Rabbi Peretz Chen | How do we build desire for good things in our children?

00:00 Hello, everyone. Today I want to open with a story about Bamba and Paz orange drink that made a long journey, all the way from Ashkelon to the city of Khan Younis. No less! So what happened? My older brother is serving in the reserves. He’s a combat medic, and this past Shabbos he was in Khan Younis with his unit. They’re medical personnel who, sadly, sometimes receive wounded soldiers. They treat them and do what needs to be done. May it be Hashem’s will that, with His help, they won’t have any more work of that kind. Since my brother was in Khan Younis this past Shabbos, where they don’t have fish like they do at home, or Shabbos cholent, our community at our Chabad House in Ashkelon got organized. People prepared Shabbos delicacies for them: meatballs, really good food, fish, schnitzel, side dishes and cakes. Someone arranged drinks, and there was couscous and couscous soup too. They were set for a really delicious Shabbos. But of course, the challenge was getting it from us into the Strip, all the way to Khan Younis. Through various arrangements and coordination, thank G-d, it all came together. Then on Thursday, before everything set off on its long journey, I remembered that years ago, when my brother was a soldier stationed on Mount Hermon, he used to travel from there back home to central Israel. He told me that sometimes he liked to buy Bamba for that long trip. They used to sell a kind called Masibamba—older viewers might remember it—a huge bag of Bamba for parties and birthdays. He’d buy Bamba and Paz orange drink. He loved that combination. So I remembered it and said to myself: I have to arrange that. We have to get it for him now, too. I told one of my children about it, and he got excited. He said, “Yes, let’s—

02:14 let’s get it!” So he took the little money he had. We went to the store, and my son used it to buy Bamba for his uncle, my older brother. We searched a few stores because Paz orange drink is hard to find these days, but we found a bottle. It’s a little glass bottle. We put it in a black bag and sent it to him with the delivery to Khan Younis. And after Shabbos, my brother sent a video of himself holding that package and the note my son had written to him. “Thank you so much! This really warms my heart. I’m going to take the special thing you brought me,” he said to my son, “and eat it on Shabbos. I’ll drink it on Shabbos and enjoy it on Shabbos.” So, thank G-d, that mission was a tremendous success. Where did my son get that willingness to do something good for someone else—for his uncle—and spend his own money? He doesn’t have much money. He’s a little boy, eleven years old. Where did that eagerness and desire come from? I told him the story and we talked about it. It moved him, and it awakened in him a desire to do good. One of our tasks as parents—and this is what we’ll discuss in today’s class, with Hashem’s help—is how to awaken in our children the desire to do good, to give to others, to show respect and to daven. How can we, with Hashem’s help and heavenly assistance, awaken that desire in them? Thank you as well to everyone who responded to the poll we held in the group, the class’s WhatsApp group. Most of you wrote that you wanted us to discuss how to awaken a desire to do good in children. So this class is in response to your request. Today we’ll think about how to do that, and we’ll also delve a little deeper and look at where desire fits into the structure of our souls—

04:23 what this faculty called the power of desire is, and just how significant it is. So let’s begin and dive straight into the deep end. As human beings, the structure of our soul has two parts: intellect and middos, our emotions. The intellect is everything we think about in our minds. We come up with ideas, reach insights and analyze things internally. Then, after those things are in our minds, they move into the realm of the heart, of emotions and middos. The heart gets excited, the heart loves, the heart gets angry. That’s how we operate all the time. The mind reaches conclusions, and those conclusions stir emotions in our hearts. I conclude that something is good, that a person is good, and a feeling of love for him awakens in me, along with a desire to connect with him. If I understand in my mind that someone is unpleasant and I should keep my distance, a feeling of distance from him awakens in my heart. I don’t want to be close to him; it doesn’t feel good to be close to him. That’s how it works all the time: mind and heart, mind and heart. That’s the way Hakadosh Boruch Hu created us. But there’s something else above all of this, something that drives and moves the whole system: what’s called the power of desire. When you want something, the mind thinks about it, and then the heart responds emotionally. The heart is drawn to it—or the heart says, “Stay away from that.” It all depends on the power of desire. I want to tell a story that illustrates just how powerful desire is. When there’s a strong desire, the entire system that follows responds accordingly. It’s told that in the time of the second Rebbe of Chabad, the Mitteler Rebbe, Rabbi Dovber, there was a chossid named Reb—

