"Improve your performance and peace of mind," said the ad. "You’ll discover products to help you manage your life and pursue your dreams. Our mission is to help you experience happiness and peace of mind greater than you’ve ever imagined."

This advertisement promotes one of modern technology’s latest innovations. Known as the "Palm Pilot," it is a compact electronic diary that can fit into the palm of your hand. It can hold more than 12,000 telephone numbers, five years of appointments, and a huge amount of additional data.

Just a few months ago I purchased a palm pilot, anticipating that it would fill my need for a compact device that could hold the vast quantities of information I need to have always available at my fingertips. Besides, I am certainly interested in pursuing my dreams!

True to its reputation, my new Palm Pilot was extremely helpful, allowing me to store telephone numbers, appointments, task lists and a host of other information in one small gadget, which I could keep in my pocket. It simplified my life in other ways, too; once, for example, when I had to give a phone number to a friend who also has a Palm Pilot, I just held my Palm Pilot opposite his and beamed the number onto his machine.

I might have though that I was on my way to plenty of happiness and peace of mind, until last night.

After Shabbat I opened my Palm Pilot to locate a phone number, and was shocked to find that all of the information I had recorded there over the course of months – everything – was gone. An error inside the mechanism had caused my Palm Pilot to reset itself, automatically deleting all that its memory contained.

Baruch Hashem, just recently I had made backup computer files of the information stored in my Palm Pilot, so I was able to recover it. Nevertheless, at that moment it became perfectly clear to me that this device was not going to bring me more happiness and peace of mind than I had ever imagined. I learned the hard way that we should not believe every advertisement that comes our way.

Yet the most important lesson we can glean from the Palm Pilot is one we can learn when it does function as it should.

A special feature of this device is that one can have it store information by actually handwriting into it. Unlike other digital diaries that require one to type, the "Palm" has an option to write. One writes the letters in a small space on the bottom, and they appear on the larger screen above, as if they had been typed.

This feature is a boon to those who are accustomed to writing with pen on paper, although it is not exactly the same. In order to write into it, one must learn to use the Palm Pilot’s special "graffiti alphabet," for that is the only alphabet its computer recognizes. It is not difficult, and in a short time anyone can master the Palm Pilot, and be able to write to his heart’s content, just as he would with pen and paper.

But a word of caution is in order here: simply writing into the Palm Pilot is not sufficient. The person who is writing must make sure that the Palm Pilot is entering his characters correctly. While writing, he must keep checking to see that the letters he is marking down are the same letters that are being recorded on the screen. Many times, in my haste to get data into the machine, I thought I was writing the letters "j…k…p," for example, only to find that the machine read my letters differently, and on the screen the letters "s…h…o" appeared in their place. Obviously, I had deviated slightly from the correct way to write the special alphabet characters. The Palm Pilot is a very precise instrument, picking up my incorrect writing and reading it as something other than what I intended.

This is the main lesson we can learn from our friend the Palm Pilot: Looking at what we are writing is not enough. We must focus on the results of our writing: what is being produced on the screen as we write?

Those of us who are blessed with children or students are writing all the time; we write on our children’s hearts. And as we write, it is crucial that we focus on the results that are coming up on the screen. When we say harsh words, or when we withhold our encouragement, we are in fact writing. We are recording on our children’s hearts that they are faulty; that they aren’t good; that they can’t succeed. Although we may think that we are helping them through our harsh criticism, for that is certainly our intent,that is not the message that comes up on their hearts.

I once had occasion to work with a boy who was suspended from high school. When he called his father with the "good tidings," the father reacted with patience and hope. "Don’t worry," his father told him, "we love you. Come home, and we’ll see how to work things out."

The boy, who had been anticipating a harsh reaction, confided in me that at that point he had been in the midst of a major emotional and spiritual crisis. He had already decided that, had his father reacted harshly, he would then and there have left religion altogether, rachmana litzlan.

In his later years, Harav Eliyahu Lopian, ztl, said that he was sorry for all the times he had dealt harshly with his children. "With children one must deal kindly," he said.

To fully appreciate Reb Elyah’s commitment to kindness, we must realize that all his life he worked intensively on the midah of ka’as(anger). Even in his younger years, he never punished his children when he suspected that his own anger – rather that the true benefit of his children – might be motivating him. On one occasion, he waited two weeks before punishing his son, as only then was he sure that no trace of anger remained within him. Yet this spiritual giant expressed regret over all the times he had dealt harshly, and felt that his children would have benefited more had he responded to them only with warmth.