Refuting the legal analysis underlying the Supreme Court’s recent ban on spanking is not difficult, as Evelyn Gordon so incisively demonstrates.
The court itself barely offered any legal reasoning. It contented itself with quoting the title of the 1992 Basic Law on the Dignity of Man and stating the obvious: Children are human beings, too.
The court’s social science was no more convincing. It was content with a half-page citation of authorities, without even deigning to tell us what they say. Justice Dorit Beinisch seems blithely unaware that the pendulum has swung once again on the issue of physical punishment (as it is wont to do in such matters).
A number of recent studies have come to the conclusion that moderate physical punishment can be an effective educational tool and doesn’t harm children.
Beinisch’s entire argument against any physical punishment was that any parents who spank their children even once may become child abusers.
She assumes, without support, that every parental spanking is a microcosm of what child abusers do on a continuous basis. But that is false. The means, intent and psychological makeup of the child abuser bear no relation to those of a normal parent who occasionally spanks a child.
Moreover, the argument is logically absurd. No one ever became an alcoholic without taking a first drink, but that hardly mandates Prohibition.
In one respect, however, Beinisch’s opinion reflects a widespread intellectual malady. She suffers from what economist Thomas Sowell has termed cosmic egalitarianism.
She is offended not only by inequalities created by human legal systems, but by those written into the cosmos. Thus she repeats numerous times the trenchant observation that children are little and parents are big — and that apparently offends her.
But maybe God knew what He was doing when He created the world that way. The Torah sees the parent-child relationship as a model for our relationship with God. For that reason, the commandment to honor our parents is placed together with the commandments dealing with our relationship to God.
Children are born dependent. They rely on their bigger and wiser parents to protect them and to guide them, just as we rely on an omnipotent and omniscient God. Children learn from their parents that they are subject to rule and that authority commands respect.
Far from granting parents unlimited authority to punish children in any manner they want, the analogy between the parent-child relationship and our relationship with God imposes severe restrictions on parents.
God created the world only to bestow good on others. Prior to creation, He was complete unto Himself. Everything that happens in this world conforms to that purpose.
If “bad” things happen to us, which we experience as punishments, they are designed to enable us to partake of the greatest possible good: a relationship with Him. (How that works is the subject of entire books, and no book alone will convince anyone.)
Those punishments are forward looking, not punitive. Their purpose is not to hurt us for what we have done in the past, but to improve us with an eye to the future.
As parents then, the sole justification for punishing children is the desire to help them grow to become the best adults they can possibly be. The future, not the past, is our concern.
Punishment inflicted because we are angry, or because we feel personally injured by our children’s failure to heed us, has no parallel in Divine punishment. God needs nothing from us, and we cannot injure Him.
Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe, one of the great ethical teachers of our day, writes that spanking our children because we feel personally injured by them is not punishment. It is vengeance, which is specifically forbidden by the Torah.
God does not “lose it,” and we are not entitled to either. If we cannot limit ourselves to a simple potch, designed only to convey a message and not to hurt the child, Wolbe writes, we should not spank at all.
To make sure that he never punished out of anger, for example, the Alter of Kelm always waited two days before punishing his children.
Most important of all, nothing a parent does should ever cause a child to lose the sense that he or she is loved. Children must understand that it is their wrong actions that necessitate the punishment, not who they are.
As soon as the punishment has been meted out, Wolbe advises, the parent must take pains to demonstrate their love with gentle words.
That love, unfortunately, is something no court can legislate.