Rabbi Shlomo Landau

good morning everybody every hunt if we say viremam tanumi kalasha and that bark who elevated us from all lushen from all expression and a number of years ago someone shared me something so profound as a jewish person as a yid we go through experiences that are random tanumi kalashan they're more elevated than any expression you can't explain it as much as you try for example not that long ago to walk our first child down the chupa i can't i can't describe that feeling i can't write about it and i think about mr sham one day when i walk my child who's put us on this journey down the hupa hashem i i can't even begin to describe what i'm sure those sentiments and emotions will be about 36 hours ago i came to this shabbaton i've never been involved with kesha navi i didn't even heard of it actually and it is indescribable what i've seen over the last 36 hours it is so more elevated and so much more guy been and higher than any words can describe to see the incredible commitment and dedication of parents to their children people opening up to complete strangers because maybe they can gnash a nugget of inspiration of something they could take home to their house of the unbelievable dedication of mesiras nephesh from kidalia on every other person that's involved here it's very mumtanamic i can't describe it and i know when i come back to lakewood people are going to say where were you for shabbos and i'll say kesha nation i'll say what is that i'll be like i can't describe it i'm sorry i'll really try that's not what we're going to talk about today we're going to talk about something that i am not an expert about and that i struggle with like everybody else i'm not a therapist i was a rough for 20 years now i'm a positive but i will say that this is something which is first and foremost in my my mind and my wife's mind all the time and that is building resilient kids and especially let's call spade a spade we're all in the same room here definitely the thing that we're worried about the most besides after our child that's struggling or maybe equally is the rest of the children in our family i was speaking to rebecca landau and that's not my wife she's the wife of rabbi lando from varetsky by the way friday night there were a lot of people the session because they thought rabbi lando from veretsky was speaking so i know i was i was like to get to i'm going to call him after shabbos and say rabbi landa i just want to give you yes i spoke to his wife last week and she she runs a support group by the way fantasia she runs a support group from others of struggling children she's a torski so she's she's got a lot going on for her and she said to me that the topic that whenever she asks the women what should we bring a speaker about and about everyone unanimously says the same thing the rest of the kids the rest of the kids so i'd like to take mamish a few minutes to talk about building resilience in children just to demonstrate how inept i am at this so my wife my wife and myself we ran a cure of community for two decades and there was a family in our community that had three children that were beyond rambunctious virai mam tano mikhail there's no way to describe what their children were like and they were secular and every time that they would come to makhav we had a fellow who worked together with me and care of every time that they would come to his house he would they would see how these children sit through the whole sudah they share divreitard they sing smears they're respectful they say they bench together and they're like this is crazy there are people in the world who have children that are misuddar they have children that are functional respective respectful if this is what yiddish i could bring we want to know more about it and eventually they became from and they're tremendous beautiful benetika family today but what happened was that their children still were the same rambunctious verimontanum colossian children and they felt like they did something wrong and then they came to us for a shabbos meal and they realized you could be from and still have kids that are off the charts so i'm not an expert but i want to share just a few nuggets what the of what the research shows about resilient children and we know the research just supports what clients throw in the tire have shown us for thousands of years and just just to segue in or tiptoe into what i want to talk about less than a year ago i'm going to say in the last five years i got a phone call from a premier rabbitson if i said her name i think almost everyone here would know who this robinson is and she said i'm arranging a getaway for post-high school girls and i'd like you to come and speak i said i'm flattered i could talk to my agent i didn't say that um i said what do you want me to talk about she said i want you to talk about one word hashem no torah no want you to talk about resilience she said i interact with hundreds maybe thousands of post-high school girls post-high school girls and as long as the narrative follows the way they crafted their life they're okay you see what's going to happen is they're going to go to high school they're going to get into high school they're going to go to high school they're going to get into their seminary of choice they're going to come back and take courses at tti and pqr and all those different things they're going to get a shidduch because of course why not they're going to get married have great shell and bias have wonderful children and everything's going to be roses it's going to be a bowl of peaches and then all of a sudden something doesn't fit the narrative they don't get into the seminary and by the way rejection is so painful they get into the seminary but they can't keep up they come back and they can't find the job no shidduchim are being read or everything goes well and they get married and all of a sudden what do you mean i thought