always drunks and prostitutes, and as a child, I loved them very much. I didn’t know yet what a drunk and a prostitute were, but I did recognize magic, and my father’s bedtime stories were filled with magic and compassion. And now, 40 years later, here I am, not far from the world of my childhood stories. I try to imagine my father coming here after the war, 19 years old at the time, to this place that, despite its many troubles and dark alleys, projects such a sense of peace and tranquility. Compared to the horrors and cruelty he witnessed during the war, it’s easy to imagine how his new acquaintances from the underworld must have appeared to him: happy, even compassionate. He walks down the street, smiling faces wish him a good day in mellifluous Italian, and for the first time in his adult life, he doesn’t have to be afraid or hide the fact that he’s a Jew.

When I try to reconstruct those bedtime stories my father told me years ago, I realize that beyond their fascinating plots, they were meant to teach me something. Something about the almost desperate human need to find the good in the least likely places. Something about the desire not to beautify reality, but to persist in searching for an angle that would put ugliness in a better light and create affection and empathy for every wart and wrinkle on its scarred face. And here, in Sicily, 63 years after my father left it, facing a few dozen pairs of riveted eyes and a lot of empty plastic chairs, that mission suddenly seems more possible than ever.

Translated by Sondra Silverston

Aesthetically speaking, of course, they’re hideous, by far the ugliest and most ungainly of all body parts, and that’s a collection that includes crinkly elbows, pinched anuses, dank armpits. It’s a low, low bar, to be sure, but no other part on us humans, male or female, comes close to testicles. I assure you Apple would never design them that way; iPackages would be sleek, aerodynamic, integrated into the main body case, and made from gleaming titanium; sure, they’d have lousy battery life, but you wouldn’t have to cover them up in shame your whole life.

Practically speaking, testicles are a hassle, and that’s not even taking into consideration the testosterone they produce, which seems to cause so much trouble in the world. I suppose it’s fitting that the part of our body most directly responsible for war and superhero movies and Ashton Kutcher should be so ludicrous in appearance.

So, why mention this now? Because although I’ve tolerated them well enough until this point, I turned 41 a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve been considering, ever since, just cutting them off.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate them. They’ve given me two beautiful sons, and though I don’t for a moment think my wife married me only for my testicles, it’s not inconceivable that a lack of them might have negatively affected her decision to spend her life with me. But that, as they say, was then; we’re not going to have more children, and so, as I stood in the shower the morning of my 41st birthday—the race of my life half-run, less no doubt ahead of me than behind, one foot in the grave and the other on a slippery patch of ice—I looked down and thought, Why? Why keep them? All they’re good for now is cancer, which, I’m sure, they’re busy at already. At best they’ll continue to drop lower and lower each year, becoming ever uglier, ever more laughable until they’re slapping around my knees and cease operating at all—dead, useless, like the old Underwood typewriter I keep in my office, keys jammed, ribbon missing. And that’s the best-case scenario.

The best offense is a good defense, and I can’t figure out the slightest reason to schlep these preposterous things around for another 30 years, waiting for them to kill me. I feel like I’m carrying around a pair of terrorists in my pants. I glance back at every dog that passes me on the street, reminded by every un-neutered beast of the ridiculousness of our own similar genitalia and jealous of every one that’s been castrated. Well, poochie, I think to myself as he prances by, that’s one less thing to worry about. Two, actually.

The friends I share this idea with react as you might expect—they think I’m being extreme. But I feel I’m being practical—frankly, what could be riskier than leaving the damn things on?

My wife suggests it’s just a fear of aging, and there’s something to be said for that. I drink my Liquid Greens every morning, I ride my bicycle, I take raw vitamins and if I have bacon on Monday, that’s it for the next seven days. I’ll have a cigarette or two at a party, that’s all, and I limit my alcohol intake as best I can. But none of this is done in the desperate pursuit of youth; the truth is, I don’t have a fear of aging. I have a fear of dying. There’s a difference.

My shrink suggests this has to do with my finishing my novel; that 41 is still young, and that my obsessing about death is simply a manifestation of guilt—guilt over successfully finishing the book, of selling it to my publisher, of being (ugh) happy. And so, says the good doctor, I’m torturing myself with thoughts of death. “Besides,” he adds as the session draws to a close, “I’m 65. Go cry to someone else about dying.”

He might have a point. Anxious to get to work on something new, I’ve taken out an old story of mine, about a man who does just that—physically tortures himself. His family and friends beg him off it, tell him he’s going to get seriously hurt, that they love him and don’t want to see him permanently injured or worse. But what can the poor man do? It’s the only thing that gives him any relief from the troublesome joy that he finds, to his surprise and dismay, filling his middle-aged heart.

Shalom Auslander‘s novel Hope: A Tragedy will be published next year by Riverhead Books.

By the time of these memories, in the early 1960s, when I was 6 or 7, the rural had given way to the suburban, with ranch houses and expanded Capes surrounding Lake Nelson. But in a cold enough season, when the shallow water froze and two-by-fours burned in trash barrels for warmth, my father retrieved his skates from the closet and headed for the ice.

The skates rose above his ankles, the laces ascending through 10 sets of eyelets and six pairs of metal studs. They were figure skates, toughened by black polish and the scalpel sharpness of the blade. I had a beginner’s skates with blades as dull as a pencil’s shaft.

My father, in his patient way, had taken it upon himself to teach me to skate. I was a good enough athlete when it came to touch football and swimming lessons at the JCC, but neither balance nor precision came naturally to me. So, my skates slapped at the surface of Lake Nelson and my legs splayed outward and my knees knocked and sweat popped on my forehead, even in the 20-degree air. Just beyond my wavering reach, my father skated effortlessly backward, calling out strokes to me like a coxswain, urging me forward to meet his grasp.

When I gave up in frustration, as I inevitably did, he took my halt as his cue. With a glance every so often over his right shoulder, he threaded his way backward across the lake, not a wasted motion in his strides, sometimes lifting one skate off the ice, perfectly balanced on a sliver of steel. I watched him in awe.

*    *   *

On a spring morning last year, we sat, my brother and sister and I, outside the hospice room where my father lay dying. Our vigil was into its second week by this time, and what preceded the vigil were 20 years of prostate cancer, two or three of advancing diabetes, and several months of kidney failure.

At one point in those last days, my brother sat beside my father, and my father spoke. “Give it to me straight,” he said, a ramrod voice emerging from beneath the morphine, a more assertive statement than he had issued in weeks. My brother, making certain this order wasn’t part of some delusion, asked my father what he’d said.

“Give it to me straight,” my father repeated.

“Everything?” my brother asked.

“Everything.”

My father heard a tenderly expressed version of everything, and the next day he drew his last breath. The three of us were gathered around him, watching him gasp for air, watching the very last beat of pulse pass through his carotid artery. Looking at his open mouth, looking at the tight, dry skin of his face, looking at the remnant of feathery hair on his scalp, I couldn’t help but think of a baby bird, waiting for its mother to feed it.

Because his death at age 89 had not come as a surprise, we children and my stepmother had spent the previous days talking about what kind of funeral to have. My father was a Jew by heritage and an atheist by fervent choice. His anarchist mother and father, the renegade offspring of a rabbi and a cantor, respectively, were the sort who feasted and danced at Yom Kippur banquets. My father rarely spoke the noun “religion” without affixing the adjectives “materialistic” and “sectarian.”

Yet he had approved a Jewish funeral for my mother decades earlier and done the same for his eldest brother in 2006. He had maintained a membership for 40 years at a Reform temple. Its rabbi had visited him in the hospice. There were people in our nuclear and extended families—myself, several cousins—who found meaning in observance.

So, my siblings and stepmother and I struck a compromise to oblige the dead and solace the living. We would hold a secular funeral for my father, presided over by the Ethical Culture Society leader who had married him and my stepmother, while those relatives who yearned for a religious form of leave-taking would be free to do so in a private way.

*   *   *

One Sunday during the years when I played Little League baseball, my father took our family to the ballet. As we sat in the balcony at Lincoln Center, gazing down onto the stage, my father whispered to me of the male dancers, “They’re in better shape than Mickey Mantle.”

Devoted to baseball and its heroes, I could not comprehend then what I know now was perfectly true. My anarchist father was a student of the body, including his own. He lived in his skin as much as he lived in his mind.

When he skied, he cut parallel turns with the precision of the machinist he had been. When he played catch with me, his fastballs stung my palm through the mitt. Even at bowling, by appearances so sedentary a game, he exuded muscle. He would loft his 16-pound ball so that it seemed to hang in midair like a planet. Then it would fall to the polished alley, flirting with the gutter, until its wicked rotation sent it crashing into the 1-pin, scattering the other nine sideways with destruction. I, the failed acolyte, struggled for spares.

When I reached my teens and saw my father adding some pounds to his middle, I once tossed out the boast that I could beat him in a race. He dared me to prove it. So, we drove over to the track of a nearby college and lined up for a 440, one full lap. I went out fast and heedless and by the second turn, as I was straining for air, he cruised by me in a controlled, steady pace. He was waiting for me at the finish line, and I said nothing all the way home.

Long after such Oedipal battles stopped mattering, I loved walking with my father, whenever my adult life and working schedule put me in his vicinity. He went out for three or four miles every morning, legs snapping briskly, as much the image of physical efficiency as on the Lake Nelson ice. Now we moved in tandem, and perhaps, though he never said it, he was proud that into his 60s and 70s he could keep pace with a son 34 years his junior.

*    *    *

In the hours after my father’s death, we in the immediate family made the funeral plans. The ceremony would take place four days later, no concession to the Judaic tradition of burial within 24 hours, with a luncheon at a nearby hotel to follow. Meanwhile, the observant portion of the extended family made our plan to stay at the gravesite after the others left to say kaddish. But I already knew that prayer alone felt somehow insufficient. By then, my father would have been reduced to ashes, having requested like my mother to be cremated. I could feel nothing for ashes.

So, the idea took shape with my fiancée and a cousin to wash my father’s body, to fulfill the ritual of tahara. We arranged to do it on the morning after he died, in the funeral home where his body then lay. It was not a Jewish funeral home, and in fact the funeral director in his private life was a church deacon. Maybe because of his own faith, though, he understood and respected the imperatives of ours.

On a damp and raw morning, well-suited to our somber task, we arrived. My cousin had brought an ArtScroll volume of funeral and burial liturgy, as well as a set of tahara prayers he had printed off the Internet. I knew much less than he did. But I was answering to some imperative I did not yet fully understand, something even more specific than being Jewish and being a son.

The funeral director led us from his office through several empty salons to a room in the rear where my father’s corpse waited on a stainless-steel table. My cousin and I put on white robes, almost like lab coats, and rubber gloves. The funeral director opened the cold-water tap of an industrial sink. My fiancée read from the prayers and began to weep.

*    *    *

Nearly a decade before he died, my father began to severely limp. He had already undergone one hip replacement, quite successfully at that, but now the other was afflicting him. Or so his doctors informed him. My father came up with his own diagnosis, irrespective of the evidence: He decided he had bone cancer in his spine.

Instead of having the hip-replacement surgery, he walked less and sat more. His legs, those legs that had skated and walked and beaten me in a race, began to atrophy. When I asked about getting the hip replacement, he shrugged me off with vague assurances. He told my stepmother he was fearful of dying on the table from the anesthesia, something that had happened to one of his childhood friends.

Ultimately, years too late, he consented to the operation. It turned out he didn’t even need full anesthesia, just the half-measure called twilight. He did his designated week or two in rehab and then skipped almost all of the outpatient follow-up sessions. Back at work, as founder and board chairman of a biotechnology company, he moved around its office hallways and factory floor in a golf cart. When he flew on vacations, he required a wheelchair to get from the ticket counter to the gate.

My father’s mind remained undimmed, a fact that I savored, especially after having seen his older brother disappear in a fog bank of Alzheimer’s. But I could not fathom how such a physical person could surrender his physical self. Never before had I seen him give up—at anything. Why this? I realized, at a certain point, that I did not just need him to be physical for himself; I needed him to be physical for me.

*    *    *

As I washed my father’s body, I looked upon it. I saw his foreskin, uncircumcised in his anarchist parents’ wish. I saw how hairless his skin was, the result not just of age but the female hormones prescribed to stave off prostate cancer’s advance. I saw the scar on his abdomen from the burst appendix that nearly killed him in his early 20s. I saw the seared flesh on one calf where he’d leaned against a motorbike engine on a trip we’d taken together to Bermuda decades ago.

His body was nothing like the body described in the verses my cousin chanted from the Song of Songs: “His head is burnished gold, the mane of his hair black as a raven … His arms a golden scepter … his loins the ivory thrones … his thighs like marble pillars. Tall as Mount Lebanon, a man like a cedar.” And yet to see his body, to touch his body, to watch his body, brought the person back to me.

I remembered that trip to Bermuda well. I was 16, my father 50. We had been fighting a lot, and my mother had suggested a short vacation together, father and son, as balm for our wounds. One morning, my father proposed that we walk the main road along the southern shoreline, 10 miles from our hotel to another one, where we would have lunch. Fit as I was, I worried we would never make it. My father, glad to be with me, needing nothing to prove, flagged down a cab after six or seven miles. We drank beers together at lunch, the sharp effervescence mixing with the dried sweat on my lips.

In the funeral home, when my cousin and fiancée and I were done, we dressed my father in the burial shroud and covered his head in a cloth hat and hoisted him into the cardboard coffin that would be transported to the crematorium, an odd choice indeed for a Jew of his era.

I am of a generation that has accepted as an unquestionable truth the premise that a corpse cannot look lifelike and that anyone who tells you so is either a mourner lying or a mortician selling. But on that dismal morning last spring, as I washed my father’s body in tahara, I was thankful beyond words to see that he did look like himself.

The purpose of tahara, we are taught, is spiritual. We purify the body to purify the spirit, make the literal into the metaphor. Yet for me the process ran in the opposite direction. Through the spiritual I sought to reclaim the physical—the tactile, inch-by-inch evidence of my vigorous, vibrant, virile father.

*   *    *

When I went to college in Wisconsin in 1973, I asked my father if I could have his skates. Winters were long in Madison, and there were lakes and canals and rinks for skating. So, he let me take them.

For my first two years of school, I continued to flail away, untrained. Finally, as a junior, I signed up for a no-credit class in skating. That winter and spring, I leaned how to stride and to push. I learned how to execute crossovers. I learned how to skate backward.

Living in New York for the past dozen years, I haven’t skated much, except to accompany my children as they took lessons. By now, the black polish has worn off my father’s skates. The blades are brown with rust. The inner soles have cracked. Meanwhile, my year of saying kaddish is ending. My father’s first yahrzeit falls on the 10th day of Iyar, May 14 by the civil calendar. The next day, our family will unveil the headstone for his grave.

To be honest, those skates never fit me right. My father wore a size-9 shoe, and I’m a 10½. Whenever I put on the skates, my feet start to cramp. One thing I’ve come to realize, though, is that a 10½ skate feels too big on me. And a hockey skate, as most men wear, feels too slippery. It’s only in my father’s skates, on the Lake Nelson of my bereaved soul, that I can imagine being able to catch up to his outstretched hand.

Hear our voice, Hashem our God, pity and be compassionate to us, and deliver us, Oh Father in Heaven, from our mothers here on Earth. Bring us back to you, Oh Lord, if only to get us the hell away from them, for we are in agony and depressed and neurotic and sexually dysfunctional. We have turned away from You, we have become guilty, we have robbed, we have slandered, but Jesus, let the punishment fit the crime, and no crime could fit the punishment of mothers such as ours, Oh God. Hear our cries, Oh Lord, He who did deliver us with a mighty hand from the from the land of Egypt but clearly saved the 11th plague for us, He who took us from the land of bondage to the land flowing with guilt and shunning, a land of superegos and shame and Hitler and pogroms and arthritis and Alzheimer’s, and for which the only solace is alcohol and violent pornography. For you are our Lord, the All-Knowing, the All-Understanding, but Who, let’s face it, Oh Lord, never had a mother Himself, so doesn’t really know, does He? May He who split the Red Sea and delivered his children from suffering do so once again, speedily in our days, or just let the sea collapse on us and get the damn thing over with.

(For sons, the fast begins at sundown the evening before Mother’s Day, and continues until loss of consciousness results in blessed, merciful death.)

