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Rabbi Rami Guides are brief, often humorous, no-nonsense explorations of issues facing spiritual seekers. Written for people of any faith or none, Rabbi Rami Guides hope to start conversations rather than end them.

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Forgiveness

God

Parenting

Psalm 23

Parenting: A Rabbi Rami Guide

By Rami Shapiro

ISBN: 978-0-9896454-5-4

www.rabbirami.com

Cover and interior design by Sandra Salamony

Cataloging-in-Publication data for this book is available upon request.

10 98765432 1

INTRODUCTION

Who Am I and
Where Did I Come From?

CHAPTER ONE: You Are a Tube

CHAPTER TWO: You Are the World and You Are from the World/Universe

CHAPTER THREE: You Are God

Where Am I Going?

CHAPTER FOUR: There Is Nowhere to Go

What Am l Here To Do?

CHAPTER FIVE: To Open Your Heart, Stretch Out Your Hand, Broaden Your Mind

CHAPTER SIX: How Big a Slice? How Small a Pie?

Why?

CHAPTER SEVEN: Because

Summary

CHAPTER EIGHT: Last Words

AGAPI'S LIST: STORIES TO READ TO YOUR CHILDREN

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

I'M NOT DR. Spock, Dr. Oz, or Dr. Phil. I don't know anything special about potty training, early-childhood development, or family dynamics. While it's true I no longer crap in my pants, this may change as I get older. And as far as nutrition and all other relevant parenting subjects go, my being overweight and as crazy as the next fellow certainly doesn't attest to my expertise. The only credibility I have regarding parenting is that I am a parent, and any guy with a functioning penis of a certain age and level of virility can do that.

I am a Ph.D. as well as a rabbi, however, so you can add Dr. Rami to the Spock, Oz, and Phil list, but I teach Bible rather than human development, and, in case you haven't noticed, the Bible's tips on parenting are less than stellar:

Adam and Eve's firstborn, Cain, kills his younger brother in a fit of jealous rage (Genesis 4:8), and while we can't always blame parents for the murderous behavior of their children, one can't help wondering.

Abraham sends his first son, Ishmael, off to die with his mother in the desert (Genesis 21:14), and years later sets out to murder his second son, Isaac, in an act of child sacrifice to God (Genesis 22:1-14).

Lot, Abe's nephew, is raped by his two daughters who are too lazy to walk over to the next town to meet guys and make babies (Genesis 19:30-36), and Tamar, the widowed wife of Judah's son Er, dresses up as a prostitute and seduces her recently widowed father-in-law and has twins by him (Genesis 38:1-30).

God tells moms and dads that they can stone to death a rebellious son (Deuteronomy 21:18-21), and Jephtah, one of the Judges of Israel, kills his daughter to fulfill a vow he made to God.

And that's just the Hebrew Bible. Turn to the Gospels and we discover that Jesus never talks to his human dad; his mother thinks he's insane (Mark 3:21); he seems to tell us to hate our moms and dads (Luke 14:26); he rejects his own mother (Mark 3:31-35); Jesus' heavenly Dad is intent on killing him (Luke 22:42), and abandons him as he dies (Matthew 27:46). All in all, if I'm looking for a book on parenting, the Good Book isn't all that good at it.

So this is definitely not a book about Bible family values. So what, if anything, does a rabbi, even one with a Ph.D., know that is applicable to parenting? I would say two things: asking questions and telling stories.

Judaism is all about asking questions and telling stories. In fact, we often ask questions just so we can tell stories. Why, for example, after Abraham sacrifices a ram to God rather than his son Isaac, does Abraham return to his waiting servants without Isaac? He tells them before leaving for the sacrifice that he and Isaac will return to them after the sacrifice (Genesis 22:5), and yet only Abraham returns (Genesis 22:19). Where's Isaac? The Bible doesn't say, so we Jews fill in the blank by telling stories. In Hebrew, we call these stories midrash (to seek out, investigate). Stories help us investigate and seek out meaning in the blank spaces of our lives.

For example, perhaps Isaac, who according to Jewish tradition is thirty-three years old when this event happens, decides that he is safer not traveling with dad for a while. Or perhaps, he suddenly remembers what Abe did to Ishmael, Isaac's half-brother, and sets off to find Ishmael and reconcile with him. This makes sense, since we see Isaac and Ishmael together at their father's funeral (Genesis 25:11).

The point is, we don't know. And when we don't know, we tell stories.

What does storytelling have to do with parenting? Everything. The biggest unknown in a parent's life is her child. These beings come into the world without papers. We have no idea who they are, where they came from, what they are supposed to do, where they are going, or why they exist at all. So we make up stories: stories about them and stories about ourselves; stories about nature, about life, death, and afterlife; stories about fate, karma, destiny, heavens and hells, and rewards and punishments. And we tell these stories to our kids. Except we don't tell them they are stories. We offer them with the same matter-of-factness that we use when we tell them that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and not to take candy from strangers. The stories we tell our kids shape them far more profoundly than the rules we set for them. Here is a true story about rules:

Many years ago my congregation held a party on Miami Beach. My then five-year-old son ran around the beach with his friends building and smashing sand castles. He wore a regular bathing suit, a T-shirt, and a six-shooter. My son always packed heat. It wasn't a real gun, of course, and he wasn't allowed to point it at anyone, but he wore it and shot imaginary bad guys when the mood took him or the need arose.

