‘A Threefold Cord is Hard to Break’

Written by Rabbi Elliott Karstadt — 18 December 2021

This year, Professor James Rilling at Emory University in Atlanta, published research in which he had scanned the brains of grandmothers while they were looking at pictures of their grandchildren.

“What really jumps out is the activation in areas of the brain associated with emotional empathy,” Rilling said. “That suggests that grandmothers are geared toward feeling what their grandchildren are feeling when they interact with them. If their grandchild is smiling, they’re feeling the child’s joy. And if their grandchild is crying, they’re feeling the child’s pain and distress.”

By contrast, when the grandmothers looked at pictures of their adult child, subtly different brain areas tended to be activated: areas of the brain associated with cognitive empathy. The fact that looking at images of their adult children lit up areas associated with cognitive rather than emotional empathy, could indicate that they were trying to understand their adult child, rather than experiencing this more direct emotional connection. “Emotional empathy is when you’re able to feel what someone else is feeling, but cognitive empathy is when you understand at a more intellectual level what someone else is feeling and why,” Rilling said.

This might help to explain the experience many grown-up children have of their parents often seeming more excited to see their grandchildren than them.

“Young children have likely evolved traits to be able to manipulate not just the maternal brain, but the grand-maternal brain. An adult child doesn’t have the same cute factor, so they may not the same emotional response.”

Rilling has identified what is called a ‘global caregiving system’ in the brain that is activated in mothers, fathers and grandmothers – and his next study will focus on grandfathers.

This morning, Saul read to us the story of the biblical patriarch Jacob meeting his own grandchildren for the first time. His relationship with them is really only fleeting, but it serves to tell us something about what the bible thinks about grandfather/grandchild relationships. Although the bible does not have the benefit of MRI scanning technology, it can teach us something.

It seems to tell us that the relationship between grandfathers and grandsons is different from parents. When Jacob puts his hands the wrong way round, Joseph attempts to correct him, assuming that his father’s blindness has caused him to make a mistake. But Jacob says: no, I am doing this because my connection with these two boys is different from yours – not better, not superior, but different. The connections that we have with our grandparents is distinct from the relationship with parents.

Many Holocaust survivors, while wanting to protect their children with silence, have been much more likely to share details of the horrors of the Shoah with their grandchildren – perhaps because of that emotional empathy and it being harder to say ‘no’ to them; perhaps because being older means wanting to talk more openly before it might be too late.

We all know those times when a grandchild has been able to persuade a grandparent of something, when their children are simply unable to sway them. The detachment of that two-generation gap, as well as the deep love across it, can achieve different results.

While the world inhabited by our parents and children is perhaps more recognisable to us, the worlds in which our grandparents and grandchildren grew up are so much less accessible, more foreign and therefore more intriguing to us. It also provides a link to those historical times that nothing else can match.

As rabbi Arthur Green says, ‘Jews have a particularly strong awareness that our lives serve as bridges between those who came before and those who will come after us; each of us is a living link between our grandparents and our grandchildren.’

And in blessing his grandsons, Jacob references his own grandfather, Abraham, the person with whom this whole story began, but who Ephraim and Manasseh are never going to meet.

These last two years have been a strain on that connection. While parents stuck at home in lockdown supporting children trying to keep their education going remotely while also themselves working from home have had a very difficult time, grandparents have also suffered in not being able to make connections with their grandchildren. Those who have been separated by continents and oceans have missed whole developmental stages in the lives of their grandchildren.

This is not simply missing the joy of young people, but missing seeing the development of that ineradicable link between past and future – between the world that is being left behind, and the world that is being born.

In our Chavruta Project, that we just finished this week, we read the story of Rabbi Chama bar Bisa, who left his home to study Torah, and left his son to be taught by his father. When he returned from study after many years, he met his son who he no longer recognised, saw what a great scholar he had become, and was distraught that, if only he had stayed, his son might be such a great scholar. It is said that these three generations of son, father and grandfather, are proof of the verse ‘a threefold cord is hard to break’ – that there is a kind of unbreakable strength in three generations.

Of course, this connection, this link, need not simply be a biological one. One of the joys of working in inter-generational communities like Alyth is to see our young ones connecting with elders who provide that link regardless of biology.

So, may we continue to strengthen that thread that links the generations – in a time that was probably unimaginable to the biblical world, in which we might also form relationships with great-grandparents. May our grandparents and our grandchildren help us by broadening our horizons, by learning about each other’s worlds, which are often strange and foreign. And may the bonds of love transcend even those times when we cannot physically be together. ‘A threefold cord is hard to break.’