Episode 1 Fire Side Chat with Rabbi Breitowitz: Jewish Family Forever

[Music] it's [Music] welcome my name is aaron bella poston and welcome to the human being we are starting a series in conjunction with jewish family forever fireside chat with rabbi yitzhak brightwoods now let me introduce you first to the idea of jewish family forever and then i will introduce rabbi brightowitz so dr professor friend gary schiff gary schiff he is one of the initiators for jewish family forever and what they stand for is strengthening jewish families in israel and around the world by what providing learning opportunities focus on strengthening jewish families online or in person also building connections with other organizations that face who share similar values for their constituent families ensuring schools support traditional family torah-based values and number four actively supporting legislation or judicial reform which will support jewish traditional torah values throughout society encountering the influence of those who are pushing the celebration of relationships and identities which are against tour values now our start of the show is rabbi professor yitzhak breitowitz he is the rob and senior lecturer he's the rabbi emeritus of 22 years in the woodside synagogue in silver spring maryland he's also the tenured professor of law emeritus at the university of maryland and i think this is one of his highlights of all he gives the weekly total lecture here at the yield tonight given a youtube channel which i strongly suggest that you subscribe and you hit the notification bell so that when the news videos are uploaded you will be notified and without any further ado i'll introduce now i'll switch seats with gary schiff rabbi poston thank you very much we're excited about this project we're excited about the uh this lecture and many more to come to work to really help to strengthen the jewish family around the world and we're thrilled that that yibba mit and rabbi brothers have joined us in this effort i just want to say one thing this uh this week is my father's fourth yard site when he passed away there were difficult decisions to make about end of life decisions i was in bethlehem at the time that's the difference between the bethlehem israel bedford pennsylvania and i asked rabbi graduates uh how to proceed and that's the kind of trust we had uh he guided us uh family in a beautiful way and so we have a long relationship with rabbi bryawicz and we trust him with the dark family and i hope with the thoughts that he gives you today you'll see how precious this rabbi is okay i want to start with just a question rabbi about um you know there's people that are actually uh talking about that did they really need to get married do they um they need to uh you know it's a time when when people are questioning when young girls are saying um you know do i uh is my value just in making babies is is uh but but they're really delaying marriage and um you know i know this isn't such a jewish value to do this and then the question is is it on is it on the young man's responsibility the young woman's responsibility whose responsibility for getting married and what can we do here to encourage young people to to go in the direction of torah and to develop relationships and marriages um at the right time in their lives well again i just want to say that it's a real pleasure to participate with gary in this very very important project and god willing he should bring a great great merit to his father's nishamah there is nothing as important in judaism as the family in particular the relationship of husband and wife and parent and child and it is very very true that more and more people are just either deciding not to get married or they're marrying late they decide for various reasons not to have children even even if they do get married and obviously there are individual circumstances in which there needs to be flexibility and i don't mean to cast aspersions and then the individual case but let me just recall to you a verse that is literally in the first part of the torah that we're going to read this shabbat it is not good for man to be alone lo toef adam lovato and the commentaries ask the obvious question what's so bad about being alone after all adam is in the garden of eden at that particular juncture he has everything that he wants there's only one tree he's not supposed to eat from so what is existentially bad about being alone and the commentaries give us a very striking insight that's very relevant to modern life man in a state of aloneness in the garden of eden has an infinite capacity to take from the world but one cannot be godly one cannot be good until one learns how to go beyond their egotism beyond their selfishness beyond their hedonism and care for another person marriage was not created actually so i should take things marriage was taken what was given to me given to us so i should learn to be a giver and emulate the ways of god who is a giver and not a taker because god owns everything now psychologically this is a complex dynamic and the reason is part of being a selfless giver in life is giving the other person the opportunity to give to you so actually it's an interesting dynamic that the person that simply says i give i don't take he's actually a very bad spouse because he doesn't give he or she does not give the other spouse the opportunity to become a giver so there is room within the ethic of giving to be vulnerable enough to show that you need what the other person can give to you but that's the whole point the whole point of life from a jewish perspective is to emulate the ways of god now we live in a society which puts such a premium on gratification and hedonism i want to make as much money as i can i want to have as much fun as i can and yeah i'd like to have sex so maybe you know marriage is the means to have sex and the truth the matter is in this society you don't need marriage for sex but all of that is about gratification all of that is about heatedness godliness comes when you're willing to connect to another you care about another you go beyond your egotism you're willing to even expose and reveal your vulnerabilities and together a couple can create something that is greater than the sun of their individual parts and this is true by the way even if they don't have children there's a whole discussion there is a mitzvah in the torah to have children but one has to understand that marriage is good and marriage is sacred and marriage is noble within the context of the