Every summer we uproot our family from our busy, vibrant life in Israel and transplant ourselves into the quiet mountains of Pennsylvania to spend a few weeks with my family. And every summer, I marvel at the same thing. How unbothered my children seem to be, strangers in a somewhat strange (or relatively differently land). My son is not embarrassed to wear his kippah out and about – despite being the only kid for miles who wears one. My daughter drops a Hebrew word into an English sentence without even noticing. They approach total strangers with the same curiosity and kindness they would in Israel. They assume everyone knows about Falafel and Shawarma. It is so pure, and purely admirable. My kids do not hide who they are just to fit in for three weeks. They are fully themselves, wherever they happen to be.
Now, because my brain is constantly going back and forth between present day and and the days of the Bible, I keep thinking about the biblical figures who had to walk this exact tightrope, deciding every day whether to blend in or stand out. And the more I watch my own family strike that balance, the more it comes down to one question. How do you raise a person who can move between two worlds and never lose themselves in either one?
Scripture answers this, and it takes two verses, not one, to get the full picture.
Moses grew up a prince of Egypt, then fled to Midian after killing an Egyptian taskmaster, a place with foreign gods and foreign customs. There he married Tzipporah and they had a son. This is where the Torah tells us how Moses held onto himself in exile:
Ger hayiti b’eretz nokhriyah. I was a stranger in a strange country. Moses did not bury that sentence in his own head or whisper it so as not to make waves in his father-in-law’s home. He named his son with it that sentiment. He did not melt into his surroundings to make his life easier. He said exactly who he was and let it live. Naming Gershom was not a slip or a moment of weakness. It was an act of nerve.
But Moses had a second son, and this is the half of the story that often gets skipped. He named him Eliezer, and told us why:
Eli-ezer. My God is my help. If Gershom is Moses declaring who he was, Eliezer is Moses declaring who had carried him the entire way. One name says I do not belong here. The other says and I was never alone while I was that stranger. Moses did not raise a household on identity alone. He raised it on identity plus gratitude, the stranger and the rescue, side by side under one roof.
That combination is the whole point. A child who only hears “we are strangers here” can grow up guarded, bracing against a world that is not home. A child who only hears “God has helped us” without ever hearing “and we are still who we are” can grow up soft at the edges, easy to blend away. Moses gave his household both sentences. Neither name or child stood alone.
One chapter after Gershom is born, God appears at the burning bush and sends Moses back into the very palace he fled, to demand freedom for a nation of slaves. That takes a man who knows exactly who he is and knows exactly who has been holding him up the whole time. Gershom gave him the nerve. Eliezer gave him the confidence that he was not doing it alone.
This is exactly the tool we give to our children when we let them wear the kippah out in public and speak Hebrew at the playground without apologizing for it, and when we teach them, in the same breath, that none of it happens by accident. Identity without gratitude gets brittle. Gratitude without identity gets diluted. Our children need both names, spoken out loud, every single day.
That is the inheritance we must hand down. Not just declaring who we are, but declaring, in the same breath, who has been carrying us the enitre way.
