Your Child Is Entering Yeshiva Ketana? Everything Parents Must Know | Rabbi Moishy Meiri #004

00:00 Speaker 1 How does the move from a Talmud Torah to a yeshiva ketana affect a boy? How can we trust him without doing everything for him? For this episode, I sat down for a fascinating conversation with Rabbi Moishy Meiri, an educational counselor at the yeshiva ketana in Tzfas and a parent coach for families with teenagers. We talked about adolescence, the challenges it brings, and, above all, how stepping in less and listening more can improve our relationship with a teenager. I’ve added Rabbi Meiri’s contact details to the episode description. I’m Meir Wishnapsky, and you’re listening to me on Chabad Education. Rabbi Moishy Meiri, welcome.

00:33 Speaker 2 Glad to be here. It’s wonderful, amazing.

00:37 Speaker 1 Yasher koach. I wanted to ask: what is our role as parents in this transition from Talmud Torah to yeshiva ketana?

00:49 Speaker 2 That’s a big question, I have to say, and a lot of people grapple with it: many eighth-grade teachers, many yeshiva staff members, and many parents. But if I had to distill the answer I want to give, it would be: give him strength. This transition is very significant, and our role as parents is to give our children the strength to make it well and to enjoy their time in yeshiva.

01:18 Speaker 1 Mm-hmm. You’re right at that intersection, in contact with parents. What challenges do you often see arise in this transition, in the relationship between parent and student as he moves from Talmud Torah to yeshiva ketana?

01:34 Speaker 2 First of all, there’s a major event here even before the challenges that come with it. There’s a huge difference between the way things work when a child is in eighth grade—between the parents, the Talmud Torah, the daily routine, and the child in the middle of it all—and the way things work when he moves to yeshiva and is there 24/7. The difference is enormous. In eighth grade, the responsibility is always on us, almost entirely on us. We see our child every day. We send him to school, pick him up, make sure he has food. If there’s a problem at school, they call us. We’re always there. Then he goes to yeshiva, and suddenly, in terms of how much we’re present, everything changes. We’re hardly there. He’s there 24/7, and the yeshiva keeps running, with its schedules and everything it takes care of. It simply carries on. Every so often, they involve us. Suddenly, we’re hardly there in a practical sense. But in essence, we’re still these children’s parents. They’re our children; we’re their parents. That doesn’t disappear. It even grows stronger. So that’s the event in its own right. This transition shakes things up for both parents and child. And then there are all sorts of additional challenges. For example, how does he maintain his connection with us now? When he’s home every day, he doesn’t really have to think about it, and neither do we. It just happens. But when he’s in yeshiva and there’s some distance between us, how does he maintain that connection? How does he feel it?

03:26 Speaker 1 That’s exactly what I wanted to ask. If we don’t see our child for a long time—and he’s already a bachur, a teenager—what does the connection look like? When he comes home, I see him after work. His mother makes him food and gives him a hug. But when he’s in yeshiva, he might be away for two weeks, in a completely different city. Where does that connection find expression then? You said it can even grow stronger. Where is the connection?

03:56 Speaker 2 There’s a practical question here: how do you stay in touch? Phone calls, packages, letters—how do you do it? I won’t address that, because every family does what works for them. I’m talking about something more fundamental, and it’s so important. We are this child’s parents, and there’s a bond that cannot be broken. It’s a very strong emotional bond. Often, when our child leaves home, a kind of dance begins: how will this bond find expression? But the fact that it does find expression, and that our child needs us—that certainly doesn’t change. It even grows stronger. The way it takes shape, though, does change.

04:48 Speaker 3 So what should that look like during this transition to yeshiva ketana, when he isn’t at home? Folks, another episode of Chabad Education is beginning. If you connect 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 on special guests and produce content of the highest quality. Be part of the journey. Let’s continue.

05:13 Speaker 2 First of all, we need to know that a bachur can do much, much better in yeshiva when he has the backing of his family. Now, what does that backing mean? We’ll need to talk about it a little. But he needs it. The thing about adolescence is that they give off this prickly message: “I don’t need you, and stop nagging me.” If the parents come to yeshiva, it’s “Oh no, don’t let anyone see you. It’s embarrassing. Don’t come in.” He won’t go meet them. Not every boy is like this, but many are. He meets his parents on a nearby street, or tells them to come only when no one will see, and things like that. What he’s telling us is, “I’m on my own. I don’t need you. Maybe my friends are more interesting to me. Stop nagging me.” That’s the message he sends. But beneath it lies a deep need for our backing as his parents. He needs it. And if he has our backing, his ability to succeed in everything he does in yeshiva—in learning, keeping to the schedule, his social standing, his joy in life—is on a completely different level.

