Dear Dr. Tyson.

I wanted to send you a note because I am having a discussion with my 10-year-old son. We have been doing what generations before me have done . . . sending my child to Hebrew School. We send him so we can have him learn about his religion and where he comes from.

 

 

 

 

Friday, March 30, 2018—Passover

Dear Ingrid,

An embarrassingly belated reply to your thoughtful email. The universe has been keeping me quite busy lately, but I do get to all my emails—eventually.

 

Of course in a free country, within limits, you can raise your children how you please, on whatever belief system you choose. For this reason, most people in the world who are religious, practice the religion of their parents. For example, the chances of Christians raising a child who later becomes Muslim, or a Muslim family raising a child who later becomes Jewish are extremely rare. The children will be more likely to grow up believing in no Gods than in the Gods of other religions.

 

So the urge to raise your son as a devout, practicing Jew, being one yourself, is entirely normal and natural. But of course you have, at most, only 18 years of direct influence on him. Your son will spend more than eighty percent of his life under a different roof than you.

 

From what I have seen and encountered, Judaism manifests across a huge range of practices—from emboldened Jews who enthusiastically eat bacon to the various sects of Orthodox Jews who, among other practices, maintain separate kitchen utensils for dairy and for meat. As a scientist, I have much more experience with atheist Jews. They do not view the Torah as the word of God. They see it as a book of stories—not to be judged for their truth or falsehood, but as a repository of insights from which wisdom for living one’s life can be derived.

 

Think about it. When we read fairy tales, we are not judging them for whether they are true or not.

 

Instead, we fold lessons derived from them into our world views. Not only this, atheist Jews will commonly celebrate the high holidays with no less ritual than practicing Jews, right on down to leaving an open seat at the Seder table for Elijah, and making sure the front door is unlocked, so he can just walk right in if he happens to show up.

 

Why would an atheist Jew do this? The answer is not hard. Rituals and traditions account for some of the strongest binding forces among peoples of the world. Attending Mass on Sundays for Catholics. Prayer five times per day for Muslims. Ancestor worship for the Animist religions. One can participate without judging whether the events that established the ritual have any literal truth at all. The participation creates a sense of community, which has almost always contributed value to civilization. It disrupts civilization only when people require that others share their particular rituals, with threat of force to achieve it.

 

Being on the spectrum and liking science as he does, your best bet might be to not enforce the literalism of anything religious, but to keep him plugged into the beautiful traditions of the religion, and emphasize the value of ritual as a seed and taproot of community. Often that alone represents the greatest challenge when raising autistic children—getting them to embrace the value of love and compassion for people and for relationships.

 

Rest assured that you can raise a wholesome, intelligent, law-abiding child without requiring he believe that Moses turned a staff into a snake, or that manna fell from heaven.

 

Good luck. In my experience, it takes some of that too.

 

Happy Passover to you both.

Neil deGrasse Tyson