Rav Avi: Hello and welcome to Responsa Radio, where you ask and we answer questions of Jewish law in modern times! I am Rabbi Avi Killip, and I am here with Rabbi Ethan Tucker, Rosh Yeshiva at Mechon Hadar, a center for higher Jewish learning based in New York City.
Rav Eitan: Hello, Avi!
Rav Avi: Hey, how are you doing?
Rav Eitan: I'm doing alright.
Rav Avi: So here we go: "My young son drinks a bottle of milk each night before bed. Sometimes he gets his bottle just after having had a hot dog for dinner. At what point will this become a problem with kashrut? Or in other words, at what age should a child start to be expected to observe mitzvot, and are performative rituals like shaking a lulav on Sukkot different from religious prohibitions, like eating non-kosher food?"
Rav Eitan: Alright. Well, this is something all of us with kids, I think, have wanted to know at one point or another, how miserable or convenient we can make our lives on these issues. So I think I want to start from the end, maybe the generals, and get to the specifics. Really this general question of essentially when does a kid become a Jew, on some level, or when do they become someone that we kind of expect things of in the world of mitzvot. And here, I think there's actually a degree of clarifying misperceptions that we have to start off with. I think many people have the feeling that, well, until you hit 12 or 13, anything goes. It doesn't matter, it's nice if you train the kid, but there's really no expectation, particularly, that they do anything at those younger ages.
One of the really interesting contributions of one of the great scholars of the history of halakhah, Professor Yitzchak Dov Gilat, great 20th century scholar, was to point out that actually in the earliest levels of rabbinic literature, there's no notion that 12 and 13 really have much to do with the age of mitzvot at all. There's a famous statement in Mishnah Avot, in the Ethics of the Fathers, which says that at 13 somehow it's the age of mitzvot, but that Gilat shows and draws on other scholarship is a way later addition to that mishnah, that no one ever in the earlier Talmudic period actually had ever heard of.
Rav Avi: So this is gonna really change the whole idea of bar mitzvah, huh?
Rav Eitan: Yeah. Well, we'll see sort of where it comes from in that it's not as simple as you might think. The bar mitzvah is sort of growing out of that notion and that text, which don't get me wrong, takes on some serious weight later on. But what Gilat shows is that for the most part, the way early sources thought about mitzvot was you do them as soon as you are able, that fundamentally you look at a person and you say, can the kid do the action involved responsibly and consistently? Then they are no different really than any adult who has the same capacity.
So you see this laid out very clearly, there's a Tosefta in Tractate Chagigah in the first chapter, which says things like if a kid knows show to shake something, like a stick or a light saber or whatever it is, then they're obligated to shake a lulav. If they know how to wrap themselves in stuff, then they're obligated in tzitzit. If they know how to speak, then you teach them how to say the shema. Now, that last one, I think, is a great example where very involved Jewish parents focused on their kid's performance of ritual do that almost instinctively -- as soon as the kid can start to speak, they're teaching the kid shema, but it's really part of this much larger package of watch the developmental growth of your child, and as they're ready to step into a mitzvah, it seems the plain meaning of the Tosefta is, that's when they become obligated like any adult.
Rav Avi: So it really puts mitzvot into the same category as life. I mean, in general that's how we treat our children: we let them do things -- as soon as you can draw with crayons, you can draw with crayons, and as soon as you can type, you can type.
Rav Eitan: That's right. And I actually think there's a deeper philosophy of education point here, which is when your kid knows how to shake stuff, they're gonna be shaking sticks and light sabers. At that point, it's your choice -- are they just gonna be filled up by whatever the ambient environment is gonna put in their hand, or are you gonna say you're actually now capable to use this new power that you have for this specific mitzvah for good, for developing your Jewish commitment, et cetera, et cetera. So that's a kind of backdrop here that I think is really important.
Now, the ages of 12 and 13 nonetheless do appear in some earlier sources; they tend to be markers for the age where we imagine someone or the average child gains a certain degree of mental capacity and responsibility. Almost like they can really understand the consequences of what they commit to. So, particularly like in the context of nedarim, of judging whether someone's made a vow that's actually binding upon them, there the Mishnah says when a girl turns 12 and a boy turns 13, at that point if they make a promise and a commitment that they're gonna do something, it will have the Biblical force of a vow, and before that, it's either unsure and you've gotta check it out, or no, they can't possibly really understand what they got themselves into. Gilat shows how that little piece of data from the area of vows spreads gradually over time to other areas of law, and gives the ages of 12 and 13 this kind of greater significance in all kinds of other areas.
