There comes a point in the life of a fairly ordinary Jewish parent when a perfectly pleasant evening at home takes an odd turn and you find yourself being addressed, across your own table, in the careful, composed tone usually reserved for panel discussions.

Nothing dramatic is happening, no one is shouting really, in fact, that’s part of the strangeness. Your child, thoughtful, diligent, broadly kind is speaking with great calm and sincerity, as though presenting a well-considered position at a seminar. Somewhere in the middle of this calm explanation, it dawns on you that your own people are the subject.

This tends to happen when everyone is comfortable. Shoes off, dinner on the table, the small domestic rituals intact. They’re exactly where they have always belonged. They have not stormed out or slammed doors, they’re speaking reasonably. Though it’s the reasonableness that unsettles you. If they were raging, you could rage back. Instead, they sound like someone who has spent a semester acquiring a vocabulary and is now trying it out at home.

You realize, fairly quickly, that this is not a conversation you can win by producing more facts. Facts are not what’s at stake. What’s at stake is tone, positioning, the subtle but unmistakable effort to locate oneself on the morally correct side of a complicated world. Teenagers have always done this. They are built for conviction. What feels new is the choreography, the careful way belonging now seems to require a small preface, a slight step to the side, a gentle announcement that one is not entirely implicated.

I should say here, before anyone reaches for a label, that the households in question are not exactly hotbeds of reactionary politics. Most of the parents I know marched for civil rights, argued for gay rights, donated to causes, worried about fairness long before their children discovered the proper terminology for doing so. People........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)