Heed, My Son…

Iggeres HaRamban

…the discipline of your father and do not forsake the guidance of your mother.  And so begins the Iggeres HaRamban with this quote from Sefer Mishlei.

The Rabbeinu Yona in his sefer, Shaarei Teshuva, introduces us to a person who shuts himself off from mussar, which is the spiritual equivalent of shutting oneself off from oxygen and then some, because whereas the lack of oxygen will only impact on a person’s life in this world, the lack of mussar will also severely circumscribe his breathing in the next.

Rabbi Moshe Hauer tells us that if you're your own rebbe you're in big trouble because a person is incapable of seeing his weaknesses.  A good friend doesn’t look at you through rose tinted glasses.  He gives it to you over the head if need be.

The key to Teshuva, as the Rabbeinu Yona has made clear, is to be open to guidance.  A person has to be mekabel, and he acquires this trait by training himself to be a shomaya (one who hears),  and it’s with this fundamental yesod that the Ramban begins the Iggeres with the words Shema beni (Heed, my son).

Shema beni is a clarion call to open oneself up to guidance, and who is the most basic person to give guidance/mussar if not a parent?

But as Rabbi Hauer explains it, it’s really a two way street because while the child most definitely has to bend an ear in the right direction, in one way or the other it’s incumbent upon the parent to create the circumstances in which the child will be inclined to bend that ear and open up and pay attention.

And exactly how does a parent go about creating an environment in which his child will be motivated to absorb that which he is striving to give over?

Rabbi Hauer lets us know that the best way to influence someone is to be a role model that the person would want to emulate, and that probably counts double for kids.  Today we often refer to this as mentoring but the Ramban was ahead of the curve on this more than seven hundred years before mentoring found its way into a dictionary.

And this is the big key to Shema beni, because before the Ramban actually gets into the mussar that permeates the Iggeres he introduces himself as the conveyor of that mussar.  He is both the parent and the role model par excellance, and as such he is a unique position to focus his son’s attention on the content of the Iggeres.

But he wasn’t the only game in town.  In fact, he wasn’t in town altogether because he had been exiled by the King of Spain, and he chose to go to Eretz Yisroel, and it was from there, in Acco that wrote the Iggeres.  In light of this reality, the Ramban puts down one more contextual marker so as to further lay the ground work for the ultimate acceptance of his words.

The Ramban didn’t jumpstart the Iggeres with half a verse.  After opening with Heed, my son, the discipline of your father he finished off the verse with and do not forsake the guidance of your mother.

Rabbi Hauer enlightens us with the fact that with the second half of the verse the Ramban put the idea of co-parenting on the table with both parents being in sync with a common language and a common approach.

The Ramban’s lead into the body of the Iggeres proclaims to his son that he should pay close attention because he has something important to say.  And then he follows with the words and do not forsake the guidance of your mother, thereby signaling to him that if he should ever be in need of direction he should seek out his mother because whatever she will tell him in his father’s absence is part and parcel of their common Torah. 

The Ramban was not only speaking to his reality that was compromised by geographical separation, he was also speaking to ours in which the father of the house sets the instructional tone and the mother imparts it on a daily basis.