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: So this question is of the very fun variety that I will call "what do you do when?" "What do you do when you're in the middle of praying the amidah and your baby wakes up crying in the other room?" What do you do when your prayer time is interrupted by a child? More specifically, if that prayer that you're praying is the amidah, so you can tell us, what's the significance of all of those stages, and do they have the same or different answers?
Rav Eitan: Okay. So, let's step back here, because to understand where we even go here, there's a presumption here, actually, behind the question, which is that there's a problem to interact, to move around, et cetera, do something, whatever they feel the need to do to respond, in the middle of the amidah. Which of course, its name, at least that name for it, the "standing prayer," does indicate that you're in some kind of coerced normative position. So let's just talk about that, and then we can come back to the kid piece.
So, there is this very old tradition, as old as the prayer itself, that the amidah, this specific moment of focus and really direct communication with G-d as it's understood, must be done in a kind of uninterrupted fashion. And that has two dimensions to it, which actually sometimes compete with one another. One is interrupting the flow of the words. That is to say, the amidah is an actual script, more or less, of words that you are supposed to say, and to interrupt it in the middle with speaking is akin to someone in the middle of performing in a play turning to someone, you know, offstage and saying, actually, can you get me a glass of water, my throat is a bit dry, right? So there's some notion there of interruption with words.
And then there is a notion of the interruption of one's physical posture, actually standing rooted in one place as opposed to finding a way that, you know, one moves around or is somehow interacting with one's surroundings. So, on the question of moving, there's a lot of early sources that are pretty clear they don't even like you bowing too much during the amidah, that should be very restricted.
But you have this fascinating source that talks about Rabbi Akiva, he used to bow and go flat on the floor so much when he prayed the amidah that the Tosefta says he began in one corner of the room and ended up in another corner of the room. And he clearly had some different notion of what posture was required that he felt like he could sort of move around, at least as part of his prayer.
Now, there's other sources that imagine not kind of from your own internal fervent devotion, but due to external distractions, potentially having to interrupt the amidah. So, listed here, this is in another passage in the Tosefta, you've got someone praying in a public square or street and there's animals or wagons who are coming right towards them. What are they supposed to do?
Rav Avi: Seems like a good reason to move!
Rav Eitan: Sounds like a good reason to move. So the Tosefta says you may not interrupt the tefilah, ein mafsik, but you're allowed to move. Alright? So that sort of seems to indicate that, well, ideally you would stay in one place, but that's not the beginning and the end of the whole story here, and ideally what will happen is you will move but make sure that you don't speak. That is to say, the real interruption to the tefilah is the words -- ideally you have a stationary posture, but if need be you move around.
Rav Avi: Got it.
Rav Eitan: However, immediately following that ruling we get a kind of crazy story where we hear about Rabbi Chanina ben Dosa, who let a snake bite him while he was davening the amidah rather than interrupt it. It says v'lo hifsik, that exact same verb that the Tosefta said you're not supposed to do when you move out of the way.
Rav Avi: It's certainly hard for me to believe that he maintained his concentration while being bitten by a snake.
Rav Eitan: It seems hard to imagine. And this we'll come back to, how much is this story even attempting to be paradigmatic, and how much is it some unbelievable extreme outlier case of a very pious man? But nonetheless, the bottom line of that story seems to suggest that he had to allow the snake to bite him because otherwise it would have been an interruption, and it doesn't seem that the plain sense is he would have had to charm the snake by pronouncing some sort of formula; it would seem the simplest way the snake would not bite him is he would run away. But he felt that moving from his stationary posture would have been an unwarranted interruption.
