Parenting Uninspired Children - Tehila and Jeremy Gimpel: The Land of Israel Fellowship

all right well fellowship we are entering into a new era welcome uh to gila gimpel to the fellowship we opened up for questions and answers and a lot of the questions had to do with parenting with children with family and i just wanted to bring the expert here expert okay so hi guys so nice to meet everyone um i've really been enjoying getting feedback by email and questions and kind of getting to know some of you um there's a question that keeps um coming up in different you know different forms and permutations and it's about what do we do about kids that aren't following in our path you know as part of this fellowship i'm sure that a lot of you have this feeling that you're you know starting a journey with hashem or in the middle of a journey with hashem and we're really lit up we're inspired we're excited and then it doesn't always transfer to the kids you know you might have a bunch of kids and one of them is not really into it you might be the only one who's getting fired up for torah and the rest of your family is just kind of looking at you like what's happening with mom what's happening with that so what do we do about kids that aren't following the same you know faith path journey that we're on um that's something that keeps something keeps coming up and i think we also you know relate with that as a family i've yet to meet um a family uh neither jewish or from the nations it doesn't at some point have some kind of struggle with you know with this issue with you know with your kids how do you get them excited and inspired for the things that you're excited and inspired for and what do you do when they're not what do you do when they're not um you know jeremy and i sometimes laugh and we'll see a family they're like oh that family is perfect they don't have any struggles with their kids and over the years we've learned to just say wait for it wait for it because you know everyone at least that we know seems to have uh seems to have you know this issue that they have to deal with in some way or another um now what is the what is the right way to look at that you know internally how do we deal with that how do we how do we deal with our kids and how do we deal with our own feelings of shame and inadequacy around you know things that didn't exactly turn out the way we planned with our kids what do we what do we do with that so i'm going to take at least my fundamental prison through which i see things and then i'll give it over to the expert maybe with a little bit more detail the story of judah is the foundational story of the jewish people he's the father of king david he's like the leader he is the king and you see the story of judah is a story of self-discovery they sell joseph judah literally has an identity crisis he leaves the family cuts himself all from the destiny of israel goes down and says multiple times to abdullah becomes intermingled with prostitutes intermingled with non-jews and oh just he's like he's out he is off the path and jacob and his family are just like what do they do and then it's a whole process for judah to actually find his way back into the fold to take his place within jewish destiny to take his place within the family and i think that that is a blueprint for all of us that every child needs to find their own way then we have our way and we've found our own way and we've paved our own path in our own lives and then the best way for a child to really grow into himself is he's going to have to make mistakes he's going to have to go down and he's going to have to find his own way back into the family and into the destiny of israel and i think that that's like very comforting to realize that uh every person has their own faith journey and as the children kind of grow and evolve they're gonna find their own way and that's not something to like be embarrassed of that's just the blueprint of how the world works i would take it even further i would say the entire book of breishi the entire book of genesis is really a story of parents struggling with this right you have avraham struggling with ishmael you have yitzhak struggling with asa you have yaakov struggling with all of his kids right it's like it's like that's it's not it's not the exception it's almost it's almost the rule um and before the before the torah even gives us you know before the torah even tells us about the laws and you know gives us the ten commandments it's already setting out for us get ready even when you know even in the the greatest giants the founders of our the founders of our faith they struggled with this it's not you know that that for me kind of takes away that element of oh you know shame what's wrong with me why you know why isn't my kid behaving the way that i wanted if you know that that all of our fathers struggled with this and their you know their story is is really the blueprint print for all of our reality i think it kind of settles down that that feeling and also to realize that the epic legendary stories of the patriarchs and matriarchs of israel all of us have our own stories that are unfolding and we have kind of a model that with these challenges uh sometimes emerges the most beautiful of all stories yeah something interesting is that in hebrew the word for parent is horit and um you know hurray comes from the from the root of peregrine is to be pregnant from what i know um and we have you guys are from how many different countries 24 24 different countries you guys can tell me about your languages but i'm pretty sure that hebrew is the only language where the word for parent actually means pregnant in hebrew it means it teaches us that your entire parenting career and it doesn't matter if your kids are 2 20 or 40 your entire parenting career is kind of like an ongoing pregnancy just because the kid is out of your body doesn't mean that you're done with a pregnancy because with a pregnancy when you're pregnant you know your your baby is developing and you don't rush it you never meet some you know mom who's saying you know i really hope my baby's born prematurely because i just you know wanna wanna get them get them out because you know that inside your baby still has stages to develop and so the hebrew language i think is teaching us to look at our entire parenting career like that you know you're never going to say okay you know you're 10 years old you're 18 years old you're 25 years old i expect you to be you know done and fully baked you're on a journey it's an ongoing pregnancy where each stage has its development and to have this expectation that at any certain stage your child is going to be completely done developing and becoming who they are um it's it's just it's an unrealistic expectation and that sort of also for me gives gives um you know the right a healthy kind of perspective on um on how to see how to see your child's development and even in that hurrah to teach hooray to parent hirayun and torah itself it's all saying this is all just a pregnancy we're all within this womb of like uh mercy reckon is mercy but it's also like a place