Student Questions

One of the main things we hope to accomplish with this blog is to give you all an outlet for the questions many of you have that we unfortunately don't usually have time to discuss in class. By sending them to questions@maayanot.org, we will have the chance to think about, discuss & research the questions & respond either here, through e-mail or in person. We've already gotten some questions, including a bunch from Rivka Herzfeld. We will be addressing them one by one - I'll start here. Rivka asked:

If a כהן marries and has a child with someone who is forbidden to him, why is the child punished? He didn’t do anything wrong, and it seems unfair that someone should be penalized for something his father did.

This is a hard question. We know that Judaism does not believe in vicarious liability ("לא יומתו אבות על בנים...איש בחטאו יומת"). The question can be expanded to anyone with restrictions based on their birth status, for a ממזר to עמלק. The question is also true in the reverse - why should we reap the benefits of the actions of אברהם אבינו, or כהנים be privileged because אהרון earned the כהונה?

Without fully answering the question, I hope to make it a bit easier to deal with and quote an excerpt from an article I wrote a while back for the Purim edition of Ma'ayanei Torah:

Perhaps the key to understanding this issue is the following distinction: Children are not punished for their parents’ actions. This is both intuitively unfair, and refuted by the pasuk cited above. However, no one disputes that the actions of parents can affect the circumstances into which their children are born, and in which they grow up. As an extreme case, a pregnant woman who smokes crack will harm her innocent child. The same with parents who choose to waste all there money on lottery tickets rather than properly feed their children, or who abuse their children. Actions have consequences that extend beyond the actors themselves to the people around them. It's still not "fair", but it at least puts it into a framework that is more recognizable. עמלק's children are condemned through no fault of their own, but that is just an inherited status based on the decisions made by their ancestors, the same way that our status as Jews is based on our parents response of נעשה ונשמע, or Avraham finding Hashem. Your circumstance won't determine whether or not you get to עולם הבא, just the challenges you'll have to face to get there.