Sermons and Divrei Torah
Pleasantville
by Rabbi Elyse Goldstein
(Sermon - Rosh Hashanah 5760)
Perhaps some of you saw the movie Pleasantville last year, in
which two teenagers– a sister who is “on the edge” and a goody-goody
brother– are somehow swept into their television set into a black-and-white
Leave it To Beaver kind of wholesome family sitcom. Of course,
they freak out at the possibility of having to live that kind
of healthy, smiling, respectful-to-elders type of life. They try
desperately to get out.
The world they land in is in the 1950’s. Here’s what it looked
like: 80% of workers worked a 40-hour week. 70% of the American
population felt that religion was one of the “most important factors”
in their families’ life. Top disciplinary problems in school were
gum, noise, dress code, littering, and running in the halls. Family
rituals included family dinner, family gatherings, and drives
in the country. There were 16.1 incidents of juvenile violent crime
per 100,000 teenagers.
But then, something interesting happens after a few scenes in
Pleasantville. The overall wholesomeness begins to crack as both
crime, and passion, hurt and anger, love and jealousy emerge.
Some of the residents enter the “modern” period. And here’s what
that age looks like: In the 1990’s, the average work week across
all sectors is 45-50 hours a week. 40% of the American family
feels that religion “has some impact” upon their families' life.
Top disciplinary problems in schools are drugs, alcohol, pregnancy,
suicide, rape, robbery and assault. Family rituals are T.V and
vacations at Disney. Each week, the average school-age child spends
1.8 hours reading, 6.6 hours doing homework, and 21 hours watching
television. The average adult spends 15 hours a week watching
television. Juvenile crime is up 500% from the 1950’s, with 75.8
incidents per 100,000 kids.
Now, which world you would want to live in?
I used to believe what most of us I think were taught as Jews
to believe: that all people are born pure, that, as the daily
morning prayer assures us, the soul which comes from God is organically
and originally good. I used to believe children were blank slates
upon whom nothing evil was written. I’m not so sure anymore.
This year, a startling study came out which argues that indeed,
children are born naturally aggressive, and must be tempered away
from a natural propensity toward evil. Richard Tremblay, the author
of the study, argues that children are not born naturally gentle
and then “taught” by society to be aggressive, butu the opposite:
human nature is to be aggressive from the womb, and our job as
parents and leaders and educators is to teach children how to
curb this aggression. He cites disturbing statistics and hours
of studying “normal” toddlers from “good” homes.
The Torah actually suggested that centuries ago. In Genesis 8:21
we read: The inclination of the human heart is toward evil, from
very youth.” The two inclinations, yetzer hara- the innate desire
to do the wrong thing- and yetzer hatov- the innate desire to
do the right thing– fight each other from our earliest age.
I still don’t know if it is nature or nurture, but I do know this
year, in the shadow of Colombine, Colorado and Taber, Alberta,
I am rededicating myself to teach children non-violence and gentleness.
Everyone sitting here today is a teacher of children in some way.
It doesn’t matter if you are a parent, grandparent, aunt or uncle.
Perhaps you are a doctor, or a dentist. Or a store cashier. You
are a teacher of children because children will cross your path
at countless points in your life- and they are watching everything
you do, and how you do it. Toddlers looking out the window of
a van can see how you react to traffic in the car next to them.
School children see how you deal with anger when you walk out
of a store, seething at the clerk. The group of teenagers sitting
behind you can hear how you talk when you sit in the mall, casually
shmoozing with a friend.
Paul Sullivan wrote this scathing indictment in the Globe and
Mail, “..the whole world is too busy, too restless to stand still
for the Ten Commandments...we’re all refugees from somewhere or
something. We wave goodbye to generations of friends and neighbors,
and leave our homes, our farms, our towns, and end up in McDonald
or Dennys or Wendy’s looking for a friendly face. Our neighbors
are strangers...Not surprisingly, we literally drive each other
nuts. Road rage had become a routine commuter hazard, like psychic
potholes. If its hard on you, its hell on kids. Set in front of
the TV by parents too distracted or driven to pay attention, they
take instruction from their surrogate parents at Fox. So on weekends,
we try to compensate by forcing them into ferociously competitive
team sports and yell at them from the sidelines. No wonder they’re
so desperately dependent on each other. And as the adults get
lost in traffic, the kids are forced to create their own cultures
from the received montage of images and sounds, an almost feudal
hierarchy moulded by the mighty bonds of peer pressure...Why are
we so helpless to intrude into this gothic nightmare? Are we so
cowed by professional educators that we don’t want to interfere
even if our children are being brutalized by their peers? Are
we so well-trained to respect diversity that when confronted with
the latest lurid manifestation of junior’s quest for self that
we seethe in silence?..Or is it because we don’t really want to
be part of our kids’ lives? teenagers are too messy, time consuming
and moody. We’ve got our own problems.”
