August 8, 2025

Just about every night, before bed, we read one of Eder’s favorite books, usually a few times in a row. Eder loves many books, but for the past few weeks, his absolute favorite has been Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed. He loves it so much that he often doesn’t have the patience to wait for us to read it to him—he will take it out and read it to himself. He recites the story with joy while out walking or riding in the car, and often, after he announces the doctor’s pronouncement will emphasize the story with “that’s what happened.”

Recently, Eder has started improvising within the story. It started on a visit with his grandparents. We’ve been spending a lot of time with him working on please and not just screaming when he wants something. In the middle of his dramatic recitation of No More Monkeys, he paused and said, "the doctor should have said please." For that week, every time he told the story, it was about how the doctor could have gotten what he wanted if he just said please. There was a week when every rendition of the story involved monkeys injuring different body parts and getting booboos that needed a kiss. And then, my favorite question, “where's the Dada monkey?"

Listening to Eder’s questions and comments on the story has made me realize that despite growing up with this cute rhyming story, I had never really thought about it. I had always written it off as a story to teach kids to avoid jumping on the bed. But now, thanks to Eder, I’m thinking about so many different pieces of the story in a new way. Why do we, in a story for toddlers, model the kind of speech that we wouldn’t appreciate in real life? Why do we tell stories that feature absent fathers and mothers who are out of control? Why tell a story where every single monkey falls off the bed? Why not tell a story where the monkeys learn and find ways to play that don’t involve getting hurt?

Now, you may think I'm losing it. Oh no, pregnancy brain and sleep deprivation and suddenly the rabbi is hallucinating Torah in toddler literature. But I think this is adynamic that we all fall prey to at one time or another. All of us have stories we’ve inherited that we’ve never interrogated or stories that we’ve written for ourselves that no longer serve us. It’s very easy for these stories to become ingrained in our psyches to the extent that they dictate how we engage with the world around us. It’s very easy for us to just repeat without ever wondering why.