Rabbi Shimon Russell discovered his best self by parenting his struggling kids

Photos: Elchanan Kotler, Personal archives

E

very couple who sets out to build a Jewish home desires — and generally expects — to raise a loving family. But what happens when somewhere down the line, the dreams and fantasies implode, leaving parents scratching their heads in shock and bewilderment when their child’s behavior takes an unexpected turn? How can parents distinguish between rebelliousness and trauma, between malice and inner brokenness? And how can we expand our consciousness and stretch what we thought were our limits, instead of falling into the counterproductive trap of our own emotional triggers?

Rabbi Shimon Russell, an international authority on the phenomenon of young people who opt out of frum life and a longtime Lakewood mental health professional before relocating to the Jerusalem suburb of Givat Ze’ev, also wants to see us in healthy, supportive relationships. And he’s even given us a book to help us get there.

Drawn from Rabbi Russell’s talks and wisdom, Raising a Loving Family — written by author and educator Rabbi Zalman Goldstein — is not only a rich repository of foundational parenting psychology and practical down-to-earth guidance for creating loving and enduring bonds with our children; it’s about how to make kids feel they really matter, and how, by developing healthy parental attachments, to raise them in a way that even if and when problems and crises arise, they’ll have the resilience to weather the storms of trauma and other roadblocks in their young lives.

True, there are a lot of parenting guidebooks out there, and some are even Torah-based, but this one doesn’t talk at you, it talks with you and holds your hand. Because no one knows the complex challenges of today’s struggling youth and their overwhelmed, confused, and devastated parents like Rabbi Russell. He’s been there and back himself, on a journey he never wished for and never expected — but one that’s molded him into a person he never dreamed he’d be.

A Different Script

It was 1963, and the Russell family was driving through the streets of London on the way home from their zeide’s traditional Pesach Seder, when inquisitive nine-year-old Shimon, looking out the back window at the city’s sparkling lights, suddenly asked his father, “Daddy, why do we go to a Seder every year?”

Growing up in South London as a second-generation British Jew, Shimon’s father didn’t connect much with traditional Judaism. His mother, who had a religious childhood, drifted from much of her religious practice after being billeted by law with non-Jews during the Blitz of London during World War II. But some Jewish spark remained, because the family kept a kosher home, and the Russell boys attended religious Talmud Torah three times a week.

Shimon’s father could have ignored the question that Pesach night, but instead he answered his young son to the best of his ability: “Because we’re Jewish, because my father took me to his father’s Seder, and this is just what we do.”

“Does that mean it’s true, that we really came out of Egypt, and that’s why we’re passing down this story?” asked Shimon, repeating what he’d enthusiastically learned in Talmud Torah.

“Yeah, I guess that’s true,” said his father.

“So in that case,” asked Shimon, “why are we driving?”

“That was the last time my father put me in the car on Shabbos or Yom Tov,” Rabbi Russell recalls. “After that, my grandparents came to us for Pesach. It changed the trajectory of my entire family. Although my father continued to work on Shabbos until he retired, my brothers and I would walk three miles to shul every Shabbos and Yom Tov, and in honor of my bar mitzvah, I decided to become fully shomer Shabbos. By 18, I was in yeshivah in Eretz Yisrael, and my brothers followed — although my parents were a bit dumfounded how all that happened under their noses.”