Child Versus Parent Part 4

Again and again, we look back and find that the great deed or n.o.ble utterance of some historic figure is merely the echo of an earlier word or deed of a forbear. We have seen it in the influences that shaped or in any event steered Garrison, Mazzini, Pestalozzi. Former President Tucker[R] of Dartmouth College declares that the memorable speech of the Defender of the Const.i.tution is to be explained not by his own greatness. His father had made it before him.... This speech was in his blood. The fact is that the great address of the Defender of the Const.i.tution was made by his father fifty years earlier when Colonel Webster moved New Hampshire to enter the Union." The grandfather of Theodore Parker was the minister of Concord at the time of the Concord fight and on the Sunday previous he had preached on the text: "Resistance to tyrants is obedience to G.o.d."

That a kinsman or kinswoman may equal, even surpa.s.s, a parent in influence wide and deep upon a child might be variously ill.u.s.trated.

No more familiar ill.u.s.tration obtains than that of Mary Moody, aunt of Emerson, of whom his son writes: "She gave high counsel. It was the privilege of certain boys to have this immeasurably high standard indicated in their childhood, a blessing which nothing else in education could supply. Lift up your aims, always do what you are afraid to do, scorn trifles,--such were the maxims she gave her nephews and which they made their own.... Be generous and great and you will confer benefits on society, not receive them, through life.

Emerson himself said of his aunt[S]: her power over the mind of her young friends was almost despotic, describing her influence upon himself as great as that of Greece or Rome.

It may in truth often be a sister who brings strength and heartening to a man. Ernest Renan writes to his sister Henriette[T]: "But that ideal does not exist in our workaday world, I fear. Life is a struggle, Life is hard and painful, yet let us not lose courage. If the road be steep, we have within us a great strength; we shall surmount our stumbling-block. It is enough if we possess our conscience in rect.i.tude, if our aim be n.o.ble, our will firm and constant. Let happen what may, on that foundation we can build up our lives." Again he wrote to her: "My lonely, tired heart finds infinite sweetness in resting upon yours. I sometimes think that I could be quite happy in a simple, common life, which I should enn.o.ble from within. Then I think of you and look higher." The tender inquisitress was not satisfied, declares the biographer of Renan,[U] until all was pure, exact, discreet and true. She said to her brother: Be thou perfect. Most of all she sought to cultivate in him the habit of veracity, a habit the seminary had not inculcated it appears. So great was the influence of Henriette that for years afterward not only did her brother act as she would bid him act, but, far rarer triumph of her love, he thought as she would have bid him think, in all seriousness, in all tenderness, with a remote and n.o.ble elevation, checking as they rose those impulses toward irony, frivolity, scepticism, which she had not loved.

CHAPTER XIII

WHAT OF THE JEWISH HOME?

Before answering the question, what of the Jewish home, before discussing the problem to what extent does the irrepressible conflict take place therein, it is needful to place the Jewish home in its proper setting. In truth, the historical glory of the Jewish home, let Jews remember and non-Jews learn, is the most beautiful and honorable chapter in Jewish history. Nothing can dim the brightness of its one-time splendor. If nothing else of Israel were to survive, the memory of the home would honor and glorify Israel for all time. Truly there is nothing in world history quite comparable thereto.

Somehow the world without has been touched to awe at the beauty and radiance of the home in Israel. It has felt that the reverent love within the Jewish home was more than love and reverence, that these were touched by that beauty of holiness which gave to them their exalted quality. The Jewish home blended two ideals, patriarchal and matriarchal. It was never patriarchate alone, nor yet solely matriarchate. It was a home governed by a joint sovereignty. It rested no more truly upon tender love for the mother than upon real reverence for the father. In a sense, it might be thought that herein the Jewish home was not unique, for Plato had said: "After the G.o.ds and demi-G.o.ds, parents ought to have the most honor." And Aristotle had added: "It is proper to give them honor such as is given to the G.o.ds."

But the G.o.d whom Israel honored stood infinitely higher than the G.o.ds whom the Greeks honored before parents. Canon Driver points out in the Cambridge Bible that duty to parents stands next to duties toward G.o.d: the penalty for cursing them is death even as the penalty for blaspheming G.o.d. Ibn Ezra held that, if Israel keep this commandment,--Honor thy father and thy mother,--it will not be exiled from the promised land. Exiled it was from the promised land, but obedience to the fifth Commandment did much to make the life of Israel despite exile one of the beauty of promise fulfilled.

