Rabbi Akiva Rutenberg - Shalom Bayit Pannel

We talked about respect and um I think one of the challenges with respect is that very often both partners want to give respect to each other but they feel like how can I respect you if you just talk to me that way? How can I show you respect? How can I even feel respect if you just said that about my father? If you just said that about my country, if you just said that about about this, about that about something else. So we get into a negative respect loop where we each want to respect each other because who would want to be in a marriage but you don't respect your partner. I always tell people I say if you convince yourself that your spouse is a loser the prize you get is you get to have the loser that that's your prize. So we all want to respect each each other but the challenge is we get into these negative loops. And I think about one of the big challenges in relationships is we tend to mind readad. We tend to think, "Oh, I know what you're thinking." We look at each, you know, we don't see our own face. We see our spouse's face. And on their face, we see a negative face and we say, "Oh, you must be upset with me. That's going to make me upset with you." And we we create this negative loop. So, one of the best things you can do in a relationship is try not to mind readad. Try to stay curious. But I want to share with you a little story, true story that a good friend of mine uh name is Mosha Gersh. He's an author and a coach of mine and he shared with me this story that took place with his friend in Los Angeles a few months ago. And this is the story and I think you can extrapolate from the story a lot of wisdom for your marriage, for your children, for everything else. And the story was like this. There was a teenage girl, she was I think about 12, 13 years old in a religious home and she started dressing differently than the family and she was rebelling which is very normal in teenage years to to do that. And the father specifically was getting unnerved by this. And it created tension between the father and the daughter. And this tension spiraled and it wasn't going in a good direction. She didn't feel heard. He didn't feel heard. And it got to a point where they weren't talking to each other. They were saying hi by. But like there was no communication. And the father decided, he said, you know, I want to send my daughter a message to stop this negative spiral. And he writes her a beautiful email. And in this email, he writes to her how much he loves her, how much he's always going to love her, and how like this is just a temporary phase. And he writes this beautiful message. And he sends it to her. And lo and behold, literally within 24, 48 hours, he sees a difference and she starts being more open and makes him more open and the relationship starts cycling in a different direction. And within two weeks, they're talking to each other more than they did before the fight. And by two and a half weeks later before, you know, on Shabbat, she walks over to him and she says, "Can I sit next to you by the table?" So he turns to her in a quiet moment and he asks her, he says, "I feel so much better that we're communicating with each other now. What was it in my email that really got you? What what did I say? What did I say that really got you?" And she turns to her father and she says, "What email, Dad? You know, I don't look at email. Email that's that's for the old people. I don't look at emails. And the father realizes that she didn't change. He changed. He became open to her seeing him differently and he was looking at her with a different eyes. The true story. He was looking at her with a different eyes which made which made her look at him with a different eyes. And this is to me probably in a nutshell the secret to relationships. If we can get out of our head, if we can get out of our assumptions and get out of oh oh you know if you really wanted to respect you wouldn't do this, you would do this, you would do that and all these assumptions you know the says that when we talks about intimacy it it refers to knowledge and if you take the word intimacy you break it up it says intimacy. A person wants to be seen. And the greatest way we're seen is when somebody wants to know us. When somebody's curious about us, when they're interested in us, but when we make those assumptions, we go into a negative spiral. And what is the what is the prerequisite for all knowledge? I think Aristotle said this, but it's it's very very true from a Torah perspective as well. What's the prerequisite for all knowledge is re humility. Recognizing that you don't know. If I think I know what every facial expression means and I think I know what you're thinking and I think I know all those things, I don't even create an opportunity of connection. Wishing everybody here and everyone who watches this in the future, shalom bay, happiness in your marriage, in your in your with your with your children. We should all grow like the my colleague said from our challenges and we should hear good news from >> Amen.