Fomo & Jomo

[Music] uh hello everybody uh this is danielle corrupt and i'm speaking to you from toronto ontario i'm the rabbi at the buy it of thornhill and it's wonderful to be able to engage with you once again for a very worthy organization amudim which is doing such important work throughout north america and beyond for claus israel especially helping the most vulnerable of our population it is a tremendous honor to be able to engage in a conversation with dr david pelkovitz who was no stranger to amudim nor is he a stranger to anyone most likely listening or watching this presentation dr pelkovitz is the strauss chair in psychology and education at yeshiva university um he is uh usually one of those go-to voices that our community goes to when we are facing issues of crisis or tragedy god forbid we typically turn to our healthcare professionals and dr pelkovitz really represents uh the clout that seabor in helping us heal and helping us cope and come to terms with some of the very very difficult issues facing our community and society in general dr pelkovitz welcome it's really an honor to have you here with us uh for amudin thank you it's an honor to be here and especially an honor to be here with you given how much i've always learned from the role and leadership and then addressing all the concerns that we'll be talking about in this program thank you um i uh we are going to be discussing a topic that i believe is dear to your heart uh which is uh putting things in a pers in perspective in a polarized world going from fomo to jomo could you dr pelkovitz please uh elaborate on this on this theme please yeah sure um there's um been a real shift in the world um in recent years it's been going on for a while um but um it's it's basically a uh feeling that um social media has become especially in younger kids has become such an incredible um force shaping everything from self-concept to anxiety levels to one's core sense of identity and more and more i've had parents and adolescents and kids even you know approach me and ask um i feel that i'm too dependent on facebook i'm too dependent on instagram on um on tick tock and yet i can't seem to get off of it it makes me sad it makes me anxious um and yet i feel pulled into it can you give me some strategies for trying to uh to get better better control over this all right and and what are the um besides besides the addictive behavior what what are some of the what is some of the negative fallout that we're seeing when people become when people's realities are defined by what they perceive themselves to be and others to be on social media well it's it's it can all often be a false superficial kind of identity that's based on everything that we know is um is is is superficial and cannot be associated with an enduring sense of well-being as an example uh even going to the point of what what do adolescents or even younger kids fantasize about nowadays they often fantasize about being famous they often fantasize not necessarily about being good and giving people but about you know what do i need to do in order to um in order to get the most possible likes on um you know my various social media accounts and it's not surprising that um you know and and studies that have been really getting much more publicity just in recent months um you know we're finding increases in um serious kinds of uh emotional disorders especially given covert you know so you have that as well um so there's a rise in um in depression a rise in anxiety a rise in kids especially girls having poor self-concepts and even to the point of increases in suicidal ideation and even suicidal attempts all right so um how do you as a as a therapist as a guide um you know the type the topic is going from fomo to jomo going from fear of missing out right this this need for celebrity this need for being part of this the popular group um and you you say joma which is going from joy of missing out and uh especially with young people how do how do we change that perspective given that so many of our kids are using social media and many of our adults as well yeah so so for both because adults you know i i these these programs are designed to maximize getting that dopamine hit they're designed to addict us um so what we need to do is is we need to come up with some strategies for uh mindfully disconnecting for increasing awareness and i have some specific recommendations that i think it probably makes sense for us to um um you know uh talk about some of the strategies i'll i'll start with uh just as an example um let's talk about strategies for uninterrupted socializing so strategies for uninterrupted socializing with some of the authors on this there's a wonderful book um called the distracted mind by gazali g-a-z-z-a-l-e-y and rosen and what they break down which other since then have um have talked about also is just as an example uh the following approaches okay so number one is the goal you need you need to know what's what's your goal if your goal is to be able to talk to people in uninterrupted way you know with our eyes bouncing off of our our the person you're looking at size our hearts bouncing off each other you know um so the the the goal in this case might be to keep your phone in the pocket when when in one-on-one conversation with another person um kids and parents tell me that this is something that they would love to be able to um to focus on and to and to work on having that goal go from the unconscious to the conscious um makes a big difference it says in proverbs it says initially without that vision thing you kind of fall apart and um that's that's number one okay it says to put it on and in fact when certain communities have had programs to to foster um getting better control over this topic of uh use of phones and social media um this was one of the main things that kids very much appreciated and wanted more of when when whole communities made up their mind to make this into something that's front and center the second area would be as an example is clarity um which is basically it's called metacognition which is um the need to to which