Rabbi Lawrence Kelemen makes a claim that sounds almost too simple to be true: you, the parent, have enormous control over the religious trajectory of your child’s life — and one specific sentence, repeated in your home, can undo years of good intentions.
The sentence is some version of “it’s tough to be a Jew.” Maybe it’s said with a sigh after a long day of religious obligations. Maybe it’s a joke about how much easier life would be without all the restrictions. Kelemen is blunt about the effect: say that sentence, or communicate its spirit often enough, and don’t be surprised when your child eventually walks away from observance. Children are paying far closer attention to your emotional tone than to your formal instruction. They will absorb exactly what you model — and if what you model is burden, they’ll go looking for something lighter.
This connects to a broader principle Kelemen teaches about building a child’s earliest sense of faith: it isn’t primarily built through explanation. It’s built through a living example — parents who visibly fulfill mitzvos with simcha, with joy, and who say their brachos with real kavana, real intention and presence, rather than rushing through them as rote habit. A child who watches a parent light Shabbos candles with genuine feeling internalizes something no lecture could teach them. A child who watches a parent race through Kiddush while checking the time internalizes something too — just not what the parent hoped.
The practical challenge here is that most parents don’t consciously decide to model burden. It creeps in through exhaustion, through the ordinary friction of juggling religious obligation with work, parenting, and everything else life demands. Nobody sets out to make Shabbos look like a chore. It just sometimes ends up looking that way by minute two of a long week.
A few ways to catch and correct this before it becomes a pattern:
Notice your own unscripted commentary. The offhand remarks you make while doing something religious — under your breath, half-joking — are exactly the material your child is quietly cataloging. If your running commentary on Yom Tov prep is mostly complaints about the workload, that’s the takeaway your child gets, regardless of what you say in a formal conversation about why you love being Jewish.
Slow down the moments that matter most. You don’t need every bracha to be a meditative experience, but the ones your children witness most — the Shabbos candles, Kiddush, the blessing over the challah — are worth the extra three seconds of real presence.
Talk about what you love, not just what you’re obligated to do. Kids hear plenty about halachic requirements. They hear much less, in many homes, about why a parent actually finds meaning or joy in a specific mitzvah. Narrate that out loud occasionally.
Remember that your child is building their entire relationship with Yiddishkeit off of you, specifically — not off of theory. Kelemen’s point is not that you need to fake enthusiasm you don’t feel. It’s that authentic joy, when you have it, is worth surfacing deliberately, because it’s doing more chinuch work than almost anything else you could say.
For more of these practical, research-grounded principles on raising children with real emunah, join the inner circle at lawrencekelemen.com.
This blog was co-written with Artificial Intelligence.