Torah613Torah:
One of my mottoes is that blame is a banned word. I have no issue with looking at factors that contribute to a problem and addressing them for change. In the situation of an individual OTD youngster, I am more interested in mobilizing the parents and others to work along with the kid as there are efforts to help him/her succeed in pursuing realistic and healthy goals. It is not about finger pointing. Inasmuch as the subject was raised in the direction of grouping all OTD kids into a single unit, I was pointing out that the adults in the lives of the children are the ones who form the child’s experience of living with authority figures that create the structures of rules and limits. That set of experiences, in turn, is the greatest contributor to the healthy development of a connection and relationship to a spiritual G-d. When we see fraying at the edges of Yiddishkeit, it is reflective of weak development of this side of life, and “the problem is us”. I am not blaming parents or mechanchim any more than I blame every adult in the community. We all contribute in some way to the development of every child, even one not biologically our own, or a talmid.
If the question, by virtue of grouping OTD kids together, is what can the community do to change, we must address how we, as authority figures, relate to children. Again, the most common theme to ALL kids with these issues is REJECTION. It comes in many flavors, and often is accompanied by a stack of justifications that are tantamount to “The surgery was successful, but the patient died.” Well, I am focused on the result. The success of chinuch is not that which is measured by a bechinah or the memorization of text, be it Chumash, Tehilim, Mishnayos, or Gemora. It is the implementation of Torah values in the context of everyday life, in which there is more than rote and robotic performance of mitzvos, but rather a sense of dveikus in HKB”H, with whatever level of Ahavas Hashem and Yir’as Hashem is achievable. Now, we should ask, do we, as parents and mechanchim succeed at transmitting these to our children? If not, what can we do to correct this?