Talking to Your Kids About God

By Rabbi Steven Abraham
Kol – January 2012

It never ceases to amaze me that some of, if not the most, thoughtful conversations I have as a rabbi take place with congregants under the age of thirteen. Our children’s minds are vacuums of information as they search for more. As a rabbi, and more specifically a Jewish educator, there is no greater sense of accomplishment than watching a child weigh two opinions and then choose his or her own path.

It was in this vein that starting in December I began offering a class during our Monday Moadon entitled “God, Are You There?” (A parody on the title Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, by Judy Blume). The goal of the class is to start to empower our students to think more about God. In the promotional materials for the class I asked the following:

Does God have a long white beard and sit on a throne? Does God really keep a list of all the good and bad people? This class will explore how we understand God today by drawing on a wide variety of material, from rabbinic texts to musical lyrics. We will examine the role God played, according to the Tanakh, in the creation of the world and what it means for us to be “b’zelem elohim” (created in God’s image).

The class thus far has been going very well and the questions that have arisen have caused everyone to sit and pause; yet our communal conversation about God and our relationship cannot just exist in a Hebrew school classroom. The questions I pose above are just the tip of an iceberg – we must constantly be searching.

One of the more interesting questions that have been posed by these students is whether a belief in God is necessary to be a good Jew. Or to put it another way, is there a minimum requirement of belief in God? What are your thoughts? Can we embark on our Jewish journey without this connection? Can we be committed Jews and yet still be skeptics when it comes to the topic of God? My belief is that we absolutely can, and my answer is in good company. In his book God Was Not in the Fire, Rabbi Daniel Gordis states that:

“Judaism, more than any other major religious tradition, does not see skeptics as second-class citizens…In Jewish spiritual life, faith is not the starting point of the journey. Uncertainty is not the enemy of religious and spiritual growth” (49).

And yet while uncertainly and skepticism should never be looked down upon, we owe it to ourselves and to our children to enter into a dialogue about God. There are commercials on TV encouraging parents to talk to their children about drugs; there are even websites and hotlines to help with conversation starters. Let me be your commercial interlude and empower you to talk to your children, your grandchildren, your spouse and your friends about God. Use this article as a conversation starter. Don’t be afraid to say that you believe, don’t believe, or that you cannot articulate your beliefs, for the beauty and importance of the conversation is found not in the substance, but the fact that the conversation is taking place.

In his book Teaching Your Children About God, Rabbi David Wolpe relates a story told by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. The story takes place in a town where all of the clocks in the town have stopped. Despite all their efforts, the townspeople were not able to get the clocks to start back up, and so they eventually gave up and their clocks began to rust. Yet, one old man in the town wound his clock every day, just as he had done when it worked perfectly. One day, a watchmaker passed through the town and because all of the clocks had been neglected and allowed to rust, there was no hope to fix them. But the clock the old man wound every day was able to be repaired because of his constant attention.

The constant winding, says Heschel, is like our sense of God. We need to take the time to wind our clocks because one day, without us noticing, they will run on their own. To believe in God is sometimes difficult, and to describe what we believe is sometimes even harder. Yet if we struggle with this mighty task, one day, just like the old man in the story, our faith in God will no longer be a struggle but a comfort.