Becoming a Jewish Parent: How to Explore Spirituality and Tradition With Your Children

by Rabbi Daniel Gordis

Raising Jewish children in today's secular culture poses unique and serious challenges. How do parents pass on a positive, vital sense of identity, religion, and heritage without turning their kids off or overwhelming them? How do you explain what it means to be Jewish if you are ambivalent about it yourself? And perhaps most important, how do parents who have had little or no formal religious training themselves pass on rich, multilayered traditions that may have been missing from their own childhood experiences?
In Becoming a Jewish How to Explore Spirituality and Tradition with Your Children , Daniel Gordis has written an invaluable guide for parents who are interested in introducing Judaism into their homes so that their children can grow up loving, understanding, and cherishing their heritage.

Filled with delightful and inspiring anecdotes, thoughtful information about the history, holidays, and traditions that shape Judaism, as well as a useful glossary and incredibly thorough reference section, this book is a vital resource that you will want to refer to again and again. Becoming a Jewish Parent tackles major issues in contemporary life and offers thoughtful approaches and insights to dealing with such complicated subjects as using ritual to make space for feeling, talking about God when we have doubts, incorporating girls into what has been primarily a male tradition, and becoming part of a community that supports your ideals. Becoming a Jewish Parent is the book to turn to at every phase of a family's spiritual quest.

If being a good parent means having a subtle, sophisticated, and appropriate sense of what is "honest" when it comes to love, sex, police, the government, or other complicated issues, the same is clearly true with God.  We could, when our children ask about God, tell them about all the things we're not sure about, all the reasons we could come up with to doubt that God is "out there."

Genres: Parenting, Nonfiction

336 pages, Hardcover

First published October 5, 1999

Reviews

[Katie M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Disclaimer: I'm not pregnant! I just find parenting books interesting! Shh, don't make fun.

I liked this one much more than I expected to... the author clearly writes from an Orthodox point of view but without judginess or preachiness, and I really appreciated his perspectives on a number of things.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential reading for parents who want to incorporate Judaism into their lives and the lives of their (new) children, to help make sure that Judaism is "part" of their daily lives and not just some "extra thing" that they do every once in a while. A wonderful reference for my young family and a book I routinely loan out (but only loan!) to new and expecting Jewish families.

[Dona Haber · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great book for those embarking on the Jewish parenting journey. My two main takeaways from this were: 1) that child will think/do Judaism through watching the way the parent feels about Judaism 2) There is no perfect Jewish community that will be able to fulfill all the needs of a family raising kids, so it's helpful to cast a wide net of resources.