Walking Together: The Challenge and Joy of Parenting Adult Children

Recently I was chatting with someone.  He told me what his children were up to.  He asked what my children were up to.  

I started by telling him what our oldest was up to – that he’s been working in a vineyard in Vermont, involved in the growing of the grapes and the making of the wine.  I didn’t get to our other children.

He said, “So you’re letting him do that?”

I wasn’t sure what he meant exactly, so I asked for clarification.

He said, “I guess you figure your son is still young, he needs to get this out of his system, so you’re letting him explore it before he settles down.”

I thought his comments were curious and I tried to unpack what might have been some of the assumptions behind what was said.  Here are three that I came up with:

An assumption that certain types of work are more worthy of support than others.

An assumption that I as the parent would not approve of the type of work my son is doing.

An assumption that even if I didn’t approve of it, I would or could stop him from doing it.

I’ll get back to my son - the vibrant Vermont vintner - eventually.

I want to reflect this morning on the extent to which parents impose their visions and aspirations onto their children. 

I want to invite you to think of yourself as the child or the parent or both. 

The backdrop for this reflection is the painful, mysterious story of a father told to offer his son up to God on a mountain.  The story we read this morning.  The story we read every Rosh Hashanah.

God tells Abraham to offer his son as an olah, a burnt offering.  Twice, we are told, וילכו שניהם יחדו vayelchu shneihem yahdav.  The two of them, father and son, walked together.

The commentator Rashi is puzzled that the Torah tells us this twice.  He says that the first time the Torah tells us that they walked together, it’s to convey that they were walking together even though they each had a different understanding of the situation. Abraham was walking toward an opportunity to fulfill God’s will and Isaac, unaware of what was coming up, was enjoying quality time with his father.

The second time the Torah tells us that they walked together, according to Rashi, it’s to convey that Isaac figured out what was going on and that now he was united with his father in wanting to fulfill the will of God. 

Truth is, we don’t know much about what Abraham and Isaac were thinking.  Only their actions and some brief dialogue are revealed; the rest is not revealed.

There is very little room in the story for Isaac’s own independent will. Knowingly or unknowingly, he is merely an accompaniment to his father’s personal spiritual journey for which he may literally be sacrificed.

What’s missing in the Torah is a third statement of Abraham and Isaac walking together.  The Torah could have described how Isaac embarked on his own journey and established himself and then Abraham came to visit and looked around and thought, “How nice!” and then וילכו שניהם יחדו vayelchu shneihem yahdav – the two of them walked together, each his own person, each loving and respecting the other.  But there is no such recorded visit, no mention again of father and son walking together after those frightful days that we read about this morning.

Isaac does embark on his own journey and he does eventually gain a measure of independence.  And we don’t know how Abraham reacted. 

We don’t know if they ever progressed to a place where they were walking together as two independent adults, not one subsumed by the other, not one ready to be sacrificed by the other, but two independent adults, distinct yet somehow together. 

Parents don’t generally say to themselves, much less announce to others, “Behold - I am about to impose my views onto my child.”

Behold - I am about to saddle my child with my perspective on what constitutes a valuable profession, a good life-partner or a suitable place to live.

We don’t say that to ourselves because we tend to think that what we are doing is for our child’s own good.

Moreover, considering my own experience, I would say the following.  It’s been hard for me at times to disentangle core moral values from preferences.

What that means for me is that there is a mishmash of morality, religion and socio-economics that influences my spoken and unspoken messages to my children.

I suspect that’s true of others as well.

Just to give us something to think about, and with full recognition that I have less experience as a parent than many people sitting in this room, I would suggest that there is value in doing the following:

First, identifying our core values that go beyond the superficial.  What type of human being we are trying to be, and hoping that our children will be, when it comes to integrity and how others are treated?

Second, stopping ourselves before we speak to our children, or express our approval or disapproval, and asking ourselves:  Is this about one of our core values or is this about something else?  If it’s about a core value, then how do we convey it? 

Even core values, I have felt, are best expressed through example and through conversation, not through lecture. 

Many Jewish parents worry about their child finding a Jewish partner, something that I believe is a core value.  And I have had the following conversation with numerous parents:  In addition to saying to your child, “This is how I feel", have you ever said some version of the following, of course modified based on age and circumstance:  "I’d like us to talk about your Jewish identity, about the customs and traditions that you value, about your goals for the home that you will create one day”?

That conversation, around a core value, is a crucial one.  It will evolve over time, as our children date and marry and create their own homes.  It’s a crucial conversation regardless of the religion of the partners our children choose because it will impact the Jewishness in their hearts and their homes.

If it’s not about a core value, if it’s about our preference, then we’re better off making that clear.

Often it’s hard to separate the two.  We have an inchoate sense that everything we think about is valuable, and it may be, but core values are different than preferences. 

Preserving Jewish tradition, maintaining personal integrity, treating others in a way that recognizes that they are created in the image of God – for me, these are core values.

Whether you earn a living investing in real estate or playing cello in the philharmonic or making wine in a cold and beautiful place or hundreds of other ways – for me, these are preferences.

And you can express a preference as a parent, but as you’re doing so, you should recognize that that’s what you’re doing.

I’m going to come back to my son as I said I would.

He has always derived a strong spiritual feeling from connecting with the earth.  Years ago he applied to be the director of environmental activities at a Jewish camp and wrote in his cover letter that he believes that one of the main goals of religion should be to foster a responsible connection with the earth. 

Reading that cover letter was an important part of my journey as his father.  It helped me understand, as I would now express it, that he had internalized core values that are important to both of his parents and that he was going to express those values in ways that worked for him.

Just a few weeks ago I called him right before the holiday of Sukkot, as he was knee deep in the grape harvest - literally - and I said, your holiday is coming up.  And he asked what I meant.  And I said, using the Biblical term for Sukkot, it’s Hag Ha’asif.  The harvest festival.  So Hag Sameah.  And he said, Hag Sameah.

I challenge us, parents and children, to ask ourselves what it can mean for us to walk together.  How we can share core values even as we establish our independence and allow our children to do the same.  

One final thing.

When I prepared these comments, I was drawn to the teachings of Rashi because they helped me make sense of the Biblical story but I only realized after the fact what a nice irony that is. 

Rashi wrote commentary on the Torah and the Talmud.  But that’s not how he earned his living.

In fact, few Jewish scholars of the middle ages earned their living as rabbis.  They did other things to pay the bills.  The great Maimonides, for example, was a doctor.  He took personal care of the Sultan.

And Rashi, you may recall, produced wine. 

I’m going to ask you to consider one final thing.  Leaving aside that Maimonides’ mother might have bragged more about her son than Rashi’s mom – who do you think had more fun?

Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck on October 31, 2015