Outlook

The other day I noticed a close friend of mine who is a therapist looking a bit down. I know that my friend hears a lot of misery in the course of a day but the pain of his clients does not usually appear on his face. I asked what was the matter and he told me that he had just come from a counseling session in which a young boy had broken down while describing the bullying to which he is subjected to daily in cheder.

Now it was my turn to be dismayed. Something struck me as terribly wrong. I understand that children will get into fights from time to time not always daven with great seriousness (or with mock seriousness and fake gyrations) and the like. But what I could not comprehend is how a child raised in a Torah home could deliberately set out day after day to inflict pain on another child. When I put this question to a number of my FFB friends they just stared at me in astonishment at my naïveté. Every problem that exists in general society also exists in the Torah world they all assured me. That’s the way it is.

As an empirical matter they are probably right. But I still could not make peace with it. There are certain behaviors that are so antithetical to a Torah weltanschauung that when they appear not as isolated instances but as social phenomena we should rend our garments. And bullying — particularly verbal bullying — I discovered is not confined to isolated cases or limited to boys. In fact it has its own terminology like malkat hakitah (queen of the class).

Bullying represents a twofold educational failure. The first is the failure to instill in our children empathy for the suffering of others. The Torah enjoins us repeatedly not to oppress the stranger because we were strangers in Egypt — in other words to use our own suffering to feel that of others. The bully who causes another pain has lost that ability to empathize. Good literature like the stories of Chaim Walder is one of the best ways of developing that empathy.