The Next Generation
Last week my son participated in Safety Town. This amazing and crucial Rec and Ed program introduces incoming kindergarteners to a range of important safety procedures. The children interact regularly with police officers, firefighters and other emergency care providers. Each morning the children walked through the doors greeted by officers welcoming them with hugs and high fives.
So often we see the problems in police departments across the country, and indeed, there are problems. We must also celebrate the successes. Safety Town familiarizes children with the rules they will need to protect themselves in society, while giving them access to police officers in a fun, destigmatizing manner. I am incredibly grateful for our town’s recognition of the importance of this program.
I want to go further and say that all of my interactions with police and first responders have been positive. This community works proactively to combat potential challenges. And while there are still places where there is room for improvement, I feel that we are a team.
There is one interaction, however, that has been bothering me. It is so small that I hesitated to share, yet it underlines a larger problem that I want to bring to light.
A few months ago we had to call the fire department because we smelled something burning in our home. Most importantly, it turned out to be a problem in an outlet and everyone was safe. The fire department responded immediately, of course, and once they had identified the problem, the supervisor who had been outside started interacting with my children.
He was wonderful, offering them their own firefighter helmets and coloring books, and praising my son who had noticed the smell and told us. My daughter was running joyfully with her plastic helmet, and the officer approached her and said, “We have all kinds of people in our department, black, white, people from other countries—even girls can be firefighters.”
I know that the officer meant well, and perhaps now as I repeat the story you don’t hear a problem with what he said. But a lifetime of critical textual analysis partnered with my feminist sensibilities left me unhappy with his well-intended comment. Saying “even” girls can be firefighters would cause my son and daughter to take pause and wonder why he pointed this out, because it would not occur to them that this was debatable.
I was raised being told that women could be anything. Doctor, sure. Lawyer, sure. Astronaut—well we watched it happen as Sally Ride shuttled off to space when I was 5.
It was a confusing era. We were told that women could be anything, but examples were few and far between. It seems ridiculous now, but I think I had my first appointment with a female doctor when I was already in my 20s. More mind boggling is the fact that I did not see a woman in the role of rabbi on the pulpit until I was 23. That was after I started rabbinical school. I had spent the past 10 years wanting to be a rabbi, but had had no role modeling of other women in that position.
In fact, too often when I shared my aspirations as a teenager, I was brushed aside. “They’re letting girls do that now?” “I’ve never heard of a woman rabbi.” And my favorite—on meeting my boss at a high school in Israel, where I worked after college, and after having matriculated into the rabbinical school, “Oh! Here’s the girl who thinks she wants to be a rabbi.”
Within the context of a generation, much of this changed. It would never occur to me to tell my kids that women can be doctors, most of the doctors that they have seen have been women. They know that men and women are police officers, firefighters, rabbis.
When we were watching the DNC convention last week, my son asked, “Why is everyone going crazy?” I explained that they were excited about Hillary Clinton, that there had never before been a woman president. “That’s not true,” he said. He honestly could not believe me.
That is the generation we are raising. They don’t need to be told that women are equal, they assume that women are equal. When we point out that this might not be so, by saying “even women,” we cast a shadow of doubt on that which has been, for these children, normalized.
I am scrutinizing a simple word, “even,” but a simple word can have deep and complex meaning. Twenty years of studying Torah and rabbinic texts has certainly taught me to pay attention to words. Let me give you an example of a place where one seemingly insignificant word has substantial ramifications.
Teezkor et yom tzetkha me’eretz meetzrayim kol y’mei chayekha. Teezkor—you shall remember. Et yom—the day. Tzetkha—you departed. Me’eretz meetzrayim—from the land of Egypt. Kol—all. Y’mei—the days of. Chayekha—your life. The contemporary Jewish Publication Society translation reads, “remember the day of your departure from the land of Egypt as long as you live.” Simple enough? Not for our sages. The Mishnah teaches, “We must mention the Exodus from Egypt at night.”
“The great sage R. Elazar ben Azariah said, ‘I am like a man of seventy, yet I was unable to understand the reason why the departure from Egypt should be related at night until Ben Zoma deduced it from the verse’”—our verse—“’That you may remember the day for your going out of the land of Egypt all the days of your life.—
Yimei chayekha ha-yamim, The days of your life implies days only, kol, all the days of your life includes the night also.’” Ben Zoma felt that the word kol was extraneous and thus afforded it meaning, because he felt that there could be no extraneous words in Torah. This is not a strategy that I necessarily hold by, but it is a worthwhile lesson in the power of words.
Another, contemporary, lesson in the power of words. Earlier this week my son and I visited Washington, DC and had the joy of spending the morning with my college roommate. You’ll remember that even women can be firefighters. Well, it happens that this woman is a firefighter—actually a battalion chief for the Loudon County fire department. We were riding on our hotel elevator and my son pointed to a sign and asked what it said. “Firemen’s use only.”
Imagine the irony—with a firewoman standing directly under a sign that delegitimized her professional existence. Luckily my son doesn’t read yet, so I was able to give him an interpretive translation—firefighters’ use only.
This so aptly highlighted the paradox of where we are today. My children do not believe that there has never been a woman president, but a public sign can announce that only men can fight fires—and that message penetrates deep into our psyches.
Our unique moment in history parallels the section of the Torah that we are about to enter. Next week we will enter the fifth and final book of the Torah, Devarim, Deuteronomy. The first part of the book recounts the experiences of Israel in the wilderness. Moses is telling this to b’nai yisrael—the children of Israel—because they are a new generation.
Those who were slaves in Egypt have all died and the new generation cannot personally recall– Teezkor et yom tzetkha me’eretz meetzrayim kol y’mei chayekha. Remember the day of your going out of the land of Egypt all the days of your life. Just as we must embrace the metaphor of this verse, so too our ancestors who entered the Land of Israel were unable to literally recall the inception of the exodus. They knew only freedom. In celebrating our progress, we must find the balance in normalizing the current reality while acknowledging and honoring the past. It is a challenging proposition, but one that I am glad to struggle with.
We must herald the achievements of women in society. Given the whole of human history it is remarkable how far we have come in the past few generations. And yet we must remember that younger generations are not aware that the world has ever been any other way.
Shabbat Shalom