i was going to marry prince charming and life would be ever we'd live happily ever after and they're struggling in sean baez or then the rebunging throws a curveball and they have a child with all kinds of needs that they never expected and they literally said this top rabbits and they crumble they implode they have no inner strength and no spiritual muscle please i beg you she said if you could say anything about resilience something that would make them that will build them up please do that now i i didn't know i'm not an expert on resilience i speak a lot and try to be mikhasic people and share what's meaningful to me but i didn't know anything about resilience i'll tell what i talked about soon i just need to tell you what happened after i spoke i spoke for an hour i never speak for an hour no one in today's dark could listen to anything for an hour our kids could music that's it by the way the average american teenager listens to eight hours of music a day not average from kid average secular american teen eight hours of music rebounding shalom that takes your brain and turns it into hash browns anyways i spoke for an hour because she asked me please speak for an hour they're a captive audience they're at a retreat they're not going anywhere and i spoke and i listened for an hour which was amazing then she says can you take questions and answers i'm like no more coaches we did questions and answers for almost an hour and then i said i have to leave and then as i walked out there was a line of girls waiting to speak to me i'm not saying this classic to toot my own horn or to flex as my students would say i'm just saying this to show how people crave resilience and then a young lady approached me on the way out this is where i'm going with this and she said to me can i talk to you privately for two minutes i said i don't have an office here and i don't talk to people privately but if you'd like we could go into a corner in the lobby and i'll tell the rest of the girls please stay back how can i help you now just for brevity's sake i want to describe to you what the girl looked like okay i wasn't ma iron but she was sanua rabbitson edelknadel mamish that's who she was and she says to me and she exhales and she looks at me and she says to me i've never told this to anyone i'm starting shidduchim in a few months my father and mother are hush of a people special mabitara i'm going to be read the best brochurement brisk because i'm the best girl she said i want you to know something it's all a show i am a hollow shell an edel canada hollow shell there's no paneemius whatsoever i have no relationship with rabbi shalom tara and mitzvahs are not meaningful to me i'm a straight a student i crushed all those ramban reports i could read a parhadit but there's zero inside of me and i'm gonna go out with some guy and i'm gonna marry him because that's what everyone says i should do and i'm marrying a fellow and it's a sham and a lie what should i do and i realized the and said speak about resilience she didn't need a speech about resilience she needed to fill the shell and it was hollow and empty and as parents that's our kadash we need to fill a paneemius in our children and i want to share four things that the research shows that what how do we fill our nemeus how do we fill the inner part of our child so the shell the edo canada on the external has an edo canada inside how do we do that i'm going to share just the simple research that's out there and show you how profound and beautiful it is because it's literally a symmetrical walk with with with husqva for so many years and so many generations the first thing that the research shows what i'm quoting now is you can go out there it's all it's all available i happen to be quoting from harvard that's okay but harvard is like high described harvard people never heard of harvard it's like brisk in the gosha world that's how i describe by the way to all the secular jews they're like where'd you go to sheep i said i went to the harvard of yeshivas really right huh he can't get into harvard either the tuition is different the first and foremost recipe nakuda for raising resilient children the research shows is a healthy relationship with one adult one adult that adult could be a parent hopefully both parents matteo manoy a rebbe a grandparent even an older sibling one of the ways the first and foremost way is to work on making sure that our child has a healthy open communicative relationship with a with an adult if you as a parent can't be that person rahman al-islam there are people like that find somebody else now rabbi so we all know this it's so easy to say our kids need to have healthy adult relationships but a healthy adult relationship is very hard to form with a child it's a lot of love it's a lot of listening it's a lot of time it's energy it's effort i want to say something if you don't prepare for your shabba suda i don't mean preparing the food the revisions and the ladies do an amazing job with that but if we don't prepare for our shabbos then we missed out on recipe number one because so much happens at the shabba suda by the way your children know if you put an effort into preparing something to save your job they know they're so good at telling they know if during kabbalah shabbos you are flipping through the art scroll handout and rabbi hisliker who's here with us the shabbos he put together a cute story and you read it because your kid read it also drink of all shops so i shouldn't do you were reading during chicago that's a little tiny nugget of something we could do to build that relationship quality time everyone talks about time all these things but quality relationship is not something crazy it's trying to take each of our children and our lives are so busy we're pulled in so many different directions and create a safe exclusive space just for that child i'm also a rebbe but i'm totally fine when a