Rabbi Peretz Chen | This is how we'll raise children with sensitivity to others' pain

00:00 Hello. So we come home at the end of a workday, a school day, a day of errands, and things haven’t gone the way we wanted. Not the way we planned or imagined, and we don’t feel good. What we very much want from home at those moments—from our spouse, from our family—is for them to sense that we’re having a hard time, to feel our pain. In one word, that’s empathy. Empathy means feeling and sensing another person’s difficulty and pain. Empathy doesn’t mean always agreeing that the other person is right. That’s sympathy. Sympathy means I agree with the other person: “Yes, you’re right. Yes, yes, you’re one hundred percent right.” That’s sympathy. Empathy means I don’t necessarily agree, but I feel that he’s having a hard time and I sense his pain. I’m there with him in his pain. How important that is when our son, our child, comes home at the end of a school day and things haven’t gone well for him. His friends gave him trouble, he had a run-in with a teacher, and he comes home feeling bad. Before we investigate what happened and how it happened, let him feel that we’re with him. “We can see you’re having a hard time. We can see you had a rough day. Come have a glass of water. Come sit down and rest. Come—we’re here with you. We want to help you. What do you need?” That sense of solidarity is worth so much. It gives tremendous strength to the person who’s struggling, who needs that empathy directed toward him at that moment. In today’s class, with Hashem’s help, we’ll talk about how to teach our children to be empathetic toward those around them. It will help them with their social skills. It will also help them in their marriages, with Hashem’s help. It will help them at work and throughout their lives. The truth is that empathy is something that, from a very young age,

02:05 is already there within us. You can see empathy even in very young children. Yesterday, by Divine Providence, I picked up my children from their preschools—my little two-year-old from daycare—and saw something amazing. By Divine Providence, I had been thinking about this very subject, and I said, “Wow, I’m seeing it before my eyes.” I watched my two-year-old get into the car. He has a blanket he loves very much; it’s always with him. I also picked up his three-year-old sister, who has a blanket she loves too. Her blanket was lying there in the car. She got in without it, and she was crying. Something was bothering her; she wanted something. Suddenly I looked over, and I was amazed to see how the two-year-old understood on his own. He picked up his sister’s blanket and handed it to her. She hugged the blanket, and he went on with what he was doing. In other words, he sensed that she wasn’t happy, that she wasn’t feeling good. He needed some way to comfort her, to ease her pain, to help her in the situation she was in. He took her blanket because he understood that it would calm her, and he gave it to her. That’s something we have within us from childhood. But we need to make sure we hold on to it and develop it. We need to develop it because feeling and sensing what another person is going through is so important in life. A long time ago, I saw a woman approach a certain rabbi and pour out her complaints to him. She went on talking, and the rabbi disagreed with many things she said. I witnessed the incident, and as an onlooker I also disagreed with much of what she said. But she was complaining and crying from the depths of her heart,

04:00 and that rabbi didn’t seem to have much patience to hear her out. So he told her, “With Hashem’s help, things will be good. It will be all right, with Hashem’s help.” He didn’t know what to say. Then someone standing nearby said to the rabbi, “Rabbi, Rabbi, let her finish. At least listen to her.” It bothered that person: Why wasn’t the rabbi showing her empathy? You don’t have to agree with her. Don’t agree with her. Maybe she isn’t right; maybe she’s exaggerating. That could very well be. But show that you care about what she’s saying. She’s an unfortunate woman who has a hard life. I know her a little. Things are hard for her. She wants to pour out her heart a bit, to say what’s weighing on her. Listen to her. That’s empathy. I don’t have to agree with her. That’s not sympathy. But empathy means listening to the other person and making him feel he isn’t alone in his pain. How important that is, how essential it is in life. We’ve seen that when people came to many great Torah leaders for advice about a difficulty, a crisis, or a problem, those leaders didn’t immediately pull an answer out of a drawer. No. Some would pause, close their eyes, think, try to identify with the other person, and look at him with loving, compassionate, fatherly eyes: “I’m with you in your pain.” So many people who had yechidus with the Rebbe of Lubavitch said that one of the things that helped them most was his loving gaze, his gentle gaze, the feeling the Rebbe gave them: “I’m with you. I feel what you’re going through. I’m with you through this difficulty, because you aren’t alone. This is something we’re facing together. We’ll get through it together, with Hashem’s help.” How important, how absolutely essential this is in the way we relate to our children. A child cries,

