Soured Milk
As heard from Esther Alovich
Rabbi Akiva said: My son, know that more than the calf wishes to suck, the cow wants to suckle.
Talmud, Pesachim 112a
This is Esther’s story:
My first child was a girl. I so wanted to nurse her but I was having trouble. I was weighed down with milk, but I was somehow unable to transfer the milk to her. This was Israel in the 1970s, and there wasn’t the encouragement and guidance for nursing that there is today. The nurses weren’t empathetic, they just told me to give her a bottle. I felt like a failure, I was embarrassed that I couldn’t nurse my daughter; any street cat in Israel, of which there were many, could nurse their offspring.
I was in that vulnerable, first baby, post-natal place and I was crying. When I got home a neighbor of mine said, “Ich, nursing, that grosses me out. Why do you want to nurse?” Maybe she said it because she thought it would make me feel better, I don’t know, but it was more discouragement instead of support.
I gave up after a week. When I had my second and later my third child, I didn’t even try again. Not only did I still remember the trauma of being unable to nurse, that neighbor’s voice kept ringing in my ears about how disgusted she felt about nursing. I knew that nursing was the best way to nurture and nourish my children, but I just couldn’t do it.
Baruch Hashem, today, I’m a grandmother many times over. My daughters and daughter-in-law, who’ve been raising children in a more enlightened and empathic era nursed them all. One daughter even nursed one of her children for a year and a half.
I’m sorry I listened to my neighbor. Perhaps if she hadn’t said anything, I would have tried again with my other children. To this day, I can’t understand why she said what she did, or even why she thought what she did. Nursing is the most natural and instinctive thing in the world.
Well, there’s no crying over spilled milk, but a half a century later, I’m still sorry I missed the opportunity. Some “well-meaning” comments are better left unspoken.
Forked Tongue
Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
I have a very good friend – a soul sister, who I am privileged to know. She has the purest soul and the warmest heart. She is deep and funny and spiritual in ways that few people are. And oh yes, she’s beautiful too.
She is now a grandmother, baruch Hashem, many times over, but the story she told me happened when she was fourteen. And it is only recently, she told me, with the help of a lot of internal work, that she has been able to free herself of the pain it caused.
My friend grew up in South America, and until the end of the equivalent of junior high school, she went to a Jewish school. She had a teacher, a non-Jewish woman, who taught English, who had been her teacher from grades one to nine. She also felt close to her because both her grandmother and her mother were friends with her from studying to be English teachers as well. This teacher was therefore a significant part of my friend’s formative years.
On the last day of school, this teacher wrote each of the seven girls in her class a personal note, starting with “You are…” and then what she thought of the girl. It sounds potentially positive or, at the very least, innocuous. But what did this evil woman do with the power she had to shape young minds and build character? She wrote to my friend, undeniably one of the most wonderful people I have ever been privileged to know, “You are… the poison of the class.”
The teacher then flung her purse over her shoulder and exited the class, ostensibly leaving my friend forever. She never had contact with her afterwards. But she didn’t leave her forever, she haunted my friend’s psyche for the next 45 years, making her cry from the depths of her soul every time she relived the story.
Perhaps somebody else might have laughed it off, shrugged, or even made a joke out of it. But my friend, who is incredibly sensitive, and wouldn’t hurt anyone, suffered from verbal abuse at home. Her father was extremely critical, and her mother not very communicative. So for her, it was just an extension of the criticism she had endured at home. Not to mention the sense of betrayal by someone she had known most of her life.
It’s possible that being a bubbly personality, and fourteen, my friend might not have been an angelic student. But neither did she deserve such a poisoned pen letter. No one does, actually. In fact, she didn’t even know what the word meant in English and she quite innocently asked the teacher what the word meant. The teacher held her gaze, like the snake she was, and told her in Spanish.
Such a horrible and unforgiveable thing to do to a student at such an impressionable time in her life! This was obviously a reflection of her, and not my friend, but teenagers don’t think like that. And even after they understand it, years later, it doesn’t mitigate the pain.
There are many wonderful teachers, who do, in fact, bring out the best and wondrous in their students. And they deserve the highest accolades, the greatest praise. But then, there are also teachers who are cruel and vindictive and can destroy the lives of their students better than any school bully can. Especially if said student is sweet and sensitive, and already doesn’t believe enough in herself.
Parents and teachers hold the lives and hearts of their children and students in their hands and their words have power for generations to heal or to harm, to build or to tear down.
We must always protect the young from words that are nothing less than poisoned arrows.
Holy Missive
As heard from Yaakov Levi
Lebanon. The 12th of June 1982, less than a week since the Lebanon War had begun. It was a hot summer’s day and the young soldiers were enjoying a brief respite from the exchange of artillery fire.
The commanding officer informed them that one of the soldiers was heading back to Israel and asked that each soldier write a brief postcard to his family reassuring them that they were safe, for the soldier to mail.
1982 was before cellphones and emails, and communication in The Middle East was still limited.
But it was Shabbat and many of the soldiers were religious. And although fighting in a war was pikuach nefesh, writing was still forbidden.
One of the soldiers ran to call Benny Alon z”l, who was to become a minister in the Knesset but, at the time, was serving as an army rabbi. Hearing the problem, he told the religious soldiers to dictate the postcards to a Druze soldier serving with them, and to mention in the letters that Shabbat was the reason that it was not their handwriting so they wouldn’t worry.
Rabbi Alon recognized the importance of reassuring the soldiers’ families back home and, by ruling that they were allowed to communicate in this way, allowed the soldiers to do so without desecrating Shabbat, thus allowing the families a bit of a respite in their worry for their children.
Giving Thanks
This story was publicized by popular Rav Yitzchak Fanger
“I called to say thank you”, these were the first words that science teacher Albert Joseph Siedlecki (Al Siedlecki) from a high school in New Jersey heard. “Who is speaking?” he asked. On the line was a former student of his named Lee Buono, who studied with him 40 years previously. As a middle school student in the 1980s, Lee Buono stayed after school to finish a frog dissection, which was given to the class as part of biology class assignments. Young Lee invested a lot, put in a lot of effort, and then the teacher Sidleki approached him and said, “You have good hands, the hands of a surgeon. You are a smart guy, and you can be a brain surgeon if you want.”
“I was only 13 years old at the time,” the student reminded him, “but your words changed my life. At that moment I decided that this is what I wanted to be – a brain surgeon. Indeed, today I am one, and all this is much thanks to you!” He shared that he had recently operated, as part of his job, on one of the most important judges in the country, and when he emerged from the operation healthy and intact – he was grateful. “He turned to me and said: ‘You are an inspiring figure, and I thank you. You are an amazing doctor, and I don’t know who the inspiring figure was in your life, but what is certain is that you owe them a huge thank you from me.'”
Albert, the teacher, began to cry, and shared: “Until you called, to some extent there were times when I was ashamed to say that I was a teacher, to some people. You made me feel proud and important, and for that I want to thank you,” the teacher finished with tears. We need to understand how much we influence and are affected by each other. Success is a vehicle that moves on the wheels of hard work, but the journey is not possible without the fuel of encouragement, faith and support.
We must always use our words – for good, for encouragement and for their life-giving powers.
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