kid doesn't come to yeshiva one day because his parent decided to take the morning off with the child took them out for breakfast went for a walk with them played a game with them whatever they did this is building resilience the problem is we are pulled in so many different directions financially we're trying to support our mishpaches we're trying to fuel our own rochnias work on our shalom bias be involved in simcha's kanai nahara if you're anything like me every single day in our mailbox there are multiple simcha invitations and we want to go to every single one of them that means we're not we're not home every single night of the week and the year right now i'm in a very difficult situation whereby i'm getting a lot of speaking opportunities but like you can't go away for shabbos all the time shabbos is the most important day of the whole week so we need to make a plan with our spouse or ourselves of how we can have a real goal to attaining a good adult relationship with our child they crave it so badly and sadly everyone said this a thousand times over shabbos when they don't have it with us or a functional healthy person they'll find it with somebody else and that could be so counterproductive so we we must need to carve out time i don't know when you do this or we do is where we turn off our phone by the way don't craft the plan on your phone i'm sure there's an app for building resilient children app check child has a good adult relationship build time to think about it to reflect about it what am i doing to invest in each of my children can i know how the on benched us with nine children none of my children are even a drop the same each one of them has their own personality each one has their own intellectual capability each one has their own emotional vulnerabilities and you mummy have to take time to do heiser they're so important i had a conversation with someone that was so heartbreaking there's a very affluent fellow and he never stops working and i said to him why do you work so he says i'm doing it for my children so how often do you spend time at your children a rabbi got a phone call he couldn't answer that question he's doing it for his children what do you mean you're ignoring your children in the process you're not building any resilience whatsoever we need to take time to craft a plan with every child and think about it you're a parrot of multiple of many children you know how much time and effort that takes let's call a spade a spade it's by far the most challenging task we ever got in our lives which is raising our children resilient and making them healthy i mean natara says it it's not it's not it's it's it's our greatest responsibility yo solomon told me one time i went to speak to him about expanding our mishpacha i'll be honest i cannot hurt we had a whole house full of kids and myself and my wife were having a discussion you know do we expand the mush bacha sometimes i think when people tell my wife i may have asked him she thinks children so romanticize solomon shared with me she's not here right hashem so anyways yo salmon shares to me and he said if we would know on a spiritual level api what the incredibles of bringing in shama into this world is we would just want to fill our houses with children and children and children but at the same time we also have to realize what it takes to nurture that and we have to be honest with ourselves hashem wherever you are right now and whatever your plans are you need to have a plan that's point number one and point number two is something called self efficacy if anyone here is a therapist or one you know learned about this there's a big word self-efficacy it's fine you'd have to know what the word efficacy means i'll tell you and you shiva should determine what efficacy means but it means giving your child opportunities to build inner muscle you know children all the time struggle and all the time they have necessity on us even a small child we think about that when our first when our kid was two or three years old and they had a bag of chips you know a snack bag whoever invented that by the way should be shot all my kids ever want is snack bags it's crazy what do you want for breakfast this morning i'll have barbecue potato chips it's a vegetable my son i'll be honest i have one kid who's unbelievably creative and so anyways this week i come like it's like 10 o'clock at night and he's eight he's still up he's eating supper because he'd eat supper before he's having a salad come tell you what's in the salad potato chips corn chips and pretzels he says toddy there's two vegetables and one starch self-efficacy means creating opportunities for our child to win remember when our child was like two or three years old and they they shared that snack bag with another kid with another kid in the family what did we do we made a kiddush like the whole family hooray we're so proud of you because we hopped up for your for the first time maybe in that kid's life he realized i could eat the rest of myself or i could give it to somebody else and you know giving it to somebody else maybe that's a good thing and he made a conscious decision and by the way when you applaud it oh my gosh it's amazing i want to share a moment beautiful personal moment of self-efficacy it's one of my proudest moments as a parent there's many moments i'm not proud of it's so much easier to talk about the proud moments we went to bar park for purim for those of you that were in bar park on param it's so beautiful it's so amazing we had our own kahila's purim suda then my wife drove me i didn't drive anyone to the purim suit and we came to purim as the sun was setting you know matsupuram my schwager calls that the time when you coast i don't know what that means but you coast and it was beautiful and we were still we got we still got some of this somehow we still got some of the energy and we still got the opportunity for the many