Reading On Faith

If you were to pick a book to teach ethics to kids you would not, at first glance, choose the Bible with its complicated story lines, flawed characters and often ambiguous messages. Not to mention the horrific acts of violence and an ofttimes vindictive deity that permeate the Old Testament. You would think that if you wanted to teach your kids right and wrong and how to be good people, you would write simple stories with obvious lessons, clean characters that fall into either the good or bad camp, and easy to follow cause and effect sequences that lead to either rewards or consequences. There’s only problem: these stories would not be very interesting stories, and they certainly would not be memorable.

Take the story of the Tower of Babel. In the story, all the people work together to build a large tower. So far so good, right? It has all the hallmarks of a good story for kindergarteners: people working together: presumably taking turns, listening to instructions, sharing tools, and so on. And it’s about building. Kids love stacking blocks and building towers. And what happens? God comes alone and says No. No more working together. Everyone will speak different languages now. No tower. No more cooperating. Say what you will about the merits of the story, we’re still talking about it. If the tower had been built it would have been long forgotten.

We wanted to give our kids a strong moral foundation so we decided, at Lana’s suggestion, to start reading the Bible with them every night. I was frankly worried and more than just a little bit scared to introduce my kids to stories like Cain killing his brother Abel, Joseph being sold into slavery by his jealous brothers, God destroying the earth with a flood and raining fire down on the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. My fears were twofold. I was afraid that reading the Bible to my kids would expand their moral imagination into dark reaches of human wrongdoing that wouldn’t have occurred to them otherwise. Reading scripture would, inadvertently, show them countless new ways to act meanly and unjustly years before it was ever necessary for them to learn to step outside the protective bubble of goodness we work so hard to maintain around them.

The fear was not unfounded. The year before my father had asked if he could take the kids to a live reenactment of the Christmas story put on by a local church. They setup the performance so that you were accompanying Joseph and Mary as they made their way to Bethlehem and along the way there were Roman soldiers barking orders and waving their staffs and swords compelling the dazed crowd to move quickly. Soren came back fascinated, not by the newborn savior, but by the centurions and the power they wielded. For weeks he wanted to play soldier and bark orders and wave a sword and make you do his bidding. My sweet little boy had never played like that before became instantly attracted to power the first time it was introduced to his world of innocence.

My other concern was that their understanding of God would be rooted in a place of fear and their motivation for acting morally would be avoiding retribution. I wondered therefore if perhaps we should start reading from the New Testament and just skip the backstory. But that didn’t feel right. The backstory is important. The teaching of Jesus are revolutionary if you understand the context. So you read in chronological order but if you start on page one and work your way through there are a lot of stories that raise complicated questions. And that’s the first thing I learned from reading the Bible with my kids: it’s not an instruction manual. You can’t hand it to them and say: here, read this, read this and you’ll know what to do. These are stories that require engagement and active reading and sharing and discussion. Reading the Bible, I’ve found, is an inherently relational exercise. It’s a conversation, not a lecture. And it requires something else, humility. As you make your way from Creation to the Commandments and beyond, there are plenty of questions whose answer is “I don’t know”, “I’m not sure” and “That’s a good question.”

The second thing I learned from reading the Bible with my kids: it’s not meant to teach ethics so much as it’s purpose is to teach faith. There are a set of ethics that come from faith in God. But the faith comes first. And faith is a lot harder to teach. It requires complicated stories. It yields questions faster than you can come up with answers. And most of all, it needs great, messy, fabulously flawed and deeply interesting characters because faith is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. It is an individual journey that can be aided and guided by sharing the wisdom in the pitfalls and setbacks and false summits of other people’s journey. But there is no step-by-step map that gets you there.

 

And this is the most important thing I learned: reading the Bible to your kids is itself an act of faith. The Bible is compelling because it doesn’t describe people acting the way they should act, it describes how people actually act. In the real world towers are left unbuilt over disagreements and there is no end to the ways people are cruel to each other. To read the Bible is to consciously enter into that world and come back with  questions you can’t always answer. And so you take a leap of faith, you hope and believe and trust that you are not just reading and analyzing and your kids are not listening and asking, you are all also surrendering and opening your hearts.

It turned out my kids love reading the Bible. They have always loved story time before bedtime and I wasn’t sure how they would feel giving up reading and re-reading their favorite books to make room for our Bible time. But they’re more than happy to. They ask if we can read the Bible and they get so happy when I say yes, they run to fetch if off my desk and, human nature being what it is, would get into fights over whose turn it was to get the Bible so now all three of them grab it and hold it as they carry it from my room to theirs. I’ve been surprised how much they like it, though perhaps I shouldn’t be. The stories feel important to them, more than stories about bears and dragons and princesses. They crave hard stories because they probably see throughout the bubble more than we realize. And I think they really like the conversation. They like asking questions and being taken seriously. They like being challenged when I ask them what they would do. And they like Lana and I try to explain the meaning we find in the stories. They like, most of all, that we are reading and making our way through the questions as a family.

