Emunah in Chinuch

Living Emunah By Rabbi David Ashear

The goal of every parent is to train their children to want to do the will of Hashem on their own without having to be told to. One of the greatest tools we can give them for this is to teach them about who they are serving, to tell them how much Hashem loves them and is interested in helping them, to teach them how Hashem controls everything that happens in the world every second of the day, and how good it is for them to follow Torah and mitzvot. Emunah is a great tool for chinuch and can be taught at a very young age. A woman related how much her life has changed for the better since learning emunah. She used to worry about finances, but not anymore, because she knows her parnasa comes from Hashem. She used to be intimidated by her boss, but not anymore because she knows Hashem is the only One in charge. Getting her children into schools, getting job interviews are all done without worry because either way the results are up to Hashem. Whenever she feels uncertain about anything, she picks up a Tehillim and then asks Hashem for help. Her dream is that her children acquire the same type of emunah that she has and they become even better than her. Recently, she felt so good seeing how her little children were absorbing the emunah that she has been portraying. She stayed by her parents for the summer and one morning she asked her two little children if they wanted to go for a walk. Then she remembered that the double stroller was kept outside and the sprinklers go on around four times a week at night. She told her children she had to go outside to see if the stroller was dry because sometimes it gets wet from the sprinklers. So they all went out to check and it was dry. "Baruch Hashem," she said. Then her five-year-old daughter said, "Look, Hashem wanted us to be able to go for a walk so He made sure that the sprinklers didn't go on last night." The woman was so happy hearing those words from her five-year-old. She added, if the stroller would have been wet, she would have taught them Gam zu l'tova and said, "We'll find something better to do." On another occasion, her children were playing on the swing set towards the end of the summer and her five-year-old wondered out loud, "If it's still summer, how come the leaves are falling off the trees?" Her three year old answered, "Because Hashem wants the leaves to fall now. That's why they're falling." It was that simple. Even her three-year-old was picking up on emunah at such a young age. The children can absorb so much, but it's up to us to be their teachers. Children love hearing stories, and so when we hear a nice story that shows Hashem's hashgacha , we should relate it to them. I just read a story that recently took place. A young man named Chaim Dov, lo alenu, is losing sight in his eyes, and he already had a few surgeries and has a couple of more scheduled. The last surgery was beginning early in the morning, and his father woke him up late. There was no time for Chaim Dov to pray, as they had to leave for the surgery right away. Being a chassid of Karlin, Chaim Dov prayed his tefila each morning leading up to the Amidah in a very loud voice with a lot of heart. He couldn't go to the surgery without praying first. His father suggested that he pray up until the Amidah in the taxi, as they had a very long ride to the hospital. Chaim Dov agreed, but then his father said he wouldn't be able to pray loudly as usual, being that they would be in a very small taxi, and the driver would probably throw them out if they bothered him like that. Amazingly, when the driver pulled up, he motioned to them to write down where they wanted to go, as he was hard of hearing. The father said, in all of his life, he never took a taxi with a driver who was hard of hearing. This one time that his son wanted to pray loudly, Hashem sent them a special driver to enable him to do so. Hashem controls everything and always wants to help us. This is the message we must teach by example and have our children learn from.