My grandparents never hid that they were Jewish. After everything they had survived, they seemed almost determined to make Jewish life as ordinary and as full as possible. There was food and family, Jewish learning, kippot and Tzitzit, synagogues and holidays and arguments and celebrations. They built lives in which being Jewish was not a question of courage. It was simply who they were. As my grandfather Mordechai would say in his thick European accent: “I don’t change for nobody!”
Three generations later, in this world, as it is, I find myself teaching my children to be careful. And I am not entirely sure what that makes me.
This is the part of parenting no one really prepares you for: trying to protect your children without letting them see how frightened you are. We want to give them a wholesome childhood, to make the world feel safe and solid, to appear strong enough that they can lean on us. We don't want them carrying our anxieties around in their little bodies. We certainly don't want them wondering whether there is something dangerous about the thing we have spent their whole lives teaching them to be proud of.
And yet here we are.
We are in Fiji, where my son has spent the holiday playing volleyball with a group of children he has just met, many of them much older than him- he’s just 10. Before he went down to the beach, he took off Magen David necklace inside his shirt.
“I don’t want to lose it” he said.
I felt a tiny bit relieved, yet also guilty- he learned to hide from me. A confusing message: be proud, but hide if you feel you need to.
And then, without his necklace, in just his board shorts and dark tan, within minutes, he had told all the other kids that he was Jewish.
So much for my carefully managed lesson in caution.
They started calling him Bibi, apparently because Bibi Netanyahu is the one Jewish person they knew. My son thought it was hilarious. He wore the nickname proudly, completely oblivious to the politics and stereotypes sitting behind it. To him, it was just a funny nickname from a group of new friends, and he was delighted to have been given one.
I watched him and felt the strange collision of feelings that has become part of being a Jewish parent now. Pride, because he is completely comfortable telling people who he is. Fear, because I know that being visibly Jewish can sometimes make a child a target. Guilt, because I wonder whether every small act of caution is teaching him something I never intended to teach him.
Is it good parenting to tell your child to hide a necklace? And when he does, on his own, without me telling him - that I remain silent?
Is it good parenting to pretend there is nothing to be afraid of?
I don't know.
My grandparentsc Ruti and Mordechai, would never have wanted their grandchildren to live cautiously. They had survived by refusing to let the people who tried to destroy Jewish life have the final word. And now I find myself wondering whether, in trying to keep my own children safe, I am quietly teaching them the very thing my grandparents spent their lives refusing to teach us: that sometimes it is better not to be noticed.
That is the tension I carry.
Perhaps that is why watching my son on that beach mattered so much. He had hidden the necklace, but he hadn't hidden himself. Whatever caution he has absorbed from the world, his first instinct was still to tell a bunch of strangers who he was.
Maybe that is what strength looks like now. Not pretending there is nothing to fear, and not allowing fear to decide who you become.
The necklace was hidden.
The boy wasn't.
And I think, for now, I can live with that.