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JANUARY 6, 2022 | The Jewish Home OCTOBER 29, 2015 | The Jewish Home
Teen Talk
By Rebbetzin Sori Teitelbaum
Dear Teen Talk,
I would like to begin by thanking you for giving teenagers a forum where we can feel comfortable asking questions, receiving guidance, and
Teen Talk , column in
a new
TJH, is geared to wards the teens in o ur commu nity. Answered by a rotati ng roster of teachers, rebbeim, clinicians , an d peers (!), te ens will b e hearing answers to many que stions the had perco y lating in th eir minds wished th an d ey had th e answers for.
have an overall sense of being heard. I am a 15-year-old girl, the third of four daughters. I am, b”H, a smart, fun-loving, capable girl with many friends. Yet, at times, I feel as if everyone and everything would just go on fine without me. Is it normal to feel so dispensable and how can I overcome these feelings?
Answer:
Thank you for writing in with such an important question. Indeed, not only are you “smart, fun-loving and capable,” but you are wise beyond your years. There are many adults of all ages who at times share your feeling of being dispensable. I believe the key to getting past these feelings is to understand the difference between “dispensable” and “replaceable.” No person or event or entity is indispensable. But on the other hand, no person, or event or entity is replaceable. Whatever happens afterwards is not the same as before and therefore the very fact that it IS replaced is a reminder that something was destroyed. Let’s take a simple example – a piece of furniture in a person’s home is destroyed. Or maybe a piece of jewelry was stolen. The insurance company pays for the furniture or jewelry to be replaced. But even if we replace it with as close a copy as possible to the item, every time we look at the replacement, we are reminded that the original was destroyed. My husband and I recently made
Aliya to Ramat Beit Shemesh, and we spent the summer furnishing our new apartment. We ended up (by chance) at a wonderful store that builds all kinds of premium wood furniture. We were ordering our dining room furniture, and the proprietor wanted us to feel comfortable that he was legitimate, so he showed us the beautiful chair he had made for the Viznitzer Rebbe. He jokingly said
We surely can see this concept in the story of the rebuilding of the second Beit Hamikdash. The Navi tells us that when the second Beit Hamikdash was being rebuilt, the elderly, who were alive and saw the first Beit Hamikdash, wept in despair. However, the young people rejoiced because our Beit Hamikdash was being restored. The older people understood it was a replacement and not the
You have special talents that Hashem gave you, special skills that He gifted you with. he could make a replica for us and my husband would feel the holiness of the Rebbe in the chair. We explained to him that although it would look exactly like the Rebbe’s chair, it was not the actual chair that the Rebbe sat on, so it had a totally different value to it. The chair is dispensable as it can break or become ruined – but it cannot be replaced.
same as the first Beit Hamikdash – and they wept. The replacement is never the original. As we know, many of the miracles in the first Beit Hamikdash did not exist in the second. You can replace bricks and stones, but you cannot replace miracles. Yet another example are the two sets of Luchot. The second are a replacement of the first, but they are not exactly the same. The text differs from the first to the second. The lesson
