Category Archives: Jewish Thought

True and Tragic Colors

Agudath Israel of America’s recent statement regarding the ostensibly Orthodox “Yeshivat Chovevei Torah” took that institution to task for crossing a particularly bright red line by inviting non-Orthodox Jewish clergy to make presentations at a “roundtable” entitled “Training New Rabbis for a New Generation” at its installation of a new president.

The most eloquent and straightforward defense of YCT came in the form of a posting at “The Times of Israel” by a student of the institution, Dr. Ben Elton.

While graciously “respect[ing]” the “right of the Agudah to object to cross-denominational activity” (even citing Lord Jonathan Sacks in concurrence, as Rabbi Sacks has written that “pluralism and Orthodoxy are mutually exclusive”), Dr. Elton asserts that the Wurzberger Rov (Rav Yitzchok Dov Halevi Bamberger), by taking a different position from that of Rav Shamson Raphael Hirsch on the secession of Orthodox Jews from the larger, government-sanctioned pan-Jewish community in Frankfort, is a model for a more inclusive attitude.

The Wurzberger Rov’s permitting of Frankfort’s Orthodox Jews to remain part of the official Jewish community of the city, Dr. Elton contends, “inevitably meant recognizing the status of [the city’s] non-Orthodox rabbis and institutions, perhaps even paying for their upkeep…”

Unfortunately for Dr. Elton’s thesis, it is utterly undermined by documented facts. Whatever the Wurzberger Rov’s reasoning may have been for his decision regarding the Orthodox Jews of Frankfort (as it happens, he supported the secession of other Orthodox communities from their local Jewish pan-community entities), he most certainly did not consider remaining part of the official community to constitute “recognizing the status” of clergy or groups that rejected the Jewish mesorah.

In fact, he clearly stipulated that fees paid by Orthodox members could not be used to support Reform activities in any way. He felt no differently from Rav Hirsch about the fact that Reform represented a heretical movement and could be provided no respect nor support from any believing Jew. And there is no evidence whatsoever that he in any way condoned the “co-operation and dialogue” with non-mesorah-accepting movements that Dr. Elton contends his example suggests.

In truth, the entire comparison is baseless. Rabbi Bamberger was pronouncing only on the permissibility of being part of a Jewish communal entity presenting itself as such in official dealings with the local government regarding limited communal matters. He was not permitting any sort of combined Orthodox-non-Orthodox rabbinical collaboration in rabbinical training like what YCT pointedly and tellingly included in its presidential installation.

Dr. Elton poignantly concludes by asking Agudath Israel to recognize that YCT and others who subscribe to its “vision” in fact “care very much about Torah and mesorah.”

We truly wish that were so. Unfortunately, however, and tragically, there is ample evidence that that YCT and the other components of Rabbi Avi Weiss’ “Open Orthodoxy” movement (its women’s institution, Yeshivat Maharat, and its rabbinical organization, the International Rabbinic Fellowship – “IRF”) care not much at all about either Torah or mesorah. There is abundant reason why even the resolutely “centrist” Rabbinical Council of America does not accept YCT’s rabbinic degrees as qualification for membership.

The evidence of “Open Orthodoxy”’s true essence has been publicly presented by others, most prominently Yated Neeman columnist Rabbi Avrohom Birnbaum and Cross-Currents.com contributor Rabbi Avrohom Gordimer. It is abundant.

One of YCT’s most illustrious graduates, Zev Farber, who received the institution’s most prestigious rabbinic ordination (Yadin Yadin), is a founding board member of the IRF, the coordinator for their Va’ad Giyyur and an advisory board member of Yeshivat Maharat, has publicly contended things like: “The Deuteronomic prophet (i.e. the author of Deuteronomy) was still a human being, his scope remains limited by education and social context.”

And: “Given the data to which modern historians have access, it is impossible to regard the accounts of mass Exodus from Egypt, the wilderness experience or the coordinated, swift and complete conquest of the entire land of Canaan under Joshua as historical.”

And: “The idea that the twelve tribes of Israel were formed by the twelve sons of Jacob has all the appearances of a schematic attempt of Israelites to explain themselves to themselves… These Torah stories are not history, the recording of past events, they are mnemohistory, the construction of shared cultural-memory through narratives about the past.”

