Every child in every generation in every family has been faced with the same decision as Adam and Eve in the Garden: will you trust your parents and depend on them for your moral compass, or will you instead attempt to secure the knowledge of good and evil from your own personal experiences. Sadly, every child chooses the same as Adam and Eve, and consequently, seeing their own nakedness and feeling their own shame. The best hope of parents is to delay this "crossing" for as long as possible to where the consequences of a child's actions are the most comprehensible and the least durable.
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There are words, and generally they are large words, whose meanings are difficult to explain but critical to grasp for everyone who desires to live well. Some of these words are:
- Appropriate
- Credibility
- Mature
- Discretion
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Quotable Prager Lines (food for thought):
- When a child asks, "Why? Don't you trust me?", the best response is, "I don't trust human nature."
- The heart of the Torah is based on the command to love the stranger. The other sex is the ultimate stranger. As a man, I have more in common with a tribesman from a remote people with whom I cannot speak because he is a male than I do with my own wife.
- Society should be focused on determining what is good for the whole. In light of the recent judicial activism, I wonder "how far will society bend for the individual?"