Can You Educate Without Punishing? Setting Boundaries Out of Love and the Dangers of Punishment | Rabbi Fishi Hennig #003

00:00 Speaker 1 Is it possible to educate without punishing? And how do we set clear boundaries with love and respect, without creating fear and distance? For this episode, I sat down for a fascinating conversation with Rabbi Fishy Henig, director of the mesivta in Tzfas. We talked about the dangers of punishment and how real education actually begins with working on ourselves. I’m Meir Vishnapsky, and you’re listening to On Chabad Education. Rabbi Fishy Henig, welcome.

00:24 Speaker 2 Good afternoon.

00:25 Speaker 1 Good afternoon. Is it possible to educate without punishing? Without punishment? We often see the two going together, perhaps. Is it possible to educate without punishment?

00:39 Speaker 2 First of all, that’s an excellent question. But before I answer, I want to preface it with a couple of things. First, what I’m about to say is, of course, what I think—my view based on what I’ve understood so far. That may change later. So people can disagree, and I may also become more precise about it over time. Second, I think that with anything in education, including what we’ll discuss here, you can’t just follow a recipe. You can’t do something unless you genuinely connect with it and truly understand what’s being said. If, for example, we say that you mustn’t punish, but someone doesn’t understand or see what lies behind that, he’ll only cause harm. So, as to whether it’s possible to educate without punishment: first of all, they’re two different things. They have nothing to do with each other. There’s education, and there’s punishment. Maybe I’ll put it starkly so the distinction stays clear throughout: not only can you educate without punishment, you cannot educate with punishment—if you truly want to educate.

01:45 Speaker 1 Wow.

01:47 Speaker 2 Why? Why do we think that? First, what exactly is punishment? We need to sharpen and define that, so people understand it clearly. Punishment is not being an authority. Punishment is not taking responsibility, leading, and setting appropriate boundaries. That isn’t punishment. Punishment is an action the educator takes toward the child that creates negative external motivation. It’s external—unrelated to the thing itself—and it’s also negative. It hurts, annoys, frustrates, angers. It’s something the educator does. Now, if I set a boundary for a child, even a very young child—say he’s crawling toward an electrical outlet and wants to touch it, and I grab him and move him away—I’m not punishing him. I’m not creating anger in him or causing him pain in his heart. I’m simply setting a boundary for him. And it’s important to make that distinction. We’ll talk more about why punishment isn’t needed, but it’s important to understand that being an authority and setting boundaries for a person have nothing to do with punishment. Boundaries are genuinely essential. You can’t do without them, because a person needs boundaries. Without them, he won’t be able to move forward; he won’t have self-confidence. He’ll be confused. He won’t know where the boundaries are, where he can play, where he can enjoy himself. So of course we set boundaries, and we do so firmly. But punishment is something else. Punishment is when I do something that hurts him or creates some unpleasant experience for him because of something he did.

03:28 Speaker 1 Everyone, another episode of On Chabad Education is starting. If you’re connecting with what’s happening here, click Follow on one of the platforms. The more our community grows, the more we’ll be able to bring in special guests and produce content of the highest quality. Be part of the journey. Let’s continue. I’d like us to go a little deeper into punishment. You’re saying punishment is something external, right? Some kind of—how did you put it? Motivation that—

03:53 Speaker 2 That creates external motivation.

03:56 Speaker 1 Right. In other words, the student gets a punishment, the child gets a punishment, the bochur, and—

04:01 Speaker 2 Because of that, he does or doesn’t do certain things.

04:03 Speaker 1 That’s exactly what I wanted to get at. Yes.

04:05 Speaker 2 That’s punishment. Now, another point we can expand on is why it really isn’t good. A person is made up of body and soul, and his soul is a human soul. The human soul is vast, broad, and immense. Of course, neither I nor anyone else truly knows what it is, but a person isn’t an animal. When I use punishment to motivate him to act, I’m treating him like an animal. If I want to train an animal to do certain things or refrain from certain things, I create certain responses in it. When I take that approach and apply it to a person, I’m essentially treating him just like an animal. Either I’m addressing only the lowest parts of him, or I see him as some kind of animal that must be restrained so it won’t attack or do certain things. But if we believe that behind every action a person takes is his human soul, and I address him only as though he were an animal, then I haven’t treated him as a person. I haven’t approached him the way I should. There’s another point about punishment versus education. The essence of education is “Educate a child according to his way; even when he grows old, he will not depart from it.” Education means bringing a person to a certain place in his very being, in his soul—changing him so that this is who he truly is, not merely something he does. Punishment only gets a person to do it. And that will probably last for a short

05:45 Speaker 2 time, until the punishment is no longer there. Like someone driving who knows that if there are no police around, he can speed, and he does. Even if he gets a ticket, he’ll wait a while, and perhaps it will stay with him for a bit. But when he sees there’s no police presence, he’ll start to—

06:01 Speaker 1 It wears off. It passes.

