When Livelihood Left the Home

How family life began to break down—and the way to fix it.

Stuck at Home with Your Parents

A few years ago, for Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam produced a video diary based on Anne Frank’s journal. The goal was to help young people connect more personally to her story.

The project was divided into fifteen short episodes, each about five to ten minutes long, and it was made to feel as though Anne Frank herself were telling her story directly to the camera—not through writing, but face to face. The creators had already been working on it for three years, but through a kind of strange Divine providence, it was released during the COVID lockdowns.

At the beginning of the series, Anne Frank talks about being stuck at home, unable to go to school, and complains about having to learn how to get along with her mother, her sister, and the other people sharing the house. Because it came out at a time when everyone was confined to their homes, thousands of young people were suddenly able to relate to her story in a new way.

You know, young children are happy to be home with their parents. Even students who are hardworking and love school, and even kids who are very socially popular, are happy to be at home with their families. But that changes when it comes to teenagers. They are clearly not interested in being “stuck” at home with their parents. For them, being home is not much of a joy—and as a result, their parents are often not so thrilled to be with them either.

The Punishment for Gossip

That brings us to this week’s Torah reading. We read two portions, Tazria and Metzora, and both revolve around one central theme: tzaraat.

Tzaraat is described in the Torah as a kind of mysterious spiritual skin affliction. It appears in an unusual way and disappears in an unusual way as well. It is not something one catches from another person, and it is not something a doctor can cure. 

The sages explain that tzaraat comes as a punishment for lashon hara—harmful or malicious speech. Rashi makes this point in his comment on the verse about Moses, “his hand was leprous like snow,” explaining that Moses had spoken wrongly when he said that the Jewish people would not believe him that G-d was going to redeem them—and he was therefore stricken with tzaraat, just as Miriam was punished for speaking negatively. (Rashi on Exodus 4:6)

So how was a person with tzaraat treated?

The Torah says that the person was brought to the priest, who examined the affected area. If the priest determined that it was indeed tzaraat, the person was declared impure. The Torah then states that as long as the affliction remained, “he shall dwell alone; his place shall be outside the camp.” (Leviticus 13:46)

The metzora is, in a sense, sent into a kind of “time-out.” Rashi explains there that he was to sit alone, separate even from others who were also impure. Why was he singled out this way? Because, say the sages, through gossip he created separation—between husband and wife, and between one person and another. Therefore, he too was separated from society. (Rashi on Leviticus 13:46) The hope is that, in isolation, he will begin to miss his family and friends. And then he may come to understand that just as those relationships matter deeply to him, they matter just as deeply to everyone else. That realization can lead him to rethink his behavior and choose a different path.

The Revolution That Pulled the Family Apart

During the COVID pandemic, we were all sent into isolation. What can we learn from that experience? What message are we meant to take with us?

At a Tu Bishvat gathering in 1974, the Rebbe spoke about family life and the forces that weakened it. He pointed out that before the Industrial Revolution, most people worked the land or practiced a trade. The normal pattern was that people worked close to home. A farmer worked his own field, with help from his wife and children. A craftsman—a tailor or a shoemaker, for example—worked in a workshop attached to the house, and his family helped there as well.

As the children grew older, they married and became part of the larger family unit. They often lived in the same home, or nearby, and joined the family livelihood.

Then came the Industrial Revolution. In order to earn a living, people began leaving home for long stretches of time to work in distant factories. Naturally, they grew closer to the people they worked with every day, and more distant from the spouses and children they barely saw. In that way, the family unit began to weaken.

In the Rebbe’s words:

“In earlier generations, a family’s livelihood was centered within the family itself, because each person worked for himself—whether in a craft, in business, or something similar. As a result, those families truly functioned as families. When a father worked at a craft, he could do so in his home or courtyard, and his wife and children would help him. He would educate them, and the bond between family members remained strong.

“But when things changed, and factories became the new source of livelihood, work was no longer done together with one’s wife and children. Instead, people worked in places where members of different families and different nations worked side by side, and the factories were located far from the place where a person lived, ate, and slept. Naturally, this strengthened the connection between those who worked together in one place to earn a living, while weakening the connection with the other people in one’s life, including one’s own family, since they did not share in the livelihood that tied them together. In this way, we can understand why the family no longer retained the same stability.”

(Sichot Kodesh 5734, vol. 1, p. 361)

Until about a generation ago, it was still common for extended families to live together. The grandparents lived upstairs, the children downstairs, and the grandchildren grew up with grandparents who served as a living example. The grandparents, in turn, had the joy of being part of their grandchildren’s lives.

In our generation, the moment someone receives a better job offer somewhere else in the world, they uproot their family from the place where they grew up. They separate themselves from the extended family—from grandparents, uncles, and aunts—and move somewhere they have no relatives and no support system, all because making a living has come to outweigh almost everything else.

The Spiritual Key 

Perhaps the message we were meant to learn from the “time-out” G-d imposed on the world during the coronavirus period is that it is time to be with our families again—and to appreciate what a remarkable gift that is.

That may sound idealistic. Not everyone gets along so easily with family. Sometimes it is teenagers. Sadly, sometimes it is married couples too. As long as each person spent the day somewhere else, the relationship could somehow keep going. But once people are forced to be together all day, tensions can easily grow worse.

The Rebbe says there is a response to this.

In Jewish tradition, every mitzvah has its own special quality—its own natural spiritual effect. A mezuzah, for example, is connected with protection for the home and the people living in it. Eating kosher food is associated with physical well-being. Charity, in the words of Proverbs, “saves from death.” The Rebbe also writes elsewhere that tefillin can be a source of strength for people dealing with fear or emotional struggle.

And when it comes to peace in the home, there is one mitzvah especially connected to that: lighting Shabbat candles.

The purpose of Shabbat candles, in halachah, is to create shalom bayit—peace in the home. As the Alter Rebbe explains, the sages instituted that a person should have light in the home on Shabbat so that people should not stumble in the dark; in other words, the practical purpose of the candles is to create a calm, livable, peaceful home environment. (Shulchan Aruch HaRav, Orach Chaim 263:1.)

The Rebbe connects this directly to the discussion of tzaraat. Since one of the causes of tzaraat is harmful speech, which creates division between people, its repair is connected specifically to Shabbat candles, whose whole purpose is peace in the home. He adds that while the entire Torah was given “to bring peace into the world,” that often refers to spiritual peace in a broader sense. Shabbat candles, however, express peace in the most literal and immediate sense: peace inside the home itself. That, he says, reveals their unique importance. (Likkutei Sichot, vol. 17, p. 143 and onward.)

So if we are looking for a way to strengthen family harmony, one path is to strengthen the mitzvah of lighting Shabbat candles.

In a home where only the mother lights, it is worth making sure that the daughters light a candle as well, following the Rebbe’s guidance that even young girls should light their own Shabbat candles with a blessing.

And in homes where that is already being done, the family should encourage other women and girls to begin lighting too. When we help bring peace into other homes, G-d in turn blesses our own homes with even more peace—so that the coming weeks in our homes may be filled with closeness, peace, and friendship.