thinking about how in ancient times, at least people knew that the lives their children would lead would….vaguely resemble their own???
People have always fondly reminisced about The Good Old Days and complained about Kids These Days, of course. But—and I cannot stress this enough—when my mom was born the Internet did not exist.
like I’m thinking about how I am a college student and during the pandemic, work, education, and relationships have been almost totally dependent on a network of technology that literally did not exist when my parents were college students.
When my mom was in college, she just wouldn’t have been capable of predicting what college would be like for me. I took a full semester of college from 5 hours away because I can virtually attend class through a pocket sized device that projects my image and voice into a shared virtual classroom where I can interact with my professor and other students. I wrote research papers without physical access to a library because I could read my college library’s books on my computer.
If you’re a Mesopotamian farmer, hitching his oxen to a plow, like…idk, man. I can’t picture myself at 40. I feel like a Mesopotamian farmer, trying to imagine his sons riding John Deeres.
It’s so persistently portrayed as this eternal, cyclical thing: Get a job, buy a house, get married and have kids, save for their college, send them off to college. This is the cycle of life. 2.5 kids, buy a house, have a steady career. Just as your father before you did, and his father before him.
Except they didn’t. His father before him didn’t do this, and your son will not live like you. This is not enshrined in tradition. This is not life. This is not how things are, or have been, or how they ever been. Look at it. This beautiful, ageless world of saving for your kids’ college and paying off mortgages and nuclear families. There is no way of life to pass down to your children, no tradition, nothing your father gave you that you can give to your son! You were born into a world that is unintelligible and inaccessible to the children you wanted to inherit it, and you and your children will both die in a world that is as foreign to you both!
I don’t envy the Boomer generation, nor do I have some kind of conceited disdain for them for not being able to adapt to now. So, so much of what defines our lives happened for the first time in their lifetime, and the absence of those things cannot be explained to us. Do you remember what it was like before television? Well…what is “it?”
It’s like our generation’s dim memory of childhood before Internet, and the vast, panicky knowledge that our childhoods were mostly full of a quality best described as the absence of internet, and there is no way to transmit that idea to the kids of today or explain it. We remember it, so, so clearly. It was real. But it’s gone. Annihilated.
There’s a midrash that before he died, Moses was worried about what would become of the Israelite people after he was gone. God brought him forward in time to the schoolhouse of Rabbi Akiva. Moses listened to the discussion but could not understand a thing, and nearly despaired, until he heard a student ask Akiva, “how did you arrive at this conclusion?” Akiva responded, “it follows from what Moses taught.” Reassured, Moses returned to his own time and died.
I taught this midrash last week to a class of about ten 3rd-8th graders whom I have been teaching since September and have never met in person. I asked them to continue the midrash: if Moses made a second stop in 2021, what would confuse him, and what would reassure him?
The youngest kids had a fantastic time imagining Moses trying to use an iPad, trying to understand that he was in a classroom, that we were doing remotely what he had seen Akiva do in person. The older kids wondered if he would be astonished at our level of literacy, or our coed learning.
When I asked what would reassure him they were momentarily stumped: it wasn’t the first time this group has struggled to identify positives about their lives and experiences, except in a guilty “some people have it worse” kind of way. I reminded them of what reassured Moses in the schoolhouse of Akiva: knowing that what he taught had evolved from rather than superseded the traditions of our ancestors. “Who are we learning about right this very minute?” I prompted.
One of them acted it out: Moses peering suspiciously at his iPad, then exclaiming, “They’re learning my Torah in there!” We are not unmoored, we are evolving. It is easier to see the changes than the things that remain constant, but I think there is value, whatever your cultural tradition, in asking “what would reassure my ancestors?”
“The children are using this vast, incomprehensible magical network to mock that damned Ea-Nasir and his terrible copper. Good.”
i love to think about how my ipad holds vastly more knowledge than was available to sumerians in 2000 bce, but if one of them saw me scribble away on it with my stylus, they would know what it is! from 4000 years across history, they would recognize this object if they saw me use it! and maybe they’d say ‘you know, we use something like this where i’m from’. and i’d say ‘i know. in school we learn that you invented them.’ and in a weird, convoluted, wonderful and very comforting sense, they invented my ipad too.
We literally still call it a ‘tablet.’ We still call it a ‘stylus.’ Our ancestors are befuddled by our ways, but damned if they aren’t proud.
