I would like to thank Boris and Yelena Malachevsky for always making their home available for our events. I also want to express my appreciation to Olga Kuchevsky who sponsored this Melave Malka in memory of her late husband Boris who was truly a wonderful person and was a dear friend of mine for many years. I need to also express my appreciation to the many women who prepared delicious cakes for the Melave Malka and are always making things happen.

Our speaker was Rabbi Dovid Hochberg who is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and who is truly an expert in his field. Rabbi Hochberg spoke for 40 minutes and the fielded many tough questions from the participants. The title of presentation was Secrets of Successful Relationships.

For the benefit of those who were not able to attend I wish to highlight some of the points made by Rabbi Hochberg.

As a way of recapping some of the highlights I will identify two points.

The first point is that within human development HaShem created a mechanism by which we can observe our selves similar to a mirror; namely relationships. If we take careful note of how we behave and react with the different relationships that we encounter we will notice that some are easy while others are difficult. When encountering difficult relationships it is a wonderful opportunity to use it as the mirror by which you can identify which buttons within you need sharpening, fine-tuning. His example was with a person who needs to develop his tolerance; having patience when things do not go the way he would like. Let us take someone for whom time is of highest importance and he is therefore very careful not to keep people waiting. He will discover that people are always making wait. Whether if it is for the carpool or a meeting or the doctor’s appointment, etc. when encountering this phenomenon he will be able to use these opportunities to develop his shortcoming.

Another point was his mathematical equation F = E^R (namely, level of Frustration = the gap between Expectations and Reality). So that if I buy a lottery ticket for a jackpot of $300 million and I expect to win, when I discover that my ticket did not win, my frustration will be very great. Whereas if my expectation of winning is extremely low, when my ticket does not win I will experience no frustration. In relationships one must understand their expectations and see how close they are to the reality. If there is a gap there are two choices; either raise the reality by changing the other person’s behavior or lower your expectation. In most relationships when the other person is an adult even if they are your child it is often unrealistic to anticipate changing the other person’s behavior. Rather one should readjust their expectation and the frustration will subside and a healthier relationship will replace is difficult relationship.

Many hard questions were presented from the use of corporal punishment to raising teenagers.

I thank everyone who was able to attend for making it such a wonderful experience.

I would appreciate any feedback you are willing to offer.

Paysach Diskind

Rabbi Hochberg gave us permission to make his presentation available here.