06:02 Speaker 2 It wears off, it passes. It isn’t genuine. That’s punishment. So it isn’t education. And perhaps, toward the end, I’ll return to what I said: not only are education and punishment two different things, but you cannot educate with punishment. So let’s talk for a moment about the dangers of punishment. All right, first of all—

06:23 Speaker 1 First of all, they’re two different things. And beyond that, punishment can—

06:26 Speaker 2 Get in the way.

06:27 Speaker 1 Even cause harm.

06:28 Speaker 2 It causes harm, and you also can’t succeed in educating through punishment.

06:31 Speaker 1 Mm.

06:32 Speaker 2 Now, it’s not that punishment doesn’t exist. We see it in the Torah too.

06:36 Speaker 1 Yes, that’s exactly what I was about to say. We see a lot of punishment in the Torah. There are many laws where it isn’t—

06:42 Speaker 2 Right.

06:42 Speaker 1 It isn’t only at the hands of Heaven. If someone has done something, he has to be held accountable.

06:46 Speaker 2 Mm. First of all, as Chabad chassidim, we know well that Chassidus explains there is no such thing as punishment in the Torah. It’s really a process of refinement. And this isn’t found only in our seforim. The Beis Halevi also says that any punishment from Hakadosh Boruch Hu isn’t punishment at all, and that it would be, G-d forbid, wrong to call it that. Rather, it’s meant to refine the person. In other words, there’s an action and there’s its consequence. If a child plays with fire and gets burned, he doesn’t see the burn as punishment; he played with fire. He just knows not to do it next time. He’ll be angry, sad, upset—but he doesn’t regard it as a punishment. It’s a consequence. It isn’t external, like the negative external motivation we spoke about. It’s a direct consequence. So yes, the Torah uses the word “punishment,” and, as far as I know, the Torah commentators generally use that word too. The question is how they define it. If we define punishment as something external and negative, then what the Torah describes is refinement or a direct consequence of what we’ve done.

07:54 Speaker 1 So the purpose of punishment in the Torah is to refine.

07:59 Speaker 2 Yes.

08:00 Speaker 1 What does that mean? What does it mean to refine?

08:01 Speaker 2 As we know, there are many stories where, if there was no mezuzah, a theft occurred. You see—now, by the way, the Torah is speaking to adults, to people who already understand consequences, and even so it tells you: listen, this isn’t punishment; it’s refinement. Here, we’re talking about a child—

08:15 Speaker 1 The laws requiring a warning first, right? That they be warned.

08:17 Speaker 2 Yes, yes, that there has to be a warning. Here we’re talking about a child who doesn’t necessarily understand the seriousness of what he did, who hasn’t necessarily been warned, and who isn’t old enough to understand what the consequences will be. And we take an action that’s secondary, painful, and external. In other words, the Torah is speaking about adults, people who really can take responsibility for their actions—and even there, it’s a process of refinement.

08:37 Speaker 1 It’s a process of refinement. Wow. So I’m trying to take this into the classroom, into the home. We have, I don’t know, a student who disrupts the lesson. At home, a child did something that, according to the rules the parents set, calls for punishment. He crossed a certain line. What happens then? Okay, punishment is off the table. So how do I educate without punishing? How does that work?

