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Families are not what they used to be, but maybe they never were to begin with. What people say is true: “You can pick your friends but you cannot pick your family.” They really mean to say that if we had a choice we would opt for our friends to be our family and for our family to become her friends  -- if not a little more removed.  The only problem with that wish is that if it were true, our friends would then become our family and we would likely despise them every bit as much as we do our family today.

Families breed intimacy by definition. Boundaries are few. Friendships, on the other hand, have clear delineated boundaries. That is why we adore our friendships and are so threatened by our families. The first few real emotional demands while the other has many.

Being stuck, having to work out the problems that accompany every intimate relationship makes a family.  Fly-by-night relationships can never deliver the emotional stability or impact that long term ones give.  Tensions do not dissolve families; they challenge them. Each obstacle is a joint hurdle that the group faces together.  Overcoming these obstacles bolsters the love and secures the members to the family unit.

Milestones in the family’s life act as defining agent to the individual members. If, for example, the family celebrates Pesach and birthdays with joyous abandon it is all but certain that the children will re-create those events in their new lives as they physically leave the home nest. These things are carried deep within the psyche.

Shul observances and communal events can never supplant the home as the setting of Jewish life.  It simply does not possess the same impact. The movement within America has been to give over Jewish practice into the communal arena. It will not work. There is no substitute for a home Sukkah or chicken soup on erev Shabbat.

Here is a test.   Any child who is been through a religious school education but has never observed any festivals of say, Shavuot or Sukkot at home, challenge with the following question: what are these holidays about? (I assure you they have learned them 10 times over). But ask them about Pesach or Hanukkah, which they observe, and they will respond without hesitation.

The home is a far richer environment for learning than we give credit.  This is the one arena where no surrogate can fill in the gap.