How raising my kids made me question – and rediscover – my Judaism

I thought I had my Judaism all figured out — until my kids showed me a different path. 

I grew up in a secular home built on a strong Jewish foundation. My parents sent me to a Zionist Jewish day school where I learned Hebrew and Yiddish. I was dragged to High Holiday services and came together with family for Hanukkah parties and Passover seders where stories of survival and resilience reverberated. 

Nevertheless, my childhood left me yearning… yearning for direction and a stable ground to build a life on. 

So as an 18-year-old on the precipice of adulthood, I turned to a life of Jewish observance, believing that my sense of lack would be redeemed by fulfilling the commands, demands, and obligations of an Orthodox lifestyle. 

I thought that if I could just do enough, be enough, I would finally be worthy of the love and belonging I had always craved. 

So after returning from a third-year abroad study program at Hebrew University, I made the daring decision to postpone my fourth and final year of university and move to Brooklyn to enroll in seminary instead. 

I didn’t just want to immerse myself in the Orthodox world, I wanted to learn the rules and know exactly what was expected of me. I wanted to leave behind who I had been, and become someone new, someone who truly belonged. But above all, I was intent on finding my husband, getting married, and creating a life and a family that would transcend the struggles and gaps I had faced in my own childhood.

My commitment was unwavering. 

By the time I was 22, I was married and by 30, I was wrangling four young kids, amidst a community of like-minded people.

I molded my children to look, speak, and behave like Orthodox Jews, determined to leave behind every trace of my previous life in the hopes of giving my kids what I had not had. 

I was set on forging a new path, even if it meant pretending that the pain, loss, and longing of my childhood could be absorbed into this new identity and somehow dissolve. 

On the surface, it looked like we were exactly where we belonged. But underneath, something didn’t sit right.

Over time, my efforts felt more dutiful than devotional. I was meticulous about the rules and rituals, but my heart wasn’t always in it like it once had been. And what’s more, the wounds of my past lingered, unaddressed and unresolved. I was beginning to think that maybe my drastic shift in identity was not a return, but an escape. Which left me wondering, “Who exactly am I?”

So when my kids began to resist the rituals, balk at the rules, and often seem disinterested in the very things I had hoped would inspire them, my husband and I had to make a difficult choice: double-down on the image we were trying to uphold or confront the deeper questions we had been avoiding and show up for our kids in the ways they needed? 

I had seen too many parents fail to create space for their children’s individuality, leaving too many young people estranged from their families and their faith. 

If my children grew up feeling lost and abandoned because of my rigid commitment to maintaining the image of Jewish observance, in lieu of confronting the uncertainty of who I was beyond the rules and expectations, then I would have failed. Ironically, my unwavering devotion would have perpetuated the very harms I was determined to prevent.

The decision was clear: adapt together and create a relationship where authentic connection, not fear, would guide us. 

At first, I was concerned about what other people would think and tried to calculate the severity of G-d’s inevitable wrath and punishment. But my kids were undeterred by my concerns. 

They didn’t care what others thought of them nor did they subscribe to the fear that had always motivated me in relationships, both mortal and Divine. 

I knew my kids were onto something, so I laid down my arms, and suspended the impulse to run and hide from Divine judgment and the painful experience of rejection. Spurred on by my kids’ insistence for truth, and my deepest desire to build meaningful and lasting relationships with them, I finally faced the pain of my past head-on and discovered who I truly am and what I stand for.

On the outside, it may look like I threw everything away, but, on the inside, I discovered a far deeper connection to myself and the Divine — a connection, I realized, that had been with me all along. 

And with that I returned, again, this time to myself, and was finally able to give my kids what I had not had — a sense of safety, worth, and an indisputable sense of belonging, together.