Becoming a Jewish Parent: How to Add Wonder and Spirituality to Your Child's Life Code

Raising Jewish children in today's secular culture poses unique and serious challenges. How do parents pass on a positive, vital sense of identity, religion, and heritage without turning their kids off or overwhelming them? How do you explain what it means to be Jewish if you are ambivalent about it yourself? And perhaps most important, how do parents who have had little or no formal religious training themselves pass on rich, multilayered traditions that may have been missing from their own childhood experiences?
In Becoming a Jewish Parent: How to Explore Spirituality and Tradition with Your Children, Daniel Gordis has written an invaluable guide for parents who are interested in introducing Judaism into their homes so that their children can grow up loving, understanding, and cherishing their heritage.

Filled with delightful and inspiring anecdotes, thoughtful information about the history, holidays, and traditions that shape Judaism, as well as a useful glossary and incredibly thorough reference section, this book is a vital resource that you will want to refer to again and again. Becoming a Jewish Parent tackles major issues in contemporary life and offers thoughtful approaches and insights to dealing with such complicated subjects as using ritual to make space for feeling, talking about God when we have doubts, incorporating girls into what has been primarily a male tradition, and becoming part of a community that supports your ideals. Becoming a Jewish Parent is the book to turn to at every phase of a family's spiritual quest.

If being a good parent means having a subtle, sophisticated, and appropriate sense of what is "honest" when it comes to love, sex, police, the government, or other complicated issues, the same is clearly true with God. We could, when our children ask about God, tell them about all the things we're not sure about, all the reasons we could come up with to doubt that God is "out there."

Tells how to share a positive sense of Jewish identity, religion, and heritage.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 304-315) and index.

Daniel Gordis teaches and lectures widely across the United States and beyond. A rabbi and professor, he is the author of two previous books, God Was Not in the Fire: The Search for a Spiritual Judaism and Does the World Need the Jews?: Rethinking Chosenness and American Jewish Identity. He and his wife are raising a daughter and two sons.