Q:
How much should a father chastise a child? Is there a danger of too much?
A:
There’s always a danger in too much. Not only in chastising. There’s a danger in loving too much. There’s a danger even in learning too much.
When a boy came to a certain yeshivah so the old rosh yeshivah saw that he was learning day and night. So the rosh yeshivah said to him, “If you want to succeed, you have to learn in the right time and you have to sleep in the right time. And if you learn when you’re supposed to sleep then you won’t succeed.”
So even learning you can overdo.
And the yetzer hara tells you sometimes, “Don’t listen to this advice that the mashgiach tells you to go home and go to sleep. He doesn’t have your fire. And you keep on learning!” And the end is that this fellow lands up chas veshalom in an asylum.
So anything can be overdone. You can do too much of anything. So certainly there’s such a thing as too much chastising.
Now to ask how much chastisement should be given is like asking a physician how much medicine should you give a patient. It depends. It depends on the age of the patient and it depends on his weight. It depends on his weight, his body size. It depends also on what kind and to what degree the illness has progressed. Everything depends on the circumstances.
And to say give me a clear cut prescription how much I should chastise my son is not realistic. That’s one of the big tests in life. A father, a frum father, gives the son a slap because he didn’t do something right. Then his heart hurts him: “Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I was too strict.”
So when he says to Hakadosh Baruch Hu on Yom Kippur, על חטא שחטאתי לפניך – for the sins that I sinned, he has to think this way: “One sin is maybe I hit my son too much. And the other sin is maybe I didn’t hit him enough.”
You have to worry about both sides of it.
TAPE # 205 (February 1978)
