I’ve taken great pleasure in watching my grand-daughter Dalia’s many way stations between the new-born in swaddling blanket and the bat mitzvah girl jumping around with abandon with her invited friends to the instructions of the obligatory MC. I hope to be around for some more of these growing-up markers, but nothing is given. There was no guarantee that we would be around for this much of her evolving story. She came so late in our lives that we feared we would be gone before the darkroom chemicals had fixed our images on the silver-coated photographic paper of her brain.
We’ve just returned from a long weekend with Dalia and her parents in their home in Columbia, Maryland, where they’ve lived since she was starting first grade. In her adult memory, it will stand as the house she grew up in. The stability of these years has helped heal the effects of a period marked by a few chaotic moves for reasons too complicated for this piece. Kids need predictability and order in their lives as much as they need love, and she’s had that in abundance in Columbia.
During the weekend we were witness to a reasonable sample of Dalia’s teen-age life. The all-important school piece by necessity came to us only vicariously in the form of a vivid period-by-period rundown of her school day, complete with astute assessments of her teachers which ran the gamut of those who were just going through the motions to those who presented themselves to their students as genuine, caring people. She’ll come away well-prepared for high school, though still in need of something truly inspiring.
Early in the visit, Dalia invited us to tour her newly “renovated” room. Every poster and accessory that read “little girl” has been expunged and the room has been transformed into a shrine to Taylor Swift. It feels perfectly age appropriate for the next few years, although it may begin to feel a little tired by the time she’s ready to head off to college. Yes, that’s not as far off as she and her parents might think.
The weekend sampler of Dalia’s current life included:
- An evening at the temple to celebrate the holiday of Simchat Torah. The temple has been a central part of Dalia’s life for her entire time in Columbia, and we’ll return to it later in this piece. Although the average age of those in attendance was well above 70, two of her close friends where there with their families, enough leavening to make the evening tolerable for her.
- It is a period familiar to many Jewish boys and girls of a certain age when their calendars are brimming with invitations to bar and bat mitzvahs. This weekend was no exception, so I accompanied her mother on the drive to an imposing edifice in suburban Baltimore, where we dropped her and friend off. She returned six hours later laden with bling of all sorts from balloons to rings with blinking colored lights and sweatshirts bearing the bat mitzvah girl’s logo, designed incidentally by Dalia herself. Truth to tell, the whole scene makes me fear for the future of American Judaism.
- Until now, Dalia has shied away from team sports, preferring solo activities like gymnastics, but this fall she joined a volleyball team. The timing of our visit enabled us to attend one of her matches, which her team won. To the credit of the coaches and the kids themselves, competitiveness is downplayed, and errors are not used as bludgeons against perpetrators. In fact, the kids are particularly supportive of struggling teammates. I loved seeing teenagers behaving in ways that are devoid of any Mean Girls poison.
Okay, now I’ve set some context for what I consider the meat of what is driving the central idea of this posting. Any self-respecting editor would instruct me to cut all the preceding run-up and get right down to business, but I have the privilege of following my own drummer; I consider what has come before as important context setting. In the course of the weekend, there were several mentions of Israel. That holiday celebration at the temple included prayers for the hostages and references to October 7th. It happens that the congregation Dalia has grown up in is slightly more left of center than many American synagogues, so she’s been exposed to some more complex takes on the situation, but it was clear from the few fragmentary comments Dalia made on the subject, that very little of that complexity has penetrated.
Let me be clear. Dalia’s parents are politically engaged and are as deeply committed to peace and justice in Israel/Palestine as we are. I have no doubt that they have discussed the issue with her at the dinner table and in connection with activities at their synagogue. It’s the nature of teenagers not to always send clear signals about what’s penetrating, what’s percolating and what’s dismissed or disregarded. The returns won’t be in till years from now. In the meantime, it never hurts to deliver the same message from different sources, assuming that the default response to messages from parents is often tuning out. Which leads us to the following scene:
After our final dinner of the trip on Sunday night, we asked if we could talk with her in her room when we got home. “Am I in trouble?” was her first reaction. We reassured her that this was not the case, so sitting together on her bed in her newly refurbished room, we fumbled our way through an attempt to introduce her to the shocking loss of life of innocent Palestinians in Gaza, stopping briefly along the way on the role of Netanyahu and his right-wing government,(“So, are we for him or against him?” she asked), and the role of Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran, their sponsor. When she expressed bewilderment at our introduction of Iran into the mix, we realized that we had gotten too deep into the weeds and decided to close out with a summary statement about showing compassion for the loss of all innocent lives and the need to recognize the complexity of this cruel war and all the steps that led up to it.
This whole incident raises all kinds of questions about what is age appropriate for kids to be exposed to about international events and what responsibility lies with us and her parents to expose them to perspectives that many adults have not themselves unpacked. In fact, Dalia demonstrated a surprising awareness of the meaning of the war in Ukraine. She recognized immediately that there were clearer issues of right and wrong, good guys and bad guys than what the Gaza War presented.
I’ve tried to reconstruct what I knew of the events in the larger world at Dalia’s age. I had already begun reading the New York Times in junior high school, but how much of that information I was actually processing, both factually and morally, is hard to assess. I do have the feeling that young people are capable of digesting more complex political information than we give them credit for and that TikTok might provide.
I was glad we tried to pry open some doors of understanding for Dalia, recognizing that a one-shot campaign needs a lot of back -up from home and community in order to take root. Maybe she’ll begin to think about the conversation on her own. What we did was all so spur of the moment that our effort had too many rough edges. I hope we’ll have another shot at it, but as non-resident grandparents, those face-to-face opportunities only come every few months. I need to think about what’s possible via phone, email or zoom. Any words of wisdom are welcome.