06:39 Yekusiel. Reb Yekusiel lived in the town of Liepli. He was known as Reb Yekusiel Liepler, after the town of Liepli. In the Mitteler Rebbe’s time, it was customary for a young married man, a chossid who had visited the Rebbe, to stop on his way back home—travel was by horse and wagon then, not by plane, and the roads took a great deal of time and patience. He would pass through many towns, and wherever there were chassidim, he would stop and share the Torah teachings he had heard from the Mitteler Rebbe. One day, a young chossid was on his way home from the Rebbe and stopped in Liepli, where Reb Yekusiel lived. All the chassidim in town were excited: a chossid had just come from the Rebbe! They would hear Torah teachings from him and find out what was happening at the Rebbe’s court. All the chassidim in town gathered in the beis midrash. The young man sat at the head of the gathering and began to share what his visit to the Rebbe had been like—to farbreng with everyone. They all listened to the Torah teachings and the maamar of Chassidus he repeated from what he’d heard from the Rebbe. Everyone was moved and enjoying it. But Reb Yekusiel sat there without understanding a word, and it broke his heart. “What’s going on? I don’t understand a word! This young chossid understands it and explains it, and I don’t understand it at all.” Well, the gathering ended. Reb Yekusiel approached the young man and said, “Listen, I didn’t really understand. Could you repeat it for me privately, just the two of us?” He replied, “Reb Yekusiel, with pleasure.” They sat down together. The young man explained and talked, but Reb Yekusiel felt he wasn’t understanding anything. It broke—

08:42 Him. Why? What’s wrong with me? Is my mind so closed off? I don’t understand anything. It broke him so deeply that he decided to travel to the Mitteler Rebbe himself and ask for help. “Rebbe, please plead with Hashem to open my mind.” When he arrived, he began to cry. He said, “Rebbe, I don’t understand. A young man came, understood it, explained it—and I still don’t understand.” The Mitteler Rebbe told him, “Reb Yekusiel, listen. Nothing stands in the way of the will.” Then he explained: “Among a person’s faculties is the power of the intellect—the ability to grasp and understand. But above the intellect is the power of the will. Because the will is higher than the intellect, when you want something very, very much, that strong desire can push all the faculties beneath it, including the intellect. If you truly want to understand, your will can push your intellect until it begins to understand.” It’s like lining up several objects: if you push the one in front, everything behind it moves too. The same is true here. A strong desire can push everything that follows it toward that goal. Reb Yekusiel heard this, went outside, and decided to send his family a letter: “I’m staying here with the Rebbe for a few months.” One of the students was assigned to study with him. They sat together for some time, and little by little, through Reb Yekusiel’s strong will, he suddenly felt himself beginning to understand. He began to grasp things he had never understood before.

10:36 It simply came to him. And little by little, he didn’t just begin to understand—he became an extraordinarily deep thinker. So much so that when the Mitteler Rebbe wrote the very profound sefer Imrei Binah, he wrote one of its sections especially for Reb Yekusiel. The Frierdiker Rebbe, the sixth Chabad Rebbe, said that this story shows how the Mitteler Rebbe turned a block of wood into a human being. Reb Yekusiel’s mind had been so closed, and the Mitteler Rebbe awakened a powerful desire within him. Through that desire, he was able to move forward. In other words, the power of the will is tremendous. If we want, with Hashem’s help, to get our children to do positive things, it’s very important to awaken their desire to do them. Once they want to, things can move forward. First, they need to want it. If we get children to do good things by forcing them, without their truly wanting to, they may do them because we told them to, because they listen to us and respect us. But it may not last, because they don’t want to do it—and ultimately, desire is what drives everything that follows. If we go a little deeper, above the power of the will is another faculty, called the power of pleasure. Desire is awakened by pleasure. So we need to reach that sense of pleasure too, to help them want it. And when they want it, they’ll get there. We see this at home. Every parent sees that when children want something—even the laziest child in the house—they do it. And we’re beside ourselves:

12:40 “Oh, so you can do it! Then why don’t you do it here, and here, and here?” What’s the answer? They want that particular thing, so they find the strength within themselves to do it. But when they don’t want to, they don’t find that strength, and it doesn’t happen. So our task as parents is to awaken in our children the desire to do these things. How do we do that? The first and most basic way to awaken an inner desire in children—and it’s the most basic thing in education generally—is to set an example of the things we want them to do. Say we want our children to daven. It matters to me, as a father, that my child daven. If I tell him, “Open your siddur and look inside,” and create an atmosphere of pressure and compulsion around it, he may do it. But he doesn’t want to. He’ll do it now, but nothing genuine will take root inside him. Instead, I can say very little and simply set an example. My child knows: Dad goes to shul for Shacharis. Dad goes for Minchah and Maariv. Dad doesn’t miss davening. And when my son sees me in shul, what does he see me doing? He sees me davening. I’m not chatting with all my friends or catching up on the news. He sees Dad sitting with his siddur, wearing his tallis and tefillin—and on Shabbos, without tefillin. Dad is simply davening, and he sees it with his own eyes.

