The first signs that I just won't understand

I saw something in my children tonight that scared me, and I've been thinking about it since.

As they were playing together, I started listening to the mash of Hebrew songs that they were singing together: it was a very free mix of secular and religious songs, mostly about Hanukkah, though some were prayers and some I couldn't even identify. There was some complex imaginary game that went along with it, though I was in the other room, so I couldn't even begin to guess what they were doing.

Just then, our upstairs neighbor's contractor, who's been doing renovations on the apartment upstairs since we moved in a year and a half ago, began drilling or making some other sort of really loud noise. Silvia looked up and asked what it was. Construction, I said. Then she said, Or maybe it's the noise like they made when they destroyed the Beit Hamikdash (the Temple). She then ran back to Miriam and kept playing.

I smiled for a moment and then realized how scared I had gotten scared when she talked about the destruction of the temple. For a moment, I looked ahead and realized how easy it would be for her to become Orthodox and much more religious then we were. Or, as Debra mentioned last night, if she grows up here, she might end up much more secular than if she grows up in the states. But what was it that scared me about her comments?

I realized my daughters are growing up Jewish in a way that I will never really be able to understand. The stories, the myths, the folk-tales, all of the stories that help her make meaning of her life are Jewish (except for Winnie the Pooh and Peter Rabbit and all the other Children's books she reads, but let's leave that for a moment). All of the holidays that she celebrates are Jewish, the calender, the weekly ebb and flow are all Jewish. The basis of her early life is centered around a Judaism in a way that mine never was.

She's not growing up in a world where she is the "other". As a child, I watched all the Christmas specials on TV. I knew we were Jewish and we didn't celebrate those holidays, but they were a part of my consciousness. I walked around the house humming jingle bells and Rudolph the red nose reindeer. I took pride in my Jewishness, but part of the definition was always that I was different. Silvia and Miriam don't have that part. They are the majority here, and life moves in a Jewish rhythm.

And in a way, it scares me. Not in that I don't want them to grow up this way, I do. But I guess it's how every parent feels when they realize that their child is going to be different from them in very fundamental ways. That she is going to grow up and I won't understand her. She'll look at me in High School and say "Dad, you just don't get me." And she'll be right. So maybe today was the first inkling of what is to come. If so, I'll take it. Watching them play and enjoy each other, making up songs and games as they slowly destroyed their room. If it's more of this, I'll take it, whether it scares me or not!