Yom Ha Shoah: Remembering to Remember

Tonight is the start of Yom Ha Shoah or Holocaust Memorial Day.  I feel like whoever set up the Jewish calendar made a strategic mistake by placing Holocaust Memorial Day after Passover when everyone is exhausted and just getting back to normal. Maybe if it were in the middle of Passover it would be more widely recognized.  Passover naturally brings up thinking about the holocaust, and there are similar themes but with completely different outcomes.  In our post-holocaust era, Passover has lost meaning for many. How do we celebrate God actively saving us once upon a time, when in more recent memory, we were not mostly saved? It is a huge question.

As it stands now, Yom Ha Shoah can easily be forgotten in the US.  In Israel, there is a siren to remind everyone which I wrote about here.  I feel like now more than ever we need to elevate Yom Hashoah, and we can’t just rely on survivors telling their stories.  The day should be central and remembered by all.

I am counting the omer again this year which I think can be part of the solution.  When you are counting the days you naturally keep your eyes close to the Jewish calender.  So far this year,  I am counting on my own rather than trying to pull in my family. But there are lots of counting days ahead so there is still time. Here is  my post from last year with my homemade omer counter in case you want to learn more about it.

And here are a couple of key resources for Yom Ha Shoah. If nothing else, you can always poke around these sites and learn something to share with others.    U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum  and Yad VaShem (Israel’s museum).

The Four Grown Ups: A Haggadah Supplement

This morning I was thinking and reading a little about the four children in the Passover Hagaddah, which are usually depicted as the wise child, the wicked child , the simple child and the child who is too young to ask. Every Haggadah will interpret these children a little differently, but they all have suggestions on how to parent each child according to their needs. While not directly related, I was also inspired by this piece by the Velveteen Rabbi about parents obligations at Passover to children.  And since the children were playing with magnetic tiles for a long time this morning,  I played with the idea a bit and turned it upside down for one more version.

The Four Grown Ups

The Baster: For the parent who is in the kitchen when the Seder is about to begin and says “go ahead without me, I am basting the brisket, ” you should praise this parent on her lovely alliteration and then gently remind her that as we once fled Egypt with unbaked bread, so tonight we can eat a brisket with one less basting.

The Helicopter Parent: For the parent who is so involved in teaching the children that he doesn’t learn a single grown up thing at the Seder and says, “go ahead without me, we are making baskets for baby Moses from these grape vines we gathered,” the helicopter parent should be reminded that parents have an obligation to learn on Passover too. The vines should be gently removed from his hands and he should be handed a grown up Haggadah, preferably by Maxwell House or the New American Hagaddah Jonathan Safran Foer and Nathan Englander.

The Zealot:  For the parent who is so involved in discussing an obscure midrash that she shoves off her child who has lost his page in Sammy Spider’s First Haggadah, she should be reminded that on Passover we also have an obligation to teach and to learn.

The Auntie: For the Seder guest who is not yet a parent and does not know what to ask, we should calmly explain that each child is different. There are millions of different kinds of children and parents, so four is kind sort of an understatement to say the least.

My Passover Parenting Fail

This piece originally ran at Kveller.com.

On the way home from Sunday school, my tiny children asked so many uncomfortable questions. They asked about God, and death, and bad guys, and then something even worse. That Egyptian child from the tenth plague was just temporarily frozen, I told them. Once Pharaoh realized his mistake all the children were fine. Then I desperately tried to change the subject, but it kept coming back.

My children watched Prince of Egypt in Sunday school this weekend. They didn’t watch a short excerpt either. They watched a pretty big chunk of the movie and it was nowhere near age appropriate. I was there and in hindsight I wish I had followed my gut and pulled my children out of the room. Sometimes I wonder if I am being oversensitive, all of the other parents were chatting in the other room. I was the only one in the room wringing my hands.

If I had previewed the movie, I wouldn’t have let my children watch it. When I asked the other mother who is a volunteer teacher about it she said it was very gentle. Before the scene on the plagues, I asked her how the movie handles the tenth plague.  She said, “Oh, it is very tasteful. It will go over their heads. It is just like a wind storm that comes through.” I don’t blame the teacher, other parent volunteers had canceled at the last minute and she was doing her best to fill in.

So I left my little ones seated, my tiny new 3-year-old and my sensitive nearly 6-year-old.  But when the scene came, it made my stomach wrench. It focused on the Pharoah’s adorable innocent son being hit by this creepy wind storm from God, and well, you can imagine. Next the small boy is covered by a white sheet and the Pharoah says to Moses, “Ok, you can go now” or something.  The crossing of the sea was rough too, but nothing compared to the boy with the sheet.

On the car ride home my 3-year-old said, “Why did God dead that boy.” These are moments I question everything, why do we even pass on scary stories generation after generation. Clearly, I do not believe it should be done through a video. I could have just reached for the remote, hit pause and suggested a story or game, but when I am in a community I don’t want to always be the trouble maker. It would have been better for all the children. I could have, but I didn’t.

It is so frustrating because Sunday school is a big effort. We rushed breakfast and drove 30 minutes away. And I have a feeling I will be digging out of this hole for a long time.  I wound up fabricating this lie that God was just trying to teach Pharoah a lesson. And all of the Egyptian children were happy in the end too.  My 3-year-old wanted to believe it, she kept repeating, “so God was doing a joke that wasn’t silly. The child did not really get dead-ed.”

My 5-year-old sort of believed me, but not fully.  And I don’t know if I should have been lying or not, but I do think we shouldn’t have even been having that conversation. And since we were all in the car together, I could not have a slightly older kid conversation with my son.  I did the best I could with my scrappy answers while trying to keep my eyes on the road. Parenting is hard, and messy, and this morning I am pretty sure I missed the mark.

 

Shabbat and Farming Piece

Those of us in in the mid-Atlantic are hopeful that tonight will bring our first real snowstorm of the winter.  We need the moisture and I am ready for a nice mid-week snow day. Maybe it will give me a chance for a real post tomorrow if we don’t lose power.

In the meantime, I want to share an article I have up on Huffington Post Religion today about the challenges of trying to do better at observing Shabbat beyond Friday night during the farm season.  Please jump over there to read it and feel free to leave a comment there if you like.  This article was a long time coming, and wound up having lots of different incarnations (too many in fact).  I am happy to see if finally out in the world.

Thanks for reading and your support!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chickweed and my Jewish Farming Retreat

Last weekend my family attended this amazing retreat in Baltimore, the Beit Midrash at the Pearlstone Center.  You can read my article about the retreat in the Jewish Daily Forward here.

I have to say  absolutely love pluralistic Jewish events, especially when we get to talk about farming.  I have been thinking a lot more about the idea of shmitta, the once in every 7 year sabbatical from farming and I am sure I will be writing more about that soon.

One very compelling piece of shmitta is the idea that if you had to feed your family without any farming, you would be more aware of all of the wild plants available to you. And it would also seem required to teach this plant literacy to your children.   I heard that there are some people trying to include a wild edible plant dish in every Shabbat meal as sort of a practice or way of envisioning shmitta.  I love that idea of that practice.

Here is some wonderful nutritious chickweed already greening up on our farm in February.  It steams down to very little, but it is delicious in salad or soups.