I attended my twins' "Open Class" night at their Hebrew School recently. The class is small and filled with delicious, quirky children. For years I have watched them grow and learn; and despite my boredom with most parent evenings, I look forward to the event, especially since I no longer have to scrunch myself into those little kid chairs where you're eating your knees while trying to pay attention to children stumbling through Hebrew text. They are all in the bar/bat mitzvah class, and have moved on to more sophisticated discussions.
On this particular day, they were scouring through biblical hints as to why there is such a thing as a bar/bat mitzvah, as the ceremony itself is never actually mentioned in the Talmud. I arrived an hour into the class (Okay, I enjoy it, but not for two hours), and settled into an adult-sized chair as they were talking about Genesis 22, the "binding of Isaac" story in which God tells Abraham to sacrifice his only son, Isaac, in the region of Moriah. Try as they might, my girls couldn't totally ignore me, especially as their teacher asked me to join in one of their study groups. I remained quiet as I watched each group knock heads, discuss, giggle, and go back to the text.
When the teacher called upon everyone to gather together again and the story of Abraham was brought up, a strange image popped into my mind...that of Julie Schenecker, the Tampa mother who killed her two teenage children, ostensibly for being "too mouthy." Horrific story. Horrific. And yet, it occured. How do you shoot your child in the face? How do you bind your child to be sacrificed? I raised my hand in class, and began to ramble on about how parents of teenage children are always shocked to see their delicious, sweet smelling and obedient children transform into lanky beings who could kill you with a glance and hurtful response.
Who doesn't want to theoretically beat down teenagers whose ability to ignore you is matched only by their sense of how to make you feel like a harpy? So, maybe it was Abraham who thought, "Aha! Way to prove my love and commitment to this new God, and get rid of the mouthy kid who is driving my wife and me nuts." And then, whilst raising his knife to carry out the task, he stopped. Was it God who stayed his hand, or was it that which keeps most of us from beating the crap out of our kids when they get snarky? Or is it the same thing? Was it God being a new god, getting the hang of it before he realized who He was and then absented Himself? Do I have to capitalize His name? I don't know, which is what makes me one of them thar fence-sitting agnostics.
In any case, this opportunity to think aloud in a classroom setting was delicious on so many levels: despite the detours I took, I actually spoke in paragraphs; I knew that, save the teacher and my glaring daughters, my audience was otherwise engaged and I could have been reading the American Constitution in Urdu for all they cared, and I mortified my kids in a safe environment. Does it get any better than that?
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