05:57 and you could ignore him. He cries and cries, and you could ignore him. But what will he learn from that? That we ignore someone who’s having a hard time? Instead, you need to go over to him and say, “This is hard for you. What happened?” Just a few words. Show him empathy. There are solutions, of course. Sometimes he wants things he shouldn’t have, things he doesn’t deserve, and that isn’t appropriate either. But that act of identifying with him, that display of empathy, is powerful. It has strength and value in its own right. By Divine Providence—we’ll talk about how to pass this on to children, of course, but just before that—this week’s parsha, Parshas Vayigash, speaks about the moving reunion of the brothers Yosef and Binyamin after years apart. The Torah tells us that when they met, they fell on each other’s necks, embraced, and cried. Yes, they cried at that reunion. Our Sages explain, and Rashi explains, what they were crying about. Rashi tells us that Yosef cried because he saw through ruach hakodesh that the two Batei Mikdash, the First and the Second, would stand in Binyamin’s portion and would be destroyed. He cried over the future destruction of the Batei Mikdash in his brother’s portion. That was why Yosef cried. But why did Binyamin cry? Because he saw that the Mishkan would stand in his brother Yosef’s portion, in Yosef’s inheritance, and he cried because that Mishkan was destined to be destroyed. The question immediately arises: Wait, what’s going on here? Each one is crying over the other one’s troubles. Cry over your own troubles! Binyamin should have been crying over the future destruction of the two Batei Mikdash in his portion, and Yosef should have been crying over the destruction of the Mishkan in his portion. Why is each one crying over the other’s troubles? The Rebbe gives a wonderful explanation. The Rebbe says: Don’t cry over your own troubles,

08:03 Do it. Are you facing a difficulty? Roll up your sleeves and get to work. Don’t let the difficulty bring you down. Don’t give up. Get out there and get to work. You have problems, difficulties, challenges? Go and fight them. Go and overcome them. But here we’re talking about someone else’s difficulty, someone else’s problem. When it comes to someone else’s problem, I show empathy. I cry, I shed tears, I’m there with him. My heart aches for you; your difficulty is painful to me. That is showing empathy. I identify with the other person’s problem and difficulty. So how can we really bring empathy into our home, so that our children, too, will grow up to be empathetic people toward others and the world around them? First of all, as I mentioned earlier, when we see that a child is having a hard time, we shouldn’t ignore it. He comes home in a bad mood, something is bothering him, he’s crying. Go over to him and ask, “What’s going on? Why are you crying? What happened today? What’s hard for you? I can see that this is hard. I can see you’re having a hard time. Would you like a glass of water? We can talk about it if you want, if you want to open up.” Whatever words come naturally to us, as long as they feel: We see you. We aren’t ignoring your pain. That will teach them that when someone else is in pain, we need to see that pain and not ignore it. It’s not that I don’t care. I do care about what’s happening around me, about what’s happening to another person. I genuinely care, and I want to help. That’s how, little by little, they’ll learn to notice the people around them and develop empathy for others. Sometimes everything may be fine with your own son or daughter, but someone else is having a hard time. Your children might tell you about a boy or a girl in their class who has some sort of problem. That’s a good opportunity to start a conversation about it. What happened to her? What difficulty

