By Rabbi Elchonon Feldman, Bushey United Synagogue
In the mid-1990s Dr Marshall Duke, a psychologist at Emory University, was doing research into the dissipation of the family. His wife, Sara, a psychologist who works with children with learning disabilities, noticed something about her students. She told her husband, “The ones who know a lot about their families tend to do better when they face challenges”. Dr Duke decided to test the hypothesis by developing a measure called “Do You Know”, a test for children with questions about their family. Examples of questions were: Do you know where you grandparents grew up? Do you know where our Mum and Dad went to high school? Duke took the answers he received and compared them to a battery of psychological tests that the same children had taken and he reached an overwhelming conclusion: The more children knew about their family’s history, the higher their self-esteem and the more successfully they believed their families functioned.
Psychologists have found that every family has a unifying narrative. The narrative takes one of three shapes. The ascending family narrative is exclusively positive: ‘Son, when we came to this country, we had nothing. We worked hard and became successful’. The second is the descending narrative: ‘We used to have it all, then we lost everything’. Dr Duke explains that the third narrative, the oscillating family narrative, is the most healthy one: ‘Let me tell you, we’ve had ups and downs in our family. We built a strong business, your grandfather was charitable, but we also had setbacks. You had an uncle who was once put on trial. Your father lost a job. No matter what happened, we always stuck together as a family’.
Dr Duke and his colleagues concluded that the children who have the most self confidence and resilience have a strong “intergenerational self”. They know that they belong to something bigger than themselves. Dr Duke recommends that parents pursue opportunities to convey a sense of history to their children. Use regular and special occasions to share family stories and personal anecdotes. Adopt rituals and traditions that can get handed down from one generation to another.
Dr Duke’s bottom line is that if you want a happier family, create, refine and retell the story of your family’s positive moments and your collective ability to bounce back from difficult times.
Rabbi Efrem Goldberg, of Boca Raton Synagogue in Florida, explains that this sociological breakthrough has been the bread and butter (excuse the pun) of our Pesach experience for millennia. When we sit at the seder and hear about our nation’s ups and downs, bitterness and sweetness, they feel part of something larger and greater than themselves.
This unique seder narrative of the ups and downs of becoming a people is encapsulated beautifully in the matzah, which symbolises both the bread of slavery and the bread of freedom. When we eat this matzah on seder night, we tap into the great story of our people and from it we encourage ourselves to perhaps add a chapter of our own.