Climbing Teen Mountain

Moses is up on the mountain for forty days and forty nights.  He comes down once with a set of tablets and smashes the tablets because the people have not lived up to his expectations.  He goes back again and acquires a new set.

But while he’s up there the first time, the people get nervous.  They get restless.  They ask Aaron to make them a god כי זה משה האיש אשר העלנו מארץ מצרים לא ידענו מה היה לו ki zeh moshe ha’ish asher he’elanu me’eretz mitzrayim lo yadanu meh haya lo

"As for this man, Moses, who 'lifted us up' from the land of Egypt, we don’t know what happened to him."  (Exodus 32:1)

I want to propose an analogy.   You have a small child, sweet and delicious, the child gives you so much pleasure, lifts you up out of your inchoate fear that your impact on the world will not last, gives you a glimmer of immortality.

And the child grows and starts to become more complex, more sullen, less transparent, and you say, this sweet little kid who laughed and sang and told me everything – meh haya lo?  Meh haya la?

What happened to him?  What happened to her?

The onset of adolescence, teen-hood, whatever we want to call it, is off-putting and sometimes downright frightening.

And sometimes we crave short-cuts.  If only we could do this, or do that, chag ladonai machar.  Tomorrow, we can have our delicious child back again.

But it’s not so simple.

Last week, Rabbi Adelson spoke about the lunch and learn program at Torah Ohr which takes place during Great Neck North High School lunchtime.  And some people said, “Good for you!  We need to fight back!” and some people said, “Why are you so upset?  It’s not their fault, it’s OUR fault!”   And some people said, “How DARE you criticize another rabbi and another synagogue?”

Many people had strong reactions.   Fueled in part, I believe, by the reality that the “time up on the mountain” that adolescence represents can be terrifying for parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, teachers, high school principals, and even rabbis.

It’s terrifying ‘cause we don’t know what’s going on inside the child the way we used to a few years back.  It’s terrifying because we don’t know what tablets our children and grandchildren will come down with, or in what fashion they’ll come back down to us at all.

This may or may not surprise you, but I’m actually grateful to Torah Ohr because the program, if nothing else, put on the front burner a conversation about the importance of spiritual education for teens and young adults.  Rabbi Adelson and I have spoken about it and we and our Youth House staff teach teens all the time.  Moreover, we involve them in activities and take them on trips to deepen their Jewish knowledge and identities.

So if Torah Ohr’s lunch and learn got more people in our congregation and our town to wonder, “hey – what’s up with the Jewish souls of our kids when they climb teen mountain?  What’s with their Jewish knowledge and pride and identity?” then that’s potentially a good thing.

But I hope that we’re asking these questions seriously, and wondering what our roles are, because adults should be part of this conversation.  In my view, a synagogue should be thrilled to elicit parental consent, to regard parents as partners in the spiritual growth of their children, especially when they enter the complicated teen years.  I certainly want every parent in our congregation to know what we’re teaching our teens.

In fact, I’m going to tell you.   This month, one thing we’re doing, among many others, is getting our ninth and tenth graders ready to lead a Seder for members of a local group home on Old Mill that joined us for Simhat Torah.  We’re helping the students to understand the elements of Passover well enough that they can share a Seder with our guests, and of course, one of the primary messages of Passover is that all who are hungry should join us to eat.  So the medium and the message go hand and hand.  They are learning so they can teach and reach out, and Jewish tradition places a high premium on that.  And we’re also going to encourage them to share at least one insight that they learned in class at their family Seder.

Ladies and gentlemen - I’ll shout that from the rooftops.  I’ll tweet it from Great Neck to Jerusalem.  I want every parent to know that this is what we’re doing, and that we did this with other holidays as well, so that if parents agree that it’s important for their children to understand, internalize and share Jewish tradition, they’ll encourage their children to learn with us.  And the same is true for everything else we do to deepen the Jewish knowledge, practice, and identity of each of our teens.

So, like Rabbi Adelson, I don’t understand why a synagogue would refuse to garner official parental consent. 

In fact, I’m upset that a shul would refuse, even if they have every legal right to refuse.  But whatever frustration and concern I might have, whatever frustration and concern any of us might have regarding what others are doing, can’t be the endpoint of our conversation.

Channeling Maimonides, who in his Hilchot T’shuva encouraged us to serve God out of love, not fear, I say to each of us, we have to pursue the appropriate education of our teens the way we pursue the education of younger children, with absolute love – love for our tradition and love for our children.

And we shouldn’t fear the mountain that they each need to climb during this difficult time of their lives, a time when mind, heart, soul and body are on fire, a time that is at least as frightening for them as it is for us.  A time when they are discovering who they are in the context of their peers, their families and their community.

We shouldn’t fear the mountain so much that we leave them alone to climb it. 

To parents, aunts and uncles and grandparents of yesterday’s sweet young children and today’s struggling teens and young adults – I say, now is not the time to check out.  You need to know, we need to know, who our children are hanging out with, and who they are learning with and from.

If your child is eating lunch and listening to talks about Jewish tradition, don’t you want to know who it’s with?   Don’t you want to know who is engaging your child, and how, when it comes to tradition and identity and spirit?  If you like what’s going on, great.  If not, you can say something.  You must say something.

We should care at least as much about this as we care how many touchdowns are being scored and how many A’s are being earned. 

We don’t need to hover like helicopter parents and grandparents, we don’t need to know every detail – in fact, we need to learn to trust our children – but we need to check in, even if they get annoyed with us from time to time for doing so.

The people said about Moses, lo yadanu meh haya lo – we don’t know what happened to him, but they had an excuse.  They had few options for finding out – they couldn’t very well text him and say, “We care about you.  Tell us what’s going on!”

But we do have options.  We can text.  We can ask.  And if we don’t like something, we can say something.

And we can take the time to guide our children toward an environment that nurtures their religious identity and spirit in ways that we find appropriate and healthy. 

I will be happy to talk to any parent in our congregation about the way we engage the hearts and minds of our teens here at Temple Israel. 

And if you haven’t yet encouraged your recent college graduate to attend Friday night services and dinners with their peers at Temple Israel, what are you waiting for?  I’ll be happy to talk to you about that, as well.

To the teens and young adults who are here, I want to sing the Cat Stevens line, “I was once like you are now” and I want to say, your rabbis and teachers, your parents and grandparents, sometimes have something valuable to say.  If you can’t listen with both ears all the time, try to listen with one. 

Or, to follow up on a proverb that a member of our congregation shared with me a few weeks ago at a simcha, let your parents and grandparents at least put a note in your back pocket. 

One day, you may want to read it.  And you may want to join your friends as they lead services on Passover and provide relief for victims of Sandy.  And tour Israel from top to bottom.  And share holidays with people who don’t have the gifts and resources you have.

We want every child to climb the mountain that tests and refines body, mind and soul – in fact, there isn’t just one mountain and God knows, you don’t just climb as a teen – you climb, again and again, your whole life.

But it’s not OK to say, as our ancestors said about Moses, we don’t know what’s with him.   We don’t know what’s with her. With the many challenges facing the next generation, that's an abdication of responsibility we can ill afford.

We need to know.  And guide.  And support.  Independence should be encouraged, but not isolation.  No one should have to climb teen mountain all alone.

Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck on Saturday, March 2, 2013, Parashat Ki Tissa