CHOCHMAS NASHIM: MISHPATIM:
OUR KIDS HAVE BEEN KIDNAPPED
By: Suri Davis
In this week’s torah portion there is an unusual juxtaposition of three verses:
Exodus 21: 15-17:
If a person strikes his father or his mother he must be put to death.
If a person kidnaps a man, and witnesses found him in his possession before he was sold, he shall be put to death.
A person who curses his father or mother shall be put to death.
Query: The first sentence discusses acts of a child against his parents, and the third sentence does the same, and they are interjected by the law of kidnapping. Why is the law of kidnapping inserted between the two sentences of a child harming his parents?
Rav Saadia Gaon answers that how is it possible for a child to harm his parents? If he was kidnapped as a child and the proper bonds with his parents were not established. The child was placed in an environment which had its own rules of behavior of function and there was no interaction and proper bonding and role modeling between parents and child.
In this day, there are so very many parenting and teaching classes on managing rebellious children/students. How is it possible that these children would harm parents and teachers [who are interchangeable in the torah because parents are teachers and teachers have the same function of parents in teaching children.]
It must be that our children have been kidnapped. They have been kidnapped by our society inside Judaism and outside. Several years ago, Newsday wrote about a restaurant in Cedarhurst which was selling a $1,000 pastrami sandwich for the superbowl. The information was sent to me by a non-Jewish neighbor who was rightfully disgusted by the concept. I am told that even in the most “right wing” yeshivas in the community, the children vie for the hottest $1,000 iphone, tablets, computers, software. Competing for vacation locations for midwinter break.
Our children might be physically in our home, but they are not regularly interacting with us. The lucky ones get their children over Shabbos. Many children are surreptitiously “half-shabbosing,” ostensibly keeping Shabbos but texting or going on computers in their homes.
The notion of norm is not coming from the house, it is coming from zombies on Tiktok in our kids electronics. They are not feeling our love, because it is being drowned out by the physical and virtual friends. Truly like zombies. They don’t want the real love of physical parents, they aspire to stardom of “love” of virtual friends and followers. Everyone is a star on social media. The pictures reveal the glam life, virtual, that the children aspire to make into reality.
They have no functioning independent brains; they have been kidnapped by their external brains, like external modems, which hold information that is external and cuts off connection to the internal modem, the real brain, and the real reality of life, which is home, school, work, chesed, which hold no glamour.
That is how we have anxiety ridden children, who are so unhappy, they cannot connect in real life. They cannot feel real love from their parents, which leads to loneliness perennially and maybe G-d forbid, irrevocably.
Our children have been kidnapped. We have to worker harder than ever to reclaim them, connect with them, bond with them and show them the beauty of real interpersonal love and respect. Better that they curse us in their youth for being “mean parents” with rules, than curse us when they’ve grown, that we did nothing to redeem them from their kidnappers.
Electronics is as false as a Purim mask, inviting, but something else entirely in reality. Let’s get real with our children, face to face, live.
Shabbat shalom.
Gut chodesh.
-Suri