knocks at the doors from a ton of young men everything else in between 10 o'clock at night i sobered up i get drunk on porn i'm sorry i do whatever i'd sobered up and we're putting away tables and chairs and stuff like that knock at the door and there's a man standing there and he's clearly a real nebucha i'll be honest and he says tsudaka and i reach into my pocket now before purim i went to the bank and i got a roll of ones and some other bills because i knew a whole perimeter people come over you want to give them out i had no money left i didn't have any money and it didn't have this is before the credit card machines they only take 3.5 before that my son is there he must have been four maybe five and he looks at me and says todd you don't have any money i said i don't have any money so what are we going to do because i don't know he reaches into his pocket sorry if i get choked up and he takes out his wallet i didn't know he had his wallet on ladies and gentlemen my four-year-old or five-year-old had five dollars that was all he ever had in his life he got four dollars for his fourth birthday and one dollar of purim gout where i'm from they don't give porn guilt and he had five dollars and he says to me tatty do you think he really needs it he said he really needs it look at him and he reaches into his pocket and he takes out all five dollars and he gives it to the man no don't clap for okay and i remember just picking my son up and smothering him with kisses and hugs and telling him that it was like my perhaps my proudest moment as a father and he's like number six and rabbi ladies and gentlemen my son just turned 15 and he still talks about that moment because that was a moment of self-efficacy a moment of greatness zion and he crushed it and i feel in shamayim that matzah purim at that moment it was such an ace rutzen when the additional person did what hashem does and that's just give for no other reason we need to give our children opportunities a lot of parents i think would have said no no no it's fine don't worry about it he just collected ten thousand dollars today it's okay no let your child figure it out help them identify help them identify the moment than akura and then congratulate them like you never did before when they're successful and by the way if you're a smart parent and you're a smart human being you can even craft the the opportunities for children to prove themselves give them a challenge there's nothing more rewarding in the world than the feeling of being successful there's a lot of artificial knockoffs for that but real success and work through success that's amazing so number two number one right we said was a healthy nurturing adult relationship and number two is giving our children opportunities to decide and to shine and again these all take but if we don't think about them we'll never ever get there maybe if we're lucky our child will make the right decision and then we'll be able to congratulate them if we realize if we realize and by the way success doesn't mean the way the world defines success right what's success scholastically you got an a as a rebbe this tore me apart i'm teaching for 20 years high school and this tears me apart all the time where i have a boy in the class who gets 83 on a test and he studied for three days for that gemara test and of a kid in the class who gets 100 that didn't even study he doesn't even listen and this kid gets an a and he gets a b it's great because i'm not teaching in the school anymore but i'm gonna tell you the truth i stopped grading tests the kids would be like the kids would be like rebbe when are we gonna get the test back and i'll be like when you're a senior citizen that's when you're going to get it back because it's not about to me it's if you're functioning in this class and you're doing well and you're putting in the effort and you're feeling the success oh that's who i want and i want every single kid in the class to feel to taste that success so i'll ask a simple softball question and a kid will give a response and we'll put him up on a path did everyone hear what he just said yeah oneplus one is two it does make a difference but that's his definition of success and you know what next time when i ask a question slowly the hand will go up because he was successful that's how you build self-efficacy the opportunity to put yourself out and to be successful we need to craft that narrative we need to follow it that's number two i want to skip to number four and if we have time to come back to number three because number four was so inspiring the api course or the kai for him who are part of this initiative at harvard they aren't all that speaks about building emotional intelligence in our children put this at the end but listen this is mind-boggling you know what the fourth nakuda for building resilience in your children is it's faith hope and traditions is that not crazy in a world where religion is shunt and everything that's holy is profane they couldn't control themselves from putting number four obviously the importance of resilience being faith being hope and traditions and this is really what i want to talk about it's about creating a real paneemia for our children because i think that there's so many people that observe yiddish kite but much fewer people live yet there's so many people that go through the routine they dive in they shuckle they keep taran it's just they buy a beautiful lulula vanessa but how many people have a paninis in each of those mitzvahs and no one's to blame but at least myself i look back to my career i learned brisk and i learned ponovitch and a bunch of these yeshivas and we always focused on the what huh gemara gumar is what it's what and i'm telling you i could take apart hitler mitzvah if it's a misa mitzvah if it's a standalone i could tell you the briskarov and then all those different things but i'm going to tell you the truth i