09:05 Speaker 2 Okay, right. Let’s put it this way. We all ask: At the end of the day, I have thirty children in a classroom. I can’t get a word in; they talk back; it’s chaos. How? How do you do it without punishment? How do you set boundaries without punishments, without punishing? How do we manage that? So, first of all, perhaps it’s worth saying that proper conduct from the outset—first of all, by parents at home, if we’re speaking to parents—can prevent things from reaching that point. Conduct that is authoritative, firm, and clear, where you stand by what you say. As great Torah sages have said, say “no” as little as possible, but when you do say “no,” stand by it all the way. Then your child learns that your word is your word, and proper, respectful, pleasant conduct means you won’t need to reach the extreme situation of punishment at all. Now, a teacher doesn’t get to start from the beginning. He receives children at a certain age, and it changes each time; some classes are more difficult. So of course, with them he may be starting at a disadvantage. If these are challenging students and he’s having a hard time with them, it’s not that punishment doesn’t exist as an option. But perhaps there’s something important to know. In Mishlei, King Shlomo says something that Rabbeinu Yonah, one of the commentators, explains this way. The verse says, “A man of great wrath bears punishment; if you rescue him, you will have to do it again.” What does that verse mean? He says: If you come to punish someone while you’re full of anger, while you’re upset, then “he bears punishment”—meaning, don’t punish him. Rescue him from your own hands. In other words—

10:39 Speaker 1 Rescue him, the—

10:40 Speaker 2 The young person, the child—from your hands. And if you don’t do that, then you’ll bear the sin for what happens to him. To that extent. In other words, when we’re angry, the first rule is that we don’t give punishments. What’s very interesting is that Rabbeinu Yonah doesn’t even address whether what you did was appropriate or not. The very fact that we’re angry means: Don’t respond, don’t impose the punishment or the boundary then.

11:08 Speaker 1 Why?

11:10 Speaker 2 Why? First, I think that in practice it won’t be measured correctly. And second, a punishment, in its purpose, is like medicine. Maybe we can put it that way.

11:19 Speaker 1 Refinement. Medicine.

11:20 Speaker 2 Punishment in the Torah isn’t what we generally call punishment. At least, not what I call punishment. Rather, punishment in the Torah is like the consequence of someone playing with fire.

11:31 Speaker 1 Cause and effect.

11:32 Speaker 2 Cause and effect, exactly. A very clear cause and effect. It may be frustrating and painful, but I have no one to blame but myself.

11:38 Speaker 1 Because I know—I was warned, and I did it anyway.

11:41 Speaker 2 Yes. That’s what punishment in the Torah is.

11:44 Speaker 1 And I’m a person—

11:46 Speaker 2 And I’m an adult, and I know how to take responsibility for it. The punishment we give is different: A child says something, talks back, and I take some action that, on the face of it, has nothing to do with his talking back, or something similar. So again, if we are going to use punishment, the first thing is to treat it like medicine. For one thing, not just anyone can administer it. You need to be a doctor. Second, we know that medicine is given in the smallest appropriate dose, with careful judgment, and we don’t live on medicine. You can’t live on medicine. Someone who lives on medicine is a terminally ill person. Okay? And we want people to be alive and healthy, not living on medicine. So even if we’ve reached that point, we have to know that this is medicine. Because if we look for a moment at the dangers of punishment, the first is that an atmosphere where punishment is always a possibility greatly stifles a young person’s, a child’s, creativity. If he knows that when he acts a certain way, talks back, laughs a little, or feels a bit at ease, he gets shot down, it simply stops him from developing, from giving room to the breadth of his inner life, where there are good things—his creativity. Anywhere a person feels fear, apprehension... After all, what is punishment? It’s something external and negative. It hurts; it’s frightening. So if I know that this exists in my surroundings, I’m afraid to do things my soul actually wants to explore. That’s the first danger there.

13:36 Speaker 3 In other words, I could really kill a child’s creativity by creating a situation where he knows punishment is all around him. He does this and gets punished; he does that and gets punished.

13:45 Speaker 2 It simply stops him from doing things, from developing the creativity within him. In other words, the whole—

13:50 Speaker 3 If I build, if I create that kind of atmosphere in my home or in my classroom—

13:53 Speaker 2 An atmosphere of fear, I’ve destroyed the person’s progress and the good things within him.

13:59 Speaker 3 Wow.

14:00 Speaker 2 Second, it creates distance between you and him. He hates you. And we know that, whether it’s between you and the system or between a father and his child, educating someone is possible only through a connection, through closeness. That’s clear. If I want to impart something real to him, something essential, it can only pass from my soul to his. If there’s hatred or distance between us, it won’t happen. That’s the second thing punishment does. The third is what we were just talking about: Behind every instance of punishment, there’s actually a person. Or rather, behind every crossing of a boundary, behind every improper action, there’s a person. Now, if I punish him and say, “Okay, I’ve dealt with it,” I forget for a moment that I need to educate him, because—

14:51 Speaker 3 Because you’ve dealt with that specific incident.

