How to Help Children Prepare for Yom Kippur Without Making It Frightening
A child asks, on the walk home from shul, whether Hashem forgives everything on Yom Kippur. It is late, the child is tired, and a parent says yes, because that is the kind of question we answer quickly.
Chazal answered that question far more carefully than we just did, and their answer, which sounds at first stricter, is the most reassuring thing a child can be told about this day. The Torah says of Yom Kippur:
כִּי בַיּוֹם הַזֶּה יְכַפֵּר עֲלֵיכֶם לְטַהֵר אֶתְכֶם מִכֹּל חַטֹּאתֵיכֶם
Ki vayom hazeh yechapeir aleichem l'taheir eschem mikol chatoseichem.
"For on this day He shall atone for you, to purify you from all your sins." (Vayikra 16:30)
The day itself purifies. And yet the Mishnah in Yoma teaches that for wrongs between a person and his fellow, Yom Kippur does not atone until he has appeased his fellow. If the day purifies, why does it stop at the doorway of another person? Why "from all your sins," and then a boundary?
Because the one thing the holiest day of the year will not do for us is the thing only we can do. That is not a limitation on Yom Kippur. It is the definition of what Yom Kippur is for. The day handles what stands between us and Hashem. What stands between us and a brother or a classmate waits for us to walk across the room. A child who thinks Yom Kippur is a verdict can only sit and hope; a child who knows it is a task can get up and do it. Children are much better with tasks than with verdicts.
What a child hears when we say Yom Kippur
It is worth taking inventory of what the day sounds like from three feet off the ground. The adults do not eat or drink, all day. Everyone wears white and some wear shoes that look wrong. Shul lasts longer than any other day of the year. And somewhere a classmate has used the word "sealed," with no context attached.
Each item on that list loses its charge the moment it is named in advance. The fast is for adults; children eat, and we can say so in one sentence and not revisit it. The white is not a costume of judgment; in the words Torah Live's film for young children uses, we like to wear white clothing so we are just like malachim. The length has a shape: the day's davening comes in separate tefillos, and a child can be told which one he is coming for. And "sealed" belongs to a conversation about how seriously Hashem takes us, and we will come back to it.
What we never do is explain the day through danger. Nothing in a child's behavior endangers anyone, and no one, the Sages teach us to remember, can claim to know the reasons behind what G-d does. A parent who keeps those two lines uncrossed has already prevented most of the fear.
The one thing the day will not do for us
Back to the puzzle, because the puzzle is the reassurance. The Mishnah's boundary means the day is not something that happens to a child while he sits and hopes. It is closer to something every family has done at the kitchen table.
Consider a child who tears a page in a sefer. The reflex is to hide it. What actually happens, in most homes, is quieter: the page is taped, carefully, and the tape stays visible for years, and the sefer goes right back into use. Nobody pretends the tear never happened. Nobody throws out the sefer either. Yom Kippur is not a new copy of the book. It is the repair, and the tape is allowed to show.
The Rambam describes teshuva in exactly this workmanlike way: leaving the sin behind, removing it from one's thoughts, regretting what was done, and resolving not to return to it. A sequence, not a feeling. He writes, too, that while teshuva is accepted all year, in the ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur it is more beautiful still and is received at once. These days are not a countdown to a verdict. They are the days the workshop is open latest.
The Mishnah in Yoma even gives us a character to learn from, and children recognize him instantly. It speaks of the person who says: I will sin and repent, I will sin and repent, and it teaches that such a person is not given the chance to repent. He is the person who apologizes in order to be allowed to continue. Every child has met him at recess, and some weeks every child has been him. We see that Hashem is not collecting the words of an apology; He is watching for the repair, and a repair you plan to undo is not a repair at all.
Teaching a child to say the hard sentence
If the day's real work is appeasing the people we hurt, then the skill of the season is the apology, and an apology is a skill, not a mood we wait for children to be struck by.
Researchers pooled twenty randomized studies covering 1,472 children and teenagers across ten countries, all of them taught in ordinary classrooms what forgiveness is and how it works. The children who were taught it forgave more readily and carried less anger than the children who were not, with a moderate effect on forgiveness and a smaller one on anger. The authors note that the measures were self-reported and that the sample was schoolchildren rather than children in treatment. Forgiveness, it seems, is not only a feeling. It is a skill, and skills are taught.