Rav Avi: To be even more meta, perhaps, the text you're describing uses a story to describe the moment because it feels very parallel to me to the person who wrote in this question saying there's this ideal world in which you pray and then there's the actual world in which you're praying, and there may be something very different happening, like a snake curling around your legs, that isn't in the imagined ideal state of…
Rav Eitan: Yeah, and it's what's so scary about that Rabbi Chanina ben Dosa story, because that would seem to be the ultimate ad hoc difficult situation where you would think you would run away, and yet he doesn't. So the question is, how do we balance that? And in fact actually the Mishnah, if anything, decides to side with Rabbi Chanina ben Dosa, because it says specifically even if a snake is wrapped around a person's leg while they're praying the amidah, they may not stop. Now, the Talmud of course puts a rider on that, as you would imagine, and say well, if the snake is really life-threatening, then of course you move, but if it'll just give some kind of unpleasant bite, then it seems the Mishnah's ruling is you gotta stand your ground.
Rav Avi: So the parallel you're thinking of here is the kid being the distraction like the snake or the wild animal, so I'm curious, does the Mishnah or other rabbinic text actually make that same comparison?
Rav Eitan: So, we'll get there in just a second. They are gonna sort of figure out what fits in what category. But the first thing you have to kind of do with that source material is how, if at all, do you synthesize it, given that there seems to be one source that says eh, no problem, if something's moving towards you in the marketplace move out of the way, and the other seems to be saying you may have to be willing to endure a snakebite -- how do we put those two together?
And there's really a split in the Middle Ages as to how to understand this. You have one school of thought that says moving during prayer is really not that big a deal. It's normally dispreferred, but it's not actually an interruption, and that's the position of Rabbenu Yonah, who says that if you find a snake wrapped around your leg, you can't stop saying the amidah, but you can shake it off and jump around and do whatever you have to do to get rid of that. And in that sense he says Rabbi Chanina ben Dosa's story as a kind of extreme outlier case of piety, but not something that's really expected for people praying the amidah.
By contrast, there's a whole other school of thought which says no, actually any kind of movement is fundamentally unacceptable in the context of the amidah, and if you did it and it certainly then if enough time passed such that, let's say, you could have finished the entire amidah in the interval, you'll have to go back and start all over. And those interpreters -- among them is the Rashba -- say yeah, and you know that story about Rabbi Akiva being in one corner of the room and ending up in another? Well, he did that at the end of his amidah, after he finished all the statutory blessings, then when he was just sort of adding his own supplications afterwards, he went off and did these kind of crazy gyrations with his body. But otherwise, you can't move.
Rav Avi: So that's pretty extreme, because that's saying you can't even move even for the sake of your tefilah, even as part of your tefilah, which you would think is really not a hefsek, it's exactly what you're doing. So that's a pretty extreme opposite.
Rav Eitan: Yeah, that's right. And again, I think some of those people in that position might acknowledge that sometimes you'll have to move not to be run over by a wagon, but they'll say, but the price of moving is you've interrupted the amidah and you'll actually have to start all over again if it was too much of an interruption, whereas the first school will say, that's not really an interruption, it's just a non-ideal movement during an otherwise uninterrupted prayer.
So there's a lot more to say there, but that split kind of sets us up for then thinking about the kid. And how do we view a child basically, are they like a wagon or Rabbi Chanina ben Dosa's snake, right, to the extent we're going to sort of divide it up that way. And you have a very important ruling by Rav Yaakov Molcho, who was a lesser-known figure in 17th century Jerusalem, of all places, who says that the problem of children annoying parents during their prayers is not new. And he gives the following guideline, which I think is actually very helpful both technically, and I think there's actually some important values here as well.
He says when a child is annoying you and making it hard for you to focus, you cannot speak to them. Right? This sort of higher level that even the, it's not such a big deal to move school of thought holds to -- you should not try to calm a child who's upset with words that will interrupt the flow of your amidah, but what he does imply is okay, are all kinds of hand motions or other ways of kind of gesticulating or certainly, let's say, touching the child, caressing them, if need be perhaps even kissing the child if that's the only way to calm them down. Those are of a different sort, they only violate sort of the movement school, and there you may not even be moving your legs. And he says if none of that can solve it, and here he's focused on your own distraction, well, then you may need to walk away. Right? You actually need to just step out into the other room until you finish your amidah, and then you can go and tend to that child.
