Being a Young Dad in the Cincinnati Jewish Community
“What did the stuttering quarryman say to the dump truck?” my six-year-old asks, barely containing his giggles as he practices telling the joke we made together. “Ba-dump-dump!”
This is what fatherhood looks like for me these days: crafting incredible and terrible jokes with my son, watching my toddler charm everyone with what’s commonly described as his “delicious” presence, and trying to figure out what it means to raise independent-thinking Jewish kids in our multi-layered Cincinnati, Ohio, USA, World in 2025.
I’m an older dad—born between Gen X and Millennials—who left Cincinnati for twenty years of adventures before returning to raise my children here. My Jewish journey hasn’t followed the traditional path. I grew up in my Judaism at Beth Adam, back before it had a big beautiful building across from Lake Isabella – before Rabbi Barr became the longest-tenured rabbi in the city – and I never felt like I quite fit into Cincinnati’s Jewish community. I was a Jew in a world of Christians, and a Jew outside the BBYO crowd.
High school graduation and a concurrently-timed traumatic brain injury thrusted me out into “the real world,” starting at Ohio State. Those years away brought me through adventures to Columbus, Ecuador, Israel, and Seattle. I wrestled with the reality of being a body with a soul, and a soul with a body; and studied music, meditation, yoga while needing to fit into a world of quarterly revenue goals and administrative hierarchies. I lived, learned, and wrestled with questions of identity and belonging. What does it mean to be “from” a place as an American and as a Jew? What does it mean to live Truth? These weren’t just philosophical questions—they shaped how I wanted to live and, eventually, how I wanted to parent.
After my father-in-law moved and then covid started, my wife and I decided to replant our young family in a place that felt more like home. Of all the places in the world, Cincinnati–that place I’d grown up running away from–quickly became the clear and obvious choice. But this time I was going to be living in Cincinnati as an adult with a family of my own. How were we going to fit in?
We explored several synagogues. We’d just come from a Meditative Synagogue in Seattle—a place that embraced Jewish mysticism, had members from the local arts which made an incredible choir and elaborate holiday spiels, and even had meditations slotted into services. Ultimately, we search for a Jewish experience that’s mystical, transcendent, and doesn’t feel the need to either conform to standard cultural paradigms or push against tradition just for the sake of pushing.
Judaism that speaks to me allows me to be Jewish, without hierarchy or materialism. Judaism that speaks to me reunites with the oneness that the Sh’Ma is about, and provides space to be authentic while remaining connected to tradition, which is a difficult balancing act in the modern polarized world.
That authenticity matters to me, especially in how I interpret Jewish law for our family. I appreciate the intent behind kashrut—the recognition that we’re not animals, that some things simply don’t belong in our bodies even if we could technically eat them, but some of the rules never made sense to me. My body doesn’t tolerate dairy or modern wheat, so I’ve adapted kashrut’s principles to what I call my “high vibration diet”—only organic and responsibly-slaughtered meat, no dairy, no gluten. I’m honoring the intention while making it work for my life – gluten free (dietary restriction) matzah is expensive, but it’s an important educational tool. That’s the kind of thinking I want to model for my kids (a 6 year old and a 6 month old): respecting the wisdom, understanding the why, and then making it your own.
I push back hard on fundamentalism, which I’ve broadly defined for myself as overidentification with a group. It takes shape as making choices because that’s what the group does, but not because I’ve chosen it for myself. It makes choices take longer to make, but it allows them to be my own, and sometimes that’s a tough balancing act.
My parenting philosophy maximizes for that kind of personal agency. I push as many decisions as possible to my children, appropriate to their ages. I tell my six-year-old, to the point where it’s become annoyingly repetitive for him: “I don’t care how much you know, I care how much you grow.” The world is already full of people who have to be right but have no idea what they’re talking about. I want my kids to learn from mistakes, especially their own, and to value personal growth over performance.
We light candles every Friday night. I hope it gives them a felt sense of rhythm and an expanded time horizon that connects them to something larger than themselves. Jewish tradition’s emphasis on questioning and wrestling aligns perfectly with what’s worked for me in my life, the know vs. grow idea, and what I’m ultimately trying to teach my children.
It also stacks nicely into the Jewish teaching about why the name for G-D is written in the Torah as two yuds… that “God exists in the space between two Yids.” That space of wrestling, of two people engaging in honest disagreement and dialogue—that’s what I want my kids to embrace.
But raising independent thinkers in a polarized world isn’t simple. Modern life has become hyper-politicized. Honest dialogue gets weaponized into team sports and people surrender their personhood to feel safe in a tribe. I want my children to belong to the Jewish community without losing themselves in any agenda. I want them to be Jews who think, question, and choose—not because tradition says so, but because they’ve wrestled with it and found meaning.
When we explored schools for our children, we eventually had to separate our own journeys from theirs and be firm in our conviction that we don’t parent by committee; but the choices we make—about education, about practice, about community, and more—are always balancing acts. How do we hold strong boundaries while still being warmhearted people? How do we navigate “normal” without losing ourselves in the madness? How do we teach while still learning?
Modern life is a kaleidoscope of paradox, especially as a Jewish parent in Cincinnati. The kaleidoscope keeps turning, and I’m doing my best to enjoy the way the light rearranges itself into new forms—each one calling, in its own way, for a blessing. Especially the ba-dump-dump jokes.
