I don’t know how to start this post. Do I write about a young girl, a camel, or a terrorist attack? Do I write as a parent?

It’s a sad story that began … no, maybe it’s better to say it ended…on March 5th, 2003. On that day, a young girl went with her friend to plan the end-of-year celebrations for her school. An Arab terrorist boarded the same bus and blew it up. Tal and her friend Liz were among the 17 people killed; another 53 people were wounded.

I looked at her birthday – she was born three months and ten days before my oldest daughter. It’s part of every terror attack – what is stolen is not just a life, not just a moment – but so much more. All the future that would have been – a husband, perhaps, and children. Grandchildren for her parents, nieces and nephews who will never know her. It’s enough to break you, if you let it.

So there you have the young girl and the terror attack – and now the camels. What comes to mind for many who lose a loved one, especially a child, is how to help their memory live on. Each wants their way to be unique and also related to something of their child.

After their 15-year-old daughter Malki was murdered in the Sbarro terror attack, Arnold and Frimet Roth created the Keren Malki Fund. An Israel-based, non-political voluntary not-for-profit organization providing support and help without any regard for the religious or national background of the family. Keren Malki is focused on empowerment, allowing families from every segment of Israeli society to provide quality home-care for their special-needs child the way they believe it ought to be provided.

Malki Roth

After their 13-year-old son was murdered less than a kilometer from him home by Palestinian terrorists, Rabbi Seth and Sherri Mandell created the Koby Mandell Foundation to offer a Jewish response to the impact of terror and tragedy— helping bereaved mothers, fathers,widows, orphans and siblings re-build their lives, and create meaning out of suffering.

Koby Mandell

There are too many instances of parents doing similar things but each one touches. On March 5th, 2003, Tal Kehrmann was killed. We know little of her life – it was filled with smiles and laughter and friends, but it was so short. Her father tells us she loved animals, especially camels and so he has a request for us as the 10 year anniversary of her murder comes close.

Tal Kehrmann

It’s a whimsical, almost silly request but it is important to Tal’s family and will bring them comfort. It will tell them in a world of too many victims, we still remember Tal. They’re asking us to color a camel for Tal. In her diary, they found a picture of a camel, but it had not been colored in – so they have asked people from all over the world to download the picture, color it in, scan it and send it back. There are already close to 2,500 camels posted to the site – they want to reach 10,000 by the 10th anniversary in just under 3 months.

We can’t always donate money to every worthy cause or donate the time to help – but can you spare a few minutes to color a camel? If you can, please go to:  http://www.tal-smile.com/DrawTalCamelE.htm.

Download Tal’s drawing and color it – use as many colors as you can – let her memory bring light to all who remember her and may her family continue to find comfort in the wonderous memory of this special girl. They  do not have her future, but if we take her with us into our future, we help them keep her memory alive. Please, color a camel for Tal.

Just two days before Tal died, she wrote a poem – it is, in many ways, a message to all of us, if we will but listen to her.

In the Middle East, children are being used by the adults who should be caring for them to turn them into jihadist weapons to conquer the world — sometimes with bombs strapped onto them to kill their perceived enemies. Children are given gun training to learn how to kill Jews, and are told that dying for the sake of jihad is the highest honor and the only guarantee to go to heaven. If these are not abuses of the human rights of the child, what is? In the elementary school we attended in Gaza, the political and cultural agenda of the Arab world was pushed down our throats in effectively every subject.

American children today are also suffering from adult agendas shoved down their throats: the environmental agenda, the feminist agenda, the gay agenda, the Islamist agenda, the class-envy agenda, the racial-divide agendas, the animal-rights agenda, ad infinitum. What people in the West fail to see is that they, too, are using their children as weapons: as tools to bring about social, cultural and political change, often to destroy the American system as we know it and replace it with a new America that the popular culture and many Americans seem so desperate to accomplish.

Experiments in child rearing do not only happen in ignorant third world countries, where people do not know better. My daughter came home from high school asking which topic to pick for an essay she was asked to write. The topics were: suicide, mass murder, or being bullied and oppressed because you are gay or from a certain race or national background. When I suggested “none of the above,” her answer was that this was the list the teacher given.

Boys are told that what was once considered normal boy play. Roughhousing, has now become a crime, bullying. Girls are encouraged to perceive themselves as victims of men and marriage and to feel hurt about it.

The American political and social divides are trickling down to our schools and placing horrific pressure on our kids. In divorces, the father watches his kids taken away from him while the mother is told she can do everything on her own without a father. In political and cultural divisions, adults are also acting like hostile, divorcing parents tearing their kids apart during custody battles. As in the Middle East, where kids are unintentionally hurt for political, social and psychological experimentation, in America we are also usurping their innocence.

