WHEN
SHABBAT
SIMPLY
DRIBBLES
AWAY
by ALEX POMSON
F or the last ten years, I have been stalking Jewish families. This has been a socially acceptable kind of stalking; in formal terms, I am engaged in family-life course research. Together with my colleague, Randal Schnoor, I have been studying a group of Jewish families in Toronto whose children were in the early grades of elementary school when we initially launched a study of their Jewish day school. Today, returning to these families for a third interview in ten years, the same children are either in high school or a few years beyond.
MORE THAN anything else, how these families mark Shabbat has served as a prism through which to observe the Jewish routes along which they have travelled.
It has been an intriguing sample of families to study. In Jewish terms, most were barely engaged when they enrolled their children in a Jewish day school: hardly any were synagogue members, few had received a Jewish day school education themselves, and a significant minority were living in intermarried families. For wildly different reasons, they had travelled a long and winding road that led to at least one child spending a few years in a Jewish day school.
Thanks to funding from the Canadian government, we have had an opportunity to return to these families nearly a decade after we first met them, after most of their children have graduated or withdrawn from Jewish day school. This has given us a chance to explore the extent to which the relationships and behaviors stimulated by their children’s schooling have survived as more than a fragile web of memories or good intentions. More than anything else, how these families mark Shabbat has served as a prism through which to observe the Jewish routes along which they have travelled.
Like many families with little pre-existing Jewish cultural capital, observance of Shabbat was the Jewish expression they were most likely to adapt once their children started Jewish elementary school. Their synagogue attendance did not generally change; neither did their observance of Jewish dietary practices nor their memberships in other Jewish organizations. But when it came to Shabbat, a good deal shifted.
In their children’s first years at elementary school, many families began to mark Shabbat for the first time in their own homes, rather than sporadically at the homes of their parents. If they had previously observed Shabbat through gathering at home for a weekly family meal, they now added Kiddush or sang some special Hebrew songs. If previously they had made it a custom to go out to eat as a family on a Friday night, now there was Jewish talk at the table — about, for example, the children’s mitzvah of the week.
The reasons behind such changes are not hard to discern, and they have significance for those interested in nurturing Jewish engagement more broadly. Children bring home the accoutrements of Shabbat in their school bags: they make Kiddush cups in school; their kindergarten classes have a Shabbat box that students take turns bringing home. For parents, without having to leave the comfort zone of their homes, as it were, Shabbat finds its way into their lives. And in an age in which parents value connecting school with home, most take the view of “why wouldn’t we?” If their children have learned at school how to celebrate Shabbat, why wouldn’t they also celebrate it at home in some way?
Some parents do resist, and are not comfortable chanting blessings over wine or bread when they themselves have rejected most religious expressions, but the great majority are willing to indulge their children. In fact, it is so normal to adapt the rhythms of their own lives to those of their children that some parents, we found, didn’t notice what had changed at home until someone else commented on it.
These patterns naturally played out when their children were still quite young, when they sought out or depended on their parents’ attention. We have now had a chance, almost ten years later, to see what shifts occurred over a longer period of time due to what biologists call ontogenetic change (the natural processes of aging) and/or what sociologists call generational change (the shifting roles in the family brought about by new life stages such as the move from elementary school to high school or through life transitions such as Bar or Bat Mitzvah or parental divorce).
We found that just as some parents had previously not noticed how they had adopted a fairly regular practice of marking Shabbat in some way, others now hadn’t noticed that it had withered away. As one father wistfully commented, “I don’t remember a conscious decision to stop [doing anything together on a Friday night]. It just sort of happened... which is too bad.”
When there are few other sources of Jewish inspiration at home (a common denominator among a significant minority of our sample), it seems that children have an outsized influence on whatever Jewish practices do or do not happen. In the same way that it was comfortable to take on Shabbat practices when children brought them home from school, it has also been easy to let them drop when children no longer agitated for them. As another father explained, “As they got older, they were playing here and there outside. We didn’t insist that they come in and we do [Shabbat].”
These last examples highlight the erosion of practices as a consequence of aging or ontogenetic processes. Those same processes, we are finding, can also lead to an intensification of Jewish practices, particularly in terms of engagement outside the house. One single mother, when we first interviewed her, did not go to synagogue on Shabbat because, she said, her young daughter was too tired at the end of the school week and wanted to sleep in. Now that her daughter was older and ready to come along with her on Shabbat, she had become a frequent shul-goer and, more recently, a board member at a synagogue towards which her daughter gravitated because of social opportunities there.
A more common phenomenon — driven by generational rather than ontogenetic change — is how the run-up to Bar/Bat mitzvah, and then a year of ferrying children to celebrate with others, cements parents into social and communal relationships that might not otherwise have taken hold once they had left the adult social networks of their children’s schools. If parents and children choose to mark their Bar or Bat Mitzvah within a congregation, rather than in the context of a home-made event (an increasingly widespread phenomenon), this choice keeps in motion a flywheel of Jewish social engagement that was set in motion during their time at school. In turn, this dynamic sees expression in maintaining Shabbat practices in both public and private spaces, at home with a stable circle of Jewish friends and in the community.
Because parents’ Shabbat habits are largely driven by their children’s interests or simply by their physical presence, once their children age and move on from Jewish schools, little remains of whatever customs they took on during those years when their children were young. Without social reinforcement, this dynamic is almost inevitable despite the best of intentions. To use the evocative phrase with which Franz Kafka bemoaned his father’s failure to pass on what he called the few flimsy gestures he performed in the name of Judaism, these customs and practices simply seem to “dribble away.” This happens even when these customs are as joyful as some of the Shabbat experiences had been in the lives of young families. ■
Alex Pomson, Ph.D., is Director of Research and Evaluation at Rosov Consulting, and is a member of the faculty at the Hebrew University.
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