Jewish Life Digital Edition June 2015 | Page 41

ARTWORK: © Permission kindly granted by the artist, Alex Levin, Art Levin Studio, NY - www.artlevin.com [phone]

Parents used to be the primary Torah
teachers for their children – and our Sages
explain that when one teaches his children
Torah, it’s as if they are actually standing
at Har Sinai to receive the Torah!
similar to the obligation of bris milah6
(circumcision), which initially falls on
one’s father, but, in the event that it
hasn’t been done, the obligation then falls
to the person himself to see to it that he is
circumcised. The obligation to study Torah
lasts the entire length of a person’s days
on this earth, as the Torah commands us:
“Lest you remove them from your heart all
the days of your life.”7 And every Jew, regardless of age, whether poor or wealthy,
healthy or sick, is obligated to set aside
time for Torah study each day.
In addition to teaching a child Torah,
the gemara8 explains that a father is also
obligated to teach his sons to swim, as
well as to teach them a trade, explaining
that if a father fails to teach his son a
trade, it is as if he has taught him to be a
thief. In other words, if we don’t teach
our children an honest profession, they’ll
be forced to learn a dishonest one! Believe
it or not, our Sages even gave us career
advice9 regarding what types of trades we
should teach our children: A man should
teach his son a clean, easy profession and
then pray to Hashem that He should send
the child blessing and success in all that
he does, because wealth and poverty do
not result from the profession, since one
can find wealthy and poor persons in every profession, but are in accordance with
a person’s merit. And our Sages clearly
preferred manual labour, as they worked
in such varied professions as: woodchopper, field labourer, launderer (and not the
money kind!), tailor, blacksmith, shoemaker, as well as merchants and traders
in various goods. One of our Sages even
advises10 that a person should continue
his family’s trade, whatever it may be.
To be clear, the mitzvah of teaching a
child Torah is profoundly different from
teaching the child to do mitzvos. A child

is not obligated to do any mitzvos, either
positive or negative, so, accordingly, the
education in such things is not required
from the Torah. The obligation to train
our children in the doing of mitzvos
comes from our Sages, who required that
we slowly accustom our children to the
performance of mitzvos so as to not
overwhelm them when they reach the
age of maturity at which they actually
become obligated in doing mitzvos.
However, teaching a son Torah, a single
verse in the Chumash (the Five Books of
the Torah), to understand what it says
and what it means, is a commandment
from the Torah itself.
Our connection to Hashem and our ability to serve Him is intimately linked to our
knowledge of Torah. Once a child starts to
speak, the gemara11 teaches that the first
words that he should be taught are: Torah
Tziva Lanu Moshe, Morasha Kehilas
Yaakov12 (“The Torah was commanded to
us by Moshe, it is the inheritance of the
congregation of Jacob”), and then the first
words of the Shema: Shema Yisroel,
Hashem Elokeinu, Hashem Echad13 (“Listen Israel, Hashem is our G-d, Hashem is
One”). Even though we teach this line to a
baby, who certainly will not understand it,
this is the basis of all future Torah learning, as learning at a younger age makes a
profoundly different impression than at an
older age, as the mishna14 in Pirkei Avos
teaches: “One who studies as a child, to
what is he compared? To writing on new
paper. And one who studies as an older

person, to what is he compared? To writing on paper that has been written on and
erased.” In fact, learning Torah is profoundly different than any other areas of
study, as even if one doesn’t understand it,
it still influences him. The gemara15 teaches that, when Rabbi Yehoshua ben
Chananya was still in a bassinet, his mother brought him in his bassinet to shul, in
order that the child’s ears should absorb
words of Torah – and he grew up to become one of our great Sages.
We are blessed to have wonderful father-and-son learning programmes in our
community. It is the way that Torah
should be learned, a mesorah (tradition)
handed down from father to son. In fact,
parents used to be the primary Torah
teachers for their children – and our Sages explain16 that when one teaches his
children Torah, it’s as if they are actually
standing at Har Sinai to receive the Torah! But, seeing that this would