Elul 7: It’s easy to be thankful when you know someone else can change the diapers.

(I wrote this for a Jewish parenting blog, but they didn't like it. Maybe you will!)

It’s easy to be thankful when you know someone else can change the diapers.  With an almost ten month old at home, I change a lot of diapers.  I am deeply and meaningfully involved in the life of my daughter and my wife.  Whenever our daughter does something new, I am simply in awe.  I find deep meaning in her babble or her attempts at piano playing or dancing.  I am deeply grateful for the gift of a (relatively) flexible career and community.  

Yet, I am a congregational rabbi.  My community is amazing.  They love my daughter as if she is their own.  They want me to be an active participant in my family’s life.  As a rabbi, I have meetings, appointments, funerals, celebrations, Torah study, Daf Yomi that all take up a significant portion of my time.  With the blessing of my community, I regularly walk home for lunch with my wife and daughter.  I change diapers, give baths, do naptime and bedtime as often as I can, and generally try to be as egalitarian as I can.  As I try to cultivate an attitude of thanks and blessings in others, I find myself regularly appreciating just how lucky I am.  Doing pastoral care, seeing the lives of other clergy people, I feel so grateful to be in my community and with my family.  I am grateful for a sense of work/life balance.

Yet, amidst all of my parenting and synagogue work, my wife’s full time job is our daughter.  No matter how many meetings or appointments I have, I know she will be available to take care of our daughter.  While I try to consult her about evening programs and the like, if I want to grow my congregation, I need to devote time to it.  My wife gladly shoulders the bulk of the childcare responsibility, but I always wonder if I am doing enough.  As thankful and in awe as she is of our daughter, what is new to me is sometimes old news to her (although I generally get a text/photo anytime anything interesting happens--which is about 10 times an hour).

My wife takes care of much of our family life.  From morning until night, she laughs, talks, plays, dances, cleans, cooks for and feeds our daughter.  It is incredibly exhausting work-as everyone on this site knows.  At the end of the day, she is grateful for me to be there and do dinner/bedtime--whenever I can!

In short, it is easier to be grateful when you aren’t changing all the diapers.  As we enter the month of Elul, this is a time of t’shuvah, of renewing, not just of repenting, but of making mental or physical lists of the blessings in our lives.  It is a time for us to consider all that we do well and all the places where we need to work a little harder.  For me, I recognize that holy work that my wife does.  I recognize the great gift I have of working in a community that cares for me and my family.  I see that it is even easier for me to have the great joy and spirit of thanks I have for my wife and daughter when I have such amazing and reliable child care (my wife).

-Rabbi Philip Weintraub