The Power Of Good Chinuch

Today I learned a lesson about the power of chinuch. I have a friend who is a very special person. He is a regular guy on the outside but I think that in all of Yerushalayim there may not be another avrech who is as big a baal chesed as he is. He selflessly devotes himself to helping and giving to others and opens his home to those who have none. People don't just visit him and have a meal - they live with him, free of charge. He also sits and learns and has no money. If I had money and could support an avrech - he would probably be my first address.

Today we were talking and the topic of smoking came up. I expressed my 'radical opinion' that smoking is terribly bad for you. He differed. Smoking, he explained, is a matter of personal preference. If you want, then you smoke and if you don't want to then you don't have to. The health risks are overstated. Maybe it will kill a person at the age of 90 or 100 but not before. His father has been smoking since he was very young and he is fine. So did his grandfather. He doesn't smoke but almost everyone around him does and they are fine. The overwhelming evidence against his position doesn't faze him in the slightest. "Look at Rav X", he told me. "He smoked and made it past 100." Besides, he reminded me, smoking also has benefits. It calms a person.

I heard what he said and decided that if someone could be so crum [crooked] and maintain such a twisted, unconscionable, untenable perspective on an issue which is universally agreed upon by all doctors in all fields and every smoker can also testify to the negative effects, then it is not worth my time to try to convince him otherwise. So I didn't. I also didn't try the old argument that many rabbonim hold that it is assur min hatorah to smoke and all the other ones hold that it's a bad idea and would he eat a piece of meat that many rabbis held was treif and those who held it was strictly kosher still felt it was better not to eat it.

But I learned an important lesson. He told me that the way he was raised was that smoking is a matter of choice and both choices [i.e. to smoke or not] have equal merit. The power of education.

So if one can raise a child to think that smoking is really not that bad for you and even as an adult he continues to believe that utter nonsense, imagine how powerful the long term effects of teaching one's child positive values??!