By Rishe Deitsch, Senior Editor, N’shei Chabad Newsletter
I’m with the N’shei Chabad Newsletter for 36 years, first for 13 years as writer of the Harriet the Harried Housewife column and then for 14 years as editor and finally for the past nine years as senior editor. I hope I’ve accomplished a few things towards my goal of helping to prevent needless suffering.
When I look back at these three and a half decades, one of the things I’m proudest of is getting Izzy Kalman into my fellow Lubavitchers’ homes, schools and lives. His method of dealing with bullying, and helping children deal with it, has impacted many children for the good, turning tears to smiles. I have seen it with my own eyes. He teaches us to de-escalate hostilities instead of escalating them, and since everyone has hostilities aimed at them during the course of daily life, this is a priceless skill for everyone at any stage of life. And it can be taught. And it doesn’t take millions of dollars of hundreds of hours of sessions.
I hope you will watch his video by clicking on [nsheichabadnewsletter.com] and scrolling down to “Meet Izzy Kalman.” I hope you will read some N’shei Chabad Newsletter articles about him (see below). And I hope you will ask your hanhalah to bring him to your school (yes! even one time can make a world of difference) to speak with students and staff (separately).
If your child is suffering, Izzy can help your child, privately. It usually takes just one to three sessions.
As Izzy likes to joke, “Rishe bullied her daughters into taking me to speak about my anti-bullying methods…”
My daughters Hindel Levitin (Chabad of Northern Palm Beach); Chanel Lipskier (The Beis Medrash Women’s Circle of Crown Heights); and Zeesy Silberberg (Chabad of West Bloomfield) all took him to speak to their communities, with great success.
When Izzy spoke in Crown Heights, the event took place in my house. Interest was so strong in this issue (with so many children suffering from being bullied on a daily basis) that my large dining room couldn’t hold them all. Afterward, many women stayed to ask Izzy questions. As I cleaned up, I heard the questions. It was heartbreaking to hear what some children are going through. The hanhalos would surely do anything to alleviate this suffering, but “zero tolerance” just doesn’t work.
Please, contact Izzy at [email protected] and ask him to get involved with your child’s school now. His itinerary is almost full for his upcoming visit. He arrives end of December. Thank you for reading this far and please email me at [email protected] if I can be of any further assistance.
IZZY KALMAN SPEAKS
It’s been a year since I returned from my whirlwind presentation tour in the U.S., when I spoke about bullying mostly to Chabad schools and organizations. Once again, b’ezrat Hashem, I will embark on a new six-week adventure beginning at the end of December.
Thanks to the encouragement of Nshei Chabad’s indefatigable editor Rishe Deitsch, I have published a couple of long articles on bullying in that wonderful magazine as well as in COLive.
I attended Lubavitcher Yeshiva of the Bronx, under the leadership of the tzadik Rabbi Mordechai Altein, from 1957 to 1966. Perhaps the most important intellectual trait instilled in me through the Torah studies was questioning. We were to take nothing for granted. The rebbeim were thrilled if we could stump them with a kushia. Perhaps this tendency to question is what ultimately led to my dubious distinction as the world’s most ardent critic of the anti-bullying movement.
The anti-bullying movement is not a Jewish movement. We don’t go around teaching people that anyone that upsets them deserves to be labeled a rasha and is not to be tolerated. We teach that everyone is equal in the eyes of Hashem and we must love them as ourselves, even if they are not always nice to us. We want our children to have the wisdom to deal with each other directly, not to have to be protected from each other by authorities and to be malshinim on each other.
The anti-bullying movement was born in 1999 in response to the horrific Columbine shooting. After seventeen years, bullying is still being called an epidemic.
I have seen so many tragedies of sets of parents who used to be good friends, becoming enemies because their children are not getting along with each other. And never before have so many parents been pulling their children out of schools for failing to stop their children from being bullied. While two parents have trouble getting their own couple of children to stop bullying each other, they blame they school and the other child’s parents for the bullying their child is experiencing. Schools do not deserve to be blamed for children’s bullying, and neither should the other child’s parents. It is not their fault.
This is not the place to discuss the problems with anti-bullying interventions and laws, but the interested reader can find my explanations in detail in my Nshei Chabad articles and especially in my articles on my Psychology Today blog, Resilience to Bullying.
While private schools may be exempt from anti-bullying laws, it is my impression that they have taken the anti-bully campaign especially seriously. The reason is quite simple: parents demand it. They will pull their children out of the school if they are not satisfied with the school’s efforts. Yeshivas desperately want to keep each student in Yiddishkeit and they desperately need every tuition. Thus, they go into high gear with anti-bullying efforts. When they discover that bullying has become a monumental problem in their school, they assume they have uncovered something that had previously been under their radar. They can’t see how their anti-bullying efforts may actually have caused the increase in bullying.
