The following is a transcript of Episode 5 of the Perfect Jewish Parents Podcast. Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Masua: 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 Masua Sagiv. I’m Scholar in Residence for the Shalom Hartman Institute, and I have four kids between the ages 3 and 14. 

Josh: And I’m Joshua Ladon, director of Education for the Shalom Hartman Institute. My kids are 5, 8, and 10.

Masua: This episode was recorded in Israel, where in the summer, the Shalom Hartman Institute runs a number of study programs for Jewish leaders, for rabbis, heads of Jewish day schools, folks who work for Hillel on campus, and lay leaders. I brought my family to Israel this summer, as did you, Josh.

Josh: Yes, though I assume my bringing my family to Israel had a different feel than you with your family. While my wife and I met in Israel, I spent my 20s studying in Jerusalem, we’re not returning to where we were born and raised, as you are. But for us, Israel is still not like visiting any other location. There’s something about this trip that feels like an opportunity to figure out where we are in the bigger story of the Jewish people.

And it has allowed me to put front and center for my kids that we are part of a much larger Jewish people where everyone doesn’t look, act, or sound the way we do. I imagine this sounds familiar, given that you as an Israeli have been living in the U.S. for the last two years.

Masua: You know, I have a friend who said that once you cross the ocean, you are always on the wrong side of it, which is not exactly how I feel, but one central idea that we discuss at Hartman is that the Jewish people went from no home to two homes, going from being without a safe place that people can call home, being perpetual victims and exiled, to two homes, to having two thriving centers, homes for the Jewish people in North America. And in Israel, which is very not like the classic version of Zionism that a Jew outside of Israel is either an Oleh, an immigrant to Israel, or a potential victim.

And I feel this is my reality today, my personal reality today. I went from one home in Israel to two homes, both literally and figuratively. My family are both comfortable and slightly foreign in America and in Israel now. And it’s hard to feel completely at home in two places at once, but I really hope that we can still keep on holding the connections to both locations, even though this connection has a price of, of foreignness and, and constant longings.

Josh: Meaning like, when you’re at home in America, you’re missing things from Israel. And when you’re home in Israel, you’re missing things from America. 

Masua: But I’ll try to be less of a Jewish mother. And I’ll say that not that I’m missing the other place, but I really am glad to have both experiences together.

Josh: I appreciate both, yes. And I think it should be said, we’re very privileged to be able to globetrot with our children in service of showing them the diversity of the Jewish people. And I hope I get to do more of that, but it’s not enough, or I can’t simply rely on jet travel to inculcate a sense of broader Jewish peoplehood for my kids.

It’s also something I’m trying to do in my home and the books we read and the, you know, movies we watch, whatever. And that sense of feeling a connection to the Jewish collective is, as you mentioned, it’s a sweet inheritance. There’s something really powerful about making connections with Jews around the world, with feeling responsible for Jews who need help around the world. And there are challenges that come with this either because it can engender this sense of foreignness. Oh, I feel at home and not at home in a bunch of places.

And as we often see, just because someone is Jewish doesn’t mean I agree with them. In fact, I disagree fervently with many Jews. Raising children committed to Jewish peoplehood, to the collective of the Jewish people that transcends religious and ethnic definitions, brings with it a lot of questions that you have to be able to navigate with your kids.

Masua: To explore these questions, we are joined today by Tal Becker. Tal is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute and legal advisor of Israel’s foreign ministry, and his life, both growing up in Australia and raising a family in Israel, as well as his professional career pursuing peace for Israel, is embedded in the story of the Jewish people. We talked with Tal about what it means to raise children aware of the broader Jewish collective, the possibilities this opens up and the questions one is likely to face. 

Josh: We’ll be back with that conversation after a minute.

Masua: Welcome back. Tal, it’s really great to be here with you in Israel. Josh and I were talking before that this transition from one big Jewish center to another big Jewish center, whether it’s from Israel to the North America or the opposite, with our families, really give us an opportunity to think and reflect about where we are situated, where our kids are situated in the bigger story of the Jewish people.

Now, you definitely had time to think about this question of your, you and your family as situated in the bigger Jewish story or the bigger story of the Jewish people, wherever you want to take it. And we want to ask you, can you tell us a bit about you, about your family? What brought you to this place? What in your upbringing has led you to where you are today?

