Passing on the Faith: Transforming Traditions for the Next Generation of Jews, Christians, and Muslims

Teach Your Children Well: Closing Observations on Constructing Religious Identity in the Next Generation

Teach Your Children Well: Closing Observations on Constructing Religious Identity in the Next Generation Diane Winston Only take heed, and keep your soul diligently, lest you forget the things which your eyes have seen, and lest they depart from your heart all the days of your life; make them known to your children and your children’s children—how on the day you stood before your Lord at Horeb. The Lord said to me, ‘‘Gather the people to me, that I may let them hear my words, so that they may learn to fear me all the days that they live upon the earth, and that they may teach their children so. Deuteronomy 4:9–11 From their origins, the Abrahamic faiths have placed a high premium on transmitting religious identity from one generation to the next. Yet each of the traditions has developed its own methods for religious training . That’s why an opportunity for educators from different faith traditions and professional disciplines to come together holds special promise. Unexpected similarities may bring comfort, just as unanticipated differences can spur revelatory insights. The October 2004 conference, ‘‘Faith, Fear and Indifference: Constructing Religious Identity in the Next Generation,’’ and the subsequent collection of essays based on this gathering confirm this hopedfor outcome. Scholars, theologians and clergy, practitioners and theoreticians , parents and educators, Jews, Christians, and Muslims spanned Teach Your Children Well / 265 customary divides in search of common ends. Surmounting differences in what they do and how they do it—as well as how and what they believe—conference participants reasoned together about handing down their deepest values and cherished beliefs to today’s youth. While the task is not unique to this generation, the charge has become more complicated in recent years. Old-time religion perennially battles the lure of the new, the glitzy, and the feel-good here-and-now. Today’s perils, however, exist on a different scale. Contemporary consumer capitalism, hyper-individualism, and the ubiquitous entertainment culture feed restlessness and relativism, which is further fueled by increased mobility, technological advances, cultural pluralism, and changes in family life and the structure of work. As the papers in this volume indicate, conference presenters have wrestled with these challenges both head-on and obliquely. As the concluding respondent, it falls to me to critique those efforts and point to paths not taken. As a historian, I view contemporary challenges within the larger framework of religious continuity. As a journalist, I ask the question, ‘‘So what?’’ What’s the bottom line and why should we care? And for my starting point, I offer three snapshots from my own tradition , Judaism. 1) Before going to Sukkot services this year, I gave Isabelle, my fiveyear -old daughter, some background on the holiday. ‘‘We build and decorate a little hut and then eat dinner there.’’ ‘‘Why Mommy?’’ ‘‘Because we want to thank God for being so good to us.’’ She considers this briefly before announcing on our way out the door that ‘‘I don’t want to be Jewish, I want to be Christmas.’’ Once we arrive at the synagogue, the youngest children are assigned to groups led by teenage girls, and Isabelle trots off for a holiday treasure hunt. Afterwards they paint fruit and make garlands to decorate the sukkah. The rabbi draws them near to talk more about the holiday and when it’s time to go, Isabelle protests. She wants to know when we’ll be building our own sukkah. 2) Sara Chandler is a twentysomething student at Jewish Theological Seminary’s Davidson School of Education in New York City.1 Asked how she chose her vocation, Sara said she was looking for an experience similar to her summers at Camp Eisner in Great Barrington, Massachusetts . ‘‘I really the missed the down-to-earth community of Jews who loved to sit and sing and celebrate Shabbat,’’ she told a reporter. 266 / Diane Winston Finding a havurah (a small group for study and fellowship) at school, she said, ‘‘was like water to me.’’ The importance Sara herself assigns to her five years as a counselor at a Jewish summer camp echoes the findings of a new study by sociologists Amy L. Sales and Leonard Saxe that Jewish camps are a prime socializing experience and that the counselors , more so than campers, were the main beneficiaries.2 3) Ikar, a new shul in Los Angeles, calls itself...