WOMEN NURTURE AND ENHANCE EVERYTHING
THEY COME INTO CONTACT WITH,
MEN MOST OF ALL.
As the father of five daughters, I often worry about the direction in which the world is moving. For thousands of years, history was very masculine and aggressive. We had the Greek Empire, the Roman Empire, Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan—a world that was all about brute strength. Men lived by the sword and became known for their violent exploits. Little by little, however, as civilization progressed, allowing spirituality to spread, a more feminine world began to emerge. Suddenly people began to question the old notions. Maybe might didn’t make right after all, they said. Maybe we could accomplish more through peacefulness and tenderness and nurturing and relationship-building—all of those wonderful “feminine qualities.”
For hundreds of years, civilization continued along that path, the right path, but it seems to be regressing of late—going back to raw masculinity and savagery. This must not happen, and that is why this conversation is one of the essential conversations in the book. Children need to understand what the feminine represents on a much larger scale, in its historical context even. We can’t expect them to fully understand it today, now, as children, but we can certainly lay the foundations for it, so that they’ll understand it when the time is right.
Let’s begin with a brief conversation about the dual nature of God, one that I have often discussed with my older kids. Two of the world’s great philosophers, René Descartes and Benedict de Spinoza, had very different opinions regarding God’s true nature. Descartes said God created the world and left humanity to its own devices, that He was aloof, detached, and unmovable. Spinoza said God had never abandoned us: that He was everywhere we looked—that He was part of nature itself.
The Kabbalah posits that both philosophers were right. There are in fact two sides to God, it suggests, one masculine, one feminine. The masculine God is the God of history, revealing Himself as strong and determined, a miracle-worker, rewarding the just and punishing the wicked. This God is represented by a straight line. The feminine God is the God of creation, an all-encompassing celestial presence, nursing the universe in Her womb, nurturing, soft-edged, and gentle. This God is represented by a circle.
These two aspects of God—the linear and the circular—are also said to represent the spiritual origins of men and women. Men are a line: their approach to life is very direct and goal-oriented. Women are a circle: less direct, gentler, more open to the world around them, inclined toward circles of family and relationships. Our gender, then, very much determines our approach to life, and this is why we complement each other so perfectly.
The linear approach is too rigid, however, so when a woman comes into man’s life she makes him more flexible. “Be a line!” she says. “That’s good. I wanted a man. I didn’t marry a woman. But be a little bit of a curve, too. Don’t be so rigid and stubborn. You don’t always have to have your way. And don’t be afraid of commitment. Attach yourself to this circle—I will not confine you.”
A woman elevates and redeems a man. She makes him enjoy life, slow down, delight in his children, and seek less goal-oriented pursuits. Women nurture and enhance everything they come into contact with, men most of all. And, in fact, to be completely blunt about it, a man without a woman can sometimes be insufferable. That is why the book of Proverbs says, “A man who has found a woman has found goodness.”
This Kabbalistic approach further argues that life is all about balance: the male God of the line and the female God of the circle, the active and the passive—two halves, operating in unison. To ignore this is to live a life without balance, and we all know what happens when we lose our balance.
If someone were to ask me to sum up the Jewish religion in a single sentence, I would say, “Judaism is the cultivation of the feminine.” The Jewish people are really the battered wives of the nations of the world. We have always tried to develop and cultivate our feminine side. Moses, the greatest prophet in the Bible, refers to himself as a nursemaid. King David was a warrior, but his real passion was for the harp and lyre. In fact, if you travel throughout ancient Israel, you won’t find a single triumphal arch glorifying a military victory. When the Jews fought, they fought out of necessity, not in the pursuit of glory. Even then, the Jews had a decidedly feminine worldview, and were convinced that one day men would beat their swords into ploughshares. Think about that for a moment. It means, quite literally, that lines will be turned into circles; that men will become more feminine; that human rigidity will give way to a new softness; that the nurturer in us will replace the restive warrior.
The prophet Isaiah also spoke of a time when the wolf would lie down with the lamb, and of a time when a child would lead a lion. He believed that the predatory streak in humans and animals would be purged, that human beings would one day learn to get along, and that harmony would prevail. Our whole culture would become more circular, he suggested, and the competitively linear quality that so much defines our society—with some people at the top of the totem pole and others at the bottom—would gradually disappear.
