The following is a transcript of Episode 6 of the Perfect Jewish Parents Podcast. Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Josh: Hello, and welcome to Perfect Jewish Parents, a new podcast from the Shalom Hartman Institute about the joys and always of raising children Jewishly. I’m Joshua Ladon, Director of Education for the Shalom Hartman Institute, and I’ve got a 10-year-old and eight year old and a four-year-old.

Masua: And I’m Masua Sagiv. I’m scholar in residence for the Shalom Hartman Institute, and I have four kids between the ages of three and 14.

 How are you today, Josh?

Josh: I’m doing great.

Masua: I’m going this week to talk with my eighth grader’s class about what’s going on in Israel in the past few months, and when my fifth grader heard about it, he was somewhat upset that I’m not coming to talk with his class too. You see, he’s hearing stuff all the time, but he feels like the adults are not willing to talk to his age group about it.

And this is not exactly news, right? It’s not new or special to the current situation in Israel. I feel like we could have recorded this episode at any moment in the past decade at least, and say in this current moment and current situation in Israel, and it would be fitting.

Josh: Yeah, it’s really fascinating to me that you, who teach about this topic at you know, one of the best universities in America, is then going to speak with eighth-grade class. And the fifth grader feels like, wait a minute, I want you to do this to me with in my class also. And feels like, oh, no one’s talking to me about this.

I think that that reflects the American mil of like being afraid a little bit to talk to kids about difficult issues, especially when it comes to Israel. And I’m really impressed. I’m impressed that you’re gonna make that trek.

Masua: Thanks. You know, one of our colleagues yesterday, he lectures and speaks with politicians from all around the world, like with the highest ranking officials. And he also gave a class in his daughter’s middle school, and he said it was the hardest lecture that he ever gave in his life.

And yes, I mean, it’s challenging for me to go from teaching the American Bar Association or at a Hartman conference with the Washington DC Federation to my kids’ day school. But I think it’s really important. Talking about Israel is hard. Israel evokes a lot of emotions and convictions, and the situation in Israel is so complex that at some point it became easier not to talk about it.

In Hartman, we are talking about Israel and about how to talk about Israel a lot. And in this episode we invited Sivan Zakai, who’s the Sara S. Lee Associate Professor of Jewish Education and Hebrew Union College. Sivan is a scholar, a teacher, an educator, and an educational consultant, and we’ve talked with her about how to talk with our kids about Israel and what these conversations reflect about, our family, our parenting, our communities, and also our people.

We’ve talked about strategies of conversations for different ages and also strategies for different levels of convictions that we have in different matters. What should we do when we don’t have an answer? And what should we do when we have a specific state in the issue?

Josh: Yeah. I mean, I think that that’s one of the core challenges we’re facing as parents, but also, you know, at the Hartman Institute, we have a vision for a state of Israel that is committed to a liberal Jewish democracy, and we want our kids to be committed to that. And at the same time, we want to help them understand their own role in the Jewish story in a relationship to Israel.

Masua: So we touched a bit on some of the core challenges that Israel poses to the mainstream of North American liberal Jewish community. But mainly we talked about the process of how to talk with our kids about Israel.

Josh: We’ll be back with this conversation in a moment.

Hi everybody. Sivan. It’s so wonderful to have you with us. We know that talking about Israel with our own children is always a raucous roller coaster of a conversation. We don’t know what’s gonna happen. It could be great. We could feel totally confident, we could feel really challenged. We’re excited to talk to you a little bit about what it means to talk with children about Israel, and also to think about what are the challenges parents have and, and educators have.

But before we get into that, tell us a little bit about your family, the Jewish flavor of your family, what are you working with?

Sivan: I am the mother of three children, one in elementary school, one in middle school, and one in high school. So I really span the age range of kids at home and I have a kid who’s just about to go off for a semester in Israel and a kid who’s never been to Israel at all.

Masua: So let’s dive in exactly there. What is the appropriate age to start talking with our kids about Israel and how do we talk to our kids about Israel in different ages?

Josh: Small question.