relationship of a husband and a wife [Music] then of course it gets augmented when you take on the role of parent but one has to understand that even a childless marriage as sad as that might be is a sanctified holy noble good relationship that makes the world better than it otherwise would be now listen i'm obviously aware of the fact that divorce rates have skyrocketed and although the jewish community is a little better than the general community but it's at least in the united states it's not much better it's catching up in a negative way and part of that i think and again there are particular reasons i mean obviously the torah allows for divorce so the torah obviously understands that sometimes marriages don't work so i don't mean at all in anything that i say to cast dispersions on individual cases i i myself are very familiar with individual cases but it's a general proposition i think the ethic of either not getting married or getting married very late or getting divorced comes from the ethos of instant gratification now i remember the first time i got a fax machine in those days i used to use fax machines this is before email and i had to send the fax from baltimore to china and it took five minutes and i was drumming my fingers what is taking so long right so i too was habituated to instant gratification i mean think about a hundred years ago how long it would take to send a letter from baltimore to china it might take six months and here i was being a little upset that it took five minutes but that's what it is we want instant gratification i want it now if my relationship doesn't work throw it out the phone doesn't work throw it out camera doesn't work whatever it is marriage doesn't work throw it out we're not used to the idea of hard work and again i include myself we're not used to the idea that good things take sacrifice and they take effort and that's kind of why when things don't work out we just want to get out we want to bail out and go to the next instant gratification so in the best way again it doesn't always work out this way because we don't maybe they'll come up with other questions we don't necessarily give our kids the education for marriage and the like but in the best way [Music] marriage is kind of almost the best school you can have in life to develop yourself morally spiritually to become a giver rather than a taker and of course when you're a parent even more so and more than a yeshiva more than a show more than anything this can be the great laboratory for spiritual growth thank you it's beautiful beautiful beautiful um you know i was talking to my son and he had an interesting analogy he said uh you know we're just talking you were just talking about delaying marriage that uh he compared into the netflix phenomena so it's a saturday night and a couple is shabbat's over and they want to watch a movie together and so they start looking and no they don't like this one they don't like that one and before you know it took them a half hour and they said well i guess we won't watch a movie tonight so he i don't know if he came up with that who came up with it but the idea is you know the idea of looking for the perfect person you know do we have too much of that going on and what how do how do you counsel young men young women uh about what i mean what what's the core things you're looking for and and where do you go with that yeah that's a very very very good analogy and indeed uh even within the most religious circles we find this particular problem this is not only a secular or less religious problem and that is people look for perfection people make up lists they make up a list of 100 qualities and they will not uh marry somebody because they only have 97 of them uh and one has to understand that often often the consequence of this is going to be they get nobody at all you know the talmud talks about the idea that things are predetermined that god announces before you're born who you'll marry it's called bashert in yedish so katana a young man went to the stifler and said when will i find my bashar and the staffer said you met her five years ago and you simply let the opportunity uh pass by again i think part of the problem once again without at risk of repeating myself it goes back to the notion that if i look at marriage as the thing that's supposed to give me gratification then yeah i want it to be perfect but voltaire himself said that the best is often the enemy of the better that when we think things have to be 100 we are disabled from doing something very significant think about in the aftermath of the holocaust many of you would have parents or the grandparents who are survivors of the holocaust that generation is actually dying out but there's still some survivors and many of them lost their first families in a tragic way and they knew they had to rebuild the jewish people and no i was not alive then myself but you know the stories i'm told is you simply i went over to somebody hey let's get married you know and and they made it work because they had a commitment they had a vision you know my spouse is not going to be perfect because i'm not perfect i mean listen if i insist on perfection who's going to want to marry me right so life is about compromising and life is about prioritizing and life is about an understanding that things are not going to be 100 but you can make it good you can make it you and then with the other person so when we talk about you know what you're looking for you're looking for a partner in life someone that's not a duplicate of you in fact in many ways you might say opposites attracted that has a certain amount of validity certain amount of validity if they're two opposites it may not work but you're looking for somebody that you're comfortable with someone that you feel understands you and someone that you feel you understand we're looking and again even though i myself identify as karate but i would say extreme religiosity is not necessarily the most important quality you know you want obviously if you're an observant jew you want someone who's committed to mitzvot but i would put much more emphasis on me doubts about unkindness on gentleness on a sense of humility a kind of happy optimistic outlook on life and someone that is flexible and willing to roll with the punches because you know life is not perfect well from god's perspective it is but from our perspective there's all sorts of imperfections that we don't understand and if you can't roll with the punches if you can't be resilient if you can't have a sense of