My mother still describes how she and my dad took me to the airport in Chicago on the day I left home to complete high school in Israel. She describes returning to the house and heading up to my room on third floor and sitting on my bed as she wept. I still feel mildly annoyed, more than thirty years later, when she tells that anecdote. Having just dropped off our eldest child at college, however (and like so many other moments in my life as a parent), I understand both my mom and her story so much better.
As kids leave home, the mix of emotions that parents feel is real and appropriate. It’s not about being happy that they’re successfully moving on to the next stage of their lives vs. the sense of loss at seeing them move out. It’s both. It’s not the joy and gratitude for having arrived at such a wonderful moment vs. the anxiety (in some cases, even pain) at witnessing the passage of time and coming to terms with our own aging.? It’s both.
Transitions are, pretty much by definition, about the mixture of feelings which might otherwise be mutually exclusive.? Successfully managing them, and helping our kids to do the same, is really all about realizing that and giving both ourselves and them the space to do that. I may have known this intellectually before this week, but I never understood it so well until now.
As our kids go off to school, whether that entails them leaving home to become college freshmen or just getting on that yellow bus with a lunchbox for the first time, we have a great opportunity. We are given a chance to better understand ourselves, our kids, and even our own parents.
And we have the opportunity to stand in the transition, fully aware that as parents ourselves, we’ve come full circle – we’ve been the kid and now the parent. And with awareness can come understanding, wisdom, connection, and when necessary, forgiveness.? If that isn’t an opportunity, I don’t know what is.
Listed for many years in Newsweek as one of America’s “50 Most Influential Rabbis” and recognized as one of our nation’s leading “Preachers and Teachers,” by Beliefnet.com, Rabbi Brad Hirschfield serves as the President of Clal–The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, a training institute, think tank, and resource center nurturing religious and intellectual pluralism within the Jewish community, and the wider world, preparing people to meet the biggest challenges we face in our increasingly polarized world.
An ordained Orthodox rabbi who studied for his PhD and taught at The Jewish Theological Seminary, he has also taught the University of Pennsylvania, where he directs an ongoing seminar, and American Jewish University. Rabbi Brad regularly teaches and consults for the US Army and United States Department of Defense, religious organizations — Jewish and Christian — including United Seminary (Methodist), Yeshivat Chovevei Torah (Modern Orthodox) Luther Seminary (Lutheran), and The Jewish Theological Seminary (Conservative) — civic organizations including No Labels, Odyssey Impact, and The Aspen Institute, numerous Jewish Federations, and a variety of communal and family foundations.
Hirschfield is the author and editor of numerous books, including You Don’t Have To Be Wrong For Me To Be Right: Finding Faith Without Fanaticism, writes a column for Religion News Service, and appears regularly on TV and radio in outlets ranging from The Washington Post to Fox News Channel. He is also the founder of the Stand and See Fellowship, which brings hundreds of Christian religious leaders to Israel, preparing them to address the increasing polarization around Middle East issues — and really all currently polarizing issues at home and abroad — with six words, “It’s more complicated than we know.”