Becoming a Jewish Parent: How to Explore Spirituality and Tradition With Your Children

By Daniel Gordis and Rabbi Daniel Gordis

Book Overview

Raising Jewish children in today's secular culture poses unique and serious challenges. How do parents pass on a positive, vital sense of identity, religion, and heritage without turning their kids off or overwhelming them? How do you explain what it means to be Jewish if you are ambivalent about it yourself? And perhaps most important, how do parents who have had little or no formal religious training themselves pass on rich, multilayered traditions that may have been missing from their own childhood experiences? In Becoming a Jewish Parent: How to Explore Spirituality and Tradition with Your Children, Daniel Gordis has written an invaluable guide for parents who are interested in introducing Judaism into their homes so that their children can grow up loving, understanding, and cherishing their heritage. Filled with delightful and inspiring anecdotes, thoughtful information about the history, holidays, and traditions that shape Judaism, as well as a useful glossary and incredibly thorough reference section, this book is a vital resource that you will want to refer to again and again. Becoming a Jewish Parent tackles major issues in contemporary life and offers thoughtful approaches and insights to dealing with such complicated subjects as using ritual to make space for feeling, talking about God when we have doubts, incorporating girls into what has been primarily a male tradition, and becoming part of a community that supports your ideals. Becoming a Jewish Parent is the book to turn to at every phase of a family's spiritual quest. If being a good parent means having a subtle, sophisticated, and appropriate sense of what is "honest" when it comes to love, sex, police, the government, or other complicated issues, the same is clearly true with God.??We could, when our children ask about God, tell them about all the things we're not sure about, all the reasons we could come up with to doubt that God is "out there."

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0609604082
• ISBN13: 9780609604083
• Release Date: October 1999
• Publisher: Harmony
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.4" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Great book not only for parents, but for any Jew

I had the pleasure to be one of Rabbi Gordis' students. His book gives a fresh look to the age old question of 'Why?'. I am a college student without any children and yet I found myself drawn to this book to help find my place in my religion. It helps relate ritual and holiday into the whole time and space aspect in Jewish history. If you have any question about the Jewish faith, this book should definitely be one of the ones you consult.

A perfect book for new parents!

As a parent of three kids, I loved this book, which is easy to use, full of great advice and inspiring. It's a how-to book and a "why-to" book. Clearly, Rabbi Gordis really knows what it's like trying to raise Jewish kids in our society, and any parent will find him/herself nodding along and then grateful for all of his insights. He offers all kinds of ideas - large and small - for how to make our kids proud, knowledgable and passionate Jews. In the process, he also explains all the holidays and many other topics! I can't think of a better gift for new parents (or even seasoned ones).