Tal: Well, thanks, Masua. Thanks, Josh. This is fun, first of all, so I’m glad to do this with you. I was born in Paris. My father from Morocco. My mother was born in Uzbekistan, but her family’s from Poland. But we ended up in Melbourne, Australia. The Melbourne Jewish community, we lived like in the heart of what you would call the Jewish ghetto of Melbourne, very tight knit community, predominantly Holocaust survivors and their descendants. 

And I grew up very much with my mother’s parents and my mother, for whom the Holocaust was a very big part of how they understood their Jewish identity, a very strong Zionistic family. And in essence, I felt like if I didn’t make Aliyah, if I didn’t move to Israel, I would have to explain why. I didn’t have to explain why I was doing it. I would have to explain why I wasn’t doing it. It was a, it was almost a given. I went to Bnei Akiva. I was very involved. I went to a modern Orthodox day school, Yavneh. I always grew up feeling like Melbourne was a way station before moving to Israel, which was just the natural thing. And also I think as a young guy, when I was about 18, I said to myself, either I’m going to be a professional cricketer, you know, cricket, that’s a popular game, even though it’s not North America, not that known. Or I’m going to bring peace to the Middle East, right? Those are the only two options I have in my life. 

And this idea of being part of where the Jewish story was being told and being shaped, especially when you’re so far away, in Melbourne, it’s hard to delude yourself that you’re, you’re playing a big part in the Jewish story. You live a very rich and meaningful kind of full Jewish life if you want to, but you’re not exactly at the center of decision making and I had an urge for that as well. But if I can jump to my kids here, I have six children, and I think they, they grew up with two parents who are very clearly Olim, right? You guys decided to move here. That awareness, I think, has shaped them, even if we haven’t talked about it. And it’s still part of me, very much part of me. I’ve been here almost 30 years. But I’m still a bit of an outsider in some way, like part of me is, is still like, whoa, this is Israel and whatever. 

Just to tell you one little story that just jumps to my mind. We used to live in an apartment. We had a tiny little backyard, a little backyard, actually not too bad. And we had a hammock in it. And if you creaked your neck in a certain angle, you could basically see the old city of Har Habayit through a crack. So I’m sitting with my daughter on the hammock. And I asked her, she was in grade four at the time, and I asked her, what did you learn at school today?

And she said, Akedat Yitzchak, the binding of Isaac. And I’m thinking to myself, that’s a bit of a weird thing to teach. Intense. But whatever. And I said, do you know where that happened? And she looked at me like I’m a total idiot, like how could I not know where that happened? I’m asking if I don’t know and she goes, yeah, there, and she just points to it. And for her, it was just like obvious that this is where it happened and it was just like a natural, and for me, like the chills are coming through my spine and oh my God, if my grandparents, Holocaust survivors could have heard my daughter so nonchalantly saying, here I live in Jerusalem, and that’s where Akedat Yitzchak happens.

So it’s kind of the gap I feel between myself and my children is pretty intense in that, because I’m still, I still have that kind of awe and wonder and sense of privilege of living here, of being in Jerusalem. I live in Jerusalem. That’s an amazing thing. And for my kids, it’s just where’s the bus to whatever. It’s not a, it’s not a thing. 

Masua: Let me ask you something. This was a very, like an oleh narrative, immigrant to Israel. Yes. And yet you’ve been working for the past a lot of years in the peoplehood field and you’re committed to peoplehood. Can you talk about how this connects with your experience and specifically how this connects in your family?

Tal: I would say first, personally, we moved to Australia from Paris. I am very rare individual who lost their French and picked up Yiddish because my mother would translate my French to my grandparents into Yiddish. So I learned Yiddish and lost my French through that translation process. But the urge for belonging, given my personal story was always very strong.

And I think, frankly, in the psychology of most people, but certainly of children, there is this kind of inbuilt tension between wanting to belong and wanting to stand out. Those are always there in some way, and I, I often think about in terms of parenthood, how do you create the spaces so that your children can do both?

And for me, that pull of belonging was unbelievably strong. I wanted to understand why is there meaning to me here in Australia or wherever else. And the fact that I could connect myself to a people’s story was an organizing principle for me speaking psychologically. But then for every teenager or wherever else, I can’t just belong, I have to also stand out in some way, right? And then comes the pull of, how are you going to do it uniquely? How are you going to do it in a way that people notice you, even if it’s, that’s a little bit embarrassing. And that, that I think has always been the kind of mixture with me. 

