Kiddush Hashem Points

 FJN, January 5, 2007

Over my stay in Chicago for my son’s recent marriage, not only did I keep hearing how wonderful my son is from what seemed like everybody in that great city, but, even more, those same people couldn’t stop raving to me about my three other children, now adults: How nice they are, how capable, how talented, how good. Those are certainly nice words for a mother to hear, and while I was still basking in the glow of all those compliments, I attended a Pirkei Avos class with Rabbi Yossi.

We were discussing the quote from Rabbi Akiva who used to say, “Beloved is man for he was created in God’s image” and what a great responsibility that places on all of us. We can’t act out in public or we will not be a Kiddush Hashem. A smile lit my face as I thought of the same children who had just been hugely complimented and the trial and tribulation it was getting them there: I did it with Kiddush Hashem Points.

See, my three boys are, respectively, 14 months and 20 months apart. (Forget my daughter; she was always an angel, but then again, she was four years the senior and she got to boss around her three baby brothers.) I want you to picture an attempt at, oh, something simple, like grocery shopping, with a triple stroller. Did I hear sympathetic cluck-clucks more times than I ever wanted to? Please. Did I hear “You’ve got your hands full” enough times to make me want to strangle somebody? Indeed. In fact, I used to spend good chunks of time trying to figure out a great comeback for that remark and I was never quite satisfied with the results. The one I liked best was, “I know. I’m lucky,” but between you and me, the only reason I could carry all that off with a smile was those Kiddush Hashem points.

The Kiddush Hashem points were nothing more than a star chart with a twist. And, to me, the twist was the most important part, the part that I think everyone leaves out but ought to leave in. The twist is the raison d’etre, the Big Picture, the why-are-we-here question at a pre-school level: I told my boys that when they are good in public, people will look at their yarmulkes and say, “What nice Jewish boys,” but if they are not good in public, people will look at their yarmulkes and say, “Jewish boys are a bunch of rowdies.”

Now, if you stop and think about it a moment, you’ll see that that explanation ought to be totally illogical. Why, after all, would a four-year old, a five-year old and a six-and-a-half-year old care what the world thinks when what they really want is for mom to buy them that bag of candy in the snack isle?

The answer is that if all I ever did was give them that “Jewish boys” speech, you’re right; it wouldn’t have made any difference at all. But that little talk was neatly placed on top of a lifetime of little talks (a short, but sweet lifetime) on what it means to be a human being in this world. When they were just infants and I’d take them out for walks, I’d say, “Look at Hashem’s beautiful flowers,” or “Wow, Hashem did an outstanding job tonight painting the evening sky.”

At meals, they were told, “We have to thank Hashem for this delicious food.” There was even a moment in grade school when I believed one of them was not as forthcoming with the facts as he could be and I said, “I may never know the whole story, but you can’t hide it from Hashem. Do you think He is happy with you?” The notion that there was Someone Above running the Universe to whom we owe appreciation and reverence was as natural to them as being dressed in the morning.

There’s a huge benefit to teaching this concept to very young children: You have thrown the ball into their court. That is, when you teach them at an early age to love and fear God, you’re no longer in the mechanical, puppet-on-a-string relationship with them of, “Do it because I said so.” When you do that, you’re doing all the work, getting all the aggravation, and getting very little of the desired behavior out of them in return.

Instead, when you put God in the equation, your relationship with your children becomes one of, “I think you’ll see it’s to your own advantage to do X or Y or Z.” They do see that advantage because they already want to be good in the eyes of Hashem.

And let’s not forget that those points, dutifully marked down in a notBook for each and every possible behavior that I’d want to address, got traded in for Lego’s at the toy store once a month. Hey, never underestimate the power of a primary reinforcer.

But let’s not underestimate the power of Hashem from a child’s perspective, either.