humor if every little thing that goes wrong you know is so upsetting to you you know you're not going to be able to be a good spouse and and i would recommend you're looking for a spouse you're looking for those qualities of flexibility resilience optimism hopeful attitude and you know caring and you know the the russia-saran brings an interesting point avraham had a servant eliezer he was a righteous man and avram did not want his son to marry eliezer's daughter he sent eliezer to avraham's family these were a family of idolaters of pagans why would avram prefer pagans to his faithful servant and iran says because although eliezer as a canaanite was very very righteous the canaanites had a streak of cruelty and avraham knew that although his family was pagan they had the quality of kindness as rivkah demonstrated therefore the iran says i'm not giving this as a halacha better to marry an idol worshiper who's kind than a very religious person who's cruel because because religious issues can be changed by education and exposure but mido to vote they're very difficult if they've god forbid there's not a midatola it's very difficult to acquire them right so i think people are looking for the wrong thing i mean i know that uh people often emphasize you know the girls might emphasize in the haredi world black hat you know the right uh yeshiva etc um i think we need to focus much more on me dose and resiliency and optimism and kindness as the primary qualities and of course let me let me just express the obvious idea one does not have the right to hope for that type of unless you develop those qualities within yourself now sometimes god gives you a freebie that's true sometimes not such a great person might be zoha for whatever reason to a phenomenal uh partner in life and again some people have all the luck so to speak it's amazing from hashem but in terms of what you have a right to expect you know you cannot expect to find a person of mido to vote unless you work on it yourself so people have to realize that part of what is called the hishtat look the effort of trying to find a marriage partner is the spiritual work on yourself to become a better person and uh i know so again those are the things that i would i would look for now i do want to say one other thing people often tell me and i often hear this in the yeshiva world wonderful woman again i'm speaking from a male perspective i deal with the men but but women might say the same thing and the other way around wonderful person but i don't feel chemistry i'm not sexually attracted is that important so here i have to say the following you know theoretically i could make a whole speech not important the most important thing is me though to vote but here's the thing if you're the khafichai foreign doesn't ask me questions but if you're taking time i would say yeah okay looks you're not important chemistry is unimportant just get married make it work but we're not the happy time and the point is even if something that may intrinsically not be so important if it bothers you if it affects you if it gives you unease then you can't go ahead with it because what's going to happen is either you're going to get resentful or the other person is going to sense that you're not attracted to them and you're putting them through a tremendous shame and humiliation so i could make a list of the theoretically most important qualities but i also have to pay attention to what this individual person is bothered with to know as a rabbi as a counselor for me to ignore even the idiosyncrasies of a person would be a very very big mistake would be a very great disservice right so we do have to work within the limitations of the person and of course keep in mind that since sexual intimacy is part of a jewish marriage number one for children but even without children there's a mitzvah for husband and wife to have that intimacy so there does have to be a certain amount of sexual attraction i just want to follow up with just a quick follow-up yeah because i know of uh a couple um you know that things didn't work out with them a young couple because they were in a different place relative to one aren't there some you know in terms of the religious world are there some make or break kinds of things that you would say yeah so so first of all i guess first of all i would have to say uh it depends on your situation what often happens is husband and wife were in the same place when they got married and then one became a when one didn't want to go there that's one type of problem but if you're talking about before we even get married right anytime they're holding a significantly different religious place that is high risk you're in the red zone automatically however that doesn't mean it's impossible i wouldn't advise it i wouldn't encourage it but there are such unions and some manage to be reasonably well the only make or break issue really is tarata mishbakar because it takes two to tango tango meaning the following theoretically i can be ashamed shabbat even if my wife is not or vice versa actually commonly the other way is the way it works the wife might be ashamed of shabbat and the husband not theoretically we could agree to have a kosher home but the other spouse is free to eat their tray from the garage or whatever it is that is not optimal and it creates a lot of confusion on the part of the kids but it is possible if on the however tyrata mishpacha is something which automatically affects the observance of the religious man or woman meaning if i'm married to somebody who doesn't want to keep the laws of neither then i will not be able to keep those laws either so i would have to say just in a very superficial way that the make it or break it point is the mikvah is the mikra shabbat kashruts are you you can work it out although with great great difficulty and i wouldn't encourage it but it is a possibility right nida is not a possibility and i would also say that the second thing is jewish education for the children meaning to say if i am married to a spouse who refuses to allow the children to have a jewish education that would have to be a maker to break it of course the problem is it's not even clear that divorce is going to help you because with joint custody and the like you may still have a problem so be very very careful in terms of where you go with that choice of marriage partner very interesting you know i have a dear friend and uh and he's got three kids and the kids are aged ones and 26 one is finally pushing 30 and another one's 34. and none of