06:18 Speaker 3 What does that backing mean?

06:20 Speaker 2 Well, we’re touching here on a point where I want to suggest something that may run counter to the way many other people understand “backing.” The backing our child needs from us is trust. But I want to explain what trust means. It doesn’t mean some kind of unrealistic confidence: “One day you’ll be a rosh yeshiva.” I don’t know if he’ll be a rosh yeshiva. He doesn’t know if he’ll be a rosh yeshiva. I don’t know if there’ll even be a yeshiva for him to head. I don’t know. Not that kind of grand, detached confidence. That isn’t trust; it’s just a weight on his shoulders that he doesn’t know what to do with. On the other hand, trust also doesn’t mean getting overinvolved and cushioning his path so that everything goes just right and he never faces a challenge, for fear that he’ll break. That isn’t trust. Trust comes from somewhere deep within us: knowing that our child, this bachur, is walking a path he’s capable of walking. He can meet challenges, and he will have challenges. He needs to have challenges. If our son has no challenges in yeshiva, something isn’t right. He needs them—challenges in learning, or with his chavrusa, or with his roommates, or with a staff member. He needs to have challenges. He will have challenges. And we have to believe that he can get through them. Believing in him means not cushioning his path.

08:04 Speaker 3 What do you mean? Say I get a phone call. I’m in Jerusalem, and my son is learning in a city several hours away. He calls and says, “Dad, it’s really hard. It’s really complicated.” I don’t know whether it’s his learning or his friends, but he’s facing a challenge. I’m not there; I’m not part of what’s happening, and he isn’t coming home to me. How am I supposed to respond? Am I supposed to say, “You’ll manage, it’s all fine”? Is that the backing you mean? What does it look like in that phone call that, sooner or later, all of us get?

08:37 Speaker 2 So let’s talk about that for a moment. All of us—me personally, you personally, every parent—have traveled a path through life, through Divine Providence. That path has created what I call cracks in us. What do I mean by cracks? Because of the path we’ve traveled, we become very sensitive to certain things. We may be very sensitive to someone cutting us off on the road. We may be very sensitive to a failed test because, for some reason—and I won’t get into the reason—we experience failing a test as something unbearable. That’s our experience. Often we’re not aware of it. We don’t know that’s how we experience it, but we do. Who knows? Our child. Our children sense our cracks very clearly. Where can you see this especially well? When a child talks to his father, he speaks in a certain way. He’ll tell his father that his rabbi is picking on him, or that he’s the only one left in the class without a chavrusa. When he talks to his mother, he also tells her about his experiences in yeshiva, but he tells her that the food there is inedible. He doesn’t tell his father that, and he doesn’t tell his mother about the chavrusa. Why? He knows what speaks to his father, what sets him off, and he knows what speaks to his mother, what sets her off. He senses it unconsciously, but he senses it very clearly. And our child wants to reach those cracks, to set us off. It matters to him.

10:16 Speaker 3 What does he gain by setting me off?

10:19 Speaker 2 I—I’ll give a general answer, although it varies from child to child. Generally, if my child sets me off, then he’s leading me and I’m being led. I lose my judgment. I’m no longer in a position of strength, understanding, or sound judgment. When I speak with parents, they often tell me, “We feel powerless.” I tell them, “The power is there. If you’re powerless, then the power is with the child, and our job is to keep it with us.” When our cracks set us off, we aren’t thinking clearly. The child gains so much Dad this way. His father is completely caught up in him. That’s something the child needs. He really feels that Dad and Mom are utterly wrapped up in him: he’s hungry—what’s he supposed to do? He’s hungry. Or he has no chavrusa. What’s he supposed to do without a chavrusa? He’s lonely. That feeling is so hard, and his father gets so caught up in it with him, that the child feels such a powerful connection. He can’t give it up. It’s addictive.

11:32 Speaker 3 So he gets more Dad. He says, “Now Dad’s thinking about me. Now Dad—wow.”

11:35 Speaker 2 Dad is occupied with me. And more than that, whether he’s more or less aware of it, he can maneuver things this way. Now Dad won’t be angry with me if I didn’t do well on the test. Now Dad will get permission for me, because he’ll call the mashgiach or my rabbi, explain how serious the situation is, and say that intervention is necessary. He gains a lot of ability to get things he wants this way.