is a fancy way of saying why why is this important you have to get to the emotional get into the into your heart why is this important to you to recognize that these devices can reduce our own empathy it according to research it not only reduces our empathy for others it reduces our perception of how empathic others are to us which is an incredibly important kind of um thing to keep in mind social media tends to sort of objectify other people does it not yes and and it does um it does it in a way that is really uh very alarming you know it tends to polarize things so we see the other as being evil and horrible and somehow uh you know there's um some very recent research that shows that it's tracks things over time and they find that families are now spending less time at thanksgiving dinner than they used to because there's so much tension over differing political views so you're bound in any typical family to have democrats and republicans in the case of the united states um dining together and it's fascinating they've actually tracked it and show a pretty significant dropping in the amount of time so that the meals kind of um end earlier than um that than one would expect and it's amazing that they have this data now so that's just one one simple uh example of it well if i could if i could just follow up with that for a moment before you get to the next point you know recently facebook was accused by a number of people who came forward and said that they were creating deliberately polarized communities on social media because their their marketing data told them that when people get an emotional rise off of reading something on social media they tend to become more engaged will stay on longer and may even buy things that they see in the ads because they're so emotionally riled up this is a this is very uh disconcerting of course if it's true we're not going to convict facebook in this discussion but um this is certainly something that we have to be careful about if people are deliberately manipulating me emotionally to get a rise out of me and to start hating or disliking somebody else that's probably bringing out the worst in me is it not yeah look all of these um you know social media sites their financial model as i understand it is partly based on maximizing hits maximizing time on the site and maximizing in many ways the negativity and the polarization that keeps things going it's it's it's it's part of what um you know it's like and i'm sure any rabbit somebody in your position what do you how would you maximize the likelihood that you're gonna grow your membership and grow the passion of people attending your show half it's probably going to be by really reaching them in their hearts you know and giving those kind of classes and having those kind of programs those kind of speeches that's that's what they do and um i don't think it's coming necessarily from an evil place um but it's often coming from a place of um really not necessarily um you know um prioritizing what's best what's best for um their their their customers and again i don't wanna you know i certainly have no right to and no expertise to but certainly what that whistleblower has shown in those um congressional hearings um has made that uh very clear let me just uh just because i didn't i didn't talk about it a second ago let me just take a second to review with you some of this stuff um here's just a quick summary of some of this stuff is um is that the echo chamber on various social media platforms it it's designed in a way that it empowers status seeking extremists so that um you know people who aren't extremists people who are just talking in a very um sort of um in much more moderate kind of way their voice get tends to be drowned out and they tend to become quiet because if you become too vocal on these sites people come after you yeah and they may threaten your safety so there's a tremendous tendency for the discourse to become not only um not only filled with personal attacks but sometimes real threats on the safety of the person listen to this those who deactivate their facebook accounts uh report feeling happier okay that's great okay not surprising but in the case of millennials in the case of people who were born into a world where they already had their iphones they typically reopen their social media accounts very soon after they find they just can't they can't do it they can't they can't do it it's so much a part of their identity and how they deal with um with with with their their emotions and how they get their news that it becomes something that there's a true addiction to so you know when it comes woven into the fabric of their identity and is their main new source um and and to just expand it to drop um there's evidence that our political discussion networks have been shrieking shrinking in recent decades this is before you know the the you know some of the elections the recent elections in the united states but it's been shrinking and um which means that um you know there's uh there's all of this sense of polarization but um there's a fascinating new study there there was a book that just came out a couple weeks ago that is amazing because he makes a very strong case that much polarization is false social media exaggerates the polarization and people when they sit down and really talk to each other and hear each other out are much more likely to be able to maybe change their views and be open to others views the name of the book and again i can't emphasize enough how um it's totally changed my perspective on these things because it's a it's a a man by the name dr chris bale b-a-i-l and it's called breaking the um social media prism and what he shows with very very well done research and all kinds of uh you know a large team and you know very respected kind of ways of getting to his uh you know getting to his conclusions is he comes up with some specific ways of trying to help us see things through the eyes of others without letting the false polarization that happens with the extremists online uh take over so that's that's great for a person who's going to read