"We can be our families best teachers" #devartorah#Vaetkhanan#parashat hashavua

 In an unsigned letter to the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, the author writes: 

We teach best by example. Edmund Burke said, “Example is the school of mankind,          and they will learn at no other.” To me one of the clearest examples of teachers who             care about people they teach come out of the music classroom. Here are musicians,             performers themselves, some sufficiently talented to be recitalists. Yet they sit in a             room with a beginning violinist, listening to the squawk and screech and scrape of the         bow across those strings.  How can they stand it-the violation of their art, this                    desecration of music? Because a music teacher cares more about that child than about         the art itself

 Someone said, “A mediocre teachers tells, a good teacher explains, a superior teacher demonstrates, but the great teacher inspires.”…”A teacher affects eternity,” said Henry Adams; “he can never tell where his influence stops.”

No wonder the rabbis teach after a long list of commands, “And the merit of Torah study is equal to all of these.” (BT Shabbat 127a) The commandment to teach our children can be found in this week’s Torah portion, Va-etchannan for the first paragraph of the Shema is contained within it. One of the most important mitzvot enumerated in this prayer is to teach these words diligently to our children. (Dt. 6:4) The sages maintain that grandparents are also obligated to teach these things to their grandchildren. (BT Kid. 30a) The Sifre, an early midrash on Deuteronomy, expands this commandment to teach Torah not only to our biological children, but anyone whose impression of Judaism is likely to be shaped by their contact with you. (Etz Hayyim Humash, page 1026)