***

About two months after we started reading the Bible together I got a call from my old friend Ben. He used to be a rabbi and when we were in high school in Mexico City he used to be in high demand from parents who needed a Torah tutor to get their son ready for his bar mitzvah. I always remember him describing what he did as learning, never teaching. As in “we learned” and not “I taught my student.” I was glad he called as he is someone who takes reading scripture very seriously and I was curious for his perspective.

I told him that as I was reading the Bible to my kids I would try to draw lessons from each story. And sometimes I wasn’t sure if the lesson was really there or whether I was adding a layer of interpretation to make the story tidy and easy to digest. When we read about Adam and Eve getting cast out of Eden I made it into a lesson about not being grateful for what you have. When we read about the Tower of Babel I made it into a lesson about being too proud and learning how to be humble. When we read about Noah building an ark even though everyone else was mocking him, I made it into a lesson about not caring what others think about you but listening to God instead. These lessons are almost too easy. The stories are far more complex. Noah, after all, collapses drunk one night after surviving the flood and watching the world get destroyed by God. Adam and Eve were not just ungrateful, there’s a larger question about where the quest for knowledge if not power fits into learning to live a life of simple gratitude.

Take the story of Jacob, which is so complex and can’t be packaged neatly into an easy to follow curriculum on ethics and morality. What’s the lesson? We tell our kids not to lie, but here he is tricking his brother Esau and lying to his father Isaac. We tell our kids not to play favorites and to always try to be fair, and here is a story of Rebecca clearly favoring her son Jacob and maneuvering for him to receive his father’s blessing and become the leader of the tribe. That same kernel of favoritism appears again in the next generation, so much so that Joseph’s brothers are so jealous they sell him into slavery.

So what’s the lesson? Like I said, if you want to teach your kids simple principles like don’t lie and don’t play favorites, the Bible is not really the first book you’d reach for. I tell my friend Ben that the heart of the story is Jacob building an altar every time the going gets tough, like when he’s running away because he fears Laban’s wrath. Jacob, who the whole story is wily and crafty, ultimately surrenders to God. He repents and throws himself on God’s mercy to stay alive. That’s what I want my kids to learn from Jacob. And I tell them to notice that even though Jacob has received forgiveness doesn’t mean he’s been spared the consequences of lying and being deceitful. He lives as a man on the run. He never again gets to see his mother Rebecca before she dies. God forgiving you of your wrongdoing is not the same thing as God absolving you of consequences. We ask for forgiveness not so that we can have a shield against the blowback of our bad behavior. We ask for forgiveness to get close to God again so that we are ready to drop to our knees the next time we do wrong. So that life is more than just avoiding consequences.

“You know, I just read the Jacob story with my son,” Ben says.
“Oh really?” My ears perk up. “What angle did you take?”
“We started by talking about how Esau didn’t value his birthright and the role it entailed to be the leader of the family. And how if God meant all along for Jacob to become the leader, was it really sinning for Jacob to do what he did if the lying fulfilled God’s intended plan.” Ben stopped and laughed. You know….we got into the whole free will thing and you know how that goes.”
“Yes I do,” I chuckled a bit. “But you see what I mean, right? The whole free will discussion, did Jacob choose to do what he did out of his own volition or was he just following the script God gave him. That whole discussion is very interesting and we can spend all afternoon on it, but doesn’t it just get us further away from teaching our kids.”
“What do you want to teach them?”
“You know…the meaning of life.”
“What do you suppose the meaning of life is?”
I paused. “Well I’ve been thinking about it, thinking about how to condense it and teach it to my kids. And I think it’s this: we are meant to be humbled so that we can get closer to God. We stumble and we fail so that we may reach for humility and gratitude and deepen our connection with our Creator.”
“I don’t know,” Ben said, ever the rabbi, reminding me of my friend years ago that loved debating and argumentation and finding the whole in your argument. “And the newborn baby that dies a day after it’s born? It never got a chance to live and stumble and fail and get close to God. Are you saying that baby’s life had no purpose?”
“Well no.” I stumble. “Of course not. Well you tell me. What is the meaning of life?”
Ben laughs a more serious laugh. “I wouldn’t know,” says the man who devotes every hour of his free time studying the Torah. “I wouldn’t be so presumptuous as to say what the meaning of life is.”
“Why not?”
“That’s really not our decision, you know.”
“Well then, why read? Why study the Bible? Why try to teach your kids the stories?” I ask earnestly.
Ben thinks for a while.
“If you believe, as I do,” he says, “that the Bible is divinely inspired by God, then spending time with these stories is spending time with God.”
“Yes.”
“And that’s a good thing. A good way to spend one’s life.”