Walls Around Nothing

After Five full posts on this blog, just as I had suspected, I began to run out of things to write. And then, wouldn't you know it, "Something happened to me on the way to work this morning!". No, not really, it happened over shabbos.

In my house, on the second night of Pesach, we always have the same discussion. we start counting the Omer, and we mull over whether the women should count with a bracha. The logic for a woman not counting with a bracha is, that if she's going to forget somewhere in the middle, according to some poskim, the prior brachos were all in vain.

Lest you think that I have some bias against women, I should make it clear that I myself would have asked the question, because my wife probably davens Ma'ariv with a minyan more often than I do.

So we were deciding what we would do, and I said to my wife, "Y'know, I don't like this defeatist attitude. Maybe we won't make it all the way to shevuos with a bracha, but if we gonna go down, sugar, we're goin' down swingin'!" (End of story: We both made it to shevuos with the bracha. Alert Pesach Krohn!)

We spent this past Shabbos at the home of an old friend. Their kids go to the same school as the kids in my previous post, "Real Jews". The wife had heard the story of "Shimmy", the abandoned foster child who now sleeps in a yeshiva dorm, and at the table, she asked me if I knew anything about him. Her husband was shocked at the story.

"There's really a kid like this in our school? We should switch our kids to another school!"
I was livid. He was unperturbed. "I don't have anything against this boy," he said. "But I don't want my children to be influenced by someone who has no one being mechanech him."
(And as if to illustrate his point, his little son piped up with the story of a troubled kid in his own class, who one day cut off his peyos and ate treif. The story sounded fishy, so I did a little research. Turns out it's only partly true. What happened was, the kid switched from Shearis Hapleita to TA.)

He's very proud, this friend of mine. He's proud that his children never miss minyan. He tells me all the time, "When I was a kid, there was no such thing in my house as missing minyan. It just didn't exist. I don't want my kids being exposed to influences that give them these choices."
He always says, "If I could afford to quit my job, I'd home school my kids." He doesn't let his kids play with anyone who has a VCR in their home, because he can only regulate what they watch on his own VCR. (I made that up.)

I’m glad he’s very protective of his kids. But at what cost are they being protected? At what point is it too defeatist, to say “I’m not going to try, because I may lose something if I fail!”?

When I was younger, there were two kids in my school, (younger than me) who would constantly pick fights with everybody. Nobody in my family ever met an argument they didn't like, but these kids were beyond that. They really had no place in the school, and after countless fights, my brothers were desperate for my mother to convince the principal of this.

Instead. she urged them to bring the kids home with them. If they are so troubled, she reasoned, then it's our job to do what we can to help them. They did come one day after school. And the next day, and the next.

Turns out, their father was raising them on his own, trying to make a living as a handyman, while hiding his kids from his ex-wife, who had gone crazy and was trying to kidnap them. For two years, they came to my house after school, while Daddy worked the long hours he needed to to make ends meet. My parents even sent them to sleepaway camp, a far more expensive one than me or any of my siblings could have hoped for.

After about two years of this, ex-wife shows up on our doorstep. But don't fret, she’s with the father, who suddenly remembered that she wasn't all that crazy in the end, and they should get back together.

They moved out of town, and we've never heard from them since.

I wrote it concisely, but you can imagine that the two years had some rough spots. My siblings are all feisty, and these kids were obviously going through a rough time. But there was never any question about helping people who needed help. If your frumkeit doesn’t tell you that, of what value is it?

Perhaps my mother got this attitude from my grandparents, who have taken in countless neglected children over the years. Perhaps I should stop boring you, and get to the point. I have a number of stories that demonstrate my points, and you can see them here.

There were all kinds of people coming and going in my house over the years. For arguments sake, let’s assume they exposed me to the concept of missing minyan and that's why I have trouble sometimes pushing myself to go. Maybe, my children will see me, and have the same problem.

But I envision my friend, my host for shabbos, building a wall. The wall gets bigger and bigger, taller and stronger. By the time his kids are grown up, it will be impreganable. A wall of unchanging ritual, of davening with a minyan for a respectable amount of time, of wearing a hat and jacket in the street, of covered magazines in the supermarket, of tznius and shmiras halashon.

An infinitely protective safeguard, protecting nothing.