And: “Abraham and Sarah are folkloristic characters; factually speaking, they are not my ancestors or anyone else’s.”

He also has called it “impossible” and “unrealistic” to ask Jews plagued by same-sex attraction to “give up on the emotionally fulfilling and vital experience of intimate partnership that heterosexual men and women take for granted” and has encouraged only “exclusivity and the forming of a loving and lasting relationship-bond as the optimal lifestyle” for Jews facing such challenges.

YCT’s Rosh Yeshiva, Rabbi Dov Linzer, was once reported in the New York Jewish Week as having asserted that the Sages of the Talmud were unconcerned with a person’s religious beliefs; that, in the article’s words, “it was Maimonides who introduced the concept that Jews must adhere to basic dogmas, and even he was not consistent in his demands for such adherence.”

He has also asked, as a “reasonable question” whether we “should we be bending the halakhah to conform to our modern notions of egalitarianism.” It is, he decides, “a reasonable question to ask and a hard one to answer.”

YCT’s newsletter has featured a profile of an alumnus whose “most proud accomplishment” was having “created a meaningful Haggadah” for people living lives in violation of a sin the Torah characterizes as “an abomination.” The “Haggadah” was lauded because it “spoke to their understanding of what it means to be liberated.”

Such positions espoused by YCT leaders (and those are but a few of many such examples) are run-of-the-mill notions in the non-Orthodox rabbinic world. They wouldn’t raise any eyebrows in non-Orthodox circles. But how do they comport with “car[ing] very much about Torah and mesorah”? There can be only one answer: they don’t.

Which is why “Open Orthodoxy” and its institutions have felt free to ignore the Jewish religious tradition in the realms of synagogue worship and gender roles. If the mesorah is just an historical artifact of a primitive, unenlightened period, why not just “update” it?

A half-century ago, a combination of optimism and ignorance led well-intentioned Jews to believe that the Conservative movement truly respected our mesorah and was just a more “open” and “accepting” form of Orthodoxy. Today, some Jews, sadly, are making a similarly hopeful error about YCT.

Rav Yosef Dov Soloveitchik once wrote that “Too much harmony and peace can cause confusion of the minds and will erase outwardly the boundaries between [the] Orthodox and other movements.” He knew of what he spoke.

Despite the enticing phrase “Open Orthodoxy” and the protestations of YCT, Yeshivat Maharat and the International Rabbinic Fellowship that they are Orthodox institutions, their true, tragic colors are blindingly evident.

A Contrarian Approach to Kiruv

I unintentionally shocked a Jewish journalist several months ago. I had invited the non-Orthodox reporter to Agudath Israel of America’s offices to introduce her to the organization’s various divisions and projects, and to some of my colleagues. But later, conversing with her about various issues, something I said – although to me it was entirely unremarkable – seemed to take my guest aback.

She had brought up the topic of abortion rights. I noted that Orthodox Jews don’t regard the issue as one of “rights” but rather of right – that is to say, our obligations to our Creator. Odd as it still seems to me now, my guest reacted as if a new lens on the world had suddenly opened before her. She wasn’t about to suddenly adopt the Orthodox paradigm, I’m quite sure. But she admitted that she hadn’t ever considered its contrarian conceptual source – the idea that we are here on earth not to reach our own conclusions and assert our rights but rather to accept G-d’s will and serve Him. Suddenly, she seemed to understand why the Orthodox approach to a number of contemporary issues was so different from her own and that of her own professional and personal circles. She had actually thought a new thought.

I was reminded of the reporter’s minor epiphany by the recently released and much-reported-upon Pew Research Survey of American Jews.

There are all manner of puzzlements in the survey results, likely a result of the very broad definitions employed by the researchers. One category of “Jews” is “Jews by affinity,” which is to say Americans lacking any Jewish parentage or any Jewish education who simply opt to call themselves Jews. There are apparently more than one million of them (which might go a long way toward explaining the survey’s finding that fully one third of all “American Jews” erect a holiday tree in their homes each December).

