Shabbat Ha-Chodesh 5785
You can listen to Rabbi Miriam's sermon here or read it below.
Life can change in a single moment. The moments we fear, the moments we torment ourselves with the possibility of happening and the moments we do all we can to drum into our children what they need to do to prevent them, so that God-forbid our nightmare never becomes our reality. While they are still strapped safely into their pushchairs we show them the green man, we have to wait for the green man before we can cross the road, never cross somewhere else, it isn’t safe. As they get older and the freedoms start so the anxiety heightens and the warnings increase, don’t walk along looking at your phone, it will get snatched out of your hands while you aren’t aware enough of your surroundings, be alert, stay vigilant, don’t talk to strangers. Even when they appear to be safely in their bedrooms, we have the anxiety our parents never feared, who is communicating with our children, are they getting bullied, being groomed, being taken advantage of online or are they being the bully or tempted to take part in a crazy TikTok challenge like the names that became synonymous with death, like Tommie-Lee Gracie Billington who died aged just 11, or the 20 children in 18 months who died taking part in a so called “blackout challenge”?
Yet it wasn’t until the release of “Adolescence” that I, and so many other viewers were given a whole other much deeper danger our children are exposed to. A danger that permeates their school lives, that infiltrates the messaging they receive from social media and affects not only their interactions with friends but how they see themselves. A danger made even harder to protect them from because it is transmitted in a language unique to their generation and so effortlessly and speedily embedded deeply into their culture that it can supersede a childhood of values passed down from parents to children, that we think is woven into their DNA and in no danger of being supplanted.
For those who have not yet seen the 4-part Netflix drama I don’t want to give too much away because it is something that I think should be experienced (and I do think it is something you experience and feel, you don’t just watch) and it is and should be difficult viewing. It needs to be experienced by any parent, teacher, clergy or medic, anyone who either personally or professionally has teenagers in their lives. I do however add that this wasn’t something I felt it appropriate for my own 13 year old to view with us. Although not in any way graphic it is an extremely difficult watch and I personally think there are other ways to explore these themes with teenagers themselves.
Jamie is a 13 year old boy from, what superficially seems like a loving home and within minutes of the first episode the police are breaking down the front door of that home and taking him from his bed, crying for his dad and professing his innocence, while viewers are left desperately hopeful, for the short while one could be, that there has been a terrible mistake and this obviously lovely and so easy to relate to young teen is surely innocent of the murder of a girl in his English class.
What the short series does so brilliantly is demonstrate as its writer Jack Thorne explains that “although we are told it takes a village to raise a child, it also takes a village to destroy a child too.” That this crime is not pinned on a single issue but as you peel back the layers, you see parents who were not seeing, a school that was not hearing, the internet that was colluding to take ones vulnerabilities and bolster giving a toxicity to power, and the behaviour of other kids which when mixed with Jamie’s own truth, the way that he was feeling about himself with all his teenage insecurities and his own chemical responses was a potent mixture which led to the acceptance of
a hugely problematic view of himself and the world around him and the perpetrating of this barbaric act.
It's that village effect which is so troubling, so unsettling, because how do you protect your child from the society they are growing up in? Especially because we are all part of our own children’s village and aren’t always aware of how we are cementing the dangerous narratives or somehow confirming their world view. We are all the product of our own village narrative and what better time of year is there than this, to explore this issue as our own reality, to see what overt and subconscious messages we portray when we share the narrative of us as a Jewish people. We are not doing this somewhere communal and institutional but around our dining-room tables, surrounded by family, we say this is who we are and this is how we got here through how we tell our seder story, how we tell the Pesach narrative in just two weeks’ time and how we bring the ancient past into the modern day by the parallels we draw. Our children are getting subconscious, subliminal messages about who they are all the time; about being a boy or a girl, if they are clever or sporty, popular or cool about what it means to be a Jew. But on one night of the year that subliminal messaging becomes very overt.
The good thing about the format of seder is unlike the world of internet memes and TikTok videos we have the time and space for nuance and the safety and familiarity of the people around the table to respectfully disagree and place their own reading of the situation into the mix. But why has the Pesach seder got anything to do with a teenage boy imbibing someone else’s narrative of toxic masculinity and stabbing a girl who rejected his advances?
Because how we see ourselves as Jews in the world can be framed by ourselves or others and on seder night it can be framed by the glorifying of the plagues or the guilt ladened removal of the drops of wine from our cup. It can be framed by thinking we never escaped the persecution of Egypt which simply followed us into the wilderness and around Europe for millennia or whether we went from being the slaves to the task masters. Whether the charoset symbolises the hard work we have to do to rebuild the potential of a two-state solution or the maror symbolises the bitterness of the relationship with our neighbours forever. Seder can be a place of the voicing of these kind of extremes heard and absorbed by every generation around the table or it can be a place of nuance, respectful conversation and the most ancient tradition of creating a time and place to ask questions. It can help us see who we are as a person in relation to our families, to those around us, as a Jew in relation to the rest of the world, as the wicked or naïve child,
The advice I took for myself from “Adolescence” was from the Detective Inspector and from the response I had to watching him. When he had spent a horrendous few hours at his son’s school, which happens to be the same school as the alleged perpetrator and victim, trying to collect evidence on this case, he was clearly being made more and more starkly aware of the inadequacies of the institution that both enabled a certain culture to thrive and why his son has been making up excuses not to have to attend. I was predicting his move because I know instinctively it’s what I would have done. I thought he was waiting for his son to come out of school so he could remove him from there, tell him he never had to go back. I could hear myself rushing to want to fix it for my kid, but he was a far wiser parent than I am. He wasn’t finding a solution for his child, he was simply making time to listen to him. He realised it’s easy to rush to blame our under resourced schools or the social media platforms we don’t understand, abstract big entities which are intangible and unwieldy in terms of who
takes responsibility but in truth we can all do one thing which could have a much more profound impact on our children, who they are and who they will become and that is to give them time to really listen to them, to understand them and hear about the world they are interacting with. This seder before we rush to the humour of labelling our children as one of the 4 sons, before we use the bread of affliction to affirm a narrative of 3000 years of suffering or glorify the plagues to show our enduring strength, let us listen to our children, their struggles with their own identity and the people or ideas which booster or belittle them and let’s try to understand who they really are before we offer to help them part their own seas and find their own paths to their next chapters