But there’s good news. Ending bullying is, in reality, surprisingly simple. The details are beyond the scope of this article, but it requires two elements. The first is teaching kids the wisdom to understand why others continue picking on them and how to successfully make them stop through the practical application of ve’ahavta le’reacha ka’mocha. The second is getting school staff to replace counterproductive interventions with ones that help kids quickly solve bullying problems on their own.
While the word “bullying” conjures up images of terrible violence, the truth is that most bullying is verbal, and even most physical fights begin with anger over insults. Teaching kids the solution is easy with the proper methods.
One boy was being beaten up almost every day by boys that were angering him by calling him “shorty.” He learned to simply reply, “You’re right! I’m short!” and “Do you think I’ll ever be tall? I doubt it!” and children stopped bothering him almost immediately.
His experience was not atypical. Most bullied children stop being picked on very quickly once they begin responding in a friendly manner rather than getting angry or upset. We have also developed effective responses for all common bullying situations. When these lessons are given to the children in an entire school, the social atmosphere dramatically improves. And teachers, instead of spending time dealing with endless bullying complaints, can spend their time teaching!
I hope you will give me a chance to help. I cannot cover the entire U.S. in my upcoming trip, but am available for additional bookings in Los Angeles, South Florida, Chicago, Phoenix and the New York City vicinity. Chabad gets a 50% discount. Individual children can also turn to us for counseling. Call (718) 983-1333, or (972) 954-2091, or email [email protected].
i attended his event last winter by The Beis Medrash Women’s Circle i watched his videos afterwards, and read two of his books and what i learned basically was DON’T ESCALATE THE HOSTILITIES when hostilities come at me (and they come at everyone occasionally, it can’t be avoided), instead of bristling and throwing hostilities back, so they escalate, i learned to not escalate it sounds simple but it’s not, it was a skill i had to learn but BOY OH BOY does it ever work it’s amazing what happens when you learn to de-escalate hostilities… miracles happen… in friendships, in… Read more »
LA Morah: regarding addressing the “bully”; but who is the bully? It is not an objective diagnosis of a person. Is it someone identifiable by their horns and tail, they way bullies are often depicted in illustrations? A bully is whoever someone else says he is, but the person being accused of being a bully rarely sees himself that way. If you address a “bully” but he denies he is a bully and even claims he is the real victim, then how do you address the bully? Who is he? My approach does not only address “victims.” It addresses everyone,… Read more »
Anti animal abuse is. It is by far, many more times, promoted and advocated then anti bullying is. The reason is that those who promote it, are in fact the most extreme and worst bullies, ever to exist. There are videos of 5 year old girls doing things like putting there feet softly up against large dogs, with comments demanding the torture and death of the kid for “abusing” the dog by “kicking it”. There are other videos of the same kind of fanatical bullies demanding similar torture and death, for people riding horses. There is no such thing as… Read more »
Thank you to Rishe and the Nshei newsletter. You tackle difficult topics in a beautiful way.Thank you for bringing topics like bullying to the forefront so they can be worked on for the benefit of the next generation.
Crown Heights and Brooklyn are TOUGH neighborhoods. My first time visiting one of the local Boy’s Yeshivas, two boys were beating the stuffings out of each other in the hallways. This is NOT!! how Jewish children are supposed to act! Parents sometimes adopt the attitude of “My kid against your’s, survival of the fittest” THIS is Jewish??????
My thoughts exactly!!!
What about in camps…. My son was bullied when they put him i a bunk that had boys from a different Yeshiva then his…. Now that the school year started we are feeling it… Hes just not the same boy anymore!
since i have benefited from training by Izzy kalman, i can explain a little
zero tolerance sounds good on the face of it
but in reality, think about it, who is going to follow your child around his/her whole life making sure nobody bullies him/her? who is going to have “zero tolerance” for anyone who hurts his/her feelings?
nobody is going to. so it’s far, far better to teach your child now how to deal with insults, than to try to zap every insulter.
almost every child can be taught. i’ve seen it.
TBMWC is having a second event with Izzy Kalman? i still recall the first. izzy role-played with Bassie Chaskind and they were hysterical!
Zero tolerance sounds great in theory and workshops, but it doesn’t work in reality. I think we should give this a try
BSD, at the same time that you are working on anti-bullying techniques for children, why don’t you work on anti-bullying techniques for supposedly “normal”, sometimes even “prestigious” adults, where the stakes in real world life are tremendously greater !!!! A few years ago, I saw a fantastic video by the Chabad Rabbi, Shais Taub, who said that some adults give other adults a “tounge lashing”. Also, a Lubavitcher Rov told me right out that a certain big supposedly prestigious Rabbi was nothing more than a bully and that that was how he got into his position and did things in… Read more »
While this may work our schools should have a zero tolerance for bullying especially in the usa under trump
Empowering the victim of bullying is wonderful and much needed however the bully must also be addressed and not ignored. One,he/she needs to know these sort of actions have consequences,two,the bully has his/her own issues that must be dealt with.
Stay tuned for details on our upcoming event with Izzy Kalman in Crown Heights.