never cropped what hitler mitzvah is i'm not talking about what it is but what it is why am i spending on this well anyways i have a budget that's so limited because can i not have to pay tuition for nine children oh and therapy bills whatever that's nothing actually it's more and i'll say what i said on friday because i believe in this so strongly they just raised 25 million dollars trying to raise 25 million to give morris um raises and they should because they deserve it we need to raise 25 million dollars to create a fund for us parents so we could pay our therapists and go on vacations and give our children what they need so if anyone here wants to give 25 million dollars right now stand up you were here when it happened let's keep dreaming build some resilience but i think this is so important we need to be proactive when it comes to giving our children yiddish i just got a text message this morning we had a little get-together upstairs for some other abundant therapists i got a text message from someone in our community and he says i know i should have come to the shabbaton that wasn't the right week okay i i respect that please can you make some time to talk to my two sons he has two children that are struggling they have emunah questions now we all know often that that's just the result of all the other emotional stuff that's going on it comes afterwards but do our children have a forum where they're comfortable asking someone told me the shabbos i'm amish i was crying away inside on the outside i was empathizing but i was moms crying inside their son got ex got suspended from his from his messifta high school because he asked his rebbe a very strong hush guffa question and the rebbe said to his credit can we talk about it after class and he said why why why can't we talk about it now and the rebbe said to him i told you i don't want to talk about it now and he continued to act up so they suspended him rabbi islam this was an ashama crying for meaning he just wanted to know and they shut him down and they suspended him and then you wonder why that night he smoked up because he didn't get a high from where he should get the hive from imams just tore me apart someone else shared with me the shabbos that their son finally made it to shul mazel tub we should we should we should make shakhiana with shemo malchus and this kid has a beautiful voice and the gabba who should be blessed for many years asked him to dab him for the ahmed tell me how many shows a kleistral that would happen in but he wasn't wearing a hat so the rav came over to him and said you have to put a talus over your head which was really hard because there's a lot of things between his head and the towels a huge mop you know the new that's like a new fab with a lot of kids i always feel we should put a handle on top and just and he said no i'm not comfortable and then the rough came over and did it again four times and i just said you know i don't want to do this and we lost an opportunity for a kid to shine you know how good it feels to be a sibor especially if you have a good voice you know what resilience that builds when you finally come to shul and they recognize you it's so special and what happens he gets crushed the word resilience totally is deleted from this kid's world but as parents at least our home hopefully is a safe place and hopefully our home is a safe place in yiddish night i'm not talking about for the struggling child that's a totally different discussion for the rest of our children do we really feel ashrae no matter how awesome it is to be a yidd let's let's ask ourselves this question when we look in the mirror are we like wow i'm so happy that this is who i am because if that's how we feel then our children will feel it i was sitting by hassan a week and a half ago and hashem put a guy next to me who is a russian sifta and a very crush of a messifta and we got into the most bizarre conversation by the way i shared with him the story about this girl who was hollow biffin i wanted to see what would do he was i was instigating and he says you think that's bad i said yeah i'm going to tell you what that is so what is this my daughter came home from shabbaton i'm not saying this i'm not making kaiser here telling you the story my daughter came up from the shabbaton and the speaker said that he spoke in a different chapter and he asked the girls if they had the opportunity to be born a guy how many of them would want to be born again 70 said they'd rather be a and i was scared to ask my daughter how about your summit you're you're busy that's what he said ladies and gentlemen we have a problem forget about resilience in life if the gayam understand that what gives resilience to our children is faith hope and traditions we need to build such a beautiful narrative of yiddishkeit our children need to see that we love shabbos that we value it's so precious to us that we learn every day our children know that we take time to learn we don't celebrate correct 100 100 it's so interesting i had a conversation with someone a bunch of years ago he told me he hates gaddain biographies this is the kind of person that one day they'll write a biography about him so why he said because a child reads that and they're like i can never be a god though it is so beyond me they should have books about regular people with regular struggles there is a genre of those books throw them out but there is about regular people with regular struggles who are masliyah and who are successful and like you're saying a kid has a good dove davening they should feel good about it you have a good davening tell your child i felt hashem in my life today you hear a good tire it should suffuse you with simcha share it come home and the kid sees your happy why i had such an amazing seder with my with my coverage today and then when we take you to skype and we practice yiddish guide and we cherish it in times of challenge