12:00 Speaker 3 And most of the time he isn’t aware of it. I mean, he doesn’t know.

12:02 Speaker 2 It isn’t—it isn’t conscious. There’s no malice here. There’s a real, worthy need here, a beautiful need. He wants more Dad and more Mom. He wants to get things. That’s genuinely legitimate. It’s a beautiful need, but he needs us to be strong and not let him play on those cracks.

12:26 Speaker 3 So what’s the way forward? How do you get out of this? It sounds like he finds where I’m—where my crack is, and gets what he needs from there, not from within himself. How can I move the—what did you call it—the power back to the other side? The…

12:44 Speaker 2 That’s an excellent question. Maybe it’s the heart of the whole matter. I think that as parents, we spend a lot of time on this, or need to. The first thing is awareness. We need to know that our cracks set us off. We need to know that our children look for them. Once we know that, whenever we react from the gut, we need to stop and not act. That’s true when the children are little and we lose control at bedtime or while trying to get out in the morning. We’re rushing to work, they’re taking their time, and they find the crack. We can’t lose our composure. Violence is out of bounds. We can’t shout. That isn’t right. We need to hold ourselves steady for a moment. We know that if we lose control, we stop for a second and breathe. The same applies when the child is already in yeshiva, though it takes discernment. When our children set us off at home, we have our hands on the wheel, and our helplessness comes out as anger and loss of control. We know that’s no good. But when the child is in yeshiva, helplessness comes out differently. It comes out as intervening on his behalf, so it’s much more confusing. We’re much less likely to recognize the helplessness there, and that’s the first thing. The first remedy is knowing what the problem is. The first remedy is recognizing that our cracks set us off, and that our children work on them—they’re professionals at it. So first we recognize it. We take a deep breath and regain control, beginning with awareness.

14:28 Speaker 3 Um, do you have any stories from your work that illustrate parents being led along—parents you’ve met—cases where a parent reaches that point of helplessness and you…

14:39 Speaker 2 Recently, some parents came to consult with me. They described their son in yeshiva ketana: a good, Chassidic bochur, focused on good things, but the situation was fraught. They felt that people at the yeshiva were picking on him. The dorm counselor was against him, and so was the mashgiach. Things were so-so with his teacher; he had a relatively good relationship with the mashpia. But the situation hadn’t settled down for months, he wasn’t doing well, and they didn’t know what to do. They felt at a loss and came to consult with me. As I understood it, they had mainly come to ask how to speak to the yeshiva staff so they would finally understand them and give their son the support he needed. As I spoke with them and began to piece together the picture, what emerged was a genuinely good bochur, focused on good things, a Chassidic bochur—but every so often he crossed boundaries in a really unusual way. He blew up at almost every authority figure in the yeshiva. I can’t give examples that are too detailed, or people might figure out who the bochur is, but he really did blow up. And what happened then? He called his father. He told him how the dorm counselor had done this and that wrong, until finally he’d had no choice but to lash out at him. And this was wrong too, and that was wrong too, and he’d had no choice. Then he hadn’t done well on a test. He’d lashed out at this person and at that person—the whole story. And his father told him, “Listen, it won’t work for you to blow up and then call me to sort things out after you. That’s not how it works. You need to do things properly.” Which is a wonderful response. But the moment the call ended, the father called to sort things out, and his son knew it. And with every new incident,

16:51 Speaker 2 he blatantly broke the yeshiva’s rules and then called his father to straighten things out for him. Once that pattern became very clear, I turned to the parents and showed them the picture as I saw it. They understood perfectly. It clicked. So they asked me, “What do you suggest?” I told them, “I suggest you have faith in your son. Believe in him. There are challenges, that’s true, but he can get through them. He’s a capable bochur, a strong bochur. He’ll meet those challenges.” To make the point even clearer, I told them what I call the ice-cream parable. The ice-cream parable goes like this: you can go shopping with a three-, four-, or five-year-old, and halfway through the shopping trip, in the middle of the supermarket, he suddenly decides he wants ice cream—this one, right now. I think we all know this situation in one form or another. Now our child is crying in the middle of the store. He wants ice cream now, and everyone’s looking at us—the whole store. “What kind of parent can’t manage his child, can’t set boundaries?” And the screaming! So what’s the worst thing we can do right now?

18:25 Speaker 4 Give him the ice cream, right?

18:26 Speaker 2 Yes, give him the ice cream. But why is that the worst thing?

18:31 Speaker 4 I think because he starts calling the shots. He’ll do it again. He’ll learn that if he wants something from me, all he has to do is start crying.

