Teach Your Children

Do you have children? What have you told them about the events now occurring in the world? Looking at their faces as they watch the news and thus see their future, are you able to provide them with understanding and hope? They need to know that there is a reason for the world events and that the feelings of despair can be turned to a sense of purpose. They must be taken by the hand and shown how this world is interconnected and that the suffering they feel is being felt by all of humanity.

The wisdom of Kabbalah teaches us that each successive generation of man has developed a stronger, more demanding ego. We hear our parents or older friends and relatives talk about how each new generation is more disrespectful, selfish, etc. What they are saying is true, and demonstrates very well the concept of growing egoism in humanity.

Current events show us just how large this ego has grown through the centuries, culminating in the tremendous egoism plaguing the world today. Our insatiable appetite for more, bigger and better of everything has produced the financial crisis, environmental disasters, and social imbalance. This is the legacy that we will leave our children’s generation, who must also cope with their own growth in egoism. The strong egos of our children’s generation must be recognized, acknowledged and educated so they understand that this cannot continue if they are to live in a world that will survive the growing crises.

The current financial crisis gives us an opportunity to help our children understand the world they live in. With careful guidance, we can show them how the interconnection of all humanity is the cause. What happened here in the United States had far reaching effects on financial markets around the world. Conversely, what happens on the other world continents such as Europe, Africa or Asia, also affects us. We see how commodities or goods we were used to seeing in the stores are no longer available, or if they are, they are at a premium price, which few can afford.

Now is the time to bring families closer, to show our children what connections really mean. The family is the most perfect medium to start teaching cause and effect in terms of sharing and being concerned for another more than being concerned for yourself. Having to take responsibility for the resources available to the family and learning how to distribute them so that every member of the family has what they need, but that no member has more than their share shows on a small scale how the world must function. Jealousy, envy and selfishness must be shown to be damaging and counterproductive to the life of the family.

College students looking to graduate and start their careers must be helped to shift their priorities away from landing a prestigious job that will launch them on a fast track to an opulent lifestyle. Instead, concern for the global community will show them that a job is a means to make enough money to comfortably support themselves, their families, and their community, and that excessive income and indiscriminate spending are selfish means to take more than their share of resources that must be shared by all in this global community.

We have overindulged our children, because we have overindulged ourselves. Our generation is seeing the results of our greed, our lack of understanding of the law of Nature, which does not tolerate the behavior of any living thing that acts out of egoism and selfishness.

Crosby, Stills and Nash recorded a song over 30 years ago entitled “Teach Your Children.” The first verse of the song is:

You, who are on the road, must have a code that you can live by.
And so become yourself, because the past is just a good bye.

Our past must be a good bye, a good bye to the egoistic life we have led, and one that we must teach our children not to lead. We must become ourselves, meaning that we “love our neighbors as ourselves” and that we teach our children well to also live by this code.