Rivka Levy

The Narrow Bridge

Working on our Bad Middot

The most crucial parenting skill of all

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If someone asked you ‘what’s single thing is going the make the biggest difference to your child’s emotional health’ what would you say?

One person might say that the most important thing would be to teach them how to be a mentch. Someone else would maybe put the emphasis on self-discipline, and that their kid should know how to get places on time and tie their shoelaces right. Yet another person might say that the single most important thing should be that their child felt loved, ‘seen’ and respected (OK, that’s three things, but you get the idea.)

Me?

I think that the one thing that makes the single biggest difference to a child’s emotional health is how much humility their parents have. Let me explain what I mean.

When you’ve been working on your character traits for a while, and trying to get your ego reduced down as much as possible, that’s when you can actually start to internalise the idea that try as you might, you are not a perfect, infallible human being, and you never will be.

Let’s be clear that reaching this level takes a huge amount of spiritual striving and effort, and it doesn’t happen overnight. But once you start to even just approach this level of genuine humility, it completely changes how your view yourself and your interactions with other people, and particularly, how you view your relationship with your children.

Here’s my 5 top reasons why humility is the most crucial parenting skill of all.

A humble parent:

1) Doesn’t automatically assume that they’re always right.

This cannot be stated too many times. Sometimes, even the best-intentioned, most well-meaning, genuinely empathetic parent in the world can still be plain wrong about things. They can still make mistakes – sometimes, even huge mistakes – in how they relate to their children. They can still cause damage, pain and suffering to their children, even when it’s genuinely the last thing they’d ever want to do.

It takes humility to admit that to yourself.

It also takes a lot of humility to admit that to your children, and to openly acknowledge that you probably messed up a whole bunch of times, at their expense. The good news is that just the simple act of admitting we aren’t perfect too our children goes a really long way to fixing the damage.

2) Can ‘hear’ what their child is actually telling them.

One of the hardest things to deal with in an emotionally-healthy way is when your kid decides to travel a path that suits them, and who God designed them to be, but that goes against your dearest held principles or ambitions for them. When the first earring in the nose shows up, or the first tattoo, or they tell you that they want to drop out of medical school to go and be a gardener, or musician, or something, it can cut a parent to the quick. The more humility a parent has, the more respect they’ll accord to their children, and the better they’ll manage to react when their child chooses something that is not in alignment with the parent’s own wishes and desires.

3) Doesn’t make their own problem their kid’s problem.

The more humility you have, the less you try to pin the blame for your own character faults and issues on other people. If you’re yelling at your kids, it’s not because ‘they’re acting too wild’, or ‘winding you up on purpose’ (even if they really are…), or because they’re ‘acting disrespectful’, or to ‘teach them a lesson’. We yell at our kids because we have anger issues. Full stop.

We all have a whole bunch of negative emotions and issues that we all need to identify, acknowledge and accept, and our kids excel at helping us to uncover them.

Kids are just our mirrors. If we fix the issue in us, whatever that might be, we’ll fix it in them, too.

4) Understands that parenting is giving, not taking.

Writing in ‘Education with Love’, Rabbi Shalom Arush explains that parenting is giving. We give to our children all the time – and yes, sometimes it’s really, really hard work. But ‘giving’ doesn’t just means material things, like clothing allowances, luxury holidays and the latest i-Phones. Real giving includes a number of things that are sometimes much harder for us to part with. Like time, effort, sleep, comfort and always having things our own way. It’s impossible to really give, and to continually put what’s best for your child above what best suits you, as the parent, without a big dose of humility.

5) Asks God for help.

Humble parents realize that even when they make their best effort, they’re still going to make a whole lot of errors and mistakes with their children. They understand that they need as much help as they can get to raise happy, healthy, emotionally well-adjusted kids, and they’ll go straight to The Top to get it.

It requires humility to go talk to God about your parenting, and to admit that you’re not feeding your kids right, or spending enough quality time with them, or messing them up with your hyperchondriac tendencies, rage fits and obsessive house-cleaning habits.

The truth?

If we could fix these problems ourselves, we would. It takes humility to admit that not only are we flawed, we can’t actually do much to fix our parenting problems and own emotional issues. But once you put God in the picture, you can relax: your bit is to act humble and ask for help. His job is to help your kids turn out just fine, regardless of everything you did or didn’t do for them.

Mitzvah, or free lunch?

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A little while ago, I got repeated phone calls from a young couple who wanted to come to for Shabbat. We’d had them a few months’ ago – it was OK, but nothing special. The conversation was pretty stilted, and my girls left the table after a few minutes, because it was borrringggg.

Unfortunately as the host, I couldn’t join them in their room. So I soldiered on with our taciturn guests, making polite conversation until it was the bless-ed time of bentching.

