Accepting Tough Confrontations
January 4, 2003

As I read through this morning’s torah reading in preparation for today, I thought to myself, “I wouldn’t want to be in Moses sandals. Listen to this mission God commands him to undertake: “Go to Pharaoh and say, ‘thus says the Lord. Let my people go that they may worship me. If you refuse to let them go, then I will plague your whole country with frogs. The Nile shall swarm with frogs, and they shall come up and enter your palace, your bedchamber and your bed, the houses of your courtiers and your people.”

The torah doesn’t say what Moses was thinking, but I bet he was trying to invent several good excuses for evading this mission. After all, Pharaoh was no pussy cat. He was an absolute dictator with absolute power to harm whoever got in his way. Who was Moses to threaten him. But God’s command was to go and Moses went.

We can all empathize with the fear and trepidation on Moses’s part because we have all been in a similar spot. We have all had to confront situations that filled us with dread. We have all faced a crisis – the mere thought of which — made our stomachs churn.

And we can all learn from Moses’ response. He went to Pharaoh. He did what he needed to do – as difficult as it was. At times, we, too, must walk a path that is unpleasant and even painful because the right thing to do is confront the problem head on.

I was thinking about the recent situation with Trent Lott who was scheduled to become the Senate Majority Leader when the congress convenes this month. His laudatory comment that things would be different had segregationist Strom Thurmond been elected President in 1948 is totally unacceptable. Yet, for many weeks, nobody confronted Tent Lott on his words. It seems that he had even made a similar statement a few years ago. So why hadn’t he been challenged? The reason is that Trent Lott is a powerful man. Had the attempt to remove him from his leadership position failed, he could have made life very uncomfortable for those senators who had tried to unseat him. Fortunately, eventually, enough people stood in opposition to Mr. Lott that he abandoned his effort to ride out the storm.

But politicians don’t always have the backbone to stand up to powerful figures. I can remember the years that J. Edgar Hoover was the head of the FBI. Hoover was an evil man. He colluded with Senator Joseph McCarthy in a communist witch hunt in the 1950's. He violated constitutional liberties during the civil rights battle led by Rev. Martin Luther King. And he gave covert support to Richard Nixon’s attempt to pervert the political process.

Yet, no one would confront him because he was a very powerful man. He had potentially damaging information, collected by his agents, on most politicians. So no one who could have terminated his command of the FBI had the courage to do so.

The desire to avoid confrontations is not unique to politicians. It is an attractive way to deal with problems for many of us. As parents, we know that guiding our children’s growth to maturity is often a series of confrontations. They seem to fight us at every step. And the conflicts are not pleasant. So rather than face resistance, often we capitulate. At the moment, it seems like the painless course for a mother and father to take.

We give in when our children fight us on Hebrew School. We often avoid prying too deeply into what our children are doing regarding their consumption of alcohol or their experimenting with drugs and sex. After all, a house constantly filled with tension, where one argument follows another, is hardly a good environment for either children or parents. So, all too often, we resist doing what we know to be right: deal with the issues, even if for the moment, it causes friction and pain.

But in the long run, we are not doing ourselves or our children a favor by skirting around problems. Parents who avoid being the teachers and guides they should be will face even greater problems in the future.

We might recall an event that occurred in Scarsdale a few months ago. A homecoming dance was being held at the high school, and when the principal arrived, he found perhaps one third of the six hundred students there in a stupor from drinks they had mixed at various homes. In the bathrooms and corridors of one of the nation’s most prestigious high schools, boys and girls as young as 13 were vomiting, incoherent, unconscious or on the verge of passing out.

Geraldine Greene, the executive director of the Scarsdale Family Counseling Service, pointed a finger at Scarsdale parents. She maintains that underage drinking is an adult failure. “In every case, an adult has let a child down. Somewhere along the way, they haven’t exercised due care. The community has high academic expectations for its children. Why can’t it have behavioral expectations as well?”

The principal of Scarsdale High School, John Klemme, responded to the sordid affair by announcing an indefinite moratorium on dances. He took an even stronger measure. He suspended a number of students. As you can imagine, Mr. Klemme was under a lot of pressure from the powerful parents of his community to back off from these measures, especially the suspensions. College applications specifically ask about them. But Mr. Klemme stood his ground and refused to capitulate. He urged parents to answer honestly any application that asked about suspensions even as he acknowledged that nobody knows if that disciplinary action might have negative repercussions in an unbelievably competitive college market. But he promised that the school would help present each student in the best possible light by advising him or her how to write a personal essay that takes ownership for what happened. Moreover, Mr. Klemme offered to write a personal letter stating that the student “had accepted the consequences of his or her actions and had moved on.”

To my mind, Mr. Klemme modeled behavior parents would be wise to adopt. He held the children accountable for their actions, but also offered to help them grow from their experience. Putting his head in the sand and making believe he didn’t see, would only have encouraged the same unacceptable behavior to repeat itself. By taking firm measures, however painful at the moment, hopefully, he put an end to harmful and delinquent conduct at his school.

The lesson to parents is that sometimes the most painful, the most dreaded steps we must take in guiding our children into maturity are precisely the ones we cannot afford to avoid. Parents who fear to confront their children, who give in at the first sign of their children’s displeasure, teach them that they get their own way even when displaying bad conduct. But what parents need to teach their children is that they are accountable for their actions and that their delinquent behavior brings consequences.
Yes, it is difficult being a parent. But refusing to exercise that role only means the difficulties will multiply and become even more complex in the future. Mothers and fathers in Scarsdale learned that lesson the hard way. May we, in our community, benefit from their experience.

Shabbat Shalom