Parsha Review Podcast · Rabbi Aryeh Wolbe

00:01 - Intro (Announcement)
You are listening to Rabbi Aryeh Wolbe of TORCH in Houston, texas. This is the Parsha Review Podcast.

00:10 - Rabbi Aryeh Wolbe (Host)
All right, welcome back everybody to the Parsha in Focus. This week's Parsha is Parsha's Emor, and this is in Leviticus, chapter 21, verse 1. The portion begins with the following and note the redundancy here that we will see in this verse Vayomer Hashem el Moshe. And Hashem said to Moshe say to the children of Aaron, the priests, and you shall say to them, to a dead person, a Kohen, should not contaminate himself among his people. So we see twice that the verse says, and you shall say again, we'll read this again you shall say to the Kohanim, the children of Aaron, the priests, the sons of Aaron, and you shall say to the Kohanim, the children of Aaron, the priests, the sons of Aaron, and you shall say to them that they shall not become contaminated to a dead person, to a deceased corpse. So the question our sages immediately ask is what's this redundancy? So Rashi, the great commentary, says amor ve'amarto. What is that telling you? That is telling you that you shall teach the children and that responsibility of teaching our children is a responsibility of the parents. The parents are responsible to teach their children. This is something which is especially in our generation, where many people have forsaken that responsibility and given it to the schools. Let the schools educate my children. I don't need to educate my children. The school will educate my children, and that's a big mistake. School is an arm of the parents, or partners with the parents, and it's important to understand the proper perspective that parents need to have on education. So let's talk a little bit about education. What does this mean?

02:12
Number one is that do as they say, not as they do, is a flawed concept. Your children see everything that's going on. They see and they internalize what they see. Everything that's going on. They see and they internalize what they see. When they see a positive action by the parents, they adopt that positive action. When they see a negative action, they adopt that negative action. When they see neglect, they become neglectful. When they see responsibility, they become responsible. The children adapt. The children absorb everything that they see in their parents. Now, it's not what they say, meaning if a parent tells the child to be honest, but the parent themselves are not honest, the child is not going to follow what they say. They're going to follow what they see the parents doing. The children follow by example. They don't follow by edicts or by words of the parents, and it's so incredibly important that parents understand the responsibility they have to their children.

03:16
Now I don't think. Okay, thank God, I'm a parent of eight beautiful, magnificent children. I don't think for a second and don't kid yourself to think that, oh, you have to be a robot now and you have to be a perfect person. I always tell my children I'm an aspiring, growing Jew. My goal is to be perfect and I aspire to be perfect, hopefully one day to become a perfect person. I'm imperfect and I'm trying. I make mistakes. I'm a human being. Have I done things in my parenting that I needed to go to my children and apologize? Yes, many times, because I'm not perfect, but we have to recognize that it's a growth process for us and for our children. It's an interesting thing. I don't know if this is correct, but I think it's correct.

04:07
You know, the Torah tells us that the firstborn child gets a double portion of the inheritance. Why does the firstborn child get the double portion Right? So if you have nine children, you divide up your estate after a person passes away and you give it to 10 children, because the oldest gets two portions. They get a double portion. We see this by Jacob. When he passed away, he gave his oldest who he considered his oldest, which was Joseph, from his real wife of Rachel. He gave him a double portion. That was for Ephraman menasha, and we learn this throughout our Jewish law. We see this responsibility that a father has leaving an inheritance to his children. The oldest boy gets two portions. Okay, why so? I think it's fair to say that the first one is the guinea pig. Okay, we don't know what we're doing yet.

05:10
As parents, we don't know exactly the right way to parent. We don't know exactly the right methods. We don't have all of the answers yet. Some of us never get the answers ever. We just figure it out later, in retrospect, like, oh, I wish I would have done this, I wish I would have done that. But the first child makes us a parent. The first child makes us responsible. The first child makes us a parent. The first child makes us responsible. The first child makes us look at ourselves and look at perhaps some of the mistakes that we may have done. It gives us the opportunity to introspect and start evaluating our own ways and them. Being our teacher is worth another portion of our inheritance. I think it's an amazing thing I really do. I think it's an incredible thing that children shouldn't think that their parents are God. I don't think that that should be, oh, what my father does.

06:08
Children need to see their parents as growing organisms. We're growing, we're constantly organisms. We're growing, we're constantly changing. We're not perfect. We're trying to be perfect. We're trying to become the best possible people that we can become. But in the process we make mistakes and we need to learn from it and we have to modify and we have to adjust and we have to strategize it. And we have to modify and we have to adjust and we have to strategize.

06:36
And, most importantly, in parenting, we need to pray. We need to pray for our children every single day. We need to pray for their success. We need to pray for their influences, for protection from negative influences. We don't know, as parents, what our children are going to be exposed to in school. We don't know what they're going to be exposed to with their friends on a play date with their friends. We don't know what they'll be exposed to. We have to pray for Hashem's assistance, for Hashem's guidance, that they not be influenced in a negative way, and this is our, by the way, in our prayers every single morning we say Make the words of your Torah sweet in our mouths, for us and for our children and for our grandchildren. What are we praying for our children? It should be sweet for us. If it comes sweet for us, it'll be sweet for them. No, we're praying already now. And imagine this little children, already at four or five years old, learning how to pray, are already praying for their descendants.