One of the areas it first spreads to is Yom Kippur, and when children are able to fast. But that too seems like it's grounded in a physical maturity of when is a person able to actually go 25 hours. And it's only later, seemingly really, he argues, in the post-Talmudic period, that you really get to a kind of consistent broad statement of well, the mitzvot only really kick in on a Biblical level when you hit 12 and 13.
Rav Avi: There's something really interesting about starting with the idea of who has to fast on Yom Kippur, and spreading that out to all of the mitzvot, when we live in this modern society where there are many Jews who only really notice halakhah when they're fasting on Yom Kippur, that it seems not surprising to me, maybe, or poetic in some way, that that's the mitzvah that's getting spread out, and understandable that other precedents maybe are getting lost.
Rav Eitan: Yeah. There's a kind of marker of basic Jewish practice that so many people today act out through Yom Kippur, and one of the interesting things is another area where the Talmud has some degree of struggle as to whether you have to worry about a kid and what they're doing is specifically in the area of eating non-kosher food. And you have this long discussion in the Talmud, it's the question of katan ochel nevelot, if you see a kid who's just eating treyf food, haim habeit din metzuveh lahafrisho, does the court, does the community -- not even the parent -- does the Jewish community have a responsibility when seeing a small Jewish child eating non-kosher food, have the obligation to stop them?
It's an interesting Talmudic passage like many, where it kind of entertains both sides of the issue. Fundamentally it comes down on the side of answering that question no, which is to say, you don't really have to stop a kid who is eating treyf from eating treyf. But, what it sort of emerges as a compromise position on the other side is it says but you surely can't actively feed that child something that's non-kosher, and restricts the kind of laissez-faire piece to standing back when a certain scenario is playing out on its own.
Rav Avi: That's an interesting parallels of eating versus not eating, or eating versus ceasing of eating.
Rav Eitan: Yeah. I think that's right. And it brings us back to our questioner's case, which is, well here we've got the bottle of milk after the hot dog for dinner.
Rav Avi: So we're acknowledging here that kids, even older kids, maybe all the way up to 12 and 13, aren't feeding themselves necessarily. Someone's providing them with food.
Rav Eitan: Yeah, and so what does it mean that we're actually, you know, to the extent this parent is asking, I am actively giving my child milk after I know they've had meat, and it seems some degree of the discomfort comes from that, and that discomfort, at least theoretically, seems very well-placed in light of that Talmudic discussion, because there's an idea first of all I would say, right, if we go back to that earlier paradigm, well, maybe as soon as a kid knows the difference between meat and milk, they're supposed to make a distinction. And even if later we say, well, that's a kind of rabbinic training before the Biblical weight of that kind of, you know, mitzvah kicks in, isn't there some role of the parent at least ideally setting up the situation such that it doesn't happen?
But, there's some other factors here, which make it a little bit more of a lenient case. So, first of all the prohibition on eating meat and milk too close to one another is actually only a rabbinic prohibition, and not a Biblical one. Right? To remind us, the Biblical prohibition on meat and milk is actually consuming meat and milk that have been cooked together, and we're not here talking about feeding a child pig, which would be an unusual bedtime snack, and also something that is much more serious kind of on the religious plane than what's being described here. That's point one. Point two is, the child here being described with a bottle is clearly earlier than the age of having any mental capacity to really appreciate that they're even in some kind of state of violating anything here.
And those two factors are very significant. You have someone of no lesser stature than Rav Ovadia Yosef who says specifically when dealing with very, very small children, where they are not someone with any kind of mental capacity to understand at all, where they are not a bar havanah, that time has elapsed or not elapsed -- you know, like what people say about dogs, right? They have no sense of the passage of time. When you're at that late stage of cognitive development, you don't actually have an obligation to worry about the waiting between meat and milk for a child of that age.
Rav Avi: We don't have any consideration included in that about the parent's awareness? Because clearly the parents know that they're feeding their child so close together.
Rav Eitan: That's right. So Rav Ovadia's reading ultimately, and it's filtered through a lot of earlier sources of the Talmudic passages, parents are responsible not to actively provide their children with something that is Biblically forbidden, but when it's only a rabbinic prohibition and the child themself has no consciousness of it, then it's not at the level of concern. Now what you can hear from there is, you know, if you flip some of those variables, we'd start to get more nervous. You have a parent who's feeding actual treyf food, even to a very small baby.
