What we are often too blind to see, is that life is actually all based on role modeling

A lady once came by the Rebbe and asked him for advice in bringing up good children “be a good role model” he replied. You can see (on the video of this) how she just stands there, as if that wasn’t what she was expecting to hear – “the advice is simple, but effective” replied the Rebbe.

Let’s examine how role modeling works and be able to open our eyes to how important it is for us to have the right role models – an actual commandment in the Torah to role model after God’s qualities of compassion, which can be seen in the Rebbe etc. and how important it is for us ourselves to be role models to whomever we desire to learn from us.

When I was the Rabbi of a synagogue someone once asked me – his whole life he had worked in corporate higherqueis – I forget the exact question, but I remember telling him that all the personalities of the employees change based on the manager – he said, you are absolutely right – when there is a kind manager, all the employees are kind, when there is a tuff manager, all the employees become tuff.

I’ll never forgert witnessing this first hand – it’s funny, if it wasn’t pretty sad – I was at a wedding, now our table needed a higher standard of kosher – so we went into the catering side, so you have armies of workers and a boss – so I said to the boss, we need the special kosher and he thought it was already sent out, so he flipped his lid at his employees, shouting, blah blah blah, literally seconds later, this poor black employee also begins shouting, and all the other employees tell him, to shut up!

In other words, he was copying his role model.

I once asked Lazer Medalie, an interesting guy, about educating children, and he said, when he was in Yeshivah (of married men) one of the students said, how the other day, one of his children carried a towel on his finger because the day before, he saw his father do it.

As one educational website played a video bringing home this point – children are like video cameras, recording and imitating everything their role models do.

But the thing is, it isn’t limited to children

Without going into all the details, I wrote a book on this entitled “discovering yourself” (under booklets on the website) the bottom line is, we are comprised of an identity, our identity is comprised of our role models – people we think, are cool.

This is why there is such a messed up society and it’s only gonnu get a lot worse soon, unless we change our role models

Because Hollywood introduced a new genre of killer role-models, of girls who are basically sex objects and in turn has influenced a generation of boys and girls of what is cool versus what is truly noble!

Sent via my BlackBerry from Vodacom – let your email find you!