The grace and glory of the Jewish home were twofold. The selflessness of parents evoked such filial tenderness and self-forgetfulness as to bring about the perfect understanding of togetherness. The reverence of the Jewish child for parents continued even beyond death. The pa.s.sing of the visible presence of a parent little lessened and often greatened the revering love of the Jewish child. This accounts for the pathos and romance a.s.sociated with the "Kaddish" chant of the Hebrew liturgy, forerunner of the Ma.s.s, and perhaps in the mind of Jesus when he bade, Do this in remembrance of Me. This glorification of the Author of death as well as life, is not to be viewed as a symbol of ancestor-worship but rather as a sign of the tenderest of human pieties.

What the child was in the Jewish home it became because of what its parents were toward it. To say that the Jewish mother has been unsurpa.s.sed in the history of men because she dreamed that a child by her borne might become a Messiah of its people does not quite touch the roots of the unbelievable tenderness and beauty of maternal dedication in the Jewish home. Neither is the relation of the Jewish father and child wholly to be explained by the fact of his involuntary aloofness from the world and his dependence upon the home for whatsoever of peace and joy this world could give him. It is not too much to say that the Messianic ideal of the Jewish mother and the fact of the Jew's exclusion from the world without may have tended to deepen and to hallow parental love, but the mystery abides not less wondrous in some ways than the mystery of Israel's survival.

Certain perils, it might be imagined, were the inevitable accompaniment of or sequel to this wonderful love and reverence within the Jewish home,--the peril of repression of the inner life of the child chiefly and also of the parent. But students of Jewish history would hardly aver that the intellectual and spiritual nature of the child was really stifled or stunted by reason of the illimitable filial reverence. And if at times there was intellectual self-repression and spiritual self-surrender, who can measure the inmost and invisible gains which accrued to and rewarded the child?

It is a happy thought of Renan[V] that all the joys of Israel are in reality an enlargement of the family life; their feast is a repast in common, the natural eucharist to which the poor is admitted, a thanksgiving for life as it is with its limits, which do not prevent it from being present under the eye of Jahweh who dispenses good and evil. The Fifth Commandment bade more than obedience on the part of children to parents; by indirection it enjoined parents and children alike to magnify the home, to make it the centre and core of Israel's life, so that it became the very salvation of Israel when no other salvation was at hand.

The very name that is given to Israel, the house of Israel, seems to have been prophetic of what the family life of Israel was destined to be. The house of Israel and the life of the Jewish home became interchangeable terms. That the Jewish home safeguarded and perpetuated Israel through ages of darkness and tears and tragedy is true beyond peradventure. Whether this home-life in all its dignity and grandeur was the result of the ghetto is rather doubtful. The ghetto, which was the environment of the exile in its narrowest terms, gave to Israel an unique opportunity for the development of what might be called its genius for home-life. But if opportunity and genius conjoined to create the result, this genius was inspired and fortified from generation to generation by willing, even eager, obedience to the Fifth Commandment of the Decalogue.

One might search far and wide without finding a finer ill.u.s.tration of the character of the Jewish parental-filial relation than the immemorial service in the Jewish home, commonly known as the Seder or service of the Pa.s.sover eve. That Seder with its family symposium has been the glory of Israel throughout the ages. Ofttimes its serene joy and august peace have been marred by brutal attack and onslaught, but even this, the invasion by the world's hosts, has but served to lend a new dignity and pathos to its beauty. Precious and historic memories revolve about this family-scene, the children turning to the parents for counsel and teaching and parents turning to their children and giving these of their best by bringing G.o.d and the recognition of His wonderful leading to the life of the child.

That Seder of the Pa.s.sover eve in the Jewish home reminds one of the Biblical parable,--for parable it is though the chronicler know it not,--that even in slave-ridden Egypt the angel of death could not touch the Jewish home. It was exempt from the ravages of death, because within it was something of immortal quality, something immune to the challenge of destruction. The Jew who knows something of the history of his people, over and beyond the list of boarding-schools so Christian as to shut out Jewish children, knows that this was prefigured by the prophet when he announced in the unforgettable word of the Hebrew Bible: And He shall turn the heart of the parents to the children and the heart of the children to the parents. That is exactly what the Jewish home did, turning the hearts of parent and child to each other, knitting them together in one indissoluble tie, so that the home become as naught else the very soul of Israel.

