Elissa Strauss covers the recently released Does the Shape of Families Shape Faith? from a Jewish perspective. She writes:
“The report also looks at how divorce alters the domestic rituals of religious life.
“Children of divorce experience a disruption of the “domestic church” of their home. … With their parents, children pray at meals or bedtime, read stories, and ask questions about the nature of God and the meaning of life. In homes, they celebrate religious holidays and sacraments and participate in family traditions. When divorce affects families, these practices can be more difficult to maintain.” (quoted from the report)
This point is especially interesting in a Jewish context because so much of our traditional observance occurs in the home. From weekly Shabbat dinners to Passover, the home is an important site of religious practice, and for many people, their best Jewish memories take place at the kitchen table.
Divorced Jewish parents might want to take note of this one and make sure they are maintaining these at-home rituals post-split if they expect or desire their kids to take an interest in a Jewish life when they are adults. These rituals may very well be unique to their family’s Jewish expression and individual realities (maybe it is just a shared pot of turkey-chili on Friday night, a few electronic-free hours on Saturday, or matzo brei during Passover instead of more traditional observance); the point is to maintain them.” Read more…
Categories: Faith and Families, General
Is it just me or is the link off?
Yep-sorry-it’s fixed now!
nice, it supports my jewish experience which was mostly home-family centered
Thanks for the link. It’s important to make the connections to other faiths for this report.
(And I’m still hoping you’ll get some scholars to write a few more papers on the shape of faith and divorce from non-Christian perspectives.)
And it’s important that it was published by a Jewish affiliated organazation, not an organization which purports to be secular, so it’s ok if it has a sectarian bias that promoting jewish affiliation is a positive goal.
(what it means it shouldn’t be considered a goal of a secular organization)
ki sarita – I think it makes sense for a secular organization to look at the possibility that divorce leads to loss of faith and/or a connection to a faith community. That can be seen as a potentially bad thing for the kids. I guess you have to ask them the question, though, – do they feel like it was a loss or not?
Secular groups can also work with churches to see if churches can help kids of divorce and their families. Non-profits aren’t the government. It means the group isn’t completely secular, but I guess that’s something a group can choose.
One of the side effects of performing religious rituals at home is the way they provides a sense of stability and permanence. We’ll have Shabbat this Friday night just like we had it last Friday night, and so on.
I don’t know what it’d be like to live through a divorce with children, but even for our intact family, our kids seem to benefit from learning about a cycle that repeats weekly, and one that they slowly get to participate in more and more as they get older.
Jewish spiritual observance without home literal observance of some kind is almost impossible. I don’t know if most Christians feel that way or not.