What It Means to Be a Jewish Father

My children call me “Aba.” I have been given several other names that carried weight, including soldier, instructor, and business owner. Each came with duties I understood and accepted. Fatherhood arrived without instructions and asked more of me than any of them. The word Abba reaches further into the future than anything else I have ever been called.

When I trained soldiers, I was responsible for what they could do under pressure. When I teach self-defense to my students, I am responsible for what they carry out of my school and into the street. Raising children carries another kind of responsibility. I am partly responsible for who my children become, for the judgment they will use when I am no longer standing beside them, and for the inner voice that will speak when they have to make a difficult decision alone. That responsibility travels through them into homes I will never see.

For a Jewish father, the weight is heavier in a specific way. I am preparing children to live openly as Jews in a world that has repeatedly treated Jewish identity as a reason for danger. For many years, I could speak that sentence as history. My children are now growing up inside it.

Since October 7, antisemitism has moved from the corners of public life into its ordinary parts. My children have watched Jews threatened and blamed. Hostage posters were pulled down as though kidnapped civilians were a provocation. People performed cruelty toward Jews while describing themselves as the conscience of the world. Then the danger reached our family. I had to protect my children during a confrontation in New York, controlling myself while assessing the people around us and choosing a response that would keep my children safe. After I was targeted for being Jewish, I began wearing a Star of David openly. My children also know that a mezuzah was torn from the door of my Krav Maga school in Brooklyn. Visible Jewish life had become permission, in some people’s minds, to intimidate us.

These experiences forced me to think more clearly about protection because I make my living teaching it. In my work, I teach people to recognize danger early, avoid unnecessary fights, and use force in proportion to the threat. A father must be able to stand between his children and harm. He must remain calm enough to think while fear and anger compete for control of his body. Physical defense is one part of the responsibility. My children need far more from me.

They also need protection from learning the wrong lesson about being Jewish. Children study what their parents tolerate. They register the lowered voice, the symbol quietly removed, the conversation a father avoids, and the insult he pretends not to hear. The political arguments may be beyond their understanding. A parent’s shame is easy for them to recognize. If I shrink, they will learn that shrinking is what Jews do. That lesson could outlast any single threat from which I protected them.

I want to be honest about fear. I am afraid of what can happen to my children because they are Jewish. A stranger can see a Star of David and decide that my child represents a government, a war, or every grievance he has chosen to place upon Jews. Institutions that speak fluently about protecting minorities can grow strangely uncertain when Jews ask for the same protection. This fear is part of why I act. It tells me what is at stake and points directly toward what I am unwilling to lose. Courage begins when a man understands the danger and accepts the duty to face it. My children need a father whose fear sharpens his judgment and keeps him alert.

The deeper reason I refuse to stay quiet is that silence does not end a problem. It relocates it. A threat ignored, a lie left standing, and an act of intimidation accepted without response remain for someone else to face. In time, they become the inheritance my children will open. Refusing to deal with antisemitism in my own lifetime means handing it forward in a stronger form, and Jewish history has already shown how that process unfolds. It advances through accumulated permissions. A slur becomes ordinary. An exclusion receives a reasonable-sounding explanation. A Jewish business is targeted, and the targeting is rationalized. Jewish students are advised to hide visible signs of their identity for their own safety. Society gradually teaches the aggressor that Jews can be mistreated without meaningful consequences. I am describing a historical pattern that Jewish families have learned to recognize. Recognizing it early is part of protecting our children.

That recognition must produce children with judgment. My sons need to know when to walk away, when to speak, when to find help, and when a situation genuinely demands action. They need the physical ability to defend themselves and the discipline to avoid proving themselves in confrontations that serve no purpose. Speaking up does not require confronting every antisemite. Direct confrontation can place children in greater danger, and leaving may be the most responsible decision a father can make. Strength is measured by responsibility, control, and the capacity to protect life.

They also have to know who they are. People who hate Jews should have no authority over what Jewish identity means to my children. My children should understand the danger honestly and experience the joy of Jewish life fully. They should know our traditions, our humor, our arguments, and the attachment to life that has carried our people through centuries of exile and persecution. Jewish identity must live beyond the privacy of our homes. It becomes meaningful when it shapes how a person behaves under pressure and in full view.

A father teaches this primarily through conduct. My children will remember how I responded when we were attacked because we are Jewish, whether I stood strong when the atmosphere became hostile. They will also remember whether I remained present as their father while doing it. The fight can consume a man. Anger can follow him home and occupy the space that belongs to his children. A father can become so focused on defending his family’s future that he disappears from its daily life. Protection includes the ordinary work. It means walking them to school, listening to a story that runs too long, correcting their behavior, making dinner, showing patience on a difficult night, and building a home where being Jewish is connected to love and belonging.

I cannot promise my children a world without antisemitism. I can prepare them to recognize it, meet it with judgment, and refuse to absorb its claims about who they are. I can teach them that fear carries information, and responsibility determines what we do with it. By remaining visibly Jewish when hiding would feel safer, I can show them that protecting what we love sometimes costs us our comfort.

Fatherhood asks a man to think beyond his own life. Jewish fatherhood makes that responsibility impossible to set down. I received an unfinished obligation from the generations before me, from people who endured so that I could stand here openly as a Jew. My responsibility now is to decide what I will hand to the generation behind me.

I will not leave my children alone with a danger I had the chance to face now, while I am strong.

Do something amazing,
Tsahi Shemesh