Jewish Life Digital Edition September 2015 | Page 94

living simply
A timeless recipe for weathering the storms of
life, without breaking
by Rabbi Ze’ev Kraines

There once was a boy who believed he was
a pane of glass. He was always anxious
not to fall because he was afraid that he
would break. No one could talk him out
of it, not his parents, not his friends,
not even the best psychologists and
psychiatrists. One day, a friend came up
with a cunning plan. He decided to
push the boy to the ground to show
him that nothing would happen to him,
as he was not made of glass.
He pushed the boy down… and he
broke.
I heard this parable from my teacher,
Rabbi Moshe Shapiro, who used it to
dramatise how our entrenched lifestyle
choices, beliefs and fantasies become
our realities. We can laugh at its absurdity, but the joke is on us. Are we creating new high-maintenance – and unmaintainable – needs in our children
that are making them more anxious
and dangerously fragile?

The Bare Necessities

We all know that luxuries are the things
we can live without, right? Well, yes. The

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luxuries we haven’t lived with can be
lived without. But those that we have
lived with very quickly become ‘the bare
necessities’ and we too shatter when we
have to go cold turkey without them.
It’s an irresistible spiral. Yesterday’s
luxuries become today’s minimum standards that will soon become tomorrow’s
hardships. This is not a new process; lifestyle standards have been ratcheting up
slowly over decades and centuries. We
would find it hard to cope with bringing
up pails of water from the well or rubbing two sticks together to get a fire going (though the way things are going in
South Africa…). But, in our time, this
process is accelerating at a frightening
speed and is a major contributing factor
to what is becoming an Age of Anxiety
for our children.
Remember when you were willing to
wait a few seconds for a computer to respond to a click on a website or a tap on
a keyboard? These days, even 400 milliseconds – literally the blink of an eye –
is too long. According to Google researchers, cited in the New York Times,1

The Horsey Set

Our Sages understood this dynamic
well when they ruled that a person who
has become accustomed to luxury may
legitimately receive public tzedakah
money to restore him to his status.
They base this insight on the Torah’s
commandmen t regarding the poor:
“Open your hand generously, and extend to him any credit he requires to
take care of his need.”3
The Torah’s emphasis on ‘his’ particular
need implies that we must be sensitive to
his subjectively perceived privations,
which have become his realities. Our Sages accordingly authorise a community to
provide a rich man who has fallen on hard
times with a horse to ride on and a slave
to run before him. On one occasion, the
famous Hillel could not find a slave, so he
himself ran before a previously wealthy
man’s carriage for three miles!4 Hillel obviously understood that if ‘the boy would
fall, he would break’.
Just like that rich man, children born
into a high-level service delivery perceive
all of their wants as survival basics.
That’s why their withdrawal symptoms
can be acutely dramatic when they don’t
get their ‘fix’ on time. It’s hard enough
as parents dealing with their unrealistic
expectations and their constant need for
stimulus. Imagine the spouses that will
have to put up with their sense of entitlement. Worse than that, let us not
imagine the divorces that might result
from our culture of immediate obsolescence and, worse yet, the marriages that
may never come about.

Keep it simple, smarty

The good news is that we have powerful
tools to raise happy children, even

Photograph: BIGSTOCKPHOTO.COM; PORTRAIT:SUPPLIED

Simple living,

that barely perceptible delay causes
people to search less.
In 2009, a study by Forrester Research
found online shoppers in the US expected pages to load in two seconds or less –
and that at three seconds, a large share
of these shoppers abandon the site. Only
three years earlier, a similar Forrester
study found the average expectation for
page load times was four seconds.2