Josh: It’s interesting to think, I was reflecting on my own story and my grandparents. My zaidy, my grandfather, was born in Montana to a fur trapper. We’re like the Jews that didn’t come through New York. I feel like very proudly that I’m not of New York Jewish experience. But like the story, it’s so interesting to think about, for me, the story of America, my Jewishness is wrapped up in my story of America, but my Jewishness is also wrapped up in my story of the broader Jewish people.

And there were the feeling of, oh, like when my kids are growing, we’re raising our children in Berkeley, California. How do I bring them into this larger Jewish story is constantly sort of a question. And at the same time. I’m not the only person with a weird grandparent story in, you know, West Coast Judaism is incredibly diverse. I think there were eight different languages spoken in my kid’s classroom. So on one hand, they’re living this question of Jewish peoplehood all the time. But on the other hand, it’s like, when is that story, a story of Jewish peoplehood that’s, oh, the Jews are these people that, anywhere you go, you’re going to run into someone Jewish.

And on the other hand, there’s some core narratives. Like I brought them this summer to Israel to be with us because I want them to have some experience with people who are also not like them, but are also of their Jewish story. Not to say that everyone in Israel is Jewish.

Tal Becker: I would say in the American Jewish context that I know that is a particularly acute challenge because you can also, because of America’s story of itself and because of the history of American Jews, the language of Americanness as a kind of full thing that needs to somehow sit with Jewish identity is real for a lot of other diaspora communities.

And even a diaspora community like Australia, where Australia is very welcoming, your Australianness is not as complete, it’s not as all consuming, and there is that feeling of we’re different and we’re tolerated or they’re even respected and whatever, but it’s still, this is a place that lets me be Jewish rather than I’m Australian and Jewish, at least that’s the way I grew up and so on.

Masua: Then you have the mirror image, though, that when you grow up in Israel, usually you’re just Israeli. You’re Jewish, but you’re an Israeli Jewish. When I grew up, it was clear. The only possibility for a Jew outside of Israel is either a potential oleh immigrant or a potential victim, right? And then when we moved two years ago to California, I told my kids part of the story that I told my kids is you’re gonna meet and get to know American Jews. And they asked me, why do we need to meet or get to know American Jews? I mean, what, what do we have specifically with American Jews? Why are you not telling us you’re going to meet and get to know Americans? Why are you telling us we’re going to meet and get to know American Jews? It’s a question. Why do we need, why do we need a commitment to a Jewish people or Jewish collective?

Tal: One way, you don’t need anything. If you can make a case for it, then, and it’s meaningful, then good. And if you can’t, you can’t. I have found for myself, it’s the best place to start, that the concept of peoplehood ties you to a past and a future. and enables you as an individual to tell a story about yourself that feels bigger than yourself and that makes you feel part of a community and in the most basic of psychological terms, makes you feel somehow not alone in the world, makes you at least delude yourself that what you’re doing has a greater purpose, right? I’m not sure if it’s not a delusion. 

One of my friends says that life is meaningless, but it’s better to live it as if it’s not, right? That’s the way he offers it. And for me, I don’t know whether I want to go that far, but I just, I just think it’s, we have a deep human need, most of us, not to feel like we’re atoms in some space, we want to understand ourselves in a space. Now, there’s a people that’s 3, 500 years old that has these ideas and values and contradictions and arguments and history and so on that makes you make sense of something in a way that I think is powerful. And I think you’re right, Masua, that for children growing up in Israel, it’s so given and natural. I also think as a parent, you think, oh, this peoplehood stuff will be taken care of because they’re going to a school and they’re in Israel and, but it’s not taken care of because it’s so assumed that it’s never really spoken in, in such a clear way.

Except I would caveat that in just a small way in that, at least with some of my kids, my feeling is that when we tell stories about the Jewish people, they think it happened to us, right? That’s the language. You know how on the, on the dreidel, it says neis gadol hayah poh, like a miracle was here, right? If you talk about things that happen to the Jewish people, there is an automatic thing, this happened to my gang, right? It’s not something you’re, that’s foreign. And that’s a nice part of the naturalness of it. But I do worry that the naturalness of it makes it so assumed that it becomes not meaningful enough and also not passed on. 

Josh: What you’re saying is if something is in the air, it’s easy to forget that you actually have room to shape it and that you might want to shape it. And that comes with values. 

