Teaching My Son About Judaism—and Atheism
A Jewish education helped him get over his childhood obsession with Jesus. Then he made up his own mind about what he believed.
By Lauren Apfel | May 13, 2014 12:00 AM
When my son Oliver was 4, he found Jesus. He discovered him, with kind eyes and flowing hair, in the pages of one of the “early reader” reference books he used to trawl through at the library. As he had with stories of the ancient Greeks and Romans, Oliver became captivated by the Christian Bible. The Crucifixion scene especially caught his interest; this was the illustration to which he returned, over and over again, running his fingers lightly across Jesus’ wrists, where the nails and flesh met.
For the next six months or so, Jesus became a regular fixture in our life. A game of charades would prompt Oliver to back up against the door, arms splayed, head lolling to one side on his imaginary cross. A family trip to Israel ended in tears because the rest of us were not willing to wait three hours in line to lay eyes on Jesus’ final resting place in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Oliver knew by then that some people believed Jesus was the son of God. I would even go so far as to say he believed it himself.
Oliver hadn’t been raised with any religious identity, so I watched him dip his toes into that pool with a mixture of intrigue and concern. On the one hand, I was curious about the prospect of a child of mine developing a spiritual bent in the absence of any active encouragement. On the other hand, Jesus in particular was problematic: Although I was an atheist, I had been brought up Jewish. And if my son was going to walk down the road of religious discovery, I figured, better it should be with the devil I knew.
That autumn, Oliver started at a Jewish day school. By the end of his first semester, he’d parted company with Jesus. But he soon became enamored with a whole new set of religious paraphernalia: kippot and tzitzit and havdalah, the symbolism of which stretched well beyond my own Reform upbringing. And yet I settled into the more cultural aspects of Judaism, like a hand finding again the comfort of an old, worn glove. It was hard not to. Oliver was thriving at school, learning to read Hebrew alongside English, discussing thoughtfully the meaning of Simchat Torah. I would hear him in his room, chanting brachot in a high, pure voice, and I couldn’t help but feel he was in the right place. “He’s a very spiritual boy,” one of his teachers told me, solemnly.
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/171223/teaching-son-judaism-and-atheism
= new reply since forum marked as read
is that it focuses on how we treat each other, from the fellow-Jew to the goyim, to the animals we kill for food. Which makes the whole government of Israel and the Palestine stupidity so, well stupid. But I'm not going there here. Ever. 