Sivan: Yeah. So the answer to the first question is very clear. What age do you talk to your children about anything that matters in your Jewish life? Always. You can talk to very young children. You can talk to very old children, you can talk to teenagers., there is no age that’s too young. And, in a research study that I have done with my colleagues, Anna Hartman and Lauren Applebaum, we have found that even children who are the age of three, meaning really in those early preschool years, have big thoughts and ideas about Israel already forming in their beautiful minds.

Masua: What kind of thoughts and ideas?

Sivan: So the very first thing that children start to understand is that the world is divided into different kinds of places. Some are real places, some are imaginary places, some are close by and some are far away. And that’s what preschoolers are starting to sort through. When we started talking to preschoolers about Israel, we honestly didn’t know, would children in early childhood settings think that Israel, if they live in the United States, is an imaginary place, like Arendelle of Frozen, or a real place? We didn’t know.

Masua: Wait, Arendelle is not real?

Sivan: I mean, in our imaginations it is very, very real, right? And in young children’s minds, even imaginary places can carry great power. But we learned very quickly that children are able to distinguish between Israel as a real place and Arendelle as an imaginary place, even though older children, kind of by the age of first or second grade can understand that Israel is both a real place and an imaginary place in the minds and hearts of Jews in the United States.

I once had a first grader talk to me about his best friend in Israel, and I said, wait a second. You’ve never been to Israel. How do you have a best friend? And he said, oh, well, I haven’t met him yet. I just imagine that someday he will be my best friend. And so the first thing in young kids is that they try and figure out, right, it’s a real place, and then they can layer on top of that. It can be both a real and an imaginary place.

Josh: Right, which I think mirrors, in some respects the broader North American Jewish experience and maybe we would say Jewish history as a whole, Jewish civilization. This is both a place of aspirations and dreams, and it’s a place that like, oh, there’s real stuff that happens. My seven year old, I remember when he came back from kindergarten and at one point said, oh, you know, in Israel, there’s like, the Jewish aisle, the Christian aisle, the Muslim aisle, and the Armenian aisle.

And at first I was like, what? And I was like, oh, we’re talking about the old city. But like, right, like he’s using his frameworks to understand the stories he’s hearing and that’s like a rather complicated question. I was really glad that his teacher was able to sort of, flesh out for them or give them some sort of understanding that it’s a Jewish country with people who aren’t Jewish there.

But at the same time, he really wants to go to Israel. We keep kosher. And he was like, I want to go to Israel because everything’s kosher there and I can have pepperoni pizza. And I’m like, oh, that is, you’re doing what all Jews do, which is imagine some messianic end of days in Israel where you get to do lots of stuff and, not all Jews, but I guess we would say that’s part of the Jewish imagination and I think it’s nice when the stories are, oh, kids say the darnedest things. It’s much harder when kids actually say the darnedest things and as a parent or a teacher, you’re like, oh, I wasn’t prepared for the conversation to go this way.

Masua: This is a different conversation for me because I come from Israel, I’m an Israeli, and this is my second year here in America. So some of the questions about the Jewish communities facing about Israel, I’m experiencing twice, once as an Israeli and once as someone who lives here in the Jewish community.

So, for example, last year, my 13 year old came home and she said, my classmate said that Israel should never have been established and it only kills Palestinians. And maybe before I’ll say how I responded to that. I would love to hear it from you, Sivan. How do you respond to that?

Sivan: Yeah. So first of all, I just want to acknowledge the heartache that comes with that kind of conversation. And I think that that’s increasingly prevalent. In fact, you said that this child is 13 and I will say that a larger trend that I have noticed in talking with young teens and tweens is a real hesitancy to speak about Israel to their peers because of fear of having conversations like that. And as a parent, I will say that the most important thing is that our children know that we’re willing to talk with them, whatever they need to talk about.

And so, if this were my kid, I would start with them and say, how does that make you feel? What questions does that raise for you? Because it is our responsibility as parents to create an environment where we hold our children’s deepest questions and concerns. And that to me, matters even more than the answers we might give about why the Jewish state was established and how and when, and all of those kind of questions that arise from the initial question.

