In Rav Avigdor Miller's dvar Torah for Parshas Pinchos 4: The Light of Renewal, Rav Miller starts off by telling us to use Rosh Chodesh as a mini-Yom Kippur by taking only 5 minutes to contemplate the past month (pages 3-4):

• What did I accomplish this past month?
• Did I make any mistakes?
• Was I disloyal to the Torah in any way?
• Did I live in the most successful manner available to me?
• What happened with my tefillah?
• What about my learning?
• How did I behave when it came to my obligation to give tzedakah?
• What about Hakodosh Boruch Hu? Did I think about Him enough?

Bein Adam LaMakom (interpersonal interactions):

• Did I make progress in bein adam lamokom this past month?
• Did I wrong my fellow man?
• Did I make mistakes in dealing with my neighbors?
• Also, how did I behave to people on the street?
• How was my behavior between me and the members of my family?
• How did I speak to spouse month?
• Did I say something I shouldn’t have on the first day of the month that just passed?
• What about the second day?
• And the third day?
• Think about the wrong things you said, the wrong way you reacted.

Shabbat:

• How did I use my Shabbosim this month?
• Did I spend at least a few minutes at each seudah thinking about what Shabbos is trying to teach me?

Rav Miller reassures us we can become great in these 5 minutes.

Actually, he also says that even 1 minute of teshuvah is a tremendous thing.

These minutes produce wonderful things for us in the World to Come.

Rav Miller speaks a lot about the importance of the moon and why we're likened to it.

Pages 6-7:

In other words, Rosh Chodesh is just a monthly renewal.

It's a renewal of us—WE are renewed!

This World is one of darkness.

In an admittedly massive oversimplification of why this is, we'll just say that Hashem created the darkness to create a world in which we need to actively search for & strain to see Him—and in the process, find ourselves & see who we really are too.

On pages 7-10, Rav Miller indulges one of my favorite parts of his persona as he describes the different aspects of this darkness. He includes other religions, evolution, communism, American universities, and the creating-heroes-out-of-criminals fanaticism.

I love this because in reading & enjoying it so much, I feel like I'm atoning for my entire youth.

But if you're easily offended, are a politically correct militant, or devoted to indiscriminate egalitarianism (AKA the unrelenting dogma of "I'm okay; you're okay"—no matter what!), you should probably skip it.

He concludes with this (page 10):

Couldn't have said it better.

How many years ago did he call the broadcasters "paid performers"?

Decades.

He understood before a lot of other people did.

But here's the biggest darkness: Not seeing yourself.

Pages 11-12:

Very often, Rav Miller talks about how special we truly are and how much Hashem loves us.

But this time, he's talking about a different aspect.

He makes valuable points here.

People do the worst things and insist they held altruistic or innocent motives all along.

One of the most extreme examples of this was Nazism, which started off proclaiming equality & compassion, and ended up torturing and slaughtering millions & millions of people.

Some people know what they're doing and mean to speak compassionately to deflect suspicion about what they're really up to. (Sociopaths/psychopaths do that.)

But a lot of people really believe in what they say.

That's why you see self-proclaimed Highly Sensitive People, who talk about how sensitive they are, then behave very insensitively toward other people (and not just as a one-off, but on a regular basis).

Or people who view themselves as terrifically upbeat, yet easily lose their tempers, with their family members viewing them as easily angered & manic, not cheerful & upbeat.

I knew a person who responded with impatience over even minor issues toward employees & agents in her business, quarreled so aggressively with suppliers that they refused to work with her, disobeyed police with verbal impudence, had gotten divorced several times...

...yet when her only child and his family refused to spend more than a very limited amount of time with her due to her quarrelsome behavior, she told others: "I don't understand why this is happening. I'm only for peace. That's who I am. I'm always the peacemaker."

But no one else saw her as a peacemaker.

Even people who liked her (and, despite the unflattering description here, she definitely possessed very likeable qualities too) never thought of her as someone who strove for peace. 

Even when she was in a good mood, everyone knew she could always turn in a second.

But she honestly thought of herself as a person who always strove for peace and to get along with others.

Yet she was actually more quarrelsome & confrontational than most people.

Yes, of course there are people who see themselves as highly sensitive or terrifically upbeat or peaceable—and they really are!

But some people see themselves one way while almost everyone else sees them differently—or even the opposite of how they see themselves!

Rav Millers sums this up with (page 14):

Is this getting depressing?

Of course you should also see your good points!

You have a beautiful pristine neshamah & Hashem loves you more than you can imagine!

So why does Rav Miller invest so much this time in looking at the not-such-great stuff inside ourselves?

Because by going through the darkness, we reach the light.

On page 14, Rav Miller says:

This, says Rav Miller, is why the Jewish day starts with night.

We need to go through the darkness to get to the light.

We need to go through Olam Hazeh (This World) to get to Olam Haba (The World to Come).

To understand why you really don't need to feel so bad about your negative qualities, please see here:
http://www.myrtlerising.com/blog/how-to-get-past-toxic-shame-apathy

At the beginning of Parshat Pinchas (Bamidbar/Numbers 25:11), we find an interesting Rashi.

It occurs after Pinchas's famous execution of the Shimoni prince & his Midianite floozy.

Many in Am Yisrael took offense at this because the prince held impeccable lineage from Shimon ben Yaakov while Pinchas's maternal grandfather was Yitro/Jethro—the man who once felt such devotion to the polytheistic occult that he went above & beyond in his service to idols.

His devotion to avodah zarah (idol worship) earned him the nickname "Puti"—from the word pitem ("fattened") because he fattened calves in order to offer the idols the most succulent meat.

As Rashi notes, the people disparaged Pinchas by saying:

Fortunately, Hashem came to the defense of Pinchas by emphasizing his sterling paternal lineage ("Pinchas the son of Elazar the son of Aharon the Kohen") and declaring that, in contrast to what many assumed, Pinchas davka saved the Nation with his extreme response.

Once again, we see that it's not who you are, but what you do with yourself that matters.

Judaism remains unique in its emphasis on hidden greatness.

People need to actually work in order to achieve their greatness.

They need copious prayer & siyata d'Shamya.

That's why so many our greatest Torah leaders faced innate struggles, both inside & outside themselves.

They needed those challenges to make them who they became.

It's actually harder for people born with the proverbial silver spoon in their mouth to achieve true greatness & humility.

Likewise, you find mussar in Judaism that notes how wealth tends to be a harder nisayon than poverty, although it seems the opposite.

However, Judaism notes that wealthy people need to work harder to develop empathy, humility, and generosity in line with their true financial ability to give.

My own personal experience shows that middle-to-lower-income people tend to be much more generous with their money & objects.

Rav Miller often noted that Jews in need of hospitality fared better with Jews of average means rather than the wealthy, so Rav Miller sent them to a shul where he knew these people would receive what they needed—and it wasn't from those living in lovely homes with manicured lawns.
(https://torasavigdor.org/rav-avigdor-miller-on-clean-jewish-homes/)

There are exceptions; some people understand the nisayon of wealth & rise to the occasion. But it is harder.

Many times, people with exceptional academic intelligence tend to be difficult to deal with. Not all of them, but many of them tend to be close-minded & hold irrational beliefs. (This is why so many in Western academia tend to lean so far to the Left.)

They assume that anyone who disagrees with them simply does not understand, which makes impossible any rational discussion with them.