I believe this, too, and I believe women will take us there. I speak to my children about this all the time. A woman’s gift to the world is her femininity. She takes a cold, desolate planet, warms it with her femininity, and brings forth life. A man’s gift to the world is to honor the feminine, and an added obligation is to nurture the feminine in his own heart.
I tell my children, “The world has enough harsh men, and altogether too many masculinized women. This is because the world can be a hard place, and at early age we begin to steel ourselves against the things that hurt us. Divorce, emotional violence, the unkindness of a person we trusted. But if we are afraid to be soft, if we don’t honor the feminine within, how will we make the world a kinder, gentler place?
“I want you to grow up to be nurturers, to have soft hearts and kind hands. I want you to be part of the light and gentleness, not the coldness, not the dark.”
A few weeks ago, as part of my television show, I visited a family in Connecticut. This was a second marriage for both the father and mother, and each had brought children into the new home. When we met with them, two years into the new marriage, the family was comprised of four girls, ages twenty, eighteen, fourteen, and twelve; an eight-year-old boy; and a new addition, an infant daughter, the result of the new union.
The eight-year-old boy struck me as a broken child. He never smiled. He never showed much joy. He was withdrawn and subdued. Nobody played with him. He seemed abandoned in his own home. One day I asked him, “Do me a favor. Write one page for me about your family.”
He wrote the following: “This is my family. I miss my daddy. I only see him every few months. I like my stepfather, but he has no time for me. He plays with my two-year-old sister. Then there’s my four sisters. I love them but every time I walk into their room they tell me to get out. If I touch any of their things, they tell me to stop. I try to play with them, but they won’t play with me.”
I sat down with the four girls and read them the letter, and when I was done I said, “Your brother is so lonely, and you girls are not doing anything about it. There was a time when an older sister was expected to help take care of the family. Girls added gentility and warmth and softness to the home. Why are you girls so harsh? I know you’ve been through a divorce, but why have you allowed it to harden you? Why are you afraid to be gentle to your own brother, who badly needs you? If you were boys, beating each other to a pulp and giving each other wedgies, I wouldn’t condone it, but I’d understand it a bit better. But you’re young women! You can’t afford to lose the softness.”
When I told my kids this story, I summed it up as follows: “These girls had been so hurt by life that they turned their backs on the feminine almost completely.”
Later, I sat the boy down in front of his sisters, and I asked him, “Do you want your sisters to love you more?” He nodded. I said, “Why haven’t you told them?” He shook his head and shrugged. I asked him, “Is it because it would make you feel weak?” He nodded again, looking shamed and beaten, and I found myself practically begging the girls to reach out to their little brother. How would they ever turn into gentle, loving, feminine women if they weren’t made aware of how hardened they’d become? They had a deeply skewed sense of femininity, down to the way they dressed: tight, low-cut pants, revealing tops, and gobs of make-up.
Interestingly enough, I was not impervious to some of these very elements in my own home. I remember returning to the house one Friday afternoon, late, to find my eldest daughter Mushki helping her mother set the table for Shabbat dinner. Although only sixteen, Mushki is a very feminine young lady because that’s the way we raised her, but on this particular evening I was surprised to see that she was wearing a little too much make-up. I didn’t like the way it looked, so I took her aside and sat her down. “Let me explain something to you,” I said. “There’s selling and there’s overselling. If I go to a publisher and say, ‘I have the greatest book ever, and it’s going to sell ten million copies, and if you publish it I’ll have your baby and take your last name!’ That, in a word, is overselling. But if I go to a publisher and say, ‘I have an idea, and I think it’s a very powerful idea, and you’ll have to determine as a publisher whether you think it’s viable’—well, that’s plenty. I don’t have to oversell it. I believe in the idea, and the publisher knows it.