Tal: That’s right. 

Josh: What I also heard you saying is wrestling with, is this just instrumental or is this something larger? And for me, I think this might be because this is where my religious thinking seeps through. But for me, I’m always rabbinic tradition, there’s lots of midrashim about the Torah being given to the Jewish people. There’s especially a series where the Torah then goes around and is like part of the camp and then goes back up into the heavens. And what I draw from that is when I think about the Torah, I’m not just thinking about mitzvot or commandments. I’m thinking about really like the grandiose creative output of the Jewish people.

And so for me, Jewish peoplehood is intimately related to this vision of sort of Jewish creativity, that I call Sinai, that I call Torah, that, that is interwoven with one another, so that when, thank God, the benefit of Masua coming and being a scholar in residence in the Bay Area is that our eight year olds are best friends, like, that that also is cultivating, it’s not just about people liking each other, it’s cultivating a Torah, it’s cultivating a Torah, it’s cultivating a vision.

Tal: Yeah, I wanna say two things about that, Josh. The first maybe is that at least with my children, I remember once I said to my teenage, one of my teenage daughters, I have five daughters. I said to her, I’m going to ruin your life now, I give you permission to rebel. I give you permission to rebel. Because I do think that trying to, to teach your children directly sit down and let me tell you something is almost guaranteed to be a way that they will push back against it. And so need to be much more sophisticated, I think, at least, maybe you’re better parents than I am, but it’s not really about passing on this thing, right? There is something you have to be, it has to be indirect and in the air a certain bit. 

And the second thing about what you said about the Torah and that idea, it reminds me when they asked Chaim Weizmann, first president of Israel, this is at least the myth that they say, why didn’t you accept Uganda? And he said, it’s like asking me, why don’t I visit the nice old lady up the street instead of visiting my own grandmother, right? This is our particularity, and everyone through some sense of particular identity operates in the world. You can’t operate just in that, what you need to have, everybody has a kitchen, but this is my kitchen. That’s where I do my cooking, right? It’s the mechanism through which we operate. And I think connecting people to that, connecting your children to that is critical, but you have to do it in a little bit more of a sophisticated way. Just sitting them down and saying, right, you’re part of the peoplehood is not, is not something that’s taught. I think it’s something that’s felt fundamentally. 

Josh: Well, so how did you answer your children of like, why do we need to meet American Jews? 

Masua: Basically it was, because, if we want to study or to learn about ourselves, this is part of us learning about ourselves. This is part of us learning about the possibility of Judaism. This is about us learning about the possibility of who we can be. And this is part of us being a collective. 

Tal: Yeah. And they immediately rebelled against it. 

Masua: So I have, my oldest, we need to work on her rebellion. I’m really concerned that her rebellion will come, since she’s not rebelling at all. She’s the opposite. It will come at a late time. I’m concerned. I’m concerned to the accumulative. But I want to ask you something because before we talked about this being in the air, but there are different options of being a part of a larger story. It can be the larger story of the Jewish community in Israel, or it can be the larger story of the Jewish community in North America. And we’re talking here about something a bit different, which is the larger story of the Jewish people in general. 

Now, when it’s in the air, and when you have challenges, for example, a very conflicting and contradicting political culture, then this, this really undercuts our attempts at peoplehood, right?

Tal: The first part of what you said about being in the air, I want to say that sometimes because it’s in the air, because it’s so assumed the rebellion takes the form of saying, no, I’m not going to accept this peoplehood thing as part of who I am, because you’re all assuming that I’m here already, and I want to make my own decision about it. So that, too, I think is problematic. 

I think that the assumption behind the way you put it, Masua is that, for me to feel part of a people means the people that I’m with need to be like me, right? And that’s what’s so wonderful and peculiar, I think, especially about the concept of Jewish peoplehood. I, you know, I often joke that what if, what is the meta narrative of Jewish peoplehood? I think fundamentally Jews are the people that argue about what being Jewish means, right? If you’re in that conversation, if it matters to you, you’re probably part of the Jewish people. 

And I think that’s part of the educational process, that understanding that that person that’s so different from you actually has a similar set of terms of references, but has maybe interpreted them differently, is operating in the same kind of, space of ideas as you are, but has reached different conclusions. And that richness and diversity is Jewish peoplehood. I think that’s a wonderful thing if you can to have your child adopt rather than saying, hey, there’s no such things as people, cause they’re different from me. 