that book but you know getting back to the you know getting back to how we solve the problem and you you you correctly identify this this idea of fomo that millennials who uh uh sign on sign out of their account can't they're polishing they they have to get back on so how do we how do we address this with you know you and i remember what life was like before the internet but so many of our who are our children's ages and are certainly our grandchildren's ages how do we uh how do we get them to unplug so you had mentioned the importance of keeping the uh the phone in your pocket and things like that what else what what else can we do sure sure so um so we already talked about the power of goals the power of clarity um the the next thing is a very simple um behavioral intervention you know there's nothing quite like it you know the talmud tells us that if somebody has a gambling problem sometimes um the best thing you could do for it is break the dice this is going back over the millennia break the dice amazing how how topical you know that kind of wisdom is so here on the accessibility end it's um it's removing all phones from areas of interactions so you could set tech breaks for checking your phone every 15 minutes you families can have tech free zones um and i know this is this is trite but it's it's it works you know so you have you have a very clear rule in at home that parents and kids recharge their phones every night in a public part of their house and if there's an emergency that comes in which is what kids are very worried about um you know they'll be able to check it you know at another time but they have to once they keep it in a public place they're going to start to get a lot more sleep and they're not going to be so hooked on to uh you know what what becomes this overarching need to check um over and over again the next thing has to do you have to have a strategy for dealing with boredom sherry turkell psychologist at um at mit a brilliant brilliant woman she um wrote a book called reclaiming conversations and what she found is that nowadays the kids who came of age after the iphone was developed they have a very hard time um with their anxiety about simple conversations there's a high level of social discomfort in adolescence and young adults um and she calls it a flight from conversation and she says sometimes in extreme cases you know parents could really help their kids just do the just to review the basics of social skills training how do you start a conversation how do you continue a conversation how do you show that you're really listening and paying attention you have to build up that muscle you know many kids who um came of age after covid was already in full force never even developed if you look at preschoolers the ability to have the give and take of conversation here many kids who were born um you know who were you know millennials they um they have to in a conscious way developing you don't have to turn into a social skills training expert but it might be helpful to be able to just talk to your kid about it model for them you know how to do it model for them by talking to your other family members about this stuff and that could be helpful and then the final thing is um anxiety which is um you know um there's a tremendous amount of anxiety over how are others gonna see me if i shut off my account for a couple of hours a day let's say i'm driving you have a kid who's old enough to be driving they get very nervous that if their friends are texting them or in a crisis so they don't answer them right away that they're going to be viewed as not being a presence so there are simple strategies for the cultural change that can educate kids to know that you're not you don't have to always be on call you don't have to answer texts immediately i find that um that you have to really teach kids that you know i'm available you know i i you know and you could put it on your away message and it can make a difference and i think i'm finding the kids are beginning to be more and more open to that because they're exhausted from what is being on call i want to get back to that anxiety issue in just a moment but i i guess i have an overarching question that i've noticed of late um my upbringing uh uh is very different from the way and the way that i brought up my children is very different from the way that i see some younger parents bringing up their children today and i'm wondering if if all of these strategies you know assume that a parent takes into consideration the fact that i am the parent you are the child and i will guide you and show you what is best for you um and i hope this is not too far off topic but it's certainly something that's been gnawing at me i see so many parents today who show so much their inherits to their children that they feel that their children should be in control of their emotions of their behaviors and uh put their child on such a pedestal that they don't feel that they can or should interfere in their in their children's behavioral patterns let me just give you one example um there was a parent who brought over one of their children to my house the other day and i was taught that when someone comes into your a guest comes into your home the guest is supposed to look you you as a guest are supposed to look at the host in the eye shake their hand say hello make eye contact all of these things that i was taught as a child and today it seems like some parents feel that no we have to be considerate of a child's feelings and if the child doesn't feel like making eye contact because they're moody or they're in a bad mood we have to respect that in the child and let the child go off into the corner and when the child is ready to come and make eye contact and to be engaging we allow the child to do that and and so part of part of me is is concerned that if if these solutions that you're advocating dr pelkovitz um they sound like wonderful solutions but they assume that a parent is going to be uh sort of laying down the law for their children and saying this is what is necessary and this is what you should be doing and this