Category Archives: Children

Four Stories for Four Children

Sermon delivered at the “Traditional Egalitarian Minyan,” Adas Israel Congregation, Washington, DC

Shabbat morning, Saturday August 9, 2014

Rabbi Arnold E. Resnicoff

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Four Stories for Four Children

In 1982 my four-year old daughter Malka was attending her first day at a Catholic  pre-school in a small town in Italy.  I was stationed there as a Navy chaplain for the U.S. Sixth Fleet, and the hope was that Malka’s school would help her learn Italian and make some friends outside the base.

However, waiting for her school bus to return I began to wonder whether I had adequately prepared her for a school run by nuns in traditional black habits.  Did she even know what a nun was?

When the school bus pulled up, I could see her through the window, very excited, with the look she had when she couldn’t wait to share news.  When the bus door opened, she jumped out and shouted to me, “Abba – Abba – you’ll never believe it. All my teachers are from The Sound of Music!”

The stories we know become the prism through which we view the world: the foundation and framework for our vision.  Had she grown up with anti-Catholic stories, her first encounter with nuns might have been filled with fear or hatred, not happiness and excitement, in the way stories of “the other” prepare children in so many parts of the world, including the Mid-East.

An old saying teaches that we believe what we see, but the reverse is often true: we see what we believe.  And what we believe is often colored by the stories we’ve learned.

When Abraham told the story of one God creating the universe, the idea of history – the belief that we can learn from our past — was created. After all, if there were many gods, as so much of the ancient world believed, what happened yesterday might have no bearing on today, because we might be dealing with a different god.  But with one God there could be one plan and one set of rules, so learning from the past – from yesterday, from our parents, or from the lives of our ancestors – became both possible and essential. No wonder that the Tanakh, the Jewish Bible, not only records the victories of the Jewish people, like the hieroglyphics do for the Egyptians, but also our failures.  We must learn from both.

David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, understood the power of stories when he had Adolph Eichmann captured and publicly tried in the first televised trial in the history of television.  Ben-Gurion wanted the story of the Holocaust/Shoa told, so that misperceptions could be corrected and lessons could be learned.  He wanted a new generation of men and women who came of age after WWII, during a time when many of those who experienced the war or the Holocaust first-hand kept silent about them, to hear and to learn in a way that would make them remember.

Peoples, nations, cultures, faiths: all have stories that inform their vision and help shape their thinking.

For many Americans, our national story is one that was re-envisioned and re-imagined after the Civil War, through the words of leaders like President Lincoln: words so powerfully describing our nation’s new burst of freedom, and our government of the people, by the people, and for the people, that the frequently used phrase these United States would be set aside in favor of the more-straightforward, more unified the United States.

For many Christians, the world is seen through the story of death and resurrection. For many Muslims, through the image of struggle and war – at the very least, spiritual struggle and war – between Dar al Islam and Dar al Harb, the Islamic and non-Islamic “worlds.”  For Jews, our vision is one of leaving the slavery of the past, wandering through the wilderness of the present, and moving toward the promised land of the future.

Significantly, while so many other peoples spoke of “the golden age of the past,” Judaism’s story put the best of times in the future.  And so, whether or not Judaism and Christianity agree on the “identity” of the messiah, it is the Jewish vision that laid the groundwork for the belief in messianic times for so many people of the world.

So important is the Jewish belief in the power of stories – and in particular, our Jewish story – that four times in the Bible we are commanded to tell our story to our children, whether or not they ask to hear it.  Three times in the portion Bo in Exodus/Shmot we’re taught to tell the story, twice linked to a child’s question and once not; and once in the portion Vaetchanan in Deuteronomy/Dvarim, again as a response to a question.

This four-fold repetition of the command to tell our story raised questions in the minds of the ancient rabbis, teachers who believed that nothing in the Bible was superfluous: no extra word, and not even an extra letter, could exist without meaning.

Therefore, the rabbis taught, we are commanded to tell the story four times because we must tell it in four different ways, because there are four different kinds of children. One size does not fit all.  This teaching is the foundation for the haggadah’s four children section, traditionally referred to as the four sons.

