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Shiurim & Adult Education
THOUGHTS ON BO FROM TINA SON
B”H my late parents achieved much in their lives together, but they always said that their greatest profit was their children, grandchildren and greatgrandchildren. As we commemorate our special simchas, David and I would definitely agree with that sentiment – although not at the greatgrandchild stage yet!!! It is the value of the children in our lives that makes this Dvar Torah from Rabbi Lord Sacks z”l resonate so much with us and that is why I have chosen to share this excerpt.
The American writer Bruce Feiler in his best-selling book, The Secrets of Happy Families makes a very striking and unexpected point: “The single most important thing you can do for your family may be the simplest of all: develop a strong family narrative.”
A family narrative connects children to something larger than themselves. It helps them make sense of how they fit into the world that existed before they were born.
Nowhere was this point made more dramatically than by Moshe in this week’s parsha. The tenth plague is about to strike. Moses knows that this will be the last. Pharaoh will not merely let the people go. He will urge them to leave. So, on G-d’s command, he prepares the people for freedom. But he does so in a way that is unique. He does not talk about liberty. He does not speak about breaking the chains of bondage. He does not even mention the arduous journey that lies ahead. Nor does he enlist their enthusiasm by giving them a glimpse of the destination, the Promised Land that God swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the land of milk and honey.
He talks about children. Three times in the course of the parsha he turns to the theme:
• And when your children say to you, ‘What does this ceremony mean to you?’ you shall say…
• On that day you must tell your child, ‘This is because of what the Lord did for me when I left Egypt.’
• And in the future, when your child asks, ‘What is this?’ you shall answer…
This is wonderfully counterintuitive. He doesn’t speak about tomorrow but about the distant future. He does not celebrate the moment of liberation. Instead, he wants to ensure that it will form part of the people’s memory until the end of time. He wants each generation to pass on the story to the next. He wants Jewish parents to become educators, and Jewish children to be guardians of the past for the sake of the future. Inspired by God, Moses taught the Israelites the lesson arrived at via a different route by the Chinese: If you plan for a year, plant rice. If you plan for a decade, plant a tree. If you plan for a century, educate a child.
Jews became famous throughout the ages for putting education first. Where others built castles and palaces, Jews built schools and houses of study. From this flowed all the familiar achievements in which we take collective pride: the fact that Jews knew their texts even in ages of mass illiteracy; the record of Jewish scholarship and intellect; the astonishing over-representation of Jews among the shapers of the modern mind; the Jewish reputation, sometimes admired, sometimes feared, sometimes caricatured, for mental agility, argument, debate, and the ability to see all sides of a disagreement.
But Moses’ point wasn’t simply this. God never commanded us: Thou shall win a Nobel Prize. What He wanted us to teach our children was a story. He wanted us to help our children understand who they are, where they came from, what happened to their ancestors to make them the distinctive people they became and what moments in their history shaped their lives and dreams. He wanted us to give our children an identity by turning history into memory, and memory itself into a sense of responsibility. Jews were not summoned to be a nation of intellectuals. They were called on to be actors in a drama of redemption, a people invited by God to bring blessings into the world by the way they lived and sanctified life.
You cannot build a healthy society out of emotionally unhealthy families and angry and conflicted children. Faith begins in families. Hope is born in the home.
Shabbat shalom and chodesh tov
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