18:41 Speaker 2 Exactly.

18:42 Speaker 4 More precisely, he’ll learn to set me off. Right?

18:43 Speaker 2 Very good. That’s a good and correct answer, because the child might learn that this is a method that works, and he needs to understand that there’s a limit. What about next time—what if he asks to fly somewhere? Where’s the limit? He’ll understand that this works. But I’d like to go a little deeper, and I’d argue that when our child sees the ice cream in the supermarket and wants it, he genuinely feels he can’t manage without it. He feels, “I have to have that ice cream right now. I can’t manage without it. I absolutely must have it.” He isn’t putting on a demonstration for us. He’s showing us how helpless he feels. He can’t manage without ice cream. He needs it, needs it, needs it. So if we give him the ice cream, what are we telling him? “You really can’t manage without it.” That’s such a bad message. It’s so disempowering, so diminishing. It’s a message that says we don’t believe in him. So in either case, we won’t give him the ice cream. But if I don’t give it to him because I’m saying, “He’s not going to show me what’s what,” my response will be one of forcing his hand, a display of power. If, instead, I don’t give him the ice cream because I’m saying, “He can manage without it. He doesn’t know that, but I know he can,” then that’s a message of trust. It’s a message of strength. I’m coming from a completely different place. In both cases I don’t give him the ice cream, but when I withhold it because I believe in him, I’m in a different place, and my son will be in a completely different place too.

20:25 Speaker 4 And even though the response on the ground will be the same, the outcome will be different.

20:30 Speaker 2 It will look different. I’ll tell you another story I came across recently. A mother called me whose son wasn’t really managing in yeshiva. He was breaking one rule and then another, and she didn’t know what to do. He felt he wasn’t succeeding, and he was already saying, “I want to stay home. I don’t want to go back.” It was occupying her mind constantly. She didn’t know what to do, and she kept intervening in different ways. At one point she told the yeshiva, “Don’t correct him yourselves. Whenever something happens, call me and I’ll speak to him, so he won’t feel again that you’re out to get him.” She called me after that week, worn out. It wasn’t working. True, she was the only one correcting him, but every time he broke a rule, the yeshiva called her, and she had to speak to her son and deal with it. It simply wasn’t working. She was worn out, and so was her son. The yeshiva had no answer. He kept breaking the rules, and the yeshiva said, “This can’t go on.” So I spoke with her about that same point: the trust your son needs to receive from you, the message that he can manage in yeshiva. Even if not everyone there treats him in the best possible way—even if some staff members are less experienced or less skilled as educators; that can happen in any institution—he is strong, and he can handle it. She took that in. The next Shabbos he was home, she spoke with him and told him just that. She said, “This is your yeshiva. This is the system you’re part of. If you break the rules, you bear the consequences. That’s it.” She told me afterward that her son accepted it, and gladly. He really connected with it, even though it meant he would now have to pay a price. He had received a message of trust. What was that message? “You’re strong. You can handle

22:31 Speaker 2 this, and you will.” That was the message. She really connected with it herself, and that was what came across to him. The message wasn’t, “I’ve had enough of you. I don’t have the energy for this. Stop breaking the rules already.” It was a message of trust.

22:41 Speaker 4 How do you make that switch? Listen, I’m thinking about the ice-cream story. I have young children, but how do you make that switch? Is it just a matter of changing how you think?

22:51 Speaker 2 It isn’t just a matter of thought. And I should say, it’s not all or nothing. We’re human beings. How much we slept last night, how much we’ve eaten, how much pressure we’re under right now in life—it all affects us. There’s a bar mitzvah for one child, a wedding for another, significant financial expenses. So many things around us can add to our patience or take away from it, depending on the situation. As parents, we don’t have to be perfect parents. There probably aren’t any. But we do need to start. The starting point is awareness, as we said at the beginning. After that comes practice. You have to do it in practical terms. Again and again, we practice giving our son strength and stepping back: not getting involved, pulling our fingers out of it, not picking up the phone right now to call this or that staff member. We trust him to manage the situation he’s in. When we step back—first in our minds and then, from time to time, in what we do—we gradually learn to do it more and more. It’s a muscle. You can exercise it; you can develop it gradually. The interesting thing is that it works almost the opposite way from what you’d expect. This message might sound a little like indifference, as if I’m leaving my son to manage on his own: “That’s his problem, not mine. Leave me out of it.” But the truth is exactly the opposite. Why? Say our son calls us and we’re involved. It’s a simple conversation. He calls and says, “The rabbi sent me out of class today.” “Why did he send you out?” “Because I passed a note to a friend.” Now, if as a father I have to deal with this incident, what do I say to him? “But why did you pass a note to your friend again? We’ve already talked about this, and it happened last week too. You know the rabbi