We do have our own problems, and our problems have become their
problems. Colombine, Colorado and Taber, Alberta have forever
taught us that. We expect that kids will be able to navigate the
winding, difficult labrynth of childhood on their own, somehow
make it with some parental prayers and hopes and regrets. Colombine
and Taber have forever taught us that they can’t. It’s a collective
sin, those school massacres. There is no one scapegoat, not the
media, not TV, not video games, not the schoolmates who ostracized
the killers. We are all guilty of creating a society where children
are angry, isolated, lonely, desperate, sad, stressed-out. Ashamnu-
we have all sinned.
The former First Lady of the United States, Barbara Bush, once
told the graduating class of Wellseley College the following:
“As important as your obligations as a doctor, lawyer, or business
leader will be, you are a human being first, and those human connections–with
spouses, with children, with friends–are the most important investments
you will ever make....Our success as a society depends not only
on what happens in the White House but on what happens inside
your house.”
Stephen Covey put it this way, “I am convinced that if we as a
society work diligently in every other area of life and neglect
the family, it would be analogous to straightening deck chairs
on the Titanic.”
Friends, sometimes I look around as a parent of young children
in this society and I feel as if I am on a sinking ship. I need
your help- we all do. How are we going to work diligently on repairing
childhood for this generation of kids? How are we going to resurrect
a safe and healthy childhood from its ashes?
This morning, I would like to offer ten suggestions, to restore
some sense of moral obligation, accountability, belonging, meaning
and values into children’s lives. Al chet shecahtanu: for the
sins we all have committed. We are all in the same boat in this
society. As it says in the Talmud, if you bore a hole under your
seat, I will drown too. Remember: all it takes for evil to triumph
is for good people to do nothing.
If you don’t have kids, share these ten suggestions with someone
who does. Be a parent in the broadest sense of the word. In Hebrew,
the word for parents–horim–comes from the same root as moreh,
teacher; and Torah, teaching. I promise you: many of us don’t
have extended families any more. Many of us don’t have lots of
aunts and uncles just a few blocks away. We need each other to
give our kids the feeling of having more than just their small
nuclear family. Remember: it takes a village to raise a child.
If you don’t have kids yourself, come into our village and assist
us.
1) Teach kids the meaning of service to the community. They have
to be more important to the world than just their cute little
selves. They are not here just to give pleasure and nachus to
their parents and bubbies and zaidies. Expect kids to perform
community service, not for the hours they will recieve “school
credits” for, but because your family values the doing of mitzvot.
Take kids with you to visit in the hospital, to pay shiva calls.
Have kids make get well cards and put their allowance toward tzedakah.
If you don’t have kids yourself, but you volunter for some wonderful
cause, ask your friends if you can take their kids with you once
in a while.
2) Teach children to say, “I have enough.” Teach them the difference
between “I need” and “I want.” On birthdays, lets admit it: our
kids get too many gifts, gifts they don’t like, and doubles of
gifts. Don’t go back to Toys R Us to try and exchange them for
yet more gifts. Put them away for a Chanukah donation to a hospital
or JFand CS. Be sure the kids pick out the ones they will donate
themselves. Teach kids to recycle their clothes, to donate old
sports equiptment.
3) Turn off the TV. Watch what your kids play with on the computer.