For Daughters

Hashem, Hashem, God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abundant in kindness and truth—what the fuck? If the pain of childbirth is our punishment for Eve’s sin in the Garden of Eden, Oh Merciful God, what sin did we commit to receive the punishment of such a mother? Did Eve grab a second apple on the way out? Did she bake an apple fucking pie, Oh Lord? For our misery is great, and apparently that is the only thing about us that is: Our clothing is not great, our hair is not great, neither are the way we raise our children or the men we choose to marry. Oh Lord who gave Abraham unto Sarah, hear the voices of our mothers who would cry out and say: a shepherd? No daughter of mine is marrying a shepherd. Our brothers can do no wrong, Oh Lord, and we can do no right. May I find favor in your eyes as I never shall in hers.

(After the blessing, visit the mother you swore you wouldn’t, try to convince yourself she means well, tell your partner/husband/children to just ignore her, and spend the rest of the day wondering if she’s right and you have gotten fat.)

For Mothers

Blessed art thou, Oh Lord our God, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, I should have such children myself, maybe if I give mine a dime they’ll phone me once a year, the merciful Lord, the One who forgives us for the sins we have committed, and we must have committed some doozies, after all, to deserve children like these: the son with hair like a girl, the daughter who’s out all night—who knows what she’s up to—children who blame us for all their problems and cause us to grow old before our time, children who marry whores and Philistines, who give birth to bastards and finish what Hitler started—you think you’re hurting me by dating a shvartza, you’re not hurting me—forgive us this day, oh Lord our God, for whatever laws we must have broken, they must have been some big ones; we must have must built a Golden Calf, a whole herd of Golden Calves, who knows, it’s always our fault, Oh Lord Our God, for why else would You keep from us those sons who become doctors and those daughters who marry them, like the Goldberg boy, he’s a surgeon now, or that Rubenstein girl, she married a brain surgeon kinehora, why else would You curse us with sons who never call before Shabbos, and daughters who wear jeans with their gotkes hanging out, is this why we paid for yeshiva, Oh Lord? May it be your will, Oh Lord our God, who doesn’t know Himself what it’s like to be a Mother—it must be nice to be a Father—forgive us, Oh Lord, for it’s our fault, of course it is, You go create another world, do whatever you want, don’t think about us; may it be Your will, Oh Lord, to bring us the Messiah and deliver us to Jerusalem speedily in our days, it should kill you to lift Your feet while we vacuum beneath You, Oh Lord, You have it very hard and let us say Amen. Of course we’ll say Amen.

(Take three steps backward, dab tears from eyes with tissue already soaked with sadness, wave dismissively to the right, wave dismissively to the left, wave dismissively to the center, sigh heavily, and walk out, a hand pressed against your aching lower back.)

For Psychiatrists

If He had given us a job that’s primarily sitting

and not given us a never-ending source of income,

it would have been enough.

If He had given us a never-ending source of income

and not permitted us to charge an hour for 45-minutes of work,

it would have been enough.

If He had permitted us to charge an hour for 45-minutes of work

and not permitted us in that hour to earn more than a high-end prostitute,

it would have been enough.

If He had permitted us in that hour to earn more than a high-end prostitute

and not given us the duplex on the Upper East Side,

it would have been enough.

If He had given us the duplex

but not given us the license to prescribe drugs,

it would have been enough.

If He had only given us Mothers

and not Fathers, too,

it would have been enough!

(Immediately following prayers, cancel all appointments and spend the day getting shitfaced.)

Jonathon Rosen

Bad news, folks. I’m afraid John Calvin may have been right: Things suck, and they’re not going to get better, because you suck, too.

I’m paraphrasing.

Slightly.

Of all the religious nutters to have been right about the nature of God and existence, Judgin’ Johnny C. is the worst one. Mohammed I can deal with (what happened between Isaac and Ishmael is their own shit, Mo; leave me out of it). Buddha would be great, of course, a hell of a lot better than the God of either Testament, Old or New. But if Calvin and Sobs was right, we’re all fucked.

My conversion began back in January, when my son downloaded Pocket God, a popular iPod app. “Infrequent/Mild Violence” warned the iTunes store, which was significantly better, I figured, than he was going to get with the non-pocket God. I sat beside my son on the couch, my dog Duke in turn beside me, and watched the boy play. Here’s the game: You play God, and you either torture or feed a group of endlessly hopeful Islanders. You are neither rewarded nor punished for your rewards or punishments, and there’s an endless supply of Islanders. I’m not sure, to this day, what the point of the game is. Good God, bad God, let’s call the whole thing off. It was snowing outside, though, again, as it seemed to have been doing every day since August, and watching the little tan-skinned Islanders on the iPod screen gave me an idea.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” I said to my wife.

Duke looked up at me, thinking we were going for a hike.

“H word,” said my son without looking up from his screen.

“Where to?” asked my wife.

“I don’t care,” I said. “Somewhere warm.”

And so began the long wait for the beginning of March and our trip to a small island in the Caribbean. We watched as the snow piled up outside, as one storm passed and another arrived; icicles formed along the roofline so quickly that I couldn’t keep up; one grew so large that when at last it fell to the ground, it took out a section of our fence with it.

“Crap,” I said, looking out the window.

“C word,” said my son without looking up from his screen. I could hear the poor Islanders screaming in agony.

“Why are you being so mean to them?” I asked.

He shrugged. “It’s more fun,” he said.

The week before we left another series of storms blew across the Northeast, cancelling flights and shutting down highways. But when the day came for our trip, the skies were finally clear, the roads finally passable.

We arrived a few hours later in paradise, in Eden. The beaches were pristine and empty, the people friendly and helpful.

“Hello!” said the beaming taxi driver.

“Welcome!” said the sparkling hotel receptionist.

“Aye, Mon!” called Roger, the delighted beachside pot-dealer.

We had a wonderful few days. The trip was half over. This is where Calvin comes in.

I like Calvin because he didn’t mess around. Calvin was cold. He’s pure, unvarnished, unapologetic, religious extremism. He’s theological Jägermeister—not a little depravity, but total depravity. Unconditional election. Irresistible grace. Hardcore. His theology, basically, comes down to this: You suck. Totally. And there’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t pray to make things better, you can’t repent to make things better, you can’t do shit. It’s predetermined, and this is the predetermination: Frequent/non-mild violence, pervasive misery. utter disappointment. Rated 18+, if you live that long. If life seems to get momentarily better, it will soon get monumentally worse, because all your sins are belong to us. Homeostasis is a bitch, Mankind, but get used to it; the game started before you got here, and we’re not changing the rules now.

I admire that kind of honesty.

I bought a shitty little car a while back. “It is what it is,” the salesman said.

“A shitty little car,” I said.

He shrugged. “I ain’t gonna bullshit you,” he said. Paraphrasing Calvin. Slightly.

I was standing in the hotel bar when the first voicemail message came through.

“Duke,” said Suzanna, “is vomiting.”

Duke is 12-year old, pretty old for a Rhodesian Ridgeback. We buried his older sister a few months ago, and Duke hadn’t been all that interested in life lately. The best part of the movie was over, it seemed, and Duke didn’t want to stick around for the damned credits.

Suzanna is a tech for our vet, and she has been our dog-sitter ever since Duke was a pup. I phoned her back and left a message.

On the television above the hotel bar, I saw the word “Flood.” More storms were pounding the Northeast—snow, rain, the usual, just a lot more of it.

The following morning, Suzanna left another message. Duke’s eyes were yellow, as were his gums; she was worried about his liver, and wanted to know if she could bring him in for a few tests.

Sure, I said.

Later that morning, my neighbor emailed to tell me that our road had been washed away in the floods.

Away? I asked.

Away away, he replied.

Why are you being so mean to them?

It’s more fun.

The last day of our vacation, it rained. I spent the afternoon in the hotel bar, trying to write. Roger, the delighted beachside pot-dealer, joined me at my table with some of his local buddies; he had become something of a friend over the past week or so. I told him about Duke, and about the road that had washed away, and about our trip being over, and how I was dreading the flight home: TSA always stops me, I explained, because they think my name is Islamic, when I’m actually Jewish.

“That’s why they stop you,” he said.

“Because I’m Jewish?”

“Who do you think,” my jovial islander friend asked me, “was behind 9/11?”

“Me?” I asked.

They all nodded.

We arrived home at midnight. It was raining.

“Goddamn it,” I said.

“D-word,” said my son.

We parked at the bottom of the road, and I carried the bags, one by one, up the washed-away road to the empty house; Duke was at the animal hospital, being kept alive on an IV drip; his liver and pancreas, said the vet, “needed a rest.”

We buried Duke two days later. The excavator trying to repair our road was kind enough to dig a grave for him, in the frozen winter woods behind our house, beside the grave of his older sister.

“Build a man a fire,” said Calvin, “and he will be warm for a day; set him on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life.”

Fuck you, John, I thought.

The following day, my son asked me if he could download a new game called Plants Versus Zombies.

“What happened to playing God?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “It got boring,” he said.

Well, I thought, there’s always that. Even if Calvin was right, and it sure seems like he might have been, there’s always the chance, slight as it is, that God will just get bored and leave us alone.

And the Islanders rejoiced, and they sang, and they danced, and there was much happiness in the land, for God had logged off, and didn’t even want the free update.

Yes. There is always that.

“There are two of me,” Blume told Haaretz: “Me the grown-up, the grandmother, and me who still sees the world through the eyes of a child. I can be 4 years old or 12 years old. That’s not something I think about, but when I am writing I guess that’s where I go. To that part of myself which is still at that age.” Great news for the inner tweens in all of us, who now never have to stop listening to Party in the U.S.A. What?

Of Margaret, the title character in one of her most well-known books, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, Blume recalls: “Margaret was the kind of a child I was. It was my relationship with God I wrote about. I had that kind of relationship with God. I actually felt the presence of God when I was alone in the room talking to God. It is not my story though.”

And for those of you looking for your next Judy Blume fix, the film version of Tiger Eyes, which Blume adapted with her son, who also directed it, is reportedly in post-production. Talk about the circle of life. And winning!

Relatedly (maybe) in the world of things written about young adults, Motherlode, the Times’ parenting blog, asks parents: “Are you your child’s ATM?” The answer, according to a survey on personal finance web site The Mint, is overwhelmingly yes: “The poll results show that 63% of today’s kids 17 and younger are “always” given extra money when they asked for it, and 26% of children 17 and younger “sometimes” receive extra money when they ask.”

And just what are our future leaders doing with their newfound funds? “Overall, the most commonly selected reason why kids today ask for extra money is to buy tickets to a movie/concert/sporting event (40%), followed by food/drink (24%) or to buy a toy/game/phone (19%). Only 15% answered that extra dollars are spent on school/educational purposes, and 1% wanted funds to give to or participate in a charitable effort.” Way to go, 1%!

(Also, mom, if you’re reading this, I’m going to need some cash. The LIRR doesn’t pay for itself.)

That, I think, is taking it a bit too far. Portman has her lighter side—I get a kick out of Portman’s demented giggle and adored her gangsta rap on Saturday Night Live. But it’s just that kind of goofiness that I wish Portman displayed more often. In many of her movies she seems blank (Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, anyone?), stilted (The Closer, in which she gave the grimmest, most awkward performance as an exotic dancer since Demi Moore in Striptease), or unreal (Garden State, in which she strenuously embodies the annoying male-fantasy archetype known as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl). The kind of free-range giddiness she showed at the Golden Globes and on SNL is a rarity for her. (Though then again, I’m not sure anyone could deliver the line, “Hold me, like you did by the lake on Naboo!” in a believable way.)

And this is exactly why she’s the perfect spokeswoman for her generation: Her opaque, inauthentic-feeling performances capture the spirit of the Millenials, that group of entitled, high-maintenance, short-attention-spanned, helicopter-parented, well-rounded-but-depthless weenies. The stereotype is borne out by my friends in academia, who talk about the way their students simply want to parrot back the “right” answers and expect straight A’s as their due. A professor friend tells the story of a student who got a B+ on a paper and insisted she deserved an A “because I’m an A student!”

Parents and schools share responsibility for students like these. When we parents fight our kids’ every battle, insist that their self-esteem is paramount and can’t survive honest criticism, and expect everyone else to see them as the flawless delicate flowers we’ve told them they are, we don’t prepare them for the real world. When schools teach kids only to excel at filling in the ovals on standardized tests and spitting out answers without synthesizing or contextualizing them, they don’t teach kids how to reason. Or how to be moral. Or how to cope with difference and nuance.

And you know what? I think the prescription for Natalie Portman’s career longevity and for our grade-obsessed kids is the same: large doses of fun.

A recent piece by George H. Wood, executive director of the Forum for Education and Democracy, co-author of Many Children Left Behind, and a high-school principal, points out the problems with our lack of fun. “I do think we have lost something in our unending quest of lofty standards, more rigor and higher test scores,” he says. “That something is the joyfulness of play, and the creativeness of curiosity. We have separated our children from the very world that sustains them. They will be poorer intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually for it.”

Most of us have kids who are buried under piles of homework, who have seen their recess time curtailed in favor of more literacy- and math-instruction time, and who have come to expect the stress of regular high-stakes standardized tests starting as early as kindergarten. The playtime kids get is often in the form of video games (designed by adults) and sports teams (run by adults). There’s simply no time for unstructured free play.

But play is essential. A review of research by Yale psychologists concludes that make-believe play improves vocabulary, creates strategies for problem-solving, and develops flexible thinking. Another study found that graduates of “play-based” kindergartens did better long-term in reading, math, social and emotional adjustment, creativity, oral expression, and “industry” than graduates of more academic kindergartens. And the American Academy of Pediatrics says that play helps children develop confidence, resiliency, cooperation, and conflict-resolution. Yet we parents worry, when our kids are playing, that they’re “not being productive” or that they’re wasting time that could be spent getting ahead of the Chinese. (No joke, when Josie was in pre-K I attended a school tour where the principal said ominously, “The kind of education we provide is the only way to prevent people overseas from taking all our jobs.”)

There’s plenty of research showing how “executive brain function”—the ability to self-regulate—is improved by play.

“Children who can control their impulse to be the center of the universe, and—relatedly—who can assume the perspective of another person, are better equipped to learn,” say Erika and Nicholas Christakis, she an early-childhood educator and he a professor of medicine and sociology at Harvard. They draw parallels between a preschooler destroying someone else’s block castle and a 20-year-old rudely monopolizing class discussion. Both lack empathy. Starting grade-schoolers off with a play-based curriculum instead of a “skills-based” curriculum, they argue, could help prevent the castle-toppler from becoming the entitled college junior. The skills-based curriculum emphasizes worksheets and equations; the play-based version is more multi-disciplinary and offers storytelling, problem-solving, cooperation. “The child filling out the worksheet is engaged in a more one-dimensional task,” they say, “but the child in the play-based program interacts meaningfully with peers, materials, and ideas.”

I’m reminded of Josie’s “trout curriculum” from first grade in her progressive, diverse public school. The kids worked together to clean the trout tank and measure and record the pH and ammonia levels in the aquarium. They sketched trout, learned the physiology of fry, read fish-centric fiction and non-fiction, went to see a musical about New York’s intricate waterways. Josie dressed as an alevin, a baby trout still attached to its yolk sac, for Halloween. (She wore a silver dress and silver swim cap and taped a big orange balloon to her stomach.) At the end of the year, the kids sang a song about trout (“I Believe I Can Swim,” to the tune of R. Kelly’s “I Believe I Can Fly”) and let the trout go in an upstate stream. (They had a permit.)

This is the antithesis of the “will this be on the test” school of learning, the kind that turns kids into Portman-esque nimrods. Kids learn not only the scientific method (you make guesses and predictions, and sometimes you’re wrong, and that’s OK) but also how to take turns, problem-solve creatively (why did the pH in the tank keep dropping?), share goals, and cope with disappointment. (Sometimes the trout die, no matter how hard you try. Sometimes you get a B+ on a paper.) And it helps kids connect to each other and to the wider world they live in, instead of making them think only about themselves. And they have fun.

Sorry to dump on Ms. Herschlag. I think she’s probably a mensch. And alas, I think women in particular are set up to be grinds: Our culture (and education system) tends to reward them for being chirping back the teacher’s ideas instead of being creative or paradigm-shattering. Women like Portman (or, hey, Hillary Clinton) are expected to work hard without letting the effort show, lest they be deemed too aggressive or ambitious. Boys can be class clowns, loud, disruptive, stoner-y Rogens, but girls have to be cute and “good.”

I hope Portman’s impending marriage (even if it’s to a goy) and baby will help her see the value of unstructured time, play, and joy. I hope it will help her get more in touch with her giggly and gangsta sides. And I hope more kids get the chance to have fun, and fish.