is what you shouldn't be doing and part of the concern that i have in part i believe perhaps part of the anxiety that children have today is that they haven't been given specific parameters or sufficient parameters to know the difference between right and wrong am i crazy or no i'm not crazy at all i think it's actually it's the challenge of our generation you know kids um you know what what my understanding of healthy parenting is about it's exactly what the talmud tells us you find the balance between the left hand pushing away while the right hand brings closer right between small dojo and mimi you know you need you need the balance between love and limits and that's exactly what modern psychological research tells us and what the wisdom you know the ancient jewish wisdom tells us um and kids can't thrive without that balance so all love and no limits kids grow up to be totally s spoiled and over indulged and you can a kid like that they're not going to be ready to function in the world if you have an extreme like that will limits no love rules without relationships equals rebellion okay so you need to find the balance and that's the art of parenting and it's going to be different for every one of your children because every kid has a different temperament and parents i think um you see the the part of the challenge is many of the parents that i believe you're referring to they're already um they were raised this way so so they hadn't necessarily had the role models that you know that people who grew up you know in a less complicated world um you know um had as a matter of course and um and it's interesting if i could just stay with this for a minute i think that there is [Music] something i hear often from people who i saw in my practice 30 years ago 40 years ago i've been doing this for a long time and now their parents you know sometimes even grandparents and they come to my office and they'll turn to their parents and say why did you let me do this when i was a teenager why did you let me go into manhattan um when you knew that there was a crazy uh club scene there why did you let me um basically you know have a you know a limitless american express card why do you do all of this and they get angry about it and you know there's a beautiful thought in the madrish that says the following it says this is from mishla from proverbs put limits on your kids there's always hope and don't pay attention to their yelling and screaming and going crazy when you do the limit putting on them so listen to this ancient wisdom it says the more a parent puts limits on his or her child the more that child will love the parent and that's so true but parents you know there needs to be a real by the way one more thing i find that when there's a massive community effort to address this parents are open to it because they they themselves recognize that something has to be fixed you know something that there's something off here and i think i think they're they're nervous about it and yet you know we can we can quote to demonstrate that parenting requires us to place limits on our children and and show them where the lines are and yet a lot of a lot of very from the young adults who are parents are not going to the age-old wisdom of ghazal to derive knowledge about how to parent they're going to the conventional wisdom that they're watching on social media and in the books that they're reading about how you have to validate your child's feelings and give them the emotional freedom to be able to learn about themselves and to appreciate themselves and to me there's this represents a major disconnect because we look at the torah for guidance for all areas of our life except for the parts where we don't look for guidance for those things which we feel we've advanced beyond the torah and this just it's sometimes quite um quite frustrating um for someone in my position as a spiritual leader who sees people sort of cherry-picking the lessons that we can draw from the torah and then the parts of the torah that we've moved past perhaps i mean obviously there are certain things that are anachronistic about the book of michele which talks about not sparing the rod and we don't we don't exercise corporal punishment anymore we recognize that that's not helpful and not not not the best way to parent so we've learned to reinterpret it and to to reframe it as not literally a rod but rather as a uh as a way of disciplining sometimes sometimes harshly disciplining when necessary but but how would how would you and i perhaps i'm putting you in an unfair position this is really more a rabbinical question than a psychological question but how do we impress upon our young young members of our community that the torah is a holistic guide for how we're supposed to live our lives yeah um yes it's it's an alarming development so to hear what you're what you're seeing in the front lines over there um you know um i i think that um that um it's let me tell you about a program that took place in um cleveland and in chicago and since then it's been replicated in different parts of the world it was on this topic the um rabbinic leadership who were behind the um citibank um i'm sorry citi field of cifa in the met stadium number of years ago where they say we have to ban the internet they very much to their credit recognized we blew it we flew there's a big mistake you can't this is here to stay we we have to find the balance like refersh said between isolation and inoculation so the community got together and they had some generous funding um and had in the case of chicago which was the first community did it they brought in the two leaders behind the the original um internet of cifa they brought them into chicago they invited the whole spectrum of the community from um you know the more modern to the most uh yeshivish and see etc and they put up a massive massive site just for that day and um it it had um an incredible response because what they talked about was small steps very small steps you know you're talking to somebody put your phone in the pocket um you're having dinner find you know x amount of uh