Let’s take this a step further. If we do slip up and make a mistake, at the very least we have to take it seriously and learn the right lesson. At the very least, we have to make sure we don’t make the same mistake twice, not with this child, and not with the next child either.
Not long ago, someone told me a useful piece of advice that he’d heard from a choshuve Yid. A certain person sent his son to learn in a very reputable cheder, but the child didn’t do well there. When it was time to pick a cheder for his next son, he was in two minds as to whether to send this boy to the same cheder, and he went to this choshuve Yid to ask his advice, who answered him with a mashal: When a person wants to travel by train, he first checks to see that it’s going in the right direction. He’s not going to get on a train that will take him in the opposite direction to where he wants to go.
“You’ve already seen that the school where you sent your oldest son didn’t take him where you wanted him to go. While it’s possible that things could work out differently for your second son, you should at the very least make sure that the cheder does things differently this time around, so that the results are better. After all, getting on the same train as last time and hoping that somehow, it will take you somewhere different this time around, isn’t the smartest thing to do...”
When a person makes a mistake and wants to excuse it, he often finds himself saying: No, it wasn’t me! It was just that things happened this way... or that person said the wrong thing... the other person got involved and... it was all those other people who made such a mess of everything... It wasn’t my fault!
Now, some of these excuses could be partially true, but usually, the truth is buried in a huge mound of excuses and justifications, and what happens is that instead of correcting the mistake, a person just keeps on repeating it. We have to start realizing that we simply don’t make serious mistakes with our own, beloved children — and that if something does happen, at the very least we have to figure out why and make sure that it doesn’t happen again.