24:58 Speaker 2 is watching you closely.” I give him a bit of a telling-off because I now have to deal with it. I’m caught up in my own experience: here’s another incident I have to handle. It’s hard for me; it frustrates me. And I pass that on to my son. But if I know I’m not going to handle this incident—the rabbi will handle it with my son, and as long as he doesn’t call me to ask me to get involved, I won’t intervene; maybe even if he does call me, I’ll try not to intervene—

25:26 Speaker 5 So how would you respond to that same son instead?

25:28 Speaker 2 Right. Well, then I can listen to him. I can ask him a question I’d never have thought to ask: “What was so urgent about that note?” But I’m not asking in a critical tone. I’m genuinely interested in why he passed the note. Now, I don’t agree with him, and he knows that. If there’s any doubt, I can say it too: “I don’t agree with you.” But that’s a different kind of statement. It isn’t a gut reaction; it isn’t judgmental or critical. I’m simply there with him, and that’s far more important. It’s a snowball effect in the opposite direction. When I let go of the need to intervene, I’m free to be with my son. And being free to be with my son is a much greater gain than any intervention—calling the rabbi and saying, “Don’t be so hard on him. Yes, it was a note, but he didn’t mean anything by it.” “Yes, he did.” I’m there with my son. He gets a father in the right way, the direct and straightforward way. Our communication is much better. We can talk. It simply works the other way around.

26:28 Speaker 5 When would you say it is right, as a father, to get involved to the point of calling a staff member? Because we’ve presented the other side: step back.

26:40 Speaker 2 That’s an excellent question. It really is an excellent question. Before I answer, I’ll say again that the rule is: there is no rule, because every child is different. I will answer, but first we need to know that, as parents, our job is to feel what’s right and trust our instincts as parents. If we feel that now is the time to intervene, we need to trust that feeling—provided we’ve already practiced letting go. If we’re involved in everything, then it’s not relevant. The question itself isn’t relevant. But if we’ve been giving him space for a while, and now something happens that makes us say, “All right, this really does call for intervention,” then it really does call for intervention. In general, I would distinguish between intervening on impulse and intervening thoughtfully. For example, when a child is about to enter yeshivah and we know he has a problem with gluten, we can call beforehand and let the staff know. Or if he has ADHD, we call the staff and tell them. That calls for accommodations. When a boy arrives at yeshivah, suddenly his day ends at nine in the evening—and if there are farbrengens, sometimes at two in the morning. The staff needs to know. Any intervention that comes from understanding and thought, from bringing the staff on board and working together, is the right kind of intervention. I’ll go further: even if we intervene without our child knowing how much we’re doing, if we feel he has a test that he worked very, very, very hard for and it’s very important to him to succeed, we’re allowed to call his teacher and say, “I want to tell you that my Levi worked very hard preparing for this test.” We’re allowed to do that—but only if we’re acting with good judgment, not out of a need to be involved, not, not from

28:27 Speaker 2 a place of not trusting our son. Then we can, and it’s even advisable.

28:32 Speaker 6 You spoke earlier about a very, very interesting point: when a student or a son calls his father and, um, pushes on his weak spots, he’s creating a connection. So we said we need to be aware that we have those weak spots and that he’s pushing on them. My question is, is there another way I can be more of a father to him and meet that need? Because he’s saying, “Dad is far away. Dad isn’t here. My parents aren’t here. I want a connection. I want more of Dad, more of Mom. I need that.” How does he make that happen? He finds the weak spot, gets his parents worked up, let’s call it that, and then he gets more of Dad. Dad thinks about me, Dad calls me, Dad calls the staff about me. Is there an alternative to that? How can I be there for him as a father when I’m not actually there?

29:27 Speaker 2 The answer is that, first of all, I need to close up that weak spot. Once my son knows he won’t get more of Dad that way, we’ll find other ways.

29:43 Speaker 6 Mm-hmm.

29:45 Speaker 2 But I’ll add that this is what we were talking about earlier with the snowball effect. When I’m not constantly involved, and then my son calls me, I’m free to be with him in what he’s experiencing. That’s the kind of father he needs, and both he and I gain from it. That’s how it should work.

