Reb Yaakov was particularly attuned to the dangers of exposing children to any kind of falsehood. He once visited the kindergarten of his son Binyamin’s yeshiva and noticed that the mezuzah had been placed lower on the doorpost than is halachically prescribed, so the children could reach it upon entering the classroom. The idea of getting children used to touching the mezuzah when they come into a room was a good one, said Reb Yaakov, but the means were wholly inappropriate. “Put the mezuzah on the upper third of the doorpost where it belongs,” he said, “and let them use a stool to reach it. Otherwise they will grow up thinking a mezuzah can be put anywhere you wish. One does not raise children with falsehood.”
He even objected to the widespread practice of parents giving money to their children to put in the shul pushke, because it is based on an illusion that the child himself is giving tzedakah. To educate children in giving tzedakah, he said, they must experience giving up something of their own. Even the talking lampposts on a Torah tape for children, Reb Yaakov felt, lessened a child’s sense of the distinction between truth and falsehood. But while Reb Yaakov stressed that parents have to be careful to eliminate every form of sheker in their children’s education, he emphasized the importance of children developing their imagination.
A camp director once asked Reb Yaakov what he should do with comic books that some of the counselors had cofiscated. Reb Yaakov told him that the damage of comic books lay not just in their content but also in the fact that the pictures obviated any need for the child to use his mind to visualize what he was reading about. Rather than expanding a child’s mind, they caused it to atrophy. Letting a child read comic books was, he said, the mental equivalent of tying his arm to his side. On the other hand, Reb Yaakov felt there was a definite role for literature in developing a child’s mind and providing him with information. He wrote a warm letter of approbation for Rabbi Chaim Rabinowitz’s Hebrew novel Levatim, in which he praised the author for having offered the best portrait of Eastern European Jewry in the inter-war period and expressed his hope that he would write more novels in the same vein.
A group of parents in a Bais Yaakov school once protested the teaching of nursery rhymes, which they considered too “goyish.” When Reb Yaakov was asked for his opinion, he asked, “Was the niggun that my mother used to sing to me about tzigelah and teibelah a “Yiddishe” niggun? And aren’t many of the Chassidic niggunim taken from Polish marches? What are nursery rhymes? Children too young to know how to structure a sentence are taught to form a sentence from words. What’s so bad about that?” Reb Yaakov had a keen understanding of childhood as a distinct stage of development and of children being quite different than little adults. He spared many parents unnecessary aggravation — and children unwarranted punishment — with one simple rule of child-rearing: One does not punish children for something that they will surely not do when they are older. Nor should one try to force them to do something that they will one day do automatically.
Reb Yaakov once calmed down an enraged father, who was yelling at his three-year-old son for sitting in Reb Yaakov’s chair in Beth Tefilla, by telling him, “He’s only three. When he grows up he won’t sit in my seat.” Similarly, he stopped a father who was trying to force his young son to shake hands with Reb Yaakov. “Why waste your energy on something that he will someday do gladly?” Reb Yaakov told him.
One Shabbos morning in Williamsburg, Reb Yaakov intervened to stop a father who was slapping his young son. A tallis bag was lying nearby on the ground and Reb Yaakov deduced that the boy was refusing to carry it to shul because it was Shabbos. This time the father was not trying to force a child to do something prematurely, but punishing him for not wanting to do something which would be an aveirah for an adult. Reb Yaakov sharply rebuked the father, asking him, “How can you hit a child for not wanting to desecrate the Shabbos?” He was sensitive to the fact that children have needs and desires of their own quite apart from their parents’ plans for them. A family close to Reb Yaakov was shocked when the youngest of their seven sons informed them that he wanted to be a Skverer chassid. They went together with the boy to Reb Yaakov expecting him to convince their son that boys from proper German-Jewish families do not become chassidim. To their surprise, Reb Yaakov spent his time assuring them that it was not a reflection on them that their son wanted to follow a different path of avodas Hashem. Obviously their son had certain emotional needs which, he felt, could be filled by becoming a chassid and they should honor those feelings. Reb Yaakov even recommended a step more radical than the parents were then prepared to consider — sending the boy to the Skverer Yeshiva.
A couple from Europe were surprised upon arriving in Toronto in the early 1940s to see the Rav’s daughter Rivkah riding a bicycle. She explained to them that her father did not feel she had to be “too different from the other girls.” He told a talmid that when his family finally arrived in Toronto, he bought a bicycle for the children as soon as he could save enough money. Smiling, he explained, “I had always wanted a bicycle. As a rav I could not ride one, but how could I deny my children something I wished I could do?” Almost forty years later, Reb Yaakov’s opinion on bicycle riding had not changed. When Rabbi Dovid Zucker asked him whether he could let his daughters ride bicycles and mentioned that there were those who forbid it, Reb Yaakov told him, “Sometimes you have to learn to fife (whistle) on the world.”
Reb Yaakov believed that formal schooling should in many respects be modeled on the family. Ideally, the child should have the same rebbe or teacher for three years, so that the teacher knows the child intimately and a relationship of genuine love can develop. And just as a parent’s primary effect on his child is by example, so too with the rebbe.
Reb Yaakov once refused to hire a rebbe for Yeshivas Maharil Graubart in Toronto because he saw the man place his elbows on the Gemara while learning. He felt that the example of the rebbe is so crucial that he could not take the chance of hiring anyone who might lack the full sensitivity to the sanctity of the Gemara. Each child has to be educated, Reb Yaakov once told Rabbi Shmuel Dishon, the menahel of the Karlin-Stolin Yeshiva, as if he were a potential Moshe Rabbeinu. The Rema rules that a Jewish infant should not nurse from a non-Jewish woman if there is any possibility of obtaining milk from a Jewess (Yoreh Deah 71:67). And the Vilna Gaon writes that his source is the Midrash that Moshe Rabbeinu refused to nurse from an Egyptian woman because he would one day speak with the Shechinah. But, asked Reb Yaakov, if the reason that Moshe Rabbeinu did not nurse from a non-Jew was that he would one day speak with the Shechinah, how can we derive from him the halachah for every other Jewish child? From this, said Reb Yaakov, we learn a fundamental of Jewish education: Every Jewish child must be educated as though he will one day speak with the Shechinah.
Reb Yaakov put great efforts into his own children’s education. He did not send them to cheder or school until he taught them to read himself in order that they not pick up any of the mispronunciations that had crept into the Lithuanian Lashon HaKodesh he had learned as a child. His student Reb Dovid Frankel once spent days combing the bookstores of the Lower East Side in search of Chumashim from which children could learn to read as Reb Yaakov thought they should — i.e., with only a few widely spaced words on the page and no Rashi commentary distracting the child. A yeshiva has a duty, said Reb Yaakov, to develop each child over the course of the year, and not just pass him from one level to the next. And that development has to be of the complete child, not just in his Gemara learning. It is a common error, he told Rabbi Yitzchak Knobel, to think that Gemara needs a rebbe but that in other areas it is sufficient to provide the talmid with the proper texts: “Mussar, too, needs a rebbe. The yetzer hara is perfectly content to have a person learn Mesillas Yesharim as long as he learns from the work only what the yetzer hara wants him to.”
Yonason Rosenblum - The Life And Times of Reb Yaakov Kaminetzky
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