In a way, the image of the four children is an early example of personality profiles like Myers-Briggs: a reminder that differences in individuals must drive differences in the ways we interrelate with them.  Educationally, it is linked to the verse in Proverbs/Mishlei (22:6) that teaches chanoch l’naar al pi darko – teach a child according to his or her way:  an approach that would eventually become the basis of today’s Montessori schools!

Based on the verses surrounding the four commands to tell our story, the haggadah’s personality profiles include:

  • hacham: wise
  • rasha: wicked or sometimes, “ill-mannered”
  • tam: simple or pure
  • sheh-ayno yodaya lishol: one who does not know how to (or does not care to) ask – the one I will call the detached child, not engaged or involved in any way.

The haggadah’s image of four children has sometimes been explained as stages in our life as we age, parts of our personality, or even, more metaphorically, as generational differences, as we’ve moved from “the old country” to (for those of us in the U.S.) life in America.

Of course, neither indicators like the Myers-Briggs personality types nor the haggadah’s four children should make us think that human beings – ourselves or others – easily or completely fit into any one category.  Instead, we are presented with archetypes that help us understand the trait or approach that is most prominent in a person’s general attitude or during a particular exchange.

To understand these four Jewish archetypes, it’s important to remember that “quadruples” in Judaism, sets of four, are often best understood based on the interplay (combinations and permutations) of two major factors or characteristics. So for example, the four species we use during Sukkot can be compared and contrasted through the characteristics of taste and smell:  the etrog or citron has both, the willow has neither, the palm has taste but no smell, and the myrtle has smell but no taste.  Similarly, individuals can be understood based on knowledge and good deeds: some with only the first or only the second, some with both, and some with neither.

This approach can be applied to the four types of children we have as well.

Towson University Professor Russell Jay Hendel has suggested that the two categories for the children might be knowledge and respect, but for me the best approach is head and heart: what educators might call cognitive and affective approaches to learning and teaching.

  • The tam – the simple or “pure” child – represents the heart without the head.  When a simple question is asked, a simple answer should suffice.  This might be a child for whom pure faith is enough, and who seeks a spiritual connection, not an intellectual understanding.
  • The rasha – the wicked — represents the head without the heart.  When the only connection is intellectual, it is easy to become a skeptic or cynic: an outsider with no emotional commitment to give foundation to a struggle to understand, let alone embrace, what is not yet understood.

The Bible’s description of this child’s words make those words sound like a question (“what is…?”), but the verb says is used, not asks.  For me, this child’s words represent so-called questions that are not questions at all: they are challenges, attacks, or put-downs.  Two people can ask the same “question,” but while one’s words sound like a request for information, the other’s make our blood boil, putting us on the defensive, and making us feel we are under attack.  That’s because we are.

When I worked on Holocaust remembrance materials for the military, one question that was frequently asked of me was why six million Jews should be remembered in a separate way from the millions of others who died during the war.  For a serious question, there was a serious answer.  But I knew that sometimes there was no question at all behind those words.

  • The hacham – the wise child – combines both head and the heart.  This child asks for information, but as an insider, part of the family and part of the community.  He or she asks about the testimonies, statutes, and laws that were commanded by “the Lord our God.”
  • Finally, the sheh-ayno yodaya lishol – the detached child, the one who does not know how to ask or is not interested enough to ask – is the one with no connection, neither head nor heart. The danger is that this child represents so many of our children today: perhaps not yet completely lost, but not at all involved.

Strengthening this understanding of the fourth child as non-engaged, Professor  Hendel (whom I mentioned earlier) writes that he heard the late Rabbi Dov Baer Soloveitchik give a pre-Passover lecture in March of 1971, teaching that “does not know how to ask” could also be translated as “does not care to ask.” Hendel explains that this translation might be based on the way the same verb is used in  Ex 2:25, “and God saw the suffering of the Jewish people and God cared.”

The late Lubavitcher rebbe once taught there is a fifth child: the one who does not come to the seder at all. But if we understand this fourth child as detached and uninvolved, then no discussion of a fifth child is needed. However, we should understand that while the Passover Seder might be our tradition’s foremost attempt to engage our children and tell our story, we should never believe this one night is sufficient. Whether or not a child is physically present at the seder, we cannot always be sure he or she is really “with us” as the story is told that night.

