Reply To: Going off the Derech

pcoz-thank-you, B’ezras Hashem I hope so.

RSRH_I hear everything you are saying and like popa-bar-abba said, my son is not any happier now either. Perhaps he feels freer, since he isn’t learning or doing any mitzvos, but usually he is angry, bored or depressed. I never raised my kids to think that a non religious Jew can’t be happy, I always taught my kids that we live by the Torah bc it’s emes. Like you said, there are many paths to happiness (even though it’s based on false pretenses). You said, “Many, irreligious Jews and non-Jews enjoy much real, genuine, and lasting simcha in there lives.” But isn’t this is based on their feelings of “success”, and “accomplishments” which they attribute to their own efforts? The core premise of their ‘genuine’ simcha is false and lacking.

And perhaps, when ‘everything is going right’, everyone can be happy. But when things are not going well, I’ve never seen secular Jews weather the storm the way so many religious Jews do.

The kids my son are with are not a happy bunch. They seem to be trying to escape life’s responsibilities, and barely function in the real world. Living as a responsible, successful secular Jew would be better than living as a street boy without goals. Unfortunately, that’s where my son is right now.

popa-bar-abba-like you said, my son is not happy. But he doesn’t seem to want to leave the rut he’s in right now. I am not telling my son he must be frum, that is between him and Hashem, and he will have to find his own way. But I am telling him that in my home, I expect him to behave a certain way, and that doesn’t include sleeping all day until 3pm, and then hanging out with street kids until 3am. The difficulty I am having now is in deciding how to enforce that.