14:53 Speaker 2 Because I’ve dealt with that specific issue, and I feel at ease.

14:56 Speaker 3 I have quiet in the classroom.

14:56 Speaker 2 I have quiet in the classroom, right.

14:58 Speaker 3 At home, things are a bit more—

14:59 Speaker 2 Let’s take the classroom as an example now. Say there really is a child who needs punishment, and we’ve reached a point where we can’t carry on without that painkiller, without that medicine, and so on, and we give him a punishment. The danger is that once we’ve given it, we’ve eased our conscience, because we’ve covered over the educational work that’s needed here. We’ve forgotten about it.

15:22 Speaker 3 Which is—I just want to follow this through. What might that work be?

15:25 Speaker 2 What might it be? It depends very, very much on the child’s age, on the person, and on what he did. If he talked back, if he was late—give me a specific example for a moment.

15:32 Speaker 3 You’re saying that when I give a punishment, I don’t see any of that at all.

15:34 Speaker 2 If I give a punishment, I’ve closed the case.

15:36 Speaker 3 That’s it.

15:36 Speaker 2 I’m done.

15:37 Speaker 3 So yes, I understand.

15:38 Speaker 2 And that brings me back to punishment and the question we raised earlier: what should I do? We need to remember that even if I reach a point where I feel I have no choice—say, I can’t get a word out in the classroom—and I punish the student, I still have to remember that something happened here that calls for an educational response. As long as I don’t address it from an educational standpoint, I haven’t educated anyone. I’ve just made the problem disappear, and that’s all. I haven’t done anything educational. There’s perhaps another danger in punishment. It isn’t necessarily greater with teenagers; it’s just more visible with them. The moment I punish someone, I’ve taken responsibility for his actions away from him. If he did something undesirable and received a punishment for it, I’ve essentially told him, “Okay, that’s the price of this incident. If you do it again, you’ll pay that price again.” But is he now responsible for making sure it doesn’t happen again? No. When we raise a child, we want him to be genuinely educated, to uphold the values we want to instill in him—and to take responsibility for that himself. If he does something that goes against a value and we punish him, we’ve taken that responsibility away from him. Now it’s the supervisor’s responsibility, the father’s responsibility, the educator’s responsibility.

17:09 Speaker 4 Like a fine.

17:10 Speaker 2 Like a fine.

17:10 Speaker 4 Like what you said about the police officer. Yes.

17:13 Speaker 2 Right. Think of a person who drives too fast and knows he’s speeding. He’ll get a fine of a thousand or fifteen hundred shekels, but he has plenty of money. Does he understand the problem? He’s even been fined once, and he still speeds. Why? Because he hasn’t really taken responsibility for the fact that speeding could kill someone. It could cause harm. All he’s understood is that it costs money. So it will happen again. If he truly understood the nature of the problem with speeding, he might still speed later, but at least he would be taking responsibility for it. When he gets a fine, though, he comes away thinking that the whole problem is the price tag. The student, too, sees the limit as some amount he has to pay—fifteen hundred shekels, or whatever it may be. That’s where it ends for him. So if speeding is worth the price to me, I’ll do it.

18:10 Speaker 4 So both the parent or educator and the student or child—

18:15 Speaker 2 The one we supposedly educated by punishing him.

18:17 Speaker 4 Both remain in a place that has nothing to do with education.

18:19 Speaker 2 Exactly, exactly.

18:20 Speaker 4 Yes. So what have we said, essentially?

18:22 Speaker 2 That’s the point. So really—

18:25 Speaker 4 Wait, so what do we do? You’ve set punishment aside entirely. So is there no place for it? You said it isn’t—

18:32 Speaker 2 So—

18:32 Speaker 4 So what do we do?

18:33 Speaker 2 What do we do? First of all, being authoritative and firm is not punishment. When I hold a boundary, that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m punishing anyone. As long as I conduct myself respectfully, speak firmly, know clearly what needs to happen and guide things in a respectful way, that isn’t punishment. And it resolves a great many issues. Now, of course—

18:54 Speaker 4 Is that something you’ve seen in practice, something you’ve experienced as…?

