NITSABIM-VAYELEKH: Should We Bring Our Kids to Synagogue?

MOSHE’S LAST ASSEMBLY

In many Jewish homes the same conversation comes up every week. Do we bring the kids to synagogue or not? The service goes on for hours. They get bored. They don’t understand a word. And they can be a distraction for the adults. So more often than not, the decision is to leave them home. When they’re older and can follow what’s going on, we’ll bring them.

This week the Torah answers that question. And the answer is 3,500 years old.

Parashat Nitsabim-Vayelekh takes place as Moshe is about to die. He knows he will not enter the land of Israel. And one of the last things he does is neither a warning nor a farewell. He convenes an assembly, one to be held every seven years.

That mitsva is called Hakhel, “gather.” At the end of the Shemita year, during Sukkot, the entire people of Israel was to come together in the Bet HaMiqdash to hear the Torah read aloud. And the Torah spells out who has to be there:

“Gather the people: the men, the women, the little children (hataf), and the stranger who lives in your cities, so that they hear and learn, and revere HaShem your God, and take care to fulfill all the words of this Torah” (Debarim 31:12).

The men, of course. The women, too. But hataf means little children: four-, five-, six-year-olds, toddlers who don’t talk yet, babies carried in arms or pushed in a stroller. Why would the Torah command us to bring them to the Temple, to an event that consists of listening to a text they cannot possibly understand?

IT IS ALL ABOUT THE EXPERIENCE

Maimonides explains why (Mishne Torah, Hilkhot Hagiga 3:6), and his explanation changes the meaning of the whole event.

Hakhel is not a Torah class. If it were a class, where you are expected to understand everything, someone who doesn’t know the language would have no business being there. But Maimonides writes that even the foreigner or the convert who does not understand Hebrew is obligated to show up, pay attention, and listen “with the joy and the trembling of the day the Torah was given at Sinai.” And at the other extreme: even the great sages who already know the entire Torah must listen with total concentration. Every person, Maimonides says, “should see himself as if the Torah were being revealed to him at this very moment, and he were hearing it from the mouth of the Almighty.”

Hakhel is the mitsva of being present at a collective spiritual event. It is a reenactment of Mount Sinai, the day the entire people of Israel, men, women, and children, stood at the foot of the mountain. At Sinai, nobody asked whether the children understood. They were there. That was what mattered. Because that is what Jewish continuity depends on: not on what a child understands, but on where a child has been.

A CRADLE IN THE HOUSE OF STUDY

The Talmud Yerushalmi (Yebamot 1:6) preserves a memory of the childhood of Rabbi Yehoshua ben Hananya, one of the great sages of the Mishna. It comes from Rabbi Dosa ben Harkinas, a very old sage who had known him as a boy:

“I remember that his mother used to bring his cradle to the house of study, so that his ears would cling to words of Torah.”

Rabbi Yehoshua’s mother did not wait for her son to understand. She wheeled in the stroller, so to speak, and there the baby soaked up the melodies of Torah and heard voices arguing in a language he did not yet know. That baby grew up to be one of the greatest sages of the Mishna, the man of whom Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai said: “Happy is she who gave birth to him” (Avot 2:8).

My wife Coty likes to tell the story of a little boy whose mother took him to a Torah class that was obviously over his head. And yet his eyes lit up every time he went. One day his mother asked him: “Do you understand anything this rabbi is saying?” And the boy answered: “No. But his words taste like ice cream!”

Ask any adult what they remember of the Rosh HaShana of their childhood. Almost nobody remembers the rabbi’s sermon. But everyone remembers the sound of the Shofar. The melody, and the tears, of Oqed Vehane’eqad. The Kohanim on the Dukhan, barefoot, their heads covered. Standing under a father’s or a grandfather’s talet, his hands resting on their heads in blessing. Everything a child takes home from the synagogue comes in through the ears and the eyes, not through the intellect. And those are exactly the things they will want to come back to, twenty or thirty years later, when they decide they want their own children to have them too.

Moshe did not summon the children to the Temple for what they would learn. He summoned them so they would be there, enjoy it, and want to come back.

THE PRACTICAL DILEMMA

Most of the synagogues I know have a children’s program, so that the kids are not running around during Tefila or the Torah reading, when the adults need to concentrate with as little noise as possible. It doesn’t always work perfectly, because there is no such thing as a soundproof synagogue when there are children in the building. But it is essential that the children come to the Bet HaKeneset. And that they enjoy it: that what they remember of the synagogue is not an adult yelling at them, but a place where they are welcome, with prizes and activities made for them.

A synagogue without children has no future. And no present. Children are to a synagogue what flowers were to the Bet HaMiqdash: they give it life, color, and joy. If at times there is a little more noise, that is a small price to pay for having them there, and for letting them experience Hakhel: gathering with their elders before God, listening to the Torah.

We should encourage children’s minyanim, with prizes and gifts, so that they leave the synagogue wanting to come back. So that they associate the Bet HaKeneset with happiness, not with being scolded. There is no better formula for the future of a community than encouraging children to read from the Torah when they are little, to read the Maftir at four or five years old, as we do in my Bet HaKeneset, where we throw a party and give gifts every time a child reads for the first time.

The future of Am Israel depends on our children connecting to the Bet HaKeneset with joy.

 

SYNAGOGUE AND GRANDPARENTS

Whenever I see a little boy or girl playing on the steps that lead up to the Aron HaQodesh, I am reminded of this story, which I believe is true.

It is told that in the Spain of the Inquisition, the king, who wanted to persuade Don Isaac Abravanel to convert to Christianity, asked him one day: “How do you explain that in church there is absolute respect and silence, from the adults down to the smallest children, while in your synagogue there are always kids running up and down the aisles?” Abravanel answered him without mincing words: “Your Majesty, at a wake, people stand before the dead in silence, in fear and with the utmost reverence. Everything is very formal, and nobody moves from his seat. But in their grandparents’ house, children feel at home, and sometimes they jump around and play and have a good time. For our children,” he said, “the synagogue is not a house of mourning. It is their grandparents’ house.”