Your ability to perceive it accelerate with age. What once seemed something that had to be endured, long days, weeks and months disappear before your eyes and you are left wondering what was ultimately achieved.

People around you change, including the ones closest to you. Sometimes the changes are subtle, at other times overwhelmingly brutal, sending your senses reeling from the change required within yourself to now incorporate this new person into your life. For a brief instant, you think, do I even want this new person in my life, it’s a valid question, which cannot be easily reconciled based on the sheer volume of time and emotion invested in that connection.

The endurance required to maintain connections despite their change is ultimately an intricate part of the journey in life.

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Submission as a word has been perverted, to mean a form of humiliation. Depicting one as being at the mercy of another and conjuring images of wrestlers or people garbed in shiny leather.

To submit is to acknowledge that;

• You lack the superiority and power and are beholden.
• You have no independent will and that your destiny is not in your own hands.
• Your life’s work is to strive, believing in its success with no guarantee of it.

All these realizations sound depressing at first, however, when you dive in and understand what is at stake you come to realize that a genuine submission is euphoric and liberating.

It’s the realization that a fence is not built to cage you in but rather to give you the confidence to strive, knowing that you have a safety net in place.

We should never be afraid to submit to the ONE who gives us everything and asks for a pittance in return.

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Can I sit on your lap daddy? you know when I’m older you will regret it!

The innocence, the intimacy that it implies with the desire to be united by proximity and touch.

To be sensitive and understand that there is a need beneath these words that has nothing to do with the question itself.

A prophecy revealed “from the mouth of babes”.

Longing for those moments and regretting not having stored more of them, to warm my heart during the times of each day when the emptiness within is cavernous.

Closing my eyes and seeing clearly the expression on her face, the love and the tenderness in her eyes as we embrace again. Soon my love, very soon.

But not soon enough.

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During our prayers, when we reach that point of standing face to face, as it were, with our Creator what do most have in mind? The short answer is their needs.

We can couch our prayers and supplications so that they sound noble but ultimately, we have our hand out. As we should, of course, because we are completely dependent on HIS mercy and kindness.

However, why would our petition deserve answering, are we deserving. I think most will agree we are not. Because we will be better in the future. hmmm… The traditional answer is because HE is benevolent and altruistic and wants only good for us.

Whist this answer is true and resonates, after all, nothing else makes sense. It leaves us with an empty feeling. Somehow unable to contribute in any meaningful way to our good because everything we do seems inconsequential in the larger scheme of things and even worse it feels transactional. If we do what is right and good we will be rewarded…

So here is a thought that has been percolating in my mind, maybe we should be thinking about and meditating on HIS pain and praying for HIS pain to be removed. 

You will say HE is GOD what pain are you talking about. The answer is simple, we are HIS pain. Every time we think, speak or act in contradiction to a moral life we increase HIS pain.

If you reflect on this, I hope you will agree that HIS pain is all that really matters and its rectification instantly answers all our prayers in any event. So why waste time by repeating the countless versions of the same petition HE has heard throughout the generations and get to the root of all our needs, Tikkun Olam or in the immortal words of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks “To heal our fractured world”.

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It should not be our role, to live vicariously through our children, to enjoy the successes of our own youth or even worse, corral them to a pathway which would satisfy our own perceived inadequacies.

So, what is our role as parents?

To love our children unconditionally, despite the pain and heartache they cause us at times.

To always be there for them, when they feel adrift in this world without a safe harbour.

To believe in them, despite often times not agreeing with their choices.

To always try to engage them in conversation so that we have a means of imparting our values, love and experiences to colour their sense of where they came from.

This is not a nice-to-do list, this is our obligation to HaShem.

Children, on the other hand, have no such list of obligations, just one to “honour one’s parents”.

But what does “honour one’s parents” actually mean?

Don’t break their heart.

Don’t betray their love.

Don’t forget where you came from.

Don’t forget that they would rather die than let anything bad happen to you.

Don’t forget that, no matter what they miss you terribly and want you back.

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• purpose,
• meaning and
• above all things, a forward momentum.

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On the face of it, the question posed is fair and is hard to argue with, because it promotes unity and solidifies a core of any religious aspiration. It is also a question which is hard to answer to a non-Jew because a certain degree of sensitivity needs to be applied, so I did my best in the circumstance and won’t bore you with my reply here, however, it got me to thinking how I would answer a non-practicing or someone who associates themselves with the Reform movement.

I think we need to remember what happened approximately 2000 years ago when some of the cosmopolitan and liberal Jews of the time decided it would be a great idea to welcome new members to gain influence in Rome… Christianity was born.

The Orthodox movement rejected such overtures and did not welcome them into the mainstream, and that is why we have traditional and authentic Judaism today, as well as the centuries of persecutions at the hands of these estranged wannabes. The Reform movement whilst noble in its fundamental ideal of being inclusive, relevant to the times and making it accessible to the wider world in an attempt to break down the historical prejudices against Jews, is, unfortunately, a slippery slope to the complete abandonment of Judaism. Ask yourselves a simple question, what would you call a third generation (I believe I’m being generous here) reform Jew?

I believe if you are honest the answer would be a non-Jew. If the reform movement was an outreach program, which drew disenfranchised and assimilated Jews out into the mainstream Orthodox path, then it would be a movement that most Orthodox Rabbis would endorse. Unfortunately, the Reform movement doesn’t have such aspirations and in many instances, holds their interpretation as the benchmark rather than the compromise that it is.

In this way, it becomes more fundamentally problematic than other religions for the Orthodox world, because the orthodox youth has the perception that these are Jews that live a different life as opposed to gentiles having a different religion. For the record, I’m not some Haredi that sets stones aside for Shabbos altercations, in fact, I come from a family that would insist to go once yearly to an Orthodox shul, for Yom Kippur.

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