In any event, dealing with children who are so apathetic that they have no interest at all in our traditions and beliefs – in our story – presents parents and the community with the challenge to find other ways to engage.  But does not know how to ask can also describe an altogether different child: one who literally has never learned to ask because all past efforts have been rebuked; one who never imagines that his or her question might be heard or considered; one taught to remain silent, because he or she has nothing worthwhile to say.

Perhaps, like Abraham’s wife Sarah — about whom the midrash recounts that she died of a heart attack when she heard the news of the akedah (the binding of Isaac), learning that her husband had come so close to sacrificing their son – some individuals (or whole groups of individuals) are left out of the most important discussions and decisions of all. They are left to suffer consequences over which they had no power and no say.

In other words, some individuals are detached and apathetic because they have not yet been successfully engaged; but others are detached – bewildered, even, at the thought of asking a question — because they are so often ignored and excluded; or because they are brainwashed, battered, or numb.

It is important to note that even the so-called wicked child is still engaged. The Broadway musical Wicked, a play about the “Wicked Witch of the West” in the Wizard of Oz, makes the point that some individuals we call wicked might be misunderstood, even ultimately representing the best in us after all, challenging the system through engagement with it. The detached child, on the other hand, may not yet be lost, but without a connection to serve as lifeline to the Jewish story, that child may ultimately drift away completely, from the Jewish people and the Jewish faith.

Four times we are commanded to tell our story to our children, to pass along the Jewish message to the next generation.  It is a story that does not turn a blind eye to suffering, but it is one that sees hope in the future.  One lesson from our stories should be to keep faith that better times – the best of times – are yet to be.  No Jew should ever be taken in by the belief that “the situation is hopeless” or “things will never change.” Our story should drive our vision and our most basic belief: that the world can change for the better, and we can be part of that change.

But we should remember the lesson of the four children: we must work to understand each individual and hear each question before we respond. Otherwise, we may be providing answers important to ourselves, not those important to our students or children.

For example, when I was in college, many Jewish teachers were touting Judaism as “the most rational” of religions, demythologizing it to show how reasonable it was.  Partly as a result of that approach, I think, many of my contemporaries turned at least temporarily to faiths like Buddhism and Hinduism, in search of spirituality and mystery, not rationality.  Perhaps, at least at that time in their lives, the questions so many young people were asking were more those of the simple child than any of the others, but their questions were not answered, and probably not even heard.

Our hope is that all our children – every Jew – will be connected to our people and our faith with head and heart, but we should begin to teach and begin to share based on where each child and each person is now.

Jewish teaching explains the verse “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” – as opposed to “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” – as a lesson that each of us must struggle with faith until that “faith relationship” becomes personal: becomes our own. We must never forget that we are part of a community, learning the lessons of the past and the stories passed down to us. But we each must wrestle like Jacob did with the angel, even to the point that it hurts or wounds us to do so, until our relationship with God, with Torah, and with Israel becomes uniquely ours. That faith relationship must be one that touches our minds and our hearts: our lives and our souls.

Then, through us – as individuals and as a people — our stories will continue to touch, inspire, and eventually even repair the world.

The Nature of Dignity or What it means to become an Adult

Rabbi Mordecai Miller

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Congregation Beth Ami

January, 2014

 The Nature of Dignity  or  What it means to become an Adult

On the surface, we know that they still have many years to go before they can really speak about being an adult, but how many of us pause to consider what it really means to “become an adult”?  How does that relate to the ceremony of Bar or Bat Mitzvah, and beyond the opportunity it offers for celebration – (not to be sneezed at by any means!) – of what profound significance does it really have?For those of us well past the age of thirteen; we can appreciate the irony when the Bar or Bat Mitzvah says, “Today I am a man,” or “Today I’m a woman.”

What does it mean to become a “Bar” or “Bat Mitzvah” ?

In Hebrew the term is an idiom which denotes that such an individual has reached a point in their development where they understand the consequences of their behavior in society.  Traditionally, there is a b’rachah to be recited by the parents of a child who reaches this stage.  “Baruch … she’patrani me’onsho shel zeh.” “Blessed art You … Who has absolved me of the consequences due to this person.”

