Very occasionally, I come upon one that offers both genuine insights into raising children and a sensible -- and replicable -- framework through which readers can integrate those insights into their very own lives. My favorite this year is not a recent publication, nor did its ideas surface in a viral essay or widely streamed TED Talk. It's not even, on its surface, a parenting book.
It is the Haggadah, the roughly 2,000-year-old religious text read during the Jewish holiday of Passover.
As an observant Jew, I've been reading the Haggadah for decades at my family's annual Passover seder, a ritual meal marking the Exodus story from the Bible. What made this year different is that not only will I read the Haggadah at the seder, I co-wrote one, commissioned by Kveller, a Jewish parenting website.
How can one write a book that already exists? The structure and core components of the text remain mostly traditional while the explanations, translations and commentaries that accompany it are new. The Haggadah is one of the most innovated-upon Jewish texts, and my co-author and I are part of a long history of writers who tweak it with the hopes of making it more relevant.
Though I did my fair share of modernizing the Haggadah, the real joy of this project was discovering how relevant the traditional text is to anyone who regularly deals with children. The Haggadah was designed to fulfill the biblical commandment to teach our children about the Israelites' liberation from slavery in Egypt, and it goes about this task with a kind of wisdom and compassion I hope to maintain year-round.
Encourage questions, not answers
The Haggadah emphasizes learning over knowing, which is to say curiosity over mastery. In it, children are encouraged to ask questions rather than deliver answers. Some even say the seder can't really begin until someone asks a question.
During the seder, there's no teaching-to-test. The book has zero interest in having children parrot a litany of who-what-where-when facts or proving who knows the most. Instead, it is designed to promote an independence of mind and help children find their way to meaning and understanding on their own.
"Anyone who is just reading the Haggadah, without asking themselves questions, is missing the point," said Rabbi Joshua Ladon, West Coast director of education for the Shalom Hartman Institute. "Questions are often better than answers because of all the possibilities that are provided in the moment. When my children ask me a question and I am able to sit with the question and don't answer it right away, we can open up worlds."
Early on in the Haggadah, children -- traditionally the youngest one or ones in the room -- are supposed to sing four questions. They ask what makes this night different from all other nights: Why do we eat matzo instead of leavened bread? Why do we eat bitter herbs? Why do we dip twice? And why do we recline or sit in an especially comfortable manner? Then, instead of answers, the Haggadah moves to a collection of stories that explain, indirectly, what exactly makes this night so different.
In the Haggadah, we learn that "in each generation, each person is obligated to see himself or herself as though he or she personally came forth from Egypt." The authors seemed to understand that such intimacy could never be achieved through a straightforward response and is much more likely to come about through stories.
Straightforward responses are boring for kids and often signal the end of a conversation. Stories, on the other hand, provide an opening. They give children a chance to forge a personal connection with the text.
"The stories in the Haggadah point you in lots of different directions ... giving you different possible ways of thinking about what an answer might be," said Rabbi Joshua Cahan, a scholar, teacher and Haggadah expert.
He explained that part of what makes the Haggadah so effective is the fact that it is a ritual designed for self-exploration. Children get to experience the safety of tradition and comfort of knowing what will happen next while feeling liberated to ask big questions about the nature of freedom and their connection to other Jews, past and present.
What does it mean to be a slave? What does it mean to be free? What does it mean to belong to a community? A successful seder will have everyone asking the questions and contemplating, though never exactly concluding, what the answers might be.
Meet our children where they're at
One of the stories in the Haggadah is about four children: one who is wise, one who is wicked, one who is simple and one who doesn't know how to ask at all. At first glance, this section appears completely insensitive and out of touch with modern approaches to child-rearing. But read it a handful of times, and it becomes clear that this section knows just what it's doing and has children's best interests in mind.
The story of the four children is not a critique of kids but of parents who are either unable or unwilling to meet their children where they're at. It also, in a very subtle but clever manner, points out that parents are no less capricious than children and subject to moods that change the way they view their children. The text makes this point by having the wise child and the wicked child ask suspiciously similar questions and receive very different responses from their parents.
Cahan explains that this lesson is older than the Haggadah itself and appears in an ancient text that states "according to the level of the child's knowledge, the parent teaches them."
"Somehow, everything we do, they thought of. The basic concept [of meeting our children where they are] is certainly there. We are always learning how to do that well, and we are always managing to do that badly as well," he said.
It's easy to view our children as caricatures, whether positive or negative, especially in our increasingly competitive and externally motivated world. The Haggadah reminds us that we don't engage with our children in order to make them the best, and it even pokes fun at the notion that any one kid can be the best.
Instead, we all arrive to the seder table with a different set of needs and experiences, and year after year, those needs and experiences will change. One commentary on the Haggadah claims that we are all four of the children: wise, wicked, simple and don't know how to ask. Remembering that about my own kids, and myself, will help rid me of any hubris I might feel when one of my children succeeds and any shame I might feel when they fail.
Sometimes, a little positive reinforcement is necessary
Lastly, the writers of the Haggadah understand that engaging with children requires a fair amount of humility and practical-mindedness. There's a lot of debate these days on whether kids should get rewarded for doing what is expected of them. The rabbis who wrote the Haggadah thousands of years ago say yes.
At the beginning of the seder, parents hide a piece of matzo (the afikomen), and toward the end of the seder, the children are supposed to search for it. Whoever finds the afikomen can usually trade it in for a small prize.
The rabbis of yore didn't do much debating about parenting. But in this rare instance when they do chime in, their insights are so wonderfully grounded in parenting reality. They wrote this whole book to teach children but were self-aware enough to understand that, no matter how great their book is, the kids will need a little something-something to stick with it.
I've yet to manage to -- or really, to be honest, want to -- incorporate a parenting philosophy into my everyday life. The chaos of parenting my children has yet to feel burdensome enough to merit a system. In fact, I kind of enjoy the chaos.
But the Haggadah's take on parenting is one I might be able to stick with. With all the emphasis on asking questions and sharing stories, it's the rare approach that offers structure while making plenty of room for the chaos. It encourages us to point our children in the right direction and then allow their minds to roam, unburdened by a sense of right and wrong or parental expectations.
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