that's even more amazing to our children when our children know that we have a crazy schedule and we come home and we have no kayak and we still open up the safer and learn you know what that does to them i have a family member who shall remain unnamed who committed when he got when he got married he was a boy who struggled he could have been he could have been part of this uh initiative or his parents could have and he he committed to learning a half hour every single day ralph heimstein's rush of shiva was very big into this and he wouldn't be messi condition unless you committed to learning a half hour day i'm telling you this guy is a very busy businessman and sometimes his day finishes at one o'clock in the morning or he's away at a semicolon and everyone else is sitting and schmoozing and this guy's at his safer it's no wonder that his misifter today is not stamina learner he sees me sees me seriousness for for limited time but the mysterious nephes doesn't have to just be in terms of learning or davening it's just a perspective a yantef comes there should be excitement in the home not stress i know easier said than done forget about pesa we'll talk about everything else okay come on let's call a spade a spade i look back in the last 12 months i think the highest moment in my entire family was the seder it was the seder i tell you something beautiful which is not my own but i started doing it about a decade ago and it's transformative my seder is a totally different seder did i i don't now my kids don't let me do it but when they were younger i did this practically anyone know what a huddle is and before you have a football game the team gets around everyone puts their arms around one another yeah and they're like i didn't do the wrong part it's not me but i went into huddle with my children and i said to them for three thousand three hundred and thirty some years our family has not missed the seder and we have a family tree up to david hamilton i know we're okay why because you see the person that ran the seder made sure that the children understood how important the sailor is and one day may have asked him not kids but ears you're going to lead a seder and tonight you really have to listen because you're such a strong link so tonight's such an important night ask answer discuss it's your night and it's the night for the opportunity for me to share with you let's make this the most amazing night of the year and you know what children understand okay if you ask a good question my family i have a box of 500 spoons of plastic spoons and you get a spoon by the way my kids want four for manustrano alone and they could cash those in on pesach for different things he used to be able to cash it and this is hard for me to say for toys r us now it's amazon or whatever all the other types of things down but they have a cat every one of those spoons has a cash value you cannot imagine the brilliant questions that my kids ask and the totally crazy ones tati how can you put that coming in the left side of yours of your of your kitten not in the right side of your kettle because shema yeah the kind of vessel no there's no reason because i'm more comfortable i don't know put it by my heart but we need to lay evenings like the seder are what carry our children and they know they know how we worked so hard my wife works so hard for pesach but when it comes and we sit around and the table is beautiful i know this sounds like a magical crazy world but we were we were able to craft that one night a year the other 353 years days of the year has total chaos but a kid remembers that and they remember it with and especially the struggling kid by the way they go back to that night my son who was struggling all the years the seder to him was a climax or a high point and another family a member of mine that was at risk before it was popular the seder is his favorite night of the year he sings louder and stronger than everybody else and he's an adult and it's weird for some reason the seder creates incredible power to him and particularly when your seder is multi-generational i didn't that's not part of this research but why i want you to know something the children have a strong connection to where they come from are incredibly resilient it's one of the most brilliant and beautiful concepts that's been discovered but we know this when your child knows where you come from and where you come from could be a parent a grandparent it could be a mushroom doesn't make a difference that's very powerful so i don't think i said one quidditch since i started speaking we all know every single thing that i said le basi el kazakh we need to take time out of our crazy schedules and we need to give our children a healthy adult relationship and sometimes in life we have to divide and conquer you'll take three i'll take yehuda and we'll both try to take so-and-so maybe we need to craft those those real relationships we know we know in our hearts that that's the most powerful and precious thing that we have questions just what we're going to do with it and you know what it's the saddest thing when we look in the rear view mirror of the last 12 months or two or three years of all the missed opportunities this is so precious and so important to us and yet we don't do it we need to be hazardous and we also need to give our children up we can't afford we can't spoon feed them life let them fail that's part of efficacy let them be matzliak and celebrate it hold their hand when they fail cry with them empathize that also builds inner muscle life is not about successes the way the way you ruin your child is to constantly be there you know constantly help your child just be successful be successful be successful let them fall like someone said yesterday rabbit young shabbat sadiq is the tsarik he said sadiq when he's not following his exotic when he's come and then we also have to focus uh so hard on