Faith here, reporting live from my home office which happens to sit right next to my sick kid’s bedroom. Today (and many days this past winter) I join millions of parents who have struggled to balance the demands of work and parenthood.
I keep trying to remind myself that I am lucky. Thanks to the COVID era’s proliferation of remote work, I can sit on my regularly scheduled zoom calls, hop next door to check on my son and run downstairs to grab more Tylenol. It’s definitely a dance that I know many like teachers, service workers, and health care providers don’t have the luxury of.
Even before COVID radically shifted how and where we work, one of the significant benefits I’ve experienced in the Jewish communal sector is the widespread recognition and appreciation for family life and everything that comes with it. If you’ve ever been the recipient of a meal-train you know how powerful it is to have neighbors, friends, and colleagues prepare food for you when you have a child, experienced a loss, or suffer an accident.
Let me be clear, our field has significant strides to make around paid parental leave, but Jewish tradition deeply values the role of parenting and generally, Jewish organizations are accommodating to employees who are parents so we can be present for our children’s milestones, bouts with illness, and shifting needs. And this is how it should be. Judaism understands that the home (and by de facto, parents) set the educational foundation for the moral development of a child. As we learn in the Talmud, “what the child speaks in the marketplace, he has heard at home from his mother or father.” (Sukkah 53, Rashi)
While it’s a gift to be able to show up for our kids when they need us – it is also really hard. Especially when we have a deadline, we feel like we’re competing for philanthropic dollars, or we’re managing complex teams across multiple time zones.
So, how do we do it all? How do we center the Jewish values of parenting with presence and compassion and maintain focus and productivity? How do we seamlessly transition between caregiver and colleague without sacrificing either role? This challenge gets even more pronounced when I think about my Israeli colleagues watching their children leave for war. What does it mean to parent and work through a war in your backyard?
Let’s open the floor to discussion and learning, because I surely have more questions than answers. How do you maintain productivity while embracing the fluidity of professional and parental roles? What lessons have you learned, and what strategies have proven effective in balancing the demands of work and family life? How can we make our workplaces more aligned with our Jewish values?
Today, my day looks like checking in (again) on my sick kiddo, before I dive deep into problem solving a tricky question with a colleague.
In solidarity,
Faith,
Chief Innovation Officer
Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies
#Parenting #WorkLifeBalance #ProfessionalDevelopment #JewishProfessionalCommunity
