Standing Tall as a Man

As King Solomon wrote: “Listen, my son, to your father’s guidance, and do not abandon your mother’s teaching.” A Painful Question The Talmud rules that a father must teach his son Torah. With this, it puts the father at the center of raising a child. Yet one of the painful things we can see in our generation is this: boys go out into life and do not know how to stand. I don’t mean standing on their feet. I mean standing on the inside. They do not know what it means to stand tall as a man. And the question cries out: where has this gone? For anyone who opens his eyes, the answer is quite plain. For most of the years a boy is growing up, only one side of the equation is shaping him. And one side cannot do the work of the other, no matter how holy and lofty it is. The Foundation Hasidic teaching speaks of a well-known and great distinction: the difference between the one who gives and the one who receives. In the mystical language of the divine attributes, this is the difference between Wisdom and Understanding, between the “Father” and the “Mother” on high. The father gives the “point.” He gives the first raw potential, the first spark, the direction and the identity. The mother receives that point and builds it into a whole structure. She gives it breadth, detail, warmth, form, and a rich inner life. Both are holy. Both are necessary. And neither can replace the other. A mother can give warmth, structure, values, and depth of heart. All of these are the foundations of the soul. But standing tall as a man is something else. It is the very meaning of what a man is: how to stand without collapsing, how to fight without running away. This cannot be passed on in that way. It is passed on by seeing. This is the place to remember what our Sages teach: “Serving a Torah teacher is even greater than learning Torah from him.” A student who watches his teacher at his inner work, in his struggles, and in his steady effort receives the deepest thing of all, something no book can hold. And if this is true of a teacher and his student, it is seven times more true of a father and his son. A Parable: The Blacksmith Here is a parable. To forge steel, you need two things. You need fire and a hammer to shape the hot iron. Then you need water to cool it and harden it. The water is good and necessary. Without it, the tool is never finished. But water alone can never forge steel. It has no power to strike, to shape, or to bend. Before a sword or a suit of armor can come out of that iron, you first need the fire, the hammer, the great heat. That is exactly how it is between a father’s role and a mother’s role in raising sons. The mother, like the water, surrounds, protects, hardens, and completes the structure. But the first forging, the very shape of a man, needs the fire of a living male example. What Went Wrong When a male role model is missing from a boy’s life, the problem is not only that sons grow up “weak.” The problem goes much deeper. The pattern itself is erased. The boy does not know what he is supposed to become, because he has never seen it up close. It is like a mold that has been wiped clean. There is nothing there to “fix,” because nothing there was damaged. There is simply nothing there. That is why anyone who has tried to “fix the boys” without dealing with the root has come away empty-handed. A Word to the Heart My dear friend, young married man, young father: do you sometimes feel that your job comes down to earning a living? That most of the raising of your children happens “at home,” without you? That what helps your sons grow is mostly what is given to them from outside? Please hear one clear thing. Who you are, your inner work, and the way you stand up to your own struggles have the greatest influence of all on your sons. Your son learns what a “man” is when he sees his father get up in the morning, fight his own laziness, and sit down to learn Torah. He learns it when he sees his father face something hard and not break. He learns it when he sees a man who lives his faith. He does not learn it from books or from talks. He learns it from seeing. You are the living Torah scroll your son learns from.