Hearing the sound of the future in our children

My son was reminding me that I am first his father.”

This past Shabbos, as I approached the pulpit to lead a Mi Sheberach, my five-year-old slipped away from youth groups and followed me up. He then proceeded to be exactly what he is, a five-year-old. He tugged at my tallis. He knocked my kippah off my head. I was not going to scold him in front of the entire shul, though I would have preferred he choose a different audience for that particular performance.

After davening, a congregant told me about his father, Alex Friedman. After the Holocaust, Alex davened in the Poalei Tzedek shul in Kashau, Slovakia, the only shul in the city still functioning. Roughly 10,000 Jews had lived in Kashau before the war. Afterward, there were about 2,000. On Rosh Hashana of 1945, there were just 80 people in shul. There were widows and widowers, people still waiting for a spouse who never came home, and young survivors like Alex who had not yet married.

There were no children.

For the rest of his life, whenever Alex Friedman found himself in a shul where children were making noise, he would tell people what it was like to daven in a shul without them. He knew what that silence sounded like, and he wanted others to understand how beautiful the noise of children in shul could be.

Walking my son home, I kept thinking about a pasuk I return to whenever my two roles, father and rabbi, pull at each other. In Parshas Vayeira, Hashem speaks of Avraham with deep affection. “Ki yedativ l’ma’an asher yetzaveh es banav v’es beiso acharav v’shamru derech Hashem la’asos tzedakah u’mishpat. (For I have known him, because he will command his children and his household after him, that they keep the way of Hashem, to do righteousness and justice” (Bereishis 18,19).

Rashi explains that yedativ is a term of chibah, of love. Hashem is telling us why Avraham is so beloved.

Avraham had already accomplished remarkable things. In Charan, he and Sarah built a following, “ha’nefesh asher asu b’Charan (the souls they had made there)” (Bereishis 12,5). His tent was open on all four sides, perhaps the most public home in the ancient world. Yet when Hashem explains His love for Avraham, He does not point to the size of that following. He points to what Avraham will leave behind.

That legacy had been far from certain. Famine, exile to Mitzrayim, Lot’s departure, and still no child with Sarah. Then three visitors arrive at his tent with news. Sarah will have a son. The man who spent his life bringing others into his tent would finally have a child to raise within it.

And the Torah says not just “banav,” his children, but “banav v’es beiso acharav,” his children and his household after him. Avraham’s mission was not simply to raise a child, but to build a home where righteousness and justice would become a way of life, something the next generation could carry into the world long after he was gone.

• • •

On Shabbos morning, in the middle of a very public moment as a rabbi, my son was reminding me that I am first his father.

It is easy to become preoccupied with the public side of life. There is a real rush when a drasha lands, when a room comes alive, when our home is full of guests. I am grateful for every one of those moments.

But what matters most often happens somewhere else. It is in walking my son home when he needs time alone with his father. It is in the ten minutes before the bus takes my boys to school, going over the Hebrew vocabulary words we have been working on together.

No one applauds those moments. But my children will remember them. That will be my legacy. The walk home.

The survivors of Kashau had a shul, a minyan, and the tefillos of a destroyed world. But they could not yet hear the next generation. Alex Friedman knew what those of us in thriving communities easily forget. The noise of children is the sound of a people with a future.

Of course we teach our children to respect a makom tefillah. But we must never become so focused on keeping them quiet that we forget how fortunate we are to hear them. A shul filled with children’s noise is not a distraction from Avraham’s mission. It is a sign that the mission is alive.

So the next time a little hand pulls at my tallis in front of the whole congregation, I hope I remember what that sound really is. It is the sound of the future.

Rabbi Benny Berlin is spiritual leader of BACH in Long Beach. www.bachlongbeach.com.