“When you put on too much make-up, Mushki, you’re overselling yourself. And you of all people don’t need to sell yourself! You have something many others girls don’t have, real feminine dignity, and it shows in every aspect of your demeanor: in your soft, gentle disposition, in your extraordinary maturity. Don’t become hard. Don’t become a line. Be careful always not to become one of those people for whom the external is more important than the internal, for whom form is greater than substance. You already have tremendous strength. It’s the men who often fight about money, power, the size of their homes, the types of cars they drive—because those are the weapons they use to sell themselves. But if you’re a strong person on the inside you don’t have to show fake strength on the outside. You of all people don’t need to this. You are already beautiful naturally.”
“So I should remove it?”
“No. You can use make-up on special occasions, like the Sabbath, but use it sparingly. Make-up should be about highlighting beauty, not about masking ugliness, not about salesmanship.”
I also talk to my eldest son about femininity, for the two reasons I mentioned earlier: I want him to honor women, and I want him to nurture his own femininity. He’s a really good boy, and he’s already very nurturing, largely because he’s been raised around girls—he has five sisters—and because his mother is a very feminine, very nurturing woman. In short, he’s already quite comfortable with that side of himself, and I know it will make him a better man.
Now, as I said, he’s a really good boy, almost a perfect boy, and that is why I was so shocked by the story I am about to tell you. I came home one night, shortly after ten, and I found him on one of those Internet chat rooms with several kids from his class at school. He was eleven years old at the time. I watched for a few moments, and I saw that it was all boys, since my son goes to an Orthodox, boys-only day school, but suddenly a girl came online, someone they knew from the neighborhood, and almost immediately one of the other boys referred to her as a “bitch.” I couldn’t believe it. At a religious day school, and at that age? I took my son aside and confronted him. “How can you be friends with a boy who has no respect for girls?” I asked him. “What kind of man would call a girl such a thing? The most important thing in your upbringing is to grow up to be a gentleman, a mensch. And a gentleman is discerned above all else by how he treats girls, by how he treats women. When you get to school tomorrow, Mendy, I want you to confront that boy. I want you to tell him, ‘I have five sisters. You don’t talk about a girl like that. That is a disgusting word and I don’t like it and you should never use it.’”
I didn’t stop there—I wanted my son to really understand why this was so important to me: “Virtually every divorce that I have seen involves a husband who doesn’t sufficiently cherish the feminine,” I told him. “These husbands come home and they take for granted all that their wives do for them. As a result, the wife becomes harder toward the man she once loved. That’s what happened with my parents, as you know, your grandparents. Saba came from a very poor background, and he worked very hard to make money. But he wasn’t around often enough. And by the time he came home, he was so beat up from work that he often had very little affection to share. He didn’t make Grandma feel cherished. So she steeled herself against his hardness until she stopped feeling for him, and the family drifted apart. So this is really close to home for you, and I am disturbed that you would allow this boy to refer to a girl as a ‘bitch.’ That’s tantamount to condoning it. You have been taught to respect women—even to be in awe of them. How is it possible that you didn’t protest the use of that expression?”
My son fought back tears and apologized, saying he’d never let it happen again.
“You must always respect women,” I continued. “And part of that is to inspire your friends to do the same. There should be no room in your life for boys who put girls down and call them names.”
Some parents might say I overreacted, but I don’t believe so. I spoke to my son calmly but sternly. I had no rancor in my voice, and I spoke to him from the heart. But I was going to get my message through. I was raised by a single mother who did everything for her five kids. I am in awe of women, and I will raise my sons to feel the same. The conversation was designed to underscore something my son already knew, because we talked of it often: In our home we honor the feminine.
And we respect the feminine in every form. I tell you this because I am thinking of another story, a very personal story. I have a brother who is gay—and to be Orthodox, Jewish, and gay is very challenging, believe me. I am very close to my brother, as are my kids, and I often talk to them about their uncle. I see my brother as a highly evolved human being, a man with a golden heart. I have often said, a little facetiously, admittedly, that the perfect man is a gay man who is attracted to women. Still, there’s a bit of truth to it. I believe that the perfect man is a nurturer who isn’t afraid to be a nurturer, and my brother is eminently qualified for the job. While I am completely accepting of my brother, I have to admit that I lament that he never married and had kids because I believe he would be a wonderful father—a much better father than I am, in fact. Even as children, while I was off doing all the manly things—playing sports, running around, getting into trouble—I could see that my brother was already superior to me in his emotional development. He was only a year older, but he was sensitive, well-rounded, tender, and inordinately concerned with our mother’s welfare.