07:44
We pray for our future generations, that we should be guided in the ways of the Almighty God, creator of heaven and earth, that we should have good influences, that we should be in a good environment and we should be wholesome people, wholesome human beings. That's our goal, that's our objective in our lives is that our children grow to be fine, responsible, good people who follow the ways of the Almighty and His Torah. That's what we want. We want them to be good people. So this is one of the places in the Torah where the Torah charges us with the responsibility of being good parents. Teach your children, guide them, be patient with them, love them.

08:33
My grandfather, I used to teach in a yeshiva which is, I would say, more of a rehab for children who had very difficult lives, some of them with difficult parents, some of them with difficult circumstances, with difficult circumstances whatever they may be, each one in their own individual case, and we would use the Torah to guide these children and the vast majority have grown to be really, really magnificent people, magnificent adults, responsible parents eventually, and it's really amazing the transformation that the Torah can have on a person. But I remember I asked my grandfather of blessed memory. I said how do I ensure that my children grow up to be good people and don't have the challenges that these children have, that these students that I had? So he always said the following principle, and I think it's a principle for our generation that we need to understand our culture.

09:37
My grandfather said once upon a time you used to be able to educate your children with a harsh manner, with a stick. Most of the adults here who are over the age of 50 will remember where parenting wasn't always with a candy. Parenting was a little bit more stern, where parents would reprimand their children and tell them the right way they need to do things and tell them, sometimes a little bit too harsh, of how wrong they were doing things. It wasn't always with love, it wasn't always with an affection. Sometimes it was really stern and harsh In our generation. My grandfather said we can only educate with love. We can only educate with love. Why? Because think about it like this we have a world out there social media, by the way, all of these things didn't exist. When I spoke to my grandfather about this over 20 years ago, this was before MySpace and before Facebook and before Twitter and before X and before all of the other Instagram and TikTok, and all of those that have one button Instagram and TikTok and all of those that have one button, which is called the like button. That like button.

10:58
What does it do? It gives you a sense of encouragement, a sense of worthiness. You're worth something. People like the photo that you're posting, people like the video that you produced, people like your content, and it gives you a sense of encouragement and it's not necessarily a bad thing. But it can give a person a false sense of love and it's very easy. Today the streets are very quote loving.

11:30
If the child doesn't have the proper love in their own home, it could be a very big challenge and the child who's growing up in a home which is hopefully a home of Torah, a home of Jewish values. If they don't have the proper love there, they'll get the love elsewhere, and that's our responsibility as parents to raise our children with a sense of security, with a sense of confidence that their parents, us, as parents. We need to shower our children with love. We need to shower them with a confidence that they know that they're being loved. That doesn't mean that we don't criticize them when it's necessary. It does not mean that everything they do is fine. But if there is an abundance of love, then you can correct. You can correct the mistakes every once in a while that a child does, and it doesn't mean that we're constantly beating them over the head oh, you're doing this wrong, you're doing that wrong. No, we should be showering them with love, giving them hugs and kisses as much as we can to our own children, not other people's children. You got to be careful about that. But you have to shower your children with an abundance, and even an overabundance of love, because today the streets are not like they used to be.

12:55
It used to be that someone who left religion, someone who was out of the regular confines of religion whether it be Christianity, islam or Judaism you were a loser out there in the world. You had to be involved with something. You had to be. It was part of your identity. Today, secularism, atheism, agnosticism, all of that is heroed and it's celebrated and it's a problem. It's a big problem because if we don't give our children a sense of connection and a sense of affection that they should be getting from their home, then they'll get it elsewhere. And that's our responsibility and this is what the Torah here is telling us Amor, amor, talk to your children, talk to them a lot, have a relationship, build a connection with your children so that they love being in your home and they don't want to resort to go to other people's homes, to run away from the home that you've established for them. That's our responsibility as parents to again shower our children with love. Hashem should bless us all that we should fulfill our responsibilities of being parents in the appropriate ways, with good influences, with positive reinforcement, constantly to instill in our children the way of Hashem in everything that we do. Yes, we're not perfect. We're not perfect, but we're growing as well and our children should see within us you know what.

14:34
You make a mistake, you can apologize to your children. I've done this numerous times. Where I wrote to my children. I said I want you to know what I did yesterday was incorrect. I was wrong and I reprimanded myself to my children and telling them that this is wrong. What you saw yesterday I did was wrong and I'm accountable. I'm taking accountability for it and there's nothing wrong with our children seeing that we take responsibility. You make a mistake. You're human, it's fine. We're a growing organism. That's what Hashem hopefully wants us to be doing is correct yourself. You make a mistake, that's fine. Take responsibility, be accountable for those mistakes and hopefully our children will learn to go in the right ways of Hashem constantly, every day of our lives. My dear friends, have an amazing Shabbos.