My 2-year-old daughter parrots everything her older brother does. And it’s very interesting to me. Whatever her brother is in the mood to play, she plays. So sometimes I see her in a firefighter’s outfit in full gear, with her mother’s high heels and a pink purse around her neck, putting out an imaginary fire in the living room.
What strikes me is that I see embodied in that scene the human desire to be. There is an unrelenting aspiration to become; an unending search for identity. The question of who am I perpetually hangs over our heads from beginning to end. She’s going to have to work hard to answer that, as we all do.
And I pray that G-d guides her, gently, to a place of her own truth.