In other words; up to this point in the child’s development, the parent is held responsible for their child’s actions (read “misbehavior”); from this point on, the child is now held accountable.  To put this in “Jewish” terms: since Mitz’vot (i.e. “Divine Commandments”) define the responsibilities of the individual – what  their Creator obligates them to do and what their Creator forbids them to do; becoming Bar or Bat Mitzvah means that person has reached the stage in their life where they are capable of understanding and complying with these obligations.

Speaking this kind of language puts in perspective the significance of each individual’s role in society.  This comes to the original title of this article: “The Nature of Dignity”.  I would like to suggest that every human being has an innate yearning to be significant: a raison d’être. There are very few – if any – who are satisfied being mere “cogs in a wheel”.  The truth, however, is that very few of us will ever achieve the immortality of a Shakespeare or a Beethoven or a Moses, and even those individuals haven’t achieved universal significance.  What chance, then, do we have?

A profound discovery occurs in the life of an individual when they realize that the nature of dignity – of self-worth – lies in being of service to others.  This fundamental truth, which flies in the face of natural human impulse, is suggested by the English word “knight”, which comes with the title “Sir…”  The word is directly related to the German “Knecht” (Yes, “gh”was once pronounced “ch” as in the Scottish word “loch”!) which means “Servant”!  In fact one of the mottos of England is “Ich Dien” which translates to “I serve”.

So the question shifts to “Who or what do you serve?”  To who or what do you devote your life?”  The more encompassing the answer, the higher the level of self-worth or human dignity.

Putting this together: becoming an adult essentially means taking on the responsibility to serve others; ones family and society. “Giving back!”  Again, from the Jewish perspective, there can be no greater service that represents such “giving back” than serving the Creator of the Universe – by performing God’s commandments: mitzvot.  In the process of discovering those commandments and in serving God by ones devotion to family and society, a “mere mortal” achieves universal significance!

Shalom,

Mordecai Miller

Bar Mitzvah Preparation for the Learning Disabled Child of an Interfaith Family

Rabbi Steven Lebow

Temple Kol Emeth 

 

Bar Mitzvah Preparation for the Learning Disabled Child of an Interfaith Family

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The first time I heard Michael Graner read Hebrew I knew I was in for trouble.

 As a congregational rabbi it is my job to make sure that every child is adequately prepared for the bar/bat mitzvah.

Bar/Bat Mitzvah tutoring is not the most prestigious or glamorous part of my job. Nevertheless, I pride myself on being sure that every child can read the Torah blessings and Parsha (Torah portion) fluently.

When Michael came to my office that fall to have his Hebrew fluency evaluated I had no reason to expect that he would be any different from my other students. I had observed Michael during Mid-week Hebrew over the years and I remembered him as a normal, boisterous twelve year old.

“Go ahead and read the Torah blessings,” I said to him.

“O.K.,” he said. “Rabku at Edonee…” He stopped and looked up sheepishly.

“What?” I said. “Read it again.” It was late in the afternoon and I assumed that fatigue was affecting my hearing.

“Rabku at Edonee,” he read once more.

I winced at Michael’s mispronunciations and seeming disregard for the Hebrew vowels and even its consonants.

“No,” I said gently. “The first word of the Torah blessing is ‘Barchu’, not Rabku. You’re reading it backwards. Try it again.”

“O.K.,” Michael said agreeably. “Rabku at Edonee Haboregard…”

We were in deep trouble. Michael had been in Hebrew School for three years and had somehow managed to escape learning any Hebrew. In truth, he seemed to know some Hebrew, but he persisted in confusing one Hebrew consonant for another.

It was now October and his Bar Mitzvah service was seven months away. Faced with the almost insurmountable task of teaching Hebrew to Michael in seven months I took a deep breath.

“Try it again,” I said to Michael.

It was going to be a long afternoon.

For a moment I began to wonder why I had never applied to law school…

To add one more wrinkle was the fact that Michael came from an interfaith family who desperately wanted him to have a Bar Mitzvah but who lacked any ability to reinforce Michael’s Hebrew studies at home.

“Rabbi,” said Michael’s mom, “I’m not from a Jewish background, so I can’t really help him prepare for his Hebrew studies.”

“We know he can’t read Hebrew well, if at all,” said his father, but I’ve already forgotten most of the Hebrew I learned thirty years ago when I had my bar mitzvah.”

“What should we do?” the mother asked me.

“Well,” I suggested, “We could arrange for a private tutor for him.”