Masua: So I think you reflect something really interesting here because you’re saying, this is about our kids, but not just about our kids because we are having a harder time to talk about Israel in general, right. Because either we were educated that everything is, you know, butterflies and, and roses in Israel.

Josh: Yeah. Spiritual Disney World, as some of, some of the, one of the ways some of us notice that.

Masua: Very nice. And then either we grow up and still think that, or we grow up and everything crumbles around us. Or we say, this is way too complicated, I want nothing to do with it. And we start disengaging. And then our kid comes and they want to talk about this and they wanna talk with us, but they also have to respond to their peers, which is another question altogether.

So the first thing that you’re saying is, I am so glad that we are talking about that. Wonderful. How does that make you feel? But then I do wanna push you a bit further and ask you, what’s the next thing that you are, that you’re saying or doing?

Sivan: Yeah. So I wanna challenge an assumption that you have, which is that our teens then have to go back and have that conversation with their peers. 

Josh: Mm. Nice.

Sivan: Actually, we can slow it down. That is part of what parenting affords us, that the chatter of the internet does not. We can say, you actually don’t have to respond to that until you want to respond to. And we can separate out those conversations. There’s actually layers of conversations, one that’s happening in our nuclear family, one that’s happening perhaps in the larger Jewish world, and then one that’s happening in the larger world in

And we can actually give our teens in particular a choice about when they enter that larger fray and when they don’t. And so, to me, the point of that conversation is not to prepare our teens and tweens to go back into that larger fray and respond. They are not as some, in the Jewish world would hope, foot soldiers in the Zionist army who have to protect and defend the reputation of the Jewish people. They are teenagers who are working through what it means in their own lives to create meaningful Jewish lives, and they get some choice about how and when and with whom they do that. 

So I wanna slow the whole thing down, not to prepare our teens to go back and respond, although some will choose to, but to have first an internal conversation.

Josh: It was interesting to me, Sivan, that you went to, why was the state of Israel established? I’m particularly interested in and feel like I live in a world where the question of Jewish power and Jewish vulnerability is constantly sort of being played out, both in private Jewish spaces and more public spaces. And so I would want to have a conversation about saying, yes, there’s this painful element of Israel right now, which is, the Palestinian people live primarily in these locations where the Israeli military, uh, I’m using a technical term of occupy, some people would say have liberated the Jewish state, and what does it mean to navigate that and what does it also mean to navigate, Israel was a thriving pre-state community, you know, since the early 1900s being, and I would want to navigate that conversation by sort of getting them to sort of core values that recognize, yeah, history is broken, it’s challenging.

Humans without power suffer and humans with power need to check their power. And do that responsibly. And I, I love that idea of slowing down the conversation. I wonder how to slow things down in this very fast-paced world. It feels hard.

Masua: You know, I really respect what you said, and I’m grateful for saying, wait, slow down. This is definitely a conversation in our inner family environment. But would you want us as a community, to talk about Israel in a certain way? Hannah Arendt, she was a Jewish philosopher, said that true patriotism must involve criticism, and I wonder what the right path, or several paths, in your opinion to talking about Israel in our community to our kids.

Sivan: So the first thing I wanna say is that my primary allegiance in this conversation is to the agency of our children. not to the state of Israel. Now, that doesn’t mean I don’t also have a deep abiding love and allegiance for the Jewish people and the national state that is attached to that Jewish people. I do. But I am starting from a different initial starting point, which is that our teens have agency over their own lives. They not. We are the ones to determine how they will situate Israel in that life that they will build for themselves. And that includes, and I know this is really scary for a lot of people, that means I let go of the outcomes.

Like I cannot guarantee that your kid will say a specific thing or feel a specific thing. I probably can guarantee that your child will know certain amount of context, right? That they might know certain things, but not that they will feel or do specific things because that is for them to decide. 

So yes, there are all sorts of conversations that I would like to have with children and teens in our community. And I don’t have outcomes for those conversations because those outcomes will necessarily be varied if we take seriously the idea of children’s agency.

Masua: The conversation itself is the outcome I feel.