In later years, I worked at becoming more like him—at becoming a more feminine and emotionally available man. Or, as I’ve taken to calling it, a Circle Man. I want to be domesticated, I want to be less linear and more pliable, less goal-oriented and more means-oriented. I want to be able to speak to my wife about the things that weigh on my heart, and I want to learn to cut through all of the emotional baggage that so often saddles so many men, myself included.
This reminds me of another story: Some months ago, a man came to see me for counseling. He had recently switched jobs, and things weren’t going well, and he was having a very tough time. So I asked him, “Do you talk to your wife about these things?” And he said, “No.” And I asked, “Why not?” And he just shut down—I could literally see him shutting down. “Because I don’t want to,” he said. “I’m just not comfortable with it.”
I shared this story with my children and expounded further: “Too many men these days have the same problem. They refuse to get in touch with the softer side of themselves, their feminine side. They won’t talk about pain, or about feelings of failure, or about the things that really count, because they are afraid to appear weak. They think people will look at them as failures. So they hold everything inside, giving their emotions no outlet, and their feelings gnaw away at them and destroy their lives. Often, the first thing to be destroyed is the marriage. These men do not allow their wives to fulfill their roles as nurturers. A woman cannot nurture a man who shows no emotion. And a man who is unable to show emotion has little understanding of the feminine, both without and within.”
This reminded me of yet another story, one that actually illustrates how far such a man might fall, and I shared that with them, too. “I know a man, I’ll call him George, whose wife informed him, suddenly and unexpectedly, that she wanted to separate. The man was absolutely shattered. The marriage had not been perfect, and he did not pretend to have been a perfect husband, but he had a two-year-old son, and he didn’t want to put him through a divorce. In the interest of making things easier on his wife and son, and in the hopes that they might reconcile, George immediately offered to move into a nearby hotel. He had a few good friends, of course, and they would phone him from time to time, and take him to lunch or to dinner and let him talk, which is what he most needed at that difficult time. But one of the friends—let’s call him Mark—never phoned, and this was odd and disturbing because Mark had been very much part of George’s life. Mark was married, and he had a little girl the same age as George’s son, and they had often socialized, sometime with their wives, and sometimes as dads out for a Sunday stroll with their toddlers.
“Weeks went by, and George continued to live in the hotel, trying to repair his marriage, which was beginning to look less and less likely, and still Mark didn’t call. Finally, after an entire month, the phone rang in George’s hotel room. It was Mark, at long last. He said a few noncommittal things—‘tough times,’ ‘hang in,’—and George patiently heard him out. When Mark was finally done stumbling along, saying things he didn’t actually seem to feel, it was George’s turn to talk. ‘Listen, Mark, I want to tell you that I am very glad you finally called me,’ he told his old friend. ‘It is good to hear your voice. But I must also say that I expected to hear from you a long time ago, and I have been very hurt. My life has been turned upside down by this, and I’m living in one small room in a hotel, and I miss my kid so badly that I’m always on the point of tears. I thought that you of all people would have reached out to me.’
“And Mark took a moment, then said, ‘George, you sound like a girl.’
“Isn’t that terrible? Mark had not only failed to reach out to his injured friend, but had berated and insulted him for expressing his true feelings, for being ‘weak enough’ to experience pain.
“What kind of man does that, and to a close friend? Well, I will tell you what kind of man: a man who has never developed a gift for nurturing. That, to me, is a man who has lost something very precious. He has not only purged himself of his nurturing instincts, but he actually mocks a man who has them. Imagine: We are creating a world where a man is berated for feeling!”
It is hard for me to understand that type of hardness. To me, the feminine is something to be revered. When I was in Yeshiva in Israel, studying to become a rabbi, I had no exposure to girls. It was forbidden. All we did was study. The very idea that girls existed was enchanting to us rabbinical students. We looked at women not as objects of lust, but as awe-inspiring creatures. To us, a woman was like an angel. I couldn’t wait to meet a woman and marry her and live with her at my side. To have a wife of my own—whoa! The very thought was amazing.