If you weren’t a Medium watcher, let me fill you in. The show’s heroine, Allison (Patricia Arquette) was a psychic in Arizona who worked for the Phoenix District Attorney’s office, helping to solve crimes. She had to juggle her psychic visions, her relationship with her engineer husband, Joe, and the needs of her three quirky daughters.

It’s ironic that a show about the paranormal was so, well, normal. Allison didn’t look like the cookie-cutter starlets populating the TV universe. She wasn’t a size 2. She never wore spike heels to a crime scene. Her house looked like a real home, with unfortunate blue-and-yellow kitchen tiles I’m certain she hoped to replace as soon as they could afford it. Her girls squabbled at the breakfast table, and not in an adorable smart-assed sitcom-sassy way. I loved the show’s depiction of a loving marriage in which the partners fought and made up and had the same arguments over and over. (“Allison! Maybe that was just a regular dream, not a message from beyond the grave!” Oh, Joe.) Sure, the plot holes were so big you could drive an SUV that belonged to a dead woman now sending Allison messages about her murderer through them. But even though I didn’t always love the show, I always loved the show. It was like a beloved, sometimes maddening friend.

Parents don’t get a lot of televised validation of our lives. TV is escapism (and, indeed, Medium was great at deploying creepy music and creepy visuals to deliciously jumpy unreal effect), but TV can also make us feel pretty crappy about not measuring up to its fabulous artificiality. Not Medium. Medium was sisterly. It applauded us for making our marriages work. It knew how hard it can be to get dinner on the table when both parents work. It spotlighted the special-for-being-not-so-special moments real parents share—when we sit down on the porch or on the couch with a beer and a sigh after the kids have gone to bed, happy to slough off the day and reconnect with each other. Joe and Allison loved each other, entertained each other, and teased each other, but sometimes they went to bed without having sex, because they were tired.

They fought about childrearing. In one of my favorite early episodes, Joe was embarrassed that their oddball middle daughter refused to take off her new red bike helmet, sleeping in it for days and insisting on wearing it for her school picture. Allison reminded him that the school photo was a portrait of who the kid was at that moment, and that right now she was a little girl who loved her bike helmet beyond all reason. That’s familiar to a parent, and so were the fights about money, like when Joe wanted to tap into their daughters’ college savings accounts to fund a new business and Allison said no and Joe worried that Allison didn’t believe in him.

Medium was suffused with the dread of not being able to take care of your children—not being able to keep them safe, not being able to send them to an expensive camp, not being able to keep them from dating bad boys, and not being able to prevent them from being murdered in terrifying ways. Real-world fears and fantasy fears were smooshed all together in a great miasma of parental anxiety.

It’s hard to argue that a show about a family named Dubois was at all Jewish. But I’ll try. As the writer Rebecca Eisenberg posited on Facebook, the DuBois family, like Jews everywhere, share a tradition they inherited from the mother’s side of the family, one that is based largely on faith and is often questioned and misunderstood by others in the community. Remember in the first few seasons how Allison hid her talents? Towards the end of the series, her special qualities were well-known, and she exuded pride in them. That is a nice arc of assimilation to acceptance. And of course, the fact that a show about the afterlife never actually professed to know what happens after death felt very Jewish.

Of course, the main reason for Medium’s success is that the notion of being loved and cared for from beyond the grave is powerful. The day I gave birth to Maxine, shortly after my dad died (Maxie is named after him), my ultra-rational, non-woo-woo mom told me a story. As she entered the subway to come meet the baby for the first time, a Latin musician was playing “Moscow Nights” on the guitar. It was one of my dad’s staples when he was in a folk-acoustic combo in college, a song he played every time he picked up the accordion at home when I was little. “Moscow Nights” is not exactly a fixture in the subway music world. Then when Mom arrived at my apartment and started to clean (moms!), she picked up two plastic magnet letters that had fallen off the fridge. The letters were M.I.—Michael Ingall.

Of course neither mom nor I think my dad was throwing magnets on the floor to remind us of his presence. We felt his presence all the time ever since he died. Or maybe that was his absence. It can be hard to tell those things apart. And that, too was part of the appeal of Medium: the show’s constant reminders that there is no love without loss. How can I not think of the Yehuda Amichai poem, “Near the Wall of a House,” which reads: “Love is not the last room: there are others / after it, the whole length of the corridor / that has no end.”

I hope so. And Medium let me believe it—for an hour a week, anyway—literally as well as figuratively.

And yet the secular New Year calls to us. It’s a marker of time passing. Even once we’ve had our youthful spark beaten out of us by childrearing, we’re drawn to the idea of wearing something sparkly, going somewhere festive, and drinking something alcoholic. We want to toast the future, the unknown. We want to make resolutions.

I asked Tablet Magazine’s readers and Facebook friends to share their vows for 2011.

One reader calling herself “Half a Jew” replied: “Use my time wisely, keep focused on my end goals, play with my cat more, and most important, keep remembering to tell my best peeps I love them.” Amen to that. Especially the playing with the cat part.

Another, named Jennifer, said: “The best new year’s resolution I ever made was to never turn down anything in the new year. Wanna go to a hockey game? Yes. Wanna join me for lunch? Yes. Wanna go on tour with me up the West Coast? Yes. That was the year that I did more, saw more. and experienced more fun than I had ever imagined … and all cause I said ‘Yes’ instead of ‘No.’ ” Love it.

My own parenting resolutions for 2011 are similar. “Try to say yes” is a great philosophy for life. (Stephen Colbert thinks so, too!) That doesn’t mean indulging the kids their every whim; it means aiming for “yes” and, if “yes” isn’t possible, figuring out a more affirmative “no.” I hate playing with Playmobil and Lego, but it wouldn’t kill me to do so more than I do. And if the sight of those little farshtunkiner plastic things makes my heart sink too much, I could offer a different “yes”—Blokus, Quirkle, Perfection, story-writing, tangrams or my girls’ new favorite game, “fake newscast.” It’s an old parenting trick, but one I could use more often: When the kids ask for a cookie, I don’t have to bark “No, it’s almost dinnertime.” I could say, “Yes—after dinner.” There’s a difference, and it’s not just semantic.

But back to reader resolutions. Writing on Facebook, one responded: “Same resolution I seem to make every other day—try to be more patient with my kids and enjoy the time I get with them.” True that, too. But like the traditional New Year’s resolutions about losing weight, going to the gym, and enrolling in an adult-ed class, this one is easier said than done.

For whatever it’s worth, here are my other resolutions:

I want to teach Josie to edit video, not only for “fake newscast” but also to encourage her finally to make her All-of-a-Kind Family movie.

I want to be better at scheduling flute practice; be a more attuned and encouraging listener; find more “performance” outlets (even if that just means making Bubbe to sit on the couch and kvell).

I want to be more religious about date night (as much as we love the spawn, being away from them more would be good for my husband and me).

I want to watch Matilda, Singin’ in the Rain, and Freaky Friday as a family.

I want to expand my children’s food horizons, even if it kills me (and them). Recipes welcome, people!

I want to keep better track of the comedy—you’d think as a writer I’d have a record of the kids’ best lines, but no.

And this summer, I swear, I will open a lemonade stand.

What about you?

Parents, I think, face these two dueling forces every day. Sometimes these voices come from inside us; sometimes they come from the media and the parents around us.

Any parent who’s visited a playground recently has met a Keep Fear Alive parent. She’s the one who’ll sidle up to us, narrow her eyes, and say, “Are you sure you want to eat that? No, I’m just asking. I definitely don’t want you to second-guess yourself or be anxious in any way! Because stress can cause headaches, lack of focus, short temper, back pain, menstrual problems, acne, obesity, and forgetfulness. And if you’re stressed you might be unable to calculate the digits of pi past the first 23 places, which would really screw up your next homeschool math session! Wait, you don’t homeschool? Wow. Um, wow. Well, I’m sure your children go to the top-of-the-line private school in your—oh. OK. Well, that’s great that you’re toughening them up for the real world! I bet they could fight a bear!

“Anyway, it’s great that you’re allowing yourself to Keep Fear Alive this way, luxuriating in the Fear and rolling around in it like it’s poop and you’re a golden retriever. Because that shows you really care about your kids. Fear is love! Our rabbis have told us you can’t have ahava, love, without yira, fear! Yes, I know they were supposedly talking about God, but I think they misspoke. What they meant was that it’s impossible to be a good parent without quaking in terror at all times. And there’s so much to fear! For instance, if you vaccinate your children they will get autistic and also cry, which means that you have betrayed their trust by letting someone stick them with a needle. And sure, chelation therapy is an option—ignore the stuff from ‘experts’ like the ‘board certified’ ‘pediatricians’ at the ‘Mayo Clinic’ who say it can cause fatal liver damage, because they’re all in the pockets of the pharmaco/rationality lobby—but it’s expensive. Fortunately it won’t be a problem if you skip vaccines completely. Sure, your kid will have to rely on herd immunity from other kids to avoid measles and whooping cough—the death rates of which are highly exaggerated by the mainstream media and ‘American history’—but kids today need to toughen up. If they can’t survive measles, they can’t survive competition with China. And this is one more reason to hate illegal immigrants, because they probably aren’t vaccinated, thus diluting the pool of vaccinated kids who give our unvaccinated kids herd immunity.”

The “Keep Fear Alive” parent has plenty to say about shards of glass in frozen peas, hormones in nonorganic milk that will give your 7-year-old son breasts, kids getting high on nutmeg. Which your teen is probably doing right now.

But for every Colbert there’s a Stewart, urging us to restore sanity.

“Dude,” the sanity-prone parent will say, “losing sleep over an unknowable future isn’t doing us or our spawn any favors. Blaming others—immigrants, gay people, poor people—for our troubles and our children’s troubles is foolish. Take a deep breath. Enjoy the actual process of parenting your actual child. Be present. Don’t let guilt paralyze you. And let’s try to encourage everybody else to simmer down, use inside voices, stop being hyperbolic and reactionary—and let’s do that without name-calling.”

Stewart put it best. In his invitation to the rally, he said that we need more of the sort of people “who think shouting is annoying, counterproductive, and terrible for your throat; who feel that the loudest voices shouldn’t be the only ones that get heard; and who believe that the only time it’s appropriate to draw a Hitler mustache on someone is when that person is actually Hitler. Or Charlie Chaplin in certain roles.”

Can we stand in solidarity about this, please?

1. Rabid squirrels hiding in s’chach

7. Cushions of indoor-outdoor picnic furniture offer succor to bedbugs brought in on hapless guest’s pants, whence they are certain to wend their way into child’s bed, feed upon child’s blood

Illustration by Will Horton

***

Hi, Liel, a person whose views are diametrically opposed to mine on everything and who has no child and therefore no moral authority but is an authority on new media so I bow to that (hereinafter, PVDOMENCNMAANMBT). How are you?

I got a little obsessed about cyberbullying this week, thanks to that recent New York Times story on how schools are dealing with the problem. I was struck by the parent who sued his daughter’s Beverly Hills school district for punishing her after she cyberbullied another kid. Her crime: She videotaped her friends, egging them on as they trash talked another girl, then threw the video up on YouTube. In the video, her friends mock the other girl’s looks (“she’s the ugliest piece of shit I’ve seen in my whole life”), her mother’s boobs, the fact that she’s a “slut,” the fact that she’s “a spoiled brat who isn’t worth a shit.” Charming. The school gave the girl who made and posted the video a 2-day suspension, and her father took the school district to court on behalf of his daughter, known as J.C. in court documents. A judge ruled that because the video didn’t cause “substantial” disruption in school, the girl shouldn’t have been punished. And the school district had to pay J.C.’s legal costs: $107,150.80.

The law on cyberbullying isn’t always clear. The Anti-Defamation League says that many states have anti-bullying statutes, but very few states specify whether schools can intervene in electronic bullying.

Regardless, I read the New York Times story as a parent, and as a parent, I wanted to beat J.C.’s dad, a recording-industry lawyer named Evan S. Cohen, with my laptop, then put the video on YouTube. After Cohen won the case, he insisted that his daughter keep the YouTube video online, even though she offered to take it down. He said he wanted to perform a “public service” and show people “what kids get suspended for in Beverly Hills.”

Um, dude. There’s legal culpability, and there’s moral culpability. What ethical lessons are you teaching your kid? That if she acts like a cretin and gets in trouble, daddy will bail her out? That it’s OK to humiliate another kid? (The victim’s name is repeated many times in the video, which I’m not linking to, because I’m not going to do Evan S. Cohen any favors.) Look, I’m a First Amendment absolutist; I agree that the girl has the right to free speech. Just as her father has the right to be a schmuck and a crappy parent. But I don’t have to celebrate that.

***

Dear Righteous Mama,

While I shall never defend the predilections of the litigious class, I’m afraid that the crux of our problem lies elsewhere. What we have here pertains neither to legal nor to moral culpability; what we have here is a question of platform.

You began your elegantly argued dispatch by stating that the conversation shall focus on cyberbullying, that is to say, bullying by means of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and the other blunt instruments of the World Wide Web. Unlike more traditional forms of bullying, the cyberbully is enabled not by virtue of his or her strength or size but by his or her access to widely available objects like a computer, a video camera, or a cellular phone.

Herein, I believe, lies not only the problem but also the solution. Mr. Cohen’s daughter, let’s call her Kid A, posted disparaging remarks about Kid B on YouTube. Kid B, arguably, could have easily logged on to her computer, fired up her webcam, and produced a video twice as scathing, twice as funny, and twice as popular. This, no doubt, would have taught Kid A a fierce lesson and would have saved the school district a pretty penny in legal costs.

What follows, in the grand prophetic tradition, is a litany of complaints. Again we see the Israelites grumbling and scheming, comically disobedient and deeply corrupted. And again the prophet concludes with an exhortation for the errant people to mend their ways and find a path back to God. But Jeremiah never answers his own question: What wrong did God’s Chosen People find in their divine benefactor that led them astray?

For hints of an answer, don’t ask a prophet. Ask a parent.

In a gargantuan piece in New York magazine, Jennifer Senior plumbed reams of social science studies to try and explain why parenting, as the article’s headline poignantly put it, was all joy and no fun: why, in other words, so many parents are reportedly thrilled with having had children and yet driven to despair by the daily machinations associated with raising these very same tots. Senior’s finding is unsurprising—parenting, she writes, is one of those thoroughly satisfying yet frequently unenjoyable activities that give us little immediate pleasure but much by way of meaning and a sense of purpose.

Herein lies the solution to poor Jeremiah’s conundrum. Senior writes of the disappointment common to many new parents—the slow, sinking realization, after years of living as independent and carefree adults, that raising a child is an emotionally draining undertaking demanding of all manners of sacrifice. It’s not hard to imagine the Israelites feeling the same way. There they were, after all, a band of wanderers, chained in the house of bondage but never without their bit of meat and other earthly delights. Then, suddenly, midwife Moses delivers them a newborn covenant, and all of the sudden there are so many things they just can’t do anymore, like nibble on a ham and cheese sandwich or spend their Saturdays doing whatever they please. And just like so many contemporary moms and dads who ponder the value of parenthood, the Israelites start wondering whether this whole business of having a God is even worth it.

Whether we realize it or not, it’s a question that has become a staple of modern life. We may not always put it in such epic terms, but the decisions we make often force us to choose between two irreconcilable drives: the theistic and the solipsistic. The first suggests to us that there is a God up or out there and that even if we don’t follow a particular religion we’re at least obliged to acknowledge that some things are more worthy than our mere selves. The second argues the opposite, claiming that since we can’t really know for sure the true nature of anything that exists outside of our own minds, we may as well not worry about it too much.

These, of course, are profound and complex philosophical positions, but they’re frequently the engine behind simple, earthly behaviors. Greed, for example, is inherently solipsistic. Think of BP carelessly operating its drilling site just to save a few dollars and leading to the worst ecological disaster in the nation’s history, or of corporations seeking unrealistic profit margins and bleeding dry entire industries as a result. Fear-mongering is solipsistic as well, as are most of the dark urges that have come to power our politics, our economy, and so much of our personal lives.

Luckily for us, Jeremiah has an answer at the ready. The prophet never doubts that worshipping Ba’al is a kick—the Canaanite deity’s followers, after all, believed that the best way to make the earth fertile is to fornicate in the temples—but he also knows that kicks, by their very nature, don’t last very long. By worshipping God, he promises his people nothing but blood, sweat, and tears, a heavily regulated life burdened by restrictions and controlled by commandments. But he also promises them the much deeper joy that comes with doing not what feels right but what is right to do.