After all, to their way of thinking, if they mastered trigonometry by 10th grade while you still struggled with algebra, how you could possibly know better than they do?

Many never realize that academic intelligence does not include emotional intelligence, practical intelligence, or a solid understanding of ethics & integrity.

(A lot—though not all!—of them also hold a really poor work ethic, always looking to earn the highest salary while doing the least amount of work, preferring to dump all their work onto subordinates. This explains why so many companies are badly run and even tank at some point. It also partially explains why so many universities fail so badly at their entire purpose of being—to educate—despite being staffed by doctorates.)

Throughout his commentary on the Chumash, the Kli Yakar constantly emphasizes how Hashem chooses the lesser.

Har Sinai was the smaller mountain.

David Hamelech was the youngest brother with a suspicious lineage (though in reality, he held the same lineage as his brothers, yet initially, no one knew that for sure).

Yitzchak Avinu & Yaakov Avinu were the younger brothers.

The highest statuses in Am Yisrael all went to younger brothers, rather than the expected firstborn: The Levi'im & Kohanim descend from Levi (son #3 of Yaakov & Leah) while the Messianic royalty descends from son #4—Yehudah.

Moshe Rabbeinu was the youngest & suffered from a speech impediment.

In the incident with the Shimoni prince and Midianite floozy, the people challenged Moshe Rabbeinu's approval of the zealous act of Pinchas, saying:

Tzipporah, the daughter of Yitro & wife of Moshe Rabbeinu, came to Am Yisrael from the nation of Midian—just like the floozy.

The correlations they attempted to draw sound bizarre because Tzipporah joined Am Yisrael in purity & law. She married Moshe Rabbeinu in a completely kosher manner.

What is the similarity between Moshe Rabbeinu's holy marriage & the Shimoni prince's brazen pritzut?

None.

Yet we've all seen how people's minds jump to draw even the most irrational correlations to "prove" some type of hypocrisy against a person they'd like to discredit.

The Me'am Lo'ez mentions that Ruth descended from the Moavite king Balak, which means that the King of Yehudah also descended from him.

Rebbi Akiva descended from the Canaanite Sisera, the evil tormentor of Am Yisrael during the leadership of Devorah & Barak. Canaan is particularly repellent because it was a cursed nation.

This list goes on.

In Parshat Metzora, the Kli Yakar reveals the truth about the famous peddler who tried to sell everyone in Tzipori the elixir of life--shemirat halashon:

That peddler himself was a former gossiper & tale-bearer—a rochel.

Having done teshuvah, he now sought to spread his newfound knowledge & teshuvah to others.

But rather than accepting him as he was now, the people gathered around him to put him in his place.

"Take the board from between your own eyes!" they mocked him. "Look at your own faults!"

The thing is...he DID look at his own faults! That's how he did teshuvah.

Yet the people insisted on looking "behind" the atoning peddler. They persisted in focusing on how he had been before, rather than how he was now.

Only the wise Rav Yannai saw the truth of the peddler's behavior and showed interest in the famous elixir of life.

(For the full commentary on this episode, please see: http://www.myrtlerising.com/blog/part-ii-the-happy-cure-for-blabbermouthed-fault-finders-aka-the-kli-yakar-on-parshat-metzorah)

We learn from all this that the criticism can be TRUE.

Moshe was married to a descendant of Midian.

Pinchas's maternal grandfather really was Yitro (though his mother descended from Yosef Hatzaddik), and Yitro really was a zealous idolator before he joined Am Yisrael.

The peddler atoning for his sins of the tongue by "peddling" the laws of guarding one's tongue really had been a terrible transgressor in this area.

It's all true!

Maybe your background really is wonky & you really did use to act like a jerk.

And the Torah comes to tell us: So what?

Even when people point it out (which is forbidden, by the way), we learn that your lineage or former sins do not matter as long as you have distanced yourself from those influences.

In other words, their seemingly savvy & sophisticated criticism ("Ah-ha! Caught you!") is actually null & void, according to Torah hashkafah.

All that matters is that you have turned from evil & now invest in being good, whether that means your background or your deeds.

The Torah informs us that it is not who you are or were, but what you have done with yourself that matters.

For more by Nechumelle Jacobs, please start here, then follow the link at the bottom:
www.myrtlerising.com/blog/a-poem-for-lag-bomer-by-nechumelle-jacobs

I just read an extraordinary memoir called Sori's Story: An Amazing Life of Survival & Faith by Sori Kraus & Devora Gliksman, also based on interviews with Rosalyn Livshin.

(Devorah Gliksman also authored another of my favorites, a memoir of the Paneth family from pre-WWII until they reached America: The Sun & the Shield.)

Born in Czechoslovakia in 1933 to a loving regal mother and a father who was both a talmid chacham & the epitome of bitachon & exemplary character, Sori led a charmed life with her younger sister Ruti.

Sori & Ruti received an ideal upbringing from caring, frum, devoted parents.

Interestingly, Sori's mother's chassidish father decided to wed her to the Litvish Shmuel Juda Binyomin Bernfeld in an effort to save his daughter from the encroaching Haskalah & Reform Movement—the Sori's chassidish grandfather believed that by marrying off his daughter to a talmid chacham, she would be saved & protected from the poisonous winds of change.

And he was right.

Sori's parents enjoyed an idyllic marriage together, full of the richness of Torah.

Together, they succeeded in imbuing their children with yirat Shamayim, bitachon, and wholeheartedly joyful devotion to Torah & mitzvot.

This memoir, more than any other, portrayed Hashem's Hand in Sori's survival during the Holocaust.

Although stories abound of children who survived, I found Sori particularly striking because up to the point she separated from her parents, Sori led a very sheltered & genteel childhood with gentle & loving parents, maids & nannies, plus warm & loving extended family.

Sori herself was a very sweet, well-behaved, lovely, innocent little girl.

Pampered yet disciplined, Sori's parents continued to shelter her & Ruti with piety & gentility even after they were forced to move into the ghetto.

At age 8, Sori's father & mother suddenly told her she needed to wear peasant clothing, get on a train by herself with false identification papers (and a new identity which Sori needed to memorize on the spot, and travel all alone until she would see through the window a distant cousin leave the train from another car. 

Furthermore, Sori was only told this right before she needed to actually do it! (This was the best way to handle this difficult situation.)

The family needed to escape to Hungary and they could not do it together.

As I read this, I found myself, How on earth...?!

According to all logic, a little sweet sheltered girl like Sori should never have made it past the train ride.

Usually, the children I read about had experienced more independence & responsibility before they found themselves on their own.

Or they were accompanied by an adult, even one from the non-Jewish underground.

Or they were a bit older than Sori—like age 10 or 12.

Or they possessed spunkier or bolder or shrewder personalities (like Sori's sister Ruti).

Sori was one of these quiet, sweet, guileless little girls.

Her parents had no choice & setting Sori off on her own was clearly agonizing for them (though they outwardly projected calm & resolve to Sori).

Such a sweet, sheltered, refined little girl like Sori should never have survived that journey (which, after successfully getting off the train, included a trek through the woods & a dangerous border-crossing on foot, plus nearly getting ravaged by pitchforks in the hands of Nazified Hungarians searching for Jews as she lay hiding under a stack of hay).

The fact that such a little girl like Sori managed the train journey displayed such a clear Hand of Hashem.

Miraculously, Sori, Ruti, and their parents all survived.

