Let Them Talk

Jews talk. This is a point of pride for me. We ask questions, argue over the answers and then ask more questions. So I think we need to lighten up a little when young children do the same.

If a child wants to know what is happening in synagogue, answer him. He is trying to learn something. We should support him and we ought to be pleased that he is both curious and asking.

This High Holiday season, I was sitting in a synagogue with my eight-year-old son when he started asking a few questions during the service. My son wanted to know why the cantor covered his entire head with his tallit during certain prayers during the Rosh Hashanah services. He had not seen that before and it was a fair thing to ask me. He was not yelling or running around, but sitting in his seat with his machzor on his lap and something had caught his attention; he wanted to understand it.

Sadly, someone nearby gave us what I can only describe as the stare of death. My son’s questions, which were asked in a whisper and answered quickly by me, were clearly bothering her and she repeatedly tried to shame both my son and me during this holy day. There was a time when I probably would have understood the reaction, or at least been embarrassed enough to tell my son to stop talking and asking for explanations. But I had a very different reaction in our post-Oct. 7 world.

I grew up attending a synagogue in Philadelphia with a well-known old-school rabbi and an intensely formal culture. Adults did not talk during services and children were generally not welcome. When children were allowed into the sanctuary, they could sit down but had to follow expected rules: sit quietly, follow along, and do not disturb the adults. For years I approached the synagogue, and frankly much of Jewish education, with that same formal and fairly rigid instinct. Judaism and traditions mattered enormously, and something that important was supposed to feel serious and formal.

Having children amid growing concerns about Jewish continuity has changed my thinking. Sitting in this sanctuary with my son, I was thrilled that he was asking questions and paying attention. As opposed to being bored and asking to leave, an eight-year-old boy had been interested enough in something during the long High Holiday service that he wanted his father to explain it. I didn’t want to shut that down.

The Jewish community is already struggling with antisemitism, assimilation, fracture and declining affiliation. And so many of us understandably spend plenty of time worrying about whether our children will stay connected to Jewish life. If we want our younger generations to love our faith, our culture, and our peoplehood, we need to be welcoming when they show interest and have a spark of curiosity. A young child whispering a question during a holiday service is a much smaller problem than a teenager who has no interest in coming back to our community.

I want Jewish children to learn Hebrew, know our history, understand our peoplehood, and study our texts. That will take years of work, and some of it will be difficult. But as a teacher, I know how much it helps when a student is curious enough to ask a question. My son was giving me a chance to explain something he wanted to understand about his own faith. I wanted to encourage that while I had his attention.

Children should not have to fully behave like adults before they feel that a synagogue belongs to them and understand what is going on and why it has meaning. I want my son and other children to feel welcome in a sanctuary while they are still learning how to follow the service. Yes, plenty of synagogues have children’s services and programming for younger guests, but as long as children aren’t disruptive, they should be fully embraced and welcomed in a sanctuary.

The Torah tells us to teach our children when we sit at home, when we walk along the way, when we lie down and when we rise. Learning should be part of our ordinary lives. While there are specific moments like the Passover Seder that are explicitly exercises in passing memory from one generation to another, that does not mean that synagogue services are not spaces of learning, questioning, and teaching too.

Anyone who has children knows how fleeting their interests can be. Something grabs them—a melody, a Hebrew word, the shofar, a Torah scroll, seeing the priestly blessing—and for reasons that may or may not make any sense, they want to know everything about it before moving on. If you happen to catch one of those moments, use it. If a child asks why we stand, explain it. If she wants to know why people bow down and end up on the floor on the High Holidays, tell her. If a curious little one becomes fascinated by the shofar, spend ten minutes talking about the shofar because this could lead to so much more for them.

Parents still have responsibilities to everyone else in the room. If a child really is disruptive, he should be taken outside. There are moments in Jewish life that demand quiet, reverence and gravity, such as Kaddish or a sermon. I deeply value those moments myself, but surely we can tell the difference between a child disrupting an experience for everyone else and a child briefly trying to understand what is happening.

Some Jewish communities are extraordinarily good when it comes to inclusion and cultivation of children’s curiosity. Children sing and dance, questions are welcomed, and food, stories, friendship and laughter accompany prayer and learning. Plenty of synagogues, Jewish organizations, and Jewish schools understand this already. Others might benefit from watching how they do it.

This matters in Jewish education more generally, too. We should want children and young adults to work hard and learn from our texts, our history, and embrace the gifts of Western civilization, but we should also want them to enjoy their classes and feel comfortable with their teachers. They should be able to ask questions, laugh and sometimes get excited enough about something to keep talking about it after class. While we spend a lot of time thinking about what young Jews should learn, we also need to care about whether they enjoy learning it. Rabbi Avraham Bornstein observed in his introduction to Eglei Tal that it is through enjoying the words of Torah that a person becomes attached to the Torah.

My children and other younger members of the Jewish community will have plenty of time to learn about antisemitism, war, Jewish vulnerability and the centuries of history that make us who we are today; they need to understand their obligations as Jews. But they should also have years of good memories that anchor them to the Jewish community with joy and cement them to our people, such as singing a song they love, dancing with a Torah, getting an answer from a rabbi, laughing around a holiday table, and finding something sacred or meaningful in a sanctuary service. Those experiences matter to me, and I want my children to look forward to the next service or holiday because they have enjoyed and found meaning in the last one.

The Talmud offers an interpretation of Isaiah’s promise that our children will be taught by G-d. The rabbis say not to read banayikh, “your children,” but bonayikh, “your builders.” I think of that teaching when I see children in synagogue. As a Jewish parent, I can say that many of us are counting on our children to carry forward Jewish life, to teach their own children and keep our congregations and communities strong and vibrant. How we welcome them now will help shape whether they want to do that. Children belong in the sanctuary during holiday services. We want them to keep asking questions and to keep coming back.