If we are ever to grow—as individuals and as communities alike—we would do well to follow Jeremiah’s example. This would likely mean setting aside our obsession with happiness, too often understood as the pursuit of gratification, and focusing instead on righteousness, the bleaker but more substantive quest for truth, love, and justice.

And if you have any qualms concerning what it’s like to give up so much by way of instant pleasure for something else, something more important, something bigger than yourself—hey, just call your mother.

Tourist Development Association of Palestine poster, circa 1935.
CREDIT: Boston Public Library

I’ve written a column about Jewish parenting for eight years, first at the Forward and for the last year at Tablet Magazine. In that time, I’ve written 11 pieces about Jewish children’s books, nine about the High Holidays, seven about Passover, six about the Jewish female body, four about summer camp, three about Sukkot, and two each about vaccines, organ donation, and Tu B’Shevat. I am painfully aware that I have never, not once, written about Israel.

That’s because I am deeply ambivalent about Israel. Modern-day Israel, as opposed to historical Israel, is a subject I avoid with my children. Yes, of course I believe the state should exist, but the word “Zionist” makes me skittish. (I understand that I may be the Jewish equivalent of all the twentysomething women I want to smack for saying, “I’m not a feminist, but I believe in equal rights.”) I shy away from conversations about Israeli politics. I feel no stirring in my heart when I see the Israeli flag. I would no sooner attend an Israel Day parade than a Justin Bieber concert. Neither Abe Foxman nor AIPAC speaks for me. I am a liberal, and I am deeply troubled by the Matzav, Israeli shorthand for tension with the Palestinians, and I do not have answers, and I do not know what to do about it, and I do not know what to tell my children.

So, it was with a huge sense of identification and relief that I read Peter Beinart’s controversial essay in the New York Review of Books last week. As you no doubt know, Beinart, an associate professor of journalism and political science at CUNY and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, wrote that leading Jewish institutions viscerally reject opposition to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and of the country’s Arab citizens, and this has made younger non-Orthodox Jews like me—who are deeply committed to human rights around the world, who reject being told what to think and do without the airing of all points of view, who have issues with military force—turn away from Jewish communal organizations and refrain from even thinking about, let alone identifying with, the state of Israel.

“Having kids definitely played a role” in his writing of this essay, Beinart told Tablet’s Marc Tracy. “I think it made me think about not just my Zionist identity, but what kind of Zionism was available to them. And the more I thought about that, the more I began to worry.” In the piece, he mentioned that he could imagine his children, who attend an Orthodox shul, winding up either among the apathetic college students identified in a recent survey who don’t identify at all with Zionism, or among the right-wingers who boo when the notion of Palestinian suffering is even mentioned at an Israel solidarity rally. “Either prospect fills me with dread,” he writes.

Oh, dude. I can relate.

When I wrote recently about the attempt in Canada to censor a children’s book depicting a Palestinian perspective on the Matzav, I had a teetering stack of middle-grade and young adult novels and non-fiction about the conflict on my desk. Josie, my 8 year old, wandered into my office and asked if she could read one. “Sure,” I gulped. She wound up choosing Samir and Yonatan, a poetic, elliptical novel about a Palestinian boy and a Jewish boy in an Israeli hospital. When she returned the book to me, I asked, “What did you think?”

“I’m not sure I understood it,” she said. “Can you explain it a little bit?”

I stumbled desperately through an explanation of why two peoples feel they have a legitimate claim to the same land.

“But having land is like having a seat on a bus,” Josie replied. “You can’t just push someone out of their seat, and you can’t just leave your seat and then come back to it after a long time and just expect the person who is sitting there now to give it to you.”

My panicked reaction to her words surprised me. I found myself trying to convince her that Israel did have that right. But that’s not what I believe. But I’m not sure what I believe. I want my children to love Israel, but I don’t want them to identify with bullies. I was spinning in my own head like the desperate, overwhelmed woman in the Calgon commercial: J Street, take me away!

But Josie’s bus-bully analogy resonated. Baby-boomer Jews seem wedded to a sepia-toned image of Jews as victims—in the shtetl, in the Holocaust, in Israel’s early wars. But in real life, victims can turn into bullies. Perhaps being the parent to girls, rather than boys, helps me see this—in Mean Girl dynamics, the power shifts back and forth almost every day. We want a bright clear line, but heroes and villains in the real world are much fuzzier.

Until now, I’ve taught my children about Jewish identity through ancient history, through food, through songs and prayers, through the story of American immigration. I’ve left any Israel talk to their teachers. When someone said of the camp Josie will attend this summer, “Oh, that’s a very Zionist camp!” I felt a stab of unexamined, visceral panic. I’ve always known I’d take my kids to visit Israel one day, and I figure they’ll go on a teen tour or do a study program there just as I did. But putting it off till tomorrow, like a Jewish Scarlett O’Hara, isn’t a good long-term strategy.

So, exactly how should liberal parents who want to foster Jewish identity, but who see Zionism as the conversational equivalent of an Alar-coated apple, teach their children about Israel? “You have to expose children to a multiplicity of authors and positions, then they can synthesize their own ideas,” says Alex Sinclair, lead researcher at Makom, the Israel Engagement Network of the Jewish Agency. “When we tell kids what to think, we forbid those kinds of critical, evaluative moves.”

In a 2007 piece in the Jerusalem Report, Sinclair wrote, “Educational thinkers since Socrates have known that one of the soundest ways in which to get people to feel committed to and invested in a given issue is to ask them to take a stand on it: to debate. In good schools, from the earliest grades, children are asked to collate evidence, analyze data and evaluate positions. Indeed, ‘evaluation’ is the highest order of thinking, according to Bloom’s now classic taxonomy of the cognitive domain. Yet, in Israel education, we seem to want to prevent Jewish children (to say nothing of adults) from aspiring to that level.”

Furthermore, Sinclair tells me, teaching American kids about Israel should be a lesson in teaching pluralism. “It’s about seeing Israel as non-monolithic, containing a variety of voices, without saying ‘you have to follow a particular party line,’ ” he says. “There are other debates beside the Israeli-Palestinian ones. There are discussions to be had about living in a diverse culture, about religion’s role in the state. I’d love for American kids to be exposed to young Russian and Ethiopian Jews as well as to Palestinians.”

He makes a funny analogy: “You have little girls, right?” he asks me. “And they love horses, right? There are American organizations that let you sponsor a horse, give money to the horse, you get pictures of the horse, and maybe one day you meet the horse. We need something similar to foster one-on-one connections between American and Israeli kids. And what they should wind up with is ‘If what I think is different from what some political parties think, that’s great.’ You have to allow kids to have that space.”

And all this means we can’t expect blind fealty. Right now, the big American Jewish communal organizations measure the success of their youth outreach initiatives in “Do the kids wind up supporting the Israeli government?” Maybe instead we should encourage kids to be able to engage in informed debate and be able to appreciate Israel’s history while also feeling empowered to urge its government—and ours—to take positions we think are right.

When you’re an American Jewish parent, ambivalence and sorrow about the state of Israel aren’t necessarily bad. Disengagement is. What I need to fight in myself is the tendency to tune out when I’m confused and upset. When I tune out, I can’t learn, and I can’t teach my own kids. Disagreement with Israel doesn’t mean not loving Israel, just as being upset with your own children doesn’t mean you don’t love them. But I need to engage with what frightens me, and my failure to do so is why it’s taken eight years to write this column.

She’d committed to Oliver! first. She’d been cast in the chorus; when she expressed disappointment about not getting a bigger part, I launched into the whole song and dance about how being in the chorus is in some ways even harder than having a featured role because you have to create your own backstory for your character. And that it’s only fair that older kids get the bigger parts. And that if you’re cheerful and reliable in a small role now, when you’re one of the youngest kids, you may go on to get a bigger role when you’re older. Yes, I was a high-school theater geek and went on to be Rosh Drama at a Jewish summer camp. Could you tell?

But then we learned that the camping trip would take place on exactly the same days as the play. There was no way Josie could go on the trip for just one night and still do the show. This trip is a huge bonding opportunity for her class and the school’s other 3rd grade—when my daughters were smaller, I’d watch the 3rd-graders gather in the lobby with their sleeping bags and backpacks and marvel at how grown-up they looked. And now my kid was old enough to be one of those sleeping-bag-luggers. I knew that going camping would make the kids feel big and competent. It would help cement their group. Did I really want to tell my kid she couldn’t take part?

Of course, it was hard to tell Josie anything because I didn’t know what I wanted myself. On the one hand, I’m thrilled that she loves Hebrew school and participates enthusiastically. Last week she wrote mitzuyan!, or excellent, in bold letters across the top of her own homework, but still. Her shul friendships are intense. She loves going to family services. She chose the summer camp she did because one of her Hebrew-school friends testified that he loved it. How delighted am I that Jo is getting a sense of Jewish affiliation and identity that doesn’t come from our house? I wanted to encourage it. Besides, she made a commitment to the play. We should honor our commitments. That’s a moral lesson I want to teach. Hadn’t I just delivered the “no small parts, only small actors” speech a few weeks earlier? I’d never have considered letting her quit the play if she had a lead role, right?

I wanted it both ways. Ma nishtanah? Here I was, seeking a perfect ideal of full immersion in both Jewish and secular American life. Which isn’t easy—there’s a reason the numbers of Reform and unaffiliated Jews and the numbers of Orthodox Jews are growing, while the number of Conservative Jews (the branch I identify with) is stagnant or shrinking. Playing both sides is harder than choosing a side and staying there. But just as I smacked up against some hard realities when choosing between Jewish day school (which provides deep learning about our culture and immersion in Hebrew language and Jewish history and literature—all values I cherish) and public school (which provides genuine diversity and American civic participation—all values I also cherish and that are completely antithetical to the first set of values), here was another lesson in the reality that it’s impossible to have it all. Life isn’t an Enjoli ad.

So, I waffled. It’s what I do.

I kept returning to the fact that I didn’t want to send Josie the message that one’s word is one’s bond only if one gets to play The Artful Dodger. Promises matter; she’d promised her director and her company that she’d be there. So, I told her that the camping trip conflicted with the play, and, since she’d signed on to the play first, she’d have to miss the camping trip.

I expected pushback. I thought she’d want to go with her school. Instead, Josie seemed relieved to have me make the decision for her. She was sad she couldn’t do both activities, sure, but unlike me, she’s not a ditherer. She understood she’d made a commitment. Besides, she was loving rehearsals, self-importantly toting around her script and pondering her motivation as Orphan No. 3.

So, I told Josie’s teacher, Grace, that Josie wouldn’t be going on the trip. Grace proceeded to lobby hard for me to change my mind, but since she herself went to Chinese school and American school, she understood the pull of living in two worlds.

Belatedly, I learned that the kids were doing almost all the show in English instead of Hebrew. In my day we learned all of “Kol ha’olam hoo Cabaret” and “He’Abir mi La Mancha” in Hebrew, and we liked it! And I wish Josie’s religious school had taken the pedagogical opportunity to discuss the anti-Semitic aspects of Fagin. (Did you know that late in his life, Dickens revised the book to be less Jew-hate-y? He’d befriended the Jews who bought his London home in 1860, listened to the wife’s criticism of Fagin, made changes, even created a noble Jewish character in Our Mutual Friend, published in 1865. There’s a nice lesson plan about redemption and the value of getting to know The Other in there.) Or, hey, simply talk about Jewish attitudes toward orphans, justice, and mercy.

So, uh, the Jewish content I was hoping for isn’t happening so much. But the lessons Jo’s getting about teamwork and community and hard work and obligation are also important. And in a great act of kindness, Grace let Josie choose which class she could sit in on while her own class is away. Josie chose a 4th grade class, even though she loved her 2nd grade teacher, “because I don’t want things to be too easy.” And that’s a great lesson too.

Most of all, the fact that (unlike her mother) Josie’s not resentful about not being able to do it all is pretty heartening. Sometimes you do get the best of both worlds.

Josie, 8 years old, is going to overnight camp for the first time this year, which has made me reflect on my own experiences as a child at Camp Ramah in New England. I loved the lake, the trees, the pine-fragrant bunks adorned with the vintage scratchitti of long-ago youths who’d presumably left camping behind for cholesterol-lowering drugs and the raising of future campers of their own.

I grew up in a different era, an age before cell phones and personal computing devices. In an era before MTV’s Unplugged, we were perpetually unplugged. As a kid in a small city, I rode my bike all over the neighborhood. I lounged with my friends in Swan Point Cemetery on weekends. We spent hours, unsupervised, in various garages and basements.

My own kids’ childhood is very different. They’re in organized activities all the time. They don’t roam like free-range fowl throughout the city. For Josie, one of the most fascinating things about this year’s marvelous Newbery-winning children’s novel When You Reach Me was its portrait of a latchkey kid on the Upper West Side in the ‘70s; in a book that deals with time travel and foretelling the future, the most astonishing detail for my kid was that the protagonist got to walk around New York City alone.

The most significant difference between my kids and me, though, is that they can’t imagine being unwired. I showed them a picture of Gordon Gekko holding his then-super-futuristic cell phone in the movie Wall Street, and they asked if it was a giant walkie-talkie. Josie recently quizzed me about Superman: What was a phone booth, and how did he change clothes in it? When I tell her we had to stand up and walk over to the television to change the channel and that we only had telephones attached to walls, she stares at me as if I’m speaking Urdu. I showed her Atari’s Pong, the antiquated video game we played on my TV growing up; she thought I was playing a joke. All you could do in this “game” was move a line, slowly, up and down, as a single dot ricocheted in slow motion around the screen? This was once considered fun? Josie and her friends play Toontown and Wizard 101 together, visually rich, hugely complex, multiplayer games with their own elaborate universes. They make plans to “meet” each other on weekends in digital glens and seven-story buildings in their avatar forms.

A couple of summers ago we visited friends in Fire Island. Eyeing my iPhone, an 8-year-old girl said, “Which generation?” I told her it was the earliest version and she rolled her eyes. “I want the new one, but my mom isn’t psyched for me to break my current contract,” she said airily, as bored as a Kardashian. “I’m totally getting it, though.”

So, is today’s sleepaway camp—with its lake, trees, cabins, chadar ochel, and drama and crafts bungalows looking exactly as they did generations earlier—an artifact, an artificial construct belonging to an earlier time, like some New World version of a Roman Vishniac photo? Is it ridiculous to expect kids to give up their iPods, handheld computer games, Facebook, Twitter, IM? Can we really trap them in this historical setting, like bug-spray-scented, cell-phone-less flies in amber?

My answer: We not only can; we should. Kids need unplugging. I’m no Luddite or technophobe, and I was among the snarling parents who objected when Mayor Michael Bloomberg went on his rampage to ban cell phones in schools after September 11. But in the summer—the last vestige of carefree childhood in a high-pressure, high-connectivity world—kids should be forced to interact face-to-face with each other, with their counselors, and with a sylvan world. It’s one of the last great communal spaces for kids.

Every camp has its own rules about the use of technology, of course. Some allow cell phones but let kids use them only right before Shabbat or right before bed. Others allow iPods in the bunk only. (In my day, at rest time, we were allowed our giant, awkward Walkmans that seemed the height of techie cool.) But whatever a camp’s written rules, compliance varies. One Jewish website is rife with whispered tales of texting in bathroom stalls.

“Each camp’s culture is different, of course, but for most part the undergirding value is that camp is a place in which community is built in real time and real space,” says Rabbi Eve Rudin, director of Camp Excellence and Advancement at the Foundation for Jewish Camp. In other words, al tifrosh min hatzibur; don’t separate yourself from the community. The real community, not the virtual one. “When you’re plugged in to your headphones, you’re separated from the world around you,” Rudin says. “There can be appropriate times in the camp day to be separate and quiet—reading a book in your bunk, writing a letter, listening to music. For some camps, then, an iPod is acceptable. But we generally don’t encourage families to send valuables to camp.” Camp, she adds, should be a place where all kids start on equal footing, but “the reality is that parents don’t always want to abide by it.”

Ah, there’s the rub. Is connectivity really so important to the kid, or is it really about the needs and anxieties of the parent? For most kids, camp is a time to be in a completely kid-centric, immersive environment. Kids adjust to camp culture. They learn the camp rituals and songs (speaking of which, OyBaby’s new CD, We Sang That at Camp, is hilariously awesome). They fold themselves into the tradition; they don’t expect the tradition to adapt to them. But parents can be more obstructionist than helpful to the process. I’ve heard stories about camps with no-outside-food policies in which parents smuggle food in care packages, hidden in tennis balls. Websites like bunk1.com and campregister.com help parents stay connected to their little darlings 24-7. In my day, we had to write home twice a week, and we could line up to use the pay phone outside the mercaz. And we walked uphill to the archery range, both ways.