“Rabbi,” said the mom, “It’s expensive to be Jewish. We would hire a tutor for him, but our budget is already stretched tight.”

“If it were for summer camp,” said his Methodist mother, “I could probably get my parents to chip in and help with the expenses. But my parents are Protestant and they have no clue about the importance of this day in Michael’s life!”

“Rabbi, we know how important it is for interfaith families to affirm their child’s Jewish identity. But we just can’t afford the additional Hebrew tutoring. What should we do?”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, in that case, I will tutor Michael privately, at no charge.”

“”How hard could it be?” I wondered to myself.

Two months went by, very slowly. His reading of the Torah blessings was still deeply flawed. Close, as they say, but no cigar.

Michael’s Torah and Haftarah portions were in even worse shape. Michael could barely make his way through the first couple of words. How would he ever learn his parsha? How would I ever be able to train him to read directly from the Torah?

I honestly did not know how to teach Hebrew to someone who learned differently.

Law School was looking better all the time.

That October I had lunch with a friend who is an educational consultant. I described my frustration over Michael’s inability to grasp Hebrew.

“He’s obviously got Dyslexia or some kind of Language Processing Disorder,” she said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You know,” she said to me. “His brain is not processing language in the way same way that you or I do. He’s probably very bright,” she said. “But he’s got to learn a language in a different way.”

“Put the Torah blessings on YouTube, and let him listen to them over and over. Have him write the Hebrew out phonetically in English. See if that helps jumpstart him.

“He’ll get it eventually,” The consultant said to me. “He is going to learn the parsha a little differently than other kids. Just have faith.”

I went home that afternoon thinking about learning disabilities and wondering what else I didn’t know about teaching Hebrew. The weeks went by and I tried new techniques every week.

I posted the blessings on line and made Michael listen to them every day. I recorded a sound file of his parsha and downloaded it to his iPod. Michael listened to the sound files every single day, as if they were the newest lectures from Tony Robbins or some other motivational speaker! I taught Michael to recognize syllables, instead of just words. I had Michael whisper the prayers and then I experimented with having him shout them at the top of his voice.

I tried at every Hebrew lesson to have faith in Michael. And even on the days that he faltered and failed to recognize any of the Hebrew I tried to just put my faith in, well, You-Know-Who..

Keep trying,” I told him as we were struggling with the Torah portion one day. “Never give up,” I said to him. “Never give in.”

A month later when he learned to sing the Torah Trope Michael’s face brightened. My educational consultant had suggested that this might happen. Some kids with learning disabilities do better when they sing, than when they read.

“Go and figure,” I said to myself. “I’m a congregational rabbi, not a neuropsychologist!”

One day in February Michael walked into my office. He opened his siddur and without a word of introduction he sang in a clear voice “Barchu et Adonai…”

“What?” I asked incredulously.

He then again repeated the Torah blessing fluently and without a mistake. Just like that. One week he couldn’t do it and then the next week he did it flawlessly. Michael had gone from not knowing it to getting it. I couldn’t credit my inspired teaching or even the advice from the consultant I had used. It was almost as if a miracle had happened.

“How did you finally learn it?” I asked Michael.

“I just practiced like you told me,” he replied. And then Michael looked down and began to chant the “V’ahavta”.

A few months after that Michael came to the bima and chanted the entire service effortlessly. He then chanted his aliyot, without a mistake. Only a few people in the room could truly know what a triumph that moment must have felt like for Michael.

Of course Michael’s Jewish grandparents were moved by the bar mitzvah of their grandson. But even Michael’s Methodist grandparents were touched by the importance of Jewish values their daughter had helped give their grandson.

I learned many lessons from tutoring Michael that year.

Learning disabled kids are just like other kids. They need help and they need love. And interfaith families are the same as all Jewish families. They need to know that their rabbi will support them in what can be the difficult task of raising Jewish children when one parent isn’t Jewish.

As Michael was chanting his haftarah I caught a glimpse of his parents, their faces bathed in pride. I looked away, my own eyes starting to mist. We were watching a young boy begin the long odyssey from ignorance to literacy, from confusion to commitment.

Watching Michael that day I marveled at the strength that God gives us to overcome whatever flaws or deficits we may have. Having conquered his inability to read Hebrew, Michael was now over the hump.