30:04 Speaker 6 You’re now launching a new program, and it sounds very, very fascinating. I’d love for you to tell us a little more about it and where it came from. How did you come to put together a program like this and bring it out to the public? What do people get from it? Who is it for? Tell us a little about the project.

30:18 Speaker 2 First, I’ll say that what we discussed in this episode—this trust in a child, genuine trust—didn’t come from a book I read or something I studied. These insights came from many years of work on the ground. You see the same situation again and again and again, and you make this clearer to parents, and you can see what are almost miracles. When parents understand it, the speed with which their son’s functioning in yeshivah changes is remarkable. And when you encounter one case after another like that, you can’t keep it to yourself. You have to create a program. I should say that this is my thirteenth year working with this age group. For most of those years, I worked as a mashgiach in a younger boys’ yeshivah. I was a mashgiach there, and—

31:08 Speaker 6 My mashgiach, too.

31:09 Speaker 2 Yes, that was when I had just started. Over my years as a mashgiach, I felt a need to do more educational work, more professional work, so I went to study educational counseling in order to do better educational work as a mashgiach. I didn’t think I would end up working as a counselor. I studied, enjoyed it very much, and gained a great deal from it. At a certain point, the yeshivah’s need for someone in that professional role of educational counselor kept growing, until two years ago I made the transition to working solely as the yeshivah’s educational counselor. Throughout all those years, and particularly in the last two, I’ve met more and more boys and parents. Some were from the yeshivah; others came to me privately through word of mouth. And I hear the same language again and again, the same confusion around adolescence. Parents reach this stage and don’t know what to do. They react instinctively. These are good children and excellent parents who handled their children’s younger years very well. Suddenly the child becomes an adolescent, and it’s such a turbulent, hard-to-understand stage. He gets prickly, as we discussed earlier in the episode, along with all kinds of other things. Parents simply don’t understand. They don’t know what to do, and their reactions take over without their realizing it. That’s what led me to create the program “Growing Up the Right Way,” based on what I’d seen in the field. This program gives parents the most professional, most practical, and also most Chassidic tools. The Rebbe’s approach to all these issues is woven throughout. The course sessions include many of the Rebbe’s letters and sichos—not as something forced in, but as an integral part of the approach, because this is the approach we believe in. It’s the approach we use in the yeshivah and that I use in my private work as well. The course is really meant to give parents tools. It begins with four sessions addressed to the parents themselves, on parental authority, belonging, separateness, and boundaries. They lay the foundation. Any parent who watches

33:19 Speaker 2 those four sessions and does the small, practical assignment at the end of each one—and I worked very hard to cut down a lot of material so that each session would be short, fifteen or sixteen minutes, but still have a lot of depth and a very practical assignment—will come away with tools to handle almost any challenge adolescence brings. After that, there are two sessions on adolescence itself: what it is, what it looks like, and what our role is at that stage. Two sessions deal with safety, including online safety. There’s another session on the transition to yeshivah and communication with the educational staff, and then there are three sessions to choose from. Parents can choose a session intended for parents who are baalei teshuvah. My parents are baalei teshuvah, so I felt it was important to make a dedicated session, also based on my work in the yeshivah. Or they can choose a session for parents of a child with ADHD, or one for shluchim abroad who send their children to study here in Israel.

34:28 Speaker 7 It sounds like it really comes from your work on the ground, with all that precision about what’s needed. Before we finish, we always ask whether there’s a tip for avodas Hashem that you’ve heard, something you live with, that you’d be willing to share with us.

34:51 Speaker 2 There’s one idea I live with. We’re recording this conversation close to Pesach Sheini, and Pesach Sheini teaches us that nothing is lost. I live with the awareness that the yetzer hara’s job is to keep dripping into our minds the thought that the situation is hopeless, that we’re hopeless. I’m not talking about the children; I’m talking about us. How hopeless we are. We don’t have a chance anymore. Once we started davening; once we started learning. Once we were serious, Chassidic, pure. Now we don’t have the strength anymore; it’s been so long, and there are all sorts of reasons. It finds all sorts of ways in. Each person has his own weak spot, and here’s someone else who knows how to find it: the yetzer hara. It constantly wants to tell us how hopeless things are. Before we place our trust in our children, we need to trust ourselves. We can do it. We’re capable. We’re worthy. When we know how to trust ourselves, we have strength in our avodas Hashem. It gives us so much strength from within, and we can place our trust in many others, too.

35:57 Speaker 7 Wow. Rabbi Moishy Meiri, thank you very much.

36:00 Speaker 2 Thank you. It was a pleasure to be here.