of growth it's a place like just giving a safe space to allow the child to like find them find their own way yeah and um with that um you know i was uh studying there's a prayer of the uh um who was one of the greatest spiritual leaders and torah scholars of ashkenaz in the 17th century he wrote a prayer i'm going to try to send it out to everybody by email i actually found a translation of it into english as well he wrote a prayer for parents to say over their children and it's it's a it's a beautiful prayer and just having you know he teaches us that just every you know every child needs prayers our children need our prayers um and an interesting thing that he says within within the prayer that he wrote was and it connects to what we were just talking about about genesis is that he says may we all you know you know live um you know merit to eternal life before you hashem and you know what verse he he quotes he quotes the verse he says right may he live before you who is he talking about when he says may he live before you when did that show up in the bible busted i don't know of course you do ishmael okay right right when he says may he live before you when hashem says you know i'm going to give you yeah right he says may ishmael it before you right and so it's i think it's so interesting that within his prayer he doesn't quote um a verse about one of the children that were like the top you know the top contenders for being the greatest successes in the bible right he quotes he quotes avraham talking about ishmael meaning that desire that avraham had for ishmael to you know successfully live a god-fearing life in front of hashem that was like a sort that was a source of inspiration for the in that prayer i think that connects kind of what we were talking about so i just love that prayer i'm gonna send you guys out um a copy of it um and another thing that i think gives us a lot of um kind of strength in this in our in our gives us you know for me that's it's a really important thing in our parenting journey is um is taurus study with each kid something interesting that um about the about maimonides writes in the um laws of torah study you would think that in the laws of torah study the first law would be study the torah right wouldn't that make sense it's the laws of torah study interestingly the commandment to study torah actually only shows up in the eighth law that maimonides brings you know what the first ones are about studying with your children studying with your children maybe you would think that it's like okay you study you have a lot to impart to your children and then you know the rambam would say teach that to your children he goes in the opposite direction he says study with your children study torah with your children and then later on he says learn torah for yourself so for me that that that teaches me something so um fundamental it's like you can learn on your own that's great but the real learning process comes from learning with your children when you sit and try to you know crack something open and make it accessible for your child and meet them in the place where they are um it's it's a greater torah study than just getting fired up yourself something really interesting happened to us we were um you know we were trying to study with our children i said to each kid i said i really want you guys to find the torah book that you know the torah field that that speaks to you the most and we're gonna we're gonna learn with each child the thing that interests him most we're gonna have individual special tour study time with each kid and so you know so our son akiva said i want to learn you know he wants to learn the prophets great so we're learning prophets with him eden says we want to learn i want to learn um you know prayer so we're studying you know we're studying this together with little noah we were learning the secret book about to see because he's four and he just started wearing succeed last year and then with our oldest son who seems to be uh one of our one of our um least inspired that's not what i'm gonna say one of our one of our dear friends in the fellowship who i've been writing you know i've been emailing back and forth with on this subject she told me she shared with me the idea of individuating that adolescence teenagers young adult they need to individuate and they need to kind of find their own individual identity so with our audience it seems like everything that we're excited about in torah is the opposite of what interests him in torah right if if at all right so so then i kind of came up and i was like hey you know you wanna what do you wanna learn and jeremy and i were all about learning the you know the mystical teachings and the prayer and the and the spiritual and the prophets and i was i kind of thought he was just going to brush me off and be like nah he goes yeah i want to learn i said what do you want to learn he goes i want to learn the law i want to learn and i said okay and he goes i want to learn the law of the sabbatical year the the working of the fields how do you how you're allowed to work the fields in the sabbatical year now sabbatical years in like another year and a half he's like i want to prepare for the sabbatical year and i'm thinking to myself okay so i go to the shelf and i find a book about the jewish laws and we are just learning together chapter after chapter of how you're allowed to pull up weeds in the sabbatical year that's going to be in another year and a half right jeremy was like i was shocked that he wanted to learn anything at all and then of course he chooses like the one topic that is like it's like the least it's not ours like not us but whatever right we were so happy and it reminded me of the talmud says that that when hashems when the torah the torah comes down into the world it's like a it's like a hammer hitting a rock right sparks go out everywhere it says there's 70 faces to the torah there are 70 70 ways in which the torah comes into the world and each person has their own spark each person has their own way and so um for me that was you know just showing how how each kid has their own path and torah and it's you know instead of us just trying to come and say you know this is the way of the torah hashem says no there are 70 paths in the torah right how can i kind of accompany you on your torah path which might be totally different you know it might be totally different and not even look like a torah path to me but that doesn't mean it's not a torah path there's just you know there's just so many ways that that can express itself um in the world and so that's the answer on one foot for that question it's definitely not an answer it's like the beginning of just like an ongoing conversation but i think that remembering that uh the children they're not us they kind of come through us and that they have to find their own path in the world and that uh everyone should be blessed to help their children find their own path in the world and when their path seems like they're going all the way in the other direction just realize that that's a part of their journey as well all right