building a beautiful yiddish kite i'll say something that's tragic on one hand and beautiful on the other hand i was going through a tremendous void in maharbata satara when i pivoted about two months ago three months ago we moved to lakewood and i was a rebbe for 20 years in high school and a rub of a community we walked away from everything because it wasn't working out for our little kids that's how life is you're only as happy as your most unhappy child we got our das tyra we made our decisions and we embraced it but i'm going to be honest with you i teach on torah anytime and i speak and i lecture but that doesn't give me the choice of teaching a classroom for those of you that are teachers there is nothing more amazing than a successful lesson and there is nothing more hurtful than what it doesn't succeed you need to have a lot of successful ones and then you could have a few bad days i was really hurting and i decided i'm going to commit suicide it's a scary word i don't mean that way i'm going to take i'm going to take a 12th grade job in the afternoons in a messified lakewood okay yeah i shouldn't use the word suicide i'm gonna do something scary and i took a job it's in english teaching english now i told them i don't know how to teach english i'm gonna be honest with you i don't know english i can't even teach history i'm going to teach hashgaffa you can write on the transcript whatever you want jewish philosophy jewish thought it doesn't make a difference the psychology of spirituality i don't care what you write doesn't make a difference to me because it says they do get diplomas but i teach hashgraph and i come into the classroom each time that i speak that i speak and by the way this is i love these kids i love everyone ava's nephew 27 tremendously active energetic kids i come into the classroom which is a little bit smaller than this my first time because i'm the new teacher so they got to give me a run for my money and there's party lights in the entire classroom and the lights are off and there's a kid on a guitar and a kid on the piano and they're they're having a nice little kumzis let's see let's see what the rebbe is going to do so i'm not the kind of guy to like say hey give me the guitar let's do this it's not me i just stood in front of the room and i watched until it became so awkward and uncomfortable and everyone stopped talking and someone turned off the light those strange lights and someone turned on the regular lights and one kid just kept on talking nobody turns to my system i'm not going to use the words let's see if this guy could last more than two minutes and then it was quiet i don't know how many minutes later probably not so long just felt long and i just began and i said david cohen was 37 years old he lived on the upper west side with his wife zahava they had a beautiful family picture-perfect family and he sat down one night to talk to his wife about bar mitzvah plans for their oldest son shimon and i finished that story about a half hour later and i drove home the message and 40 minutes later the class of quiet class by the way came over and each kid introduced himself and said that was really interesting and thus began one of the most interesting journeys i've ever had because i come to the class twice a week for 45 minutes and i just talk about the things that matter like why we dropping and what does it mean to have a relationship with hashem and i shared with one of them one of the most amazing things which none of the kids in the class ever heard because you see to most kids there's a division there's the star kids and there's the non-star kids and i just changed their perspective and said there's the star kids and the other star kids so you have the guys learning the whole day but you have the other guy that david one part of chemin estrella with kavanaugh today that stark to me or he learned and to say that he doesn't usually learn a little bit that stark to me and that life isn't black and white and that it's a series it's not all or nothing and all of a sudden the craziest thing happened my class was 40 minutes a half hour later everyone's still sitting and schmoozing and talking about things in life that matter and my goal with this class is just to build up anemias and each week we talk about something else to last week a kid asked could we talk about elim habba and i'm about shema was never there but i could share with you what i know the closest i ever got is shabbos may no i'm happy my name is sarah shabas we talk about chambers you think any kids in 12th grade know what shmir shabbos really means this knows a lot of don'ts you know how many kids never heard of the word neshama yasera any kids never heard of the word neshama ladies and gentlemen i'm saying this and it's cynical and it's true but it's not cynicism the most precious thing that we have is how many people think about that how often do we talk to our children about it i've been speaking a lot for high schools over the last bunch of years i love telling them when you turn around for boy the banished guy rights and the arizo you get your first dose of nisham yes whether you do it in your by your couch in your living room or in shul imagine if every little kid who was fourteen fifteen ten or eleven or twelve by by hal would take a minute and say hashem is giving me an extra added dose of him for the next 26 hours it's really powerful i you know how i know it's powerful because i started doing it and it transforms my shabbos you know how powerful it is i share this with my class i'm telling you it's transformation i said before you could take three steps back this month take three seconds and think to yourself i'm about to talk to the only being in creation that could actually make things happen in a real way and i don't i know i don't deserve it but he wants to hear what i have to say three seconds it transforms your shminasari once a day it transforms