For anyone who likes to point out that their parent who smokes is a tzaddik in all other ways, and I totally believe you, substitute alchohol for the smoking addiction. No matter how wonderful that parent may have been all your life, would you defend alcoholism the same way? We are not impugning their niceness, or kindness or ability to face edversity. We are arguing that if they truly love their families to the best of their ability, they would love them AND themselves enough, to QUIT SMOKING. This is a vice that physically affects not only the one who does it, but all those around him/her. It EMOTIONALLY devastates the loved ones who have to live with the aftermath and pain of the damage the smoking does to the smoker, when they die a slow and painful death from lung cancer or emphsyema, stomach, or bladder cancer. There is no justifying this easily preventable tragedy. Those who “smoke three packs a day until they are 90 and die peacefully in their sleep, of old age,” are the VERY rare exception. Maybe they would have lived to 120, had they not smoked.
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