The book describes Sori's experiences hiding in Hungary, moving to a different Jewish family (all wonderful) every 3 months, a stint in a Christian orphanage, and a horrific 3-day stay with her sister in a center for immigrants & homeless—including the criminal & mentally ill dregs of Hungarian society.

Hungarian law forced the girls to stay there for 3 days, during which the frum community of Budapest did their best to help the girls by providing them with kosher food & kind treatment. 

​Sori's family ended up on the Kasztner train with the Satmar Rav Yoel Teitelbaum, which included a stint in the inhuman Bergen-Belsen death camp.

​It was fascinating to read the first-hand impressions of the Satmar Rav, whose purity & humble greatness even awed the secular Jews around him.

(Though not everyone. At one point, the Satmar Rav ended up in barracks with "mainly rough, secular people who gave him no rest," as Sori's father described it.)

​The Satmar Rav made sure to eat only kosher food (though he permitted others to eat whatever food they could find, kosher or not), he fasted 3 times a week, gave Torah classes, learned privately with others, and made himself available for questions & advice.

On Simchat Torah, the Satmar Rav managed to create an atmosphere of joy amid all the torment, leading everyone in singing & dancing. Sori found this accomplishment miraculous & rejuvenating.

The Satmar Rav risked his life for acts of caring & concern for every other Jew, whether he knew them or not.

A frum woman who dedicated herself to supplying the Satmar Rav with kosher food received his blessing for survival & his promise of a shidduch for her.

She merited to leave that horrible place before the Satmar Rav did.

In 1945, Sori's family made it to Eretz Yisrael and, after a brief stay in the Atlit detention camp, the family settled in Tel Aviv.

Sori's family settled in Eretz Yisrael for Torah reasons and distanced themselves from the secular Leftist Tziyonim.

Sori describes the tireless efforts of the secularists in Atlit to secularize the religious.

They insisted religious practices were no longer necessary & that life on a kibbutz would be perfect, painting a picture of "financial prosperity and communal living and utopia for everyone." 

Note: In reality, the kibbutzim never achieved this—except for those that eventually turned to capitalist enterprises. The rest survived on government assistance or shut down.

Furthermore, many children who grew up on kibbutzim left due to their traumatic memories of waking up frightened in the children's house at night with no adult around—the person assigned to night duty in the children's house usually abandoned this duty to go to sleep—and their parents unreachable in another building. The children did not enjoy this communist lifestyle and later sought to create normal homes for themselves outside the kibbutz movement. Some "utopia."

​These secular Leftist influencers approached the religious Jews with displays of compassion & tremendous concern for all they suffered. 

They particularly targeted religious children, many of whom came on their own as Holocaust orphans.

Sori recalls how bad she felt for them, with no way to resist the constant pressure & wooing of the secular Leftists.

Despite the innate gentleness & kindness of Sori's mother, the Leftist onslaught forced her to speak sharply to the camp organizer & counselors, demanding that they leave her daughters alone.

But they ignored Sori's mother.

As Sori sums up on page 273:

Fortunately, Sori continued to enjoy the love & bitachon that always emanated from her parents, which made her impenetrable to the wooing of the secular Left.

The chareidi Agudah did its best to help them, and managed to succeed despite the Agudah representatives only allowed to visit (rather than join the staff as the secular Leftists did).

The family rebuilt their life in a suburb of Tel Aviv (later moving to Tel Aviv proper), and even brought a lovely new baby into the world: Yishaye Yosef.

Even before the UN voted to allow the Jews to create their own state, Sori emphasized that she and her family felt at home in Eretz Yisrael (page 291-2):

This beautiful feeling was marred by the Arab-sympathizing British occupiers and their suffocating limits on Jewish immigration to Eretz Yisrael.

During Israel's 1948 War of Independence, Sori's father felt so sure of Mashiach's imminent arrival, he laid out his Shabbat clothes every night so he'd be ready to greet Mashiach upon waking up.

(He continued to do this until the end of his life in I think the 1960s.)

The book does an excellent job of describing the mixed feelings the non-Tziyoni frum Jews experienced during that time.

On one hand, Sori felt that Hashem's Great Love for Am Yisrael would allow the Jews (despite the secular majority) to triumph. She & everyone else felt innate optimism, a feeling of unity with all other Jews despite their level of practice, pride in their Land & the Jewish soldiers fighting to defend both the Land & the people, plus they felt united with other Jews in the desire for the struggle to "culminate in a safe, secure haven for Yidden from all over."

She describes her initial perception of the Jewish victory as "a dream come true" and "To live in a place run by Jews, for our benefit, without being subjects of anti-Semitic rulers" and as a "harbinger of Mashiach's times."

Yet events in 1949 would mar than initial optimism, noted on page 304:

In other words, the secular Leftists now in charge did not share the same feelings of unity that the profoundly religious Sori & so many other Jews felt in Eretz Yisrael.

In 1949, the Israeli government brought 40,000 Jews from Yemen to Eretz Yisrael.

It's rare to come across an eye-witness account by a religious neighbor of the Yemenite Jews.

Fortunately, we have Sori's.

She remembers when they moved into her Yad Eliyahu neighborhood (a suburb of Tel Aviv) with nothing but the clothes they wore, optimism, and large families of children.

Sori found them very religious, very pleasant—and very poor. She describes them as "very simple, sweet people who were staunch believers in Hashem and in their mesorah."

Sori's fondness & admiration for her new neighbors made what happened next all the more painful.

The Tziyoni leaders began a campaign of pressure on the Yemenite Jews to change their ways.

These leaders & their minions actively worked to convince the Yemenites to change their views and compromise on Torah & mitzvot.

They confused the Yemenite Jews with lies, claiming that they—these secular Leftists—also kept Torah...just in a different way. These propagandists asserted that things had changed.

They insisted the Yemenites were "crippling" their children.

The pressure started in the maabarot tent camps & continued into this Tel Aviv neighborhood, where the large Yemenite families lived in impossibly cramped apartments in poverty with little food.

Note: Charedi activists struggled to intervene on behalf of the Yemenite Jews in the maabarot, but the secular Leftists blocked them at every turn, going so far as to beat up the young charedi yeshivah students who insisted on coming in to help their Yemenite brothers & sisters. 

The secular Leftists boasted of their generosity regarding the cramped housing they gave the Yemenite Jews in Yad Eliyahu, insisting they could not give them larger homes & claimed they were trying to find jobs for the Yemenite husbands. 

They promised to take the children to a place where the children would receive sunlight, nutritious food, spacious living, and fresh air.

(Remember, the journey from Yemen and the stint in the squalid maabarot prior to Yad Eliyahu greatly weakened the children's physical health, which they found difficult to regain living in cramped conditions of Yad Eliyahu without porches or yards, and without enough money for plentiful food.)

The Jewish Agency reps promised the children would return home "happy and rejuvenated."

After tremendous pressure over the long term on these impoverished people, most parents finally capitulated out of concern for their children's health & the reassurance of the observance of religious traditions.

The Jewish agency counselors cleverly showed up in conservative (though modern) clothing to take the children.

Sori & her family watched the scene with great foreboding.

She described the counselors as young men & women brimming with health & energy (something very attractive to young children).

As they took the Yemenite children to the waiting buses, Sori noted how the "Large, pale, white palms clasped the small chocolate brown hands tightly" and how the petite, undernourished "waifs" were dwarfed by the "ebullient counselors both physically and emotionally."