14:26 He also sees that Dad does it joyfully. And when Dad talks about shul at home, he speaks about it positively, about the great privilege of going there. Little by little, he comes to understand and recognize that it’s something good, and he too may begin to want it. After all, I want him to daven too, right? It matters to me. So I can make it enjoyable for him. I can encourage him and offer little rewards and incentives. Then, in his mind, shul becomes associated with getting a treat or a candy afterward. Why do so many kind people hand out candies to children who come to shul on Shabbos? Because it creates a pleasant association that can gradually make them want to be there. Then, when they grow up, they’ll enjoy being in shul even without the candy, because they remember it as a good experience. We create that positive experience for them. Children need those treats and encouragement at first to draw them in that direction. One of my children isn’t exactly eager to go to school every day. So one thing I do—and, boruch Hashem, it works very well—is keep a supply of treats. He knows that when we get to school, he can choose something from the bag. That’s what gives him the desire to go. There are limits, of course. If he asks for two, I say, “No, just one. One only. That’s the agreement.” But it makes him want to get up, get ready, arrive at school, and go into class with the treat he chose. There’s something enjoyable about it. It’s not just “Go, go!” with tension around it. He wants to go because he enjoys it, because there’s pleasure in it.

16:24 So that is our task: to create in our children a desire for these things and to set an example. We want our children to show respect and speak respectfully to us, their parents, to their siblings, and to people in general. How do we do that? By letting them see how we show respect. They should see me speak respectfully to my wife—not belittling her, hurting her, or speaking unpleasantly. I should try to speak to my children as respectfully as possible, and to the people I meet or talk to on the phone. They see it; they feel it. Besides setting an example, another thing that can do a great deal to awaken their desire for these good things is telling stories about them. One of the strengths of a story is that it shows us something concrete: here’s how a person acted in this situation. It gives a child something to aspire to—a desire to follow the path the story portrays. We spoke about davening, so tell them stories about davening: how powerful is it? How has it helped people? What strength does it have? There are many stories about davening in the Gemara, in Tanach, and in life generally. Tell them stories about respecting people—how people showed respect to others, and how much good that respect brought about. There are many such stories. In this way, little by little, we’ll plant in them the desire and pleasure of connecting to the things we want them to connect to. In other words, to get children to do good things,

18:29 To do good deeds, to take positive action, we need to awaken in them the desire to do so. When there is a desire, as the Rebbe said to Rabbi Yekusiel Feller, that desire drives everything that follows. If there is a desire, everything will move forward. I once told a story in one of the classes about a time when my mother wanted me to eat cherries. I didn’t know the fruit; I was a little boy. So what did she do? Instead of telling me, “Eat them, eat them, they’re healthy,” and making a big deal of it, she simply sat beside me in the room. I haven’t forgotten it. She told me a story about cherries. I don’t remember what the story was, but it must have moved me very deeply. Apparently, cherries sounded like a dream to me. She awakened in me a desire for them. Then, when the story ended, she went to the kitchen and brought back a little dish of cherries. I ate them happily, with great pleasure, because my mother had awakened in me the desire for them. Once I wanted them, I naturally ate them and enjoyed them. Everything else became much simpler and easier. So that is our task: with Hashem’s help, to awaken in our children a desire to do good things. When we awaken that desire in them, the good things will, with Hashem’s help, happen. May it be Hashem’s will that we merit, with Hashem’s help, to awaken in our children—our sweet children, who are the central mission of our lives, the heart of our shlichus—a strong desire and real enthusiasm for good, positive things. We’ll set a personal example for them and tell them stories about these things, and then, with Hashem’s help, they’ll want them. And when they want them, as we discussed earlier, that will set everything that follows in motion, with Hashem’s

20:32 help. We began with the story about Khan Yunis, about the Bamba and Paz juice in Khan Yunis. May it be Hashem’s will that all the soldiers in Khan Yunis, throughout the Gaza Strip, in the south and in the north, have only tasty Bamba and tasty juice—and nothing else unpleasant. May they be healthy and whole, may they be protected, and may they succeed in their missions, with Hashem’s help. May all the wounded recover and return to their families healthy and whole, in mind and in body. May we merit the coming of Moshiach and the resurrection of the dead, and may we merit to have all those holy souls with us again, with Hashem’s help. If you feel that this class speaks to you, that it touches something in you, share it with others. If you have something to add, please write it in the comments below. Share this whole subject, too. And again, may it be Hashem’s will that we merit, with Hashem’s help, a great deal of nachas and only, only good news. Thank you very much. All the best. Good news.