Adam Lanza, mentally ill or not, may not have had to end the way he did. He lacked fear of authority while living in the isolation of a large home with a mother desperate to please him by taking him shooting, buying assault weapons, guns and ammunition for a son she knew was not well. This mother was told by the popular culture that she could replace the father in her son’s life and that the son would not feel any difference whether the father’s activities were done by the father or her. This poor mother told her friends she was trying to bond with her 20-year-old son — what she unfortunately did not know was that this is an age when young men hate to be seen with their mothers.

American culture has hurt women, children and the family structure by telling women they could do everything, by telling men they are disposable and by telling girls that motherhood and marriage are unnecessary.

In the larger picture, the American epidemic of mass gun shootings by young men could be a cry for help by several generations of American kids who have suffered under decades of experimentation and indoctrination in our public schools. It could also be a cry for help by American single mothers, who are told they can take the role of both men and women in the family including the difficult task of raising young boys to adulthood alone. Women need a break; kids need fathers as much as they need mothers. They also need the traditional extended family relations: the nurturing grandmother, the funny uncle or aunt, cousins. It is time for America to end the self-righteous pressure on our kids to change America.

Originally published at the Gatestone Institute.

Thirty-eight years ago, Palestinian terrorists attacked a school in Ma’alot and murdered 22 Israeli school children. It was so different than the horrible massacre that just took place in the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut, where 20 children and 7 adults were murdered. I have no words to ease the pain of parents who have lost children, those who have lost their beloved relatives – not then, not now, not ever. In Ma’alot, we knew the motive – it was hatred and a belief in a radical interpretation of Islam that allowed, encouraged, and blessed murdering infidels, even if they were children. Perhaps especially if they were children.

When I became an uncle at 14 I bought all the kids in my Yeshiva a bar of ice cream to celebrate. The feeling was innate. Something big had happened in my family. My sister was a mom. My parents were grandparents. And my own status had been upgraded as well.

Now, in becoming a grandfather at 46, I’m kind of at a loss as to what to feel. Martin Amis famously said that becoming a grandfather “is like getting a telegram from the mortuary.” Yet it’s not the imminence of my own demise that I’m experiencing. Rather, it’s a joyous a sense of perspective. And this is especially true after witnessing the senseless, horrible, and unspeakable tragedy at the Sandy Hook school in Connecticut.

I have not yet seen my granddaughter and I have purposely chosen to write this column prior to that amazing experience. I wanted to capture the raw emotion of the news rather than the exhilaration of the event. The baby was born in Los Angeles and I am on a plane traveling from New York to meet her. In the pictures she looks like the cutest little doll. Seeing my firstborn child as a mother is likewise a revelation. It was just yesterday that she was my baby girl. Now she has a baby girl of her own. Life throws up so many surprises, and it all happens so quickly.

In my life I have had professional successes and professional failures. I have hosted national TV shows and lost national TV shows. I have written best-selling books and I have written books that have made it to the remainder table within a few months. I have felt the exhilaration of running for the United States Congress and the letdown of failing to win. I have been put on the air to host nationally syndicated radio shows and I have walked into rooms where I was to  deliver an advertised lecture where my wife and I wife constituted a significant percentage of the audience. Like the cows in Pharaoh’s dream which we read about in this week’s Torah portion, I have had years of plenty and years that were lean.

Yet the one thing I have always known, amid the hills and valleys of life: whether or not you succeed in your public endeavors, you cannot fail at your private commitments. Whatever your professional ambitions, they dare never supersede an appreciation of your personal blessings. A man must overcome the natural insecurities that tell him that his wife and children are not enough to make him feel like he matters. If you fail at business you have had a setback. But if you fail with your family you have failed at life. Period.

I knew that as a child of divorce I spring from a place of too much pain to allow that pain to be recycled to my own children. That, amid my own internal brokenness, I had to give my children the happy home which is the birthright of every child. That amid my own inner turbulence I had to raise my children with security and stability. That amid some of the shattered fragments of my own heart, my children had a right to be raised with laughter and humor. That amid the crushing burden that I carry of parents who were not together as I grew up I had to make my own children feel that life is comprised of pieces of a puzzle that ultimately cohere and fit.

When your child marries and has a child of their own there is a certain feeling of accomplishment. You have inspired the next generation to create a new generation. Your example as a parent, though imperfect, was at least powerful enough to inspire your children to follow suit. Your example as a parent, however inadequate, was sufficient to motivate your child to choose life.

Once, when I served as Rabbi at Oxford, a student who was a child of divorce told me in my kitchen that he would one day marry but would not have children. “I think the world is a dark place and I see no reason to bring children into the world. There is happiness but also so much suffering.”

Of all the failures I can think of in life, the failure to have your children want to be parents is perhaps the greatest of all.

