How Do You Raise a Jewish Adult? – with Stephanie Ives Transcript

Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Yehuda: Hi everyone. Welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show from the Shalom Hartman Institute, creating better conversations about the essential questions facing Jewish life. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer. We’re recording on the eve of Purim, March 13th, 2025.

In Jewish law, kids become Jewish adults responsible for their own performance of the commandments, incurring their own reward and punishment for their actions at the age of 12 or 13, regardless of whether there’s a ritual or ceremony to mark the occasion. Bar or bat mitzvah—they don’t actually describe an event. Not getting called up to the Torah, or chanting it, or giving a speech, or playing Coke and Pepsi with preteen friends on the dance floor, or enduring awkward hugs from relatives you’ve never met, or depositing checks. None of it. Bat Mitzvah just literally means reaching an age in which you acquire the responsibilities attendant on Jewish adults.

For us as modern Jews, Jewish tradition making an arbitrary declaration that our kids become adults at the age of 12 or 13 in this rite of passage is a little weird. It’s a relic of a different time when the milestone of hitting puberty, or being around that time, would mean marriageability. and being thought of as an age where kids were old enough to take part in family responsibilities, bringing in some income, whatnot.

But now, our 12 year old, who becomes bat mitzvah this weekend, and I got through saying that without bursting into tears, our 12 year old still whines about loading the dishwasher. We have no plans for her imminently to take part in shaping her financial present or future for a long time from now. In our day and age, actually, both adolescence and adulthood are getting stretched out further and further, older and older. So the myth that they’re crossing a boundary now from childhood to adulthood at this age is implausible, sometimes even, looking at our kids, laughable.

But then again, the milestone is still useful, maybe less for giving us an empirical transition or marking an empirical transition for today’s Jewish preteens, and more for giving us as parents, or as a Jewish community, some signposts to mark and assess our progress in our job, our responsibility of teaching and transmitting Judaism to our children, one of the key elements involved in inducting young people into this religion so predicated on commitments and obligations.

We as parents are supposed to ready our kids to become citizens of the Jewish people. They’re supposed to become responsible as individuals for their own deeds. They’re supposed to become responsible to become good members of their communities, their societies, of the Jewish people itself.

In that respect, I’m actually glad that I get to launch my kids into Jewish adulthood before they leave my house. They get to practice being Jewish adults in an incubated environment before they have to do it alone. So then I also think that these milestones of kids becoming Jewish adults is also something of a checkpoint for us as parents as well. Each time I’ve encountered one of my kids becoming bar or bat mitzvah, this is the third one, I’ve had some wistful moments trying to evaluate how I think I’ve done. We modern parents think of parenting as an abstract, prolonged verb, and I have very mixed feelings about the very idea of parenting as an activity. Maybe we’ll talk more about that.

The rabbinic tradition has really specific and delineated obligations, measurable ones. that describe what we’re supposed to hand over to our children. It has benchmarks in Jewish learning. You have to learn this by this age and that by a later age. We’re supposed to teach them how to swim and to teach them a trade. We’re supposed to ready them for financial independence and for a life of partnership.

Parenting? Well, that’s infinite and impossible. It might lead us to think about our role in molding or forming our children in ways that ask too much of us while specifying too little. But something about a prose checklist that the rabbis offer us feels like a useful counterweight.

Back at Noah’s Bar Mitzvah, I guess that was six years ago, I decided to fulfill this checklist by outlining in my speech at his Bar Mitzvah what I thought were the four essential Jewish ideas we’ve been trying to inculcate in him since birth, and that I wanted to have him to have in summarized form, like cliff notes, for his record of his home based Jewish education to date.

Now, I didn’t really think he’d be paying attention at his own bar mitzvah. Don’t worry, I saved the file on my computer in case he asked for it. But the truth is, it was more for me than it was for him. I was asking myself amidst all the hubbub and whirlwind of raising children, the carpools, cooking dinner, changing diapers, what was I trying to do as a Jewish parent?

We Jews are worried all the time about our collective future, and I think the haunting question that faces any Jewish parent who really thinks about it is just this: What did I, not our community, not our schools, our synagogues, but what did I do to preserve and hand over to those I was able to hand something to?

And in moments like this, then again later this week, Sally will get called to the Torah for the first time. Her Hebrew name is going to be announced in a public Jewish space for the first time since her naming. And now, not to tell people her name, but to welcome her into the club as a member. I also reckon with something that a teacher of mine said to me many years ago. It was a very accomplished rabbi and educator, and he said to this group of early career professionals that I was in that, at the end of the day, regardless of how many people you reach and teach, your primary contribution to the Jewish future is going to be through your children.

I felt mixed about it when he said it then. It was before I had kids. And I still feel mixed about it, thinking of all of the people who are childless, or who struggle with their kids, and who still give great things to the world. On a personal level, I think about those comments now a lot, and I wonder whether it actually might feel right. I definitely feel this more as I get older, maybe because I’m not sure about what I put into the world that actually shapes people or changes the world, but I do see some imprint on my children. Every time I look at them, I see possibilities for the world that extend well beyond my own limitations.

As I’m caught up in all this reflection, which I think is the gift of ritual moments, time for reflection, I wanted to think about what it means to be a parent of emerging Jewish adults together with my chavruta in this endeavor, which is pretty much the least romantic way to describe your spouse or partner.

So I invited Stephanie, my wife, Stephanie Ives, we’ve been married for 25 years. Stephanie is the head of Beit Rabban Day School. She’s been a guest on the podcast before during the pandemic when we talked to a head of school, a rabbi of a synagogue, and the head of a Hillel about what it meant to do the work during that time. We’re on the verge of bringing our third child together into Jewish adulthood. Steph, thanks for coming back on the show.

