Q&A: Children’s Effort
Children’s Effort
Question
It is well known that the entire conduct of the world is in the hands of the Holy One, blessed be He, except that we have been given the obligation of making an effort. The question is: children are presumably exempt from the obligation to make such effort, so why must they make an effort to bring the spoon to their mouth and avoid dangerous places and the like? After all, everything is in the hands of Heaven.
Answer
Known to whom? Not to me. I’ve written more than once about the nonsense in the concept of “hishtadlut” (“making an effort”). See Column 279 and elsewhere.
And since there is no such obligation, then neither children nor adults are obligated in it. Not everything is in the hands of Heaven.
Discussion on Answer
Certainly, like any intelligent person. Except that from this it follows that one should not listen to my halakhic rulings, including this one.
Why does it follow from this that one should not listen to your halakhic rulings?
I trust your judgment and intellectual honesty that you are trying to aim for the halakhic truth like any other believing Jewish rabbi, and presumably you succeed no less than others.
So one can certainly hear halakhic rulings from you, but someone who wants to drink a cup of wine might drink and burst.
Best regards.
Rabbi Yitzhak Zilberstein actually argues that children are exempt from hishtadlut; here it is:
An unusual halakhic ruling by the gaon Rabbi Yitzhak Zilberstein, rabbi of Ramat Elchanan in Bnei Brak and a member of the Council of Torah Sages, which was published in 2014 during Operation Protective Edge, following questions that reached him from parents regarding sirens in the middle of the night. The main question was: should they wake the children? The parents explained that after moving them to the protected space they wake up, and afterward they are tired in the morning in cheder.
“As is well known, the work of putting children to bed is holy work but also difficult, and after, thank God, the children fall asleep, we turn to putting the house in order from the previous day and preparing it for the next day. Yesterday at around ten at night there was a siren; we woke the children and took them to a protected space as the instructions require,” the parents wrote.
“After the danger had passed, a celebration began in the house. The children became unusually alert and could not fall asleep. Of course this disrupted our whole evening, but the children themselves also suffered, and the next day when they went to cheder they were very tired and could not concentrate on their learning.”
They asked: the next time there is a siren, do we need to wake them and act according to the instructions, or can we leave them sleeping in their beds?
Rabbi Y. Zilberstein replied in an answer that appeared in the collection Vavei Ha’amudim, which publishes his responsa, and said that a woman is not obligated to wake a child and take them to a protected space. Rabbi Zilberstein gives two reasons.
A. Because the obligation of hishtadlut to enter a protected space applies to adults and not to children, since minors in and of themselves are not obligated in commandments. Therefore they are exempt from the obligation of hishtadlut, and so we too are not obligated to wake them—especially since this harms them when they are awakened, and in addition it interrupts their Torah study.
B. They are little children who have not sinned, and perhaps because of that they are not obligated in hishtadlut; and the Torah of schoolchildren is without blemish, as explained in tractate Shabbat: “The world endures only for the sake of the breath of schoolchildren.” Therefore there is no legal obligation to wake them.
That sounds bizarre to the point of parody. If you have a photo of that collection, it could be very interesting (mainly regarding the question whether Rabbi Z. can technically divorce his wife). Better also with a few later issues, to make sure they didn’t rush there to correct the misunderstanding. After all, it’s ridiculous—are minors also exempt from seat belts? And what about the obligation of hishtadlut to feed them—perhaps the parents are exempt from that too, and the children will eat from the outstretched hand of the blessed God? It’s true that for any concrete person (minor or adult) the specific risk to him is tiny, and probably Rabbi Zilberstein was speaking only in such cases if the quotation is indeed accurate, but as a general instruction not to take safety precautions, that is an instruction that with very high probability will lead to deaths, whether minors or adults.
The obligation of hishtadlut is idolatry.
Hishtadlut is mentioned in only one context: “In a place where there are no men, strive to be a man.”
That is, if you arrive at a place where crazy people live who believe there is such a thing as an obligation of hishtadlut, try not to go crazy.
Hello Rabbi, in your opinion, according to this answer are you considered an apikorus? Best regards.