them from his perspective or he didn't maybe he just doesn't know maybe he doesn't know it there's something going on but they're they're not they're not you know nobody's engaged nobody's dating nobody's uh they may be dating but there's nobody and so you know i almost don't want to ask them hey how are the kids because it's on their mind all the time they pray for it is there any advice you can give to parents to somehow encourage adult children um in this path is there a way to get to them either through friends or through some other way to help in this situation you know it's very very tricky with adult children because adult children are adults and i think a lot itself recognizes that parents should not be in the role of micromanaging the decisions that adult children make i mean part of parenting is to let your children grow up and make decisions even if they're not the most most positive so it is very tricky and also it'll be counterproductive in many cases if an adult child feels like you know his mother says when am i going to see your grandchild type of thing you know it really turns turns them off and it makes them uh almost more adamant not to have a relationship with that parent so you have to be very very you as a parent to an adult child have to be very very very diplomatic and you know kind of stress the positives don't kind of be accusatory you know when are you going to get married but just say you know and hopefully now again let me point out that if if the parents don't have a good marriage that itself was going to be a problem but let's assume let's assume they have a good marriage there can be a talk in which a parent can just say you know i just want you to know that my life with your mother or my life with your father has been so good and so rewarding and we got you out of that marriage you know other children and i just hope you know i'm not going to push you but i just hope you'll give some thought that maybe you could have to bring the same joy into your life that we've had in our life now as i say that that works when you have a good marriage if you don't have a good marriage it's a little more difficult to market so to speak but you do it in a gentle way in an open way and uh not not accusing and not making demands right or the lack you know yeah okay now this is uh uh i want to ask this uh question rabbi i know yeah we have made aliyah in a late our lives um but um the it seems like the pool of available applicants as it were in israel given the amount of young jewish men and women here is sizable and it also is the united states vote but there are certain points in people's lives maybe when they have an opportunity to to come maybe it's something uh if they're not having success in the united states they should should they should they think about coming here is it how do you think israel plays into this i mean israel is a place that honestly you look at the um it's a place where even secular people are it's are having lots of children um it's different than america the the culture is a little different and maybe maybe there's something positive getting here as difficult and as difficult as a mitzvah as that is yeah one thing i will say i i myself have been in israel for ten years still adjusting again getting there uh one thing i will say that israeli society and again i include secular as well as religious i'm not limited to religious is a very family oriented society i mean of course you have your swingers in tel aviv but by and large uh there's a big commitment to family to having children part of it is because there's a certain tragic dimension in israel israeli life we've been through so many wars you know young young men have young men primarily have died men and women have died in terrorist attacks i think there's a sense that every child is very very precious uh even within the medical system you'll find fertility treatments are covered by insurance much more so than in the united states and the government subsidizes every child that you have so it is a family friendly society you know whatever criticisms you might have of israel as a whole one of its great strengths is that children marriage and children are treasured and that's even true to some degree you know within the secular segments of the population as well in fact i've said i've often said and other people have said it as well that a secular israeli still has more or less some type of strong jewish identification a 90 percent fast on yom kippur uh light sharpest candles etc even if they don't you know keep all the all the halachas so aliyah is something that i think every jew needs to take into account um at least ask the question now aliyah may not be for everybody because some of the adjustments may be difficult and i have to be honest as i tell people before i made aliyah i used to say everybody has to come after i make aliyah you know i said well maybe it's not for for everybody but the thing is it is irresponsible and a dereliction of duty not to ask the question why am i not in israel maybe you'll have a good answer maybe you won't but to simply ignore the question is irresponsible we've been praying for 2000 years bring us back bring us back bring us back and god says well come back what's stopping you a 12-hour hello flight you know uh and now you know uh you can get ben and jerry's and skippy peanut butter you know let's you know what what are you lacking you can have everything you can have everything here i mean even 30 years ago you had to wait like you know six months to get a telephone you know uh things were a little hard now brooke hashem with never has benefits you can finish the paperwork before you land no so things are a lot easier and i have to say too although uh you know i'm not a prophet obviously but if you look about look at what's happening in the united states and of course my own children are in the united states and i am an american citizen and i'm very appreciative to the united states but there are a lot of things that are happening that are matters of concern not just corona which of course affects israel as well but kind of the breakdown of law and order of the real possibility of you know armed revolution depending on the outcome of the election from either side right actually and the fact that there are calls for defunding the police as it were in which crime will just be rampant there seems to be an unraveling of a civilization that that was typically relatively stable for more than two centuries and obviously you know i don't know what's going on