A CHILD NEEDS TO UNDERSTAND ONE OF THE
BASIC TRUTHS ABOUT FORGIVENESS:
WHEN WE FORGIVE, WE ARE DOING IT
FIRST AND FOREMOST FOR OURSELVES.
A child who doesn’t learn how to forgive is a child who lives in a prison of his own making. Resentment, hostility, and anger have turned him into a prisoner. That child needs to understand one of the basic truths about forgiveness: When we forgive, we are doing it first and foremost for ourselves.
Earlier, I spoke of a family in Connecticut—several children from two broken homes, struggling to adjust to life under one roof. The eldest daughter was off in college, and she was doing fine, and the other children were dealing with the situation as well as they could, but the sixteen-year-old girl was completely unforgiving. When I tried to talk to her about how she hoped to address the issue, she was dismissive. “I don’t care about any of that. All I care about is being successful. I don’t want to need anyone.”
Later, I spoke to my children about my interactions with her. “She was only sixteen years old, but she had the cynicism of a forty-year-old. Her heart was becoming hard. I told her, ‘The best you can do is to forgive your parents for the mistakes they made and move forward. To be angry and unforgiving only makes you hold onto your pain. Anger is a terrible thing. It robs a home of peace. It destroys marriages. It ruins lives. And it is threatening to ruin your life.’
“I want you kids to know that if any of you are ever angry with me, for whatever reason, you need to talk to me about it. If I make mistakes with you, and I’m sure I do, I want an opportunity to apologize, and to address those mistakes.”
As my children know, one of the central themes of Judaism is that you can’t be fully human if you don’t learn how to forgive. But children today seem to be angrier and more unforgiving than at any other time in history. Indeed, anger has become such a pervasive part of growing up in this day and age that it seems to be an accepted rite of passage. This, to me, is a catastrophe. If your child is angry with you, you need to deal with it. If you’ve done something to make your child angry, you need to face it. And even if your child only thinks he’s angry with you, you need to figure that out, too. You mustn’t let anger fester. Anger is a destroyer of lives. Volatility seems to be the standard nowadays, the happy home a thing of the past—something from an earlier, gentler era. You don’t see a single show on television today that tries to sell the idea of a “happy marriage,” and that’s probably because no one would buy it. We make fun of The Brady Bunch, who were a happy, smiling, communicative family! That’s ridiculous!
I myself come from a broken home, so I understand what it does to people, and it has made me cautious about my own role as a father. I feel it is my responsibility to absorb the pain and chaos I was raised in, to figure out how to filter it through my system and heal the wounds so that I don’t pass it on to my own children. My great fear is that I will do to them what was done to me. One cannot raise children in chaos and volatility. They have to see an example of loving parents and a well-ordered home.
Do I always succeed? No, far from it. My father, as I said earlier, is a great man, but a complicated one, and I’ve inherited some of those complications. I sometimes yell at my kids, less so since becoming host of Shalom in the Home—which in many ways really opened my eyes to the amount of yelling in the average household, and to its horrendously destructive nature.
Still, there was a time when my daughter Chana seemed a little bit afraid of my volatility. I noticed this, and I tried to control even the most sporadic outburst, and whenever I failed to control it I would apologize to her, but I was apologizing so frequently that my eldest child Mushki became increasingly cynical. “Tatty, what’s the point of apologizing when you know you’re going to do the exact same thing again?”
She was right. A few nights later, I made this the subject of our dinnertime conversation. “Look,” I said, “your father, what makes him, hopefully, a decent man, is that he wrestles with his mistakes, he struggles to be a better man. But he is not a perfect man. Your father is flawed, and he is full of contradictions. Try as I might, I don’t always succeed in doing what I know to be the right thing.”
Last summer, I did a radio tour with my family across the American South, broadcasting from a different city five days a week. We covered 6,000 miles in our RV. There were nine of us, plus two friends, inside the vehicle, and—believe me—it can get on your nerves in no time at all. I found myself speaking harshly to the kids. “Come on! I’m tired. I’ve been driving all day! Move, move, move!” Needless to say, this created a nervous environment.
One night, a beautiful Friday night, we were having our Shabbat dinner out in the woods, next to the RV, listening to the chirping of the crickets. Toward the end of dinner, I asked for everyone’s attention. “Listen,” I said. “I have something to say for about twenty minutes, after which I’m going to go completely silent and give you guys forty minutes to respond. We’re going to spend one hour on this. One full hour. You can say whatever you want in response. No holds barred. Just be respectful, that’s all I ask.
“I want to begin by saying that you guys are the light of my life. You guys bring me so much joy, and one of the reasons I love going on these road trips with you is that I get to spend so much time with you in close quarters. I know I tend to get busy at home, and sometimes I don’t focus on all you guys as much as I would like, and going on these trips together makes me feel very close to all of you. Still, even when we’re away, I sometimes feel that we’re not as close as I’d like us to be, and I know that this is because I have hurt you at times. I’ve yelled at you, sometimes fairly, sometimes unfairly, but even when it was fair it wasn’t fair. There is no excuse, ever, for a parent to lose his temper, no excuse to raise one’s voice. I realize that at such times I have failed you as a father, and I’m asking you to forgive me.
“I am also asking you to please try to understand that what I want most in my life is to give you what I wasn’t given. This is not about stuff, this is not about an iPod or a big house, but about the gift of peace. I want you to grow up in a home where there is minimal volatility, a place where you can internalize peace. If I can do that, you will be able to handle whatever life throws at you in the years to come. Each of you will be like a hurricane: strong winds on the outside, with peace at your center. No amount of volatility will unnerve you.”