I guess I was, too.

The legal profession was safe from me, at least for the time being. The rabbinate had suddenly become fulfilling again.

Sleeping and Awake

Rabbi  Steven J. Lebow,
Temple Kol,Emeth
Marietta, Atlanta Georgia

 

“I always take a nap, just before I go to sleep…”

I am dreaming and here I am.

I am 8 years old and my parents, Doc and Rita, have driven 12 hours from South Florida to Cleveland, Georgia.

(I had driven to Georgia only once before this and that is a story for a different memoir. The story of my first trip to Atlanta, in 1963, is a sad tale, full of sand and tears. That story will simmer on the stove for some other time.)

We pull into Camp Coleman and there is no sign at the entrance. In 1965 the Klan was still bombing synagogues and churches. There is no UAHC Camp Coleman sign and there are no Jewish stars. No visible signs at all, except for the mile markers my father instructs me to count.

We drive down a dirt road and there it is. Just the Ad Building- what is now called the Misrad. The Administration Building (Misrad) of the camp sits by a lake. I had never seen a summer camp before.

If truth be told, I had never seen a lake, either.

As a child I was fascinated by that lake. I sat by it, dreaming and daydreaming, for hours. Only years later did I discover it had a name, “Lake Shalom”.

And then, it was many years later, when I looked down at the lake from the Ulam Gadol (Elishva), that I realized that the lake was shaped, vaguely, like the state of Israel.

I was only 8 years old the first time I sat by that lake. It could have been shaped like Rhode Island for all I knew.

But that lake was not shaped like Rhode Island. The lake was signified, like so many other things at Coleman, Jewishly.

Everything at that camp, outside Cleveland, Georgia, was signified as Jewish. I see that looking back, awakening from the dream of the middle of my middle age.

The food at Coleman was Jewishly significant. It was blessed in Hebrew. I had never heard Hebrew songs before. In fact, I had never heard the Motzi, the blessing over the bread, either.

I had been the only Jewish 3rd grader at Sunset Elementary School, in Ft. Lauderdale. No one at the school cafeteria in 1965 blessed their lunch room meals. And no one, I am sure, sang the Motzi at my gentile school.

But that first summer at Coleman everyone in the dining hall was Jewish. As I looked up and down the lunch room bench, at Coleman, it suddenly occurred to me that everyone was Jewish. And everyone that first summer I spent at camp sang the motzi.

Looking back, I guess that hearing that Motzi must have changed my life, in ways germane, but ineluctable and inchoate to me then.

Looking back, I see that 8 year old who returned home from that first summer at camp. I see him, small for his age- in fact, small for any age. I see that young boy, now in the fourth grade, singing the Motzi at every lunchtime, for many years to come. Singing Jewishly wherever he went.

Jew-less in Gaza, as the poet sings.

That young child sang the Hebrew blessings out loud and unashamedly during the final years of elementary school. He sang off key, but at least with gusto.

For fifty years, that little boy has sung the same Hebrew melodies that he learned fifty years ago. Now he is 58, but yen he was only 8 years old.

And now, both late at night and early in the morning, dreaming and awake, the melody of those Hebrew songs come back to him.

I know those Jewish melodies still sound on and on and on. I know, because I hear them still.

No matter whether I am dreaming, or awake.

Parents And Children

August 11, 2006

By Rabbi Robert H. Loewy

 

It is so wonderful this evening to be in the presence of a number of our college students, both undergraduate and graduate, some of you studying here in New Orleans and many of you elsewhere, a few of you heading off to college for the first time. Your mere attendance this evening is a source of uplift for us all. We know that this past year has been difficult for you. Even if you have been away from New Orleans, your focus has been on your home town and how it will recover. You’ve lost houses and friends and familiar landmarks, been constantly identified and heard, “Oh, you’re from New Orleans. I’m so sorry.” Perhaps you had a typically great year and felt guilty when thinking about home. I hope you are aware that we do not begrudge you your joy in the least. In fact the opposite, it is what we wish for you.

As most of you know, I am not an impartial observer of this process. Monday morning, bright and early, Sara and I will be heading to Texas for her sophomore year. So my challenge for this evening was to present a message that will speak to the students, the parents and all in attendance without embarrassing my daughter too much. As is often the case, my wife Lynn came to the rescue. Earlier this summer she handed me a book with those famous words: “It might be good for a sermon.”

