Fatherhood and Metazoans
In preparation for Pesach, I've started reading Jonathan Sacks' Haggadah. The commentary shows pretty impressive secular scholarship. This passage got my attention:
With the imminent birth of our baby I've been thinking a lot about fatherhood. In a scurrilous attack piece, New Jersey journalist Matt Katz accused me of plotting to fool my offspring into becoming vegetarian by resorting to mind games. I certainly never said anything of the sort. What I might have said was that I thought as a father I could set a good example in the home but encourage my children to experiment outside the home and come to their own conclusions.
I do wonder if this approach is too liberal and the traditional method of simply instructing children in right versus wrong practice is better. In the end, I think I ascribe a lot of importance to behavioral flexibility. Evolution shows us that many species have died out because they lacked the physiological plasticity to adapt to rapidly changing conditions. I hope that encouraging children to engage in moral reasoning will prepare them best for the many unforeseeable situations they are likely to find themselves in as the world goes through a period of upheaval.
Fatherhood and motherhood are two distinct phenomena and Judaism attaches equal importance to both. A child derives its biological identity as part of the Jewish people from its mother. The hebrew word for compassion, rachamim, derives from rechem, meaning 'a womb'. A mother, more than a father, is bound to the child through unconditional love.I like this idea of the need to socialize fathers, though I'm uncertain that fatherhood is not a genetic drive in human males. Just as love has a physiological basis that varies dramatically between vertebrate species (vasopression receptor expression), it wouldn't surprise me if genetically specifies predisposition for father-child attachment didn't vary widely between and possibly within species, including our own.
Fatherhood by contrast, is a social construct. It belongs to culture rather than nature. There are animals including primates, genetically close to human beings, in which fathers do not even recognize their children after a few months. Fatherhood, like fidelity, is not a constant across cultures. The supreme challenge of any civilization said the anthropologist Margaret Mead, is to socialize males and persuade them to invest their energies in the home, the family and children.
With the imminent birth of our baby I've been thinking a lot about fatherhood. In a scurrilous attack piece, New Jersey journalist Matt Katz accused me of plotting to fool my offspring into becoming vegetarian by resorting to mind games. I certainly never said anything of the sort. What I might have said was that I thought as a father I could set a good example in the home but encourage my children to experiment outside the home and come to their own conclusions.
I do wonder if this approach is too liberal and the traditional method of simply instructing children in right versus wrong practice is better. In the end, I think I ascribe a lot of importance to behavioral flexibility. Evolution shows us that many species have died out because they lacked the physiological plasticity to adapt to rapidly changing conditions. I hope that encouraging children to engage in moral reasoning will prepare them best for the many unforeseeable situations they are likely to find themselves in as the world goes through a period of upheaval.
- sheikh X at 8:16 AM
4 Comments:
there is a midrash (i mention this because i know what a big fan victor is of midrash) that says that when yitro agreed to let moshe marry his daughter, tzippora he made moshe promise that he would give his first son to idolatry. subsequent scholarship has suggested that this only meant that moshe's first child would not be compelled to follow a predetermined path, but would be allowed "moral flexibility' to choose his own spiritual inclinations and to explore theological alternatives. The rabbis say that in the end all of Moshe's offspring chose Judaism but that none have been remembered or noted as particularly distinctive or accomplished- and that perhaps this is the reason why. I'm not sure what the point of all this is, but it seemed to be related.
I see - so you're arguing that I should compel the kid to be vegetarian.
Re Moses - i recall that he had two children. As presumably only the first was allowed moral flexibility, the second child serves as a control for the effect of upbringing on later achievement. As neither are remembered for accomplishment we can conclude that moral flexibility is not sufficient to explain their indistinctiveness.
Rather, as in the case of Herzl, the Rambam, Einstein and other luminaries, it's more likely connected the greatness of the parent.
in defense of Rambam and his son, Avraham ben Rambam- his son was distinguished as a leading political and halachic figure in his own time, and was a leader in the campaign to validate his father's works in the Jewish community (sounds funny to us today, but it was a very big problem). Some of his writings have even survived to this day. He certainly pales in comparison to his father in the memory of posterity, but it's not exactly fair to to remember him as indistinct (or undistinguished). In the case of Herzl and Einstein, there might have been a problem of giving the children to idolatry...
Maimonides son became a wanna-be Sufi.
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