“When I was in seminary at Neve. Goingto families for Shabbos was a very cool chavayah that my friends and I took advantage of”
It rankled me to read a letter defending elitism in Bais Yaakovs as being positively motivated, an attempt to protect our children from an increasingly complex and subtly subversive world.
Recently, I was on the receiving end of being excluded because someone wanted to keep their children very sheltered and didn’t deem my family frum enough. My daughter had tried inviting a classmate over many times, but the mother constantly said today wasn’t a good day for her, or her daughter already had other arrangements. Occasionally, she’d invited my daughter over instead. We didn’t stop trying because it didn’t seem like the girl didn’t want to be my daughter’s friend — they played together in school a lot and her friend was really excited when she came over. At one point it started to feel awkward.
Then the penny dropped. They don’t want their daughter to come over!
The realization hurt. A lot.
I know some of my hurt is my issue to work on, but I do think that when it comes to sheltering our children from other children, we need to tread very carefully, because even if well intended, we can still be doing something wrong on two accounts: 1) We’re causing distress to the people we exclude. 2) We’re creating spiritually fragile children who are going to shatter into pieces when they’re inevitably exposed to something their parents don’t want them to be exposed to.
Create a free account to keep reading.