So we teach the sentence, at the kitchen table, before the day: "I did it, and I am sorry, and I will not do it again." Three clauses, the Rambam's sequence in a child's mouth: owning it, regretting it, leaving it. Notice what it does not require: tears, a speech, or a performance of remorse in front of an audience. And because a repair needs two hands, we teach the other half too: when your brother says it to you, the answer is "I forgive you," said like you mean to be done with it.
The most effective teaching, though, costs the teacher something. Consider a mother, in a scene that is illustrative rather than reported, who tells her seven year old on Erev Yom Kippur that she is sorry for shouting that week. The child, who has been told for days that Yom Kippur is when we say sorry, looks genuinely startled, because it had not occurred to him that the day applies to her too. We see that children learn what forgiveness costs by watching who pays it, and the first person they watch is us.
Five things that go away for a day
For young children, Torah Live's Lessons for Little Ones film on Yom Kippur is a small model of how to teach the day without fear. It counts the Aseres Yemei Teshuva on ten fingers, five and five. Then it takes the things adults set aside, eating and drinking, bathing, creams, leather shoes, and wipes each one off the screen while the children join in. Nothing is banned with a frown; things simply go away for a day. When the child on screen says, "But I'm a little boy, so I'm gonna be eating," the answer is warm and immediate: that's right.
That is the structure to borrow. The five inuyim are presented as absences, not punishments, and the child is given a role that is neither fasting nor fear: eat your breakfast, play quietly, be one of the people the day is about.
An older child, meanwhile, can be given the davening itself, in child-sized pieces. There are two ways to talk to Hashem, in the words of the Siddur and in your own words, and a long Yom Kippur becomes bearable for a child who knows he is allowed both. The Torah Live course Talking to Hashem is built around exactly that distinction, and Emunah and Tefillah takes an older child deeper into what talking to Hashem changes. For our own preparation, Rav Yitzchak Berkovits teaches the adult version of this same work in the Elul and Tishrei series Lachshov.
What to do in the ten days
- Answer the fast question factually and once: adults from bar and bas mitzvah age do not eat or drink, and children do. Then stop; repetition teaches a child there is something to worry about.
- Do not decide a child's fasting practice from an article, this one included. When children begin to practice fasting depends on age, health, and halacha, so ask your Rav, and involve a doctor where health is a factor.
- Give a young child a job for the day: play quietly, look after a younger sibling for ten minutes, carry the machzor.
- Teach the sentence before the day: "I did it, and I am sorry, and I will not do it again." Rehearse it over something small.
- Say your own apology out loud, to your own child, where they can hear it.
- Choose one moment of shul the child is old enough to sit for, Kol Nidrei or Neilah, and go home before the moment they are not.
Questions parents ask
At what age do children start fasting? This is a halachic and medical question about a specific child, so ask your Rav, and a doctor where health is involved.
Do children need non-leather shoes? The widespread practice is that adults put away leather shoes; communities and circumstances differ for children, so ask your Rav.
What is kapparos, and do we have to use a chicken? There are two established practices, a chicken twirled overhead or money given to tzedakah. Families follow their own custom; ask your Rav.
What if my child refuses to apologize? Skills fail under pressure. Go back to rehearsing the sentence over small things, model it yourself, and let Yom Kippur be one occasion for it rather than the deadline.
Is it normal for a child to be frightened by Yom Kippur? Common, and usually a sign the child has heard about the verdict without hearing about the repair. The remedy is the Mishnah's own: hand the child the part of the day that is a task.
The child on the walk home deserves a better answer than the quick yes, and now we have one. Hashem forgives on Yom Kippur what is between us and Him; what is between you and your brother, He is waiting to watch you repair. That is what "sealed" was always about: not a door closing on a child, but how seriously Hashem takes what we do to each other. The tape on the page is not the record of a failure. It is the proof that somebody wanted the sefer back in use, and this is the season we do the taping. Teach the sentence, hand out the jobs, and let the children see us pay for our own apologies. For the davening side of the preparation, the courses above are included with a Torah Live subscription at torahlive.com/signup.