It foreshadowed what was to come later.

During the absence of the children, Sori felt pained by the infinitely sad eyes of the Yemenite mothers who remained behind without their children.

A few months later, these formerly sweet refined children returned with shrieks & wild noise.

Sori described feeling ill upon seeing how the children appeared after a few months in the hands of the secular Leftists.

Yes, the children returned well-fed, happy, confident, and wearing new clothes.

But as Sori saw it (page 308):

Also gone were the boys' payot & tzitzit and the girls' long braids.

Their mothers burst into weeping, and continued weeping even as the children reassured them they still kept Torah & mitzvot.

Yet the children only went through the motions of mitzvot out of respect for their parents.

The fathers looked stoic & upset, and Sori's heart ached for them all.

As time went on, Sori realized that the Jewish Agency representatives had "secularized those children beyond recognition."

She viewed their initial campaign to wear down the parents as "all but kidnapped" these Yemenite Jewish children.

She continued to see profound sadness in the eyes of the Yemenite mothers long after the return of the children.

Finally, Agudah received permission to send their own representatives to the maabarot for one summer.

Sori chose to go help.

Due to her former imprisonment in Bergen-Belsen, Sori did not experience the shock her friends experienced upon encountering the squalid conditions in the camp.

Sori described the children as "sweet" with "sunny personalities" despite the impoverished conditions.

The parents expressed their gratitude & pleasure over their children finally receiving a Jewish education in contrast to the "foolishness" taught in the secular schools infiltrating the maabarot.

Sori noted that most of the children participated eagerly with the Agudah counselors & even happily readopted some of their old traditions.

After their time was up, Sori and the other Agudah activists tried to maintain contact with these children.

Indeed, with this support, some Yemenite children managed to withstand the unrelenting onslaught of the secular Leftists—and remained religious.

However, the secular Leftism swamped the charedi efforts.

Sori acknowledges that the loss of most of the centuries-old Yemenite community to secularism caused her deep pain, especially as she was forced to watch the process while helpless to do much to stem the onslaught (despite her heroic efforts in the camp & her family's support of Agudah to help their Yemenite brothers & sisters).

On page 310, Sori's great love for her fellow Jews & for Eretz Yisrael cause her to muse:

A lot of people dislike hearing such words & seeing these events in their true light.

However, Sori speaks from a great love & understanding of Torah, Am Yisrael, and Eretz Yisrael.

Listening thoughtfully & open-mindedly to her perceptions can help us understand where our true struggle lies & to whom & what we should really be aligning ourselves.

This is important & still affects us today.

Sori's family remained in Eretz Yisrael for the rest of their lives, though Sori herself eventually moved to England (for reasons explained in the book), where she married, raised a family, and worked to enhance the Torah Judaism of England.

However, she looks back on that choice with some reservation.

A part of her regrets not settling in Eretz Yisrael after her marriage, but she acknowledges that everything comes from Hashem and that for some reason, she and her husband decided to settle in England despite her father's pleas for them to settle in Eretz Yisrael.

Despite her humility in describing herself & her accomplishments, reading between the lines indicates that Sori did a lot to build Torah Judaism in England, much of it via girls' education.

Nonetheless, a great love of Eretz Yisrael remains with Sori.

One of the most charming parts of the book lies in Sori's description of life in her family's new apartment in Tel Aviv.

Their apartment stood nearly on the seaside of the Mediterranean.

During the summer nights, the family dealt with the heat & humidity of Tel Aviv by sleeping on the sand of the seashore.

Sori remembers those nights on the sand & how much she relished the cool Mediterranean breeze, the sound of the waves, the spacious night sky filled with sparkling stars, and the salty smell of the sea.

The experience also brought a beautiful wake-up at dawn, accompanied by a dip in the sea, which Sori described as "my own private pool."

Despite the length of this review, the book includes so much more than what's written here, such as:

• the profound warmth & love Sori's parents managed to give her throughout her entire life, regardless of any traumas or distance
• a vivid description of Jewish life in Pressburg/Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, prior to the Holocaust
• the astounding bitachon Sori's father managed to cultivate & imbue in his family
• the other wonderfully special & heroic people in Sori's extended family
• Sori's experiences during the Holocaust
• Sori's return to Czechoslovakia as an adult
• Sori's years in England, plus her special marriage and raising a family
• Sori's work in England
• Sori's struggles with trauma & healing
• Much, much more!

I'm very grateful to Sori and everyone involved with publishing this invaluable book.

It's very special & offers the reader so much, both as a memoir and as a beautiful & loving guide on how to cultivate a beautiful Torah-based family life & live your life with Hashem despite difficulties & traumas.

UNFORTUNATE UPDATE 2/5/2022:
baruch-dayan-haemet-estelle-bat-leah-linda.html

Estelle Hedaya lives in the Surfside building that collapsed in Miami. She is still not accounted for. A family member of hers contacted me to let me know her name for davening: E̶S̶T̶H̶E̶R̶ ̶B̶A̶T̶ ̶L̶E̶A̶H̶  ESTELLE BAT LEAH LINDA.

(There was confusion about her proper name for davening. ESTELLE BAT LEAH LINDA is the confirmed name to be used.)

Please daven for rachmei Shamayim (Heavenly compassion) for all those accounted & unaccounted for in the Surfside collapse, and also for their shocked & worried loved ones.

May we only hear good news.

With regard to the collapses & crushes, it relates to the execution of skilah—stoning.

(Chazal makes this connection, not me. Also, it's Chazal—particularly the Rambam—who says we should search ourselves in times of disaster & not focus just on natural causes.)

One sin that earns the punishment of skilah is violating Shabbat.

Another is cursing Hashem (as described in Vayikra 24:10-23).

(There are other transgression that bring execution by skilah, but let's just focus on these two for now.)

With this in mind, what can we do practically to sweeten din?

Well, the opposite of cursing Hashem is praising Him.

A lot of us already praise & thank Hashem, but maybe we could do even more (and complain even less—even if life really IS difficult & our hardships are not just our perception).

Rav Avigdor Miller recommends telling Hashem at least once a day: "I love You!"

If you're not doing that already, you can do that.

If you are doing it already, you can decide to say it twice or thrice a day.

You can blow kisses too & give Him a thumbs-up.

Saying to Hashem "I love You!" is very short & easy, yet rife with meaning & sweetness.

Also...avoid reading blasphemy, heresy, and atheism.

Regarding Shabbat:

If you haven't already, you can start making a daily learning of 1 Shabbat Law a day.

Because you started on that path, Heaven gives you tons of credit for it even if you haven't managed to keep Shabbat perfectly.

For more on that idea, please see here:  how-the-baby-steps-in-this-world-create-your-future-world-of-beautiful-pulsating-light.html.
And here: crushes-collapses-baby-teshuvah-and-an-update-on-cholim.html

You can also decide to make Shabbat even happier. You can take upon yourself:

• to sing more
• tell more inspiring stories
• read material that enhances your Shabbat
• take just 1 minute on Shabbat to really feel the special day.
• bring in Shabbat earlier
• bring Shabbat out later
• prepare a special food or salad in honor of Shabbat

For some, the Erev Shabbat preparation could use enhancement, like: 

• getting ready more efficiently
• taking care not to yell or get angry or eat foods that make you tired or irritable
• baking challah (which includes the powerful mitzvah of hafrashat challah)
• singing as you work

Everyone's situation is different & so each individual enhancement of Shabbat depends very much on each individual's situation & soul needs.