Like I said, I’ve had worst shabbos experiences, but I’ve also definitely had better, and I wasn’t so keen on repeating the experience any time soon.

In the old days, I had a huge fear of being ‘guest-less’ for Shabbat, but the last couple of years have been pretty solitary in many ways, and as a result I’ve learned to not only tolerate ‘family only’ Shabbats, but even to welcome them.

Add into the mix the huge amounts of stress I’ve been under, in various ways, over the past few months, and voila, we reach a situation where I often don’t have Shabbat guests, and I’ve got a lot more fussy about who sits by my table.

(I know: what can I tell you? I’m definitely not Artscroll Biography material.)

So when this young couple asked if they could come again, I told my husband to make our excuses and decline.

Behind the scenes, I was having quite an intense ‘teenager’ time, and I also didn’t have a lot of spare energy and koach for guests. It was that time a couple of months’ ago when even cooking for myself had become a bit tricky.

A few weeks’ on, the couple asked again. Again, we made our excuses. My kids had friends staying over, and from our previous experience with them, this couple didn’t really ‘combine’ well with anyone else.

A few weeks’ on, they asked again. Again, I had far too much going on in my life to handle guests, and I told my husband to decline. Which is when I started to ponder to myself: what’s going on here?

I mean, if I’d told them the first time to come whenever they wanted, and just call, and it would be a pleasure to have them, that would be one thing, and I’d have no complaints.

But I didn’t, and I hadn’t, and to keep calling after repeatedly being told ‘no’ set some alarm bells ringing.

Even in university when I was dead skint and had one armchair that I’d rescued from next to the dumpster, I used to invite my friends for meals and Shabbat suppers. Even when I was a young 20-something newly married (and still dead skint…) I used to have guests almost every week.

It’s just something me and my husband did, and it never depended on us having a lot of cash or a perfect home.

By contrast, something that me and my husband never, ever, did was invite ourselves over to someone else for Shabbat –

(barring the one time I asked really good friends if we could come for lunch last minute, as I’d been caught up in some crazy situation and hadn’t been able to buy or cook anything myself.)

With friends, you can do those things and it’s ok, because it’s clear that you’re not just after a free lunch, and that there’s some mutual caring and reciprocity going on.

So we can argue it’s just an age thing, a stage-in-life thing, but I don’t think I agree. I invited people decades’ older than me for meals in London, right from the first year I was married.

After pondering it, and wondering if I’ve just got plain mean, it struck me that’s what’s bothering me about all this is that there doesn’t seem to be any reciprocity on the table. It feels as though there’s an expectation that I’m just meant to happily have this couple for Shabbat, ad infinitum, with no friendship, caring or concern in return, simply because I’m 41 and been married for 18 years.

Why?

Who said?

I’ve had times – plenty of them – when I was terribly lonely on Shabbat. I’ve also had times when I could barely afford to buy a chicken for Friday night supper – but I never expected someone else to fill that lack for me. That would be making my problem their problem. What I have done to alleviate my loneliness, more times than I can count, is to reach out to someone else, someone new, and to invite them over to me.

I know, what a shocking thought!

But just maybe, God is giving this young couple plenty of quiet Shabbats for a reason. Maybe, He wants them to dig a bit deeper, to see past themselves and their wants, and to start to realize that if you’re the one that’s offering to cook, one way or another you’ll always have company around the Shabbat table.

No suffering without sin

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That’s a heavy headline, isn’t it?

It’s also a quote from the Gemara, and it crops up in a whole lot of places whenever you get into a discussion about why apparently ‘bad’ things can happen to apparently ‘good’ people.

This idea underpins the basic fundamentals of living life with emuna, as set out by Rav Arush, namely:

 

1) God is doing everything in the world.

2) Everything that happens to me is for my good, even the stuff that’s hurting me and is very painful and incomprehensible.

3) God is using the event, incident, occurrence or suffering to send me a message that I need to work on something, fix something, or change in some way.

 

Now, there are many flavours of heresy in the Jewish world, but one of the most popular, particularly in frum circles, is the idea that God sends people suffering stam, for absolutely no good reason.

The basic complaint goes like this:

“I’m a kosher person; I keep tons of mitzvoth; I pray with a netz (sunrise) minyan every day; I stopped watching Superman movies 20 years’ ago; I’ve made a number of sacrifices to keep Hashem’s torah, ergo – I don’t deserve any of this hard, horrible stuff that’s happening to me.”

It sounds pretty convincing, doesn’t it?

Until you remember one thing:

There is no suffering without prior sin.

If someone is being sent a difficult or hardship, it’s ALWAYS for a good reason.

Here’s where we hit a very necessary and often overlooked point of clarification: sometimes, the issue you need to fix in your soul is left over from a previous lifetime. It could well be that in this lifetime you are Miriam the super-pious light of the world, but in a previous lifetime, you may well have been Jack the Ripper – and that’s a spiritual debt that still needs paying down.