Stephanie: I’m so happy to be here, and I will just mention, in contrast to the speech that you gave at our first child’s bar mitzvah, the four things you wanted him to know about being Jewish, I gave a speech about the fact that his name, Rachamim, Clément, Clement, is a pope’s name. So just in case it didn’t work out with Judaism, he already had the name!

Yehuda: It’s very kind of you to give him options.

Stephanie: It’s a contrast of our parenting, I think, a little bit.

Yehuda: I want to start by talking about parenting and parenting philosophy. Yeah. I remember you saying early on, and I know you tell this to a lot of new parents, that you don’t really have any rules about parenting except dress your children as animals until they can, until they know the difference. But I don’t really think that’s true.

I’m curious when you think about your parenting, specifically of Jewish children, I mean that’s the only ones we have, but when you think about parenting Jewish children, whether you feel like you have a philosophy of Jewish parenting, a philosophy of parenting more generally.

Stephanie: You know, I actually feel, it is very hard to sincerely tell you I have a philosophy of parenting because I know our own children are so different from one another and I know so many children who are different that, I can say this is my philosophy of parenting, and then I can think about the, you know, hundreds of people I know for whom that would not work, and there is sort of a hubris in it. So, I won’t say that, but I can tell you a couple things I really think about.

Yehuda: And I want to be clear, like, there’s something awkward about a conversation like this. And it’s for two reasons. One is, when you start talking about philosophy of parenting, it sounds like you’re showing off that, like, whatever my kids accomplishments are, however great them, that was, we did that. Right? And only people who talk about parenting tend to be people who are, quote unquote, “good” at it. Yeah. So this isn’t a conversation between us that’s like, It’s not really about our kids, right? It’s about what we wanted to do with our kids.

But the other thing I want to say, and I want to come back to this later, is part of the reason a conversation like this is also a little awkward is because parenting, weirdly, is sometimes construed as a private activity. And it’s like, we don’t sit around with our, we sit around with our friends talking about our kids all the time. But we don’t really talk about like, what are we trying to do with our kids? Right? So that’s what I’m trying to get at. Not like, look, look how great we did, but more like, how do you think about this?

Stephanie: Yeah. And I do talk about that actually all day, every day, right? With teachers and colleagues and with parents. I think it’s funny that you and I may be happy, but I think about it all the time. And I have a couple of thoughts, which is sort of the way, like what I try to remind myself of in the moments when I’m panicked, as every parent is panicked, like this is the kind of question that gives you the sort of anxiety as a parent that you make the wrong decision, to take the wrong strategy that’s based in too much anxiety to try to achieve the goal of for whatever it be.

So first of all, the goal should never be, my first philosophy is—the goal should never be “I would like my child to be like me.” It’s just gonna set you up for disappointment, and for guilt, and for shame, and also, it neglects the most beautiful thing about your child, which is they’re not you. They’re something totally different that you were gifted to be part of creating. And I think about that all the time.

And I also really believe that like, in education in general, that you should make your thinking obvious. Right? To the people you work with, to, definitely to your children and to your students. So I think you probably have heard me say things like that to our kids, many times. And at the same time, you do obviously want your child, maybe you don’t want, maybe you’ve gotten past the idea of, oh, they should be a lawyer like me or a Jewish educator like me. Our kids have told us they feel pressure to be Jewish leaders, which is comical, right?

Or, you know, I’ve gotten past the idea that we have to have the exact same skills or talents or interests. But we all want our kids to have our values. And I think really the only way to do that is living your values in a way that doesn’t appear to be oppressive. So when I think about, how do you pass on your Jewish values, you live them, you talk about them, and you sincerely enjoy them. If they’re oppressive to you, they’re not going to want them.

But even if, even if all that is true, you still get what you get. It’s not a recipe for, then that child will come out with your values. It’s just, okay, I did my best, right? And it’s pretty good.

Yehuda: So I’ll pick up on a few things that you said in there. One of them is about, you know, the humility of knowing that your children will not be like you in a whole bunch of ways, and you simply don’t know which those are. I would say this is more of a trap for parents who have their own biological children, because you see the genetic material show up in a certain way. They look like one parent or the other. They sometimes have the mannerisms, and that may lead you into this deception that they are a version of you.

And that’s, you know, Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree book, of like, the overall hypothesis is what does it mean to confront the reality that children are strangers and sometimes we’re even kinder or more curious towards strangers than we are towards people who we think we have deep resemblance or kinship to. So the piece of that I understand.

But you drew a distinction between, you know, trying to inculcate, I don’t think you use the word inculcate, you talked about modeling your values or teaching your values. I would,

Stephanie: No, I actually, can I, can I refine that a little bit? I don’t think it’s inculcating and I’m not, I don’t think it’s modeling because modeling has an element that’s performative in it and I, I truly don’t believe that works. I think it’s practicing. And the beauty of our religion is practicing has a role for people of every age at all times. And you can think about it as expansive as possible, so that when you are practicing, there are authentic opportunities for your kids to be practicing with you.

Yehuda: So you mean not practicing, like, let’s do all of these things whether or not I sincerely want to do them.

Stephanie: Oh, no.

Yehuda: It’s let me practice by doing what is close to my heart and what I care about, but by practicing it in the presence of my kids, I’m not trying to pretend that I’m enacting something that they learn from, but your hope, but what are you, so what are you hoping then instead?

Stephanie: I’m hoping that that experience, as meaningful as it is to me, Will become meaningful to them through the process of being an authentic part of it, not being talked down to, look, you know, if I believed brainwashing work, I, you know, I’m not above that. I’d be amazing at it. You know how I know it doesn’t work? I got a whole lot of it and it didn’t work for me, right?

Yehuda: It worked for a while.

