Becoming a Soulful Parent: A path to the wisdom within - book review

• Published date: 27 September 2021
• Author: DASEE BERKOWITZ
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

The question is innocent enough. He wants to receive a general update on our morning's activities. Of course, I could meet his innocent question with a generous and satisfying reply: "Good!" My answer is to sigh and focus on my siddur. I take in the Hebrew letters: dependable, unmoving, unchanging. I need their earthbound pull, the heaviness of ancient time, to steady a morning filled with the dizzying motion of my children spinning in their own vortexes and striking out at one another every so often, just for the fun of it.

"Why do you guys fight all the time?" I asked Yael one Saturday morning. She looked at me with the grin of a preteen slightly supersized on her young face. "Because it's fun."

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Why can't a good old game of solitaire or reading a book be considered fun activities for my three kids?

Our home can be a pressure cooker. On Saturday mornings when we all begin to rattle, we just barely manage to zip, button, and lace ourselves up and head outside for the 10-minute walk to meet Leon, who has been at synagogue since its doors opened earlier that morning.

Here, in this sacred space, surrounded by white walls, smooth floors, and the friendly hum of prayers, the pressure is released and my children's energies simmer. There is space and light, and there are other children to play with.

Sometimes we get there late, "just in time" for the end of the service. On one such occasion, as members began to clear their chairs and prayer books, I clutched mine tightly. I needed to pray. And as my children and husband joined their friends at kiddush in the main hall, I left them and the general grown-up chatter and made my way to the back of the synagogue space. I found a quiet spot near the door that opened onto the green foliage of early autumn. I stayed put, the words and letters drawing me in.

"Instead of taking the words apart," I remembered theologian Henri Nouwen writing, "we should bring them together in our innermost being... We should wonder which words are spoken directly to us and connect directly with our most personal story." My eyes were pulled to the word ahava (love), which begins the prayer Ahava Raba (A Great Love). In the prayer book, this prayer immediately precedes the Shema, Judaism's central declaration of faith. I started to play with the word in my mouth and was struck by the vowels...