Our children are always watching

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.

But if we no longer succeed in keeping God in mind 24/7 as we go about our lives and remember that He is watching us, we still have the children. In the case of our own children, we know how impressionable they are and how quickly they mimic our actions and (sometimes embarrassingly) our speech. We are also aware of other people’s children too. An example that springs to mind is that of the adult who happily crosses the road against a red light when no-one watches him, but who will take care to cross on the green, or to use a pedestrian crossing, if small children might get the wrong idea and copy him with tragic results.

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.