Josh: I would say Sivan, you’re touching on, for me as a parent, the central spiritual challenge I have, which is I am both committed to process and there are boundaries about which I’m gonna love my kid no matter what. It’s gonna be harder on our relationship later on if certain outcomes emerge and I guess educationally, how do I cultivate a commitment to the marathon? Cause what you’re saying is it’s a marathon. 

And also, it’s really hard to do that around things that feel politically urgent. And it goes both ways. Meaning my, in the beginning of the pandemic in April of 2020 when we were home from school and Yom Haatzmaut happened, which is, it’s not like I’m going out of my way to decorate the home for Israel Independence Day, it’s not the, it’s not the cornerstone of my, religious, cultural, spiritual existence.

But my eldest at the time was like, well, we have to have a barbecue and we have to do a parade. And being, she had been acculturated into certain things and on one hand I’m like thrilled that she’s acculturated to some sort of engagement relationship with Israel. I lived in Israel for eight years. My wife and I met doing work helping Jews speak to Palestinians at the time. Like that’s how we met. Because we were committed to the Jewish people, in that way.

nd at the same time I was like, oh, what does it mean that she has some deep connection at age eight? And I’m like, wait, that’s not what I feel committed to, but wait a minute, but she feels committed to it. And like, how do I navigate that sort of when it shows up so excitedly. What happens when your kids really like something that you don’t love? Or it’s not the way you would do something?

Sivan: I’m gonna share with you two parenting moves that I use in my own house. specifically to deal with the challenge that you are talking about, Josh, which is how do we both honor children’s agencies and try and instill in our children the things that we hold most dear? And it’s also an attempt to get at the challenges of raising children who are not themselves the same age as one another, and therefore even our children are not in one developmental phase.

So some kinds of questions, including some kinds of questions about Israel, I do something that in my mind, I call “The Philosophers Council,” where I say there’s like a philosophical question you raised earlier, Josh, issues of power and powerlessness. What ought we do? Are we obligated to act in a particular way? But I actually don’t know the answer, right? I don’t have an answer or an outcome that I think is right for example, what should the final borders of the state of Israel be like? 

Actually, I don’t know because I don’t know how to get there. I wish I did, but I am not politically savvy enough to be able to solve that problem. But we can think about it together. And so in a philosopher’s council, we’ll put a question on the table and then we will just think about it. And anyone who has a thought or an idea can kind of put it forward and we’ll kind of think about it and we probably won’t come to any conclusion, but we will function together with adults and children having equal say in the conversation together.

But there’s a different parenting move and in my head I call this the Sanhedrin.

Josh: The council of rabbinic judges, we’ll say.

Sivan: And this is a move that I learned from my own parents, and it goes similarly to the philosophers counsel, except it goes in ascending age order. And this is for questions that I, I actually, I really have a, a thought. I actually would like to see a specific outcome that I think is the most compelling, the most moral, the most in line with my own values.

And I want to honor my children’s agency for thinking through questions on their own. And so we’ll put a question on the table, and then the youngest child will hash out an answer and we’ll think about that answer, and then the next youngest child will hash out an answer. 

The younger children get to hear the answers of the older children and the adults, and ultimately it is the adults who get the final say in this version, right? We get the final word. But the children also get to practice voicing ideas in their own way, at their own developmental level before they’re influenced by adults. And that is my way of balancing that tension that you’re talking about. About both wanting to let my children be who they are, including liking things I don’t like and disliking things I like, and wanting to say, in this family we have certain core beliefs and values, and I want you to hear what that sounds like.

Josh: Hmm.

Masua: That’s so interesting because, that’s an amazing methodology. For that the only threshold is for us to have the commitment to talk about these issues and maybe if we do need to insert context and in some cases it’s really hard to insert context, just think of, you know, everything that’s happening since the last election. This means that we have to have a strong commitment as parents to have a very present issue in our house, in our family.

Let me just ask you one question. Maybe going back a bit. Some of these conversations are based on an assumption that Israel is important for us. If we agree with this assumption, what do you think is the way to insert that into our family, talk about that with our children from an early age. How does that look like?

Sivan: I don’t have a plug and play formula for you. I will say we know from research on children in all sorts of cultural contexts that conversations that matter in their communities matter to children, as well as to teenagers and adults in the community. So if you are having a conversation in which Israel is central, or it doesn’t even have to be central, one key part of a larger conversation about contemporary Jewish life, that conversation will be something that the children in your families will tune into.

