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12 Av 5761 - August 1, 2001 | Mordecai Plaut, director Published Weekly
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Home and Family
Repeat Performance
by Esther Lichtig, Beitar

I was sitting by my window. I do that a lot these days. Firstly, because I love the view, and secondly, perhaps more honestly, because that pink battered couch that lives in the corner of my living room has an irrestible alluring quality that my tired body can't seem to ignore.

Ouside my window is a boys' paradise. There are about four dump trucks, two tractors, bulldozers and various other machines. Day in, day out, I've watched with fascination as the convoy moves up the hill and down the hill. I often wondered aloud, how it is that men sitting behind the wheels are still sane. Hundreds of times each day they go through the same procedure, collect the rubble, go down the hill, dump the rubble, go back up and fetch some more. But even as I wonder, I am amazed at the miraculous change taking place beyond my very eyes. There are now roads where there were none before and hills where the land was flat. Land previously inhospitable to mankind is being made ready for our usage and I thank Hashem.

I turned back to the house. How many times must I wash those dishes, make those beds and sweep this floor? How many times will I think why my life is so mundane and boring (Hashem -- forgive me for using those words. I don't wish to complain).

It's O.K. I need no answers. I know these repetitive almost habitual chores that make up a woman's everyday life are building an edifice as high as the heavens. They create a miniature Mishkon where I serve as kohein and they provide fertile ground for my sanity to blossom.

Just one step further, all you mothers who want to know why you have to say the same thing one hundred times before anybody hears what you have to say.

On a tape on education, R' Diamant says that he attended R' Elya Lopian's shmuessen for six years and in every one, R' Elya zt'l repeated the same guideline rules. At the end of one month, everyone could repeat these rules verbatim and at the end of a year, probably everybody could say it in their sleep. But it takes years before it actually becomes a part of a person. By constantly repeating the regulations, R' Elya was molding his disciples. So as we say each morning: right shoe, left shoe, tie up left shoe, tie up right shoe, we are making this act part of our children's blood so that they can do it no other way when they grow up.

Repeating things only reinforces them.

Repeating things only reinforces them.

 

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