We gathered together, 35 of us, to continue our discussion about how to be the best parents for our children. With our worlds rocked recently by the suicide deaths of two seemly content 18 year olds, we each sought some grounding and guidance from our Jewish tradition.

Our previous session of the Mishpacha Family Alternative Learning program became an emotion-packed support group, as adults shared heartfelt concerns and fears. We agreed that if young men who appeared fine were actually roiling in turmoil, then perhaps our own children could be struggling with demons of their own. How do we open up conversations, without stepping into a minefield that shuts our children down?

Our Mishpacha Coordinators directed us to three Jewish values that could guide our communication:

• Miyut sicha, minimizing the conversation – striving to choose words carefully and speaking about meaningful subjects. 
• Emet, being honest and truthful – recognizing and owning the emotions and judgments that lead to conflict. 
• Shema, listening – allowing our young people to talk while we hold back on the critiques, suggestions, or judgments.

  Listening, we learned, is a form of sacred communication, that needs to be practiced. Our most sacred act, reciting our most sacred prayer, compels us shema yisrael – listen you Jewish people. 

In chevruta (study pairs), we delved into favorite texts about these three Jewish values. We then talked about situations for which we might have responded differently (better?) had we thought about this particular value or text.

Are you interested in exploring more Jewish texts about effective communication? Check out our  favorites!

By the way, the Or Ami Center for Jewish Parenting is hosting presentations in the coming months to help parents improve our parenting:

• Parent/Teen Collaboration Models: How and Why to Work With Your Teen To Raise Your Teen on Wednesday, November 30, 2011 at 6:30 pm with Dr. Bruce Powell who knows teens. In addition to raising his own 4 children, Dr. Powell, founder and Head of School at New Community Jewish High School, was instrumental in founding two other LA Jewish High Schools. This is NOT a recruitment event for the High School; we bring Dr. Powell to Or Ami because his parenting wisdom is so enlightening and helpful. 

• Cyberbullying: What Families Don’t Know Will Hurt Them on Wednesday, December 7, 2011 at 7:00 pm with the Anti-Defamation League’s Eva Vega-Olds, Project Director (Pacific Southwest Region A World of Difference® Institute) and Matt Friedman, Associate Regional Director.
  This interactive workshop for parents and teens (grade 7 and older) will increase understanding and awareness about the problem of cyberbullying, educate and empower adult family members to effectively discuss and respond to experiences with cyberbullying, and provide tools and skills to teens for responding to cyberbullying and being allies to others. 

• Rabbi Kipnes’ Top 10 Tips for Raising Decent Jewish Teens and Pre-teens on Wednesday, February 8, 2012 at 6:30 pm. Come learn with Rabbi Kipnes how to effectively communicate with your kids about sex, drugs, love and more.

Today I signed onto an OPEN LETTER to Village Voice Media, saying that “we agree with 51 Attorneys General. Girls and boys should not be sold for sex on Village Voice Media’s Backpage.com.”

Mr. Jim Larkin, CEO and Chair
Members of the Board of Directors
Village Voice Media 

Dear Mr. Larkin and the Board of Directors of Village Voice Media: 

It is a basic fact of the moral universe that girls and boys should not be sold for sex.

So we were surprised and stunned to realize your company, Village Voice Media, continues to publish an Adult section on its classifieds Web siteBackpage.com that has been used as a platform for the trafficking of minors. 

Arrests of adults selling minors for sex via Backpage.com have been reported by the media in Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Maryland,Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Mexico, Ohio, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin. And these are just some of the cases that have been documented. 

As moral and religious leaders of many creeds and backgrounds, we are united in calling on your publication to shut down the Adult section of Backpage.com. We appreciate your efforts to put in place new measures attempting to screen for ads featuring minors. 

However, we do not believethat these measures are doing enough to adequately solve the problem, and we share the opinion of the nation’s 51 Attorneys General that the bestway to eradicate your company’s connection with the sex trafficking of minors is to shut down the Adult section of your Web site, as Craigslist did. 

We trust that your company shares our outrage over the sex trafficking of minors. While we empathize with your business challenges and the increasingly difficult marketplace in which Village Voice Media competes, we trust that you are committed to running your business withoutcompromising the lives of our nation’s girls and boys. 

We know there is much more to be done to end the sex trafficking of minors beyond what we ask of you. Ending this practice for good requires agroundswell of people in our business, media, and religious communities joining together in partnership. We need educational campaigns and robustlaw enforcement to challenge all dimensions of the problem, including the poverty and abuse at the root of the practice. 

But we can do something right now to help these girls and boys. Please shut down the Adult section of Backpage.com immediately so that no minor is exploited through advertisements on your Web site.

[The letter is signed by leaders of national religious organizations including: Rabbi David Saperstein, Director of URJ Religious Action Center for Reform Judaism and Rabbi Jill Jacobs, Executive Director of Rabbis for Human Rights-North America…


… and now by me…

Rabbi Paul Kipnes, Congregation Or Ami, Calabasas, CA

Learn more about this campaign to protect our children on the Groundswell website.  Perhaps you will sign onto the citizens letter.  

