In the opening mishnah of the second perek, Rebbi (Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi) teaches:
הִסְתַּכֵּל בִּשְׁלֹשָׁה דְבָרִים, וְאֵין אַתָּה בָא
לִידֵי עֲבֵרָה, דַּע מַה לְּמַֽעְלָה מִמָּךְ, עַֽיִן רוֹאָה וְאֹֽזֶן שׁוֹמַֽעַת,
וְכָל מַעֲשֶֽׂיךָ בְּסֵֽפֶר נִכְתָּבִים
Contemplate
three things and you will not come to the grip of transgression: Know what is
above you—a seeing eye, a listening ear, and all your deeds being inscribed in
a book.
This teaching clearly caught the imagination of R’ Jonathan Muskat, Rabbi of the Young Israel of Oceanside and the author of this piece (“Our children are always watching”) which was recently posted to the Times of Israel. There he writes:
There is a
mishna in Pirkei Avot that scared me as a young boy. The mishna states that, “ayin
ro-ah, v-ozen sho-ma-at v’chol ma-asecha ba-sefer nichtavin.” There is an
eye that sees, an ear that hears and all of our deeds are written in a book.
God is watching everything we do. We constantly live under a microscope. This
thought can be so frightening and paralyzing that we may tend to ignore it. But
sometimes we are reminded that we are being watched, not by God, but by our
children. Very often, we don’t even realize how the smallest things that we do
as parents can be so impactful on our children.
My initial reaction was that this comment had nothing
to do with Rebbi’s teaching at all. The mishnah was surely focusing on how we should
cultivate God-consciousness as a means of reducing and ideally eliminating the possibility
of doing something wrong. The reference to children watching us was cute but only
tangentially relevant. My second thought was quite different.
Rebbi lived some eighteen centuries ago, at a time
when people in general—and not just Jews—had a far greater sense of
God-awareness than we do today. He lived in an era in which lives were far more
closely linked to their immediate environments than ours are today, a time when
people’s perceptions of cause and event, of reward and punishment, were sharper
and more immediate than they are now. We can imagine how much easier it is to
be aware of God in a society which the main events of one’s day are so much
more closely related to one’s survival than they are today: growing and harvesting
crops, animal husbandry, preserving one’s water supply and making one’s own
clothes. Heaven hung directly above their heads and they were acutely aware of
it.
In modern society we have surrounded ourselves with so
many man-made distractions: the average American, I once read, has about five
hours a day in which he or she is neither working nor engaged in domestic
chores. Much of that time is taken up with the pursuit of leisure and/or pleasure,
if the scale of the entertainment and recreation-based industries is anything to
go by. In theory a practising Jew would spend most or all of that time learning
Torah and contemplating divine matters, and this aim can be fulfilled by those
who are fortunate enough to be supported in their full-time learning—but it
would do no-one an injustice to suggest that most of us do not reach that level,
at least on a daily basis.
Children are not God. But R’ Akiva reminds us (Avot 3:18)
that we are all created in His image, and that includes the children who carefully
note what we say and do. Maybe this is why R’ Shimon ben Yehudah (Avot 6:8) lists
children among those things that are befitting not only to the righteous but to
the world at large.
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