CHAPTER XIV

THE JEWISH HOME TO-DAY

So much for the traditions of the Jewish home! What of it in this day and generation? The fact cannot be denied that the Jewish home is seriously threatened in our time. I do not go so far as a commentator on Jewish affairs, who declared as long as a decade ago: "The Jewish home, as we have known and loved it for ages, has ceased to be. It is no longer a Jewish home but the home of Jews. All the grace and beauty of Jewish ceremonial and custom have died out of it. The young generation goes out into the world, unaffected by the influences that held past generations loyal, and so Judaism and the community go alike to waste." And, yet, that the indictment is not wholly unjustifiable came to me when I learned of a Jewish mother who insisted upon a young married daughter averting the birth of a child, because its coming would interfere with and abbreviate a long-planned summer vacation in European lands. The home which trifles with life's dignities and sanct.i.ties in this fashion is become a mockery of the one-time majestic Jewish home.

It will be noted that the reference is not to the vast majority of Jewish homes in West European lands and in our lands, for these are the homes of the poor. And the homes of the poor present a problem, which in the absence of economic-industrial adjustment no ethical aspiration will solve. As for the largest number of Jewish homes in America, in them dwell victims of the ma.s.s migration movement which has within two generations transplanted huge numbers from continent to continent. Who will decide which raises the more serious problem, the involuntary migration of the hapless many or the voluntary imitation of the world by an unhappy few? There has really been more than a migration, for innumerable hosts have suddenly been compelled not only to wander from one continent to another but to leave one world behind them and to enter into a wholly new world.

The move is not merely from Russia or Roumania, Galicia or the Levant to America; it is a plunge into a new world-life with all that such sudden sea-change involves. This transplantation to strange climes and an alien life results in many cases in the tragedy of utter misunderstanding and alienation between parent and children, a tragedy remaining for some Zangwill to portray. But it is not only the homes of the poor and the oppressed Jews the texture of which has greatly altered within a generation. For within the homes of the well-to-do in Israel a graver and a sadder peril has come to threaten as a result of the repudiation, though it be implicit, of parental responsibility at its highest and of filial duty at its finest, which repudiation in truth is sequent upon the abandonment of the ancient and long unwearied idealism of the Jew.

If the homes of the poor are endangered from without, the home of the rich is in peril from within. Prosperity and its abandonment of the highest have undermined the home to a degree beyond the possibility of the effect of adversity. If it behoove children not to be over-insistent upon their parents accepting their ways and becoming exactly like them, it is trebly necessary for children to understand that foreignism in parents does not justify them in compelling parents to a.s.similate the externals of the new world and its new life. Under these circ.u.mstances, parents have a peculiar right to be themselves, to insist upon the essentials of their own _modus vivendi_, to cherish and maintain the things by which they lived in a past arbitrarily cut off.

It ought to be said that the Jewish home has been more menaced by the life of the world into which Israel has in some part entered than by any other circ.u.mstance. The truth is that the Jew's home is become a part of the world and in its new orientation (or occidentalization) has lost its other-wordly touch or nimbus. Thus Israel never really found it necessary to stress filial obedience. The latter has always been one of the things taken for granted. Save for its obviously necessary inclusion in the Decalogue, the Jew has always dealt with filial obedience as it dealt with the theory of divine existence or the fact of Israel's persecution taking all alike for granted.

If the conflict in the home is a little sharper within than without Jewish life, this is in some degree the defect of its quality. The large part played by the home in the life of the Jew makes the transition to the new order seem harsh and bitter. The Jewish parent of yore lived his life within the walls of the home, and the Jewish mother particularly pa.s.sed her days within the limits of a home. It is not easy for the Jewish mother to surrender that sense of possession which grows out of undivided preoccupation with child or children, that sense of possession fostered as much by a child's sense of dutifulness as by parental concern. The Jewish mother, whom the middle-aged have known and loved, found her deepest and most engrossing interest in the days and deeds of her children. It may be and it is necessary for the Jewish mother to relinquish her long-time sense of ownership, but let it not be imagined to be easy. And it is the harder because with, perhaps before, its relinquishment comes a sense of deep loss and hurt to the child.

Nor would the necessity of yielding up the sense of possession in itself be so serious, if there did not coincide with it an ofttimes exaggerated sense of independence in the Jewish child. We may be witnessing an almost conscious break with the centuried tradition of filial self-subordination, or it may be that the revolt of the Jewish child seems more serious than it is because of the filial habit of obedience in the life of the Jewish home. Whatever be the explanation of the new filial role in the Jewish home, it is a sorry thing that Israel in its a.s.similative pa.s.sion should be ready to surrender the home and its historic content, should be so unsure of itself and so sure of the world without as to be willing to give up its best and most precious for the sake of uniformity with the world.