Now, this presumes something that I think at first seems a little harsh, and it's clear that for some very very small children, this doesn't work, but which I think is actually a really important message, which is that the child's discomfort and unease at that moment may not be the most important thing in the world. That part of being a parent is also to be able to judge that, okay, if my kid is in danger, of course I drop everything and take care of them. I would say even less than that, if the kid is hysterical, like they just bumped their head and you know nothing terrible is gonna happen to them, but they're like really really upset and they need some calming, yes, you pick them up, you have whatever kind of physical calming, et cetera, and you can probably do a lot of that without actually breaking into a kind of verbal expression.
But that then there's a lot of other cases, and these become more and more prominent when children get to, like, the age of two, where actually the kid thinks it's the most important world at that moment to get the parent's attention, but it's a very important thing that a parent can teach a child, which is I'm going to give you a tremendous amount of attention; in this three-minute interval, I'm actually doing something very important.
And while I don't think that's Rav Yaakov Molcho's agenda in this psak, in this ruling, there is something about that that I would want to say to this questioner, which is there really is actually a balance here, where you're standing in the presence of G-d is something that is extremely important, and just as parents have to remember to take time for themselves in all kinds of areas once they have children and not just hand their entire life over to their kids, this is a kind of spiritual manifestation of that, that perhaps some of these strict halakhot around this, I'm gonna prompt us to keep in mind.
Rav Avi: That's interesting. There's a lot there, and I could go in a lot of different directions with it. One thought that comes to mind is the difference between the examples in the Mishnah that you gave were examples of danger or pain with the snake, to the person doing the praying themselves, which feels maybe a little bit different than saying oh, it's the kid in the next room that's suffering for a minute, as opposed to me myself suffering for a minute. It's like, maybe I would stand there while a snake was biting me -- probably not, but maybe -- but I definitely wouldn't stand there while a snake was biting my kid, you know, as somewhat different. So there is some difference there, I wonder if there's any precedent or idea of… I mean, I guess, clearly on an extreme we would have pikuach nefesh, you know, you stop it if someone's in danger.
Rav Eitan: Yeah, and look -- children are fundamentally vulnerable, and there's even a sort of general presumption in halakhah that children have the same status as people who are sick in terms of their vulnerability, and therefore some of the rules that you bend for them. And so I would say, the smaller the child, the lower the bar is for making sure they're okay, comforting them, et cetera, and again, what Rav Molcho says very clearly is, essentially anything that you can do without breaking the word flow of the amidah, including physical relocation, touching the child, gesturing, et cetera, et cetera, one should certainly do that if it's going to calm the situation down.
Rav Avi: And then your last point about teaching kids what's really important, I think also within the frame that I was just giving it makes me think about when your kid is crying and you bend down to pick them up, how much is it for them and how much is it actually for you, where you know that, okay, they can't find their favorite truck, but you'll find it in a minute, you know, you know that they are actually okay, it's actually because it's hard for you to watch them be unhappy for a minute that you can't.
Rav Eitan: Right. That's right. And that's where, yeah, I think we could probably have a much longer conversation about parenting and get some other experts on the show here. There's some, there is some tension there between whether it is the appropriate response to serve your needs of calming you down at that moment, or to kind of train yourself to say, well, I do know it's okay, and I've gotta finish this. And again, we're not talking about a process that has, like, 30 minutes to it -- it's basically a couple of minutes to finish the amidah.
I will say another place where I think that comes out and highlights how the amidah is a particularly intense place -- there's a lot of other parts of the davening that also, we try not to interrupt, but they have a very different kind of standard to them. Specifically the paragraphs of the shema and the blessings that are around them, and the pesukei dezimra, the preliminary psalms that we say in the morning, kind of gearing up towards that intense prayer experience. Those generally have a rule that's laid out starting in the Mishnah, later in the Shulkhan Arukh, where when you're at a natural break, you can respond to any incoming stimulus that's demanding your attention.