I then turned to my second daughter: “Chana, I know there are times when you are distant from me because you feel I have hurt you with unpredictable moods,” I said. “And I’m asking you to forgive me because you deserve a soft, warm father who shows consistency. Nothing hurts me more than the thought that I could have hurt you, and that as a result you are slightly more distant from me. I love you with all my heart and I ask you to forgive me.”
By that point, Chana was quietly sobbing, which was unusual—she is not a girl who shows a lot of vulnerability—and the other kids were trying to interrupt: “Stop, Tatty! You’re being way too hard on yourself! You’re a great father!” And I said, “No. I’m going to speak for twenty minutes, and then you’ll speak.”
And I really spoke from the heart. I said, “I’m trying my best to ensure that whatever shortcomings exist in the generational life of our family are going to stop with me. I’m trying very hard to heal myself so that you guys will never suffer any pain—at least from me. I can’t control what others will do to you, but I can certainly control what I do, and that is my solemn promise to you, here, tonight: that I will work harder to always be the best father I can be.”
It was quite eerie. All you could hear was the crickets chirping, me talking, and Chana quietly sobbing. But I was happy. The subject of forgiveness is critical, and the evening already felt magical to me. I knew I was getting through to them just by looking at their faces. I know children, my own and many others. And I know that they will seldom talk to you about the things that hurt them. They’ll talk about getting shortchanged when the chocolate cake comes around, but they won’t talk about the truly important feelings. They internalize those; they get angry; they distance themselves from you and often even from the rest of the family. I didn’t want that happening in our home.
“I have seen children become hard because they are in pain and because no one acknowledges the pain,” I said. “This is perhaps because they are afraid to let others see it, afraid that their pain and anger will only make things worse, or that it is somehow ‘wrong.’ But this should never happen in our home. Mistakes will be made, certainly, by all of us, but when we cause each other pain we need to talk about it. If I hurt you and I am unaware of it, I can’t address it. By allowing me to see my mistakes, you will be helping me become a better man.”
When I was finished, everyone became very silent, and I said, “Okay. Now it’s your turn. Tell me the things that I’ve done that are wrong. All I ask is that you do it respectfully because I, also, can be wounded.”
So for forty minutes we went around the table, one by one, with me as the moderator, and each child told me what he or she was thinking. Not surprisingly, the younger ones had no real complaints. But the older kids spoke their minds, and they had four basic grievances: first and foremost, that I shouted, which I promised to stop. I was raised with yelling, I explained, and I was unwittingly bequeathing that to my children, but that was no excuse. My yelling was unacceptable, and I would redouble my efforts to address the problem.
The next complaint came from my son Mendy, who said I didn’t always listen. He’s a big reader and a big fan of information, like his father, but I don’t always have time to hear about Abraham Lincoln’s various nicknames or the last time the Olympics were held in Athens, so I sometimes tune him out. That really bothered him, and I thanked him for telling me because until we spoke about it that evening I didn’t realize how much he was being hurt by what he perceived as my indifference.
The next complaint came from Sterni, my thirteen-year-old, who hates the fact that I smoke an occasional cigar. I explained that I do it to relax, especially when I’m writing, but I agreed that it was a disgusting habit and assured her that I would make an effort to phase it out.
The final and most startling grievance came from my eldest daughter Mushki, who said that I sometimes appeared disrespectful of my own wife. She gave me some examples, doing her best to mimic my tone. “You’ll say something like, ‘Debbie, what do you mean you didn’t take care of that! You knew I needed it today! I thought you knew that!’” In listening to Mushki, and in being made aware of how I sounded to her and to the rest of my family, I realized I would need to work on two things—tone and delivery—and I assured them I would do so. But I have to admit that it was the most hurtful criticism because I worship my wife, and I thought this was evident to my kids. I want them to believe in love, and I want them to know that a marriage can really work, despite all the modern evidence to the contrary, so I have been working very hard on that.
That was a life-changing evening for me, and I don’t use those words lightly. In seeking forgiveness from my children, they taught me a great deal about the things I needed to address in myself, and they gave me a chance to work on personal shortcomings that were clearly having an effect on my entire family.
Fast-forward three months to Yom Kippur evening at our home. The evening is all about forgiveness and atonement, and it is considered the holiest night of the Jewish year. We prayed the holy kol nidre service, and when it was over I took my wife and kids into the study so we could share a few moments of privacy. “As you know,” I began, “the custom on Yom Kippur is that God can forgive you for the things that you’ve done against God—blasphemy, desecrating the Sabbath, and so on—but He cannot forgive you for any pain you’ve caused other people. Even God can’t grant forgiveness for harming others. You have to seek that directly from the injured party, and only they can bestow it. So I want to ask forgiveness from all of you if I’ve hurt you in any way.”
I impressed on them that one mustn’t always judge people by what they do, but by how far they’ve come. Not by the destination, but by the journey.
“Your father, unlike you, thank God, was raised in a very challenging environment,” I went on. “I saw nothing but fighting. We even saw the police at our house. To this day, more than thirty years after the divorce, my parents do not speak to each other. I internalized a lot of that, but I have tried hard to get it out of my system. I know I’m not there yet, but I will always try to do better.”
The reason forgiveness is so important, and the reason it is such a central theme of Judaism, is, as I said, because we believe that you can’t be fully human if you don’t forgive. This is what I was trying to impress on my children through these conversations.
I am not the only person in our home who makes mistakes, but I am responsible for the way those mistakes are handled. When one of my children does something wrong, we deal with it, forgive him or her, and move on. But forgiveness goes much deeper, and I needed them to understand that. Part of it is about making the offender feel better, and about reestablishing the connection, but the main reason we do it is for us—so that we don’t let it poison our hearts and turn them to stone.
“An unforgiving heart is a heavy heart,” I tell my children. “When you don’t forgive someone, you become bitter, and that feeling festers, affecting you more than it affects them. When you forgive, the one you are truly freeing is yourself.”