Here in the United States the mass slaughter of 20 children, while the work of a lone gunman, should have us all asking whether the lives of children are truly valued. There are other considerations that would lead us to believe that we don’t cherish children as much as we ought. There was an article in The New York Times this week about how the American birthrate is plummeting. Young people, living in the big cities, are enjoying a life focused more on themselves and can’t be bothered to have children. This follows a European trend where the continent has now reached “lowest low” fertility, meaning that the birthrate has fallen to such a degree that it will take Europe at least three generations to replenish its number. This explains why Europe has become so utterly dependent on immigrants for any kind of population growth.

A curious anomaly in this trend is the State of Israel where the family average of about three to four children for secular families is among the highest in the industrialized world. For me that is a statement of Jewish values, that amid all our life pursuits the one that means the most is having and cherishing children.

At 46, I can freely admit, I am nowhere near the professional achievements that would make me feel more fulfilled. As a man of inner uncertainty, I have often relied on external achievement in order to feel important both to myself and others.

Yet, a friend, who is an accomplished businessman, wrote to me the moment he heard of the birth of our granddaughter, “You are a great tribute to the Jewish people, bringing another generation to the world. You have made a more powerful contribution to the goodness of the world and to the strength of the Jewish people than the imagination allows.  Just think of the implications just two generations out.”

His words were a powerful reminder to me of the most important things in life. That my wife and I are blessed, thank God, with children. That in His infinite kindness, God has given them health and allowed my eldest daughter to marry a devoted young man who has my respect and my daughter’s devotion. And in an even greater kindness, He has blessed them, on Chanuka, the festival of lights, with the greatest light of all, the miracle of life.

Wealth transfer is a hot topic in financial planning. Thinking about how to pass funds from one generation to the next can be emotionally difficult. Perhaps the older generation doesn’t approve of the way the younger spends the money, or the younger generation isn’t involved in the family business. Furthermore, tax and legal issues can complicate matters.

While estate and inheritance planning can be complex, other wealth can be transferred more easily: the wealth of knowledge. My grandmother successfully passed a financial education to my mother, who transferred it to me, as I am a proud third-generation licensed broker. My maternal grandmother Miriam Rosofsky struggled against social norms to enter the work world. But eventually she had the distinction of being one of the first women to hold a U.S. Securities license. She started as a secretary in a brokerage firm, but then began picking up her own book of clients. My mother Rhoda Goldstein was an associate vice-president in Dean Witter. Dinner-time conversation around my childhood table alternated between medical issues (my father was a surgeon) and economic discussions. I saw how both my parents helped people gain and maintain their physical and financial health. It was therefore only natural for me to begin my financial career partnering with my mother on Wall Street.

After I made aliya, I founded Profile Investment Services, Ltd. with the aim of helping people living in Israel create financial plans and maintain U.S. brokerage accounts. I try to follow in my mother and grandmother’s footsteps in transferring the wealth of financial knowledge to my own children. Even though none have announced their desire to be financial planners (but my wife recently became a licensed U.S. broker), they do check stock prices regularly.

We frequently discuss fiscal responsibility, budgeting, and other economic topics at our dinner table.  Some of the kids are reading books on behavioral finance, and others are reading books about loyalty, fidelity, and trust. My mother, keen to pick up on children’s natural curiosity about money and the way the “grown up” world works, recently came out with a book geared for young adults about how the stock and bond markets work, and how an entrepreneur can raise the funds necessary to fulfill his dream. If you’re interested in sharing this information with your children and transferring the wealth of financial knowledge to them, visit my website to get her new book Stocks, Bonds, and Bicycles. Let me know if you recognize any of the characters in the story.

The French magazine Le Point reports that police are investigating the possibility that three soldiers, who had been forced out of the French army because of their neo-Nazi beliefs, committed the shocking murders of Arab French soldiers and Jewish French school children. Their description matches an eyewitness report of a facial tattoo.

Late Monday night Le Point reported that investigators of the killings in the towns of Toulouse and Montauban believe the two cases—the Thursday murder of paratroopers in Montauban and  the attack on the Jewish school in Toulouse that killed four people including three children, are indeed related.

The same scooter, a Yamaha T-Max, was used by the shooter in both cases. Its license plate was recorded on video surveillance tapes from the town of Montauban. The same .45 caliber gun was also used on both days.

The three soldiers were reportedly discharged in 2008 for neo-Nazi links, after pictures of them were published in satirical magazine Le Canard Enchaîné performing a Nazi salute. They were members of Montauban’s 17th parachute regiment, the same as the soldiers killed on Thursday.

Colonel  Michel Esparsa,  commanding officer of the 17th parachute regiment, had  filed a complaint against the three soldiers who “admitted the facts” and should be “severely punished.” The profiles of these sinister characters  correspond to the meager  reports available to investigators to identify the crazy killer from Toulouse, including arm and facial tattoos. The complaint filed against the three in 2008 said the soldiers “have particularly explicit tattoos.”

A witness in Toulouse said the gunman had a facial tattoo.