There’s no doubt that camp is Good for the Jews. Research shows that teenagers report greater levels of connection to Judaism at camp, and campers are significantly more likely to send their children to camp themselves when they grow up. According to the Foundation for Jewish Camp, 66 percent of Jews who attended Jewish camps considered their Jewish identity “very important,” as opposed to 29 percent of those who never attended a Jewish camp. Jewish camp alumni are 50 percent more likely to join a synagogue and 90 percent more likely to join a Jewish community center than their non-camp fellows. And camp’s world-unto-itself mystique is part of what makes it so indelible. There’s something primal about the physicality of it all, the intensity of friendships forged at camp. Movie nights feel more special when media is a rarity. Romance feels more thrilling. Shiurim feel less like school when they’re held among pine needles. You can’t Facebook that stuff. Well, you could, but feh.

Take the seder.  This year I joined the Facebook group “Great Seder Ideas for Kids!” and adopted several suggestions from it. To illustrate the plague of blood, I poured water into all the Hebrews’ glasses, then pretended to be Pharaoh and poured water into my own; I’d secretly placed a few sprinkles of red gelatin dessert powder therein, and the glass filled up with “blood.” The kids were gobsmacked as I screamed in terror. I also provided a mix of personalized seder poems and songs, combining the classic stories of our people with in-jokes and references to family members.

Our seder featured an interpretive dance interlude, inspired by Moses’s sister Miriam, in which the kids boogied under an ocean-blue sheet waved by adults. As we sang Dayenu, we beat each other with scallions, a Sephardic tradition that represents the Egyptian overseers beating the slaves. Maxine told what has become an annual joke, lifted from the delightful middle-grade novel Penina Levine Is a Hard-Boiled Egg, about a kid experiencing Passover and Easter in a multicultural world. Said joke: Can Elijah get through a screen door? He can, but it’s a strain! (Get it? A strain!)

All of this raises the question: Is this a seder or a circus?

I’m not self-congratulatory about my parenting. I am all about the second-guessing, self-flagellation, self-questioning, and guilt. And I’m worried that my attempts to tailor the seder to the kids have gone too far. Our sages have always wanted the seder to prompt questions and engagement, but when parents like me create a multimedia extravaganza, what do we lose in the process? Are we, as they say, diluting the brand?

Stephen Colbert touched on this subject last week, devoting a segment on his show to the commercialization of Passover. As Colbert put it, “Tradition-loving Pesach-poopers complain that this holiday doesn’t need leavening.” (Get it? Leavening!) He quoted Miami resident Dorothy Raphaely, who told the Wall Street Journal that “Tedium is part of the tradition.”

It’s true. As a kid, I went to Jewish day school, where texts, prayers, and rituals were taught the old-school way: by rote, in a fevered spew of Hebrew and Aramaic. There was little attempt to make things relevant. We kids understood that there were expectations: We would memorize; we would be silent; we would not confuse Judaism with a Pink Floyd sound-and-light show.

My education may not have emphasized modern-day values like multiculturalism. But when I was my kids’ age, I knew a lot more Hebrew and a lot more textual content then they do now. Sometimes I feel the tradeoff has been worth it; sometimes I don’t. I don’t mean to sound too “hey kids, get off my lawn,” but it’s not accidental that kids today have an air of entitlement earlier generations lacked. Isn’t tailoring the seder to children part of a larger cultural trend of catering to our kids’ every whim? My generation takes its kids to fancy restaurants and smiles tolerantly as they hurl dinner rolls. When our kids get in trouble, we blame the other kid, the teacher, the school, the playground, the community. Are we really doing our kids—or our society, in the long term—any favors by convincing them the sun rises and sets upon their golden, flawless heads?

And when we turn a seder into the ritual equivalent of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, aren’t we giving up a meaningful, mysterious adult night? My child-free friend Lori and my editor Liel host sedarim that involve discussions and debates about free will and international politics. Meanwhile, my seder involves wearing a mask that looks like boils.

I spent a lot of my childhood hiding novels inside siddurim. I was bored a lot. But I also understood that there was a huge, important grown-up world I would one day be privy to. Is it possible that some presents are worth waiting for? Life isn’t one big afikomen gift.

I think hardest about this question during the High Holidays. It’s been eight years since I had a truly spiritual experience. These days I attend children’s services and devote my attention to hushing, shushing, and quivering with worry that my kids are not sufficiently engaged, or, alternately, that I should have given them the kind of education where they expect not to be sufficiently engaged. I realize that Orthodox Judaism gives moms like me an out, excusing women from all time-bound mitzvot. But whatever your level of observance, not being obligated to do something doesn’t mean you don’t necessarily want to do something. I’m always torn. I want my kids to love Judaism, to feel drawn in to our narratives, to make connections between ancient stories and the world they live in today. But I also mourn the personal engagement with text I once had. Does becoming a parent—particularly a mother—inherently mean buckling your own intellectual needs into a booster seat in the way-back?

I don’t have answers to any of these questions. And I suppose the tensions can be productive. “It is a part of the human condition to live in polarities,” wrote Abraham Joshua Heschel in God in Search of Man. “A challenge is not the same as a clash, and divergence does not mean a conflict.” But I’m not F. Scott Fitzgerald, and I don’t pass his test of a first-rate mind: the ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time. Instead, I whiplash back and forth between worrying about engagement and worrying about traditionalism; I fret about the state of future generations (the ones eating candied fruit slices at my own table) and the state of my own. But that too is part of the history of our people, after all.

I suppose I should take comfort in a quote from that Wall Street Journal article that Stephen Colbert did not share on TV: “We have to make sure that rituals don’t become dead symbols,” says Rabbi Kenneth Brander, a dean at Yeshiva University.

The dean’s right—no meaningful religion can be frozen in amber. But how to balance relevance and respect, the needs of the many and the needs of the few? The tension can get overwhelming. It’s brutal feeling that we can’t let ourselves, or our kids, off the hook. To some degree, I suppose I’ll just have to be patient; as my kids become more independent, I’ll regain more of my own spiritual focus.

Or so I hope. Perpetually angsting over how to be the best Jewish parent you can be isn’t really productive. Parenting is easier when we just take it holiday by holiday, plague by plague.

These days I carry EpiPens. I bypass fancy pastries, since they often contain vile marzipan. I don’t eat in Indian restaurants anymore, as bits of cashew and almond often seem to find their way into even ostensibly nut-free dishes. Once, on a cross-country flight, I accidentally bit into a nut in my airline meal and panicked. The flight attendant took me up to the first-class bathroom and taught me how to make myself vomit: She got a saltshaker, filled a teaspoon and said, “Swallow this, fast.” I did as she said. It worked. When I reported back to her, eyes watering, she told me, “All flight attendants over 35 know that trick; airlines used to have mandatory weigh-ins.” How odd that the sexism and sizeism of a bygone era saved my life.

Passover is probably the biggest holiday challenge for folks like me. Many Passover desserts rely on tree nuts for texture and heft. Swanky seder salads invariably have walnuts hidden in them like bombs in The Hurt Locker. And of course there’s charoset, known to the nut-allergic as the Mortar of Doom. So, when I began hosting the seder, I started experimenting with nut-free charoset recipes.

In 2006, I tried a Yemenite variant with figs, dates, wine, fresh ginger, coriander, cayenne pepper, and sesame seeds. (Sephardic Jews and some Ashkenazim—including me—eat seeds and legumes on Passover.) But the charoset it yielded was simultaneously not nuanced enough and too coriander-y. In 2007 I tried an Israeli version with apples, bananas, dates, lemon and orange zest, cinnamon, wine, and honey. But that charoset, as those without nuts frequently become, was an icky-textured glop, and banana-scented baby-food glop is not enticing to anyone. We left it for Elijah, but he didn’t seem interested either. In 2008, to avoid the glop issue, I used big chunks of granny smith apples to provide the crunch other charosets get from nuts. I tossed them with cardamom, Slivovitz, dates, raisins, and cinnamon. Finally, triumph!

But because I am the Lindsey Vonn of nut-free charoset, I was not content to rest on my laurels. So, I continued experimenting. In 2009 I tried mixing Yemenite and Ashkenazi traditions in a version with apples, raisins, dates, wine, pine nuts, cardamom, and cayenne. The pine nuts were too oily and added a greasy mouth-feel to the dish.

This year I’ll be trying two new recipes. One is adapted from the Jews of Curacao; it will have peanuts (I can eat those, because they’re legumes, not tree nuts), brown sugar, dates, raisins, figs, wine, honey, cinnamon, orange, lime, and watermelon and tamarind juices. Yes, it could be completely disgusting. So, to be safe, I’ll also revisit the Great Charoset of 2008, a combo of apples and cardamom.

You might think I’d be advocating for all charoset to be nut-free. Or that I’d attend a seder at other people’s homes only if they promised not to serve the vile indehiscent items. You would be wrong.

Of course I believe infants and toddlers with hardcore food allergies should be kept away from foods that could make them sick. But the rest of us, including school-age children, need to be responsible for our own eating. My parents didn’t make a big deal out of my allergy; they taught me to always find out what I was eating.

Today’s parents, I’m afraid, try to control everything in a child’s environment as if casting a spell at Hogwarts. They succeed in panicking their kid, convincing him that danger is everywhere, and making matters worse for these very few kids who really are that allergic. What’s up with the parents who claim their child is allergic but haven’t had him tested? Or the parents who haven’t done blood tests as well as scratch tests and food challenges? Or who dismiss doctors who tell them their child may have a sensitivity but not a true allergy?

Are there children who are so desperately allergic they can’t be in a room with nuts? Absolutely. Are they common? Doubtful. I say this as someone who is allergic enough to have stopped breathing, lost consciousness, and required intubation. Once, after I made out with my college boyfriend after he’d eaten a walnut brownie in the cafeteria, my lips swelled up so much I looked like Amanda Lepore. Yet I tested only at level 4 (on a scale of 0 to 6) on the blood test that determines just how allergic you are. My doctor said that in over 30 years of practice, he’s never seen a 6. Here’s my proposition: If you can produce test results saying your kid is a 4, you get a nut-free table in the classroom. If your kid is a 5, you get a nut-free school. And if your kid is a 6, you get whatever you want, because that blows. (As an aside: All parents of allergic kids should teach them to be judicious about swapping spit and eating while drunk—it sounds like a joke, but adolescence was when I had to learn new lessons about living with a serious allergy.)

As most parents of young kids know, food allergies have been on the rise for the last two decades. Some immunologists think the “hygiene hypothesis” is responsible, that we’re all so clean and purified and antibioticked and antibacterial-soaped that our immune systems have lost the ability to do their jobs right. Others think a lack of exposure to nut products in early childhood may be the culprit. I’d love to hear from Israelis who were raised on Bamba, the peanut-based Cheetos manqué that’s a childhood staple. Were you shocked when you learned that most American parents would no sooner give a 2-year-old a peanut snack than they would a bag of broken glass drizzled with botulism toxin?

In any case, Passover is a good time to think about how we respond to nut allergies, and not just because of those farkakte flourless hazelnut tortes on every seder table. It’s because this is a holiday about freedom. Our sages ponder the part of the Exodus story in which God hardens Pharaoh’s heart. Was Pharaoh responsible for his own actions? What role does free will have in the story? Can children become actualized, differentiated adults if we don’t give them the tools and chances to control their own lives? The Israelites moved from slavery to freedom; we don’t want children to be slaves to their fears. And we don’t want them not to feel responsible for their own health because everyone else in the community has been handed that responsibility. Ultimately, we all own what we put in our own bodies. If we encourage kids to live in fear or rely entirely on others for protection, aren’t we condemning them to slavery?

I know what it’s like to be scared. For weeks after I nearly died as a young adult, I’d sit quietly outside my superintendent’s apartment after I’d eaten dinner. My heart was pounding. I could feel my throat closing up. I was flushed and having trouble breathing, because I couldn’t be 100 percent sure that I hadn’t accidentally eaten a nut. And a panic attack can look and feel an awful lot like anaphylaxis. And I know what it feels like to worry about your child. My kids, thank God, didn’t inherit my allergy (I had them tested), but Josie has spent several nights in the emergency room with severe asthma, and as a 4-year-old, Maxine wandered out of my in-laws’ backyard and got lost in a neighborhood with a deep ravine. Parenthood is terrifying. I understand wanting to do anything, everything, to protect your child.

But Passover is a celebration of becoming your own master. Don’t we want to offer that gift to our children?

For lunch today I ate a pastrami sandwich on white bread with mayonnaise, and it was delicious. I can already hear you—and my dead grandmother—groaning: oy, what a goyishe deli sandwich. To be honest, it wasn’t my fault. I did it in solidarity with my kids.

Children can do that to a person. One day you’re a nice Jewish boy who knows the proper place of mustard and the next you’re saying “That’s nice, honey,” when one of your kids comes home from her touchy-feely, multi-denominational school and announces, “Poppy, I love Jesus.” Sorry to throw Jesus on top of the mayo-induced indigestion. I guess I’m just used to having him (Him?) around now.

Most people move closer to religion when they have children. Ground them in something solid, you think. Or: carry on the family tradition. And perhaps: make them suffer like I did. At least that’s what I expected to do when my husband and I became parents almost seven years ago. He comes from an Irish Catholic family, and mine is conservative Jewish. On paper, at least, my faith seemed like the way to go for gay parents, seeing how the boys in Vatican City don’t like our type much. I was never super-observant, but I was bar mitzvahed, I went to Jewish summer camp, and I make a mean matzoh ball soup. So the kids would be Jewish.

Then, like Lot’s wife, my faith dissolved. It started slowly, as I discovered that the rituals I’d always wanted to share with my children—seders, Hanukkah, and so on—left me surprisingly empty. As time went on, I found myself feeling, well, kind of hostile. Instead of pulling me back to my roots, becoming a dad actually yanked me away.

I imagine that part of it was my rebelling against my parents and they way they raised me. Also, being a non-traditional father, maybe I didn’t want my kids to be beholden to an ancient set of tenets designed to hand down the values of past rather than embracing new ways of looking at the world.

What happened most, I think, is that my “dad” reflexes kicked in. More than anything else, I felt compelled to protect my babies from a potentially dangerous influence. There is something about Judaism that, after 40-plus years of unquestioning loyalty, now rubs me the wrong way. How could I tell my children to accept the idea that the Jewish God is the only god when I want them to grow up with friends who worship different deities—or none at all? If you go around insisting that your god is better than Mary Catherine’s or Patel’s, it’s a short leap to the whole “my dad can beat up your dad” thing, which I’m pretty sure will never be true. And then “my dress is prettier than yours,” which is in fact true (one advantage to having gay dads) but isn’t something I want them to start gloating about until they’re at least in middle school. Add to that the notion of the “Chosen People,” and Judaism started to seem to me like a terribly arrogant belief system.

What bothers me most about Judaism isn’t anything written the in Bible. It’s the whole Member of the Tribe syndrome, or what I unkindly call The Clan. I know it’s an ugly stereotype, but to me there’s some truth to the fact that Jews band together in exclusionary, even unhealthy, ways. Back in the days when I still had faith in my faith, my husband and I applied to a nice, conservative, Jewish school for our older daughter’s kindergarten. The headmaster was very warm and open and said that gay dads wouldn’t be a big deal on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. But by chance, she asked, was our surrogate Jewish? No, she wasn’t, we told her. Now we had a problem. Even though we were raising our daughters Jewish (at the time), and even though our girls don’t really have what you (or they) would call a “mother,” if the woman who gave birth to them wasn’t Jewish, then some parents would not consider them to be Jewish either. That might lead to “social” issues, the headmaster told us—perhaps fewer friends, and certainly later, fewer (if any) dates. In other words, our baby would be treyf.

I can’t say that I was entirely shocked. When I was about 14 and my sister 10, our parents sat us down and explained that we were special, that no matter how much lox they eat, the goyim will never understand Jews or Judaism. (Proof: the cinnamon-raisin bagel.) Some of them actually hate us. Therefore, we were told, we were never to even date anyone who isn’t Jewish, because dating leads to love which leads to marriage, and a mixed marriage is a one-way ticket to disaster. My parents didn’t come right out and warn that if you put a Christmas tree and a menorah in your house the Hanukkah candles will set the pine needles on fire and burn the whole place down, but that was the implication.

