As we got to know each other a little better over the next two years, Charla’s story emerged. Having been trained as a teacher, she loved teaching the youngest grades. But eventually she had sadly concluded that within the school system there was little she could do for those in her charge...
“Rabbi,” she said, “into my classroom walked four- and five-year-old children who had never in their lives held a crayon, pencil, or book. They had never had an adult read them a bedtime story. They had spent the entirety of their short lives plopped in front of a TV, neglected by their drug-addicted mothers.”
As a teacher responsible for a large class of children, there was simply too little that she could do for them. It broke her heart to watch little lives destroyed almost before they had begun. Charla decided that she could not spend her entire day surrounded by such tragedy; instead, she would volunteer to work with one child at a time. And so each day after she finished helping me with my work, she headed over to a church-run child-care center and tried to be a short term mother to one child at a time. (Buried Treasure, p 71-72)
How important do you think you are to a child’s development? (As a parent, grandparent, uncle/aunt, or role model)
The Hebrew word for parents is horim—the ‘im’ signifies that the word is plural. There is no word for a single parent; one can be a father, or a mother, but not a single parent. What inferences do you make from this?
If there was a singular form of the word, it would be horeh, but the word does not exist. A very similar-sounding word, yoreh, can mean either an archer or the first gentle rains of the season that germinate the freshly sown seed in the field. How is each parent like a yoreh?
Proverbs 6:20-23 (The Message) says:
Good friend, follow your father's good advice;
don't wander off from your mother's teachings.
Wrap yourself in them from head to foot;
wear them like a scarf around your neck.
Wherever you walk, they'll guide you;
whenever you rest, they'll guard you;
when you wake up, they'll tell you what's next.
For sound advice is a beacon,
good teaching is a light,
moral discipline is a life path.
How much of parenting do you think is instinctive (i.e. you parent as you were parented)? Are our instincts trustworthy? If you parent instinctively, how can you adjust to the personality of each child?
Rabbi Daniel concludes, “Maybe the rain does fall equally upon each seed, but no archer shoots all his arrows identically...The wise archer handles each arrow in the unique way its mission demands...After the birth of their child, [horim]—like the archer—can shoot powerfully and straight or like the mothers of Charla’s pupils, leave the arrow to dangle limply from the bow, most likely to fall to the ground ” (Buried Treasure, p 76). Be an archer!
Closing Thought: You know at least one other Hebrew ending in ‘im’—Elohim, one of the names for God. Although the word is plural, it refers just to the one true God!
What does parenting look like in this passage? For better or worse, it that how people parent today? What aspects of parenting do you not see in this passage?What is your reaction to this story?
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