Similarly suspicious is the survey’s definition of “Orthodox.” How else to explain the bizarre finding that fully 15% of Orthodox Jews regularly attend services in a non-Jewish place of worship? (Or that 4% of them, too, have holiday trees!)

Times, to be sure, are strange. But still.

All that aside, though, the clear and less-contestable takeaway of the survey is that there is a very large and increasing number of halachically Jewish American Jews who have opted out of Jewishness as a religious identification altogether, on whose radar Judaism is a fading blip, if that.

The larger community’s approach to such “unaffiliated” Jews has long been to offer an elaborate smorgasbord of “Jewish” choices: Funky Federation programmatic food, somewhat moldy “denominational” fare (whose expiration dates have come and gone), “tikkun olam” appetizers, various affinity-group pastries “koshered” by adding the word “Jewish” to them (like “Jewish” vegetarianism, or “Jewish” yoga and even “Jewish” activities condemned by the Torah).

Even some of the various Orthodox kiruv, or outreach, groups, all of whom do wonderful work in the American spiritual field (or desert) occasionally lapse into entertainment-mode, enticing unconnected Jews with nosh whose ingredients, while they include healthful Jewish additives, remain essentially nosh.

There’s nothing wrong, of course, with trying to reach Jews “where they are,” with connecting to them through their personal interests or culture. And certainly nothing wrong with using the beauty of a Shabbos (or the aroma of a cholent) to help a Jew begin to “bond” with his or her heritage. But might there be room, even a need, for a… different approach?

What if, instead of special offers and glitzy offerings, we simply proclaimed loud and clear – in billboards and web ads and social media – that being a Jew, like it or not, precious fellow Jew, means being Divinely charged, that it means shouldering, whether it is always comfortable or not, responsibility ? And that ignoring that mandate is a reckless wasting of an opportunity to live a meaningful life by doing G-d’s will? That each of us has a stark and urgent choice: either to regard our lives as the brief opportunities to access eternity they are, or to waste one’s days in the pursuit of stuff and fun and “rights”?

Would such an ‘in your face” challenge just be a total turn-off? Or might its message actually reach Jews, at least those who prefer being challenged to being wooed?

And might, just might, there be more such Jews than we dare imagine?

The common wisdom is that most Jews simply can never “become Orthodox” – that is to say can never come to accept and respect true Jewish belief and halacha. And so there’s no point trying to offer them the entirety of their religious heritage. But maybe the less common but more Jewish wisdom lies in Jewish tradition: that there flickers in every Jew’s heart a spark of desire to serve G-d, that every Jewish soul was present at Mt. Sinai.

Yes, free will exists, and each person in the end makes his or her own choices.

But could the best way to fan some Jewish sparks into flame be to simply, starkly state the Jewish facts – that the Torah is our Divine inheritance, and that striving for a fully observant Jewish life is the mandate of every Jew?

History’s First Complaint

“It was all her fault,” the first man, referring to the first woman, told their Creator, establishing the principle of cherchez la femme in the very first week of history.

In a more precise translation of the Hebrew verse in Beraishis, which Jews the world over will be focused on soon as we begin the public reading of the Written Torah anew, what Adam said was: “The woman whom You provided to be with me, it was she who gave me of the tree and I ate.”

No wonder that the rabbis of the Talmud branded Adam, for those words, an ingrate, a “denier [literally, ‘turner-over’] of a favor.”

What is intriguing and may be significant is the word Adam used for “whom,” asher. It is a common word, and can mean either “that” or “who” or “whom.” But it is often contracted to a single letter, shin, appended to the word that follows.

In at least one place where it isn’t so shortened is in the Creator’s words to Moshe Rabbeinu, announcing the production of a second pair of Ten Commandment Tablets, to replace the ones “asher shibarta,” “that you shattered.”

While that phrase may seem to telegraph disapproval, the Talmudic amora Resh Lakish conveyed a tradition that the word asher should be read there as implying quite the opposite, a pun on the phrase y’yasher kochacha, a congratulatory blessing (that might literally if awkwardly be translated: “may your strength proceed straight!”). So that the phrase “that you shattered” becomes “congratulations for having shattered.” (Yevamos, 62a)

Could the same word in Adam’s mouth imply something similar?

