Q:
You spoke about training ourselves to love our children. But my question is that sometimes when a child grows up, it’s not that easy to love him.
A:
The answer is, practice what the Tomer Devorah says: מימי קדם. That’s one of the middos of Hakadosh Baruch Hu that we emulate; He reminds Himself of how much He loved us when we were a young nation, a new nation. The Jewish nation today, maybe there is not so much to show off today to Hashem; we don’t look so well today. But Hashem says, “I love you like מימי קדם, like when I loved your forefathers.” Ahh!
Always remember when he was your little boy, how sweet he was. Once upon a time he was a cute little boy and his mother said “I could eat him up, I love him so much”. Now you wouldn’t eat him up right now. But try to imagine that feeling and try to recreate it again. That’s what the Tomer Devorah says. Work hard on that.
Actually you can love your big son even with more love. A little boy, you know, doesn’t have any mitzvos, he doesn’t have any Torah. But now he’s a big son and you have to know whatever he does, any good deeds, it’s your credit. When your son makes a bracha, your son puts on tefillin, it’s your credit. ברא כרעא דאבוה – a son is like the foot of the father.
And therefore, a son is a very big investment and your investment increases in value as the son grows older. He’s doing more and more mitzvos. If you’re standing in your store, or in your office and you’re working, and your son is sitting in the yeshiva and learning Torah, it’s your Torah that he’s learning.
And therefore it’s like buying in stocks, buying an investment. At the beginning it yields only a small dividend. With the years it yields more and more. So you should love those stocks more and more as the years go by and you should think, “How I love that son with an affection!” עזה כמות! You should love him with an undying love.
Now that’s not easy. It’s easy to say, but it’s not easy to do. But it’s an ideal we should all work for. We should all labor for the ideal of loving our close ones.
I want to tell you something. It’s contagious. From loving your own children, you’ll be surprised, you come to love other people’s too. The Gemara says that a judge in Sanhedrin who is so old that he forgot the love of children is possul to be a dayan in Sanhedrin anymore; because he forgot ahavas banim; he forgot the love of children. In order to be a real judge, you still have to love your children, and therefore, if many years passed already since he had little children, he no longer loves anybody that much – of course he’s a dayan, a talmid chacham, he’s a tzaddik, but you still need that fuel, that fire that comes from loving your children.
And therefore, work on it and it’ll give you a perfection that makes you come closer to Hakodosh Boruch Hu.
August 1988
