Bullies to Buddies: A Torah Guide for Turning Your Enemies into Friends

Are you a talmid or talmidah in a Jewish day school or yeshiva? And are kids acting like your enemies, being cruel to you, ridiculing you, talking about you behind your back, excluding you, pushing you around? Do you wonder how children who have been receiving years of Torah education and learning the importance of ve'ahavta le'reacha kamocha can be so mean? Have you been turning to the rebbeim, morim and menahalim for help, only to find it makes the problem worse? And even more important, do you wish the kids would finally stop tormenting you and start treating you like a friend?
This book will provide the answers to all these questions – and a lot more. It will take the mystery out of the kids’ cruelty towards you. You will learn how the nefesh habehamis works and causes people to act in ways that may seem more appropriate for animals. You will discover the rules of the social games they are playing with you and why you have been losing. And even better, you will learn to be a winner, all by yourself, by understanding the secret power of ve’ahavta lere’acha kamocha.
You will learn how to disarm all types of insults, rumors, physical threats and attacks, cyberbullying, social exclusion, bragging, and more. You will even learn how to get along better with your brothers and sisters, parents, rebbeim and teachers. When you learn the simple secrets in this book, you will be able to have a life without enemies. Some of your tormentors might even become your friends. And if your enemies were once your friends, they will almost certainly go back to being your friends. Everyone will like and respect you more when you learn to use the hidden power of ve’ahavta lere’acha kamocha.
From the Author
In 2004, I published a book for young adults, Bullies to Buddies: How to Turn Your Enemies into Friends, based on my two-and-a-half decades of helping kids free themselves from the misery of being bullied. Over the years, many thousands of copies have been purchased.It has brought me great pleasure to produce an updated version of that book for for the observant Jewish audience. My parents, Holocaust survivors, made sure to send me to yeshivas for elementary and high school, so that I would grow up into a Jew who is firmly rooted in our rich millennia-old history and committed to our continuity.
In recent years, I have become increasingly involved with Jewish clients and schools, both in the US and in Israel, where I now live. It became apparent that the strictly observant religious population needed a book that is based in Torah concepts and values, and reflects the language it uses and the situations its children encounter. I enjoyed the opportunity to apply my Jewish knowledge and experience to the task, and with the help of some great advisors, produced a volume that I must say I am quite proud of. It is not merely a Jewish version of my previous book, it is an improved version because I wrote it with an additional fifteen years of professional experience. My artist daughter, Lola, also drew forty new illustrations, and I am extremely grateful to her for the time, patience and sense of humor she invested. There is no other book for Jewish youth quite like it. First of all, my general approach to bullying has been fundamentally different from the prevalent one that has been adopted the world over, an approach that for many reasons has been failing, with the result that bullying remains a persistent and confounding societal problem. Secondly, there are relatively few books on bullying specifically for Jewish youth, and to the best of my knowledge there is none that compares in breadth and depth. The truth is that it is not only a guide for putting a stop to bullying but for having successful social relations in all arenas of life. It is my sincerest hope that religious educators and mental health professionals will recognize the value of this book and help it earn a place of respect in the arsenal of Jewish self-help