(By the way, at that time this mixed-marriage fatwa was issued, our next-door neighbors were a black woman married to a white man. Of course, my liberal Jewish parents would never have a problem with that. People have the right to marry whomever they want! Except Jews.)

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not exactly thrilled with Christianity, either. My husband, the lapsed Catholic who didn’t seem interested in religion before we had kids, has discovered it again, only now as an Episcopalian. He takes the girls to church every Sunday, which even in my un-Jewish mode hurts a little. It’s hard to unlearn all those years when my parents, in their tireless efforts to promote Judaism, made Jesus out to be a no-goodnik. In fact, they made him out to be the original “not good for the Jews” no-goodnik. I’d never realized how hostile I’d felt toward Christianity until it joined my own family.

And it’s not that I don’t consider myself to be Jewish in most ways. We still celebrate Hanukkah and Passover at home, and I still fast and go to shul on Yom Kippur. Why? I’m not sure, other than that Judaism is part of who I am, as immutable as my race or my sexuality. I know I still think like a Jew, whatever that means. A few weeks ago when my husband was asked to do a reading at church, I called my mother to tell her about his aliyah. The sermon that day was about Luke 23, the part where Pontius Pilate is trying to figure out what to do with Jesus. “Are you the king of the Jews?” Pilate asks. Call me crazy, but I couldn’t help feeling a little bit of nakhes at how the king of the Christians was once a Member of the Tribe.

Faith is truly important to my husband, and having agreed to give our children a religious upbringing when I thought they’d be playing for my team, I can’t rightfully deny him that now that I’ve dropped out of the game. So I put the girls in their Sunday-best dresses every week, and I kvell over the colorful wooden crosses they bring home. I’ve even learned to bite my tongue and smile when it’s their turn to bring the stuffed Jesus doll to live with us for the week. Though I must admit I enjoy finding him left in odd corners of the apartment so I can yell things like “Who left Jesus in the bathroom?” I like to think it’s a sign that my girls are already losing their religion, too.

Marc Peyser is a senior editor at Newsweek.

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“Mom! Josie won’t let me play fairies with her!”

And so it goes. I’d like to tell you that time off from school means time spent baking gluten-free organic muffins and jamming joyfully with our family bluegrass band. But not so much. Intensive togetherness in our house means whining.

In Émile, Jean-Jacques Rousseau described the “original perfect nature” of the child. To him, spending time with children necessitated respecting their inherent harmony and wholeness; the very first line in the book is “God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil.” During the “age of nature,” Rousseau claimed, or ages 2 to 12, a child should receive no moral instruction at all. “The mind should be left undisturbed till its faculties have developed,” Rousseau wrote, believing that it’s not until adolescence that children are actually able to reason.

Of course, Rousseau dumped his own five illegitimate children in orphanages, so what did he know? And the way mine are behaving right now, I’m tempted to follow his example.

But what if we look at what Rousseau said rather than what he did? Are our children indeed perfect little noble savages, blank slates for us to screw up? Does that make it impossible for them to understand the mixed messages we send—for example, when it comes to tattling vs. telling? After all, from the time they were tiny, we’ve been instructing them to come to us when they have a problem. Don’t use your fists, we say, tell me what’s bothering you. But by the time they’re in kindergarten, our message has changed: Work it out yourself. Don’t be a tattletale. Surely this is an example of Rousseau-ian messing with our children’s perfect nature.

Judaism, of course, has its own take: tattling is a facet of lashon hara, “evil language.” Lashon hara, the Talmud says, is sinful to engage in even if it’s true. (And make no mistake: tattling usually is true. Researchers have found that children who tattle are telling the truth 90 percent of the time, says Ashley Merryman, co-author of Nurtureshock: New Thinking About Children. According to the Talmud, lashon hara harms three people: the speaker, the listener, and the person being spoken about. That’s certainly true of tattling. Look at famed Torah tattler Joseph, of Technicolor Dreamcoat repute. In Genesis 37, we learn how Joseph was tending the sheep with his brothers, and brought his father a “bad report” about them. (Was it true? We don’t know, and it doesn’t matter.) Along with his annoying tendency to share dreams in which he looked awesome and his brothers didn’t, Joseph’s run-to-daddy tendencies led to him being sold into slavery. Coatless. His family wound up starving and his father thought he was dead. Tattling did indeed harm the speaker, the listener, and the one tattled-upon.

But look at it from Joseph’s perspective. “According to observational studies of siblings,” says Merryman, “for every time a kid tattled to a parent, he had 14 other disagreements with his sibling or transgressions that he didn’t complain about.” I bet that was true of Joseph. His 10 older brothers, aware of who their dad’s favorite was, were probably picking on him constantly out in the sheep-tending fields. Jacob may not have blamed Joseph for tattling, but we’re not Jacob. In our real-life modern-day world, according to one researcher, we’re 10 times more likely to chastise a child for tattling as to chide a child for lying.

“Parents think ‘no tattling’ means ‘try to work it out on your own, but if you can’t, or if you have a real problem, then come to me,’” says Merryman. But kids often think they have tried to work it out on their own, and still we dismiss them. Thus, “kids turn ‘don’t be a tattletale’ into ‘don’t tell me the truth when you have a problem.’”

We have to help kids navigate these shoals, because the social consequences of being perceived as a tattler can be dire. “A child who repeatedly goes to the teacher after, say, second grade or so, will be socially ostracized by other children, considered more immature, considered unable to hang with the peer group,” says Erika Rich, a child psychologist in Los Angeles, points out. “Tattling becomes a social deficit.”

And a culture with a full-on “tattlers suck” ethos can have dangerous implications. One study found that among fourth and fifth graders, tattling is considered as serious a transgression as theft or property damage, says Merryman. And this worldview leads to the “Stop Snitching” movement, which encourages citizens not to cooperate with police. (Though to be fair, many police informants do seem to be motivated by self-interest. According to a study by Northwestern University Law School’s Center on Wrongful Convictions, informants are responsible for 46 percent of wrongful capital convictions from false testimony. They may be motivated by cash or by a plea bargain.) Rick Frei, a professor of psychology at Community College of Philadelphia, has created The Snitching Project, a study of community attitudes toward police cooperation. He has found that people were more afraid of damage to their reputation than of physical retribution if they talked to police. (They were also more likely to cooperate when a victim was elderly or a child and less likely when a victim was a drug dealer.)
But back in my house, with its non-criminal (but very annoying) tattling and whining, I need help surviving this vacation and beyond. The key is to be explicit about my expectations, say the experts.

“Up until first grade, you want kids to utilize adults as problem-solvers, because they’re still learning how to problem-solve,” says Rich. “We provide modeling. We have to teach them the correct strategies. Then by first or second grade, it’s important to help them make the shift into problem-solving themselves. It’s time to have a conversation: This is a new expectation I have for you. You need to come tell me if there’s danger, to you or to others, but if there isn’t, try to work through this on your own.”

When my kids run to me with a glass-shattering wail, I might say, “Wow, how have you tried to handle it?” or “What’s your motivation in coming to me?” or “Is this an emergency?” (As my friend Paula used to say, “Is there blood? Is it arterial?”). Mary Beth Hewitt, an educator who specializes in children with challenging behaviors, recommends that we recognize kids’ attempts to use words to solve problems and reinforce the positive facets of their attempts. Then we can help them refine their attempts (“Another way to say that might be…”). We can empathize with their feelings (“That makes you really mad, huh?”), ask what they’ve tried and what else they could try, and offer alternatives.

“Your job is to raise capable children,” says Bill Corbett, a parenting educator and author of Love, Limits & Lessons. “To do that, they need to take accountability for the problem. Ninety-nine percent of the problem is emotionally based—they feel left out or angry—and a parent can help them develop the emotional intelligence to deal with it by directing him to talk about the feelings. Generally, with repeat tattling, you just say ‘Really? Wow!’ Most parents have gone overboard in solving problems for their kids—we’ve raised a generation of kids who say, ‘I can’t do it myself; you do it for me.’”

To help a kid distinguish between tattling and telling, snitching and being a responsible member of a democracy, Corbett says, “Acknowledge that the child has brought you the problem. In doing so, you teach a kid ‘I did the right thing by going to Dad.’ Concentrate on the relationship: You have the right to tell me anything, but I have the right to take action or not.” (Shari Storm, author of Motherhood is the New MBA: Using Your Parenting Skills to be a Better Boss, offers a shorthand: “Are you telling me this to get someone in to trouble or to get someone out of trouble?”)

All the experts agree: the very word “tattling” is bad news. “We shouldn’t have it in our parental vocabulary,” says Corbett. Merryman concurs. “Since I learned about this research, I never call a kid a tattle-tale,” she says. “I would much rather have kids come to me when they feel they need to than set a pattern where they expect I will criticize them for asking for help.”

But back to our pal Rousseau: I’m not sure my kids’ savagery is so noble. But I also don’t see them as empty vessels, ready to be filled (even after their bat mitzvahs, bien sur) with my civilizing parental wisdom. Alas, with child-rearing, as with discerning the difference between tattling and helping, nuance is where it’s at. Shades of gray can be irksome when you’re trying to keep to a word count, but that’s life. And parenthood.

Back in the day, of course, we just wanted our kids to survive childhood. I once wrote a piece for the Forward theorizing about why Judaism historically didn’t address stillbirth or miscarriage. Why weren’t babies who lived less than 30 days given funerals? Why weren’t they attended with the rituals associated with mourning? I’m guessing it’s because attitudes were different in a time when an infant’s death was a regular occurrence. It was better to move on, push past grief, plan for the next kid. Today we have the luxury of neurosis. We get to dwell. We have fewer kids, and we not only expect them to survive to adulthood, we expect them to go to Yale and become gastroenterologists and program our TiVos. We get worked up about vaccines and breastfeeding because we can. But it’s more than that. I’ve been pondering why vaccine advocates can cite reputable studies until the cows come home, insisting with ever-increasing vehemence that Legitimate Science does not show that vaccines cause autism and let us explain the concept of herd immunity and you put all our children at risk if you don’t vaccinate yours and do you know that People Used to Die of Measles—and the anti-vaccine folks come back just as forcefully with anecdotal evidence and studies that the Friends of Science see as substandard.

Meanwhile, I wave around studies showing that once researchers correct for maternal age, income, smoking, intelligence, and education levels, the evidence is inconclusive about whether breastfeeding is better than bottle-feeding with modern formula—but lactivists continue to hurl insults at bottle-feeders and insist they’re harming their children and society. Why do we talk such different languages, at such cross-purposes?

I thought about this while sitting in a school meeting that turned into a heated referendum on the H1N1 vaccine. Like all New York City public schools, my kids’ school is making the vaccine available, but the Department of Education has been surprised by how few parents want it. Current estimates say that 25-35 percent of families want it for their kids, far below the original 50 percent estimate. Why? “There are still a lot of parents who want the vaccine for their kids, but many really don’t,” said Neal, my brother-in-law and a pediatrician who runs school health programs in the Bronx. “No one is lukewarm about it.” In my kids’ school, one person ranted about how a holistic doctor told her sister’s friend that the vaccine can eat the lining of the heart and kill you as two other mothers campaigned furiously to get the vaccine sooner rather than later and to be called to hold their child’s hand in the nurse’s office while it was administered.

So why the passion? I think it’s because we’re terrified of an unknowable future. Parenting is about making choices—how to feed a newborn, whether to work or stay home (if you’re an upper-middle class Jewess who is fortunate enough to have that choice), whether to vaccinate. We hope that what we do provides a magic bullet that keeps our kids safe and healthy in a terrifying, uncertain world. And yet, we’re supposed to let our kids disappear into a mysterious school nurse’s office, to be jabbed or made to snort something, some substance provided by a government we haven’t trusted since Watergate? Can’t I just let my kid wear a hamsa and feed her organic bananas?

“I think the anxiety about vaccines and breastfeeding is about seeking a false sense of control,” said Kiki Schaffer, director of the Parenting & Family Center at the 14th Street Y in Manhattan. “You can’t be anxious about everything, because it’s too much, so you pick a few manageable things to get really, really upset about. A few years ago it was asbestos, then alar in apples. But picking one or two things feels safer than having anxiety about the whole world.” And I think part of making your choice about what to get worked up about involves slamming the choices of others. Because what if they’re right? What if you’re the one who’s screwed up when it comes to your kid? Nothing could be more horrible to contemplate. Better to close your eyes and go on the attack. At this point, the notion of kids dying of old-school diseases seems far more remote than the notion of your specific kid getting autism or an immune disorder. We don’t know any kids with rubella. We know lots of kids with autism.

Next year, I’m going to have to decide whether to allow Josie to have the vaccine that protects against the human papillomavirus. The idea of 9-to-11-year-old girls getting vaccinated for a sexually transmitted disease is a certainly discombobulating. Jojo’s a baby! She’s not going to have sex until she’s at least, I don’t know, 35.

Indeed, many parents are opting out. Some worry that the vaccine will encourage promiscuity; others have concerns about the contents of the vaccine itself. Yet the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention believe that the vaccine is safe. (So do my kids’ pediatrician, my own G.P., and my brother-in-law.) The fact that 11,000 women are diagnosed with cervical cancer every year and 3,700 die is a compelling argument for the vaccine. The fact that 70 percent of American girls have had sex by age 18, while the vaccine is most effective among people who have not yet have sex and thus haven’t been exposed to any strain of this very common virus, is a compelling argument for giving a kid the vaccine while she’s young. (Should boys get the vaccine? Good question.)

Neal thinks that the HPV vaccine offers an important opportunity for pediatricians. “From a clinical perspective, I like the idea of using a discussion about the vaccine as an opportunity to talk to parents about how they’re going to keep communication channels open as their kids get older,” Neal says. “We need to acknowledge parents’ emotions and anxieties. Just offering and re-offering the vaccine is not the only intervention we should be doing.”

Would reframing the public health concerns around pediatric immunizations increase the numbers of kids getting vaccinated? Do we have to wait for more massive outbreaks, along the lines of the ones in ultra-Orthodox communities, perhaps involving even scarier diseases? Perhaps if we stopped treating opt-out parents as if they were stupid and instead treated them as though they were frightened for their own children’s welfare, it would color our approach and let us communicate more effectively. Or maybe we should make it harder to opt out. Or both.

All I know is that judgmental eye-rolling doesn’t help anyone. Not kids, and not parents.

“And what did you do?” I asked Josie.

“On the way back from lunch I told Girl Y, ‘Just ignore Girl X,’” Josie told me. “I said, ‘She’s so mean she’ll only get meaner and scarier if you react to her.”

Was that a good answer? Should Josie have intervened in the bullying, telling the Mean Girl to cut it out? Should she have asked the Mean Girl’s best friend what, exactly, was so funny? Should she have engaged a teacher or lunch monitor, thus gaining a reputation as a meddlesome tattling geek? How should teachers, administrators and parents deal with teasing and taunting that happens outside the classroom setting?

I have no clue.

There’s no question that kids can be breathtakingly cruel. According to “Hostile Hallways: Bullying, Teasing, and Sexual Harassment in School,” a 2001 American Association for University Women (AAUW) report based on a national survey of 2,064 public school students, eight in 10 students have experienced some form of harassment in their school lives. But hey, just listen to Josie, sharing a typical sneer from the elementary-school world:

So I wondered: Is there a way to foster bullying-prevention in a Jewish context? Apparently, yes. In 2006, through funding from the Jewish Women’s Foundation of New York, Professor Shira Epstein at the William Davidson Graduate School of Jewish Education at the Jewish Theological Seminary launched the “Addressing Evaded Issues in Jewish Education” program. (“Evaded curriculum,” a term coined by the AAUW in 1992, means topics students grapple with constantly in their daily lives – gender, body image, bullying and more – that aren’t usually addressed at all in the classroom.) Epstein has also written a curriculum for Jewish Women International (JWI) called “Strong Girls, Healthy Relationships: A Conversation on Dating, Friendship, and Self-Esteem.”

“Bullying is a reality,” says Epstein. “But we need to talk about the whys of bullying. We can’t just be reactionary, talking about punishment. We need to look at the larger culture that fosters bullying. The hard work comes in mindfully creating a culture in which we can be supportive of each other. How do we help girls think about what it means to build sisterhood?”

In Evaded Issues’ online resource guide, Epstein writes about the way one Jewish Day School, Hannah Senesh Community Day School in Brooklyn, addressed subtle forms of bullying – teasing, cliques and exclusionary practices – in school. The head of the school chose to use the Bullyproof curriculum, produced by the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women.

