Sheltering our children. Is that really our Mesora? Dvar Torah Parshas V'Yeira

Dvar Torah Parshas V'Yeira
By: Dovid Teitelbaum

After Avrohom and Sarah gave birth to Yitzchok they decide to pick up and move. Chapter 20. “Avrohom journeyed forth from there to the south country and settled between Kadesh and Shur, and he sojourned in Gerar”. Moving to a more isolated location in the desert makes sense, so that Yitzchok can be brought up away from the negative influence, but why did they then spend time in Gerar, the capital of the Philistines?

Rav Hirsch explains that this was exactly their intention, they wanted their child to grow up away from the outside influences yet not in complete isolation. To quote R”H. “To grow up in complete isolation, which denies the student all contact with people that think differently and whose aims and life differ from his own, is a dangerous educational mistake. A child who has never seen a life other than his parents, never had an opportunity to compare his parents’ lifestyle with that of others, and never learned to appreciate the moral contrast between the two, will never learn to value, respect and hold fast to the ways his parents have taught him. He will surely fall victim to outside influences at his first encounter with them.”

Protecting our children from the negative influences of the outside world is the challenge we all face, and so in a previous article in the FJJ, Rabbi Nechemiah Gottlieb: Director of Ichud stated as fact that our Jewish Mesora is to therefore shelter our children as much as possible. But is this really the case?

Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch lived in the 1800’s and is considered to be one of the pioneers of the Yeshiva/Beis Yaakov school system and the Agudas Yisrael movement. He was a Rosh Yeshiva and Rav of a large community and wrote countless articles on Chinuch Habonim. He is credited as being the one who saved religious Jewry from the Reform movement of the day, a philosophy which was as anti-religious as anything we have today. And though they had no Internet and cellphones they managed to attract many more Jews to leave the faith. And while some would like to change history by saying “it’s only in recent times that we face such extreme pressure from the outside”, that's distorting the facts to fit an agenda. (See, Artscroll publication, Architect of Torah Judaism of the Modern World by Eliyahu Meir Klugman).

So who better to learn about our Jewish Mesorah than from Rav Hirsch himself. The following is taken from an essay that can be found in a Feldheim publication titled “Collected writings of RSRH volume VII”. I underlined what I felt was most appropriate for our topic at hand. (I encourage all readers to read the entire book for themselves.)

Page 413: Rav Hirsch begins by telling us the hypothetical story of someone he says we all know and who he refers to as Mr. Y.

“He was a wonderful man who was imbued with true Jewish spirit and he was a shining example of piety. His home was filled with torah and mitzvos, an oasis in a world that was filled with moral and spiritual corruption. Anything that bore even the faintest tinge of un-jewish belief was kept far away. This man was one of the most outstanding and devoted champions of tradition in Jewish communal life, he fought against all forbidden innovations. He viewed so-called modern education as the worst threat to Jewish survival. Moreover, in order to protect his children from the poison of modern education he not only anxiously isolated them them from every contact with the modern world but filled them with arrogant contempt for all other knowledge and scholarship that he deemed as nothing compared to the study of torah. So what happened to this man?

It is said that this man died of a broken heart, grief stricken because not even one of his children remained Jewish, not in feeling or practice. All of them, as teens and later in manhood, had been spiritually ruined by the very things he had so zealously sought to protect them.

But anyone who would have evaluated this fathers approach could have predicted these sad results from the outset. The very best way to have our children catch a cold on the very first time they go outdoors, is to shelter them from fresh air. If we want our children to develop a resistance to every kind of weather we must expose them to wind and rain at an early age in order to harden their bodies. This rule holds good not only for a child's physical health but equally for his spiritual and moral well-being.

It is not enough to teach our children to love and perform their duties as Jews within the home and family, among like minded companions. It is wrong to keep them ignorant between the present-day differences between the world outside and the Jewish way of life, or to teach them to regard the non-Jewish elements in the Jewish world as polluting, infectious agents to avoid at all costs.

The reality is that our children will move in circles influenced and shaped by these results. They will come within the radius of this secular human wisdom, whether it be in lecture halls of academia or in the pages of literature. They will then come to overrate secular studies in the same measure they have been taught to despise them. You will then see that your simple minded calculations are as criminal as they were perverse. Your child will consequently begin to doubt all of Judaism which (so, at least it must seem from your behavior) can exist only in the night and darkness of ignorance and which must close its eyes and the minds of its adherents to the light of all knowledge if it is not to perish!”  

None of the above words are mine, they were taken verbatim from Rav Hirsch. There is no question Rav Hirsch was speaking to a generation that was living amongst an immoral and anti-religious environment. My letter is written to the Flatbush community, a diverse group of Orthodox Jews that also live in similar realities. Many of us work or at least spend time in places that don’t share our Jewish conduct and principles.

In a recent book entitled “Off the Derech” Faranak Margolese interviews many teens as to why they went off the Derech. And while we would like to believe it was all because of the Internet and cellphones, the truth is more disturbing. The three main reasons she found was, a lack of positive feelings, unanswered questions about Jewish beliefs and the ability for our children to develop their unique emotional and religious potential. Technology did not even make it on the list. The fact that we blame technology is because it takes the blame off us!

And so I ask you now, is it really our Mesorah to shelter our children or is it just something we do because we are so afraid of the influence of the outside world? Are we scared of the questions our children might ask and therefore want to avoid it all? Are we worried that maybe some of our children are unhappy being Jewish and sheltering them is easier then dealing with the problem? I think we sometimes underestimate the intelligence of our youth and think they are incapable of seeing the truth and instead we hope our children will never grow up and we will never have to deal with these issues. And so, when someone raises a sensitive and difficult subject and questions our current methods you call them an apikores!

I am not a Rabbi and definitely don't think of myself as qualified to make decisions for others, but I believe we should use the wisdom Hashem gave us and with the proper guidance from our Rabonim we can make the proper decisions for ourselves and our families.