The Value of 'Personal Example'
Another essential element in educating children is personal example, because it is the nature of a child to imitate his parents. A child who grows up in a home where his parents serve as a personal example is living with a lesson before his eyes, for every child naturally tends to imitate his own parents.
As my father Rabbi Yoram Abargel, of blessed memory, would say, as brought in Betzur Yarum (vol. 4, p. 182):
A person must guard 'his camp' with the greatest care. It is not enough for a person to place his children in a Talmud Torah. The role of the Talmud Torah is only to watch over the children until the afternoon. The main work begins afterward, when the children return home; then one must guard them carefully from anything that could damage their holiness.
For the main part of his education the child receives specifically from the home. This is called shuta deyanuka, “the speech of a child,” as the Gemara says (Sukkah 56b): “What a child says in the marketplace, he has heard either from his father or from his mother.”
When parents are upright and sincere, and conduct themselves properly, their children will not betray Hashem. But when parents do not serve as a worthy personal example for their children, the children are harmed. When the father declines, his son follows him downward. And when the mother declines, Heaven forbid, her daughters follow after her. In this matter, there is no room for compromise.
Therefore, a person cannot hold onto holiness on one side while searching for leniencies and indulgences on the other. We must know that children depend on their parents, and when the parents are in decline, the children immediately decline after them, Heaven forbid.
A person must never think that education happens on its own. If he does not invest in it, if he does not rise for prayers on time, if he does not sacrifice for the proper education of his family, nothing truly good will emerge — only externality and emptiness.
Our children do not only absorb the external actions of the home. They absorb the atmosphere of the home as well. They have a special sense for detecting their parents’ feelings and discerning the thoughts that animate the home, as explained at length in our work Chelev HaAretz on the order of the Shulchan Aruch (vol. 1, introduction, sec. 25).11
For this reason, parents cannot “disguise” themselves before their children. If the parents’ inner world is filled with confused, empty, or impure thoughts, the children will sense it, and it will affect the way they conduct themselves as well. But parents whose thoughts and actions are holy raise children of holiness and purity.
For it is a rule that whatever one brings into the world bears his own likeness.
Wellsprings of Wisdom
11. Rabbi Eliyahu Yitzchak Abba Shaul explains (Kovetz Rav Berachot, issue 3, p. 54) that there is no greater imitator than a young child. A child does not learn only from what his parents tell him; he learns from the way they live. If a child is taught not to speak during prayer, and then sees that his parents themselves are careful not to speak, the lesson enters him without needing to be repeated. But if he sees his parents complain when a guest arrives late at night, he absorbs that as well, and it will shape the way he relates to guests in the future.
Avraham Avinu taught us the power of personal example. At ninety-nine years old, on the third day after his brit milah, he did not merely instruct others to care for the guests. He himself ran to the cattle and personally involved himself in preparing the meal, as the Torah says, “Avraham ran to the cattle” (Bereishit 18:7). For this reason, Hashem said of him, “For I have known him, because he will command his children and his household after him, and they will keep the way of Hashem” (ibid., v. 19).
True education means that those educated follow “after him.” The parent walks first and shows the way, like a commander who tells his soldiers, “Follow me.” When children have seen that path lived with consistency and sincerity, they can continue it even when the parent is no longer standing beside them. This is the power of personal example: a silent education that enters the child more deeply than words can.