Josh: I’ll say, we’re living this right now, having brought my kids to Israel and there, the thing they noticed first, my eldest was like, there are so many people that smoke cigarettes here. We have problems in the Bay Area. We’ve got homelessness. We’ve got the, but no one’s smoking. And here

Masua: Not smoking… cigarettes. 

Josh: That might be true. 

Tal: I’m not sure they’re doing that as part of their Jewish identity. 

Josh: But then she said, but they’re Jews, and some of them are wearing kippot, and they’re smoking cigarettes, and I was like, yeah, that’s like, like, meaning that, that challenge of, and I liked that challenge in some respects, because it wasn’t about this person votes this way or this person votes that way, which is what I think we often traffic in when we’re dealing with adult learners at Hartman, but it’s, oh, no, we’re, people have different practices that might really bother us.

Tal: Yeah. I think the harder challenge at some level is that if they’re different from me this way, other people are different from me in that they’re not Jewish, but I have other points of connection. So why is it that the Jewish peoplehood is that thing that needs to hold us together? Maybe it’s something else that holds me together with other people. So there are porous borders there that you need to pay attention to.

Masua: Because you need to balance the fact that you are connected and disconnected. That’s right. And I think in a sense, it’s also in a very partisan world. It’s not very different than the fact that I’m connected and disconnected from a lot of the people from my fellow citizens or for my fellow people inside my own state, but it’s kind of different when, when it’s my own state, I encounter them. I’m with them. I know their ways. I know their culture. I know the way that they act. I know their practices. Now we’re trying to cultivate our kids to strengthen the connectedness, even though the disconnectedness might be much weigher. 

Tal: There is a kind of big question that is below the surface of everything you’re talking about, which is how do children form their identity of who they are? How do people understand, what are the mechanisms by which our people understand who they are? How much of it is what a teacher told them in a classroom? How much of it is from the air, as we were talking about, right? So much of who I am, I think, was shaped by being in a youth movement. And just the, what was socially acceptable, what made me feel like I was not going to be teased or left out of things.

So many of these dynamics, I think, are relevant, and in our family, we try to do a few rituals to Becker-ize Jewish things, right? So we’ll, it’s not just that we’re part of the Jewish people, but we do it in our own way so that it becomes a kind of something we own in our separate way as well. So like, Erev Rosh Hashanah, we have a a yearly ritual of everybody tries to think of their theme for the year or how they will shape the year and you put it in a hot air balloon and you tie it to a hot air balloon and we let it up in the air before Rosh Hashanah starts. We have a special Havdalah ritual every Motzei Shabbat. We do a little Tikkun Leil Shavuot, just the family.

All these kind of things that we, is not done with some great deliberate attempt to teach peoplehood, but to kind of say, it’s in my crazy belief that if you grew up with this as the thing that kind of you do as a family custom, somehow it’ll be just incorporated in your identity without it being pushed down your throat.

Josh: One of the things you’re alluding to, Tal, is Jewish peoplehood is a very abstract concept. My kids don’t understand maps, they don’t under, they’re young, but the sense of, oh, how am I drawing my family into a set of activities which helps them to see themselves beyond themselves, connected to particular people? I also want them to be connected to broader humanity. And to the story inside the Jewish people. 

And so what are those behaviors and how do I do those behaviors in ways that also help me feel unique? The desire for connection in the late nineties, when young American Jews would come to Israel, a core piece of it was like the Mifgash. You come with your school, mifgash means meeting, I’m going to set you up with Israeli Jews, your same age, and then you guys will connect. And sometimes that’s really nice. And sometimes if you’re an awkward teenager like myself who was like, oh, I’m really interested in my reformed Jewish identity. And I’m meeting secular Israelis, it’s like, wait, there’s no, we’re bumping into each other. 

Masua: Not to mention the fact, when I grew up and I was in Bnei Akiva in Holon, the religious Zionist youth group in Israel, I was very active in Holon and they brought, which is completely different than what’s going on now. They brought a group of Conservative American teenagers to meet with us. It was completely foreign to everything. 

Tal: You’re reminding me of my pen pal, my Israeli pen pal in Netanya, my mother saying you have to write to him, I’m sure his mother saying that she has to, in the end, they probably, both mothers were just writing to each other or something and pretending it was us and it felt a little bit foreign.