Stephanie: But then it came crashing down so, so bad. So I think it’s like, bringing them into the authentic experiences and actually believing that what you’re doing is so beautiful and meaningful and powerful and sophisticated and sometimes really complicated and interesting ways and making all of that visible and believing enough in what you’re doing that you believe they also will want to be part of it in their way and if they don’t, that’s probably not because of you, it’s probably because for some reason they didn’t connect to it the way you did.

Yehuda: Yeah, so you’re, it feels to me like there are three different things here. The one is this piece on practice, like you, you know, we love the observance of Shabbat and holidays in our house. We’re not, we don’t love Shabbat and holidays because of what it does for our children. We love Shabbat and holidays because it’s important to us. And so our excitement and our overspending on Shabbat and holidays, but those things, that’s like what we want our Jewish lives to be. And yes, I, what you’re saying is one piece is like practice Judaism with love. And you kind of hope that they will…

Stephanie: And sincerity and complexity

Yehuda: And sincerity, and complexity, all those things.

Right. There’s a second thing you said, which is values, right? You do care about them having your values. And there’s the third thing you don’t want, which is, I think it’s telling them what to do.

Stephanie: Ah, this is where, you and I are so different on this.

Yehuda: Like I said, my Bar Mitzvah speech was like, these are the four things. It’s not that I think that by telling the four things that they are going to agree with all of them. But they at least have to know what, like, I want of them.

Stephanie: Ah, no, Yehuda. I so disagree with you here.

Yehuda: But just tell me the difference then between, before we get into the disagreement, what’s the difference between conveying your values and conveying your hopes for them or your expectations of them?

Stephanie: So first of all you have to really, I, and I wish you, I’m just joking, have to really drill down to—what are your values, right? Because sometimes something looks like it’s your value. Like my value is that you keep Shabbat. Yeah, I understand. That’s different, that’s my theology. Right? My value actually might be, might be something much broader, right? It’s really important to me that you be thoughtful about being part of a tradition that has come through.

I mean, what it’s come through to exist today, just in my own family story, right? Like that I sit here and run an institution in America, a Jewish institution. A lot of people had a lot of remarkable struggles to ensure that that could happen to this day. And my parents couldn’t have imagined it for themselves, they couldn’t have imagined it for you. I want you to be a person who doesn’t feel a sense of guilt or, you know, guilt that you have to do this, but a sense of obligation to what people have done. For example, and to be thoughtful. If you, like, what does it mean for you? What will you do with this?

And I, I want my value to be that I will respect thoughtful decisions. And I really want them to feel a sense of responsibility to that, right? I want them, it would break my heart if our kids, like, you know, one of our biggest nachas is when our kids makes a great Jewish joke. Often, like, none of them can we repeat on this podcast. But if a, if one of them really just mocked Judaism as irrelevant, it would break my heart. I mean, I would feel that way also about Christianity, to be true, like about any religion, because religion is so important to me. But also I have no control over that, by the way, right?

Yehuda: I guess there’s some, some of it that sounds to me like cultivating good, good character.

Stephanie: Yes.

Yehuda: Kindness. Respect, love, tolerance, indebtedness to what came before you.

Stephanie: Responsibility.

Yehuda: And I’m trying to, I guess I’m trying to figure out, like, what about that is necessarily Jewish? Or is it, well, listen, I have those good values, I happen to be Jewish, therefore I’m going to teach this and I’d like my kids to kind of connect the dots between Jewishness and these overall good values.

But that’s not the same as, it’s really important for my kids to keep Shabbat. And I would love to hear what’s Jewish to you about those, about cultivating those commitments. Or, you might just say, no, I don’t actually want, I don’t want to instruct them in terms of Jewish commitments.

Stephanie: No, I’m totally happy to talk about that.

But you know this is theological, right? Because what’s Jewish about my values, I could describe that at length to you, but I also believe that there are other religions, and other structures of thinking about the world and commitments that have aligned values. I do believe in religion. Like, and not, not in a sense of—let me say this: I believe that religion can be a very powerful structure for values, learning, integration, and, and being a person in the world, right? And I am deeply committed to our religion.

If I was a person who believed a little differently theologically about our religion such that, like, I thought every mitzvah and averah, every good deed and every transgression had an immediate metaphysical reaction, I would probably have a very different perspective on raising my kids Jewishly. Because whatever they thought, or whatever they believed or however they acted, it wouldn’t make a difference as long as they did X, Y, and Z and didn’t do X, Y, and Z.

And I know people who believe that and I don’t disrespect it. I really don’t. Like, there are people much greater than you and me who believe that, and maybe you believe that, but I don’t relate to that. So for me, Shabbat is so important, actually Halakha is so important, and I could explain it to them, but I’ve taken a lot of time to think about why Jewish law is important to me for a person who doesn’t believe in every action has a metaphysical reaction. I don’t know if metaphysical is the right word, but you know what I’m saying.

Yehuda: Yeah. I guess maybe the real question comes down to, and it’s a big question for a lot of liberal American Jews. It really is. How much particularism do we feel? Which, and at a certain point, particularism demands of us to say this, not that. And it’s a very hard thing for liberally oriented people to say this, not that, and I think part of it is, part of it is fear by parents. Not that their kids won’t do it. But that by their kids rejecting the particularist hopes and expectations of their parents, they will have compromised their parents’ love. They will have disappointed them. They would have let them down. And part of me feels like…

Stephanie: I don’t think that’s what it is.

Yehuda: I do. I think it’s for a lot of people. I’m not going to tell you to do something that I think you shouldn’t do, because I fear that by telling you that, then when you will do it, you will lose your tether to me. You will feel you have disappointed me. I don’t know. I think, I think there’s some loss of, I think there’s a little bit of a loss of a self respect there. Like, and I, I know that the burden for people like me who want to be upfront with our kids about their, about things that are more specific in terms of particularistic hopes and expectations, I know the burden is on me to make sure they understand that my love for them is not conditional on it.