It certainly wouldn’t seem to, at least not on the surface. But surfaces are, well, just surfaces.

No, Adam does not seem to be expressing gratitude to G-d, but rather to be complaining to Him, blaming his own sin on the partner his Creator had seen fit to give him.

Nevertheless, the Torah’s inclusion of the elsewhere congratulatory asher in the first human’s complaint may hint at a deep truth: Sometimes griping masks something very different. Something not readily obvious – even, perhaps, at least consciously, to the griper. Complaining can cover up something deeper and more positive.

It’s a truth that many a spouse, parent and teacher has gleaned from experience. Grousing can be a strange psychological expression of disappointment in the grouser himself, not the groused-about. “It’s all your fault!” sometimes can mean the very opposite.

Adam may have been, in the Talmud’s phrase, a “turner-over of a favor,” someone who inverted a gift into a burden. But that phrase itself is telling. To invert something usually requires recognizing it first as right-side-up. Might part of Adam have fully recognized that his wife was not only a Divine gift but a divine one too, and his complaint have been a misguided projection of his own guilt?

It isn’t that the first woman was free of blame. When G-d pronounces the punishments, she is included. But it was Adam who had been commanded to not eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge; her sin was essentially complicity in his doing so. The buck, though, stopped with Adam. And he surely, at least subconsciously realized that. Might the word asher subtly hint to Adam’s essential recognition of the wonderful gift that his wife was, even as he sought to mitigate his sin on her account?

The speculation might be overreaching But it is intriguing that immediately after G-d’s pronouncements comes the verse “The man called his wife’s name Chava, because she was the mother of all life [chai].” Not exactly a show of resentment.

To be sure, an ingrate is sometimes, well, just an ingrate. But more often than we might realize, what may seem to be simple unthankfulness may also contain a measure of appreciation.

So the next time someone acts as if he or she doesn’t recognize what you’ve done for him or her, stop a minute and, rather than react with umbrage, consider the possibility that just under the ingratitude something very different might lie.

Compartment Syndrome

It’s easy for many of us Orthodox Jews to look down our noses on our fellow members of the tribe who express their Jewishness only on the “High Holidays” and yahrtzeits, to consider them to have missed the point of the Jewish mission. Judaism can’t, after all, be “compartmentalized.” It’s an all-encompassing way of life.

There are, though, even Orthodox Jews, living what seem to be observant Orthodox lives, doing, at least superficially, all the things expected of a religious Jew – eating only foods graced with the best hechsherim and wearing the de rigeuer head-covering of his or her community – who also seem to religiously compartmentalize, who seem to leave G-d behind in shul (if they even think of Him), who seem to not realize that the Creator is as manifest on a Tuesday in July as He is on Yom Kippur.

Which explains how it is that an Orthodox Jew can engage in unethical business practices or abuse a child or a spouse. Or, more mundanely but no less significantly, how one can cut others off in traffic, act rudely, or blog maliciously. Or, for that matter, how he can address his Maker in prayer with words so garbled and hurried that, were he speaking to another mortal, the soliloquy would elicit no end of mirth.

It’s not necessarily the case that such Jews don’t acknowledge Hashem. It’s just that they don’t give Him much thought – even, ironically, while going through the myriad motions of daily Jewish lives. In the most extreme cases, the trappings of observance are essentially all that there is, without any consciousness of why religious rituals are important. What’s left then is mere mimicry, paraphernalia in place of principle.

What’s wrenching to ponder is that even those of us who think of our Jewish consciousnesses as healthy and vibrant are also prone to compartmentalize our Judaism. Do all of us, after all, maintain the G-d-consciousness we (hopefully) attain in shul at all times, wherever we may be? Do we always think of what it is we’re saying when we make a bracha (or even take care to pronounce every word distinctly)? Do we stop to weigh our every daily action and interaction on the scales of Jewish propriety? Or do our observances sometimes fade into rote?

Most of us must sadly concede that when it comes to compartmentalizing our lives there really isn’t any “us” and “them.” All of us live on a continuum here, some more keenly and constantly aware of the ever-present reality of the Divine, some less so. Obviously, those who do think of Hashem and His will when engaged in business or navigating a traffic jam are more religiously progressed than those who don’t. But still.