I was raised the same way. Every year on the first night of Hanukkah, my parents presented me with a new gun and holster set. We weren't an especially violent family, and my plastic gun fetish didn't turn me into a right-wing militia member planning to "take back America." As I grew older the guns stopped coming, and they, along with my Fess Parker coon-skin cap, eventually went to the Goodwill. So I didn't worry about my son's love of toy guns.

The same cannot be said for one of my congregants. A woman somewhat older than myself came storming over to me incensed over my gun-toting kid. She was appalled that a rabbi would allow his son to carry weapons. I made the mistake of defending myself.

I suggested that if Jews had been trained to carry guns in their tallis bags along with their prayer shawls (tallis), we might have thwarted the Nazis the way we did the Persians in the story of Esther. She had no idea what the story of Esther was—my bad—and was not convinced. I then suggested the guns were training for my son's eventual move to Israel where he would join the IDF, the Israeli Defense Force, but this, too, had little effect. I finally resorted to paraphrasing the NRA: Guns don't kill, obnoxious Jewish mothers do. That unfortunately only escalated matters.

By this time other members of my congregation had assembled to watch what could only end badly. Lucky for me the woman's two sons, then in high school, were among the gathering throng. As their mother lectured me on how she never allowed her boys to have toy guns, the boys interrupted her: "You may not have allowed us to have toy guns, but we made them all the time. We had stick guns, straw guns, finger guns. We shot everyone and everything. We loved guns!"

A hush fell over the crowd. The woman herself was stunned. I imagined that she wished she had a gun at that very moment. Her mouth opened and closed several times. She clearly wanted to speak, but could not. She turned a deep and angry purple and stormed off. In my mind I shot here with a finger gun.

The crowd dispersed—"Move along, people. There's nothing more to see here"—and the moment passed. The woman quit the congregation, and I never heard from her again.

The moral of this story: your kids are going to do what your kids are going to do, and you don't have all that much control over them. Sure, when they are little, you can bully them; after all, you are bigger than they are. But don't imagine this will stick. Eventually they will either simply ignore you or find a therapist who will help them get over you.

I'm not saying you shouldn't set rules for your children. I'm only saying that you should also expect them to break those rules. But I could be wrong about all of this. Like I said, I'm a storyteller, not a parenting expert, but the Bible backs me up.

The first Dad was God. Adam and Eve were His kids. And He had only one rule in His household: "Don't eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Other than that, kids, have a good time." So what did they do? Of course they ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

What else would they do? What else would you do?

My mom used to play mah jong every Wednesday night when I was young. She and "the girls" would rotate hosting the game, and one Wednesday evening a month for fifteen years I would fall asleep with the sound of clacking tiles and Mom and her friends calling out, "One Bam, two Crack" or something like that.

During the afternoon on those Wednesdays the game was to come to our house, my mom would bake a cake and chocolate chip cookies for her friends to eat while they played. When my sister and I came home from school, she would always remind us, "You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die" (Genesis 2:16-17). Well, that is what God said to Adam; my mom said something more akin to, "These cookies are for the girls. If you take one I will kill you."

Like Pavlov's dog, I was raised to respond to certain stimuli. In this case, the forbidden cookie. There was plenty of food to eat in our house, and much of it was just as empty of nutritional value as those cookies, but it was the forbidden chip that I craved above all else.

When my mother was distracted I would study the layout of the cookies on the plate, seeking to discern which ones could be eaten and which others could be repositioned to mask the fact that some had been eaten. Satisfied that I knew which to eat and which to shift, I waited for just the right moment to steal the cookies. I usually stole one for myself and another for my sister. It wasn't that I loved my sister so much, but that I, like Adam, hoped to share the blame if caught.

More often than not we got away with the theft, and when we were caught, Mom, like Adam and Eve's Dad, didn't kill us but banished us from the kitchen to our rooms. We went with a smile on our faces and our tongues searching for cookie crumbs in the corners of our mouths.

You might take the story of Adam and Eve eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil more seriously than I do. I have some friends who believe that because of the sin of the first people, all subsequent people are doomed to eternal torment in hell, and that God had to send His Son, Jesus, to die on the cross so that those of us who accept Him as God can escape the punishment God will otherwise mete out on those who do not.

I marvel at the seriousness with which they take these Jewish stories. My mom didn't have another son to sacrifice to save my sister and me from her wrath, though I have met parents who do triangulate among their children, punishing one for the sins of the others. But my point isn't what parents do with the stories they tell, but that all parents tell stories as a way of shaping the lives of their children.

The reason I'm writing this brief Guide to Parenting is because I think storytelling rather than rule making is the key to good parenting. It is the stories we tell our kids, not the rules, that will stay with them—for good or for ill—for the rest of their lives.

The stories I'm talking about aren't just "once upon a time" stories, the stories you read to your children at bedtime. The stories I'm talking about include the more subtle stories, the stories we pretend aren't stories at all, but facts, truths, and inescapable realities. The Rabbi Rami Guide to Parenting will address both kinds of stories: the ones we tell and the ones we read, but it is the former that will occupy us the most.

Here are just a few such stories I have heard in the past week:

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