I remember actually once dropping my daughter off at day care and having provided her with, like, a very specific meal that I prepared at home, and showing up and finding out that actually she didn't really like the lunch you packed her, but we gave her some of Dylan's hamburger and she loved it! And I remember I was like, so freaked out, and completely shaken to my core. And if you asked me, what does it matter, it's a little kid? There was an aspect here of feeling like, almost like my daughter had been defiled, you know, with this sort of forbidden food. And part of that was connected to the fact that there was, like, an actual object that we treated as forbidden, that now had gone into her body. That's very different when you're talking about milk and meat kind of going in at intervals, which is much more of a practice to maintain distance, as opposed to a taboo item.
Rav Avi: So what if we dialed that bottle back a few minutes earlier, and we actually served it at the dinner table and say the rest of the family was also having hot dogs, would it start to become a concern, or is that also okay?
Rav Eitan: Yeah. So here, you know, there's another distinction, which Rav Ovadia makes in his discussion of this, which is between nutritional necessities and treats and sweets. And he says that in general --
Rav Avi: So whether it's chocolate milk or not, that's what we're talking about?
Rav Eitan: Literally, right? Basically we're literally talking about that: if it's chocolate milk, certainly if it's candies, in some way a chocolate bar, there Rav Ovadia is very much toes the line of saying, you know, if you're dealing with, like, a five-year-old, you know, and they're asking to have, like, a chocolate bar a little earlier, et cetera, like, there's no way you can be lenient about that; you've gotta maintain the proper separation. But even with an older child, he is more lenient if for some reason that's basically the nutritional necessity of what they need to eat at that time, let's say the food that's available for dinner is dairy and they ate something earlier and the result will be like keeping them up really late or sending them to bed without dinner or whatever it is, he'll say even in those cases you can be lenient.
So, I think there's an argument to be made that for a very small kid who's having bottles of milk, the milk is sort of always this core nutritional piece, yeah, all other things being equal I think everyone's gonna agree it would be better not to plan it out that way, and to at least allow a little bit of spacing. But that principle between nutritionally necessary foods and added treats is something that I think, you know, comes into play in terms of difficult situations where this may come up.
Rav Avi: Other than kashrut, are there other areas where this really comes up, that you've seen this come up? I mean, we've talked also about fasting on Yom Kippur, about the shaking of the lulav -- are there any other specific mitzvot that we think about or we should be thinking about in terms of teaching our kids?
Rav Eitan: Yeah, so I'll give you an example that's not sort of common for most Jews, but maybe it indicates another way of thinking about this. One of the places specifically where the earlier sources say that parents have to make sure that their kids observe this mitzvah is saying to kohanim who are generally forbidden from coming in contact with the dead, that they have to make sure that their kids also don't come in contact with the dead. And you don't have little kohen children kind of playing around in a cemetery. And what a number of later interpreters say is significant about that piece, even if we're lenient in all kinds of other cases like the Talmud says, eh, you don't have to worry about the kid eating treyf, is that there's something about the literal sanctity of the body of the kohen that is potentially being defiled with contact with the dead, that doesn't have to do with the cognitive process of awareness of its religious significance, but has to literally do with this sacred state of being.
Rav Avi: So that's not seen as an issue of training the kid for the future, but actually matters?
Rav Eitan: Yeah, it's almost like don't let them get hurt, as we would think about that, but with a religious frame of sort of the power of the dead and how it kind of contraindicates a state of holiness. And I think that actually some of the anxiety around small children eating non-kosher food or feeding it to them is tied up with that as well, and it goes back to my story about my daughter, feeling like, well, sure, part of kashrut is some kind of cognitive sense of I do this and I don't do that, but there is definitely a part of it, certainly experienced by many Jews, and I think it goes back even to how the Torah talks about it, that's about not taking certain things into your body in a very physical way. And one way you might think about some of the distinction is, the mitzvot that seem more about stepping into a religious cognitive space, it only makes sense to do that when the person is in that space. The ones that are just much more about how we construct our bodies and ourselves, those you can imagine having much more of an impact at an even earlier time.
Rav Avi: Great. I'll end with this story that I heard of a little girl, non-Jewish girl talking about her Jewish friend, and she said, well, she only eats kosher, and I only eat non-artificial.
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