Before long, this came to pass. I met a wonderful woman, and I asked her to marry me, and she agreed to become my bride. When I looked at her, I knew that I would never even glance at another woman. I didn’t need to; I had found the fairest woman of them all.
The morning after our wedding, I ran out to the store to buy a camera. We were looking forward to the traditional seven days of celebration, and I wanted to record every moment of those happy days. When I arrived at the shopping mall, I found an electronics store, and the young woman who sold the camera to me was not only very helpful, but very pretty. I went back to the house, devastated. How was it possible that I, a married man, could still find other women attractive? I couldn’t believe it! How could I even notice? Was love really so imperfect?
When I got home, I apologized to my wife and hung my head in shame. “Debbie,” I said. “You married a scoundrel.” I told her the story about the young lady, with my head hung low. “I’m such a jerk,” I said. But Debbie was laughing. “Take it easy and stop being so ridiculous. Everything’s fine.”
My wife may have been dismissive of my guilt, but I spent years thinking about the seemingly imperfect nature of love. Why is that we are never immune to the attraction posed by strangers, even when we are deeply and happily in love? And it occurred to me that love has to operate in this manner. The fact that a husband is attracted to other women is partly what makes love so special—the idea that he comes home every night and chooses his wife anew. Love is not meant to be static. It is designed to be constantly refreshed. Years later, I told Debbie: “You know, that morning after my visit to the camera shop? I now understand it. Our commitment to each other is not something static or staid, but a love that is constantly being rejuvenated and renewed.”
What does a woman want from her husband? Love? Perhaps, but not exactly. She was loved by her parents, after all, and as she grew up she wanted something more. What a woman really wants is to be chosen. The main thing a husband can do for his wife, the one thing her parents could never do for her, is to choose her—to turn her into the chosen one. This is how a man honors a woman, and there is no greater honor. Even the Bible sees it this way. It says that God’s love for the Jewish people is manifest in Him not just through His love for them, but for having chosen them. And the Jews have been the chosen people ever since.
That is how the line and the circle complement each other, how they function as a whole. And, I find this very interesting, in fulfilling their assigned roles men and women are not all that dissimilar from the system of “checks and balances” that makes this country work. It is the very system that God instituted in his infinite wisdom: pairing the feminine with the masculine, the line with the circle.
I tell my children, “Women need men. Men have raw energy. They can chop down whole forests, drain swamps, and build cities. Male aggression is necessary, but unchecked it becomes brutal. The feminine neutralizes masculine aggression and makes it more refined. And in neutralizing the male tendency toward aggression, it paves the way for transcendence. Women are naturally more spiritual than men. They have a more natural spiritual instinct. A woman should never lose sight of that within herself, and a man should never forget that he is ennobled through his devotion to a woman.”
I tell them, “Women are changing the world. They are trying to do away with aggression and warfare and manhood. Women are bringing about a quantum shift in our perception of heroism. Nowadays, many of our great heroes aren’t masculine at all. Men like Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela are not manly in the traditional sense, but they are the kind of men we need—men who beat their swords into ploughshares, men who forgive rather than fight. Thanks to the influence of women, we have finally learned to respect and honor those types of men. In the old days, we only respected emperors who conquered and swallowed other nations, but those men are now hunted down and put in jail. This is what I call the feminization of history. History begins with the masculine and moves toward the feminine. And that’s messianic progress.”
All of us, men and women alike, should be nurturing our feminine sides. That is the future. When we fail to do this, we masculinize the feminine. Case in point: Those hardened sisters in Connecticut—sweet girls all, but they had lost their desire to be nurturers.
Women are healers. When men have no feminine influence, their aggression has nothing to check it. If you don’t believe me, take a look around you: Wherever women have a strong voice in a culture or society, that culture is invariably more peaceful. Norway, for example, exports peace, and they have a higher rate of women in politics than any other country in the world. Women are natural peacemakers. It is the wife who brings peacefulness into the home. It is the wife who cures the brokenness of the American male. She’s the one who says, “You’re not going to be special by making more money. You’re going to be special by being a father, by being domesticated, and by loving your children and reading them bedtime stories.”
