I think I may have mentioned this before, but my family knows that I am a huge Rabbi David Fohrman fan. I listen to his Aleph Beta videos every Friday while cooking and when I run out of time I print out the transcript or read his book to share whether on Shabbat, Pesach, Shavuot- you name it!
This week’s video hit home as we approach graduation this week, and we “send our 8th graders into the world.” For those of you who have older children, you may not feel the significance of this event, but as someone who interacts with middle school students daily, I view this event as if we are sending them into adulthood. The parenting strategies you, as parents, have established during their years at Yavneh pretty much set the tone for your relationship with them until 120. So, I wonder, what is our role as parents as we send them off?
Rabbi Fohrman clearly knew what I was thinking as he shared, “One of the problems with having children is that they do not come with instruction manuals. The Torah is a great instruction manual for life. So we might ask, is there an instruction manual within it for parenting? I want to suggest that in this week's Parsha, there is a parenting manual. It's only three verses long and in those three verses is just about everything that you need to know, to parent your child, or at least the seeds of everything you need to know.”
The three pesukim he refers to are in Bamidbar 6:24-26 are known as Birkat Kohanim.
It has become a custom to bless our children weekly on Friday night with these same pesukim. And, so, Rabbi Fohrman says, “I would like to suggest that those three verses, the three verses that we parents say weekly to our children, is not just a blessing as to how God should treat them but by extension, a kind of manual as to how we should treat our children.”
These pesukim seem repetitive, but in essence they are saying three different things. Rabbi Fohrman quotes the Nefesh HaChaim, Reb Chaim of Volozhin, who says that “Blessing” means to multiply the strength- to build someone up. So when we bless our children we are building up their physical, emotional, intellectual, and moral strengths. That is a fundamental job as a parent. That is “יְבָֽרֶכְךָ֥ “.
But, the second role of parents is “ וְיִשְׁמְרֶֽךָ” - to watch over them and protect the from harm. Sometimes harm comes from the inside and sometimes from the outside. As Rabbi Fohrman notes:’Sometimes that harm can come from the outside. You give your kid rules, only cross at the crosswalks. Look both ways. Sometimes the harm can come from the inside, children can veer off in irresponsible directions and there the need to discipline the child emerges, to protect them, sometimes from themselves. But discipline is always a function of keeping the child safe in some way or another. It is really the only rationale for discipline, you don't discipline a child for your needs as a parent, you don't discipline them because they make you look funny in front of them all or what will the neighbors say if junior acts out like this? That is not for the kid, that's for you. The rationale for discipline is to watch over them, so that they can grow. Yevarechecha v'yishmerecha, 'Bless and watch over'.”
These obligations to watch over our children and build them up, maintains Rabbi Fohrman, begin in the womb even before they are born. The word for womb in Hebrew is רחם the same root as the word רחמים- compassion. To have compassion on someone means to help him/her grow and keep him/her safe.
The parenting skills found in יָאֵ֨ר ה | פָּנָ֛יו אֵלֶ֖יךָ וִֽיחֻנֶּֽךָּ:כויִשָּׂ֨א יְה | פָּנָיו֙ אֵלֶ֔יךָ וְיָשֵׂ֥ם לְךָ֖ שָׁלֽוֹם are, according to Rabbi Fohrman, “May G-d light his face towards you”, meaning, like Hashem towards the Jewish people, as a parent, that your face should literally light up when you see your child.
And, וִֽיחֻנֶּֽךָּ is from חן. As Rabbi Fohrman shares: “…let Him grant you grace. What does grace mean? The Hebrew word chein comes from the word lechanein, also related to chinam, for free; to give for free. It's completely undeserved love. It's what we might call unconditional love. It's different from rachamim, compassion. Compassion is the love that I bestow in order to attain something. It is conditional. I'm trying to build you up. I have a goal… but chein, grace, that is unconditional. It's love that has no goal. It's love for its own sake. It's love because you are my child, and I can't help but smile when I look at you. It's the kind of love that every father and mother knows, when their eyes meet the eyes of their child, and they can't help but smile.”
The third kind of love is: יִשָּׂ֨א ה | פָּנָיו֙ אֵלֶ֔יךָ וְיָשֵׂ֥ם לְךָ֖ שָׁלֽוֹם. First compassion, then unconditional love and then the third kind where, like Hashem does with Bnai Yisrael- He raises his gaze to meet the gaze of Bnai Yisrael, so too as parents meet the gaze of our children. “Love between “equals”” This is when they are at an age where they are face to face with us and can make their own choices. At times our children make choices different from ours. And, at that time we need to look them in the eye and “grant them peace.” “It's a much more difficult love for a parent to give, but to truly be a parent, it means to be able to let go. It means being able to accept your child, even in moments when they disappoint us. It is one thing to look down at a child and to meet his gaze; that is chein. It is a much harder thing to look across at a child and meet his gaze and give him shalom, give him peace.”
Where does that ability come from? It comes from all the years we spent building rachamim and chein with our children.
Rabbi Fohrman ends with recommending that if you aren’t blessing your children each Friday night you should start doing so. “And, As your child comes over to you, use those few moments to think about these three kinds of parental love and ask yourself, at this stage in my child's life, which one of those kinds does this child use? Do they need to be built up? Do they need to be guarded? Maybe they need the smile that says I'm just so delighted with them. Maybe they need to see more chein. Or maybe they need peace. Maybe they need me to pick up their chin, to look them in the eye and to tell them that I can go forward with them in love, even when they've chosen differently than I have.”
So, as we approach graduation this week, I hope that we at Yavneh have done a good job in partnering with you to support your children with רחמים, חן and שלום. Hopefully we have provided them with a feeling of safety as we protected them with compassion. We trust that they know we will always unconditionally love them and our faces will light up when we see them. (Tell them to come back and visit!) And, that we will always wish them well, wherever life takes them.
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