Stephanie: Yes. I think I reacted more to the thing you were describing than to the idea that people feel that way. Meaning I agree and I really believe you can convey both of those things to your children. You can even say, it would really make me sad if you didn’t keep Shabbat. You can say it would make me sad if you didn’t keep Shabbat in the way I did it. And I’m going to tell you why, right? Because then we wouldn’t be able to X, Y, and Z together. But I also would understand and we would find other ways.

And both are true, Yehuda, but it, that’s not true for everybody because there are people and, you know, I’m related to some of these people and I love some of these people and I don’t actually judge them for it, who would say, if you marry somebody not Jewish, you’re not gonna come to my house. Right? And for them, that line is their authentic truth. It’s not mine.

Yehuda: Yeah. I mean the Torah version of this is, we’re so accustomed, and this relates to like attitudes to Israel, that parents, you know, where they’re so accustomed to this mindset of, I love you, but you’re, but you’re gonna let me down, right? You know, and that’s like, that frames the whole thing about like criticism of Israel. You have to say I love you first before you can criticize. And I find that to be kind of weird, as though like, love is the ritualistic obligation that comes next, but actually the prophet Hosea has it differently. He reverses it.

He says, he says, God says to the people Israel, you are going to fail me, and I love you anyway. But I think that requires, I think as a parent, like, I’m not, I don’t want to convey to our listeners that I’m like an oppressive parent with my demands of my kids Jewishly. But I do kind of want to be able to convey, you’re probably not going to necessarily do the things I want you to do, but I want to be on record as having told you that.

Because I do hear from a lot of other parents that their kids disappoint them. But they never really told them, they never really told them what they wanted from them. So it’s one thing if you say, you know, I hear this from parents all the time, my kid married somebody not Jewish and I’m really disappointed. The question I oftentimes ask them is, did you tell them, did you tell them, not that that was the right thing to do, but it was important to you? And then, they’ll probably do whatever they want. But you’ll then have the burden of figuring out with them. Okay, you made this choice as opposed to this choice, and I love you regardless, but I at least told you.

Stephanie: Yeah, you’re asking people to think about having incredibly honest conversations that show all their cards to their children. And I think that a lot of people are very worried about parenting in a way that shows all their cards. You know I believe in showing all my cards, right? And I believe there’s a line because there’s no, it’s abusive to give your child all your anxiety, right? Or to give them all the levels of anxiety you might have at the world because of your exposure that they might not.

But I do believe having those conversations are really important. And as you’re saying that, you know what I’m thinking about? Periodically, and my parents probably won’t listen to it, but if you do, hi Mommy and Daddy. You might already know this, periodically when we go visit my parents, my parents, my dad will ask me something about our religious practice, and I will come upstairs huffing and puffing.

And for context for those who don’t know me, I grew up differently, very much observant, and we are also now very much observant, but the way that I should have looked based on the way that I grew up would have me covering my hair, etc. Probably cursing a little less.

Yehuda: Not egalitarian. Not egalitarian services, those kinds of things.

Stephanie: A lot of those things. And every time I, I have this conversation with my dad, which comes up every time, you know this, I come upstairs…

Yehuda: Meaning he’s worried about your level of observance.

Stephanie: For example, he’s worried, might notice that I don’t require my children to put on Tefillin every morning, which is really important to him. And he will ask me, aren’t you worried about that? Or why don’t you do that? Or he’ll take three steps ahead. How do you feel confident your kids are going to be Jewish? And I’m like, oh, I’m sorry. I dropped an entire career in law to work for the Jewish community, and Yehuda and I are like the most Jewish people on earth. I’m afraid they’re not going to be Jewish because they’re going to have too much Judaism, right?

But I actually do appreciate that he has articulated that to me. And it’s come with another kind of love. They’ve had to learn a lot about, like, accepting me. Like, even when I started wearing pants, which I didn’t do as a teenager, my dad told me that he was disappointed, right? And he let it go and whatnot, but he was so concerned that our boys didn’t always put on tefillin in every day of vacation when we were in Los Angeles. And then he also was so proud of our daughter at her Hanakhat Tefillin. And the way that I grew up, girls were not allowed to do that. But he came to that with pride.

And there’s something in the way that he’s approached it that has the authenticity that we’re talking about. And my parents always practiced Judaism as they wanted to. Not as they thought we should and I think there’s something really powerful about that.

Yehuda: I’m gonna ask you next question. I actually was gonna raise that with you because um, because I also find it funny Like how Jewish are you guys? And I’m like, well…

Stephanie: Are you sure? No, he says this: But are you sure your children will be Yehudim?

Yehuda: Come on. Really? Judaism signs my paychecks. I, at the same time, one of the things that’s interesting to me in watching your religious life is that you made markedly different religious choices than your parents, at some points on the way were kind of distancing, but ultimately turned into really, really clearly positive articulations of a set of Jewish commitments to Jewish values.

And I wonder whether that’s maybe at the core of your reluctance to kind of define what you think is the right future for your kids, because you want, I don’t know, maybe because you want to leave open for them the possibility that they will make opposite or alternative choices.

Stephanie: First of all, I don’t want to be a hypocrite, right. And parenthetically, anybody who has children or works with children knows the things that irritate them most that they’re looking for all the time to call you out on, is being a hypocrite. There’s like nothing you can do worse than that. So first of all, I don’t want to be a hypocrite.