your monastery but no one's talking to the children about this at all they're just penalizing them how come you came late the chakras why wouldn't i come like the chakras i hate davening i don't even know what i'm doing no one ever told me i should talk to hashem so if we can't create a penis and ladies and gentlemen i'll conclude this guy tell me have to finish if we can't create resiliency in the children who barack hashem are what we would call mainstream then when we get the biggest sun we've ever had in our life and a child that's home who's not being sharmishandis who's using terrible words who has no derek but has the iphone and has the car and has the vacation why would our children want to be any different so sometimes we have perceptive ones that realize it's all sham and it's artificial but not every child's like that so we need to build in the rest of our children such a resiliency emotional rookney's that whatever that person has doesn't rate we all know that even children understand what's real and genuine and meaningful versus what's just a knockoff and if somehow we're able to create a space in each child where they cherish the relationship with us and there's nothing that's stronger than that and they cherish their relationship with their abundant shalom and there's nothing stronger than that and they cherish their relationship with another youtube person which i didn't even get to talking about that by the way one of the most powerful things we could do for our children is get them involved in haaset it's an automatic wind it feels so amazing and i'll conclude with a marshall i use thousands of times i wish i could share like everything else we only have like one minute left i always tell the students like this or the children imagine for a moment that you have a terrible basement and it's cluttered beyond and your mother comes to you and she says to you shafel i can't even get into that basement and i don't have the time or the energy you're such a good organizer that's your strength and you know it is can you clean the basement i know sunday morning you have nothing on the schedule it'll take you two and a half hours and you can work your magic i'm asking you for a favorite the whole mishpakha will be enriched by it i'm not saying this is the right way to ask i'm just saying you do that and there's a hesitancy you know what i'll sweeten the deal you know that new ice cream coffee shop that just opened down the block i heard that they have like 11 frappulacino it has two and a half thousand calories and lactose intolerancy and all kinds of great stuff but if you clean the basement i'll buy you one of those i'll give you the money you can go there and buy it all right mom now you're talking my language i wanted one of those frappula dappuccinos by the way this is just my own little uh little thing okay i'm finishing i think that the tadas was actually iced coffees let's go right there so so she cleans it two and a half hours later it's beautiful she comes out and she walks to the frappula cappuccino store and she's about to put her hand on the door to open it when she hears a conversation it's a mother and a child and the child says mom could i buy ice cream just just ice cream comb the mother says ever since daddy left us it's been so hard we just need the money for rent then for everything else i'm sorry schaeffler but my i haven't had ice cream in like a year i know one day i'm going to buy you a whole container but for now i can't alison you're thinking you're like whoa i have 11 dollars in my pocket so you walk over to my child they're like can you wait one second you turn to child what kind of ice cream do you like he goes vanilla with sprinkles and they think to mother if the child has that ice cream and a half a year what was the last time the mother had what do you like of course coffee could you wait here for 60 seconds i'm telling you i'm gonna make it worth your while okay you run into the store you say this is an emergency it's i need a cone with sprinkles and vanilla i need a coffee one and you bring it outside you give the child and you give the mother the child says is that hashem no but it's his child and you give them the ice cream and you walk around and you walk back and you saunter home and you never had the ice cream and you come home and your wife and your mother says sheila how was the frappula dappuccino as good as the azadas i didn't have it why you say the story i want to ask you a simple question do you think the child had more no i'm not giving it not eating it or eating it it's push it because when they eat the frappulapuccino the lactose intolerancy sets in halfway through the sugar rush starts killing you etc etc you walk out of the store feeling worse than when you came in when you gave to somebody else you keep coming back to that this is a primitive example of what giving teaching a child giving of what teaching them ruthless of what giving them love does it trains a child to appreciate that builds resiliency my most profound and deepest brag is that each and every one of us should be able to create that resiliency in the rest of amarsha and the other 80 seventy percent and that we should have infinite nachas from all of our children i feel that the word kesha nafshi is prophetic because kesha now she's supposed to be about you and your child that's what it was crafted for i feel after 36 hours that i feel with every single person of the 900 people that were here the shabbos because we're all on a special journey we all appreciate so many things in life that maybe we've never appreciated before and we all dive in our hearts out for our children hashem should just listen to those prayers he should listen to those fearless and the kashanashi that we feel should continue to endure amit hashem they should give nachas to each and every one of us beyond our most wildest dreams thank you for listening [Applause]