fully i don't know if anybody does other than hashem but one of the possible interpretations is that god is maybe sending a message to the jewish people that yeah the gallup in america had a nice run and a lot of good things were accomplished but it's time to get up time to come home right uh you know in new york now just uh in reaction to the corona so como uh uh issued a restriction that no synagogue can have more than 10 people well hashem lisa said 10 people not nine people but i mean you know you have shows that have a thousand you know a thousand seats you know initially he said you can have 50 capacity with distancing right 10 people there is no restriction for any other activity and it's almost like the jewish people are being singled out right and zip codes jewish zip codes if you look at social media you see the rise of real anti-semitic sentiments there so i don't like to read the tea leaves i'm not i'm not that type of prognosticator but but i think and hashem is sending us messages and now israel of course is becoming and has become more and more westernized with the passage of time and that's both for the good but unfortunately it's also for the bad so there's a bit of kind of a delay a few maybe a 10-year delay unfortunately a lot of the negative stuff from there finds its way over here but still i think there is a core of of commitment to family to children to marriage that is very very strong i hear and it's still here and i hope i hope it'll last and this is a good place to to raise a child of course there are complications we could maybe do an aldia show at a different time you got to be sure to find the right school which is not easy you might figure you know in a typical american city maybe you'll have uh two or three at a maximum day schools all right you gotta choose here you may have you know 100 but you know with that multiplicity of choices it's very hard to sometimes find the right the right fit so that is a challenge for those who have children but overall if you do your homework you have friends and you have a sense of humor and resilience you can make a very very wonderful life here great again i guess i just want to close rabbi if you have any closing closing thoughts if you're talking to a couple of jewish singles that are in their mid-20s right now and you want to give them give them that you know yeah you know i just want to say that you know we live in a very competitive society and again i'm primarily speaking about the united states um to the extent that now they have exclusive kindergartens in manhattan this is before corona i gather which actually had a five-year waiting list for admission now you think about that if you have a five-year waiting list for kindergarten that means as soon as your wife gets pregnant you better register uh the kids so that five years later they can go to kindergarten and why is that important because you're going to meet makers and shakers in kindergarten that will determine your private school and your high school and your college and your graduate school and there's always another ring on the uh merry-go-round the golden ring that we're trying to grab so what happens is a person tries to get into the best high school best college best law school i'll take law as an example that i'm familiar with then you want to get a wall street partnership and you keep on going and going and going and going but what happens is at some point you reach as high as you're going to reach meaning at some point everybody knows they're not going to be president of the united states they're not going to be on the supreme court or they're not going to win an olympic gold medal or they're not going to be in the world series so what do you do with the second half of your life what do you do when you've gone as far as you're going to go in this material world of success you know alexander the great legend has it died at the age of 30 or after we conquered the whole known world i mean that's a fact that's not a legend but the legend is that his last words were what other worlds do i have to conquer and he died the legend says out of heartbreak and this is going to happen people who live lives that are based on gratification money power success at some point maybe it'll be in their 30s maybe their 40s maybe their 50s they're going to hit a wall call it midlife crisis call it burnout you can call it many many different names because at some points there may be enough energy in the achievements that propels them but then at the end of the day they're going to say what have i accomplished now it's hard at least stevenson well like a george bernard shaw once said it's a pity that youth is wasted on the young they don't know how to use it and natalie stevenson once gave a very very very beautiful speech to uh the college graduation in which he said there is so much i could tell you based on my experience but you're not going to listen to me you're going to have to experience it yourself so in a way when you sit and you tell a young fellow who's still in the middle of this rat race you know it's not ultimately it's not going to be that much that important they're not going to always hear you but the truth of the matter is without a spiritual foundation without a family without a community without a devotion to something beyond yourself you're setting yourself up for sadness and frustration and loneliness at the end of the day and therefore one has to think a little bit you know we spend so much time preparing for a lively hood and so little time preparing for a life and i think marriage family all goes into you know what life type of life do i have um i think there's a um a grave in england going back to the middle ages that says something like born a man died a lawyer and that's a very interesting point you know you're born a human being but at some point the careerism takes it over i'm no longer a person of just the career but life has to be richer than that it has to be deeper than that and that's where family torah mitzvos and family play that vital role in enriching and deepening the life that you have thank you okay thank you thank you again i i wish you much much luck in success [Music] thank you rabbi congratulations that was fantastic those are foundational thoughts that i think we could all use and thank you rabbi for sponsoring this and we look forward to our next installment and hope you will join us uh with uh jewish family forever and we look forward to building the best jewish families we can across the world amen thank you [Music] is