Telling Your Own (Sometimes Unhappy) Stories
Use stories to teach your kids about difficult truths
Years ago I was a professional storyteller, primarily sharing tales from the Jewish tradition. I gave workshops to both adults and children about telling stories from their Jewish lives. While this article is specifically about telling Jewish stories in Jewish families, the basic information is equally applicable to any family.
I was a professional storyteller for about ten years. During that time I gave many workshops to adults and children. When working with children, mostly between the ages of 9 to 15, I discovered something that shocked me: almost none of the children were aware that antisemitism still existed. They had assumed that it had ended with the end of the Holocaust. But when I told a couple of stories of experiences from own life, children’s eyes opened wide and they nodded with understanding.
Most of them had experienced antisemitic incidents, but they never attributed them to their Jewishness. They assumed that they, personally, were at fault, although they could not figure out what they had done to trigger the animosity.
I understood this well because my parents always told me I was at fault. In many cases, I later discovered that the people involved just did not like Jews.
Building Resilience
As a result of these experiences, I realized how very important it is for parents to be honest with their children, explaining realities in age-appropriate ways, rather than trying to shield them from unpleasant truths.
My understanding is seconded by many experts in child development and child psychology. According to the American Psychological Association, “Instead of shielding children from the dangers, violence or tragedies around us, adults should talk to kids about what is happening.”[i] Children pick up on what’s going on around them, often misunderstanding but sometimes understanding only too well. And when parents and teachers shield them, they often grow to distrust themselves and the adults, questioning both their perceptions and whether the adults they have respected believe they are too stupid to know the truth.
“We learn resilience by facing adversity and getting past it,” writes Richard E. Cytowic, MD, MFA, a professor of neurology.[ii] He continues, “Efforts to sugarcoat reality or shield children from harsh truths unintentionally hamper their ability to learn from misfortune and develop the resilience that makes negotiating adult life easier.”
Strengthening Jewish Identification
There are many reasons beyond building resilience for sharing personal and family stories about Jewish experiences. Excluding those in predominantly Jewish communities, Jewish children living outside of Israel are surrounded by non-Jews. Jewish culture can seem to be something that is limited to temple, Sunday School, and (sometimes only occasionally) to their immediate family.
When a parent shares his or her Jewish experiences, or stories from their parent’s life, this helps children connect with the stream of Jewish history and the larger Jewish world. What otherwise can seem like foolish customs practiced by “my family” become part of a tapestry that children begin to recognize and identify with.
Questions I heard often from workshop participants included, “I didn’t do anything Jewish as a child,” “I converted to Judaism,” and “I’m in a mixed marriage so I don’t know if this is appropriate.” The answer to all of these is the same: you still have Jewish stories, and they will help your children understand their background. This helps ground them and give them a strong identity.
How did you feel knowing you were Jewish but not doing anything? Did you feel strange when a teacher brought up Hanukkah, for example?
What was your first Shabbat, Hanukah, Yom Kippur fast?
Why did you choose to start learning about Judaism and/or observing Jewish customs?
What challenges are there (that you can explain in an age-appropriate way) to having two faiths in one home? Your children will be aware of this dichotomy and may find it difficult; your experiences will help them deal with it.
Let’s be honest: Jewish history is not a sweet story of success after success, riches after riches. It is also a story of poverty, discrimination, being uprooted and uprooted again. That we Jews still exist is a tribute to our ability to rise above circumstances and flourish.
Today’s children need to understand all of this, perhaps more than previous generations, because they may be taught that Jews are at the top of the “privilege” pyramid. This dangerous and antisemitic belief ignores millenia of Jewish struggle and attributes Jewish success to our DNA. Children need to hear your struggles, failures, and successes, and your own spiritual and religious questions that if you have not yet resolved, you can acknowledge you are still working on.
And now, on to telling the stories…
Anecdote or Story?
You undoubtedly know some people who talk a lot but are always boring, and others whose simple personal tales are riveting. The difference is that a bore recounts anecdotes, while the second tells true stories.
An anecdote is an incident: Today I went to the office supply store in the mall.
There is no story here. It happened, but it has no meaning. Stories, especially according to the Jewish tradition, have meaning. Creating one from thin air is difficult, but we all have experiences. Many of those can become stories with a little thought.
All stories have a story arc:
The beginning: introducing the situation and the problem to be solved
A middle: expansion on the problem and, if possible, three incidents of trial and error. Three is the magic number in stories, a curious cross-cultural fact.
A resolution: a satisfactory solution to the problem, and in Jewish lore usually a lesson, either overt or covert.
My anecdote is clearly not a story. It is a humdrum entry on a to-do list. But it can be fleshed out by asking myself one important question: Is anything unusual about this?
