L ast week Yisroel Besser wrote about Mishpacha’s annual meetings in Yerushalayim and about one particular session in which instead of yet another discussion there was a game that challenged each person to create an original slogan for the magazine. In his great modesty Besser declined to share an offering of mine addressing today’s competitive frum media marketplace: “Mishpacha: Besser than the Rest Week After Week.”
Biased though I may be I can’t hold back mention of my preferred suggestion “Mishpacha: From Rebbes to Recipes It’s All Here.” Oops there goes that million-dollar multimedia ad campaign.
Yisroel writes about this meeting that “things got serious after a while and the true implications of the exercise became clear: If you want to be a good worker you need to feel what it is you’re doing.” He went on to quote Rav Yosef Elefant about the analogous importance of parents giving their homes a pronounced identity a central theme relating to some aspect of Yiddishkeit whether Torah tefillah chesed emunah or something else.
Rav Elefant encouraged his listeners to “raise [kids] in a way that allows them to say ‘My parents? They never turn away a meshulach.’ Or ‘Nothing is more important to them than my learning.’ ” Reading those words it seemed clear that Rav Elefant chose them precisely to convey that the idea isn’t to tout your family as exemplary in such-and-such. The point is to simply go about creating without fanfare a home in which your kids if asked what makes it so special will naturally identify some special ruchniyus character it possesses.
