Our son’s rebbi was working to shape him — but in whose image?

He seemed like the dream rebbi. But then we realized: The help we’d welcomed was replacing the parenting we hadn’t surrendered

Chapter 1

HE

inspired our son and helped him grow — but were important boundaries disappearing?

Last year, at the beginning of June, my older son, Yossi, came home with a giant chart. He unfolded it in my kitchen, laid it on the floor, and showed it to me.

“Look, Ma,” he said. “Rabbi Ginsberg made this chart for me to help me be normal.”

I’d been busy emptying one of the pantry shelves into a box. We’d rented a bungalow for the first time this summer, so I was partially distracted. But that caught my attention. Yossi was in seventh grade, and I thought the days of charts were long behind him. Also, I had never heard of Rabbi Ginsberg. Rabbi Lowei was Yossi’s rebbi. But it was the word “normal” that set off a warning bell in my brain.

“Normal?” I asked him. “What does he mean?” Everyone in school knows Yossi and his antics, and not in a good way. He’s the type of kid who marches to his own beat. I also wondered what kind of person would tell a kid he’d help him be normal. That stung. There are gentler ways. We know — we get him the help he needs.

“I don’t know,” Yossi answered. “But he has a great prize for me. It’s a set of Mishnah Berurah.” He looked at me with a gleam in his eye. “Ma, a Mishnah Berurah is a hundred dollars. That’s a really great prize.”

He looked so happy and content. I thought to myself how odd it was that a rebbi who I had never heard of had simply blown into my son’s life, and with a chart, no less. A chart for a 12-year-old whose chart days should have been long behind him. But it was June, and it was busy, and Yossi looked happy, for once. Why ruin his happiness? I did nothing.

At the end of the school year, Rabbi Ginsburg gave Yossi his prize, too. He came to our house to deliver a set of beautifully bound Mishnah Berurah.

“I used to have a hard time in school,” Rabbi Ginsberg told me as Yossi unwrapped the gift. “It makes me feel like I need to help.”

I didn’t know how to respond, so I nodded sympathetically. A worm of discomfort crawled through my mind, and I wondered what sort of qualifications were awarded to someone with a difficult childhood experience.

W

hen September rolled around, what had happened in June was a faded memory. The summer upstate put Rabbi Ginsberg and his contest out of my mind. I only thought of it again when my younger son, Shua, came home from his first day of sixth grade and said his rebbi was Rabbi Ginsberg.

I wasn’t uneasy, but I was definitely curious about the man who had bought my older son an expensive set of seforim. I never like to ask too much about the year’s rebbi. My husband is the same way. We prefer to form our opinion as the year progresses. But I remembered Yossi and his chart, and I wondered what Rabbi Ginsberg’s reputation was.

I checked the class chat first. There was nothing but praise and excitement.

“Rabbi Ginsberg is amazing. So enthusiastic and devoted,” one mother wrote.

“My older son had him three years ago, and we LOVED him,” said another.

“He’s a real powerhouse. He’s from that Ginsberg askan family,” added a third.

And on it went. No one had a bad word to say. I wasn’t going to join in with some half-baked story about an expensive prize and a behavior chart. It would just seem like I was looking for problems.

Lucky for us, things seemed to be going well. Shua always seemed happy when he came home from school, and I allowed myself to feel hopeful. Both boys give us a degree of concern, but maybe things were looking up this year. Maybe Rabbi Ginsburg was exactly the kind of rebbi Shua needed.

He was structured and organized, and Shua thrived in that kind of atmosphere. It was the opposite of the chaos that Yossi sometimes left in his wake. I allowed myself to hope this would be the year things would turn around for Shua.