By Rabbi Akiva Rutenberg
A teenage girl, about twelve or thirteen years old, was growing up in a religious home. Like many teenagers, she began expressing herself differently than the rest of the family. She started dressing in ways that felt foreign to the household. Such exploration is not unusual during adolescence.
But her father found it deeply unsettling.
What began as discomfort slowly turned into tension. The father felt disrespected and worried about the direction she was heading. The daughter, on the other hand, felt misunderstood and unheard. Each felt hurt in different ways, and the tension between them gradually intensified.
Over time the situation deteriorated and their conversations became minimal. They would say hello and goodbye, but the warmth was gone. Real communication had stopped.
At a certain point the father decided he wanted to interrupt the negative spiral. He thought to himself that perhaps he could send her a message that would soften the situation.
So, he wrote her a heartfelt email.
In that message he told her how deeply he loved her. He reassured her that nothing she did could ever change that love. He wrote that he believed this stage of life was temporary and that he trusted the person she was becoming. The tone of the email was gentle, patient, and full of care.
He sent it.
Remarkably, within a day or two, he began to notice a shift. She seemed more open, less defensive, and their interactions softened. That in turn made him more open as well, and the relationship slowly began to move in a different direction.
Within two weeks they were speaking more comfortably than they had even before the conflict began. And one Shabbos afternoon, about two and a half weeks later, she approached him and quietly asked, “Can I sit next to you at the table?” For the father, it was a deeply moving moment. Later, when they were alone, he turned to her. “I feel so grateful that things between us have improved,” he said. “Tell me something honestly. What was it in my email that affected you so much? What did I write that really reached you?”
She looked at him with confusion. “What email?” He repeated the question. Almost amused, she said, “Dad... I don’t read email.” In that moment the father realized something profound.
She had never read the email. Nothing in her had changed.
He had changed.
Writing that email shifted something inside of him. It changed the way he saw her. He approached her with more patience, more understanding, more openness. And because he was looking at her differently, she began looking at him differently as well.
That, in many ways, is the secret of relationships.