But Josh, you said something that really made me, this is also about philosophies of parenthood at a basic level. I don’t feel that I have a right to want my kid to be a certain way or to be similar to me in the way I understand my Jewish identity. My responsibility as a parent is related to encouraging a kind of self confidence, helping to have a capacity to deal with challenges, a belief in self, different things like that.

And I am a very flawed model of what one version of being Jewish but having a universal commitment to and being Israeli to means. If that’s relevant to them, that’s great. But I’ve never really felt that anxiety of saying, will I cultivate it in them or not? And I, I’m not sure, but I think if I had that anxiety, I wouldn’t succeed more, number one, and number two, I’m not sure that it’s healthy parenthood.

Josh Ladon: I want to yes and it, because I’m from the Bay Area, so we’re going to yes and it, which is to say, I think that’s true within a spectrum of ideas. And I know that, especially around commitment to Jewish people, which can look sometimes as overly particular, there might be facets of Jewish life that I don’t feel confident talking about and therefore I never talk about it, and therefore it’s neither in the air nor is the teacher getting it, and then the values that I’m imbuing in my child, I don’t want to be agnostic about those values, I want to have values, I want to encourage them to certain values, but what I hear you saying is, and for me, that means being really clear about, oh, I have commitments to Jewish peoplehood. I want you to see those. I want you to experience those. And I don’t want that to be the end all be all of your Jewish experience. And I want you to find yourself inside the sort of broad parameters. 

Masua: I just want to highlight some of the fact that we are using terms and sometimes they can be confusing because some practices that we make. So for example, your ritual in Rosh Hashanah. It can be a peoplehood ritual. It can be a Judaism ritual. 

And sometimes it feels like because our rituals or our way of being can be interpreted as something very individual, as something for our family, as something as part of our people or as part of our religion or as part of our culture, this is also, this is one of the trickiest parts of peoplehood, which I think that even though a lot of the things that we were talking about, my family, when I tried to be very pluralistic and educate for Jewish pluralism, which was something that was very clear and obvious to my kids, but they didn’t connect it to Jewish peoplehood. They connected to Jewish pluralism or Jewish liberalism. 

Josh: What I hear you saying, and for me is, part of what I’m, my response to Tal is, I want to triangulate it. I want to think about, oh, how am I being confident in the set of values I want to aspire to knowing that I can’t predict everything, but also how am I, when we’re doing certain behaviors or I’m like, how am I also reminding them sometimes? We do this because we care about people here, or we do this because we want to be,

Masua: We’re very good at it being related to Holocaust, right? We light ner neshama, like a, how do you call it? A memory candle, every Yom HaShoah. We do it for all of the Jewish people that, that died. In Israeli educational system, you get the nerot neshama in school. The candles. You get the candles at school. Now, what I’m still missing and I’m working on is what’s the positive, not persecution version of this.

Tal: For me, it could be Yom Haatzmaut in some ways, but that’s really independence. That story. Yeah, but first of all, I’m. I don’t know if I’m an outlier in this respect. You know, it dawns on me fairly quickly that I have very limited influence over my children from a certain age forward. What do I want them to pick up from me? 

To be honest, the first things are not peoplehood. The first things are about middot, the kind of character you have. Respect for other people, kindness, what my wife calls an attitude towards gratitude. Just to understand, just to have that disposition of gratitude. Way more important to me that my children have that, and you’re, you made very good distinctions Masua, and then as I was listening to you, I was saying, I’m not even in that space. These are things, hey kids, these are things that are meaningful to me. Not because I told you, but just because you see me doing them. Not a bad option. You, your dad feels like he lives a meaningful life. Your dad has the privilege of spending his time and effort in things that he believes in. Not bad. If that’s an option for you, go for it. If not, I’m not going to tell you I’m upset with, I’m not going to be upset with any choice you make.

Again, my wife Rebecca has an absolutely brilliant concept that you give your children unconditional love, the subtext of which is you love them no matter what they do. But at some point they want conditional love, in the sense that they want you to love them for what they do. They don’t want this feeling of, well, if I screwed up or if I was great, you love me anyway. So then what does it mean anymore? And they usually look for it from friends or from partners, not from their parents. And they push away from their parents because they’re looking for the conditional, you love me because of what I did, not because of the fact that I am, right? And then they look for a partner who will give them unconditional love. Like that dance continues on. 

