In recent years, sociologists, social commentators, and religious leaders have begun increasingly to speak of a “boy problem,” whereby ever-larger numbers of young men have had trouble making a successful transition into adulthood. Tzvi Sinensky sums up some of the symptoms:
Young men in the West fare poorly in comparison with their female peers in numerous areas, including academic achievement, ADHD diagnosis, sexual abuse and harassment, violent criminal behavior, and imprisonment. There is a clear pattern of decreased male engagement with traditional religious community life. And now, during the pandemic, research shows that, on the whole, young men in particular have found it difficult to cope.
For guidance as to how some of these problems might be addressed, Sinensky turns to the sermon that the late Rabbi Norman Lamm—an outstanding American Jewish leader and scholar who died this past year—gave at his own son’s bar mitzvah in 1972. Sinensky writes:
In his sermon, . . . Rabbi Lamm opens by noting that we live during a time “in which adults habitually grasp at the last straws of their vanishing youthfulness by retrogressing into adolescence and preferring to be boys rather than men.” In such an environment, and upon the occasion of his son’s coming of age, he wonders, what does it take to become a man?
Rabbi Lamm asserts, “To be a man is an achievement.” Manhood is not simply a stage one reaches, but something one attains. He points to the fact that Noah is called a “man” among his other appellations, including “righteous and pure.” This suggests that manhood is itself an attainment.
Rabbi Lamm [urged parents] to invite our young men to join the community of adults by engaging them in conversations centering on matters of substance, through which we can initiate them into the community of the faithful.
Read more on First Things: https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2020/12/from-boys-to-men