Touching and Not Touching

I am entering a new phase in my parenting life. My children are approaching their teen years, and I am trying to reduce my involvement in their lives. This is a big transition for me, as I have spent many waking (and sleeping) hours responding to their needs. As my husband and I make small changes to our family system so that it might better suit the emerging capacities of our children, I find myself wondering: where can I look for models of relating that allow for separation, for independence, for not knowing?

In their book, Liberated Parents, Liberated Children, Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish discuss this very thing. Drawing from the teachings of their teacher, Haim Ginott, they state:

There is a time and a place for not understanding, for not being in touch, for not knowing what a child is feeling. Dr. Ginott describes this as “letting each child have a corner on his own soul.”

-Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish, Liberated Parents, Liberated Children, Your Guide to a Happier Family, p. 32.

The child has a right to their own soul-experience, a corner of their own soul. Ginott’s model of knowing and not knowing, touching and not touching, reminds me of a powerful story in the Talmud: the story of Ben Zoma. Ben Zoma was one of the four sages who entered Pardes, the perilous, mythic orchard that was host to rabbinic mystical experience. Of the four sages who entered Pardes, one lost his life, one went mad, one turned a heretic. Only Akiva entered and exited in peace. Ben Zoma was among those who did not fare well; he either lost his mind, as recounted in the Babylonian Talmud, or, as told in the Jerusalem Talmud, lost his life. The Jerusalem Talmud provides this sequence: Ben Zoma lost his mind and died soon thereafter. 

The Talmud includes a description of the visions that accompanied Ben Zoma’s madness- visions that retain their poetic force to this day. When greeted by his colleague, Rabbi Yehoshua, Ben Zoma reported the following vision:

I was gazing upon the Works of Creation and there is naught but a hands-breath between the upper waters and the lower waters. (Jerusalem Talmud, 2:1)

Ben Zoma had a vision of the primordial waters in intimate relation, but not quite touching one another. He provides a Biblical basis for this paradoxical condition: the term in Genesis for the movement of wind upon the waters is “mirakhefet (Genesis 1:2).” The very same root appears in the description of God’s care for the people of Israel; in Deuteronomy, God is likened to an eagle “hovering [yirakhef] over its young (Deut. 32:11).” Ben Zoma suggests the following parallel: just as in the case of the eagle, the touch of the parent has the quality of touching and not touching, so too, were the primordial waters touching and not touching, mingled and yet separate entities. The dynamic relationship between the primordial waters is akin to the dynamics of the parent-child relation, and of divine providence itself. After hearing this vision, Rabbi Yehoshua declared that Ben Zoma is “still outside.” Ben Zoma, it seemed, remained in a liminal state, having not quite returned to rabbinic society, indeed, touching and not touching the material world. He died soon thereafter.

When I think of the eagle, touching and not touching its young, my mind wanders to an eagle of the Jewish people, someone who embodied this quality of relating to children, standing by them in profound solidarity while also insisting upon their individuation, dignity and self-expression. I am referring to Janusz Korczak (1878-1942), the Polish-Jewish pediatrician and pioneer in the field of child psychology and wellbeing. By the start of WWII, Korczak was world-famous for his novel and effective approaches to communication with children. He had achieved such renown that he was offered repeated opportunities to escape the Warsaw ghetto, where he and the children of his orphanage lived and suffered during the years of the war. He did not accept these offers and died with his children in Treblinka. Throughout the war, he provided a paradoxical presence for the children- providing them with the capacity for dignified self-expression while accompanying them in the harshest conditions of the ghetto. We have firsthand accounts of the terrible day in August 1942 when the staff and children of the orphanage were sent to their deaths. The children are described as appearing as if dressed for an outing, wearing their best clothes, and each carried a blue knapsack and a favorite book or toy. Historian and ghetto eyewitness, Joshua Perl wrote:

Janusz Korczak was marching, his head bent forward, holding the hand of a child, without a hat, a leather belt around his waist, and wearing high boots. A few nurses were followed by two hundred children, dressed in clean and meticulously cared for clothes, as they were being carried to the altar.

-Joshua Perl

Korczak empowered his children until the end. But it was not only his heroic accompaniment of the children on their final passage that reveals his profound commitments to their welfare; it is also the manner in which he lived with them, taught them, and provided for them.

Allow me to share an short excerpt from a passage from his work, How to Love a Child. He writes here about “secrets:”

If a child entrusts a secret to you, be glad, because her confidence is the greatest prize, the highest stamp of approval. But do not force it, because she has a right to her secret; don’t force it, not by asking, nor by trickery, nor by threat- all means will be equally contemptible; they won’t bring you closer- rather, they’ll distance you from your ward. One must convince the children that we respect their secrets, that the question, “Can you tell me?” does not mean “You have to.” To my “Why?” [i.e. Why do you choose not tell me?] let them answer not with an excuse but with an honest, “I can’t tell you. I’ll tell you sometime. I’ll never tell.” -Janusz Korczak, How to Love a Child

There is something so beautiful about the space between the parent and a child that is captured in the secret, and how important is such a space for the cultivation of a positive relationship with a child! In this short passage we catch a glimpse of Ben Zoma, of that same paradoxical handsbreath between the parent and child, between ourselves and one another, and the divine. Perhaps Ben Zoma’s vision of the waters, Korczak’s vision of the dignified manner of relating to the child’s inner experience, Ginnot’s “corner of the soul,” offer us a framework with which we might honor our relations with one another in this very difficult time. Perhaps we might recognize that we both touch and do not touch one another. Like a sukkah that both touches and does not touch its inhabitants, that protects and does not protect, let us cherish the quiet “corner of our souls” and come together while acknowledging the inevitable separation between us.

With prayers for peace in this New Year,

Deena

I discuss parenting and other topics in my new book. I hope that you will have a look. And, please join me for my upcoming book events in Berkeley, San Francisco, and beyond!

Last Update: 6 months ago by Deena Aranoff