This blog has been a bit slow this past week, and may continue to be for the next few weeks, as it is the Jewish holiday season, as well as the start of the school year. Tonight is the beginning of Yom Kippur, the most important day of the Jewish year, when we fast and ask for forgiveness for our failings over the past year.
Being me, I can’t let this go without making some point about child development, so let me try. Yom Kippur is the end of ten days in which we focus specifically on asking forgiveness of people we may have harmed over the past year, as Jewish tradition says God will not forgive you until you’ve made amends with the people you have injured. At the risk of sounding like I’m comparing myself to God, I’ve always thought that a teacher or parent plays a bit of a similar role in their children’s lives, and I’ve always found this particular tradition troublesome as a model.
On the one hand, this tradition suggests that children need the chance to work out their differences themselves, without an adult acting as judge and jury (though sometimes, an adult or another child is needed to act as a mediator or protector), which I find to be extremely powerful. So often, we step in when we see children in conflict and try to sort out the conflict for them, depriving them of the chance to do the hard work of listening to other perspectives and thinking about the impact of their choices, and so often, we get the situation wrong when we try to sort it out ourselves, and end up leaving one person feeling wrongfully blamed and the other feeling victorious. We may teach children to be good corporate lawyers this way, but I don’t think we teach them to take genuine responsibility for how they affect others.
On the other hand, I think this notion of blame and forgiveness is entirely the wrong one for parents or teachers (and frankly, for God). It gets even worse when you consider that, in Jewish tradition, God literally writes people into God’s “good book” or “bad book”. Instead, our model should be one of recognizing the long, slow process of learning to take responsibility for ourselves, and supporting our children in reflecting on their actions, listening to others with their whole hearts, and making amends where needed. In this model, there is no place for blaming a child or forgiving them, unless the “sin,” so-to-speak, was directly against you.
So rather than saying “g’mar chatimah tovah” (may you be sealed for good (in the Book of Life), I will simply say:
Shanah tovah u’metukah! May you have a sweet new year!