CONFLICTING STANDARDS
The conflict of today is oftenest one between parental orthodoxy and
filial liberalism or heresy. My own experience has led to the
conviction that the clashing does not ordinarily arise between two
varying faiths but rather between faith on the one hand and unfaith or
unconcern with faith on the other. As for the Jewish home, the problem
is complicated by reason of the truth, somehow ignored by Jew and
non-Jew, that the religious conversion of a Jew usually leads to
racial desertion as far as such a thing can be save in intent. In the
Jewish home, racial loyalty and religious assent are so inextricably
interwoven,--with ethical integrity in many cases in the
balance,--that it is not to be wondered at that conflict oft obtains
when the loyalty of the elders is met by the dissidence of the younger
and such dissidence is usually the first step on the way that leads
to a break with the Jewish past.
And the battle, generally speaking, is not waged by parents on behalf
of the child's soul nor yet in the interest of imperilled Israel, but
in the dread of the hurt that is sure to be visited upon the guilt of
disloyalty to a heritage cherished and safeguarded through centuries
of glorious scorn of consequences. I should be grieved if a child were
to say to me: "I cannot repeat the ancient Shema Yisrael, the
watchword of the Jew: I find it necessary to reject the foundations of
the Jewish faith." My heart, I say, would be sad, but I would not
dream of attempting to coerce the mind of a child. I would look with
horror and with heartbreak upon the act of a child, who under one
pretext or another took itself out of the Jewish bond and away from
Jewish life. If, I repeat, a child of mine were to say "I can have
nothing to do with Israel," I would sorrow over that child as lost
because I should know that its repudiation of the household of Israel
was rooted in selfishness colored by self-protective baseness. But,
let me again make clear, if a child should say "I cannot truly affirm
God or His unity," I could not decently object, however harassed and
unhappy I might feel. I could not tolerate the vileness of racial
cowardice and desertion in a child, but I would have no right to break
with it because of religious dissent.
One of the conflicts irrepressible arises when there comes to be a
deep gulf fixed between the standards of parents and children, so deep
as to make harmonious living impossible. Though it seem by way of
excuse for children, it must be admitted that parental guidance is
ofttimes woefully lacking, when suddenly falls some edict or interdict
arbitrarily and unexpectedly imposed for which there has been no
preparation whatsoever. It may be torturing for parents to face the
facts, but they have no right to refuse to reap what they have sown,
to accept the wholly unavoidable consequences of the training of their
children. Parents who ask nothing of children for the first twenty
years may not suddenly turn about and ask everything. You cannot until
your child is twenty give all and after twenty forgive nothing.
Parents may not be idiotically doting for twenty years and then
suddenly become austerely exacting. I have seen parents, who accept a
young son's indolence, luxuriousness and dissipation of mind and body
as quite the correct thing for youth, later yield to regret over the
mental enervation and moral flabbiness of these sons.
A mother came to me not very long ago in tears over her son who had
married a poor wanton creature. What I could no more than vaguely hint
to the mother was that she had in some part prepared her son for the
moral catastrophe by attiring herself after the manner of a woman of the
streets. The household that exposes a son to the necessity of living
daily by the side of poor imitations of the street-woman will find his
ideals of womanhood sadly undermined in the end. The mother who does not
offer a son a glimpse of something of dignity and fineness in her own
life, alike in matter and manner, may expect little of her son.
Standards at best must be cultivated and illustrated through the years
of permeable childhood and cannot be improvised and insisted upon
whenever in parental judgment it may become necessary.
There is little to choose between the tragedy of parental rejection of
children's standards and filial abhorrence of the standards of
parents. And both types of tragedy occur from time to time. Sometimes
conflict is well, not conflict in the sense of ceaseless clashing but
as frank and undisguised acceptance of the fact of irreconcilably
discrepant standards. Better some wars than some peace! There are
times when parents and children should conflict with one another, when
approval is invited or tolerance expected of the intolerable and
abhorrent, whether in the case of an unworthy daughter or a viciously
dissolute son. I make the proviso that such conflict, decisive and
final, can be as far as parents are concerned without the abandonment
of love for the erring daughter or wayward son.
Severer, if anything, the conflict becomes when it is children who are
bidden to endure and embrace what they conceive to be the lower
standards of parents. The clashing may not be less serious because
inward and voiceless rather than outward and vocal. If parents feel
free to reprove children, it behooves them to have in mind that
children are and of right ought to be free to disapprove of parents,
though the conventions seem to forbid children to utter such
disapproval. Outward assent may cover up the most violent disapproval,
and parenthood should hardly be offered up in mitigation or
extenuation any more than the status of orphanhood should shield the
parricide or matricide. And it cannot be made too clear, children have
the right to reject for themselves the lower standards of parents.
Before me has come from time to time the question whether it is the
business of a daughter to yield obedience to a mother who would inflict
low and degrading standards upon her child. Or the question is put thus:
what would you say to a son, who refuses to enter into and have part in
the business of his father which he believes to be unethical, though the
father and the rest of the world view it as wholly normal and
legitimate? I may not find it in me to urge a child not to obey a
parent, neither would I bid a son or daughter waive the scruples of
conscience in order to please a parent. Times and occasions there are, I
believe, when a child is justified in saying to parents in the terms of
finest gentleness and courtesy--the filial _fortiter in re_ must above
all else be _suaviter in modo_--it is not you whom I disobey, because I
must obey a law higher than that which parents can impose upon me. I
must obey the highest moral law of my own being.
But this decision is always a grave one and must be arrived at in the
spirit of earnestness and humility, never in the mood of defiance.
Whether or not this entail the necessity of physical separation is less
important than that it be clearly understood that there is a higher law
even than parental mandate or filial whim, that parents and child alike
do well to understand. Parents dare not fail to act upon the truth that,
if intellectual coercion be bad, the unuttered and unexercised
compulsions toward a lower moral standard are infinitely worse. A child
may not forget that, when parental dictate is repudiated in favor of a
higher law, it must in truth be a higher law which exacts obedience. And
even peace must be sacrificed when the higher law summons.