The ultra-Orthodox children I hang out with in my city are maturing quickly, but not necessarily in a positive way, or at least not always in that direction.
What do I mean? The phenomenon of cholent, hitchhiking, and suits.
All Jews know Friday night, and most of them also have a habit of grabbing a plate of cholent on it. The menu offers cholent with fur, cholent with meat, with or without intestines, a food roll, and chopped liver. In order.
What is less normal is the appearance of the little ones, who sit down in front of steaming plates full of potatoes, intestines and meat and dine as if they were yeshiva students from Kibbutz A.
Where are their parents? Don't they have food at home? Since when does an 8-year-old love cholent and know how to demand that the seller 'put a lot of meat in it'? Why are they sitting around the table eating hot food for God's sake?
Did I grow up in a period characterized by austerity and therefore am I unable to remember similar scenes? I don't think so. When we, the children of the 1980s, were taken to the neighborhood pizza shop with Grandpa, we were grateful for our good fortune, and if we had also won an 'American ice cream', then we had had a fun day.
For the children of 2019 in Kiryat Sefer, the cholent isn't even fun. It's an 'exit,' a release, a refreshment for young people after three hours of diving into the depths of the issue.
It's just that these young people are eight years old.
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The hitchhiking phenomenon is no more graceful.
There is nothing more sickening than a child reaching out to hail a ride. The fact that the Haredi children live in a large, homogeneous city with several neighborhoods allows them, more than in the past, to make friends even from areas slightly distant from their home area.
They can get from neighborhood to neighborhood by bus, but some of them hitchhike. A few of them even demand it outright.
When a 9-year-old boy asked me to drive him to his residential area, from the entrance to Modi'in Illit, I was so surprised that in the panic that gripped me, I simply did it. It turns out that if he had demanded my money and even my clothes, I would have complied as well.
A nine-year-old child, a twelve-year-old, thirteen-year-old, and even fourteen-year-old getting from place to place with the help of hitchhikers – this is an anomaly. An illogical reality.
We, the children of the 80s, were never forbidden from hitchhiking simply because the concept simply didn't exist. A teenager? Hitchhiking?
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Maturity is an important component of every child's development, there's no need to verify this. The early-stage fixations of theorists from the field of developmental psychology are not pleasing to every parent, even if the "child development" institutes that are springing up everywhere are making quite a fortune on it.
But this maturity must be channeled into a proper, logical, functional channel. Visiting the local steakhouse on a daily basis, sitting around cholent tables, and hitchhiking are not necessarily inherent parts of Piaget's famous four stages of development.
So the kids today have started wearing tailored suits and shiny shoes [where did that suddenly come from?], and some of them also have phones [kosher, of course], but at the end of the day you have to remember: they're just kids. Just kids for God's sake.
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