Thursday, November 02, 2017
Elder of Ziyon
If my husband and I had stayed in Israel-Palestine, we would have never sent our daughter to a preschool of any religious orientation. We probably would have remained in the West Bank, where his family would have helped with childcare. She would have been raised a Muslim Palestinian.Guarnieri Jaradat wants her child to have Jewishness without Judaism, Israeliness without Israel, and for good measure to be Muslim without Islam.
But I likely would have brought her in to Israel with me for the holidays and the occasional Shabbat on the beach in Tel Aviv. There, she would have absorbed my brand of secular Judaism - chagim and Hebrew.
And she's whining that she cannot find this mythical community - in America.
... I needed to find childcare. Fast. None of the secular preschools I visited were a fit; the JCC was certainly out of question. I remembered the place where my friend’s son had his brit milah. I dropped by. There was no Israeli flag out front but there was Hebrew inside.
What’s the harm in a little religion? I asked myself. I signed my daughter up.
While I initially felt encouraged by the place’s welcoming attitude. I told them about our unique family situation and they seemed accepting. But I became concerned about the content. However silly, I was disappointed that their sort of Hebrew wasn’t the Hebrew I’d learned in Israel. Sukkot isn’t "Sukkot" but, rather, “Sukkos.” It’s not shabbat shalom but "gut shabbos." The kids don’t study the alef-bet. No, it’s the alef-beis.
Something else wasn’t sitting right with me. On Rosh Hashanah when I accompanied my daughter to the children’s program, I figured out what it was: . When they did a mock tashlikh, the children fished "good" and "bad" things out of a bag, tossing the "bad" into a large piece of paper, painted blue, decorated with fish, representing a body of water, and receiving candy for the "good."
"Good" and "bad"? I didn’t want her internalizing the labels and feeling the guilt or shame common to religious people of all the Abrahamic faiths. I was uncomfortable with how black and white it all was, I was uncomfortable with the moralizing.
Someone who has written dozens of articles for +972 and other sites, who literally hates Zionism, is upset at the "moralizing" of teaching children that some behaviors are good and some are bad???
One of the blurb-writers for Mya's anti-Israel book, Neve Gordon, refers to the Israeli government as representing "the intricate webs of evil." Mya doesn't object to that kind of moralizing. Only the kind that tells children that listening to parents is good and hurting others is bad.
What a thoroughly messed-up person. She wants to teach her daughter that there is no such thing as good and bad - except if course for the twin evils of Israel and the Jewish religion.
How terrible that she cannot find a community of like-minded people that trash their religion and their nationality while listening to Hebrew popular music.
We already knew that Guarnieri Jaradat was a hypocrite. But this is such self-absorbed crap - trying to damn the American Jewish community but unwittingly telling the world what a twisted and sick person she is.
No wonder that Haaretz considers it worthy of publication.