So you get sent a whole bunch of very difficult trials that really, Miriam the super-pious light of the world doesn’t deserve, but that are still a deep discount for Jack The Ripper.

This is where a person gets to really live their emuna, and this is often the whole test, and the whole ‘sin’ that needs fixing: are you going to see God behind everything that’s happening to you, and to acknowledge that He’s doing it all for your eternal good, and to get the message that you need to do some super-human work on your emuna?

Or are you going to complain, feel sorry for yourself, and convince yourself that you’re already perfect, and God must have made some big mistake so start picking on you so unfairly?

The rule is this:

If you’re alive, you have work to do. If you’re still alive, no matter how ‘perfect’ you think you are, there are still bad character traits to fix, mistakes to rectify, and levels of emuna to work on achieving. The process of self-improvement only ends when we die.

In his book Words of Faith, Rav Levi Yitzhak Bender puts it like this:

“Know yourself! Even if the entire world says that you are righteous, you have to know who you are…When a person truly knows himself, it is not possible that he shall not mend his ways…But when he deceives himself and imagines that he is something – why should he work to get better?”

On a personal note, a few months’ ago I went through a period of extreme difficulties and very hard tests in emuna. Initially, I couldn’t understand why God was sending me all this hard stuff. I mean, I’d sacrificed so much for my frum lifestyle, I spoke to God for an hour every single day, I was continually working on myself.

My underlying attitude was:

“You’ve got the wrong gal, Hashem! Stop sending me all these undeserved difficulties and go pick on someone else!!”

Really?

It took me many, many months of working things through, and at least one trip to Uman, but finally I realised that God really had sent me exactly what I was due – and had probably even giving me a huge discount on what I could have had coming to me.

I was so full of arrogance and pride about all my religious ‘accomplishments’, that I hadn’t realised just how flawed and occasionally nasty I still actually was (especially to my husband and kids…)

I was completely fooling myself as to my true level, and God didn’t want that state of affairs to continue any longer.

There really was ‘no suffering without prior sin’, even though it didn’t look like that to me, or others, at the time.

God is just.

He’s righteous. He only sends us what we need to do the work of fixing our souls for eternity. And if we don’t believe that, than however ‘pious’ and ‘perfect’ we may think we are, we still have an awful lot of spiritual work to do.

The teenage showdown

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We’re not going to get Geula with big speeches, or by sending out big, preachy emails to 4 million people telling them to dress more tznius ASAP, or else.

We going to get redeemed by treating other people with more love and consideration, and by recognising the profound truth that there is one thing ‘wrong’ with the world, currently, and that’s us, ourselves.

God showed me that very clearly a couple of days’ ago, when I ended up having a show-down on holiday with one of my teenagers.

In fairness to her, she really didn’t want to come in the first place, and I persuaded her to. Also, our air-conditioning was broken, because the car is nearly as old as our aliya, and we moved to Israel 10 years’ ago, and we were going camping, which meant no air-conditioning on arrival, either.

And lastly, we tried a shortcut through Nazareth that ended up adding an hour to our trip in the middle of a sweltering hot July heatwave day.

So we get to the camping ground, and the next thing I know is that my daughter’s in ‘short t-shirt’ sleeves and has hitched her skirt to above-knee level, to go and paddle in the stream running through the campground.

I went ballistic.

I mean, I’m a FRUM Jew, and frum Jews don’t do things like remove layers of clothes just because they’re about to pass out from heat exhaustion…

Long story short, we got into a huge row, and all these horrible words and thoughts started to bubble up in my head, and some of them even escaped out into the open.

I felt terrible. My daughter felt terrible. My husband and other kid felt terrible.

My husband suggested that we go into town, and find somewhere with air-conditioning to calm down a bit, and eat something. My daughter refused to come. While my husband was trying to change her mind, I felt another bitter volcano of angry resentment well up and rushed off to the car, before I made a bad situation even worse.

While there, I asked God for some serious help. “God, Rebbe Nachman, someone, I’m treating my daughter horribly. Please help me! Help me to see past the short sleeves, and reach out to her!” Because you know what, I used to wear far less clothes than that at her age, and she’s basically a really good kid, and not some evil baddy out to destroy all the kedusha in my home.

Suddenly, my anger started to evaporate, and I really, really just wanted to be back on the same page as my kid, even if that meant letting go of my pious standards and expectations.

My husband watched me rush out of the car, and got a bit worried I was about to do something rash. Who knows, maybe I did.

I apologised to my still hurt and misunderstood kid.

I told her I wanted her to come with us, even with her short sleeves, because SHE was what was important here, and I loved her and accepted her regardless.