And then second of all, I will say that what I believe in terms of teaching children things is a combination always of my empirical experience and then from there, studying it and researching it, right? So what I believe about brainwashing not working started with, not only did it not work for me, but it led to disastrous, potentially disastrous conclusions to then, is that really true? I better read about this. Like what? How does that work in education?

So I will tell you, Yehuda, and I think you know this, that I had so fallen from the truth that I grew up with and the only truth that I knew as a possibility in a construct where there was a single truth that didn’t work for me, that that broke down so badly that I was ready to walk directly away.

And I remember exactly, exactly the Shabbat. You might remember it too, you know what I’m gonna say? I remember the Shabbat that I realized I wanted to be Jewish. Hysterically, I was in Yeshiva University when I was debating whether I should be Jewish. I don’t know, I think I was still only wearing skirts.

But you told me to come for Shabbat to Columbia because there was a Bronfman reunion. The Bronfman Youth Fellowships. And I was like, sure, I’m coming. And that Shabbat Sharon Cohen Anisfeld spoke. I had never met a female rabbi before. I don’t think I fully knew that there were female rabbis. And I just met this whole community of people who believed incredibly different things, practiced incredibly different, who were extremely committed Jews with unbelievable truth to each of them.

Each of them seemed to have a truth with a capital T. And, like, it was a moment where I was like, no, I don’t, like, this is actually mine. And I’m going to get to define it in a way that’s meaningful, and I don’t want to give up either my obligation to it or my experience of it that I love. But if I hadn’t seen that, I would have been out, and if you and I weren’t dating, like…

Yehuda: You might not have come across it.

Stephanie: I wouldn’t have. I’m sure I wouldn’t have.

Yehuda: It’s interesting because in that example, there are going to be very observant people who listen to a podcast like this and this whole struggle that we’re trying to work through about, how normative do you convey to your children? How not? How many open pathways do you give to them? Is there’s a plausible reading of that when I don’t agree with which is this is the pathway out, right, not being really insistent on normative dogmatic frameworks. By the way, in those very communities where there are normative dogmatic frameworks, people leave.

Stephanie: Yes, they do.

Yehuda: But the leaving happens at a lower numbers and it is a rupture. And that rupture. That rupture, in and of itself signifies how hard it is, how significant the bonds are, that tether. So you could read a story like that as like, that was your pathway out. You acknowledged you were still functionally orthodox at the time. What I think you’re describing…

Stephanie: I’m functionally orthodox now, except for the egal thing.

Yehuda: Look who’s calling herself orthodox.

Stephanie: I put in my time.

Yehuda: Yeah. I think what you’re describing is the question of how do we create for our I’m going to come to students in a moment, but how do we create for our children plausible Jewish futures, multiple plausible Jewish futures that are still rooted in the core commitments that matter to them? Right? Because now, it’s true. I kind of can see, our kids could go through a set of plausible Jewish futures and some I think I would recognize more and like more, but if they wound up with Jewish futures that felt like radical departures of our core commitments that will feel sad to me. And that’s why I feel like I at least want them to know what those are. Like know what, know what you’re rejecting actually.

Stephanie: Not because it shouldn’t feel sad to you. This is a really critical thing in teaching and in parenting, right? It’s not, I want them to know this so that, you know, I don’t feel sad later. It’s gotta be from a place of, I want them to know this because I believe in it for them. It’s really important to me and for them. And I believe in it for them. And you have to know why you believe in it for them. Yeah.

Yehuda: I mean, this is one of my favorite things that the kids make fun of me for is that they, they’re always making fun of things that I say. Always. For

Stephanie: Yehuda. There’s a lot of material. “Peoplehood.”

Yehuda: That’s what they do. They, they have like a parody of the phrases that I use all the time. But part of me is like, great. You know what my Torah is, right? You know what I stand for. You know what my commitments are. And if they want to be people who are really adamantly opposed to that commitments, they’re going to have to work hard to articulate that.

And hopefully they know that by teasing, they know that we’re playing within a, like an arena together about those commitments and that their rejection of them, you know, is like

Stephanie: Do it in a chachmadik way. In a serious way.

Yehuda: In a serious way. Like make a good argument.

Stephanie: And that’s what I was saying in a sense of and I I think we might be more aligned on this than you think, is, I want them to take it seriously. I want them to respect it. I feel that this is something deserving of respect. And I don’t mean like casual respect. I mean a deep respect. And how do you respect something? You don’t respect something just because somebody tells you to. You never respect because, like you might respect shallow, but usually it’s not respect, it’s fear.

Yehuda: Usually it’s fear. It’s fear,

Stephanie: And I believe, I also believe in Ahava and Yir’ah. I also believe in love and fear. But you need to actually come to that fear on your own in a way that’s true. Right? You can’t just have fear because someone tells you to have fear. Or, because it’s based on X, Y, and Z will happen, because the first time you see that X, Y, and Z won’t happen, you’re not gonna actually have the fear anymore. It has to be internalized.

Yehuda: Yeah. By the way, you can’t instruct somebody to love something either. Which our Jewish community fails all the time around Israel.

Stephanie: So this is a really, this ism we’re getting up to two really important pieces. I think one is, how do you gain an experience? That builds love that you love without deciding you love it and maybe later on you won’t love it. Like how do you, how do you engage in something, like the act of loving before you love, right? And I want to talk to you a little bit about my educational philosophy on this. Which is sort of, it’s not a na’aseh ve’nishmah, it’s more of like na’aseh v’nifchor.

Stephanie:You can go ahead with this part.

Yehuda: Right, the Torah uses a phrase about the Israelites acceptance of the Torah, at the Revelation at Sinai, of using the phrase, “we will do it, and then we will hear it,” which is not really what it means in the Biblical Hebrew. It’s more coherent in the Biblical Hebrew, but all the interpreters, over time, said that shows the degree of their commitment, the willingness to do something, even before they had fully internalized what it means. Look how loyal they were. So go on.