interruption free time you're you know just simple simple things but they made it a community effort and it was a community effort where um not only do they bring mental health people to come in to speak but they bought rabbis to come in and speak who had you know some deep insights of their own and were known to be open to the realities of the outside world and a totally unexpected thing happened the kids who were there um loved it so much that they asked for another meeting and they wanted more they said you know something we've been dying for this we've been dying for this now to get to your specific question okay but what do we do about the fact that people are are are sometimes um you know even people more to the yeshiva gender sometimes seeing seeing the world as changed in a way that uh you don't necessarily have to pay attention to uh you know to um rabbinic wisdom instead pay attention to um you know people who were coming more from a scientific or parenting experts or whatever i think the best way to um to change perceptions is it needs to be done i think in in a massive community level so here you had um the whole community involved a tremendous amount of work went into it they did follow-ups they um [Music] they were still doing things that are tied to this and from the last i heard it made change that really lasted but it was partly because what it came with was respect for the viewpoint of everybody they didn't go and criticize the people who did the internet asifa okay in in in citi field instead they came and they showed like wow these these men have a tremendous amount to offer you know you know these are the leaders of the yeshiva world the leaders of the hasidis world and um it was there's nothing like modeling modeling and showing people that things are more complicated than you think you know and the world isn't in black and white the world is in gray and the truth lies in the gray and i think i know this is sounding a little bit not directly responsive to your question but it was a cultural change that took place with all of that effort that i i think does that a little bit address it yes i i look i i think it does i don't think we're going to be able to fully uh to fully resolve this issue about the steady erosion of what we call das torah or the erosion of rabbinic authority and people who look to rub on him for guidance um based on timeless torah wisdom um and and you say you said something very profound that we hear all again and again especially in today's very post-post-post post-modern society is that we live in the gray and it's a very uncomfortable position for so many younger people to be living in because there's a craving as you had started saying earlier in this conversation for younger people to have parameters and boundaries and to know what's what's okay and what's not okay and to live in the gray is something that we learn to do as we get older and older and and you also had talked a bit a little bit about anxiety and i and i want to try and bring this all together if i can um is you know uh one of the things that um we are perceiving is that there does seem to be a greater level of anxiety part of it has to do with this fomo the fear of missing out uh the the feeling that i need to respond right away as you had mentioned before part of the anxiety is due to covet and the the fact that because we're social animals and we haven't been able to interact um we've there's been some there's been some damage to the our collective psyche because we haven't had the social interaction that we actually j uh crave that's hardwired to our to our very being um this anxiety has manifested itself in a number of very unhealthy ways and i'm wondering if you could just talk about um you know part of this anxiety manifests itself in this polarized vociferous yelling at each other on social media like we talked about before but it also has to do with social interactions at the marketplace where everyone is who's i don't know is a stranger and an enemy potentially um and um and and the fear of the unknown because we don't know what's just around the corner with covid what the next strain or the next iteration or the next shutdown uh when that's going to be god forbid um what do we do when we have anxiety and how how do we deal with anxiety um uh is there a way is there an easy pill that we can take to help us when we're dealing with anxiety what you know we're not advocating escapism we're not advocating taking a drink or uh smoking a joint is there what can we do that's natural to help take a little bit of the edge off of our lives yeah um so um if i could just give a simplistic answer but it's i think um you know we at least start um the way uh mental health people try to address anxiety is on three channels okay one channel is the cognitive you try to get a hold of the thoughts that are feeding the anxiety often in the case of anxiety around covet it might be uh you know an awfulizing feeling like you know this is uh horrible things will never go back to normal how am i ever going to get used to it um and a lot of self-statements that we're saying on the cognitive level that are either awfulizing or tyranny of the shoulds you know it shouldn't be like this you know why can't i have a normal life what happened to the you know things that um that that i always took for granted so that's the cognitive that's um the vascentos you want to know where the person is look at where his or her thoughts are so that's on the cognitive channel on the physiologic on the physiologic channel which is you know what happens to our bodies when we're anxious our hearts will will race a little faster we different people feel in different parts of their body you may feel in your gi system you might feel a tightening in your neck you might get a headache or whatever but the physiologic is basically the natural response of the body to perceived threat and there you know this is where smartphones are you know incredibly helpful because there are amazing devices now that really teach your mindfulness there are two wonderful books on jewish perspectives on mindfulness