When men don’t allow their wives to influence them, expect disharmony. The line must become less rigid. This is what happened in my parents’ home. My father is a great man and I can’t even begin to tell you how much I admire him, but he didn’t allow himself to be softened by the woman at his side. He was an immigrant in this country, determined to provide for his family, and that determination took over his entire life. He succeeded, beyond even his own expectations, but his marriage fell apart in the process.
Alas, we men are often slaves to the thymotic urge: We need to be recognized for our achievements. Nobody makes movies about men who help their kids with their homework, or who take out the garbage without being asked. As a result, we measure success by our professional standing and the money in our bank accounts, not by the quality of our relationships.
Sadly, families tend to pass their flaws along from generation to generation. Two of my sisters, for example, whom I love with all my heart and to whom I am immensely devoted, are divorced. My older sister, Sara, struggled for a long time with her son, Jordan, who as a confused and angry teenager seemed intent on dishonoring his mother. It seemed, then, that one of the family flaws was being passed on to him.
Jordan went through a rebellious period and fought with his mother in ugly ways. Oddly enough, even as the fights escalated, Jordan was becoming more religious. It was hard to understand. He was going more often to the synagogue, going to more Jewish classes, and observing the holy laws. But he was behaving in increasingly disrespectful ways toward his mother. It wasn’t that he didn’t love her. On the contrary, he adored his mother and always remained close to her—and in fact had always been a mama’s boy (which I say as a compliment). But my sister didn’t want him hanging out with the wrong crowd or doing things that would be injurious to him, and Jordan began to chafe against the rules.
One day, after having witnessed another painful altercation, I took Jordan aside. “Look,” I said, “your mother is raising six children as a single mother. She works very hard to pay the bills. There is nothing she doesn’t do for you. And the way you speak to her is shocking. On the other hand, you genuinely want to become more religious. You’re studying, praying, going to synagogue more frequently. I salute that and I know you love your mother. I also know that you took your parents’ divorce harder than you probably know, and you are struggling to deal with your anger. So at some point you have to ask yourself: Is this how I want to treat my mother? Is this how I treat women? Is this the kind of person I want to be—a man who dishonors women?
“Do you want to be another religious faker? I don’t understand you. How is it possible that you can speak to God so warmly, then turn around and call your mother—the mother you love and adore—ugly names? Your job is to ease your mother’s burden, Jordan. I was a child of divorce, so I know and understand: My mother had to raise five kids on her own. She worked as a bank teller during the day, five days a week, and as a check-out clerk at a supermarket at night, so that we could eat—so that there would be clothes on our backs. My siblings and I knew that our role was to ease our mother’s burden, and we tried to be good kids. Are you listening to me?”
“Yes,” he said.
“There are many things in my life that I’ve done wrong, and they still pain me,” I went on. “But the things that really pain me the most are not the sins of commission, the bad things I’ve done, but the sins of omission—the good things I failed to do. One of the greatest failures in my life was that I didn’t provide greater comfort to my mother; that I didn’t do more; that we kids often left the house a mess and fought among ourselves and let our tempers get out of control. I wish I had had the ability to say to myself, ‘Enough! Enough! Here is a woman with five kids and two jobs, putting her kids through a Jewish day school, struggling to make ends meet. Stop adding to her misery!’ That pains me more than I can tell you, but even at my worst moments I never spoke to her the way you speak to your mother, because even then I still knew enough to honor her.”
I left, thinking I had gotten through to him, but before long I again heard from my sister, who said she thought that Jordan had been introduced to marijuana by one of his friends. She forbade him from seeing this boy, but he refused to listen, so in despair she called up the boy’s parents and told them: “Your son and my son are smoking pot together. They are a bad influence on each other and I think we should keep them apart.” The parents had no idea that their son was smoking pot, but they looked into it and found out that my sister was right, and they confronted their son. The next night, that boy phoned my sister’s house, and he called her every ugly name in the book: bitch, whore, slut. He was furious at her for telling his parents.