And there are Jews who forget that the world reverences and honors the Jewish home even as it reveres the Bible of the Jew! A wise friend has written: "Whenever and wherever I have been asked by non-Jews what I consider the greatest and most permanent contribution of the Jew to civilization, I have always answered: the Jewish home. Ancient Greece knew of no real home as we understand it. Israel did." But it is not enough to laud the Jewish home of old. If Jews are to rest satisfied with praises of the Jewish home that was instead of seeking to beautify and enn.o.ble the Jewish home that is, then, remembering the word of Juvenal, virtue is the sole and only n.o.bility, may it truly be said of the Jew in the language of the rabbis: "As the dust differs from the gold, so our generation differs from the generations of the fathers."

And yet there is no Jewish question here, though there be a Jewish aspect of the wider problem we are considering. Jewish parents have in the past for reasons given or hinted at been almost Chinese in their adoration of a child. And when the day of parenthood dawns, these may be as unwisely adoring and hopelessly indulgent touching their children as were their parents. It may be that in the past Jewish parents have given more to their children than have non-Jewish. Let less be given parentally and more be asked,--Jewish parent and Jewish child need this counsel most.

CHAPTER XV

THE SOVEREIGN GRACES OF THE HOME

The home lies somewhere between the outer and the inner life of man and its life touches and is touched by both. It is one of the highways through which one pa.s.ses from the inner to the outer life, the place, to change the figure, where the inner life is touched by the outer world and by it tested and searched and challenged. The place of the home in relation to the inner life is shown forth by the truth that nothing which the world can give balances the hurts and wounds one may suffer within the home. Yet such is the magic and mystery of the home that it can heal every wound, which the world without inflicts. It is in the home that the peace of the inner life most clearly reveals itself, that one's soul finds itself most nearly invulnerable to the wounds of the world without. Shakespeare is true to the facts, if facts they may be called, in his tremendous picture of the storm on the heath, which in its terror is less terrible than the storm in the home-life of the banished and broken Lear.

The relations of the home const.i.tute a test which nearly every one of us must meet and unhappiest is he who is outside of their range. No school, no testing-place like that of the home! And it is well to bear in mind that no man greatly succeeds in life, who fails in his own home, not merely because the rewards of the world cannot compensate for the failure of home-life, but because no successes without save from utterly tragic failure him who has failed within the home!

Home may be heavenly in its harmonies or h.e.l.lish in its discords. To maintain that the difference is the result of love or lovelessness in the home does not tell the whole story. Whether home is to be heaven or h.e.l.l, wracked by discord or attuned to harmony, depends upon them that make it, all of them, yea, upon the all of all that make a home.

One alone may mar a home, any one of its members, husband or wife, parent or child, brother or sister, though all together are needed to minister to its perfection.

And how are the harmonies to be achieved and the discords to be avoided? And the answer is,--through courtesy, consideration, comradeship,--all in turn, alike in the major and minor issues of life, going back to self-rule not self-will. Courtesy and consideration together const.i.tute the chivalry of the home, courtesy its outer token, consideration its inner prompting. The chivalry of the home is a reminder, occasionally required by both parents and children, that courtesy is not a grace if reserved for and bestowed solely upon strangers. The man or child, who is a churl at home and limits his courtesy extra-murally, is not only a pitiable boor but a contemptible hypocrite.

And consideration is something more than courtesy, for the latter springs from it as both are rooted in the sympathy which is the _origo et fons_ of comradeship. Consideration like an angel comes, moving the family members to think with and for others, not of themselves as pitilessly misunderstood but as capable of understanding others because possessed of the will to understand.

But there can be neither outward courtesy nor inmost consideration, least of all comradeship, unless there be the grace of avoidance of those temptations to selfishness, which more than all else blight the home by leading to conflict irrepressible and irreconcilable.

Unselfishness in its higher or lower sense is the _conditio sine qua non_ of the parental-filial relation, even as selfishness is deadly not only to those who are guilty of it but to those who needlessly endure it. For selfishness it is which more than all else converts the home into a prison, even a dungeon. Parents have the right to ask of children that they shall avoid the besetting sin of childhood, namely, selfishness, though usually the guilt of filial selfishness rests upon the head of parents who long suffer children to indulge in selfishness for the sake of parental indulgence. Fostering filial selfishness is ofttimes little more than a cheap and easy way of holding oneself up for self-approval and to filial commendation.