“Although Bullyproof is a secular curriculum,” Epstein writes, “the work carries a Jewish theme, the relationship beyn adam l’havero, between two people.” The school worked to make the curriculum explicitly Jewish by culling Judaic texts for stories, quotes, and examples of bullying and what we can learn from them. The younger grades looked at illustrations from Torah and Pirke Avot (Sayings of our Fathers); older grades looked at the Nevi’im (Prophets) and Ketuvim (Writings) as well as Talmudic texts. Did the program make bullying disappear? No, but former head of school Susan Weintrob says that it did make teachers act more quickly when they saw bullying in action. “It is one thing to recognize bullying,” Weintrob remarked, “but it is another to know how to deal with it.”

In her work, Epstein uses the stories of Sarai and Haggar to talk about shifting power balances. “Sarai was mean to Hagar because she suddenly felt low in status and was trying to get her power back!” Epstein points out. “She needed someone else to feel low so she could feel high. We want girls to understand that status isn’t static. It moves quickly.” Epstein also uses the story of Vashti as a way to explore statuses, incorporating movement and visual drama so that kids can feel emotions and power shifts in their own bodies. “In one session we portrayed Vashti as a beggar on the ground and everyone was ignoring her. One girl said, ‘She was up here and now she’s down low’ – she used her body to show how it must have felt for Vashti.”  The story of Amnon and Tamar illustrates issues of “having your voice silenced, and how to be a supportive friend.” The girls can use all these stories to reflect on their own emotions and experiences. Epstein laughs ruefully, “Unfortunately, a lot of our texts show deviousness and power plays! But that means they can provide a learning experience: How do we shift to a language of partnership, equality, support, friendship?”

And we parents, sadly, can be hindrances rather than helpers. At Hannah Senesh, Weintrob noted, teachers were excited to incorporate the program, but parents weren’t. Unfortunately, that makes sense to me. Pondering my kid being bullied, being a bully, or (perhaps worst of all) being a follower – the girl who laughs when her Queen Bee friend teases the kid with the speech impediment – makes me shut down like a garage door. Ack! Let’s talk about what you learned in math class instead! “It’s hard for adults to think about what it was like to be young,” notes Epstein. “It touches on a lot of our own issues we haven’t completely worked through from our pasts and makes us uncomfortable.” Indeed, my mom reminds me of how I wept my way through junior high, where I was at the periphery of the popular circle and sometimes got snubbed. I don’t want to explore my unresolved childhood crap! But this ostrich-y tendency also lets us excuse our kids’ bad behavior, or rush to blame other kids and/or their over-reactive helicopter parents when our own kid is cruel.

A further complication: society sends wildly mixed messages about female anger. Girls are supposed to be sugar-and-spice, and the stereotype is that girls turn anger inward (they cut their own skin, they experience depression and eating disorders at greater rates than boys do). But is that true? Why do we so love hearing stories and seeing Lohan movies about Mean Girls if girls either a) aren’t as mean as boys or b) turn their anger on themselves rather than others? It’s all so confusing! The upshot: It’s not productive to blame girls for being cruel when they’re growing up in a culture that so frequently disempowers and devalues them.

So nu, what do we do? Lyn Mikel Brown, a professor of Education at Colby College and author of Raising Their Voices: The Politics of Girls’ Anger (Harvard University Press, 1998) and Girlfighting: Betrayal and Rejection Among Girls (New York University Press, 2003), offers parents and educators 10 ways to move beyond typical bullying-prevention efforts. Many dovetail with Epstein’s suggestions: Stop demonizing kids, consider the culture that bullying takes root in, let kids feel themselves to be potential leaders who can build their own coalitions, don’t issue top-down dictates.

Does it really matter whether boys or girls are meaner? I‘ll let Josie have the final word.

Outdated, sure, but rarely dull.

Michael Chabon: The Pleasures and Regrets of ‘Manhood’ [NPR]

Wait, I sound like I’m making excuses for my kid acting like a weenus, right? I’m not. Her actions were inexcusable. I am mortified. And like many parents, I personalize what my kid does and sometimes get confused that she and I are not the same person. (And this confusion is what leads to idiocy such as boasting about your newborn’s Apgar scores—uh, dude, your kid is not a genius for breathing successfully—as well as more insidious parenting mishegas such as the dismissal of all entitled, bratty conduct as the fault of someone else: an unsympathetic teacher, a kid who deserved to get picked on, a situation that all but forced your child to misbehave.) Like many parents, I worry that my child’s conduct reflects poorly on me. And my reaction is to push the bad stuff under the rug rather than confronting it head-on.

But that won’t fly during Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. In our tradition, now’s the time to take a hard look at ourselves, including our parenting. Is mine crappy? Am I raising a unrepentant, hair-trigger-temper-owning pill? (Don’t answer that.) How can I do better?

Unfortunately, research indicates that there’s no surefire way to raise a good apologizer. A couple of weeks ago, The New York Times wrote about research in which toddlers were encouraged to believe they’d broken a toy that was very special to the researcher. (Researchers: big meanies.) University of Iowa psychologists found that the kids who expressed the most guilt had the fewest behavioral problems over the next five years. This was true even for kids with poor impulse control.

But it’s important not to confuse guilt with shame. Guilt is when you feel terrible about something you’ve done; shame is when you feel you’re a terrible person. As parents, we can encourage our kids to feel guilty for their misdeeds (and indeed, as Jews, it’s our moral obligation to guilt our children as much as humanly possible) without shaming them by belittling them as human beings. There’s a big difference between “Smacking your friend was completely unacceptable—how do you think she felt? How could you have solved the problem without getting physical? How do you think you can pull yourself back from the brink next time?” and “What the hell is wrong with you?! You make me sick!” And though I wish I knew the magic words and skills to craft a morally well-developed child, there isn’t a single parenting style that correlates with raising kids who feel appropriate guilt without crippling shame.

So what’s a parent to do? Psychologist June Tangney at George Mason University recommends that when your kid misses the mark (which is, after all, the definition of the Hebrew word “chet,” frequently translated as “sin”), you should focus not just on the bad deed but on helping the kid make amends. (The High Holidays are not only about saying you’re sorry, but also about working not to repeat the same mistake again.) Josie tends to curl inward after an outburst, so embarrassed about her conduct that she has trouble talking about it. Which means she has trouble getting out the words, “I’m sorry.” (Maxine has no such trouble. At four, she blithely views “I’m sorry!” as a get-out-of-jail-free card. As long as she says it, she thinks she’s in the clear. Wrong-o, kid.) As for Josie: I made her apologize to Bubbe; I often talk about my own values; I apologize myself when I lose my temper. Basically, I do what the parenting experts say. And I still don’t know how everything’s going to turn out. Parenting often feels like you’re flying blind.

At this time of year we’re not only supposed to apologize; we’re supposed to accept the apologies of others. And for some kids, including Josie, neither is easy. (Hey, she’s descended from a long line of seethers.) But as Rabbi David Wolpe once wrote, “The grudge perches on the heart like a gargoyle on a parapet.” Echoing the same sentiment, Buddha supposedly said, “Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one getting burned.” Buddha and David Wolpe should totally have dinner.

But children love feeling persecuted. They love wailing “That’s not faaaaaaair!” Our job is to teach them that life isn’t fair, and though sometimes people wrong us, we have to forgive. “There’s a wealth of literature saying that harboring resentments and grudges takes a toll on your psychological and physical health,” Christopher Peterson, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan who studies character strengths and happiness, told me in an interview. “Yes, you may be pissed off. But if you can let go, you are doing yourself a favor, not the other person. You don’t have to forget; you just have to choose to let the emotional burden go.” In Judaism, we’re supposed to accept all genuine apologies, which isn’t always easy for the young. Or, for that matter, the not-so-young.

So how to keep kids from ruminating about being wronged? How to encourage them to forgive? One strategy is to tell them about a time when we ourselves did wrong and were forgiven. Josie loves to hear the story about the time when I was in college and missed a flight to meet my parents at a family wedding. I called my dad expecting him to scream at me, but he could tell I felt terrible, and simply suggested ways to fix the problem.

It’s hard not to get worked up when we or our kids screw up. It’s tempting to lash out or look for blame. But doing that would really be missing the mark.

I know I cater too much to my kids’ noshing mishegas. I’ve tried the tricks: Keep offering tastes of new foods, demand they take one bite, cook with kids so they feel a sense of participation and ownership. I KNOW, PEOPLE. We’ve had some successes: they love edamame, they eat lots of fruit, and Maxine is a fiend for spicy tomatillo salsa, which she eats with a spoon. But we need to try harder.

And just to make things even more complicated, I want my kids not to have any neuroses about food and eating. At least I know I’m not alone in worrying about my kids’ diets. Former New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni (who outed himself as a childhood bulimic in his new memoir Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater, recently wrote about the challenges of urging kids to eat healthily without making them into neurotic little freaks. The Wall Street Journal weighed in with a story revisiting a famous 1986 study that found that 80% of fourth grade girls were on diets. It pointing out that in the years since then, the incidence of bulimia has tripled and anorexia rates have also risen.

Our feelings about kids and food are as tangled as a pile of spaghetti marinara. We’re anxious when our wee ones don’t eat (which is why parents like me keep resorting to sure-fire kid-pleasers), but we freak out when they eat too much. We live in a culture that equates fat with laziness, dirtiness, grossness, and kids get that message loud and clear.

This week, I have a book coming out about a fashion model who nearly died of anorexia and suffered from exercise bulimia before remaking her career as a healthy plus-size model, and I’ve been vigilant about conveying to my kids that beauty and strength come in all sizes. But Josie, age 7, still said last week, “I know you say it’s OK for bodies to look all kinds of ways, but if I were in high school I would be happy to be thin because boys like girls who are thin.” I wanted to cry. But she’s right. One 2006 study by Harris Interactive for Girls Inc. found that 60% of third to twelfth grade girls felt they had to be thin to be popular, up from 48% in 2000.

We have such screwed-up feelings about our bodies, eating and health. My book’s not even out yet, but I’ve been fascinated by how divergent people’s responses to it are. If I show people a photo of the model in question, Crystal Renn, some sputter, “You call that plus-size?? She’s gorgeous!” (Indeed she is. And yes, according to the CDC, she’s overweight.) Other people say, “How can you write a book glorifying obesity? Don’t you know it kills?”

Really? People who fall into the “overweight” category on the BMI charts actually live longer than normal weight people and frequently do better after heart attacks. The health risks of yo-yo dieting are well-documented, and most people who lose a lot of weight tend to gain it back. (Hi, Kirstie Alley!) Yes, being very fat is correlated with ill health. But shaming people – especially children – is unlikely to make them healthier or make them lose weight. What is clear is that exercise and eating good food are vital. That’s true for people at every size. But still we glorify thinness at the expense of all else, and we shun the pudgy.

This is a battle I’m obviously going to have to keep fighting. We all need to realize that while it’s important to make good food choices, being zaftig is not the worst thing in the world. (Though the cruelty and cluelessness with which we treat fat people, though … that’s pretty sucky.) And it’s only one of the battles I’ll continue to engage in as my girls grow up. Another is selling the notion of eating lots of different kinds of foods, at a nice sit-down family dinner. Doing so has to be better for the kids—and for this poor beleaguered short-order cook!—than having to dish out bland and sauceless kiddie meals in addition to semi-schmancy grown-up food.

Later this month we hope to take a field trip upstate to see where food comes from. My hope is that seeing veggies in their natural habitat, and eating them right off the vine and out of the ground, will make the girls more predisposed to eat them at home. The farm in question is owned by a family who sell their produce at the Tompkins Square farmer’s market, and who recently helped start a CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture) group at my kids’ school. These same farmers appear in a new film called What’s On Your Plate? about how eating healthily, locally and sustainably can be tasty as well as good for the planet. The film’s two narrators are older schoolmates of Josie and Maxie—perhaps they can serve as role models. (The girls and I are going to a screening later this month at the Solar-Powered Film Festival on the East River, and can I just say this column makes me sound like so much of a hippie I cannot even recognize myself? I am throwing up in my own mouth a little, and not in a bulimic way.)

In the coming new year, I pledge to do better in having family dinners in which we all eat the same thing. (A friend recommends making just one meal, but offering kids the option of cereal or yogurt—and that’s it—if they don’t like what’s on the table. Maybe I’ll try that. Email or Facebook me if you have other ideas or family-friendly recipes.) I’ve got to expand my girls’ culinary horizons. And as Josie in particular gets closer to her tween years, I want her to see food as a source of pleasure, not terror.

Mothers are reveling in their self-declared outlaw status, bragging about their kids being unwashed, un-toilet-trained, potty-mouthed, or prone to Barbie-hoarding. MacBook-tapping moms detail their own tendencies to plunk their kids in front of the TV (ooh!), have a cocktail (oy!) and give their kids non-organic, preservative-laden, character-branded junk food (veyizmir!)

Though it’s trendy to say you suck at motherhood, I doubt most of the women declaring this actually believe it. Their boasting is really about being cool. They may drive a Veggie-Booty-strewn mini-van, but their hearts are on Harleys. The problem is that by embracing “bad mommydom,” we opt out of redefining what it means to be a good mother. Most confessional writers aren’t taking up the gauntlet of redefining the norm. Instead, they identify as Other, which lets them off the hook; they lose out on the chance to say imperfect mothering is good—it’s normal, healthy, flexible.

Is it so “bad” to put yourself first once in a while, to admit that parenting can be maddening and boring, to acknowledge that our culture has elevated motherhood to an impossible ideal without actually providing social services that allow us to get anywhere near that ideal? Being a “good mom” does not mean being utterly self-negating while telling yourself it’s all for the children. It is just as narcissistic to talk about how awesomely bad you are as it is to boast about how perfect you are. (And yes, as a parenting columnist, I am aware that I am the bottle calling the sippy-cup BPA-free, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.)

All of us live and write in a culture of panicked hovering and competitiveness. (I don’t think fathers are immune, but mothers are still most often the ones blogging about the minutiae of babydom, playdates, and extracurricular activity pickups.) And now we’re witnessing backlash not just from the mommy bloggers but from the mainstream media. Parenting magazines, women’s rags, reality TV, and The Today Show have all picked up on the term “helicopter parent” and are suddenly mocking moms who can’t back off. The New York Times’s designated chronicler of the ovaried over-educated, Lisa Belkin (the writer who created a faux revolution with her disingenuous “Opt Out Revolution” article), recently wrote an entirely anecdotal piece saying that the age of alpha parenting may be coming to an end, and that micromanaging one’s offspring is falling out of favor.

Announcing that helicopter parenting is over is like saying that something is the new black. Guess what? Black ain’t going anywhere.

What is new is the notion of fake casualness. Now we’re supposed to be relaxed and real, but this unstudied-ness is, in fact, carefully studied. “Authenticity” is the operative buzzword. One trend in weddings is for low-key-seeming family-style fetes that actually cost as much as a more formal event. Clothing trends are bohemian and punk-influenced rather than overtly luxe, but they still come at price points that would make a real hippie have a seizure. Fashion mags talk about how much men love women who eat, and urge women to have dessert, but we’re still supposed to be a size two.

In other words, the standards women are held to are as high as ever. Now we’re not supposed to be self-negatingly child-centered, but our kids still have to come out brilliant, accomplished, and adorable. No wonder it’s easier to throw up your hands and call yourself “bad” than engage in debate about the impossibility of perfect goodness.

I’m not blaming the mommy bloggers for society’s unachievable standards. But blogging about how edgy you are for refusing to buy your daughter princess-themed merch (or the converse, blogging about how edgy you are for agreeing to buy your kid princess-themed merch) is small stakes. Ayelet Waldman often pushes my buttons, but she’s one of the few parenting writers who comes by her badness honestly. She’s written about loving one of her kids more than the others, about loving her husband more than any of her children, about hoping that her son would be gay but not that her daughter would be a lesbian, and about her battle with mental illness so severe that her seven-year-old told her, “I am afraid you’re going to kill yourself.” That’s far too much authenticity for some folks. It makes “OMG, I’m so bad, I haven’t washed Coco’s hair in three days” pale in comparison.

Certainly nobody’s perfect, and most of us aren’t truly bad. It might be nice to put some of the energy we pour into our personal performance art toward working to improve the lives of moms who truly are considered bad by the wider world—moms who can’t feed their kids, moms in abusive relationships or with substance abuse problems, moms who really are overwhelmed. Claiming to be a badass by typing while your kid watches Blues Clues doesn’t really help anybody.