18:56 Speaker 2 If you speak firmly and clearly, and you’re clear about what you expect, the student understands and does what you want. It helps a great deal, both at home and in the classroom. Yes. But things do happen, of course. There’s more to it than that. Students can be disrespectful or cross boundaries in all sorts of ways. As educators, we deal with disrespect and plenty of other boundary-crossing behavior. Each such incident needs to be handled. Now, if you can’t keep the system functioning without punishment—if the situation has really become unmanageable—then okay, you may resort to punishment. Just be very, very clear that it’s outside the realm of education. If the consequence is sending him out of the classroom, do it as respectfully as possible, in the clearest, calmest way you can. And if he needs to leave the classroom, he leaves. Afterward, you speak with him further. You tell him, “Listen, this can’t work this way. This can’t happen, and we don’t do this again.”

19:54 Speaker 4 That happens after the incident, once some time has passed.

19:56 Speaker 2 Yes, that happens afterward. But during the incident itself, you can—like we said, if you do resort to punishment, punishment is like medicine: use the minimum necessary, and administer it calmly. Sometimes, by the way, if something is very, very extreme and really calls for a serious response—not just disrespect or something like that—then you need to think carefully. Really think about what the consequence should be, and make it as unlike punishment as possible: a direct consequence, not something unrelated or merely negative.

20:27 Speaker 4 Can you give an example? You’ve been in education for quite a few years now, and many students have passed through your classroom. Where can I use a consequence that follows directly from what happened? Say a student did something—anything—and we keep the response limited, like medicine. I want to make this more practical. Can you give me an example you remember?

20:57 Speaker 2 I’ll tell you what I do in practice in my classes, or in my own classroom: I try very hard to avoid punishment almost entirely. I try to establish authority and boundaries in a way that lets the boy himself take responsibility. When do I use punishment? When the class can’t function. In other words, the system simply can’t keep going. Now, often, when I’m dealing with teenagers or older boys, they understand this. You can talk to them about it. Even if it’s a very serious breach of a boundary—something you feel has no place in the institution—you sit down and speak with him. “Listen, this doesn’t happen here. It can’t happen here, and you know that.” You work through it with him that way, and he understands and takes responsibility. You can see in practice that it makes the behavior less likely to happen again. Perhaps another time we can go into more detail about how to have that conversation. Now, if someone is so worried about the behavior that he wants to guarantee it will never happen again, not once in all the years to come, then he could impose an extreme punishment and make everyone afraid, and—

22:02 Speaker 4 Punishment as medicine, I’d call it—as a remedy. Make it very precise and give a punishment.

22:07 Speaker 2 Yes, yes. He can give a carefully measured punishment. He can give an extreme punishment that creates fear, but he can also choose one that’s more precisely measured.

22:16 Speaker 4 But ultimately, that isn’t education.

22:16 Speaker 2 Right. It isn’t education, and…

22:18 Speaker 4 All right, let’s not fool ourselves.

22:19 Speaker 2 Yes.

22:20 Speaker 4 In the end, education is education, but we’re all human. Sometimes we react out of emotion; our response is emotional. Say it happened in the classroom or at home, and a moment later I realize: “Listen, that wasn’t educational. I didn’t accomplish anything here.” What would you recommend doing right afterward? Is there no fixing it? Do you just put it behind you?

22:46 Speaker 2 I wouldn’t say there’s no fixing it. We have to look at what you did. It may be that the action itself was all right.

22:51 Speaker 4 No, I felt that what I did wasn’t—

22:55 Speaker 2 That you did it out of anger.

22:55 Speaker 4 Out of anger. I acted contrary to what… Yes.

22:59 Speaker 2 So you acted out of anger, and perhaps what you did was also—

23:01 Speaker 4 Yes.

23:02 Speaker 2 Not appropriate.

23:03 Speaker 4 In any case, I shouted at the boy or responded in a way that—look, we’re human. We all know this from home: you can suddenly respond in a way that isn’t controlled, that isn’t coming from the right place—

23:16 Speaker 2 So what do you suggest an educator do?

23:18 Speaker 4 Yes, because I know it wasn’t right. Twenty minutes or half an hour later, is there a way for me to repair it, or…?

23:26 Speaker 2 So the first thing I’ll say is that I personally started out that way too. I’m human too, and as time goes by, the more I think about it and reflect on it, the calmer I become and the less angry I get. But I’m still human. So sometimes, when we’re both calmer, we can talk about it maturely, and he understands that I’m human and he’s human. Maybe I shouldn’t have raised my voice, but we come to an understanding together that the boundary needed to be there, and that he shouldn’t have done what he did. Maybe I shouldn’t have shouted, but I’m human too, and it happened. I understand that. I don’t need to apologize to the student. It’s not exactly an apology; it’s an acknowledgment that I’m human—

24:17 Speaker 4 Right.

