Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis Sermons

The raw datum is dramatic enough. A child is killed every two hours by guns in the United States. Fifty thousand children from 1979 to 1991 were killed by guns, more than all the American soldiers killed in Viet Nam.

We need true wisdom to deal with this tragic phenomenon.

• The poet, Robert Frost, once wrote: "True wisdom is the ability to act when it is necessary on the basis of incomplete information." We do not have complete information and we never may have complete information as to the multiple causes that produce violence and bloodshed in our community. One can list a variety of causes:
• The ready accessibility of instruments of destruction
• The meretricious character of the mass media
• Inadequacy of the school system in transmitting emotional intelligence to our young
• The irresponsible attitude of an affluent society that warehouses its disturbed men and women and then releases them to roam the streets without therapeutic treatment and without support

We are fortunate to have gathered important experts who will impart to us their wisdom that affects especially the public domain. In the field of legislation and law enforcement we have no finer and more responsible persons than those gathered here.

For my part, I want to convey a word about Jewish wisdom that places great significance upon the home as the sacred precinct in which character and attitude and conscience are formed.

From my earliest youth, I recall my grandfather at the end of every meal and before the Birkat Ha-Mazon, the grace after meals, removing all the knives from the table. It was a gesture to remind us that knives are instruments to cut our food, not to threaten or maim living sentient creatures. On the doorpost of the house, there is a book with two biblical paragraphs placed in a metal or wooden object on the threshold of our home. It includes instruction to “Love the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our strength and with all our might,”  and tells us how to do so. "Thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, when thou speakest of them, when thou sittest in thy house, when thou walkest by the way, when thou liest down and when thou risest up.” To love God is to behave in a particular way in the home. It is to speak to your children which means not to shout at the children, not to order them about, or dismiss their questions with answers such as "Because I said so.” The child must be respected and that respect is to be found exhibited in the relationship of the members of the family "When you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down and when you rise up.”

We are like Gods to our children. They learn through imitation. How parents speak to each other, how they resolve their conflicts, how the manage to overcome their angers and dissatisfaction.

The mezzuzah is hung in the upper end pointing inward and the lower end pointing outward to teach us that love is within the family and outside the family, that it is internal as well as external, that it must be applied at home and in the marketplace.

The very handing of the mezzuzah carries with it a profound family value. It was the great commentator Rashi who had taught that the mezzuzah should be hung vertically in order to follow out the verse which says "when you rise up.” But his grandson, Rabbanu Tan, insisted that the mezzuzah should be hung horizontally to please the verse which says "when you lie down.” Here, a grandfather and grandson disagreed. How was their conflict resolved? The mezzuzah was placed in a slanted position, neither horizontal nor vertical. It was to teach you that true strength is not found in obduracy, not in obstinance but in compliance, concession and compromise. The art of living requires flexibility. Strong is not stubborn. Strong is flexible.

Clearly we need each other. We need courageous and wise legislation, we need calm police enforcement, we need schools that understand that there is more to educating a person than gaining the extrinsic marks of grades. But inescapably and essentially a large part of character education belongs to us parents, grandparents, the family. That calls for a interdependence of the school and the shul to strengthen the family. We are gods to our children. We are the hands and the feet and the mouth of divinity.

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