In one of my millions of jobs, I write book descriptions for Feldheim Publishers' website, www.feldheim.com, which is neat because I get to review all new books that come through their doors. Well, this week I got my hands on a book that I think will create quite a revolution in the Jewish world, a book published by Targum Press (distributed by Feldheim) called 6 diaries. This is the brutally honest, unfiltered compilation of the weekly diaries of six teenagers recording their shifting thoughts on tznius, modesty. They come from different backgrounds, have different personalities, and the only thing they have in common is a willingness to explore this oft-confounding and complex topic.

What struck me about this book is that it holds the potential to be more powerful than others that essentially deal with the same topic, even though it is written by young adults with no "rebbetzin" experience or deep wellsprings of knowledge and life's work to back them up. Instead, the pull lies in the glimpsing of the power of example. It's about girls telling their honest stories of personal struggle and growth, which the reader can then muse over, extrapolate from, and perhaps use as a jumping-off point to change as well. It's different than an authoritative book on the subject, where a renowned educator or lecturer offers spell-binding insight, quoting from myriad Torah sources, and presents a compelling picture of why we should move toward greater modesty. Of course, this second kind of book is eminently valuable and very uplifting. But there's something so visceral, so poignant, about seeing a work in progress like 6 diaries embodies, that unashamedly attests to--just that. There's no preaching, no guilt, or impossible pedestals to gaze up at helplessly.

The concept of teaching by example is one that I think about often. It's a "walk the walk and talk the talk", bone-deep construct that inspires others to do what they never could have been moved to do in any other way.

I wonder: what power of example do I set? What power of example do you set?

Last night I was interviewing a mental  health professional for an article I'm working on--a major feature article which cracks open a delicate and difficult subject...a subject no one really wants to openly talk about...something "can of wormsish...are you curious yet? I think I'm supposed to keep a lid on things that haven't yet come out so you'll have to wait to see for yourself.

Anyway, this person, very intelligent and highly trained, proposed a theory which struck me with force. What this person said was, "Today's kids are trying to escape their problems and not have to deal with their feelings. Why? Because we (parents) are simply not raising our kids for greatness. Look at the personalities in Tanach, in the Gemara. These people were poets, astronomers, physicians, along with being erudite scholars. They were complex, they were great. Jews are intended for greatness. We are not meant to be average. Yet today's parent is obssessed with their child being 'normal', 'regular', 'fitting in'."

Hmmmmm.... Deep breath.

I dunno. On one side you have the parents complaining that their children, nebbach, aren't geniuses ("To be honest, his IQ is only average, but don't tell the shadchanim; and anyway, those IQ tests don't mean a single thing--he was walking by five months!"), and on the other side you have people clamoring for more greatness in kids, blaming society's ills on the untapped potential we parents fail to encourage in our children. And then you have the kids who end up in therapy, complaining about how their parents always demanded they push themselves to an infinite limit so they lived their childhood always feeling they didn't measure up.

And I wonder to myself: how would a parent, theoretically, raise a child "to greatness", enabling that child to harness his or her creativity without being stifled? Is this potential for greatness truly the responsibility and capability of parents? Could it be, also, school-dependent? Society-dependent? As a kid in Bais Yaakov, when I read the classics, pored over books on Einstein's Theory of Relativity, and expressed a great thirst for knowledge and an aching desire to write, many of those around me did not see this is as a "sign of greatness" to put it mildly :-).

It sounds delicious to raise kids to discover their own innate abilities and allow them to take those abilities to whatever heights they chose, nurturing them in every which way. But, tachlis, how does that happen? What if the parent doesn't have money for violin lessons, chess lessons, art lessons, and a private trigonometry teacher? How much is intrinsic and how much is extrinsic?

What if today's adolescent escape problems don't stem from their frustrated, foiled potential? What other underlying cause might be at play? And who takes the blame?