Then a Jewish lullaby collection—as well as Ezra’s front teeth—appeared on the scene, bringing with them a host of new questions about bedtime.

Problem was, she had no idea how. For her, as a kid in Manhattan (and the Bronx), Jewishness was to my mother as water is to whitefish. It was just there, all around. You breathed it. It was what you did, how—and where—you lived. But it was not about observance of ritual or halacha; that, for her father and his free-thinking intellectual friends, belonged back in the Old World. Instead, for my mother and her sister, being Jewish meant rallies, fist-pounding politics, landsmanschaft meetings, Yiddish theater, Zionist songs, noodle kugel, chopped liver. When she became aware that some of her friends were having bat mitzvahs, she asked her father why they didn’t belong to a synagogue. His answer: “Synagogues belonged in Europe, where Jews had nothing else. In America, Jews don’t need synagogues. They have everything else.”

While Lexington, Massachusetts is certainly America—it’s the birthplace of American liberty, after all—it bears little resemblance to New York in the 1940s. It didn’t (and doesn’t) offer the kind of “everything else” my grandfather was talking about. There were Jews there, sure. Lefty politics? Some of that too. But it was unlikely that my mother, no matter how good her kugel, would have been able to find or create for me a Jewish atmosphere there like that of her childhood. (Let’s just say that there isn’t actually a store in Lexington called Minuteman Bagel, but there might as well be.) She was going to have to turn instead to religious ritual and education—and not just for me.

After much soul-searching, and with much trepidation—specifically, the fear that someone would spot her and shout “Trayf!”—my mother decided to join Lexington’s Reform synagogue and enroll me in the religious school. A few weeks before the consecration ceremony for the new children, the rabbi met with the families to welcome us and describe what would happen in the service. We’d stand before the ark, he said, and we’d all recite the Shema.

Mom raced home to phone a Jewish friend. “Sally?” she asked, ‘What’s a Shema?”

I still have a very clear, comforting memory of sitting at the piano with my mother and learning to chant the three simple lines of the Shema, Judaism’s essential affirmation of faith. I had no idea she had just learned them herself.

And now I am a mother who wants to give her daughter memories like that one. (Not to mention a mother who wants to have an apartment big enough for a piano.) I know what a Shema is; if I didn’t, I have a husband who could pretty much break it down for me. That said, I don’t want to cede Bess’ Jewish upbringing to David just because he does Jewish upbringing for a living—though I’ll be happy to give him the floor the first time Bess asks, “Who’s God?” I don’t want him to be the default bearer of our household Jewish standard. I want to start new family traditions, help Bess find meaning in who we are already. But that’s also where I get intimidated. This past Passover, we enjoyed second seder with dear friends and their kids in Boston. When the mom rallied the troops to count the omer—which we never got around to in my house growing up—my first thought was, “What’s an omer?” (Counting the omer is a daily blessing for marking the days between Passover and Shavuot, the holiday commemorating the giving of the Torah. For some reason I can never remember that.)

This is a long way of saying that I am going to have to do some reading. Just because I am a rabbi’s wife does not mean I’m a ringer. We know that when less observant liberal Jews like my mother marry or start a family, they often feel the urge to become more observant—to join a Jewish community, to create a Jewish home, and, often, to give their children more in the way of Judaism than they themselves had growing up. Basically, we’re all looking for ideas and answers—to our childrens’ questions and our own. As I am beginning to discover, there’s an ever-growing library that can help.

The books I’ve collected so far seem to fall into two rough categories: first, those on how to be a Jewish parent; and second, those on how to parent Jewishly—or, how Judaism can help you parent. (Arguably, there’s also a third category of books by sleep experts, but that’s only because the guru status of the biggest-deal expert is such that I hear him called “Reb Ferber.”) The current big-deal book in category number two is psychologist Wendy Mogel’s The Blessing of a Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children—but we’ll get to that in a later column. Self-reliant only when in her ExerSaucer (referred to by fellow parents as “Overstimulation Station” or “Neglect-atron 2000,” depending), Bess is indeed old enough to sense routine, to respond to music, to be mesmerized by candlelight. So we’re on the Rituals 101-level books number one such as parenting columnist and web doyenne Meredith L. Jacobs’s new The Modern Jewish Mom’s Guide to Shabbat, which David and I just consulted because somehow we keep forgetting when in the rundown on Friday evenings you bless your children (right after lighting the candles). Its approach, like that of Anita The Red Tent Diamant‘s 2000 classic How to Be a Jewish Parent: A Practical Handbook for Family Life, is comprehensive and concrete: here are the blessings; here (traditionally) is when, how, and why you say them; here’s the deal with keeping kosher; here’s how to install a mezuzah on your doorframe; here’s the recipe for Grandma Hilda’s Carrot Ring. Both books invite and assert the flexibility that is key to liberal Jewish practice—it’s still Shabbat if you light candles after sundown, and even if you don’t make brisket—but without crossing the line from lenient to meaningless (“Here’s the recipe for Grandma Hilda’s Pork”).

More and more Jews, it seems, are looking for this kind of gentle, practical, substantive guidance. Traffic to Jacobs’s website, ModernJewishMom, has increased by 300% over the past two years. Diamant’s other venerable guide, Living a Jewish Life: Jewish Traditions, Customs, and Values for Today’s Families, is not only still in print after 15 years, but was just updated and revised. When I asked Jacobs what she thinks accounts for the success, new and renewed, of works like hers and Diamant’s, she said, “Whether it’s a response to September 11 and the kind of world we are now raising our children in, and/or a response to materialism, I think parents are turning to the traditions of our faith to give our children a sense of peace and a sense of self.”

True. But (gasp!) it’s not just about our children. Bequeathing them Jewish traditions can give us a sense of peace, too—as long as we’re able to be comfortable with our own Judaism. Just comfortable! Not experts. “Starting to make Jewish choices as an adult can feel very awkward, even for people who were born Jewish,” Diamant writes in Living a Jewish Life. “There is a sense that you ought to know Hebrew, and when Passover begins, and what the Talmud is. Being uncomfortable in a synagogue or at the prospect of lighting candles might seem to confirm the suspicion that you will never ‘get it,’ that you will never fit in.” True: everyone feels like they’re the one who doesn’t know as much as the person next to them—the one who doesn’t know the melody, who doesn’t know why everyone covers their eyes during that prayer. Thing is, the person singing along perfectly is also wondering how that guy over there knew just when to bow. I’m just learning, we think—they’re the real Jews. Like me: at my husband’s or home shul, I’ve totally got my Jewish game on. But when we have Shabbat lunch with a bunch of rabbis and their even frummier friends, I go into a very “What’s a Shema?” place. How do they keep track of where we are in the post-meal blessing? Do they actually feel joyful because it’s Shabbat, not just because they have the day off? I am always sure that every else’s experience is deeper than my own. Which, if I’m just sitting there feeling inadequate, it definitely is.

Which itself is why it’s a mistake to confuse being less prepared with being less adequate, less experienced with being less Jewish. As my mother ultimately learned, it’s just as Jewish to inquire as it is to know. (Their temple, by the way, has become the center of my parents’ social and spiritual lives. Good call, Mom.) The trick is to get over ourselves—to read how-to books, ask questions, or just observe, and quit worrying about looking stupid. If we’re doing this for our kids, we should learn like them, too. Sitting on the piano bench before my consecration, I don’t remember being afraid that I’d forget the words to the Shema. I just remember that my mother taught them to me.

Andy left the envelope, with the warning “Brace Yourself” scrawled next to our address, sandwiched between the meatball hero and the wilting salad in my lunch bag. Inside, a form letter from the temple treasurer outlined the fees associated with our son’s bar mitzvah, which had not yet been scheduled, nor indeed agreed upon, for Erez was not yet 12 when the letter came in February and we, his parents, were not yet clear about what—if anything—the ceremony should be. Actually, “not yet clear” is putting it too mildly. We were at loggerheads.

Unaware of our conflict, and hoping that the letter would assist us “in planning for the upcoming simcha,” the treasurer enumerated some of the financial responsibilities we would be taking on if Erez became a son of the commandment (the usual translation of bar mitzvah) during fiscal year 2006-2007. Including private lessons with the rabbi, additional Hebrew school training and the “Bar/Bat Mitzvah Hospitality Package” consisting of kiddush for the congregation and flowers for the bimah, the total came to $1,500. It wasn’t the figure, though, that Andy had felt I might want to brace myself for; $1,500 is not especially high. At the synagogue where I grew up and became a bar mitzvah in suburban Philadelphia, the going rate for manhood is something like $2,000.

But the synagogue fee was merely an hors d’oeuvre. It did not include what has in many cases replaced the rite itself as the main course of the “simcha”: the party. We have attended bar mitzvah celebrations that must have cost $20,000, and heard of some much fancier. We have looked in awe upon the elaborate catering, the deafening entertainment, the photo booths and dance motivators and chopped-liver sculptures of the boy and his family. I almost said the bride and his family; indeed, sometime during the 34 years since I was called to the Torah (and accepted Cross pen-and-pencil sets and Israel Bonds at a self-consciously dignified dairy luncheon with peonies), bar mitzvahs have come to entail the kind of ostentation that used to be reserved for sweet sixteens or, before that, weddings. It seems that the age at which a person merits such Lucullan excess has plummeted in inverse proportion as the age at which anyone might possibly be considered mature has risen. Soon there will be billion-dollar brises, and no adults to engender them.

Even if we no longer expect a 13-year-old to shoulder the adult responsibilities associated with the original ritual—indeed, if we barely expect him to brush his teeth unreminded, let alone end his schooling or understand his relationship to God—he is apparently old enough to prompt a yearlong, ruinously expensive trauma. At first, when Erez’s bar mitzvah was still hypothetical, it seemed easy to avoid the problem by focusing on what we wouldn’t do instead of what we would. We knew, for instance, that we would not be offering our son and his friends the opportunity to enjoy the entertainment offered at one Florida bat mitzvah we’d heard about: a Plexiglas booth equipped with high-power fans blowing paper money. (Guests were invited to spend a minute inside, ignoring the uncomfortable imagery while grabbing as much cash as they could.) If anything, it would be us in the booth, with the fans not blowing but sucking.

But the money was just a convenient cover story for our anxiety. After all, we willingly spend, even overspend, on a good coat, a new roof, piano lessons. And our Brooklyn synagogue, having fallen on hard times since Andy himself became a bar mitzvah there in 1963, is not the kind of place that encourages ostentation. Sabbath dinners, no less than services, are mostly potluck. That we were first contacted about Erez’s bar mitzvah when he was already almost 12 suggests how few children were in the pipeline; at larger congregations, families reserve dates several years in advance, and often compete for (or end up sharing) the most desirable weekends. In short, Union Temple—informal and Reform and egalitarian enough to welcome atheist gay dads like us—is not a wealthy, starchy Goodbye, Columbus country club. Until it recently managed to sell its parking lot to a condo developer, it was even unclear whether the temple could afford to maintain its 77-year-old infrastructure; floods from the top-floor pool, leased to a health club, had a nasty habit of inundating the sanctuary and derailing what little lavishness the occasional bar mitzvah might muster.

No, the onslaught for which we needed to brace ourselves would be existential. How were we to make sense of the bar mitzvah ceremony today—not just generically, but for us, for our son? What were we meant to be marking and celebrating? And whose maturity was being tested in the process? This last was not an idle question. Shortly before the World Trade Center was destroyed, a friend attended a formal bar mitzvah party at Windows on the World: multiple bands, a rock-climbing wall, black tie all around, even for kids. Toward the end of the evening, a procession of waiters bore a giant sheet cake, blazing with candles, into the darkened room. After the newly minted man made his wish and the lights were restored, everyone could read what his parents had chosen to say to their son in the buttercream icing: “Don’t ask us for anything ever again, ever.” Which seemed to me to be a misdelivered message.

As our own bar mitzvah year began, I thought a lot about that cake. What were we asking of ourselves, and of Erez? Perhaps more than other couples, Andy and I came to these questions with dramatically contrasting experiences and expectations. Having grown up in a moderately observant, Conservative family—the kind that kept kosher except at Chinese restaurants—I had more to abandon in abandoning religion, and thus more qualms about any sort of rapprochement. Entering a synagogue feels almost hypocritical to me, unless it’s for a cultural or political function. Even so, while questioning the value of what passes for a religious education today, I have been unwilling to do anything about it, and many years ago consented in Andy’s plan to send Erez and his younger brother, Lucas, to Sunday classes at Union Temple. Even before that, they’d attended preschool at a Lubavitcher synagogue, where the fusion of practice and belief, however compulsory, rendered questions of hypocrisy moot. Observing observance there was a joy, because they believed what they believed without reservation.

But lacking that kind of ecstatic credulity, I can only see the rituals of Judaism—however beloved, however much I enjoyed enacting them when I was young, however comforting they may still remain—as more or less empty obligations to be filled, if at all, with imported meaning. Without that meaning, I feared we were running toward a pool both dry and dangerous. Not Andy, who seeing people swimming believes there must be water. For him, the bar mitzvah is uncomplicated except by my doubts. Having adopted Erez and Lucas when each was just a few weeks old—and having done so against the advice of many around him, let alone in a society that seemed to feel he was, as a gay man, bound to fail—the bar mitzvah was a chance to share the joy of his success, mixed with a bit of I-told-you-so. And perhaps it was also a chance to welcome his older son into the tradition of not understanding everything you must do.

In any case, the arrival of the “financial responsibility” letter initiated a series of (let us call them) discussions that have revealed—more than any other disagreement we’ve faced in the raising of our children—the rough terrain to be traversed between our muddy assumptions and common ground. Guest lists, music, menu, budget, the arrangement and content of the service itself: Each issue intersected maddeningly with the others. If we increased the number of people invited, then either the budget ballooned or the hypothetical menu dwindled. (Goodbye, poached salmon; hello, six-foot heroes.) And the number of people did keep increasing. Andy has a large family, with infinite cousins, very few of whom would be likely to miss the happy event. My guest list, tiny to begin with, seemed further limited by the one sure no-show at its epicenter: my late mother. The last large party we gave was her shiva.

With such emotions and imperatives in play, arguing became gridlock. And yet, for all our wrangling, we barely consulted the one person the wrangling was presumably for. But Erez is not tormented by such concerns. He is cheerfully fatalistic about what he views as an upcoming performance, not unlike playing viola for relatives or participating in a piano recital. These he always claims to dread and then in fact enjoys. He knows that the bar mitzvah ceremony will involve even more practice, in an even more abstruse language: not just vowelless Biblical Hebrew but the code of cantillation embedded in the tiny, runic markings called trope. On the other hand, he likes the opportunity to do well and somehow suspects that, once again, he will. Furthermore, having been a Jew since he was circumcised (a bit belatedly) at three weeks of age, he seems to accept this as an unavoidable milestone that has toppled in his path. If it cannot be circumvented, it must be gotten over.

And so, with a calm child but unsettled feelings, we made the first firm choice of our bar mitzvah year. One Sunday last month, while Erez and Lucas and their Hebrew school friends reviewed the Four Questions and Ten Plagues elsewhere in the building, we and the parents of six other prospective b’nai mitzvah met with the rabbi for background information and the fateful scheduling. There were plenty of Saturdays near Erez’s birthday to choose among; in the end, we selected March 10 on the basis of what the rabbi called its “juicy” Torah portion, Ki Tisa. She was right, even though it begins unpromisingly with head counts and tax policy and the tedious specifications for the oil to be used in anointing the ark—a passage in which God comes across as a kind of fussy party planner. What part of “no myrrh” do you not understand? But fittingly enough, it ends with the Golden Calf.

Poet and writer Laurel Snyder’s mother is a regular churchgoer. Her father helped found a synagogue in Baltimore. Laurel is not particularly confused about her religious identity, but she says that other people—Jews and non-Jews alike—seem to be. She’s culled her own and other writers’ reflections on being children of interfaith marriages for a new collection titled Half/Life: Jewish Tales from Interfaith Homes.

As many parents will tell you, there’s nothing quite like your own children to force you to reexamine your beliefs. Before having a son, “I never bumped up against my own thoughts about spirituality,” says Michael Kimmel. “I think many of us don’t, and I think we sort of drift.”

Kimmel, a sociologist, and his wife, writer Amy Aronson, were forced out of their drift about two years ago when their son, Zachary, took a sudden, rather pronounced interest in religion. Julie Subrin reports.

Has anything like this every happened in your family? Has a relative or friend ever forced you to rethink what it means to be Jewish? Tell us your story.