Patience

From an article in Mishpacha. Advice from Uri Zohar [famous former entertainer and baal tshuva in Israel] on dealing with kids off the derech.

IN GENERAL, RABBI ZOHAR offers two pieces of advice for parents. The first is: just wait. Most often the central problem with which our children are struggling is the gap between their physical maturation, with all the attendant material and physical desires that brings, and their much slower emotional maturation. The weaker a teenager’s inner being and more poorly developed his sense of self, the greater importance he will attach to externals, such as dress or haircut.

Unfortunately, there is no way for parents to speed up emotional maturation. Certainly external pressure will not do it.

In the meantime, parents should try to remove themselves from the equation, and not interpret every failure of their child to live up to their expectations and dreams as a rebellion or rejection of them or of Hashem. (Not infrequently, our own excessive hopes and expectations for our children are a source of their difficulties. How many fathers have damaged their sons by forcing them into “name” yeshivos for the father’s prestige, even if the son was not well-suited for that yeshiva?) In most cases our child’s failures are not rejection, but merely a reflection of his inability to yet gain control of his actions and desires.

Each of us prays that Hashem will show patience with us. We all have issues and aspects of our character or behavior that we know require improvement. Yet we remain hopeful that Hashem will give us the chance to make the necessary changes, even if they take a long time. Why should we show less patience with our children than we beseech Hashem to show us?

Hashem’s patience is often rewarded. For forty years, Rabbi Akiva despised every talmid chacham he saw and felt the desire to bite him as a donkey. Yet one day, he was born anew, and, in time, became the greatest explicator of the Oral Law. And so too will our patience as parents usually be rewarded, sometimes to a remarkable extent. How many times have you heard someone remark: The child who caused me the greatest grief is now my greatest source of nachas.

WAITING FOR ONE’S CHILD to mature is not a purely passive process. During that waiting period, the key is to keep the lines of communication open. That means showing an interest in his thoughts and feelings, and waiting for those moments where one can gain access to his heart.

That is much easier if those lines of communication were established in earlier years, before the troubles developed. Rabbi Zohar recommends setting aside time, when children are young, to speak to them daily about what concerns them or is currently on their minds – time that is not for learning or testing them on what they have learned.

Above all, minimize confrontation. To the extent that parents don’t make an issue of a particular item of clothing or haircut the child will feel less need to hold onto that item of dress for dear life. I once heard of a wise father yet in Poland, whose son began wearing a type of collar worn by those seeking the “modern world.” On a business trip, the father purchased ten such collars for his son, and thereby succeeded in completely removing the latter’s temptation to wear one.

One famous rosh yeshiva, whose teenage son sported a bushy head of hair and was often seen around town in shorts, made a point of always calling his son over to him whenever he saw him on the street and demonstrated no embarrassment over his appearance. That son is today a major figure in the Torah world.

Our children, writes Rabbi Zohar, are going through the same trial that any ba’al teshuva does – the effort to forego experiences and pleasures on behalf of kedushah. Pointing out to them their inability to properly observe mitzvos will only force them to deny that they are incapable, and cause them to assert that their failures are worked out choices. At that point, their religious failures become an “inyan” for them.