In the spring of 2004, Tim Russert, NBC journalist, best known for his interviews on “Meet the Press”, wrote a book entitled, “Big Russ and Me.” It details his relationship with his father, a sanitation worker from Buffalo, New York. As a result of that book, he received hundreds of letters from men and women telling their stories. And so he collected them into a second volume: “Wisdom of Our Fathers- Lessons and Letters from Daughters and Sons.” As parents we communicate what is important to our children knowingly and unknowingly, through our words and our deeds. I will share a few of these anecdotes that speak to us all and go beyond the parent/child relationship.

The first involves a young man, who unfortunately received a facial scar as the victim of a violent crime. He confided to his therapist that every time he shaved and saw that scar, it triggered painful memories. The therapist asked him to change his frame of reference and if he ever had watched his father shave. The young man smiled, then shared how as a child he would watch his Dad and occasionally his Dad would put shaving cream on his face and “shave” him. Many of us have similar memories I’m sure. The counselor urged the scarred young man to bring up that memory each time he shaved instead of how he was assaulted, to which the young man wrote: “Precious memories are made in an instant and last forever. I am so thankful that my Dad had the patience back then to let me ‘shave’.” My comment is simple enough. We never know when we make a memory. The most insignificant act can make a difference.

A second story teaches us that the behavior we model can teach more than many words. In 1990 a father and young son, both of whom were football fanatics had four tickets for the NFC Playoff Game between the New York Giants and the San Francisco 49ers. They went to the game planning to sell the extra two. Arriving early, they enjoyed a tailgating experience with at least 25 people trying to buy the tickets, but his father did not sell them. The boy figured his father was holding out for a higher price closer to game time.

As they approached the gate to enter, he observed his father scanning the crowd of would-be buyers. To his amazement he witnessed his father approach another obvious father with his young son and sold those tickets at face value. Years later the son writes: “I did learn something that day- something about having principles and doing what is right. I know today that my father got more enjoyment out of seeing that father and son watch the game right next to us than if he had sold each ticket for a small fortune. In doing so, he taught me a lesson I will never forget.” Indeed there are some moments that are more precious than thousands of dollars.

Of course parenting involves the mindset that there are teachable moments upon which we must seize. One Sunday morning a father and son were walking together in New York City, when they passed in front of Riverside Funeral Home, one of the major Jewish funeral homes in the City. They stopped for a moment, interrupted what they had been talking about and the father asked his son what time it was and what did he see? “It’s 10:30 and I see lots of people walking into the building.” They continued their conversation, but the boy realized they had not moved.  A little later, his father again asked the same questions. “What time is it and what do you see?” He responded, “10:50 and I see people leaving the building.”

The boy was confused as his father explained, when someone dies, there is a funeral which lasts 20 minutes, to which the boy asked, “Why are you telling me this, I am only 11?” The father responded, “Because I hope you will live a long and productive life, that you will be aware of your surroundings, that you will stay out of trouble, and that you will be thoughtful and cautious. And above all, that you will always know in the back of your mind that someday your entire life will be summed up in twenty minutes.” We each need a measure of humility as we approach life. We are all part of a much bigger picture and contribute our part to the world.

We can choose how to approach life and its challenges. The final story is illustrative of this point. An 85 year old man was stricken with cancer. He instructed his doctors that he wanted to do all that was possible to fight the disease. One day while sitting at the hospital with his daughter waiting for some blood work, he turned to her and said: “You know, I’ve had a very good life. True I was in a concentration camp for five years and lost my first wife and child, but all in all, I’ve had a very happy life.” To which his daughter wrote: “What could I say? He did have a happy life, because he believed he did. I put my hand on his and we waited quietly together.”

It was the Jewish psychologist, Viktor Frankel, a survivor himself, who wrote about how it is up to us to deal with adversity. Horrible moments may come into our lives, but it is our choice as to how we will deal with them. Certainly that is a precious insight for us all.

One last word… In the introduction to this book, Tim Russert speaks of his own son, who is heading off to college for the first time. His words could be our words to you our students and to all of us. “Study hard. Laugh often. Keep your honor.”

AMEN