Halloween celebrations and trick-or-treating: just clean fun or forbidden anti-Jewish activities? Like most issues in the Jewish community, it depends on who you ask. And not surprisingly, a Jewish school\’s stand on Halloween observance may not be shared by the students or their parents.
When my mother discovered that she had left her hearing aid back in her apartment, on the 28th floor of the Northshore Towers in Queens, N.Y., I thought for sure that meant we would miss the bus into Manhattan and, as a result, could forget about seeing \”The Lion King.\”
I remember how amazed I was by the story. Tom and Pauline Nichter and their 11-year-old son, Jason, were on the nightly news, speaking with reporters from the police station.
Until children reach a certain age, parents seethem simply as beloved offspring. Flesh of their flesh. Withbittersweet nostalgia, they remember all, from the Gerber days tograduation day.
But then it happens: the transformation.
My son, Jason,called the other day and jokingly said that I didn\’t keep myword.
Ethan Gura doesn\’t remember his sister. Still, he cannot forgether. He can\’t forget that Rebecca Alexandra Gura died in 1991 after afour and a half year battle with leukemia. She was then six yearsold. He was three.
Child rearing, it turns out, is a relatively short-term project. The truth is that we don\’t have them for very long. Eighteen years, that\’s all. Eighteen years, from birth until they move away to Stanford. If your child is 5, you\’ve got 13 years left. If your child is 8, you\’ve got 10 years. If your child is 11,you\’ve got only seven years — just a few years to put them to bed with a story and a song, to make them breakfast, to stick artwork upon the fridge.
Once, I was a revolutionary. I belonged to the generation of long hair and crazy ideas. We did more than invent rock music and protest an unjust war. We believed that we could create a new society, populated by new people — people freed of the prejudices and life-choking rigidities of the past. We believed that we could change the world, and bring greening to America.
America did change. But our dream went unfulfilled.
What\’s the biggest problem facing today\’s high school graduate? Separating fantasy from reality. And television is the culprit.
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