which are amazing written by psychologists who are also rabbis and um there's um there's uh um but a number of apps so you go onto commonsensemedia.com which is a non-commercial site and you just put in for the age group let's say you want to have anxiety management techniques for your kids you can do it that way you could find some basic mindfulness exercises for yourself you know the most popular one has been calm c-a-l-m which has a relatively small fee attached to it but is excellent you know and gives you specific mindfulness techniques for the specific issue that you're having you know what's your is your problem with sleep is your problem with worrying about work is your problem with parenting or whatever and it gives you um mindfulness and it's a skill it takes a while but just doing a little bit at a time simple breathing normal breath in slow breath out can make an enormous difference and then the final channel is the behavioral channel you know where you actually um uh respond to the anxiety by avoiding avoidance you face what you're afraid of you're nervous about going to show because you've been away from it for so long you push yourself to go back or you're nervous about getting together with friends or even if you're nervous about your anxiety about being too tough on your kids um you you do that behavioral kind of intervention and that that that could be um extremely helpful at all two other quick points so you just could you just review those three once again yes number one yes sure so number one is cognitive you think you think in a way you catch the thoughts that are making you anxious and you hold it up to the light of day in a rational in a rational kind of way and that that could really make a big difference um physiologic is in terms of the um normal breath in slow breath out mindfulness techniques and there are all kinds of uh wonderful apps out there on it um that make it more doable but recognize it's not going to work right away it's the skill that you have to do with time and then the final is behavioral which is to uh push yourself is to push yourself to avoid avoidance etc um and then the other um uh two points that have been found to really help with anxiety during cohort are um ancient wisdom and this is this is in every religion has this um one is the power of gratitude to figure out a way to focus on what we have and to be thankful for what we have and anytime we're able to be grateful that way again this is consistent with the torah readings we have around now um you know it's the essence of being jewish hashem right thank you to be thankful it helps us um in it helps us in a very basic way with our anxiety you know so because you may not have control over you know what new variant of the of the um of covet is coming but you always have control over um you know being thankful for what you have in terms of your community in terms of your family in terms of friends or whatever you have when you have that focus it literally helps with your immune functioning but helps mainly with anxiety and another especially is to be able acts of loving kindness for others makes such an enormous difference to be able to um respond to everything that's going on with um you know with with lesson it's the antidote to the negativity of social media because you know social media by the way could be a wonderful source for doing fessa you know we now know about the suffering of people who may never have known about in the past right right yeah yeah and um those last two items are so powerful the ability to count your blessings and to recognize um i always try to tell my wife as often as i can we are so blessed um even when we're going through perhaps challenging times but we are so blessed and then you just reminding oneself about all of the brachus of life are is just so um so uplifting and of course emulating hashem the to emulate the ribbon of shalollam by helping others is extremely empowering and this idea of imitating god as being a way of lifting ourselves up and alleviating anxiety uh i can't think of a of a more powerful method than that um we are coming up close to the end of our discussion but i i would be remiss if uh i didn't ask you about one more issue that i think does contribute to some of the anxiety that especially our young people are experiencing today it's no secret that from time to time and i'm rabbi pelkovitz the amount of years that you've been in this line of uh of profession you've seen so many iterations unfortunately of uh communal scandals having to do with people in leadership positions uh abusing that privilege and exploiting others and because of their position and this of course has created a significant amount of anxiety as well especially among our youth could you just share with us a few thoughts on on this topic and and how we can uh restore the the sense of joy and somehow in our lives yeah um you're talking about like when leadership fails that that that yeah so again without um you know um without in any way identifying a specific person because this is something that um something that we're sometimes faced with what how how do we talk to ourselves how do we talk to our kids when there's um um when when our leaders who should be our moral leaders disappoint us and i just make a couple a couple of points um the most important one in terms of talking to our kids is um to be understood first understand you go to your child and you ask him or her you know um you know what have you heard especially if you're in a neighborhood where um you know there's been some kind of a scandal and unfortunately there are multiple scandals in different parts of the world and if you're struggling with that now you just ask them what have you heard you know and again we don't necessarily know anything for sure um in any sometimes there are situations where a person's been actually convicted and it's still something that communities might be struggling with but you ask your child help help me here and very often they'll answer you in a way that'll give you will lead you towards what you need to uh what you need to talk about