How involved should parents and children be in each other's lives? Is there a graceful way of allowing those we love and live with to be responsible for their own lives while still offering whatever support and nurturance that lays within our power?
The issue of where parental responsibility ends and where a child's begins is hardly new to our own age. In every generation, parents have struggled with their appropriate role as their child reaches adulthood and begins to live an independent life.
At birth, parents are involved in every detail of their baby's life. No part of the child's body is beyond their prodding, wiping, or care. As the baby becomes a child, that involvement extends along with the child's ability to communicate inner thoughts and emotions. Everything the child thinks is fair game for parental comment and correction. As the child approaches teen-age years, what used to feel like intimacy now becomes invasive, and every parent of a teenager knows the experience of being told to back off.
As much as we might like to think of children as extensions of ourselves, the truth is that they are born with their own personalities, preferences, and dislikes. Parents may be able to mold their children, may be able to fine tune their character, but the essence of the child is there in the pink little bundle taken home from the hospital.
Today's Torah portion speaks of the individuality of children and the consequence of that autonomy for the parents. In speaking of Jacob and his brother Esau, the Torah comments on their distinct appearance and interests. In Midrash Bereshit Rabbah, Rabbi Pinhas repeated the words of Rabbi Levi, that "They were like a myrtle and a wild rose growing side by side; once they attained maturity, one yielded its fragrance and the other its thorns."
What Rabbi Levi observed is that children can be molded and directed in their infancy and their youth, but with diminishing returns as they approach puberty. In preschool, everyone can play together. By high school, cliques and gangs become the rule. As the Midrash notes of Jacob and his brother, "For thirteen years both went to school and came home from school. After this age, one went to the house of study and the other to idolatrous shrines."
After becoming b'nai mitzvah, Jacob's personality asserted itself through an interest in Jewish pursuits: study, prayer, good deeds. Similarly, Esau treated becoming a bar mitzvah as the end of any Jewish involvement--now he was free to leave Hebrew school behind him, to squander time in the boastful vanities of young manhood.
Our Midrash confirms what we know from life itself: That, try as they might, parents cannot make children in their own image.
That children will be themselves, and their own inner selves will filter our best efforts in their own ways.
The consequence of that timeless truth is that we do not own our children, nor do we bear total responsibility for their personalities. While parents can indeed make a huge impact on a child, the child will engage the parental advice and example in his or her own way. Perhaps for that reason, the berakhah traditionally recited at a child's bar mitzvah birthday, and recorded in our Midrash, is "Blessed is the One who has now released me from legal culpability for this child."
One can only take on responsibility for the consequences of one's own action. While casting a giant shadow over our children's perceptions and actions, their maturation entails a retreat of the parents' ability to impose their own preferences.
Ultimately, children learn to become responsible for themselves and their own behavior. Can we, as parents, learn to let our children take charge?
Shabbat shalom.