Guest Post by Rabbi Dovid E. Eidensohn/Jewish Outreach Congregation,
Monsey, NY
We discuss here a major reason for
family and marital problems: good intentions! In fact, the worst thing a person
can do is to destroy their children. But children suffer terribly in a bad
marriage. But each parent says, “That awful spouse of mine. It is a mitzvah to correct/punish
him/her.” And there is no end.
Once a Jew did something so
terrible it was unheard of for a Jew to do it. A Rov was asked to explain this.
He replied, “I don’t know why he did it. But one thing I know. He did it for
the sake of heaven.” The Rov explained that all of us have evil inclinations
that pressure us constantly to sin. But we know that the idea is evil and so we
are limited in how much sin we do. But if a person decides that he is doing a
good deed with his evil, what is there to stop him or limit his evil?
The Talmud says that a father sees
his child misbehaving and hits him. The son can get so angry that he hits the
father back. The father is punished for causing the son to sin. Thus, even when
we do something for the sake of heaven, to teach our children how to behave, we
have to make sure of the bottom line, that it be positive and not a disaster,
chas vishalom.
There are good intentions that
create bad deeds. And then there are good intentions that create good deeds,
but too much of them, until evil results.
The Chofetz Chaim as a youth
learned so much and slept and ate so little, that he became very sick and could not learn for a
long time. Doctors could not cure him. Finally, Reb Yisroel Salanter prayed for
him and he got better. For the rest of his life, the Chofetz Chaim taught
people that we pray daily that HaShem should “remove the Satan from before us
and behind us.” What is wrong if the Satan is behind us? asked the Chofetz
Chaim. But when the Satan sees that a person is really serious about being a
Tsadik, the Satan tells him to do good things, but to do good things that will
in the end become destructive and thus evil, as with the Chofetz Chaim who lost
much time in learning because he learned too much and slept too little.
When I was young in Yeshiva someone
began learning so strongly that everyone predicted a lovely future for him as a
great Torah scholar. Indeed, he became a teacher of Torah in a prominent
Yeshiva, but his extreme devotion to learning eventually destroyed his ability
to learn seriously, and he went to work.
The Chofetz Chaim was a short
person. He ordered everyone in his Yeshiva to go to sleep on time, but many
students felt fine staying up late. So the Chofetz Chaim would stand on a chair
and reach up to the light switch and turn it off. But this didn’t solve the
problem. Thus, when people are sure they are doing the right thing, they even
defy the Chofetz Chaim!
Therefore, the wise parent or
teacher, considering punishing somebody “for the sake of heaven,” finds someone to refer questions to.
In the past generations one of the
very wisest of the sages was Rabbi Mayer Chodosh, famed as the Mashgiach of
Chevron Yeshiva and perhaps the major talmid of the Alter of Slobodka. Once, a
child in a Yeshiva profaned the Sabbath. Another child was caught stealing. The
teachers involved in the case wanted to humiliate and punish the children in
the worst way, but knowing that they must ask a truly wise person first, they
came to Rabbi Mayer Chodosh. He told them, “Is a teacher a Rabbinical Court
entitled to punish people? A teacher has a function of producing a successful
student, not destroying the student with punishment and humiliation.” He warned
them not to deviate from his advice, and made a program for the children who
eventually turned out to be fine Torah people. Had they been punished and
publicly humiliated, the pain and shame would never have left them, and who
knows what would happen to them.
Another time somebody came to Rabbi
Chodosh with his very young son. The son began pulling on the tablecloth and it
seemed as if the dishes would fall on the floor. The father rebuked the son,
but after a while, the son did it again. The father became upset at the son,
and then Rabbi Chodosh intervened: “Your son is not being wild when he pulls on
the tablecloth,” said Rabbi Chodosh. “Your son noticed that a cup is upside
down. He pulled the tablecloth to get at the cup and fix it. Now, you fix the
cup, turn it over, and your son will not pull on the tablecloth anymore.” And
so it was.
Had the father hit the child or
yelled at him, the child would not understand. Who knows what the child would
think of his father?
Another father with a young child
came to another great Mashgiach, Rav Eliyohu Lopian. It was Shabbos and the child
began to play with stones, which are muktseh. The father told the child to stop
playing with the stones. But a while later, the child went back to playing with
the stones, and the father rebuked him,
with a sharper tone. Rav Lopian told the father: “Your son is too young to
understand about the laws of Shabbos. You are not teaching him how to keep
Shabbos. You are teaching him to disobey you.”
Our task is to make our children
happy, and not see in their childish actions excuses for yelling at them. Indeed,
the Torah teaches, “Serve HaShem with joy.” “Its ways [the Torah] are the ways
of peace.” Somebody busy criticizing and scolding can turn children and others
off, and end up making more problems than solutions.
A sage in Israel who is known for
his wisdom about family and marriage told me the following: Everything depends
on the children learning to do mitsvose with joy. If the child is trained to
appreciate the joy of doing a mitzvah, he/she will enjoy obeying the Torah. But
a child raised to fear the Torah as something painful may reject the Torah.
The same idea was taught by HaGadol
Reb Moshe Feinstein zt”l. Commenting on
the huge loss of Jewish children in the early generations of America, Reb Moshe
explained that in those days keeping Shabbos meant losing a job. Shabbos thus
became associated with pain and suffering. People don’t want a life of pain and
suffering. Sometimes, even today, keeping the Torah may be hard. But a clever
parent finds a way to make a child want to do the mitzvah.
Friday afternoon is perhaps the
hardest part of the week. Everyone is rushing and under pressure. My son Yaacov
Zelig with some family members made a Friday afternoon learning program in
America and Israel whereby parents write in or call in that their child learned
on Friday fifteen minutes, and the child goes into a Goral lottery. There are
various prizes, sometimes fifty dollars and sometimes more. Hundreds of
children are busy learning, and one father said, “I should pay you when my
children learn, because it saves our household Erev Shabbos!.”
The Holy Shelo was one of the
greatest rabbis who ever lived, and is one of the very few people honored with
the appellation “the holy one.” This holy man teaches that we must bribe our
children at every stage of their lives. Little children get what little
children want, and when the child comes of age we “bribe” him by telling him
that if he learns a lot of Torah, he will find a nice shidduch!
Now somebody may refuse to do this
because does the Torah not tell us to serve HaShem without ulterior motives? So
how can we raise children with bribery? But the Talmud clearly says, “Let us
learn Torah even not for pure motives, but for ego, etc., because from impure
motives one will come to pure motives.
And then there is the great mitzvah
to make one’s wife happy. The Zohar and Rashi explain that the mitzvah in the
Torah “and he should make his wife happy” means, “make her happy, not
himself.” But of course, if the husband makes the wife happy, the wife will
make the husband happy. Making someone happy is not a selfish mitzvah. But the
greatest happiness awaits when you cause another to be happy.
When parents seek to make each
other happy, the children learn from this how important making another person
happy is. And the whole family learns the joy of happiness.
The great enemy of happiness in the
family is when somebody decides that a punishment is needed because somebody
did something bad. When punishment becomes a great mitzvah, the Satan then uses
this “great mitzvah” to destroy families and children.
If someone has a comment or a
question, you can write to me at
writeus1@verizon.net.
And if it is urgent, I can be reached at 845-578-1917.