24:17 Speaker 2 And—

24:18 Speaker 4 But I imagine that works more in the settings you’re in. I mean, with younger yeshiva students, that approach works better.

24:24 Speaker 2 What about a child?

24:26 Speaker 4 I mean, I—

24:26 Speaker 2 A four-year-old child.

24:27 Speaker 4 Right, no, now—

24:28 Speaker 2 With a four-year-old, I don’t know if that applies. Everyone makes mistakes, and over time—as someone said, you should try to make each mistake only once. Mistakes happen, and as long as it isn’t a consistent pattern, that’s important to say too, nothing truly bad will come of it. I mean, if it slipped out and that’s not where you normally are, he won’t fall apart or, you know, leave Yiddishkeit because of one incident.

24:55 Speaker 4 Because ultimately, as you’re saying, the issue is when it happens again and again and again.

24:58 Speaker 2 Again and again. That creates distance. Because deep down, the child also knows that the person facing him is human. And the human spirit is so broad and resilient that it can handle mistakes. Look, a one-year-old isn’t afraid of falling, right? He still has the motivation, even if people laugh. I mean, people generally forget things or move on, as long as it isn’t something constantly impressed on them, constantly made into the atmosphere. By the way, another point just came to mind: consistent punishment—and this also relates to consistency, which is why I thought of it—can make a student into “the problem child.” In other words, if all I do is enforce the boundary—

25:40 Speaker 4 You put a label on him.

25:41 Speaker 2 I give him a label. I’m saying, “You’re a liar,” or “You’re a troublemaker,” or “You’re second-rate,” because I’ve made such a big issue of it. If I simply uphold the boundary as it is, without emotion, and don’t make it personal—if I enforce it with authority—then I’m not labeling him. I’m not making him into— But if I punish him, consistently of course, or shout—and punishment, again, doesn’t necessarily have to be an overt action. It could even be a wink, a facial expression, or certain words that give him that feeling. So—

26:19 Speaker 4 The feeling the student gets.

26:20 Speaker 2 Yes, the feeling of being hated. So, to return to what we were saying: if it’s done regularly, systematically—“There you go, you’re late again”—even a phrase like that can make me think, “I’m someone who’s always late.” Or if I’m punished for being disrespectful, and I’m told yet again not to be disrespectful, I start writing myself a story that I’m the kind of person who does that. All I need now is to actually do it, because that’s who I am. If we repeat it again and again... And maybe I’ll add something else, speaking openly, to understand another point about punishment. Often, when I make someone do something, that isn’t necessarily punishment. I can insist on it without it being punishment. For example, personally, I was perhaps shy and didn’t much like speaking in public or doing things like that.

27:16 Speaker 4 As a teenager.

27:17 Speaker 2 As a teenager, and even before that. My dear father wanted me to deliver a sicha in shul or something like that, and of course I didn’t want to. I felt uncomfortable, but he insisted. Now, he insisted pleasantly. I may have been a little angry, or frustrated, and I didn’t want to do it, but deep down I understood that he was doing it because he genuinely cared about me. He insisted. He made sure it happened. So he didn’t only enforce prohibitions—“Don’t shout, don’t cross that boundary.” He also pushed me forward in certain areas. I did it, I got there, and it really broke through a barrier for me. In fact, the fact that we’re here is partly because of that. Someone insisted, but the child understood clearly that it came from love and genuine concern. There was anger, perhaps, but no hatred. I mean, toward my educator—my father in that situation—I didn’t feel hatred. Maybe I was a little angry, but there was no real distance between us. And that’s important to know. We have to be authoritative. We can insist; we can even, in a sense, make a child do something. But the child can feel the difference. A child wants someone to motivate him, to help him advance. He wants to be better; he wants to improve. And if it’s done respectfully—as it was here, with no threats at all, just a push, a gentle physical push, so to speak—then that’s another important point to note.

28:56 Speaker 5 Someone listening to us today might be thinking, “I want to bring this into my classroom.” Maybe he’s on a yeshiva staff, or maybe he’s a parent. What would you tell him to do first? We’ve talked about a lot, and you’ve brought up so many approaches. I think we’ll need to continue this conversation. But where should he start? What’s the best place to begin?

