Question: What advice can you give people regarding family and children? What is seriously worthwhile for them to think about?
Answer: The problem in family life amounts to only one thing, on the ability to concede to each other. My teacher the great Kabbalist Baruch Ashlag used to say: “The happiness of family life depends on the ability to keep your mouth shut at the right time.”
Question: What does family life mean nowadays when a woman [1] and man can live separately?
Answer: Everything depends on education. In their time, I received guidance and direction from my parents that divorce could not be and that’s that.
Understandably, there can be all kinds of problems in a family, especially when people have been living together for a long time. I have been married to my wife for almost 50 years. People lived this way in the past, while today sociologists believe that when two or three years go by, affection and closeness disappear.
But they don’t have to divorce. It is possible to prevent this only through mutual concessions, not in any other way.
Question: You say that it is possible to avoid divorce, why is this?
Answer: You established a family, gave birth to children, you have to be their father. Things are much worse for children if the father is not present.
Children need both a father and a mother even if the relationship between them is not good. You should be concerned about silencing yourself and not the other. Then everything will be okay.
I am saying this from personal experience. For example, my wife and I can quarrel for some reason, but the next morning we must meet each other with a smile, even if the feeling of yesterday’s quarrel has not yet calmed down and we are burning to prove that we were right. This doesn’t enter the account!
Comment: But this is the wisdom of the wisdom of Kabbalah [2]….
My Response: This is not the wisdom of Kabbalah but a simple understanding that you will not achieve anything in any other way! You cannot change people or the world, I am saying this seriously. Every day my wife and I begin by taking a walk for half an hour and we are always smiling at each other, even though inside each one of us has a load of problems. But during the walk it is gradually emptied; that is how it is every day. But today begins with a decision that what happened yesterday is finished, even externally.
Regarding children, everything is very simple. Don’t preach ethics to them. With words you will not succeed in educating them, you will only push them away from you. It is possible to educate them only through an example, without words. The child will look and learn. If you say something along with this, you will ruin their education.
[200475]
From a Webinar “The Year in Review” 12/26/16
Related Material:
A Bad Marriage Is Better Than A Good Divorce [3]
Based Upon Mutual Concessions [4]
How Can We Strengthen The Nuclear Family? [5]