Creating Family Connection

L

et’s set the scene. Your kids just finished playing with their entire collection of Legos. The room looks like a tornado struck. In your sweetest voice, you ask them to please clean up. But they just roll their eyes and exclaim: “We don’t feel like it!”

“What chutzpah!” you say, and you lament the dreadful state of today’s youth.

But the truth is, when we’re asked to do something that we dislike, we react like our kids do. We’re just more tactful and pragmatic. We do what we want to do. We’re only willing to oblige others if it’s worth our while. We do what the boss says because we want to keep our job; we do what our spouse asks so we can maintain the peace. Other times, we fulfill unpleasant requests because we enjoy feeling selfless or being appreciated by the other person. But at the end of the day, we do what we do because it suits us.

This is a major flaw in our interpersonal relationships. The Rosh in Maseches Peah writes that Hashem is more interested in interpersonal mitzvos than in the mitzvos between us and Hashem, because the former involve fulfilling a friend’s will along with Hashem’s.