And part of the tension that we are having even in this conversation is that there is a commitment to Israel, but there’s also a commitment to Jewish pluralism, and once we embrace that as well, then there isn’t just one answer, right? There are a lot of different ways, and to me it is in spelling out kind of a range of Jewish options, including the ones that I do not take for myself that is important for me as a way of telling my children, there are a lot of different ways to be Jewish. You get to choose your own Jewish path. Here is the path that I have chosen, and here are other paths that other committed Jews have chosen.

I will say in my own family, my mother is a reform rabbi. My brother-in-law is Haredi. We are still all in one family, even though we make radically different Jewish choices. And we have radically different politics about Israel in my own family. So I want my children to hear my own commitments, but I even more so want them to understand that there are a range of options, and I’m not assuming that that is true in your families, right?

There might be a more narrow or more broad range of options that are acceptable in your family. The only thing that I think probably ought to exist everywhere again is a willingness to talk with children about questions that matter and Israel has for a very long time mattered in the lived experiences and in the imagination of the Jewish people, and that’s why we’re talking about it. What is the future? I don’t know.

Josh: I really appreciate that voice and that perspective, Sivan. And it’s helpful to hear, wait a minute, you have to be talking about this, meaning, one, I think observation, going back to the question of like, oh, how do you navigate the fact that Jews have power and they have an army now. Most countries do. It’s not easy to live in the world with conflict. I think there’s a lot of fear to talk about Israel. There’s a fear, like we don’t know enough. And one of the things I’m hearing you propose, Sivan, which I think is really helpful, is it’s okay to not know. It’s okay to say, hey, like, this is a question that we should investigate together.

And that, and this is certainly my concern, I’ll throw my cards on the table, Israel has taken up more and more of a central role, it’s like certainly a preoccupation of the Jewish community, but it’s actually also playing a role in Jewish education in North America, much more broadly, sometimes separated from the Jewish piece.

So it’s like, oh, let’s care about Israel, let’s talk about Israel and for me, I want that to be a conversation that’s also about how does this reflect our vision of Judaism in North America, in Israel.

For me, there’s a lot of Torah being taught in Israel. There’s a lot of amazing Jewish culture in Israel. There are a lot of Jews. I have a commitment to Jewish people. I have a commitment to the range of Jewish creativity. And I have a commitment to a vision of, of Jewish democratic behavior and being able to talk about that with my kids and integrate it into the conversations that we have about Judaism.

Not everything’s about Israel, but sometimes it’s about Israel and sometimes Israel’s sort of in the background noise, like, oh, we’re talking about a larger other issue. Oh, I’ll say this Israeli rabbi says this, but this American rabbi says this, right? So that it’s just part and parcel of the sort of fabric of Jewish life that feels really important when we’re filling up the cup of the conversation that Sivan is saying.

Sivan: Yeah. I think there are actually three different levels of this conversation, and sometimes it helps adults, but especially Jewish educators to separate them out in our own minds, even though they get often mushed together in conversations that we have with children. 

The first is conversations about Israel. The second is conversation about Israel and its relationship to American Judaism and its role in American Jewish life. And the third is about Israel in the American political system and the role that Israel plays in our own democracy and our own polarized politics here. Those are three different things, and actually we have to be doing all of them, but we have to know that they’re different.

And in many, many Jewish institutions right now, there are the first two. So there’s a lot of talk about Israel and there’s a lot of talk about what Israel means in our lives as American Jews. And there’s not a lot of talk about the way that Israel functions increasingly as a wedge issue in our own political democracy. And that is a missing piece in many institutions. And that is something that institutions can correct, but also so can families because it is the three levels of this conversation that will give our children contextual understanding. And there’s also a developmental aspect to it.

So I said the first thing kids understand is there are countries, and Israel is a country, right? But by the time that they’re in elementary school, they can add that second layer on. Israel is also a place of meaning for the Jewish people and has been across time and space, although not for every single Jew in every moment, and, as they get older towards upper elementary school or middle school, then they can start layering that third level, which is the political on top of those other two layers.