​But you can focus on doing something that really speaks to you.

​This idea is not meant to blame the victims because what happens to a group of people is a message for all of us and, among other cheshbonot only known to Hashem, the victims are often the messengers, who may even be better than the people who were spared. 

​(Everything depends & no situation is exactly the same.)

It's simply an attempt to read these strong, painful hints from Shamayim & prevent tragedies, hopefully helping to make everything better for all Am Yisrael & bring the Geula with compassion. 

May Mashiach please come speedily in our days!

First of all, I think we've all made the connection of collapses in 3 incidents affecting the Jewish community, plus the horrific compression that led to injury & death in the Meron crush.

A terrible crush links these 4 tragedies:

• the Meron crush
• the bleacher collapse in Yerushalayim
• the cable car crash in Italy which killed 3 generations of a Jewish family, leaving only 5-year-old Eitan Moshe Biran alive (Eitan Moshe ben Tal, for davening)
• and now the building collapse in Miami (which hosts one of America's larger & more vibrant Jewish communities)

The sinkhole in the parking lot of Shaarei Tzedek hospital can also be included because it featured a collapse that would've crushed people had it occurred only a few minutes later.

In Hashem's great chessed, He orchestrated the sinkhole in way which only damaged cars, not people. But the idea of collapse & crush remains, and cannot be coincidental to the timing of other recent collapses & crushes.

Tehillim should be said & we should all take some kind of loving, compassionate stock of ourselves to see what we can improve—maybe dig just a centimeter deeper than normal.

Listening again to Rabbi Alon Anava's near-death-experience story, it struck me that when he initially started keeping Shabbat, he wasn't really keeping Shabbat.

He smoked cigarettes, but instead of stamping them out, he let them go out on their own.

Prior to Shabbat, he drove an hour to buy kosher wine for Kiddush, but still went out afterwards on Friday nights.

A more knowledgeable friend labeled this negatively, but based on what Rabbi Anava experienced in Shamayim, Rabbi Anava explained his behavior with the parable of a baby.

If a kindergartner runs around, no one gets excited. Completely normal for a kindergartner's development, it would be worrisome if he wasn't able to run around.

However, if a 6-month old baby jumped up & started running around, everyone would be shocked. People would film the baby & be talking about it all over the world.

The young Rabbi Anava explained that in Shamayim, they viewed him as that baby.

Formerly a drug-imbibing foul-mouthed tattooed atheist who grew up in Eretz Yisrael trapped in radical secularism, Rabbi Anava never experienced a Pesach Seder until his NDE. (That's really shocking because Pesach is so much in the air here. Around the world, even fairly secular—including intermarried—Jews celebrate Pesach.)

His grandfather put tefillin on Rabbi Anava for his bar mitzvah and that was it for tefillin until his soul left his body, then came back from the Heavenly Court.

Even though so many baalei teshuvah take on more of Shabbat & do so faster than Rabbi Anava initially did, his background & conditioning made taking on mitzvot much more challenging than for other people.

So based on his experience in Shamayim, he felt sure the baby-steps he took resembled a 6-month-old super-baby who suddenly jumped up & started running around.

(That story starts at 1:20:00 in this video: video-tov.ml/watch/TSGXKdgZgTw.)

Needless to say, he continued until he became a particularly devoted religious Jew who now lives with his wife & children in Tzfat, and he himself teaches Torah.

Recently, I read that just by learning a halacha day in whatever area you choose sweetens the judgment over you.

Why?

By learning the halachot of lashon hara or tsniyut (dressing & behaving with dignity) or Shabbat, you are considered as fulfilling them even if you haven't perfected your execution of these mitzvot.

This idea is further explained by Rav Eliyahu Dessler in Strive for Truth!

You can see a post on this invaluable idea here: how-the-baby-steps-in-this-world-create-your-future-world-of-beautiful-pulsating-light.html.

Just by STARTING, you create a cord that connects you to the achievement of its ultimate goal, and you are seen in a completely different & infinitely better light in Shamayim.

So when people start urging teshuvah in the face of a disaster, please know you needn't overwhelm yourself or feel defeated before you even start.

You can do tiny acts—and you needn't feel like a hypocrite or a loser for taking such babyish steps!

Yosef Ezriel ben Chaya Michal is doing better & moved to rehab. It seems he can hear & feel, but not respond. He's still very much in need of our tefillot.

The last update I heard about Elozor ben Reuma (June 8) described him in stable condition and partially weaned from his ventilator, but his situation remains severe and he desperately needs out continued tefillot.

I'm indebted to a very special caring person who keeps many of us alert to daven for new cholim & keeps us appraised (as much as she can) on their different situations.

Related link:
2-survivors-of-the-meron-tragedy-desperately-need-your-prayers-yosef-azriel-ben-chaya-michal-elazar-ben-reuma.html

In Rav Miller's dvar Torah for Parshat Balak, Rav Avigdor Miller focuses on evil occultist Bilaam's blessing for Am Yisrael:

Rav Miller then explains how many people dislike this concept—both Jews & non-Jews.

It goes against modern society's cherished ideas of pluralism, egalitarianism, and democracy.

However, it's essential for Jews to maintain their Torah identity.

What most people—whether Jewish or not—don't realize is that by Jews fully embracing their Jewish identity and separating from anything non-Jewish, this itself brings the Redemption with compassion to the entire world.

Meaning, the more Jews keep themselves apart according to Torah stipulations, the better it is for the entire world—both for Jews & for non-Jews.

This is the way to achieve world peace, abundance, and all other good things.

Rav Miller goes back to the Creation of the world, in which Hashem states that every living thing in the world—trees, plants, fruits, animals, fish—will propagate l'mino—according to its own kind & its own classification.

Hashem created each creation for a reason. He WANTS there to be a variety of different things.

Hashem doesn't want a world populated with ligers (lion-tiger offspring).

He wants there to be beautiful lions with classic lion traits & He also wants there to be beautiful tigers with classic tiger traits.

That's WHY He created them as lions & tigers.

We also see this with personalities. Hashem WANTS different personalities in the world.

That's why among the unity of Am Yisrael, Hashem orchestrated 12 different Tribes with different character traits, styles, and different ways of participating.

This is real diversity. And it's healthy.

Rav Miller notes that from the beginning of Jewish history, Hashem kept separating the Yisrael souls from those not suitable for Yisrael.

Avraham Avinu & Lot split up.

Yishmael separated from the family.

Esav separated from the family.

And much later, Am Yisrael spent 40 years in the Midbar to learn how to be a Nation that dwells alone.

In Eretz Yisrael, the Am Yisrael remained with each other.

Non-Jews could only live there in certain roles & according to specific standards—they needed to undergo a circumcision, plus keep kosher & Shabbat. (Outside of Eretz Yisrael & outside of that particular role, non-Jews needn't keep kosher or be circumcised, and it's harmful for them to keep Shabbat.)

Current politicians in Israel not only ignore these ancient standards, but even run roughshod all over them—to the detriment of all.

After the Jewish Dispersion, Rav Miller mentions Hashem's sending of Paul & Mohammad to keep Jews separated.

Christians & Muslims sequestered their Jewish citizens in ghettos, where Jewish life thrived & some of our best Torah literature came to fruition.

