Eleven years ago, in this very hall, it was my privilege to participate in the ceremonies at which the first award for Jewish Family of the Year was presented to the late and much lamented Samuel W. and Rose Hurowitz. Since then, and until this day when I happily participate in similar ceremonies conferring this same award upon my very dear friends Larry and Ruth Kobrin, the health and stability of the American Jewish family has not at all improved. If anything, it has considerably worsened, reflecting the general deterioration of family life in this country, both as a result of the accumulated corrosion afflicting all our social institutions, and the frontal attacks upon the family by spokesmen for certain avant-garde pressure groups. This is not the occasion for a probing analysis of what is wrong with the American Jewish family. Moreover, not being a social scientist, my credentials for such an analysis are considerably less than impeccable. Speaking only as a rabbi who has some passing acquaintance with the Jewish tradition, and on the basis of my limited experience in counseling Jewish families, permit me to dispense with diagnosis and prognosis, and concentrate on prescription. Here too, I cannot and will not presume to be comprehensive, but rather suggest a number of essential ingredients in the effort to restore family life amongst American Jews to what it once was, or to what we would like it to be. The first requirement for a stable family is, of course, love. I am almost embarrassed to speak the word, because it has been overused, abused, and misused to the point where it has been semantically debased and emotionally voided of all content. Furthermore, there is a danger of over-romanticization and over-idealization of the traditional Jewish family as bound by mutual love. We do no good in holding up for young couples an unrealizable ideal–two people who agree on everything, who love their children without resentment, and who receive, in return, unquestio…