Stephanie: So they will do it, and then later on, you know, they’ll understand it. That’s one way. Or at some point, I’ll understand it. And as I was taught as a kid, if you don’t understand it, it’s a problem with you. Not with the text or the Rashi or whatever. I don’t really think that works for people in modern society.

But the Naseh ve’nivchor, right, later on, I’ll choose. Right now, I’m gonna do it, and later on, I will choose. I think is a beautiful way of teaching. And I don’t mean that there’s a point that you stop and you say, and now it is time to choose, children. You’re graduating. Do you still want to be Jewish? Or, like you mentioned at a bar about mitzvah, we’re not giving them a choice. Twelve years ago, when Sally, our littlest, was a baby, I had her in a wrap on me. weeks, couple weeks, maybe two weeks after she was born, and I gave a dvar torah at our friend’s daughter’s bat mitzvah, our friend’s daughter, Abby, who’s now actually in rabbinical school. We’re both really, really proud of, and she’s going to be speaking at Sally’s bat mitzvah.

And I taught, I remember what I talked about, even though I was so postpartum that I also remember I was so incoherent, and I can’t remember what I said this morning, but I still remember that, because I talked about how it’s such a funny thing to become an official Jew with responsibility, an adult. And when you actually have made zero choices for your life, you’re not even choosing the kind of Judaism you practice because you’re in a home and homes have rules and infrastructure and norms. And some of them are explicit and some of them are not, but you for sure have made no choices, with respect to that, except in a minor number of homes.

But this is when we make you an adult and responsible for your decisions, even though you haven’t chosen the whole thing. And I think that is magical and beautiful. You get to experience it with a level of responsibility, not at a superficial, playful, inauthentic level. You are an authentic, full part of this. And you know what? You’re going to get older, and then you’re going to decide whether you want it or not, but it’s not going to be a theoretical activity. It’s going to be based in lived experience.

Yehuda: Yeah, so what you’re effectively describing is habituating people into something, even to the point where they are claimants, they’re owners. And then there will be a journey in life where they’re accepting or rejecting what they’ve gotten before. But, and I think we hold this in common, Jewish education should make you a kind of person who can be a learned rejecter of what you came before, as opposed to an ignorant rejecter.

And we’ve seen this actually with friends. We have friends who, and I have plenty of learners at Hartman who feel that they were deprived of the choices to reject things. So instead they felt, they felt like they were encountering something that had been rejected for them. This is Sara Hurwitz’s book, Here I Am (Here All Along). Her basic frustration with the Jewish community she inherited was, by only discovering as an adult, she felt like something had been hidden from her, she had been habituated.

And I think that this is a big piece of the school that you lead. Although there’s no expectations that people’s households follow kind of traditional strictures and norms, there is a kind of, for lack of a better word, frum environment. There’s a kind of habituated environment to Jewish life and learning. And I’m wondering whether you see that, where the consistencies are between how you think about this for a school versus how you think about this for parents at home.

Stephanie: Yeah, totally. I’m so happy to talk about that. And I just will say I wouldn’t use the terms, and maybe this is semantics, rejection or acceptance, I would say choose. Because it, I don’t actually believe it’s realistic to think that, we’re in a time where you will have this experience and then you’re going to automatically follow. Clearly that’s done, but also it’s not right to think you will either then reject or accept. It also creates this relationship with the parents that is very dangerous, where you think every child, every decision your child is making is in reaction to you.

Right? Like, and that’s the piece of, if your kid is marrying somebody from outside the Jewish faith, most likely they’re not doing it because

Yehuda: It’s not about you.

Stephanie: It’s not about you! And you know when you know this? When you’re in your twenties. And you know when you forget it? When you’re in your forties, fifties, and sixties. But you know it so clearly in your twenties when everything you’re doing, and your parents are like, why did you do it? And you’re like, it’s not about you. You had to remember your twenties.

Yehuda: And acceptance of rejection goes that, that language of choosing is helpful because people’s lives are long.

Stephanie: And you’re gonna choose and change. Like I still, I still think we might change. And I hope so, cause I don’t wanna be like, this is, I do believe it’s a living Torah, right? So I will say that I think it’s a choice. And I also think you can’t choose if you don’t know the options. So part of being learned is understanding your options and understanding, part, I think a big piece of Judaism is not just the choice of the options that exist, but the choice of making something that doesn’t exist because you have the background.

So when I think about my work, you know, and I didn’t go to education because I was a person who was obsessed with education. Like, I did start my career in Teach for America, but that was because I knew how to teach a little bit because I’d been in Jewish youth groups my whole life and I really wanted to see communities that were poor and not Jewish. And then I came back to education, whatever, 15 years later, something like that, after practicing law, etc. And really debated whether or not I wanted to go back into education.

But for me, I always thinking about, what can I do? Like, this is so trite, but what can I do to set as much of the world as possible that I can touch, up for better, right, like whether it’s the five people around me or the 20 people or something, like, how can I make this a little better? And really leaned into the feeling like for me, between the lever of change and the way that I, and the issues I care about, I feel like I can do that by empowering kids. And that’s the way I can make the most impact.

And so when I think about, when I go into school, like literally every day, okay. Every single morning, I’m not joking, which, and almost always, I have a wig on or I’m in costume, right? I am actually looking at every child coming through that door and thinking, You’re the future of the Jewish people. And thinking, I’m really, really lucky to be part of your life. You know, by the end of the day, I’m like dead, as you know, but that’s how I start every single morning.