If you’re with other people’s kids, don’t use the TV or computer
instead of an imagination game. “The mouse that rocks the cradle”
is a powerful tool that opens up a world of junior encyclopedias
and atlases, and also cyber hate and pornography. One set of parents
in the States found out their thirteen year old had bid more than
3 million of their credit-card dollars in online auctions. Some
51/2 million teenagers log onto the Internet every day. They are
entering into a world of influences and values and enticements
that are, most of the time, hidden from our view. 43% of teenagers
interviewed in a CNN poll said their parents don’t have any rules
about their Internet use. Talking about video games, child psychologist
David Walsh, founder of the National Institute on Media and the
Family says, “The obsession is not about violence, it is about
how engrossing the game becomes.” At what point in the game do
we demand that the kid stop and read, or sit and talk, or play
outside in the backyard, or come up and help cook dinner, or a
thousand other balancing activities? And 21 hours a week watching
TV? “TV violence by itself doesn’t kill you” says David Grossman,
author of On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning To Kill
in War and Society. “It destroys your violence immune system an
conditions you to derive pleasure from destruction.” I know I
am a most unpopular advocate of non-TV homes. Our family does
not watch commercial TV, although we do own a VCR and rent movies.
My kids have seen all the Disney movies, so they aren’t completely
culturally deficient. But I can garner more daily news in 10 minutes
of reading the front page of a newspaper than by half an hour
of the “chatty news” on TV, complete with comments on the broadcasters
weekend plans and the weatherman's new tie. What meaning can the
Simpsons possibly add to my family life, other than endless fighting
over whether or not they can watch it? Yes, my kids watch TV at
grandma’s house and when we are in a hotel, the big treat is watching
whats on. But these TV times are highly monitored, and the exception
rather than the norm. And then we debried with our kids afterward,
and talk about commercialism and the truth of what they have just
seen. Its hard, but I publicly encourage other families to do
the same.
4) Don’t answer the phone during the evening meal- whether you
have kids or not. This quiet hour can restore a sense of peace
for at least those 60 uninteruppted minutes. And on Shabbat, turn
off the ringer altogether, and leave the answering machine on.
Not because I’m turning you Orthodox, but because you r kids or
your spouse or your friends or you alone will have one day that
is completely yours. You won’t be listening to the people you
care about with one ear, the phone on the other. You can actually
talk, without bells and e-mails and faxes. And you can actually
listen.
5) Make Friday night family night- no matter what. Expect the
kids to be home with you for dinner, no matter what. If you don’t
have kids yourself, be sure to let it be known that you are invite-able
to those families who do have kids. Kids need role models of every
size and shape and colour and religion and sexual orientation
and job description. If you don’t have kids, when you go to dinner
with people who do have kids, pay attention to them. Don’t be
afraid of them. Too many single people skirt their friends kids
or ask them the predictable “hows school” type questions, hoping
to get on to the more interesting adult conversation. Involve
those kids in meaningful talk around the news of the day or some
emotional issue you are dealing with. Teach them how to deal with
their emotions by letting them practice role playing with you–
how would you deal with this situation I’m having at work– for
example.
6) Be a support system to the parents around you by valuing when
they say no to their kids. Nothing is less helpful then when I’ve
made a strong decision for one of my kids, said no to something,
and other people invalidate it. “Oh come on, whats the harm?”
or “I’d let him do that if he were mine” or “she doesn’t have
to apologize to me, iit was nothing.” If a friend brings her kid
over to you to say I’m sorry, take it seriously- that parent is
trying to teach the child something. Once I had a dear friend
over on a Shabbos afternoon in the backyard. We were having a
great time, but her little one was hitting another child. She
warned him once and then twice. She said “if you continue to hit,
we’ll have to go home.” Well, he hit again, and she took him home,
all the kids crying and screaming for him to stay. Later she told
me, “What I appreciated most about our friendship at that moment,
was that you didn’t say, ‘oh come on, let him stay, it wasn’t
so bad, he’s only a kid.’ You stood by me and said goodbye to
him, I’m sad that you have to leave, but your mom is taking you
home.” Of course you should get involve to stop a parent from
abusing a child either physically or verbally. But otherwise,
stand by strict parents in their desire to teach values as well
as skills to their kids. They will appreciate it more than you
can imagine. Stand by them, for precious few people do in this
society. This is the most permissive generation of parents in
history, and it is very unpopular to be otherwise. Parents who
set limits need the backing of the entire community.
7) Tolerance is not an absolute value, with everything else just
a matter of pure opinion. Ted Byfield writes, “Apart from tolerance,
kids must furnish their own rules. That's just what the killers
at the Colorado school did. They made up their own rules. They
lived by them, died by them. That was their choice. They learned
well. A triumph of education, in a sense. They were the logical
consequences of what we taught them.” Help teach kids to stand
for something. You don’t have to tolerate everything. As Lionel
Trilling once wrote, “Some people are so open-minded that their
brains fall out.” Teach kids boundaries that were set for them
by previous generations and by experience and by a system bigger
than they are.