She could come with short sleeves, and with her above-knee skirt, and I’d try very hard to ignore them. I’d also buy her whatever (tznius) clothes she wanted in bulk quantities, if she’d let us patch things up, and just come.

So she came.

And after I spent 500 nis (around $150) buying her some really nice stuff that was still a serious bargain, I then spent the rest of the afternoon pondering what God really wanted.

For sure, God wants my daughter to dress modestly.

For sure, He also wants me to have a good relationship with her, and to keep seeing the good and treating her compassionately, too.

I put myself in her shoes for a few minutes, and I could see that at that age, I probably would have reacted exactly the same way, if not even worse. And now look at me 😉

Point is, God has a lot of patience for our young people, and a lot of love for them. And as Rav Natan wrote, when something is true, it brings you closer to God, and it doesn’t push you further away.

Continuing to make a point about her sleeves would have only pushed my daughter away, long-term. Maybe I would win the tznius battle (and that’s a big maybe), but for sure, I’d lose the tznius war.

She’d be another kid that got a bit older, and ditched the skirts completely in favour of jeans as soon as she could actually do what she wanted. I don’t want that. I want her to serve God happily from choice, which means I need to give her some space now.

Afterwards, my husband told me that he thought my making peace with my daughter had done more to bring geula forward than anything else I’m up to at the moment.

If the reward is commensurate with the effort and the difficulty, then I think he might be right.

Turning anger into compassion

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One of the things that Jews regularly ask our Creator is that God should ‘turn His anger into compassion’.

I’ve been thinking about this idea a lot recently, because my husband told me an idea he read in Likutey Moharan that explains that God often takes His cues from us. For example, if someone is working very hard on turning their own feelings of anger into compassion, God is much more likely to take that person’s prayers on the subject of turning the Divine anger into Divine compassion much more seriously.

I guess you could sum it up by saying God hates hypocrites. If we want Him to act nicely with us, and to overlook all our many millions of shortcomings and issues, He wants to see if we’re willing to act like that with other people.

Now, here’s the thing: it is SUCH hard work to regularly turn your anger into compassion (or at least, it is for me.)

Not a day goes by where I don’t read something, hear something, experience something that triggers off some massive rage fit. All this anger, and judgement and self-righteous disgust bubbles up – and dear reader, it always feels so just and proper at the time, especially when I’ve just discovered some particularly nauseating behaviour – and then I have to work like a dog to try and calm it all down again.

Depending on the circumstances, one session of hitbodedut, or personal prayer is often enough to dissolve the problem, or at least, my negative and angry reaction to it.

But sometimes, I find myself working on the same old problems, the same old difficult people, for days, weeks and even months at a time.

Just when I think I’ve finally put my angry feelings to bed about a particular person, they’ll go and do something even more annoying or disgustingly hypocritical, and then I find it all bubbles up again.

My yetzer starts whispering at me that it can’t be right to just let these people off the hook, and to keep judging them favourably, and can’t I see how horrible they are and what terrible things they’re doing and causing?

Literally, I can go round that mental track for a whole hour, noticing all the bad, disgusting stuff about a whole bunch of individuals (and believe me, it’s not even usually hidden) – and then trying to figure out how to judge it all favorably, and bring it all back to Hashem.

Let’s be clear here that BAD ACTIONS are always bad, and must be clearly recognised and responded to as such. But BAD PEOPLE is a whole different matter. Just because someone killed a granny in cold blood (BAD ACTION) doesn’t mean they themselves are completely evil and bad (BAD PERSON).

See, I told you it’s really, really hard to pull this stuff off.

But I’m still trying, not least because I know that there is no such thing as human objectivity. Every single one of us is adept at judging our fellow’s behaviour in very stark, harsh terms, while making a whole pile of good excuses for ourselves about how we just HAD to kill that Granny, because really she was the secret head of Hamas, or something.

To put it simply: I want God to tie Himself in knots to judge me favourably, and to turn His anger against me to compassion, so I have to practice what I preach.

But it’s so hard, and sometimes I get despairing and give up.

To keep me going, God has taken to sending me more, and more profound insights into human behaviour, so that I can really start to understand a little more why people do the things they do.

For example, I recently really got, for the first time ever, that certain people are so fundamentally obsessed with self-preservation, that it literally blinds them to any other consideration.

Their yetzer tells them that ‘X needs to happen at all costs, in order for you to feel good and happy and safe’, and then off they go, dead set at making ‘X’ happen regardless of who they have to squash or crush in the process.

Now, I’m not excusing the BAD ACTIONS, but I’m starting to understand that BAD PEOPLE are incredibly messed up, vulnerable and generally pathetic human beings. Once I got that, it got much easier for me to switch out of anger and into compassion mode.

At least, sometimes.