Rabbi Lawrence Kelemen, drawing on Rav Wolbe, teaches that the window for planting a child’s earliest sense of faith opens far earlier than most parents assume — and closes, quietly, if it’s missed. Wolbe describes it almost urgently: if a parent delays too long in speaking to their young child in Torah and in the language of holiness, “it’s as if I buried the child” — a real opportunity for planting is lost, not because the child is incapable later, but because the natural moment for that particular seed has a season, like any planting.
One concrete example Kelemen highlights is how young children learn brachos. Ideally, this happens gradually, at home, generally led by a mother, in the ordinary texture of daily life — not as a formal lesson, but as something absorbed the way language itself is absorbed. There’s a real difference, Wolbe notes, between a child singing Shema as a kind of affirmation, and a child saying a bracha, which is an actual address to God. That distinction is easy for an adult to skip past, but it’s exactly the kind of nuance that determines whether the child’s growing sense of God feels alive and real, or feels like recitation.
This is planting in its purest form: slow, unglamorous, and unverifiable in the moment. You won’t see the fruit at three, or six, or maybe even at fifteen. But the belief takes root during exactly the years most parents assume are too early to matter.
Ways to plant emunah in the ordinary rhythm of the week:
1. Let your child hear you speaking to God in natural, unscripted moments — a quiet thank-you after something goes right, a request said aloud when something is hard — not just in formal prayer.
2. Teach brachos gradually and personally, in your own voice, rather than outsourcing the moment entirely to school.
3. Resist the pressure to make every faith-related interaction into a teaching moment. Some of the most durable planting happens in tone, not content — in what your own face and voice do when something sacred comes up.
Planting doesn’t announce itself. It just quietly determines what grows.
For more of Rabbi Kelemen’s teaching on emunah formation in young children, join the inner circle at lawerencekelemen.com.
This blog was co-written with Artificial Intelligence.