In this case, yes. This trip was in February 2024. Last time I was in that store was March 2020, a few days before the first Corona shut-down.
This answer raises other questions:
I certainly needed office supplies between those dates; why didn’t I go to this particular store?
Why did I decide to go to it today?
Was I able to get what I needed?
How did I feel about going there today?
Was the original incident that caused me to stop shopping there resolved in any way?
Did I learn anything from this?
Answering these questions gives me the outline of my story, which I will build here for you as an example.
I boycotted the store because I was cheated last time I bought something there.
I needed to go today because one of the USB ports on my computer died. I had a lot of work to do, and I wanted to buy a USB hub so I could stop switching cords to make use of the one free USB port. No other place in my small community would have a selection.
I got what I needed.
I was apprehensive about setting foot in a place I had sworn never to enter, and I suspect I radiated antagonism because the clerk who approached me veered off when I looked up.
However, I found exactly what I needed at a price I could afford. When I went to pay, the clerk was very polite. Also, the manager was there, wearing a badge with his name and the word Manager. Previously, every time I tried to resolve my issue I was told that the manager wasn’t available. ,.lkl;op
The people in the store today were not the same arrogant, unpleasant people who had manned the store years ago. That old issue has been resolved.
I learned (or was reminded tha things do not stay the same. This shop is a chain with employees, who usually do not stay a long time. Boycotting can be “cutting off one’s nose to spite the face.”
Finding Meaning
The hardest part of this process for many people is finding meaning in incidents. We do not generally go through life thinking, “I learned X from that.” Most of the time we just float (or slog) along.
Robin Moore, whose book Awakening the Hidden Storyteller: How to build a storytelling tradition in your family, has become a classic, says, “The act of selecting a story to tell is not a random decision. There is probably something in that story that we wish, consciously or unconsciously, to communicate.”[iii]
Some ideas that might be the basis for your story’s lesson are:
The incident scared you (or made you laugh) enough to change your behavior.
It started or ended something important.
Because of the incident, you met someone who became important in your own life.
It was a tragedy or averted a tragedy.
In short, the incident was in some way either a major or minor exclamation point or turning point in your life.
Just because you haven’t thought about what you learned from an incident does not imply that the event was not meaningful. It just suggests you haven’t asked yourself why you remember it.
The lesson needn’t be something weighty. It can be as simple as, “My buddy Tim really enjoyed hearing the Purim Megillah, with graggers and horns blotting out Haman’s name. I think that was the first time I shared anything about being Jewish with a friend, and it turned out okay.”
Some stories have a covert lesson that may or may not be learned. Others seem to call for an explicit lesson: “I realized that…” or “That night when I went to bed, I thought, ‘xxx.’”
One man who was attending one of my workshops said that it would be lying to tell his kids that he had learned something from an incident. I suggested that he say instead, “As I was thinking about this incident today, I realized that…”
Fleshing Out Your Outline
Incidents
First, remember the story magic of threes. Goldilocks wandered into the home of the three bears. Three little pigs had issues with a wolf (who huffed, puffed, and blew) and their houses. Dorothy and Toto ran into the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion. Even the famous rice cereal goes Snap! Crackle! Pop! Why we stop at three instead of continuing to four or five is unknown, but it seems to be universal, so stick to it if you can.
Traditionally, these three incidents are two failures and finally a success, but sometimes the three incidents build suspense.
Characters
Only include people who are relevant to the story. If someone is fascinating but does not have an active role in the story, cut her out. You can always create a different story about her later. Describing how your characters look, what they wear, or how they speak may be relevant, but sometimes those details are unimportant. Sometimes the only thing that matters is what kind of person he is: honorable or a cheat, kind or vicious.
Setting
Use as much description of place as you can to make the story immediate. This changes from story to story, and even from telling to telling. Here’s a true example.
In the middle of a cold New England winter I once traveled an hour to tell stories at a small synagogue. When I got there, I was told they had forgotten to turn on the heat so the hall was very cold. Did I want to cancel, or to reschedule?
I looked at the crowd of 25 or 30 men, women and children and considered the program I planned to tell. All but one of the stories occurred, or could have occurred, in unspecified places in the Middle East. The Middle East has lots of deserts; deserts tend to be very hot in the summer. I could work with this. So they turned on the heat, we all sat down with coats on, and I gave the program. I added a lot of description of the desert, the hot sun beating down, sweat rolling off people, and so forth. One story took place in eastern Europe in winter. I added fires in fireplaces, people warming their hands by the fires, and hot tea and soup being served. These were details that were nowhere in the original stories, but I made them fit. Long before the furnace had heated the room, people were shucking off their coats from the heat they felt from my descriptions.