At the same time, Rav Miller offers perspective on the negative side of Christian & Muslim discrimination (page 12):

Rav Miller has eye-opening revelations regarding Jew-hatred in modern times.

He first starts off with a seemingly unrelated Gemara (page 13):

Rav Miller goes on to describe the experience of the average American Jew, who feels so comfortable in America & among American mores.

(A lot of good lies within the original American values, based on values found in Tanach. However, they still are not purely Torah values as applicable to Jews.)

Then a non-Jew throws a banana peel at the Jew or shouts something at the Jew, and all of the sudden, the Jew doesn't feel so comfortable.

The hostility reminds the Jew that he is not really a part of America (though a Jew should be a loyal, grateful citizen of America).

But the Jew is not really a part of American society.

A Jew is a Jew—a Nation apart.

And this separation is good for everyone—both Jews & non-Jews.

On pages 13-14, Rav Miller discusses the time period leading up to the Holocaust, including his own positive experience in German during that time. He also examines Holocaust studies, explaining why they're misguided in the light of authentic Torah hashkafah.

We've seen this recently in Eretz Yisrael.

In Lod, people who formerly enjoyed friendly relations with their Yishmaelite neighbors found themselves viciously & mercilessly attacked.

The Democrat party in America, traditionally favored by assimilating Jews & considered a pro-Israel party, has increasingly turned against Israel.

Democrats produce more & more politicians who hate Israel and who don't like Jews or Torah values much either.

The liberal side, embraced overwhelmingly by the assimilating Jewish population in America, increasingly opposes Torah ethics by embracing euthanasia, abortion, same-gender marriage, gender confusion & gender manipulation, wanton "relationships," unwed single motherhood, extremely immodest dress (for women only of course; men still need to wear suits & ties), and atheism...while opposing circumcision & anything religious.

Many Jews, rather than taking the cue to get out of the muck, seek instead to find within Torah support for these harmful views.

And the pareve-neutral areas keep shrinking.

For example, America formerly enabled the concept of "neutral" or "pareve."

Magazines, newspapers, and sports games used to be considered perfectly acceptable among the majority of frum people.

But with formerly conservative family magazines now promoting inane or immoral values, plus sports games presenting truly appalling half-time shows, frum Jews need to wean themselves off these formerly "neutral" pastimes.

Standard popular newspapers now promote every kind of bad thing, regularly publish fake news & deceptive headlines (humpback whales CANNOT physically "swallow" a grown man & his scuba tanks), and consistently present in the worst light religious Jews & Jews living in Eretz Yisrael. 

For example, one respected newspaper manipulated its language to deceive readers into thinking that ambulances cannot enter ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods on Shabbat or they risk getting stoned.

As everyone knows, the opposite is true.

The ultra-Orthodox Jews themselves call the ambulances to tend to their needs of pikuach nefesh on Shabbat.

In one formerly conservative family magazine—one of America's most popular & snubbed by the holier-than-thou liberal readers of the New Yorker—I wanted to read some of their inspiring stories.

I found stories lauding same-gender relationships, gender confusion, a same-gender-attracted man who adopted a Downs syndrome girl (poor girl!), and a dog profiled as a hero because of all his blood donations to other dogs.

(Dogs lack bechirah & cannot choose or refuse to donate blood. Why is the DOG heroic? The dog had no say in the matter.)

One of the century's most popular weight loss programs promotes its support of same-gender lasciviousness on the landing page of its website.

A formerly clean magazine geared toward family women once hosted a regular feature of the cute things children say.

10 years later, the same magazine had eliminated that feature and replaced it with a fictional serial glorifying an unfaithful wife.

And yes, this is also a sifting process.

The current culture in modern society forced frum Jews to take stock of themselves.

Just as urgent, non-frum Jews need to take stock of themselves.

Their children are often not Jewish & their way of celebrating Jewish holy days lacks meaning.

The tide turns against them too as their beloved Democrat party supports leaders who dislike Jews in general (and not "just" Israel).

In the non-Orthodox community in which I grew up, the cantor's wife complained to me that the Jewish boys davka did not want to marry Jewish girls.

I also noticed they lost their permanent "rabbi" & have been stumbling along with temporary "rabbis" who leave after a year or so.

Their congregation's "rabbi" used to earn 6-figure salaries for doing shockingly little.

One "rabbi" they hosted for years rarely showed up for weekday Shacharit or Shabbat Mincha; there was no weekday Mincha or Maariv. Often, they lacked a minyan for weekday Shacharit, which led them to include women in the minyan count—and even that wasn't enough to reach 10.

As a preteen, I remember a handful of elderly congregants (who'd attended cheider in their early years in Eastern Europe) complaining, "Some rabbi! He doesn't even show up for Shachris during the week!"

The inclusion of women in the minyan also ruffled their feathers, but the more "progressive" congregants always overruled their objections.

When one of these elderly men discovered I was becoming frum, he gave me a tarnished pair of copper Shabbos candlesticks, saying there was no one to use them and he didn't want to throw them out.

Another elderly congregant was desperate for his 30something son to marry a Jewish girl, offering an expensive home & lots of money for the privilege.

I'm still haunted by the pain emanating from his face as he faced leaving no Jewish grandchildren behind him.

These guys should've gotten a clue & joined a real synagogue more in line with their standards.

Their pintele Yid was so evident, but they never managed to get their religious act together.

Anyway, that "rabbi" used to just hide in his office pretending to do stuff—earning 6 figures in the 80s & 90s!

What happened?

Has their shrinking congregation left them unable to pay a "rabbi" who either does almost nothing or who produces lots of programs, but cannot rescue the sinking ship of intermarriage & disinterested Jews?

Or are there no more "rabbis" who wish to board a sinking ship for any price?

I'm not sure.

In contrast, the frum community there grows in leaps & bounds.

Chabad went from 2 little shuls to branching out all over the place.

An active kollel exists, as do plenty of Torah programs & shiurim.

A surprising percentage moved to Eretz Yisrael to settle in frum neighborhoods.

The contrast is so obvious.

The Jews who lack frumkeit but care about whatever Judaism they recognize—why can't they see the only way to keep Judaism alive is to actually live it according to Torah?

The truth is, many have already defected to the Orthodox congregations, baruch Hashem.

But here's the crunch for American Jewry:

In general, Jews are either heading toward frumkeit or drifting loose completely.

The non-Orthodox congregations in existence are increasingly filled by non-Jews (some of whom think they're Jewish & some of whom know they are not).

Only the frum communities show any growth.

We are a Nation that dwells apart.

We should dwell apart with as much joy & enthusiasm as we can muster.

With unprecedented access to anti-Torah values encapsulated within an appealing shell, plus the captivating allure of the outside world, it's harder than ever to fully appreciate the treasure that sparkles within our souls.

But it's so important & ultimately so rewarding to invest in this as much as we can.

It's interesting (and disheartening) to see how many of my peers went from young mothers of between 1-3 small children, young women who held sky-high ideals along with a tremendous will to invest ANYTHING chinuch experts insisted would make their children turn out well...

​...to middle-age mothers of large families—mothers who are emotionally & physically depleted.

​Despite a lot of very sincere effort, most have at least one child (if not more) who isn't doing well spiritually/religiously.

And all the:

• running around to different experts to find solutions & a school that is just the right fit
• leaping through the hoops of protekzia to meet whatever the parents or experts think are the child's needs
• extra doses of love, encouragement, and praise (even to the point of neglecting the other, less problematic children — who somehow do fine without all these seeming extras AND dealing with results of their problematic sibling & parents stretched thin)...