And so the way that I think about conveying Judaism, we, I’m gonna tell you it in our, in the way we’ve articulated it, right? We have four pillars of our education and one of them is empowered Judaism. We debated so much whether it should be called empowered Judaism because we, what we don’t want is like the kids who are like, I’m in charge of Judaism and I know what to do, blah blah blah, you know, I don’t want entitled to Judaism. But empowered because we want them to be the people who can not only choose, but also choose a new path and pave it.

And we think about it as having three key components, which I really think parallel our lives. And, you know, I don’t know, there’s probably some psychology in that and the way that I wrote them with the team that I work with. We think about it as fluency, we think about it as personal meaning, and communal experience.

And the fluency piece is really big, and it’s actually more unusual than you would think outside of Orthodoxy, because fluency, it’s like such a value in Orthodoxy, not fluency in every part of Judaism, right? But like the text, the basic texts, you’re the Torah, the prophets, the rabbis. And the fluency can be memorization, whatever it is, right? I might teach it differently, and I might cover it in different things, and I might teach it to different people who wouldn’t be able to learn it in other spaces. For example, people who’s, who, who are in an inter, kids from an interfaith family, right? Or girls learning Talmud, or whatever it might be.

But that fluency is so empowering. You have confidence to make choices, and you have enough confidence to say at a certain point, oh, wait, no, I don’t see the choice here. That doesn’t mean I’m out. It means I can find my way.

Yehuda: Yeah, I think there’s one big difference between how you’re thinking about this and I think how we parent at home.

Stephanie: We outsource fluency.

Yehuda: Well, no, outsourcing is a piece of it, which is important. But also there’s just a realness and a casualness. Everything you have to do in a Jewish educational environment, you have to construct that environment. And you don’t, I don’t think any parent, realistically, is, can be in the mode of constantly constructing the educational environments for their children at home. We talked about this….

Stephanie: That’s brutal. Who wants to live in a house like that?

Yehuda: Shabbat with our kids. That we grew up with a highly, a much, a much, a very, we grew up with a very different image of what the Shabbat table looks like. Our family is Shabbat observant. Shabbat meals are really important to us and to our family. At best, I’ve changed my shirt.

Stephanie: I never have changed for Friday night.

Yehuda: Usually, it’s what everybody puts on pajamas.

Stephanie: Yes, Friday night.

Yehuda: At home, like, everybody was showered and cleaned and went to shul, came home, and then the table, we set the table, there was china, there was multiple courses.

Stephanie: Tablecloths? Who ironed those?

Yehuda: Tablecloths, I know, tablecloths. So you can’t do that. You, you could be curating those experience all the time, and there are plenty of Jewish parents who do.

Stephanie: That would be inauthentic to us. That goes back to the other thing.

Yehuda: Right, so you’re saying it works if it’s authentic as opposed to, for the people for whom that’s their Shabbat.

Stephanie: So listen, I don’t actually think, I think there are so few Jews, even amongst the highly, highly literate, educated Jews we know, who can give fluency at home. I actually think you need to invest in your children’s Jewish education.

Yehuda: Although there are some elements of fluency at home.

Stephanie: And that doesn’t have to be day school, by the way. Just wanna say, yes, there’s camp, there’s other things, but there’s other forms of fluency at home.

Yehuda: Yes, there’s other things, but there’s other forms of fluency at home. How we talk, how we do Shabbat. Those are also…

Stephanie: That’s practice. Those are, those are fluency from practice. I think there’s fluency from practice, there’s fluency from learning. Because if you want your kids to have the thick kind of relationship to Judaism, that’s sticky, you’ve got to invest in it. They’re going to have a thick relationship to whatever they decide to do. Your child wants to be a biologist and they’re studying biology, their relationship is going to be super thick, right? And they’re going to be committed to it. They’ve learned a lot. They’ve spent a lot of time. I really believe that that’s a big piece of it. So that’s one piece of it.

And then the personal meaning, right? If you don’t understand why this is important to me and you don’t make those connections, that’s lost. Again, this is about school. This is about camp. This is about Hebrew school. This is about those sorts of places. And at home, It’s about articulating, periodically, why I do something.

Yehuda: Right, the index of personal meaning really comes very differently from home than it does from school. Right? Because that’s where you see a real gap between, yeah, you learned that at school, but we don’t replicate any of that at home, or we don’t, we don’t even appreciate those dimensions of something in Judaism. And, you know, we talk about this also at home a lot. There’s like, what we educate for at home, I think our core values are taught at home.

Stephanie: I think you’re right. We happen to have a school that parallels them almost directly because I run it.

Yehuda: Well, yes, but not, but we also send our kids after eighth grade to an Orthodox high school. And I always feel even with Beit Rabban, I’ll say confessionally, there’s, there’s most of the time where I feel like I’m outsourcing things that I want my kids to learn in school. And then there’s a third category, which is not what you educate for at school, what you outsource, what you educate for at home, what you outsource for at school, but what you counter educate at home.

Stephanie: Yes, 100%. We talk about this all the time. And I tell parents about this.

Yehuda: I think, I hope you encourage them.

Stephanie: Are you kidding? I for sure do.

Yehuda: Because that to me helps to bridge that gap between the personal, the journey of personal meaning that they are cultivating at home, what they get at school, and where there is sometimes a tension between those two.

Yehuda: It’s a beautiful opportunity that parents could help connect. And that, if you’re not scared of having those conversations, because you’re gonna, you’re gonna show your kids your cards, even if you don’t know the answer. And it’s so, kids love it when you don’t know the answer. It’s like tantalizing to them, right? And you don’t know what you think about something. That is such a meaningful opportunity. Counter educating, as long as you’re not doing it in a way where you’re like looking down and mocking others, which you never want to do, because obviously that’s just bad behavior, is such a powerful opportunity for conversation.

