"I had to decide whether to lie or tell the truth," I heard someone say this week about creating a Purim play to share with kids.
Ultimately, this person chose to "lie," to not tell the truth about what the Megillah really says. "It reads like a Harlequin novel," she said, not without merit - and not even bringing up how we reduce/remove the violence.
My initial instinct with regard to the "lying" was, "is it really lying?" But to be honest, I often feel the same way - that I am lying, or not telling the real story - and not just at Purim, but throughout the cycle of Torah reading and holiday celebrations.
When I was a kid, we sang "Oh, once there was a wicked, wicked man...he would have murdered all the Jews." I did not hear that song once, this year, in the celebration of Purim at the day school where I teach, in my child's preschool. I included it in Purim celebrations as a congregational rabbi, a few years ago, received by a palpable tension among parents.
When political correctness (PC) came into vogue in the 90s, it instantly became a joke in itself. We have followed it with helicopter parenting, and now parents calling the police on other parents for letting their children walk alone to/from school and in the neighborhood. In elementary school, I walked alone and with friends to school, park, and neighboring homes within a few blocks of my own Capitol Hill, Seattle home. Did I encounter creeps out there in the small world I traversed? Yes, I did. And as a result, I have a much stronger sense of what the world is, I think, really like.
What world do we make when we shield and protect our children from knowledge and experience of violence, even as it is found in our wisdom traditions, from Torah (bible) to fairy tales and folk song?
Our wisdom stories are there to teach us not only about the glory of the good, and how to behave well in the world. They are also there to teach us to protect ourselves from the likes of Esther's Haman, or Hansel and Gretel's witch, or the Three Little Pigs' wolf.
On the other hand, as a parent, I am astonished at the violence in old cartoons from my generation (and before), and I find myself not wanting to share a lot with my son. I'm talking everything from gratuitous bopping on the head from character to character in such cartoons as Woody Woodpecker, a staple of my childhood, to the violence of the superheroes of comic book and television fame, let alone the war propaganda of old Donald Duck and Three Pigs & Wolf cartoons. Even the good guys are violent in so many of these, and I find myself cringing.
What I wonder is, what are the benefits of the old-style stories with at least some violence? What does it teach our children when Haman is hanged at his own gallows? What does it say about us when we glorify this with a whole holiday? Yes, I know, the holiday is more than that; but as I have heard said/sung about so many Jewish holidays, "they tried to kill us, we survived, let's eat." What does it teach our children when we eliminate the violent sections of our stories (let alone the sexist, not to mention sexual parts) in our telling them to children, and then they go and read the whole book as teens or adults?
But what happens in each generation when someone stands up and says, "I felt like I had to lie"? What value are we teaching with this?
Are our old wisdom books passé? Should we stop reading them altogether? Do we continue to change them for younger children, but intentionally teach the more difficult parts to young teens, even as part of sex(ual) education and tikkun olam (for the violence), so that they don't discover it on their own and feel "lied to"?
How do we intentionally make use of the more difficult parts of our stories -- and our neighborhoods -- to help our children become wise world navigators? Or do we need to consider tossing these wisdom stories out entirely and creating new gentler stories?
I don't have an answer. Indeed, inside my head there continues to be a jury of my younger ("lied to") self, my parent self, my rabbi self, my anthropologist self, and an odd assortment of other voices debating the various values and issues associated with how we pass down wisdom about good and not-good in our world, how we teach caution, and how we make the world a more loving and peaceful place with less violence, less danger, and yes, less patriarchy (or frankly less domination by any one class of people).
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