Nothing is more important than to teach children, especially the children of the privileged, the art of unselfishness unless it be for the parents of privileged children to practice it. The fact that many, many families in our days are of the one or two-children variety gives to the child a tremendous impact in the direction of self-centredness,--toward what I have elsewhere called an egocentric or "meocentric" world. If, however, as happens too commonly, children are treated by selfishly and idiotically indulgent parents during the years of childhood and adolescence as if every one of them were the center of the universe, it will little avail to cry out against the child's selfishness just because he or she has reached twenty.

Other-centredness will not be subst.i.tuted for self-centredness at twenty, however much parents may be dismayed, if during the first twenty years the perhaps native selfishness of the child have been ministered to in every imaginable way.

In order to deepen the spirit of filial unselfishness it is needful to give or rather to help children to have and to hold an aim bigger than themselves. Given unselfishness, the freedom from self-seeking and self-ministration and the presence of the will to minister and to forbear, that unselfishness which is the exclusive grace neither of parent nor of child, then comradeship, the hand-in-hand quest of life, become possible. Then and only then may parent and child become comrades, not fellow-boarders and roomers and h.o.a.rders, but fellow-travelers and sojourners alike along life's way. Without comradeship, whatever else there be, there can be no such thing as home.

Comradeship shuts out the sense of possession, prevents the invasion of personality, averts alike parental tyranny and filial autocracy.

But comradeship is not to be achieved through the word of parents and children,--Go to, let us be comrades. For comradeship is that which grows out of the c.u.mulative and united experience of parent and child, if these have so lived and so labored together that unconsciously and inevitably there come to pa.s.s the fellowship of life's pilgrimage in real togetherness, comrades with souls "utterly true forever and aye."

No compulsion to sympathy and understanding and forbearance where the spirit of comradeship dwells! And such comradeship is unaffected by outward circ.u.mstance or by diversities of viewpoint or of educational opportunity or of worldly possession.

Perhaps comradeship ought to be stressed for a moment, viewing a tendency not quite uncommon to shelve parents, however politely, on the part of children once they imagine themselves to have become mature beings. Parental euthenasia can be practised or attempted in many and subtle ways. Sir William Osler's forty years as a limit,--of course the attribution is essentially fallacious,--fit into the notion of those children who are for an easy and if possible painless superannuation of lagging parents.

Needless to insist, comradeship means infinitely more than physical proximity. If children but knew how at last when they are grown and maturing, parents sometimes hunger for the companionship of son and daughter, these might be ready to give up some of their comrades whether first-rate or third-rate to satisfy the hunger of the parental heart for companionship with the child. True, it is, that parents must fit themselves throughout life for such comradeship, keeping their hearts young and their minds unclosed. But frequently the failure is due to the sheer selfishness of children, that selfishness which considers not nor forbears, which lightly misunderstands and unadvisedly rejects the parent as comrade on the way, though the parent-heart hunger and ache. Children should not require exhortation to the end that they remember parents are not feeders, clothiers, stewards, landlords, boarding-house keepers, and that in exceptional cases these continue to have the right to live after pa.s.sing the Methuselah frontier of fifty or sixty.

One is polite in exchange of courteous word even with one's hotel clerk. Occasionally one confides in the mistress of a boarding-house.

If children but knew the pain some parents feel in that att.i.tude of children which reduces them in their own sight to the level of utterly negligible rooming-house keepers for strangers, they could not demean themselves as they do. This complaint has been voiced to me a number of times within recent years, alike by people of cultivation and by simple, untutored folk. In the former case, the filial silences are generally due to disagreements and misunderstanding. There is such a thing as the acceptance of hospitality on the part of children which compels certain reciprocal courtesies. When children for any reason are unable or unwilling to yield the elementary courtesies of the home, it is for them in all decency to decide whether they are justified in accepting its hospitality.

And comradeship must welcome not regret, nurture not stifle, the fine impatiences of youth, the eager, oft unconsidered, superb, at best resistless, idealisms of youth. Parents are not to mistake this finely impatient idealism for unreasoning impetuosity. They are to remember that, howsoever inconveniently and troublingly, youth represents the ungainsayable imperiousness of the future. Parental scoffing and cynicism are more chilling to the heart of youth than the world's derision. The world's scornful darts fall hurtless upon the shield of him, armed by parental hand for life's battle with the weapons of idealism. And in comradeship it is not enough for parents not to mock nor to be scornful of children's so-called impracticable ideals. Where these are not, parents must commend them by their own works rather than command them by their words. Comradeship always means the taking of counsel and not the giving of commands. But there can be no taking of counsel with youth at twenty if the parental habit have been one of command prior to that time. Twenty years of absolutism cannot suddenly be replaced by the democratic way of holding counsel.