Q&A: Teaching Torah to One’s Son
Teaching Torah to One’s Son
Question
Maimonides, Laws of Torah Study, chapter 1
From when is a father obligated to teach his son Torah? From when he begins to speak, he teaches him: “Moses commanded us the Torah” and “Hear, O Israel”; and afterward he teaches him little by little, verse by verse, until he is six or seven years old, everything according to his capacity, and he brings him to a teacher of young children.
Why does Maimonides instruct teaching first about tradition (“Moses commanded us the Torah”) and only then about God (“Hear, O Israel”)? Wouldn’t we have thought the reverse (as you did in the trilogy)? Is this an educational instruction—that a child first needs to hear about the tradition so that the ideas will enter his heart more effectively?
Answer
I don’t think that’s the order written in Maimonides. He is simply moving from the basic everyday verses to the rest of Scripture, and then Talmud and philosophy. It doesn’t seem to me that he is talking about the subjects of study. Beyond that, you are reading significance into the order of the two verses cited at the beginning. They are just two examples, not necessarily written in any meaningful order.