At Avot 3:14 R’ Dosa ben Harkinas teaches:
שֵׁנָה שֶׁל שַׁחֲרִית, וְיַֽיִן שֶׁל צָהֳרָֽיִם, וְשִׂיחַת הַיְלָדִים, וִישִׁיבַת
בָּתֵּי כְנֵסִיּוֹת שֶׁל עַמֵּי הָאָֽרֶץ, מוֹצִיאִין אֶת הָאָדָם מִן הָעוֹלָם
“Morning sleep, midday wine, children's talk
and sitting in the meeting places of the ignoramus drive a person from the
world”.
Some
commentators take this teaching literally, as a list of four spiritually
harmful activities that we should seek to avoid. Others view it as describing a
sort of rake’s progress where a person who starts the day by sleeping late in
the morning will end up in a sort of spiritual wasteland, unable to raise
himself to higher levels. Others again—for example R’ Moshe Alshakar and the Kli
Yakar—take ‘morning’ and ‘midday’ as metaphors for one’s youth and middle
age. If by then a person’s life is not on an even keel, their predicament is
likely to be permanent.
There has
been much discussion of the third element of this mishnah, sichat hayeladim
(“children’s talk”). This term is sometimes taken to mean conversation that
never reaches above the level of the purely childish (as per Midrash Shmuel)
or which, which superficially mature and intelligent, focuses only on the sort
of childish topics that entertain the immature mind. Avot deRabbi Natan characterizes
it as conversation with children. The Avodat Yisrael of R’ Yisrael of Kozhnitz
posits yet another meaning—one that is not obvious from the text: talk about
one’s children and the difficulty of meeting their needs. He adds that, when a
person is preoccupied with the needs of one’s children, the level of concern is
constant and does not allow that person any peace of mind.
I wonder
whether, when the Avodat Yisrael writes of “needs”, he is contemplating
not merely material requirements but also what one’s children (and
grandchildren) require in terms of their intellectual, moral and spiritual
development. If we don’t attend to these matters while we can, when we have the
strength and the willingness to do so, we may find that, by the time we recognize
what we should have done, we may have left it too late to do anything about it.
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