God Must Laugh

The most beloved verses in Hebrew scripture are called the Shemah. Here is an English translation.

“Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the door-frames of your houses and on your gates.”

People have been examining these verses for millenia, so I’m not going to attempt to find some new meaning in it. I only want to draw your attention to a few things. The first is, look how kid-centric it is! It opens with a statement about God, and the whole rest of the text is about passing this truth on to the next generation. The next thing I hope you notice is how this learning takes place. Not in a book. Not in a school. In real life, side by side.

We lock our kids up in schools. Can we at least admit that? Kids have to go and they can’t leave. They’re stuck there, this milling, restless, bored population, given little of real importance to do, with a small cadre of supervisors doing their best with minimal funds to keep things from blowing up. Sounds a bit like prison to me.

So who do they get to emulate? Other kids! Who is their social network? Other kids! Who do they look to for protection when someone threatens them? Other kids! Who defines their place in their little gated community? Other kids!

Where are the adults? Too busy dealing with their own problems to deal with the problems of young people. It’s much easier to just cart them off to school, or soccer, or speech, or band, or even (rarely) church. Better yet, why not drag the kids to all of them at once. Then we can keep them out of our hair while at the same time feeling like martyrs for sacrificing so much time and money keeping them in all of these activities “for their own good.”

You know what? Kids don’t need more activities. They need more grownups. They need adults to be involved in their lives, face to face, one on one. They need someone who knows the story to tell them the story, or else they’ll just go make up their own with the help of their equally mature friends. The only way that happens is with time, because these kids are way too familiar with advertising to believe a single word that comes out of your mouth. Everybody lies. They know it like they know they’re alive. The only words they’ll believe are your actions, your habits, your life lived in front of them in the real world with real problems.