“The child is the father of the man”: How the birth of my grandson renewed my hope for a gentler year

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“The child is the father of the man”: How the birth of my grandson renewed my hope for a gentler year

Jan 9, 2025 | Rabbi Ralph Genende

Image: Shutterstock

ABC Religion & Ethics – 8 January 2025

When my grandson was soon to be born, I was filled with dread — like the Hebrew parents of my Egyptian slave ancestors, a hundred generations ago, who must have wondered: “How can we bring children into this dangerous world?”

What times we are living in! The world is tilting, as strange and dangerous beasts slouch towards Bethlehem and Jerusalem. Fear and anxiety have clouded the sun, thick as the clouds of smoke produced by the bushfires of the Australian summer — a grotesque inversion of the warmth and radiance that fire can provide.

In his most recent novel, Richard Flanagan writes of “those cusps of time where history creaks and cracks like a glacier calving an iceberg”. The mass terror attacks of 7 October 2023 birthed a such an iceberg, striking fear in the hearts not only of my people, the whole house of Israel, but of all of humanity. As a Jew I increasingly feel the icy isolation of Israel. As an Australian Jew, I feel the iceberg bearing down on my bewildered community, demolishing our confidence due to its imperviousness to the proud contribution we’ve made to this land of long dreamers.

And I worry constantly about the moral cost of this ongoing war in Gaza to the state of Israel. I’ll confess that I have little pity for the remaining Hamas combatants and their willing collaborators. But it’s hard to see the images of the destruction and the awful conditions and suffering of ordinary Gazans, and not find oneself profoundly moved — notwithstanding the fact that this latest phase of the conflict was initiated by Gaza’s own brutal leadership. To be sure, Hamas can end this war today; that’s what the defeated usually do, for the sake of their people. And yet, even now, I worry that Hamas could still win this war — because of the horrible losses inflicted on the residents of Gaza and fiercely anti-Israel sentiment across the world — despite being decisively defeated militarily.

So when our grandson was about to be born, I will admit that I was filled with dread. I felt like the Hebrew parents of my Egyptian slave ancestors, a hundred or more generations ago. Living under the threat of a tyrannical pharaoh, they must have wondered: “How can we bring children into this dark and dangerous world?”

And then little Eden was born and came from the hospital to our home on the same day. His mother, my daughter, reminded me of Miriam, the sister of Moses, who according to Jewish tradition urged her parents to act with defiance in the face of pharaonic terror — a paragon of daring in the face of despair. Don’t give into the darkness, the young woman urged her worried parents. Now more than ever is an opportunity for hope, for light, for courage. Isn’t the final hour before dawn the darkest? Perhaps this is the very moment your God has provided for you.

I hold Eden in my arms and the world pauses. There’s a deep primordial peacefulness in his fresh presence. His eyes, still so sleepy, seem very old to me — gazing backwards yet looking forwards. And when they close and he sleeps and makes those inchoate gurgling sounds, I wonder whether he could be dreaming about the womb land he has just left, a “womb with a view”? Or could his dreams be venturing even further back to some past and wondrous time? Maybe he has some connections to the Dreaming of this land’s First Peoples, or to the dreams of our Torah? After all, he was born during the Torah readings, the parshiot, telling of Judaism’s greatest dreamer, Joseph. Or could he be on a flight abreast the golden dragon that represents his paternal forbears?

All souls are old souls, bearing what William Wordsworth called “intimations of immortality”:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

The Talmud tells the tale of an angel teaching the entire Torah, all the collective wisdom of the world, to the developing foetus. At birth it taps the new born below the nose (hence the indentation) and the babe lapses into ignorance — but with the wondrous challenge to rediscover all that it once knew to be true. Every child born into our world of lies and deception has the capacity to restore truth, hope, kindness and clarity — something worth remembering and restating as we enter this new year.

Eden is the name of a place, the mythical garden of Creation, but it’s also a state of mind. And now it’s the name of our third grandson, a little boy called Eden. In his memorable poem Wordsworth reminds us that, “The child is the father of the man”. At this juncture of our history, this thought gives me hope that this little boy — alongside all the other babies being born — can help heal the world and make it a gentler and better place.