When our values compete, it’s hard to stay upright. Four writers reflect

Keep them Safe

Dina Cohen

I

watch as she drums her magenta plastic talons of one hand on the faux-marble countertop. Clippety-clop, clippety-clop. With the other hand, she drags on a cigarette, blowing out puffs of white smoke in between scowling.

Multitasking at its finest.

I want to scowl, too.

I don’t.

But it takes the self-control of a saint. Which I’m not.

“Mindy, I don’t allow smoking in my house,” I say.

She kicks the leg of the barstool she’s perched on. “It’s cold outside, Dina,” she gripes.

There are so many things I want to say in response. Say? Snarl. Like, “Well, you’re not exactly dressed for this weather, are you?” She’s looks like she’s on the way to the beach. And, “If you’d eat more, you’d have some meat on you to keep you warm.” All she’d eaten at the seudah was salad. Which I’d added shredded corned beef and candied pecans to, just to get some more nutrition into her. And, “I wish when you come to my house, you’d be more considerate and behave more appropriately.”

I don’t.

But it takes the self-control of a saint. Which I’m not.

“I have a really warm fake fur in the coat closet,” I respond.

Mindy rolls her eyes and flutters her (false) lashes at me before slinking out of the kitchen.

My eight-year-old daughter watches the exchange through enormous hazel eyes.

The jalapeño dip I ate at lunch burns my esophagus. What am I teaching my daughter? I wonder as I start loading the dirty plates into the dishwasher. Clank. Clank. I throw the silverware into the basket.

Is this going to be her in a few years? When it happens, my husband, who wishes we wouldn’t host my off-the-derech sister, will shake his head sorrowfully at me and say, “See, I was right. She was a bad influence.”

Or will my daughter become a kiruv professional on some college campus in the middle of nowhere, hosting scores of tattooed teenagers for the Pesach Seder, answering their angst-filled existential questions as she doles out bowls of matzah ball soup, having learned from her mother how to skillfully deal with people outside of her daled amos?

I’ve heard it said that life is like a fitted sheet: You pull too hard on one corner, and the other corner pops up. It’s definitely true when it comes to values, especially competing values. If you keep your children hermetically sealed from the winds that billow challenge, they may never come to you with questions like, “Why does Hashem care if I turn on the light on Shabbos?” and as they get older, “How come Hashem doesn’t let a Kohein marry a divorcée? Isn’t that discrimination?”

But then I risk them being so tightly quarantined they’ll have no antibodies to handle any encounter with the outside world. I’ll be depriving them of the opportunity to build up their spiritual immunity, of the chance to show the glow of Yiddishkeit to those who haven’t yet experienced its light. I’ll run the chance that their gut reaction to anyone not their clone will be to recoil — or worse yet, to judge.

And as I bang around my kitchen in distress over this dilemma — keep them sheltered or allow them to be exposed — am I sending vibes to my baby sister that my polite patience is just a mask? Instead of being a lighthouse of empathy and tolerance in a turbulent world, am I alienating her even further?