29:22 Speaker 2 Treat people with respect. Create a joyful atmosphere, where it feels good to be and people enjoy being there. That alone will accomplish a great deal. Uphold boundaries with authority, and explain to the child, wherever you are, that this isn’t something we do. Stand firm without getting emotional or shouting, and he’ll accept it. For example: “We don’t jump on the sofa. Please get down.” If he doesn’t, you can even pick him up and take him down. That’s okay. You didn’t shout at him; he didn’t feel any distance between you. That’s how to do these things. Sometimes, when you work within a school system, you have obligations. You know, the education department expects you to teach lessons, and you have to show the principal the results. So sometimes you need to impose a consequence or send a student out of class. Do that respectfully too: “Listen, I need to teach this class. That’s what I’m paid to do. If we can’t manage it together, then the next time this happens you’ll need to leave, and we’ll talk about it.” And if it happens: “Please step out, and we’ll talk about it.” But most importantly, when you give a consequence, don’t leave it there. Talk to the student afterward. Find out what happened and why. “Let’s see how we can keep this from happening again. How can I help you?” And of course, treat punishment like medicine—a powerful medicine. You can’t live on it; it has to be given in the right dose, and so on.

30:46 Speaker 5 Amazing, amazing. Let me add another question. In recent years you’ve been leading the mesivta here in Tzfas with a sure hand. Is there something from those years you’d like to say to the young boys and their parents about this period between elementary school—cheder or Talmud Torah—and yeshiva ketana? They’re two different worlds.

31:09 Speaker 2 Hmm.

31:09 Speaker 5 It’s quite a transition. Of course, that’s a subject in itself, but perhaps give us one point for parents. We’re coming up to that time of year.

31:17 Speaker 2 For parents?

31:18 Speaker 5 For parents and for the students themselves, the children.

31:20 Speaker 2 Okay.

31:21 Speaker 5 The boys.

31:22 Speaker 2 The boys in eighth grade, before they’re about to go to yeshiva.

31:26 Speaker 5 Because it’s a significant period.

31:27 Speaker 2 Yes, it really is a significant stage, because he’s between being a child and a teenager. I really love this stage, which is why I’ve stayed working with this age group. On the one hand, there’s a child’s drive and motivation; on the other, he already has a certain intellectual maturity. He understands things now. So I would tell parents: Your child is capable of more. He can take on much more responsibility, and he can do more in practice. Give him the chance. Believe in him—in learning, in davening, in [unclear], and in what needs to be done at home. He’s a big kid now, and there really is a lot you can do with him. And to the boys, I would say: Don’t forget that inner motivation, that wholeheartedness. It’s something rare, really rare. Reb Zusha of Anipoli said there are several things he learned from a baby. He spoke of seven things he learned from a thief and three from a baby. One is that a baby doesn’t give up. He doesn’t stop for a moment; he’s constantly active. Discouragement comes sometime around the middle of seventh grade, right? Before that, a child just keeps moving forward. This is a vital time to break through to more good things, to move on to more good things, to grow and ask questions, and to develop more within yourself. This is the time.

32:47 Speaker 6 Wow. Before someone finishes here, we always ask—I ask—what tip has worked for you in serving Hashem and in education? Something you can pass on. What would yours be?

33:02 Speaker 2 What would my tip be? This is my tip right now; in a little while it might be a different one. A realization I’ve come to recently, something that resonated with me, is this: I, too, came in with a great deal of motivation to change things and get things done. As time went on, I saw how complicated it is. That brought me to a conclusion expressed in a vort attributed to Rabbi Yisroel of Salant, though some attribute it to the Divrei Chaim of Sanz [unclear]. He said, “I wanted to change the world, and I couldn’t. I wanted to change my community; I tried very, very hard, and I couldn’t. I wanted to change my family; I tried, and I couldn’t. In the end, I realized that the only person I can change is myself.” The Divrei Chaim of Sanz said that if you change yourself, your family will change, then your community will change, and then the world really will change. In other words, education begins with us personally, at a very deep level. Real education begins here and, in a sense, ends here. With Hashem’s help, it will reach our families and our students. But we have to educate ourselves if we’re going to succeed in education, with Hashem’s help.

34:11 Speaker 6 Wow. Thank you so much, Rabbi Fishy Hennig.

34:15 Speaker 2 May we hear good news.

34:15 Speaker 6 May we hear good news.

34:16 Speaker 2 Wonderful.