Really serious clashing often grows out of the question of callings and the filial choice thereof. It is quite comprehensible that parents should find it difficult not to intervene when children, without giving proper and adequate thought, are about to choose a calling unfitting in itself or one to which they are unadapted. But here we deal with a variant of the insistence that parental experience shall avert filial mischance or hurt. And here I must again insist that children have just the same right to make mistakes that we have exercised. They may not make quite as many as we made. It does not seem possible that they could. But, in any event, they have the right to make for that wisdom which comes of living amid toil and weariness and agony and all the never wholly hopeless blundering of life.
Upon parents may lie the duty to offer guidance, but compulsion is always unavailing and when availing leaves embitterment behind. It is woeful to watch a child mar its life but forcible intervention rarely serves to avert the calamity. One is tempted to counsel parents to consider thrice before they urge a particular calling upon a child. I have seen some young and promising lives wrecked by parental insistence that one or another calling be adopted. That a father is in a calling or occupation is a quite insufficient reason for a son being constrained to make it his own. A man or woman in the last analysis has the right of choice in the matter of calling, and parents have no more right to choose a calling than to choose a wife or husband for a son or daughter.
A most fertile cause of conflict is at hand in the normal determination of parents to transmit the faith of the fathers to the children. The conflict is often embittered after the fashion of religious controversy, when parents are inflexibly loyal to their faith, passionately keen to share their precious heritage with the children, while children grow increasingly resolved to think their own and not their fathers' thoughts after God. It is easier to commend than to practice the art of patience with the heretical child, and yet our age is mastering that art,—the cynic would aver because of wide-spread indifference. Surely there can be no sorrier coercion than that which insists upon filial acquiescence in the religious dogmas held by parents, not less sorry because the parents may be merely renewing the coercive traditions of their own youth.
It is a hurt alike to children and to truth, to say nothing of the institutions of religion, to command faith the essence and beauty of which lies in its voluntariness. But if parents are not free to coerce the minds of their children touching articles of faith, it is for children to remember what was said of Emerson,—that "he was an iconoclast without a hammer, removing our idols so gently it seemed like an act of worship." The dissenter need not be a vandal and the filial dissenter ought to be farthest from the vandal in manner touching the religious beliefs of parents. I would not carry the reverent manner to the point of outward conformity, but it may go far without doing hurt to the soul of a child, provided the spiritual reservations are kept clear.
CHAPTER VIII
CONFLICTING STANDARDS
The conflict of today is oftenest one between parental orthodoxy and filial liberalism or heresy. My own experience has led to the conviction that the clashing does not ordinarily arise between two varying faiths but rather between faith on the one hand and unfaith or unconcern with faith on the other. As for the Jewish home, the problem is complicated by reason of the truth, somehow ignored by Jew and non-Jew, that the religious conversion of a Jew usually leads to racial desertion as far as such a thing can be save in intent. In the Jewish home, racial loyalty and religious assent are so inextricably interwoven,—with ethical integrity in many cases in the balance,—that it is not to be wondered at that conflict oft obtains when the loyalty of the elders is met by the dissidence of the younger and such dissidence is usually the first step on the way that leads to a break with the Jewish past.
And the battle, generally speaking, is not waged by parents on behalf of the child's soul nor yet in the interest of imperilled Israel, but in the dread of the hurt that is sure to be visited upon the guilt of disloyalty to a heritage cherished and safeguarded through centuries of glorious scorn of consequences. I should be grieved if a child were to say to me: "I cannot repeat the ancient Shema Yisrael, the watchword of the Jew: I find it necessary to reject the foundations of the Jewish faith." My heart, I say, would be sad, but I would not dream of attempting to coerce the mind of a child. I would look with horror and with heartbreak upon the act of a child, who under one pretext or another took itself out of the Jewish bond and away from Jewish life. If, I repeat, a child of mine were to say "I can have nothing to do with Israel," I would sorrow over that child as lost because I should know that its repudiation of the household of Israel was rooted in selfishness colored by self-protective baseness. But, let me again make clear, if a child should say "I cannot truly affirm God or His unity," I could not decently object, however harassed and unhappy I might feel. I could not tolerate the vileness of racial cowardice and desertion in a child, but I would have no right to break with it because of religious dissent.