My contribution has generally been in the unconditional love department, but at some point that’s annoying. It’s annoying because it doesn’t allow that other bit to emerge, which is how am I brilliant? How am I exceptional? If it doesn’t matter what I did, then why would I care about your opinion anyway? Right? In that sense, I feel like I’m giving the tools to go out in the world, but don’t look for me to love you for what you did because I’m going to love you no matter what. And in that sense, I’m not into those sharp distinctions. It is Judaism. Is it peoplehood or is it whatever?

Josh:  It’s a beautiful sentiment, and what I think you’re reminding us of is, we’re always on this path as parents to both meet the needs of our children, be there for our children, have healthy enough expectations that they rise to a challenge, and have enough tsimtsum, enough willingness to pull back as parents to give them space to become the people they need to be.

And I think one of the things that I’ve taken from this conversation is, if the idea of Jewish peoplehood becomes the exclusive value put on top of everything and you’re pushing on, obviously that’s not going to work and it will, the rebellion will happen. I think it’s also important for those of us who are trying to, that when we’re thinking about the values that we want to put forth with our children that we’re also doing that from a place of, oh, have I thought through some of these tough questions and do I feel confident when they ask those?

Tal: I’ll just say one sentence about this. I won’t, of course, mention which child, but I said to one of my children recently, you have to choose what you are going to complain to a therapist about me for. Are you going to complain that I didn’t give you enough space or that I gave you too much space, that I hovered too much or hovered too, there’s going to be something, right? Let’s decide which it’s going to be. Like I was teasing, but also describing it. 

And I think in that way, you’ve helped refine, at least for me, the most we can do is say, this is meaningful for me. This is an option. This is what that option gives me. Good luck, man. 

Josh: Tal, thank you so much. It’s been really lovely being in conversation with you. At the end of our show, we have a segment called On One Foot, where we turn the tables on our guests and on ourselves the way our kids often do. We’re trying to get them into bed, where they ask one of those really challenging questions. Our On One Foot question today asks, can we help someone die if they’re sick and suffering?

How do you respond? Where do you want to take them? What do you want to offer them in that moment?

Tal: On one foot I would, it depends on the age of the child, first of all. Like any good Jewish teacher, I would try to just turn the question back to them and ask them what they think. But I, my instinct is about the respecting the wishes of the person, I wouldn’t answer that question just because of who I am, I wouldn’t necessarily answer that question halakically, let’s go check up what the Kitzur Shulchan Aruch says. What’s the legal answer? 

I think if, if someone doesn’t have, if someone is suffering deeply and there is no prospect of them, then I personally think that respecting their wishes is a relevant criteria. And I would say, this is my view, but I’m open to other views. Do you have a different view? 

Masua: I think this will be an opportunity to think about the two values, right? So the value of life and the value of quality of life, and then talk about how you balance the two. And when’s the tipping point when something becomes too hard or too bad or too suffering to maybe overcome the other value. 

Josh: Yeah, I appreciate, Tal, I hadn’t thought of, has this person thought about it? We probably, it’s a great moment to say, yeah, we might be afraid of death, but we are not afraid to talk about death, that we set up, people should have DNRs and all of the end of life material living wills. Obviously, where my five year old, I probably wouldn’t go into living wills, but my 10 year old actually might be really interested in some legal stuff. 

But I also, I think I want in that moment to be able to say, you know what, we really love this person. And it’s important to be attentive to suffering. And it’s really important to be attentive to, our tradition says we value life at a really high place and I often, I’ve noticed myself pointing out some of the Talmudic rabbinic ideas about like, oh yeah, you can break Shabbat to save a life. What does that mean about saving a life and keeping people alive? And at the same time, what do we do when a full recovery is not possible that sometimes we might pray for their suffering to end. 

Tal, we really appreciate getting to be with you to be a person in Israel. 

Tal: Thank you, it was great.

Masua: Thank you so much for being with us today. It’s a pleasure. 

Tal: It was a pleasure. Thank you.

Josh: Thanks for listening  to our show. 

Masua: Perfect Jewish Parents is a production of the Shalom Hartman Institute, 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 events at shalomhartman.org

Josh: Our producers are Jan Lauren Greenfield and David Zvi Kalman. This episode was edited by Ben Azevedo and our theme music is by Luke Allen. Our production manager is M Louis Gordon and Maital Friedman is our vice president of communications and creative. 

Masua: This is 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 ask you a question you want us to answer, send us an email to [email protected].

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