Toledot
Genesis 25:19-28:9
Malachi 1:1-2:7
My parents had strong ideas about raising children.
My father would say, “Parents don’t own their children.” Parents do have to make some decisions for their small children; as the children grow up, the children can make more and more of their own decisions. While that happens, the parents should step back and let the children decide. Let them pick out their own clothes, as soon as they can.
He advised when a child asks for information to give all the information you can, even if you know it will go over his head. Never underestimate children. Most of the time, they will understand more than you believe they can. And if you do succeed in going over their heads, well, they will learn that they have something to strive for.
He also said that you had better make sure you have taught all your values while your children still are young. If they listen to you at all after they are 12 or 13, you can feel proud and surprised. So do not wait until you think your child has grown enough to understand your values; teach now.
Later, when your children have reached their teens, you cannot tell them what to do; you cannot make enough rules to get them to behave the way you want them. They have either accepted your values, in which case you do not need the rules, or not, in which case the rules will not help.
The way I remember it, this speech belonged to my father. He would deliver it from time to time. My mother did not talk about these so ideas so often, though she agreed.
Whenever my sisters and I would ask my father for advice, he would say, “I will not tell you what to do. I can listen to you and help you think of the alternatives, but I will not tell you what to do.” And he wouldn’t, no matter how much we wanted to know.
These ideas always seemed modern to me; but look carefully, and you can find them condensed in an ancient source, the Midrash Rabbah, on a verse in today’s Torah reading: “The lads grew up, and Esau became a man who knows hunting, a man of the field, and Jacob was a straightforward man, dwelling in tents” (Gen. 25:27).
The Midrash understands “grew up” technically: When they became bar mitzvah, then they began making their own choices in life.
Rabbi Levi said, “This can be compared to a myrtle and a thornbush that grow side by side. When they have grown and flowered, this gives its aroma, and that its thorns. So all 13 years, they both go to school and they both come back from school. After 13 years, this one goes to the houses of study and that to the houses of idolatry.”
Said Rabbi Elazar, “A man has to tend to his son for 13 years; from then on, he must say, ‘Blessed be the One who has freed me from the punishment of this one” (Midrash Rabbah 63:10).
Many classical commentators understand this as a formal blessing for the father to recite on the day his son reaches the age of bar mitzvah. You can find this blessing in most prayerbooks, with perhaps a footnote trying to explain what “punishment” means. You might decide whether mothers also say this blessing, and whether to say it for daughters at the bat mitzvah.
But I do not think Rabbi Elazar means to formulate a blessing for the bar mitzvah. Rabbi Elazar does not say, “on that day,” but rather, “from then on.” The parent must accept, from then on, that his child will make his or her own decisions. Every time the parent feels tempted to punish an adult son or daughter, to force the child to behave well, every time, the parent must repeat, “Blessed be the One who has freed me from the punishment of this one.”