September 28, 2021
Author(s): Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz,
Shemini Atzeret—Yizkor
September 28, 2021 — 22 Tishrei 5782
Good Mentors and Great Mentors
by Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
Imagine a friend or loved one comes to see you with a problem. They are wrestling with a dilemma.
Should I stay where I am at in my current job, or should I take a risk and take a new job?
Should I break up with my current boyfriend or girlfriend?
Should we be open to moving cities, to starting all over again?
Somebody offended me. Should I talk to the person, or do I let it go?
They are open to your advice. They are seeking your wisdom. Now further imagine that having heard their take on their dilemma, you have an opinion on the merits of what they might do.
How we can be most helpful to the person who turns to us?
Adam Grant, a professor at Penn, recently posted a teaching about the difference between what he calls good mentors and great mentors:
Good mentors share lessons from their experience. Great mentors help you crystallize lessons from your experience.
Good mentors give useful answers. Great mentors help you ask better questions.
Good mentors walk you through their path. Great mentors help you identify your path.
If what Adam Grant says is true, our move is less about giving answers than asking questions; less about sharing our wisdom and more about helping the other person find the answer that is right for them. To be a great mentor, our best punctuation mark is not the period, not the exclamation mark, but the question mark. We are most helpful when we ask good questions that help people refine their own thinking. People will most own an answer when it is their answer they are owning, arrived at in their own time.
A woman named Liz Wiseman was stuck in a bad pattern with her small children when she tried to get them to go to bed. She knew what the answer was. She knew what a smooth bedtime ritual looked like. So she was prescriptive. Pick up your toys. Put on your pajamas. Brush your teeth. Get into bed. She found that her prescriptions did not land well with her young children. One day, she was lamenting how hard it was to get her kids to go to bed when a colleague suggested she change her punctuation, from prescribing answers, to asking questions.
She tried that. What time is it? Time to get ready for bed, they said. What’s next, then, she asked? We have to brush our teeth, they answered. Then they brushed their teeth. So on and so forth. The road to a seamless, harmonious bedtime ritual was paved through questions.
Liz Wiseman’s young children taught her something that night. Prescribing answers rarely works. Asking questions that allows people to come up with their own answers works very well. She would go on to write about this experience in her classic book about effective business leadership, Multipliers.
What does all of this have to do with Yizkor, which we are to recite in a few moments?
And the answer is literally everything.
When a parent or grandparent passes away, the single biggest driver of how their children or grandchildren regard them is: did they love me for who I am? Did they see me? Did they let me live my truth? When the answer to those questions is yes, that inspires the deepest love. When the answer to those questions is no, they judged me, they didn’t see me, they were critical of me, I always felt like I did not measure up, that inspires complexity and profound ambivalence.
I was once doing a funeral for two daughters whose father had passed away. The father had had a long period of decline, a number of years where he required the active care of his adult children. Each daughter was heroic in lavishing love and attention on their father. No adult child could have done more. It was day after day, year after year.
While I was meeting with them, I was trying to explore their family’s secret sauce. How did their father inspire such undying devotion? No parent could command it, or order it, or guilt it, or pay for it. That kind of daily love could only be earned, could only be inspired. He clearly did that. But how?
In telling their father’s story, the secret was revealed. Their father grew up with an expectation that he would be a rabbi. After all, nine previous generations had been a rabbi. His father was a rabbi. His grandfather had been a rabbi. His great grandfather had been a rabbi. Times 9 generations. Of course you will be a rabbi too.
There was only one problem. He did not want to be a rabbi. He loved Judaism well enough. He was a serious Jew. His life was guided by Jewish practice. But he wanted to be a doctor. He loved science.
One day, his science teacher talked to his father. His father of course expected him to be a rabbi. His science teacher said to his father: I have to tell you one thing. Your son’s face lights up whenever he studies science. Your son becomes so animated when he talks about becoming a doctor and using science and medicine to heal the sick. His father heard this and told his son: you do you. You become the person you want to become.
His father’s ability to see him, to love him, to celebrate him, for who he was inspired his ability to do the same for his daughters, and that inspired his daughters to both love him with every fiber of their being.
Which brings us to the complex sacred work of remembering our loved ones at Yizkor. If they loved us for who we are, not for who they wanted us to be, great. Our work is gratitude for their wisdom and for their unconditional love. And since they did not prescribe their truth for us, but invited us to find our own truth, we are equipped for this moment, and for life without them physically. We can still hear their voices. We can still hear their questions. We can still feel their support as we find our own path, embraced by their love, which is a constant.
But if our loved ones whom we remember this morning were prescribers, they gave us their answers, okay. Our work is to love them for who they were and to do our best to forgive them their humanity.
But our work is also to learn from them. Sometimes we learn from our loved ones what to do. Other times we learn from our loved ones what not to do.
If we want to be loved for who we are, it is only right that we love the people in our lives for who they are. What tweaks do we need to make to love the people in our life for who they are? Easy to say. Harder to do. But we still have time to get it right. And when we do, when we love unconditionally, that kind of love inspires love that lasts forever. Please rise.