10:03 is she facing? How is she managing to get through it? What is she feeling? What feelings does this difficulty bring up for her? Talk about the other person’s pain. It develops that sensitivity to see someone else, to see pain, to feel pain, to feel for another person. More generally, there are values we can foster at home that encourage empathy. If we talk at home about the need to respect other people and not belittle them, and about trying to speak respectfully even when we don’t like someone, rather than speaking against them; and, of course, if we speak out against violence and all the things that violate another person’s dignity—we’re constantly speaking about the worth of another person. It’s important to see how talking about these values, about respecting others, at home also develops empathy in children. Because what does respecting others mean? It means noticing the people around you. There’s me, and there are other people. If I speak at home about seeing others, about not belittling them and not hitting them, then I’m helping develop feelings for other people, for those around us. That’s how we gradually develop empathy in our children at home. And one more thing, perhaps the most important of all, that will help them develop empathy: seeing us behave empathetically, including toward our spouse. If I see that my wife is tired, that she’s had a long day and doesn’t have the energy right now, I’ll say to her, loud enough for the children to hear, “Go on, I can see you’re tired. Go and rest. I’ll wash the dishes, I’ll bathe our daughter, I’ll take care of the task. Go and rest.” They’ll see it, and they’ll learn from us, in the most powerful way, what it means to show sensitivity toward another person. They’ll see us talking with other people, in different situations, at the supermarket,

12:14 and they’ll see us showing sensitivity. That’s what will do it. I’ll share a little story. In the previous class—for those who listened, and thank G-d, judging by the responses I received, many people did—we spoke about kindness, about developing kindness and giving, about going beyond what’s required. One of the examples I gave last week was that if you’re standing in line and someone is in a hurry, you let them go ahead when you can. That’s kindness, doing something extra for another person. And, by Divine Providence, the very next day I went to the post office. At the branch I went to, there was a line and a lot of people, and people were already irritated and angry. It was really something. My turn came, and a woman said to me, “I just need one little thing, and I’m in a hurry. Could I go ahead?” I wasn’t in much of a hurry, so I told her, “Okay, sure.” An older man sitting off to the side looked at me and said, “Good for you.” So I said to him, “Yes, this is the test. This is one of those moments when life puts you to the test.” And he said, “All of life is a test, not just particular moments.” But I thought to myself: By Divine Providence, we spoke about this in the class, and here Hashem has put exactly this situation in front of me. Let’s see how you handle what you were talking about yesterday. That man on the side saw what happened and responded immediately. I didn’t have my children with me that time, but if they had been beside me and seen it, it certainly would have developed their sense of empathy: noticing someone else, seeing another person’s need, another person’s request. And when they see us behaving with empathy, responding to difficulties and needs, identifying with the pain of the other children

14:19 at home, with each other as spouses, and with people we meet in everyday life, it will develop that empathy in them. That living example, that personal example, will develop their empathy to the greatest degree. So let’s sum up what we spoke about today in this short but important class: the great value of seeing another person—empathy. How important it is in relationships between people, between spouses, between parents and children, and between people at work. We need to bring this value into our home. When we set an example of it at home; when we talk at home about respecting others and recognizing their worth; when we respond to our children’s difficulties so they see that we truly practice this with them; and when we talk with them about someone else’s difficulty and try to understand what that person is going through and experiencing—that’s how, little by little, we’ll develop this important feeling in them. With Hashem’s help, it will help them throughout their lives, and life will also be much more pleasant and better. I’d be very happy if you have something to say or add, something that could enrich what we’ve said here. Write it in the comments below. Share your life experience, your perspective, and your insights on this subject with us. If you think this video gave you something valuable, share it with others. Share it with a friend. Let others hear this point too. It may be so simple, but it’s so important. And may it be Hashem’s will that we merit good days, peaceful days, days of success and victory for the Jewish people; that all the IDF soldiers and all the security forces be healthy and safe, and the hostages too; and that, with Hashem’s help, we merit the coming of Moshiach and the resurrection of the dead very, very soon, and merit the complete Geulah.

16:25 And until then, may we have nothing but nachas from our children. Thank you very much. Good news, and much, much success, with Hashem’s help. Thank you.