You can even say, look, I just had, I have a family, this is kind of breaking my heart, who, really grew up as secular Israelis and defined themselves as Chiloni. We have a lot of Chiloni families in the school, and I, like, am thrilled by that. I think it’s a really critical axis of diversity in our school. And this family really struggled with the fact that as their kids got older, they were really spending time, not just learning chumash, but doing tefillah. And their kid loves it.

Yehuda: Praying.

Stephanie: Praying. And Chumash is studying Bible in its original text and decoding it and, like, breaking it down. Like, we’re spending a lot of time breaking it down. These are all transferable skills. By the way, the stuff that you learn, I mean, just for your audience, what you learn in a Jewish day school around text skills is, is so sophisticated relative to what any other second or third grader learns. This is a plug for Jewish day school for one more second. Also, there is like nothing developmentally appropriate about the Bible, and that is so fabulous for their learning. Okay, so go back to what I was saying.

Yehuda: You know, do you remember this story with Jesse when he was at home and, and I don’t remember who I was in conversation with and I made reference to something that really can only be understood in the Bible through Biblical Criticism. I mean, the commentaries winded about, and he just, he was like, all right. You got to explain that to me. And I said, I said to him, are you sure you want to know? And he said, yes. And I trusted him with, well, maybe this was written before that. And he just, you know, he nodded. He was okay with it, but yes, it’s not developmentally appropriate.

Stephanie: I also want people to know, he’s the only one of our three kids who was listening to the conversation and would care to have the conversation, right? Lest you think otherwise.

So this family just really, it really, it felt like it pushed against their identity, but they really wanted to have their kids in Jewish day school. And we talked about it at length. And I feel like a failure in this because I feel like I wasn’t able to, and this is also, you can’t feel like you’re a failure because you haven’t convinced somebody of something else, but I wasn’t able to convey to them how important it is for your kid to know all this stuff and for you to tell them why you’re Chiloni. Know this and say why I’m Chiloni. And also to be open to the fact that if they’re living in America, they might actually want to join a synagogue, because otherwise it’s really hard to identify.
Yehuda: Or if they move back to Israel.

Stephanie: Or if they move back to Israel, whatever. And I feel, I felt like I couldn’t, I couldn’t convey that. And it really broke my heart, because what I didn’t want them to take away was, no, this isn’t the right place for you. It’s too religious. First of all, it’s like not, it’s not. It’s like such a, it’s such a nuanced thing.

Yehuda: Let me ask you one last piece, which is, will be about this weekend. I mean, you had alluded to before about, like, our kids have said to us that they feel implicit pressure to become Jewish leaders, Jewish educators.

Stephanie: Only one has told us that.

Yehuda: I think that, I think all of them feel it. And I, I actually kind of love that. I think it’s, I, I’m in very much in a mode, this is like part of the Hartman Teen Fellows, of like, we, this is like a great and purpose and aspiration and it’s in service of a great people. If the wrong people do it, our people will be worse for it. So let’s find great young people and tell them, yeah, you should consider doing this. If they want to be biologists, they’re not going to entertain the alternative of being Jewish educators, but there’s gotta be some percentage of them.

And, and by the way, it has historically been the case that family children of Jewish educators become Jewish educators. So I don’t feel a lot of, I don’t feel a lot of guilt about that. I want them to know that if they decide to go into private equity, that is also okay. But I want them to, I want them to know and feel that we think that our choices, our professional choices have dignity and meaning and value that we didn’t stumble into them.

And partly it’s personal. Partially it’s personal because at the pivotal moment in my life when I wasn’t sure what to do, the person who directed me back to work for the Jewish people was my father.

Stephanie: That’s right. I forgot about that.

Yehuda: And I was like dancing around all these things and he was just like, I think this is what you’re supposed to do. And I remember it. So I feel like we owe that and it wasn’t just because it was the Jews. It was because he knew me.

I guess I want to ask you, I’m gonna, so I’m speaking at the Bat Mitzvah about leadership. Now I’m going to speak about how our family believes in leadership, and that it’s not because we think leaders are better people than others, it’s because leaders are people who look around, see problems, see themselves having agency, and step into the breach to fix it. That’s what I’m going to talk about.

I would love for you to finish with something you might say to Sally this weekend at the bat mitzvah, and something you’re hoping to see in Sally at the bat mitzvah.

Stephanie: I’m going to talk about something totally different. I’m going to talk about the person she’s named after, my auntie, Sally, Salcha bat Naima, who passed away, less than a year ago in June. And one of the best things about being a Jew from an Arab land, about being a Sephardi Jew, is that we name after living people, and it gives a lot of respect to them. And she and Sally overlapped for 11 years. She took a lot of, she took a lot of joy, as you remember, in Sally having her name.

And I’m going to talk about Auntie Sally as a person who actually is, like, the best, was the best kind of person to influence a child’s future. She just was present. She was present for you whenever. She was present for you when, when you were going to need her because she was already present. And she listened. And she talked and she engaged with respect from the time you were a toddler. She would treat a toddler with the same kind of respect that she would teach, treat an 80 year old with. And she embodied, she really did embody her values and she lived them and she shared them, because she made space for everyone to participate in them, as you remember.

Her Jewish values, her, actually, all of her values in her mind, I think, were Jewish values. She was a holistic person in that respect. And I’m going to talk about, I guess this really parallels what I was saying before. I’m going to talk about carrying on that legacy and I’m not going to say I hope you X, Y, and Z, I hope you’re like Auntie Sally, I hope you’ll carry it on. I’m just going to remind her of the legacy that she holds. And I’m going to believe that she’ll do the best she possibly can with it.

And what do I hope to see? I, look, I really hope to see people eating a lot. I hope she enjoys it. I hope she is licking the honey off that Torah when she is reading it.