Rabbi Donniel Hartman, President of Shalom Hartman Institute and Director of the Engaging Israel Project, wrote this article about Living with Missiles. Because it offers an important perspective on how to live in a dangerous neighborhood, the article appears fully. It is well worth the read:

By DONNIEL HARTMAN

It’s a strange thing, having to live with missiles. Even though it has happened so often, it just doesn’t feel normal. One would not expect that the citizens of a normal country would be subjected from time to time to a barrage of missiles which terrorize, maim, and sometimes kill. One would not expect that a country with Israel’s power would find its hands tied and unable to provide for its citizens the security that is their inalienable right.

Terror has become “normal,” and when kept to a certain degree, tolerable, in modern society. We have come to learn that there are evil and deranged people and groups walking in our midst for whom the language of ethics and sanctity of life are meaningless. But we tolerate them mostly because we don’t know where they are. They emerge and inflict their harm, and what we tolerate is not so much them, but the price they extract from us.

The case of the missiles being fired at Israel from the Gaza Strip has a bizarre twist, for the terrorists are neither hidden nor unknown. They hide in plain sight in the midst of a civilian population and cloak their evil under the mantle of the generic Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the ongoing “cycle of violence.” They roam free, openly declare their intent, and from time to time, on the basis of a schedule known only to them, decide to spend a few hours terrorizing southern Israel.

It’s not normal, and the situation is profoundly intolerable. How should we – the sovereign Jewish State of Israel – respond to this abnormality? On the one hand, sovereignty entails the acquiring of power and both the ability and right to exercise it in self-defense. Sovereignty provides us with a military option. The challenge of a sovereign people, however, is to distinguish between the right to use this option and when it is right to do so.

The nature of asymmetrical war and a conflict not merely with a terrorist organization but also with a population which embraces terrorism is that one’s options are profoundly limited. Neither political overtures nor concessions, or conversely, sanctions will transform the population of Gaza from foe to friend. They have fed themselves a steady diet of evil ideology from which only they can free themselves. At the same time, a reoccupation of Gaza will not alter the reality on the ground but at best merely freeze it for a short time. When one has the power and confronts a situation in which one has the right to use it, it takes great strength to avoid the temptation of succumbing to the short-term comfort associated with using it and the just feeling of revenge which it provides. We come from a tradition which has taught that true strength is sometimes to be found in self-control.

So, where does that leave us, we the sovereign Jewish State, with our powerful army and a just cause?
I don’t know. But what I do know is that when one doesn’t know, it’s best not to pretend that one does. This has been the policy of the Israeli government over the last number of years, and despite my frustration, I commend it for having the ongoing wisdom that it has exhibited in not pretending that it possesses a magic bullet.

While I don’t know, I wonder whether a policy of targeted assassinations of leadership would not move the status quo slightly in our favor. I mention this consideration only because it is self-evident that neither Hamas nor Islamic Jihad, nor other rogue terrorist groups that call Gaza their home, are potential peace partners. The same logic, which guides the United States policy against al-Qaeda, should be assessed as to whether it would be constructive here.

Israeli society must double and triple its efforts to ensure that those in harm’s way feel that their danger and pain is shared by us all. The citizens of the south do not need empty gestures of solidarity but the real allocation of all the resources necessary in order to ensure their safety to the best of our ability and significant financial compensation to offset the hazard under which they find themselves on an ongoing basis. If life in the south is precarious, then those living in the south must be treated as the pioneers and heroes that they are.

If we cannot destroy our enemy, let’s isolate them. An Israel which initiates peace discussions with those Palestinians who can be peace partners strengthens them, marginalizes the terrorists, and creates a political environment in which Israel has more resources at its disposal to protect itself. Allowing the terrorist reality which is Gaza to define our perspective on our neighborhood is to give them a victory they neither deserve nor warrant.

We need to learn to live in an abnormal world. Our people’s embracing of sovereignty entails a willingness to live within the realities of realpolitik and alas, terror is a part of this reality. To be either passive on the one hand, or to succumb to the fantasy that for every problem there is a military solution, is to perpetuate the childlike naivete of our pre-sovereign existence. Sovereignty has its gifts and its challenges, and as a mature people we have to embrace both.

We need to learn to live in the Middle East. By live, I mean that we cannot allow our neighborhood to define or control our world. While we must learn to respond to their dictates, our priorities and values cannot be exhausted by them. We prevent terror every time our technology knocks one of the missiles out of the sky. We defeat terror when we continue to build a society of values, when we not only worry about whether we will be, but about who we will be. When issues of social justice, loyalty, and kindness, democracy, and Jewish identity reverberate throughout our public conversation and policies we are building foundations of strength which no terrorist can destroy.

It’s a strange thing, having to live with missiles, but live we will.