Jewish parenting tricks?

I've been working with my eldest for several months now on a lesson I learned back on Yom Kippur: that taking responsibility for your behavior is about more than just saying "I'm sorry," and yet it stops short of having to admit that you're a bad person. 

That is to say, if you do something that hurts or bothers another person, Judaism says that you have to go beyond a huffy "I'm sorry!" apology to doing something that repairs the relationship, if that is at all possible. I have been trying to do this with some people in my life, with different amounts of success, and I'm not sure that it's always possible. But I have gotten my son to turn around and think about how to make it up to me or another family member after being rude or hurtful. He once brought me a glass of water after he had made it take longer for me to mow the yard! Slowly, slowly, he's getting it.

But he's missing the second half: that you don't have to go so far as to feel bad about yourself over your bad behavior: in Judaism, people are not all good or all bad, but are full of the potential to be either or both. More to the point, God does not judge us as bad people over a few bad choices – or a few dozen – so we are not to judge ourselves or others that way, either. God asks that we turn from our bad habits, for sure, but does not damn us for them by any means. 

My son still thinks the opposite, though: that admitting he did wrong means admitting he is bad, but that shirking this responsibility with a curt apology should get him a clean slate. These may simply be inclinations of childhood, but I think they are amplified by a certain strain within Christianity that taught him two mis-truths: on the one hand, he was taught that belief in Jesus means that one gets instant forgiveness and never has to atone for their own sins any more, but on the other hand he learned that we need this instant forgiveness because all people are deeply and irreparably flawed and sinful. We can't help ourselves, so God helps us instead. 

We can't be good people, the logic seems to go, so God sacrificed Jesus to make it so we wouldn't have to. I suppose I can see how this seems like "good news" to some, but to me it has always sounded like a recipe for a world where everyone feels bad about themselves and yet nobody ever tries to make anything better. 

Jewish atonement theory takes more work, it puts more responsibility on me, but it gives me a sense of hope that things can get better, a sense that I am not intrinsically a bad person, a sense that I have some agency in my own life. And that is what I want to teach my kids. 

– – –

I bring all of this up because in trying to teach my kids another Jewish life lesson, I ended up teaching it to myself. 

My oldest was in a panic about a state standardized test "benchmark" and, on the edge of tears, announced that he had lost all hope. After attempts to comfort him about the test failed, I tried a different tack: I explained that I had read that hopelessness is considered one of the cardinal sins in Judaism. Why? Because to give up hope is to believe that neither God nor God's images and partners-in-creation (us) have the ability to make a situation any better than it is. And that failure-to-believe, to hope, is the quintessential Jewish sin. 

But again, unlike the Christianity Ryan had learned before, Judaism does not see this sin as an deep inner failing, but as a bad choice. It does not condemn us for this sin, it simply asks that we make a better choice. And choosing hope may not be as easy as it sounds, but we can do it. 

The amazing thing is that he took my advice, he summoned up a little bit of hope, and he did well on the test. 

The really amazing thing happened the next day, however. After being rejected for a car loan by my credit union, feeling like my life had become a giant trash can the universe kept throwing rubbish into, I almost told my wife that I had given up hope of things ever working out. Then I heard my own words to my son, and knowing that hypocrisy is the one intolerable sin to a teenager, I knew I had to take my own advice. And I did. 

I held on to the one little bit of hope I could muster, and things have started going better. Or, at least, I've started feeling better about how they are going. And that has made all the difference.