When I found out, I was so angry that I wanted to slap this fifteen-year-old across the face. How dare he speak to my sister like that, the little punk? I had never heard anything so outrageous! Instead, I took hold of my anger and went to see my nephew. “You see what happens, Jordan?” I said. “Do you know why that boy spoke to your mother in that ugly way?”
“Why?”
“Because he saw you speaking to her like that,” I said. “How can this be, Jordan? How can it not cause you pain, knowing that a friend of yours spoke to your mother in that horrendous manner? You are a good person, Jordan, so you need to confront this so-called friend. ‘Until you call my mother and apologize,’ you need to tell him, ‘I will not speak to you ever again.’
“Don’t you see? Disrespect breeds disrespect. And it will pain you forever because you are becoming something you never wanted to be. Did you ever want to be the kind of man who causes his mother pain? Men have to honor and respect women, and that goes tenfold for your own mother.”
Jordan hung his head and listened in silence.
“I will tell you something, Jordan. I am a rabbi and a counselor, and I know something about pain. And I want you to think about this: I have seen people’s lives fall apart after a parent has died because they regret all the things that went unsaid and that now can never be said. All the love that must now remain unexpressed—it’s heart wrenching. The death of a parent is one of the great triggers for a mid-life crisis. A man loses a parent and it crushes him. All the sins of omission—all the things he could have done differently—all the things he can never undo. There’s no going back. And it poisons his entire life. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
“Yes.”
“Your mother will survive, Jordan, but your goodness won’t. If you don’t correct your behavior, you will become a man who doesn’t sufficiently respect women, who hardens the softer sex because of his aggression toward them. That type of man risks depriving himself of one of life’s great blessings—namely, finding feminine warmth and comfort.”
I knew he was hurting. The father and the mother are the sun and the moon to a child. The father brings life to the home, which illuminates the mother and makes her feel cherished and loved. From that light, together, they produce the joy in the home. Jordan’s pain explained his behavior, but it didn’t excuse it.
Being an uncle has some precious rewards that even fatherhood lacks, and I have often tried to take Jordan under my wing. To his credit, he turned his entire life around, became an outstanding son to his mother, stopped smoking pot, and went to an advanced religious seminary in Jerusalem. He is currently going to university in New York where he is a leader among his peers, and spends most weekends with me and my family. Jordan’s presence in my life is one of my greatest joys and I look up to him tremendously for the courage he showed in turning himself around. He is authentically religious and shows everyone he meets an inordinate amount of respect. Jordan often thanks me for having inspired him, but I tell him I was only a small part of it. “You were responding to your own inner voice,” I explain. “Your motivation came from within.”
I often talk to my kids about my parents’ divorce because they are curious, and because they ask, and because by not answering I risk making them less curious—and, as I’ve said, I can’t sufficiently stress the importance of intellectual curiosity.
Every time a marriage falls apart—whether it’s a relative, a family friend, or a neighbor—my kids ask me about that, too, because I’m a marital counselor, and because they think I might have some of the answers. My daughter once asked, “What does irreconcilable differences mean?” And I told her, “What it means is this: Every human being is different from every other human being. But people find each other, and the love and attraction is greater than the differences. Your love for that person helped you overcome whatever differences existed.
“Irreconcilable differences simply means that the attraction these two people once shared has been lost, and all they are left with are the differences. And that’s what happens to many marriages. People stop choosing their partner.”
I spoke earlier about Moses, and how he taught the Jewish people that feelings of emptiness come from within. And I use that in marital counseling all the time. When a husband tells me that he is no longer attracted to his wife, I say to him, “Your wife is still beautiful. The emptiness is in you. You have lost the capacity to be stimulated by the everyday. You now need a young bombshell. You now need to buy a Porsche. You’re a man who is addicted to bells and whistles, and you’ll get bored with them, too, because the problem—the emptiness—is in you, not in your wife.” In short, this man has lost the capacity to honor the feminine. He can only honor a cheap, flimsy version of the feminine.
King Solomon, the wisest of all men, wrote: “See life with the woman you love.”
This is what I tell my children: “A man must always honor the women in his life, and both men and women must honor the sacred feminine within each of them. For only through cherishing the feminine do we create a warm and wondrous world.”