8) Don’t accept bullying in any form. Be the parent who kvetches,
who tells, who complains. Be the witness who champions that parent.
This summer, my oldest son went to a local day camp. My son used
to have one of those little tails in the back of his hair. On
the first day one of the boys teased him about it, and pulled
his tail. The other boys followed suit. I got on the phone immediately.
The counsellors told me I was overreacting, it was normal on the
first day for “boys to act out” of their nervousness, to compensate
for their nervousness by doing these “little things.” It happened
the next day. I kept complaining. Perhaps my son should drop out
of the camp, they suggested. What a great reward for the bully-
and so typical. The bully remains and the victim is pulled out.
I refused. Finally the counsellors paid attention, but I was made
to feel like an overprotective mother turning her son into a whiny
mama’s boy. Michelle Landsberg calls this “the inconvenience of
being a victim.” She writes, “I’d say the media have cooperated
in doing a pretty god job of tarring and feathering anyone who
commits the inconvenience of being a victim...we’ve regressed
to a positively pre-Dickensonian state of mind: If you’re a victim,
you whining, cringing creep, you have only yourself to blame.
Weakness is laothsome.” Let kids be weak, and let them complain
when they are being harassed by some bully. Insist that schools
have zero tolerance for bullying, and be a pain in the next about
it if you have to. The accused killer in Taber, Alberta, was the
butt of ceaseless teasing and bullying from the day he arrived
in town. He was neither a jock nor a brain. Nothing he did, from
helping other kids with their homework to defiantly shaving his
head lessened his ostrasicsm. “I’m never picking on anyone different
from me again” vowed a Taber student days after the shooting.
How many of our kids would make the same vow today, without the
pressure of perceived violence? There is a reason the Torah proscribes
36 times to love the stranger.
9) Go against the grain: don’t expect or reward overachievement.
In a report on Israeli juvenile crime, Suzy Ben-Baruch, the head
of Israel’s Police Youth Crime division, says, “The emphasis is
on grades, not values. We live in an age of progress and children
are expected to be more achievement-oriented, more assertive.
With all the stress on competition, we’ve lost the values like
respect for your fellow human being or respect for parents.” This
is perhaps the first generation of kids to use the word “stress”
to describe their lives as children. Tops at school, playing soccer,
dancing and ice-skating lessons, thin, attractive, charming, they
wear mini-GAP and have their own websites by grade three. We are
supermoms and superdads and we expect superkids. Do they really
need another lesson, another week at camp, another playdate after
school, or do you need them to have it?
10) Don’t accept the “boys will be boys” mythology. This may be
predictable from a woman who is known as a strong feminist, but
please, let us be painfully honest with each other about where
the high tolerance and even glorification of male aggression has
led us. After the Colorado school shootings, Calgary Sun columnist
Lyn Cockburn wrote, “Somebody has to say it: The killers in Littleton
were boys...We are, in a million ways, sending out the wrong message
to boys. We push violence on young boys, tell them guns are groovy
and desensitise them through TV, movies and video games. “ Let's
again be totally honest: girls as a whole don’t need lessons in
self-control, in empathy, in social service. They are conditioned
and socialized to be “nice and good.” Boys need to be socialized
in just the same way. Those fathers out there who believe in it
and practice finding non-violent solutions should be proud. Wipe
the word “wimp” and “sissy” out of the vocabulary of boys. I,
for one, would rather have a generation of wimps coming up than
another generation of knock-em-up, shoot-em-up macho men whose
fists are mighty and who use fear and control instead of love
and respect.
At the end of the movie Pleasantville, the goody-goody boy is
ready to go home, but, surprisingly, his sister, who had previously
been a kind of run-around, popular, airy-headed teenager wants
to stay in that 50’s kind of world. And you know what? I don’t
blame her one bit. I know you can’t go backward, but for our generation,
maybe going forward means going backward just a little.
Shana Tova.
Sermons and Divrei Torah
Additional Resources
Elul: Period of Preparation
Yamim Noraim: Days of Awe
Rosh Hashanah: Introduction
Shofar Symbolism
The Custom of Tashlich
Yom Kippur: Introduction
G'mar Chatima Tova...