you know what you need to understand so that's um that's that's number one um number two is um is the idea as a general rule of thumb to um help them um have have permission to talk about what's on their mind don't automatically um reassure them this is along the lines of what we talked about before you know there's the uh again the thought of another moment of the very torah lmk mitchell we can't master anything in life without struggle and this is something that um you know may bring with its struggle because people who um we've looked up to are supposed to be the source of protection now may be in a very different kind of place so um we just need to let them know that um it's okay to talk and it's not it's it's not disrespectful to talk uh you know the hebrew word ashrae which is the highest level of happiness is tied to the hebrew word to validate you know to validate what somebody's saying we do that for our children it makes makes sense and to name the monster to talk you know to the extent that you could allow them to talk about it and to talk about whatever anger and also to to talk about um how imperfection in general is something that is very much part of um part of what we um are sometimes faced with nobody's perfect and i'm not saying this in any way to be an apologist for anybody who might later found be found to be abusive but just the the the idea of being able to to to give voice to values and to allow it if people underestimate the power of that i have a colleague dr bessel vanderkolt who wrote a book that's been a best-selling non-fiction book over the last year called the body keeps the score one of the things he once showed me is um he showed me the picture of the brain of one of his um patients who was caught in the stairwell of the world trade center on 9 and he had an fmri a picture of that man's brain as he was reliving the worst moment of his life he was being crushed by the world trade center miraculously managed to survive what he showed me is that the part of the brain that shuts off when people are faced with overwhelming kinds of stress is broca's area the language centers of the brain but then what he showed me in subsequent scans over the coming months that as he gave this patient words for his pain as he helped him light up the language centers of the brain he helped him name the monster that's where he was able to eventually come to a place where he was able to digest the meaning of what happened and that's using an extreme example but i see it all the time you know how much good we do for our selves and our children when we allow ourselves to name the monster and to see the area of growth that can come from these kind of struggles and i'll just end with the following beautiful words of chazal which i often quote because it just makes me feel great from the madrish tohilum it says like this it says if i never fell down i never would have gotten up elujah if i never sat in the darkness i never would have appreciated the light those are those are beautiful words um i i think there's always going to be a tension between the importance of having heroes and role models in our lives and at the same time recognizing that even those heroic figures in our lives are are human beings with flaws i remember that one of the difficulties that i had as a as a booker in yeshiva was having a rebbe who i held in great esteem and i thought he was like the person that i wanted to be and then i saw him do something that i that sort of shattered my faith in him it wasn't something so horrible but it was just a flaw in his personality and it was difficult for me as a young man to learn how to process that and put it in its proper context and as we get older i think we we learn to live in that gray of recognizing that everyone is complex and no one is perfect it's very difficult i think when we're younger when we're teenagers or perhaps even younger than that to know how to deal with people who were held in such high esteem who provided us with such either inspiration entertainment torah education and then to learn that these people are are not only deeply flawed but perhaps possess a degree of evil that we could never see in ourselves and we won't be able to resolve that issue but as as you say the importance is the important thing is to open that discussion with our children allow them to know that their voice is being heard that it's okay to be disappointed but that they should their their belief in heroes should not be shattered because of one particular individual that we should try to hold people that we feel are admirable that their behavior is virtuous we should use them as role models with the caveat that even the greatest of people the greatest of godola israel will sometimes have flaws and foibles just like any other human being yeah all right well i i just wanna i i i always i i learn so much more uh in any time i spend with you dr belkovitz and i know that this has been very very helpful to so many people who might be watching or listening um thank you for being so generous with your time thank you for uh everything that amudim is doing is including offering these special video seminars for people during a perhaps a very challenging time for the jewish people and for the world as a whole as we begin to see the light emerge at the end of the tunnel let's hope that talks like this will help us emerge as more healthy individuals and please dr pelkovitz please take the last words well just say thank you for um for helping me think and helping me clarify i always learn so much from your your depth and your ability to talk about this and thank you to amudha my modem is an organization that um i just keep getting more and more involved with hamuddin because um it's um it's an organization that's involved in uh saving lives on on a regular basis in a very real way uh saving lives and they're always there and there's an ability to uh to somehow uh keep keep growing and keep serving more and more people and so that people don't have to feel alone in in their struggles so um so thank you thank you and thank you amudim goodbye everybody [Music] you