Josh: Mm. So good.

Masua: And I’ll just add to that, one piece about peoplehood and about what it means, not just for ourselves, as, how does this affect us as American Jews, but also how does it affect us as a people, as a Jewish people, how does it affect our Judaism as you said before? And I think that a lot of the things that we do in Hartman is addressing these questions of Judaism. 

Josh: Yeah, one of the most powerful moments I’ve had with Masua, a community of fellow scholars at Hartman were talking about the challenges of Israel and Masua just saying, I need you as an Israeli, like I need North American Jews. And it was a powerful moment just to think about, oftentimes we’re preoccupied with American Jewish life and its relationship to Israel and I really appreciate your three levels, Sivan, and also how do we hear from Israelis, yeah, we, we also need your voice. 

So it’s been a pleasure talking with you, Sivan. At the end of our podcast we do a little segment called On One Foot Parenting, where we turn the tables on our guests and ourselves and ask a question that our kids often ask us, unprovoked, its bathtime, its bedtime, we thought we were finishing the day, and they ask one of these hard questions. So I’m gonna ask one of these hard questions, not Israel related, and love your on one foot answer. Masua will give an on one foot answer. I’ll give an on one foot answer.

And the question is, why aren’t there dinosaurs in the Torah? How would you answer when your kid asks that question?

Sivan: I have gotten a version of that question

Josh: I bet.

Sivan: And my answer to that question is that in my Reform Jewish family, we have many different stories that we tell about the origins of the world. We have scientific ways of thinking about the origins of the world, and we have spiritual ways of thinking about the origins of the world, and they are both true. And they are both limited. And so we tell two stories. We tell a story that comes from the Torah, and then I would ask the kid to recount the story, like what is that story? What is our Torah story about the origins of the world? And explain to me what it is you understand about that. And we also have a scientific story about the origins of the world. What is the scientific story you know? I would ask the kid to answer. And then I would say, right, and we believe that both of these are true and both of these are also incomplete.

Josh: Nice.

Sivan: That’s my On One Foot answer.

Josh: Thank you. It’s great On One Foot answer. 

Masua: Very nice. Not, doesn’t seem like a one foot answer. 

Josh: It’s, you, well prepared. Well, you’ve had a, had a version. Masua, what’s your on one foot answer?

Masua: So, what I love about this question is the fact that, it means that the Torah means something to our kids. And the dinosaurs you know, means something to our kids, obviously, but also the Torah.

And for me, maybe it’s a version of your answers Sivan, but for me it’s saying, you know, maybe not everything is in the Torah, but a lot of things are in there. And then let’s talk about what’s in there and what’s not there and how, and, and more important than that, what does it mean for us? What’s in and what’s not.

Josh: What’s, yeah, I think, I think mine is a variation on both of yours, which is to say, it’s a little technical. Like, when are Adam and Eve created in the Torah? It’s at the end of the sixth day. So then like, our capacity to understand what came before that, and what could have been documented is pretty limited. And so I sort of point to that, and then I would say also similarly to Sivan, what gets captured in this story also means that there are other ways of telling sort of a long-term story. 

Great answers. Sivan, it was a pleasure to chat with you. I’m sure this won’t be the last time we talk about Israel on this podcast. And I hope we can have you back in the future. Thanks for joining us. 

Masua: Thanks for joining us.

Sivan: Thank you so much for having me.

Josh: Thanks for listening to our show. 

Masua: Perfect Jewish Parents is a production of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, where we tackle pressing issues facing Jewish communities so we can think better and do better. 

You can check out our world-renowned faculty, free live classes, and [email protected].

Josh: Our producers are Jan Lauren Greenfield and David Zvi Kalman. 

This episode was edited by our production manager, M Louis Gordon, and our theme music is by Luke Allen. Maital Friedman is our vice president of communications and creatives.

Masua: This a new podcast, so help us get the word out, hit subscribe, and also rate the show. 

Josh: If you have ideas for an episode, parenting questions, or if your kids asked you a question you want us to answer, send an email to [email protected]. 

Josh: Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time.