...these kids:

• either do not improve at all...
• ...or they worsen
• or they look eternally okay, but behind the scenes, they are propped up by:

In other words, the kids do their teachers and families the big favor of looking externally frum and going through the motions in whichever school they finally end up, but inside, there's not much there.

These kids aren't so connected.

And this is DESPITE how much their parents & schools invested & continue to invest in them, to bolster the child's self-esteem, to make frumkeit enjoyable, etc.

Again, it's important to emphasize that this topic address kids whose parents DID invest in them with incredible flexibility, and who DID attend alternative schools catering to these kids & their issues, and who DID receive outside help/treatment via therapists, chonchim (Big Brother programs), and so on.

The efforts usually did not reap the expected fruits. Not even close.

Why?

Due to the theories of modern psychology, many people view a problematic teenager as a sure sign that his parents (particularly his mother) were dysfunctional in some serious way.

This is sometimes true.

At one point, I believed this too.

After all, experts detail this theory in a convincing manner.

And proofs of this theory abound as we observe seriously warped teenagers & adults who suffered an abusive upbringing.

But as time went on, it surprised me to see that so many times, the problematic teens were davka the child that the parents (especially the mother) invested in MOST.

This isn't true all the time. But many times it is.

For example, I happened to be visiting a friend with her many children around us.

Suddenly, her teenage boy pulled a mattress into the living room & started somersaulting on it.

His mother responded by oohing and ahhing over his antics.

​Knowing her very well over several years, I understood she responded like this to give him positive attention, and not because she felt so enthralled by his somersaulting. (And yes, this is one of two kids in the family with problematic behavior—they have a lot more than 2 kids, but only 2 behave very problematically.)

Look, if a sixteen-year-old boy wants to somersault on a mattress, what's the problem?

It's fine! 

They need to blow off steam (especially the super-energetic ones) & somersaults can be a fine way to do this.

But why did he also need his mother's praise and adulation for doing it?

After all, his need was why she was cooing at his antics; she felt compelled for the sake of his "self-esteem."

She was not actually so wowed by a teenage boy somersaulting on a mattress.

And why should she be?

It's understandable behavior, but it's not mature behavior. And it's odd that at his age, he wasn't embarrassed to be doing it in front of someone from outside the family.

But his mother put on a convincing act in the hope that by feeling good about himself (including this silly accomplishment), he'll behave better. (She told me this outright.)

And she felt desperate for him to behave better.

At that point in his life, he regularly ruined Shabbos meals, bullied his younger siblings (including much younger siblings, like his 3-year-old sister), and his father started taking sedatives whenever he knew he needed to be in the same room as this son.

The boy's older sister—an exceptionally emotionally healthy person—quietly removed herself to her bedroom during Shabbos meals because she found her brother's behavior intolerable.

This happened every single Shabbos.

This sister did so quietly because she saw her parents struggling & didn't want them to feel blamed or stressed out more than they already were.

(Isn't it intriguing how this teenage sister found the emotional maturity & sensitivity to handle the situation thoughtfully, but her brother, who was almost the same age & raised by the same wonderful parents, could not bring himself to behave with minimum decency despite copious investment by his parents, therapist, and those who help youth-at-risk?)

At one point, the mother confided that when she read articles on emotional/verbal abuse & signs of abuse, she felt both startled & dismayed to realize that she identified so strongly with the victim, including the signs of co-dependent behavior toward the abuser.

She said these articles exactly describe her situation with her and her son; she felt abused verbally, mentally, and emotionally...by her own son.

And having known them all for so long & having seen this boy in action, I wholeheartedly agreed with her assessment.

Despite all the psychobabble to the contrary, I couldn't deny the stark reality in front of my face: The mother was being victimized by her teenage son.

And his behavior was NOT in response to an abusive upbringing.

As already stated, the parents went out of their way to give their children a calm, loving upbringing.

It was also odd because these parents possessed exemplary middot & enjoyed wonderful shalom bayis. They both genuinely liked & appreciated each other, and both took pleasure in being mevater to each other.

In other words, the parents presented the ideal example of a healthy relationship.

Together, they cultivated a consistent atmosphere of calm & security.

Furthermore, she & I attended the same chinuch class when our children were little and she continued long after I dropped out from despair.

Note: My experience with both books & classes indicate most chinuch teaching does NOT offer effective methods for parenting strong-willed, adventurous, bright, innovative, energetic boys. Not on purpose, but they simply have no clue, nor are they necessarily sympathetic to the very real challenges these otherwise wonderful children present. That's a huge part of the problem. Yes, you can find competent chinuch people—they definitely exist!—but you need to really dig around for them.

Back then, the chinuch teacher continued with her usual thing of giving them both wrong advice & right advice, while not realizing the harm caused by a school all wrong for the child. But the chinuch teacher kept insisting it can all work out if the parents continue to work with the school according to the school's directives.

Note: This approach NOT true. I've seen this too many times to count. If the school is the wrong fit for THAT particular child (or for the whole family), then THAT it usually what spurs a child off the derech later. A negative school experience is the main reason for off-the-derech youth later. Even two really wonderful parents may not be able to counteract a consistently negative school experience. How unfortunate that this chinuch teacher remained clueless at the time.

Furthermore, when their children were still young, my friend's husband took the unusual & very intelligent step of hosting a chinuch class for men in their home.

So it was weird to see such problems with this son, plus another son of theirs who also started acting up.

And I noticed a certain insensitivity in these two sons—the one really difficult boy in particular—not just toward his siblings & parents, but in general. Not sociopathy, but he wasn't so interested in how his behavior affected others.

Outside the family, he never went out of his way to hurt anybody—in fact, I don't think he ever hurt anyone outside the family—and he liked being around people. But I sensed a certain disconnect in him, even though he was also sociable boy.

In addition, both boys always came off as a little immature for their age from the time they were young.

Meaning, when they were six, they were somewhat immature for a six-year-old. When they were 10, they were somewhat immature for a 10-year-old. When they were 15, they were somewhat immature for a 15-year-old.

Right now, after years & years of superhuman efforts, these 2 sons are on either side of age 20 and doing okay.

Just kind of okay. Not more than that. (And still a little bit immature for each of their ages.)

And just to drive the point home, this state of "kind of okay" comes despite:

• a calm, consistent upbringing
• parents (particularly the mother) who performed incredible feats for YEARS (including through numerous pregnancies & nursing babies) to find the right parenting method
• the hunt for & investment in schools, mentors, and programs for the wayward sons

​Ironically, despite having parents stretched to the limit & focusing so heavily on one child in particular, a father sometimes on sedatives due to his son's intolerable behavior, and an aggressive bullying older brother who regularly disrupted pleasant family events, the rest of the kids are turning out pretty well!

Again: Throughout all this, their numerous other kids have been doing very well.

Yes!

Isn't that illogical?

People understandably don't like to hear stories like this because it feels so wrong.

It's not fair.

And you know what?

It's really NOT fair.

And it also brings up feelings of despair because you start to think that if all that effort didn't work, then maybe nothing does...so what's the point of it all?

However, there is no cause for despair.

This particular problem comes when parents run very hard in the wrong direction.

(And this is easy to do when you have chinuch teachers & authors unwittingly advising parents to run very hard in the wrong direction.)