A Caveat
There are some things I strongly believe you should avoid. One is telling stories about living people, unless they figure secondarily within a story about you. You may find a story about a sibling hilarious and want to share it, but it may be the most humiliating experience in their life—and if you share it with your kids, your 11-year-old will definitely share it at the Passover table to all 22 relatives.
Especially avoid speaking badly about family members to your children. Many children think that if a relative is seriously flawed, they might have inherited the tendency to have that flaw. This can stunt their development. Instead, make the story about you, classmates, neighbors, or even something you saw on social media. It’s a story, not a lie-detector test, and it’s being told because there’s something in it that might be interesting or meaningful to your listeners.
Also, in these days of rampant antisemitism, unity among the Jewish people is more important than ever. Do not talk trash about other strains of Judaism. There is an excellent chance that a negative experience you may have had was caused by ignorance. As a participant in a workshop (not the leader) I once heard two stories that trashed the Orthodox. After the group evaluation, both storytellers retold their stories with new information provided them.
One young woman told how horrible Chabad is because of the way she was treated when she was a student in a Chabad elementary school. When I asked for more details, she said that her parents, who were totally secular, had “refused to kowtow to the school’s unrealistic demands” about a dress code and their requirement that no meat be included in lunches brought from home. Her teacher kept confiscating the girl’s ham and cheese (not kosher) sandwiches, giving her apples instead. She was given an ill-fitting uniform skirt when she showed up in jeans or shorts, or a sleeved blouse to cover her tank tops (immodest dress). I pointed out that the villains were her parents, who refused to follow the school’s standards, either making their child a weapon in a fight against Orthodoxy or simply ignoring both rules they had agreed to and their child’s need to fit in.
Another participant told about the terrible manners of the Orthodox, and how shocked he was when, at an Orthodox family’s Shabbat table, the father made the ritual blessing over bread, broke off a piece of the challah and ate it before sharing it around the table. “We were guests; we should have been offered the bread first.” But Jewish law says one must do an action immediately after making a blessing, without an interruption. Sharing before the blesser eats is an interruption and is not done.
I asked the teller how he would have reacted if this had happened at the home of a Viet Namese family. He said, “Well, then it would be another culture, so it would be okay.” I explained that he, as a secular Jew, was visiting a household with a different culture: the culture of traditional Jewish law.
Both tellers were able to rewrite their stories. The woman removed the Orthodox-trashing parts, briefly mentioned her parents’ insensitivity, and said that she realized that the pain of this experience taught her to pay careful attention to her children’s complaints and verify them with the adults involved so that if valid, they could be resolved, and if not, explaind so the children understood. The man wrote that this experience taught him how prejudiced he had been, and that he would start learning more about the traditions of his ancestors.
The Telling
As a storyteller, I was at my best when I visualized the story as a movie, and told the movie as it played in my head. For most storytellers, this is a better method than memorizing a story. When you memorize, one forgotten word, one jet plane zooming over head, can throw you off. But that movie will keep rolling, and you just use whatever words fit. That cold winter’s evening, I changed my movie so it was occurring in a miserably hot summer. If we had been in an overheated room, or in a summer room with broken air conditioning, I could have told the same stories in a very cold environment, with snow and icy winds.
Robin Moore, in his book about telling stories at home, recommends using different voices for different characters. This is not my strong point, so my stories tend to have more narration and less conversation. Everyone is different.
Some storytellers use a lot of gestures, some don’t. If you do, though, make them large. Extend your arms, or march with high steps. You might slump for the old crone and stand tall with your shoulders back for the hero or heroine. Whatever gestures you use, be sure they are deliberate and boldly done.
The key to using your body and voice is to do what feels best to you. Do not be intimidated by someone else’s idea of what makes a good story.
Conclusion
Sharing your Jewish (and other) stories with your children, and asking them to share their stories with you, can be a lot of fun as well as interesting. It can strengthen your family bonds, show you different sides of your kids, and enhance your family’s spiritual or religious identification.
Please let me know if you try this, and how it goes! As long as you’re a subscriber you can return to the post and send me a comment.
[i] How to talk to children about difficult news, American Psychological Association, 2015, https://www.apa.org/topics/journalism-facts/talking-children, accessed March 3, 2024.
[ii] Cytowic, R.E., Shielding Children from Hard Truths Hurts Rather than Helps, Psychology Today, March 29, 2014, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-fallible-mind/201403/shielding-children-hard-truths-hurts-rather-helps, accessed March 3, 2024.
[iii] Moore, R., Awakening the Hidden Storyteller, Shambhala Publishing, Boston, 1991, p. 58. May be available used from Amazon, Better World Books, and others.