A Jewish mother

I am a Jewish mother. There are all those jokes about Jewish mothers. The neuroses. The possessiveness. The constant anxiety, the smothering love.

I was never that. At least, I tried not to be. And then I became it a little anyway. I didn’t really have a choice. Like many Jewish mothers today.

Because today, being a Jewish mother is not about being anxious by temperament. It’s about living in constant attention. Not abstract worry. Imposed vigilance.Thinking twice before saying their last name out loud in public.

Asking them to tuck their chai inside their shirt on the subway, and measuring what that already says about the world they’re growing up in. Choosing a school, college, not only for what they’ll learn there, but for what they might risk there. It’s always having a Plan B. Another school if things go south. Another country, even; if one still exists.

So I tell myself that if Jewish mothers are what they are, maybe it’s not a caricature after all. Maybe it’s because, generation after generation, women have learned to read the signs. Because they know. Some call it paranoia. I call it not being complacent. And it’s not because I’m Ashkenazi. It reminds me of that old Jewish joke: the pessimists went to Hollywood, the optimists ended up in Auschwitz.

So I wonder how to protect without passing on the fear, how to warn without bequeathing the anxiety. But I don’t know how to lie. I don’t know how to pretend. So I tell them everything. I tell them to be lucid, but proud. And it makes me sad, because I know they don’t live — and won’t live — in the same world as their friends. But maybe they’ll have, precisely because of that, a head start. So I tell them to be proud. Proud of who they are. Of their history. Of what they carry. I tell them not to let themselves be pushed around. Never to lower their eyes. Ever.

To be Jewish and proud. To fight. And above all, to live.

Because that, too, is what it means to be a Jewish mother.

Simone Rodan Benzaken

Accueil Blog	Livres	Perles de Zohar
Rav Yehouda Ashlag	Rav Daniel Frisch	English