Let's go back to my wonderful friend & her wonderful husband.

As described above, she invested tremendous energy & effort in her children.

Here's a specific example:

When their 2 boys were young, her husband disliked taking them to shul on Shabbos.

Admittedly, it's tremendously hard to manage the davening with 1 young son, let alone two.

It was a big unwieldy yoke on him (and understandably so).

Yet it is absolutely his tafkid to teach his sons to daven and to daven in a minyan!

That's the male role and it is HIS role to teach them this.

A mother cannot do this.

But neither my friend nor her husband realized this.

(Again, HE at least should've realized this from his learning. But socially & culturally, this idea isn't around—unless you happen to listen the minority of rabbis who discuss it according to real daat Torah.)

So despite the inconvenience among her other myriad duties, my friend knocked herself out by creating a special bag of treats (which entailed inconvenient shopping while pregnant & nursing, and with numerous young children). The special bag was huge & stuffed with treats specially picked according to their taste, and featured bows and ribbons.

She beamed with pride as she showed the bags to me while her eyes glowed with expectation.

She presented them to her sons with a huge smile and an excited tone of voice.

In the meantime, her glum-looking husband shepherded them out the door with the fancy treat bags.

She did this kind of very well-intentioned encouragement a lot.

Yet these 2 boys didn't like davening.

Even long after bar mitzvah, they often stayed home on Shabbat rather than go to a minyan. I'm not sure they even davened on their own in those times.

As far as I know, they never learned to like davening.

​The boys didn't like learning either, despite the fact that their father loved learning and was quite a knowledgeable masmid.

Their resistance toward school & davening developed into the primary source stress in the family, though both the parents have such good middot, it didn't flare up like it does in other families.

Even now, neither likes learning or davening, but the combined efforts of their parents, mechanchim, and therapists over the years enable them to go through the motions.

Interestingly, my friend & her husband have another young son now at the age where he needs to learn to go to daven with his father on Shabbos.

And this son is not only energetic (like his older brothers), but bold, confident, and savvy (unlike his older brothers). He also has an aggressive streak that his older brothers lacked at his age.

Yet despite how this younger brother should be a harder child to train, it's a totally different ballgame now.

Why? Why are things so different?

Why are they succeeding with the objectively more difficult child, when they did not succeed with the easier children?

First of all, the father finally got involved in his obligatory chinuch.

He stepped out of his former role as "mommy's helper," and took on a more proactive role as head of the home (although he is indeed still a helpful husband, but he is now more than that).

And the mother finally released these particular reins to the father—especially important when the chinuch involves something ONLY the father can do! A mother cannot be mechanech her sons about going to minyan, how to behave in shul, and so on.

(I don't mean widows, who often receive a special siyata d'Shmaya due to the loss orchestrated by Hashem. But they still struggle with this & often depend on other men to train her boys to daven. I mean married women who have a husband around to mechanech the boys. Hashem gave them a father in their home. That's what the father is there for: chinuch.)

Yes, the mother can assist in this particular aspect of chinuch. She should definitely be supportive.

But it's really the father's arena.

(This is why you see with boys off the derech that the vast majority—in addition to negative school experiences—grew up with fathers who never learned to mechanech them about davening. Either the fathers were too tough & angry or they were apathetic. Either way, there was no real chinuch about davening.)

So how do things go now?

First, before the father goes off to learn, the father leans down to his son and, in a very soft voice with an "I'm-not-kidding" face, his father says that he'll be coming back in however much time to take the boy to daven and the boy needs to be ready.

Wisely, the father doesn't smile, cajole, or speak in an excited tone of voice.

He doesn't look glum or reluctant either.

He looks determined & committed.

Then the father looks over the boy's head to the mother, and she nods.

(While the father presented it as the boy's responsibility, it's still good for the mother to support it and prompt the boy so he'll be ready when his father returns. And she does. So that's their silent way of making sure they're both in the game.)

Because she's both emotionally & physically worn out at this point, my friend no longer has the energy to make davening in shul seem full of allure & excitement.

(Though she meant well, it was always a deception anyway because until a person matures enough to understand the power of davening in a minyan, it feels neither alluring nor exciting—though some children do naturally enjoy the experience—and making it seem what it isn't often doesn't work. The kid gets all excited and then...oh. Meh. Let-down occurs.)

So at the appointed time, she pleasantly reminds the boy that his father will be home soon to take him and that he needs to get ready.

Though her voice remains soft & pleasant, it conveys a firm undertone.

I was impressed by the way this assertive, fearless boy looked at his parents with respect each time they spoke to him in this manner.

When his father came, he addressed the boy in a quiet, pleasant, yet no-nonsense manner.

And the boy went! And he went willingly.

This kind of calm & no-frills yet no-nonsense determined approach works wonderfully with these bold, energetic, assertive boys.

​Naturally, we have no idea how he'll be when he hits his teens.

But as far as his shul attendance goes, he is already doing so much better than his older brothers ever did at any age.

And knowing the parents as I do, I feel strongly that the shift has to do with the shift in the parents' roles.

Rather than the mother being the mover & shaker behind her son's davening chinuch, it now comes from the father — as it should. 

(Logically, it makes no sense that the davening chinuch can come from the mother only. Davening in a minyan is a uniquely male mitzvah that demands the full devotion of the father.)

So the mother is no longer the head honcho with the husband relegated to being the reluctant tag-along to his sons' davening chinuch.

(That's how it initially as each parent unconsciously fell into the wrong role.)

Now the father has taken his son's davening chinuch firmly by the reins. He guides his son regarding davening in shul and the mother plays the all-important supporting role.

(And this is all by spoken mutual agreement.)

And they're doing it successfully without all the song and dance of the earlier years.

Why? Because this way WORKS.

It's meant to work. That's the spiritual physics. 

And it shows how wonderful the parents truly are in their willingness to step out of their comfort zones for the benefit of their children. These changes aren't easy to make, yet both parents made them.

It's a very beautiful & inspiring thing to see.

(And just to emphasize a point misunderstood by many new parents: Too much enthusiasm & bribing implies that a particular mitzvah or activity is neither pleasant nor important on its own. This is a common method nowadays, and I initially also did it with my children when I thought it would be beneficial. Encouragement or a little bit of enticement can be very positive. But if you do too much too often, the opposite result occurs. Ask me how I know...)

Equally important, the parents also switched their later boys out of the school attended by their older brothers & placed them in a school much more suitable for their family.

(They did the same for their girls, which immediately cured one of their girls of an emotionally based issue she exhibited before the switch.)

Both school systems are mainstream chareidi, by the way. But different styles & approaches exist, even within the seemingly monolithic charedi community.

Finding the right fit for one's child is essential. (And it doesn't need to be mainstream charedi either. It really depends on what's best for that child.)

But when a better school choice is not possible—and sometimes it isn't—it's important to realize that nisayon is from Hashem, much like death or disability or an extreme financial situation are nisayonot from Hashem. In such a case, a focus on bitachon & davening helps.

So that concludes some insights into a parenting problem common today, and the possible solutions.

To recap:

• Fathers must fulfill their halachically obligated role.

 

• Fathers cannot relinquish their halachic role (even with the mother enthusiastic & confident encouragement) and expect a halachically desirable result.

 

• Mothers need to support & value their husband's halachic role just as much as they respect & value their own maternal halachic role in chinuch.

 

• School choice plays an overwhelming role in how children turn out.