So that would mean, like, between the paragraphs of the psalms, between the paragraphs of the shema -- essentially someone comes and says, hey, what's the temperature this morning -- you know, you can answer them, even though it has nothing to do with anything, and so obviously anything your kid wants, if you can just wait until that break, you break in and that's fine. But when you're in the middle of a paragraph, the standard is supposed to be that you are only responding to things mifnei hakavod, because there's some kind of honor that is needed in that context.
And that, I'll say, speaking personally as a parent, the way I have kind of juggled that is in general, my kids are supposed to honor me and I am not supposed to honor them -- that is to say, we have an appropriately hierarchical relationship there, and I will generally by default feel free to say you gotta wait a minute, you know, by showing them a finger, whatever it is, until I get to that point. But there are times as a parent when either for your assessment of your relationship with your child or your child's relationship with the ritual that you're engaged in, that you feel that you will build greater respect and greater honor by showing this is not something, you know, that Abba does because he's trying to get away from you; this is something that I do because I'm actually trying to bring you into this.
And that requires some judgement as to when what kind of child needs there, and there I tend to be much more lenient in terms of making those kinds of judgements outside of the amidah, because again the dynamic is different. I think I also find something powerful about there being different parts of prayer that actually encourage those different dynamics to come to the fore. It's like, there's parts of prayer that actually are designed to be interruptible, and to kind of hone those instincts, and then there's parts that are really about saying, we actually really don't want you to interrupt this part.
Rav Avi: Yeah, it's powerful. If we lived everything in the ideal, we would never get to see those distinctions, but it's only because we live in a real world where your kid could come up at any moment, that you really put the time into thinking and experiencing those different components of your prayer as different. I want to ask one follow-up question, I think probably comes up for a lot of parents, I know it's come up for me in the two years, two and a half years that I've even been a parent, which is what if you're in the middle of this amidah and the kid comes up to you, the kid is being loud, and you are not by yourself in your living room, but you are in fact in shul, surrounded by a bunch of other people also trying to concentrate on their own prayers, and you really feel compelled to take the kid out of the space.
Rav Eitan: So the simple answer is, when your kid is throwing a total fit in shul, you gotta take them out. And you gotta take them out even if you're in the middle of the amidah, and if you're in the middle of kedusha, or other parts of the service where everyone is supposed to be rooted in one place and not speaking. And that's essentially because in the context described by Rav Yaakov Molcho, you have the option of simply walking out of the room to get away from it, and therefore that's incumbent upon you, because you can't sort of, you know, just then tell the child to go away, so you have to leave. But you can't do that with a room of a hundred people, or even nine other people, have them all evacuate. That's the public space.
And therefore at that point, it's as if the community has a responsibility and license to take that child and go out, and you have to do it because you're the parent, and fundamentally your prayer is no more important than anyone else's in the room. The same kinds of guidelines would apply, which is ideally you would not speak, and you would simply continue your amidah while you're walking out and trying to calm the child, but absolutely sometimes people think well, I'm in a tough situation, but what can I do, I'm in the middle of the amidah? No, that's exactly the kind of place where essentially the only alternative you leave everyone else is that they should all leave the room, and that's not reasonable in that context.
Rav Avi: And I would imagine when it's not the amidah, then you really could fall back on the idea that kavod, here being kavod hatzibbur, that you really need to give some kind of kavod to the community around you, that it would be inappropriate to not interrupt your own tefilah.
Rav Eitan: You have to take that very seriously. Different communities may decide to have different thresholds of noise tolerance around children, and certainly I've been in a range of places like that, but once you understand what that standard is, and I would say even in kid-friendly communities, the standard during the silent amidah is reasonably high, and appropriately so, you have to just respond at that moment.
Rav Avi: Great. Thanks so much!
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