How to be an inspiring parent.

Read the literature on happiness, meaningful life, good old age, all the rest of it, the Harvard study, the grant study, you name it.

The biggest factors leading to happiness and a meaningful life is the quality and strength of your relationships.

The strength of a marriage, the strength of the parent-child bond, the strength

of community, and knowing that there are people there to support you. All of the good things

come from that, as the sociologists like Robert Putnam of Harvard have pointed out, social

capital, everything that makes life trustful and gracious, come from these networks

of relationships. They are the ones that really have been fractured and fragmented by modernity.

I didn't tell you, fewer people are getting married. They're getting married later. More marriages

are ending in divorce. In Britain and America,

believe it or not, almost 50% of children today are born outside of marriage. And all of these

things are devastating. And the end result is when we are teaching our children the Jewish practices that actually lead to us having

some of the strongest marriages and strongest communities the world has ever known, we are giving them the recipe for future happiness.

I remember once a very leading British politician who read some of my stuff and was very

interested in social capital, said, Rabbi Sack, can you define community for me? I said, yes, it's very

easy. I go around the world giving lectures on all sorts of different subjects to all sorts of

different audiences in all sorts of different countries. all sorts of different audiences in all sorts

of different countries. And after the talk is over, people come up to me and ask me questions.

And whoever they are and wherever I am, if it's a Jewish audience, they always ask the same

question. Do you know who I am? I know who you are. Do you know who I am?

I know who you are.

Do you know who I am?

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