Rosh Hashana presents all of us a special opportunity to hone our Creator-awareness. The Jewish new year, the start of the Ten Days of Repentance, is suffused with the concept of Kingship (malchiyus). The shofar, we are taught, is a coronation call, and malchiyus is prominent in the days’ prayers. We might well wonder: What has Kingship to do with repentance?

The answer is clear. A king rules over his entire kingdom; there is little escaping even a mortal monarch’s reach, and no subject dares take any action without royal approval. All the more so, infinite times over, in the case not of a king but a King.

And so, we might consider that kingship (or, at least, Kingship) and compartmentalization are diametric, incompatible ideas. If Hashem rules over all, then there are no places and no times when He can be absent from our minds.

Rosh Hashana is our yearly opportunity to ponder and internalize that thought, and to try to bring our lives more in line with it.

Motivators

The recent “news” story about a bar mitzvah boy in Dallas who celebrated the milestone of obligation to observe the Torah’s laws by entertaining family and guests by dancing on a stage with a bevy of Las Vegas-style showgirls reminded me of an article several years ago in The New York Times about such crass missing of the Jewish point.

It introduced something that has become de rigueur in some bar and bat mitzvah circles, something called “motivators.”

While perhaps not on the level of the Dallas debauchery, what the article described was sad enough. It highlighted the profession of a young non-Jewish gentleman from the Virgin Islands clad in a form-fitting black outfit, who “regularly spends his weekends dancing with 13-year-olds… at bar mitzvahs,” according to the report. His is a “lucrative and competitive” profession – he is a “party motivator.”

Such folks are paid to attend bar mitzvahs and other events to make sure “that young guests are swept up in dancing and games,” according to the article. The Caribbean crooner was described as smiling ecstatically at one bar mitzvah “as he danced to Ricky Martin and Jennifer Lopez songs with middle school students” and with their parents.

“Whether you can have a successful bar mitzvah without at least a handful of motivators,” the article asserts, presumably in the name of parents who employ such services, “is debatable.”

One female “motivator,” at a bar mitzvah, “in a black tank top,” was observed at the “children’s cocktail hour” enthralling the 13-year-old boys in attendance. “She just talks about, like, sex and girlfriends,” explained one of the young men, clearly motivated.

Some of the parents are similarly adolescent. While sometimes, the report notes, “they request that their motivators dress modestly… sometimes they request the opposite.”

“Dads especially,” often indicate their preference for provocative women “motivators,” according to the owner of one entertainment agency. Then he heads, he says, unconsciously alighting on an apt metaphor, “to our stable of people” to find the right one for the job.

Were it all a Purim skit, it would be, if in poor taste, perhaps funny. As reality, though, not even the word “tragic” does it justice.

How horribly far the concept of “bar mitzvah” has drifted from its true meaning in these materialistic, vulgar times.

A mitzvah, of course is a commandment, one with its source in the ultimate Commander. And the “bar” refers not to what a bartender tends but rather to the responsibility of the new Jewish young adult to shoulder the duties and obligations of a Jew – the study and observance of the Torah.

And so, a truly successful bar mitzvah is one where the young person has come to recognize that responsibility. Dancers, decadence and the lowest common denominators of American pop culture are hardly fitting “motivators” for such.

The issue is not denominational. There are excesses to be found in celebrations of Orthodox Jews as there are in those of Jews of other affiliations. While the “motivators” phenomenon might represent a particular nadir of Jewish insensitivity, none of us is immune to the disease of skewed priorities, the confusing of essence with embellishment, the allowing of the true meaning of a life-milestone to become obscured by the trappings of its celebration.

In fact, following the directive, a group of highly respected rabbis in the American charedi, or traditionally Orthodox, community, have toned down wedding celebrations (where party motivators are unneeded to get people dancing but where excesses of food and trimmings are, unfortunately, not unheard of). And many of us have taken the initiative to do the same with other celebrations as well, including bar mitzvahs.

At our youngest son’s bar mitzvah celebration, seven years ago, the new man read the Torah portion on the Shabbat after he turned 13, but on the Wednesday before, his Jewish birthday, my wife and I hosted a modest meal for relatives and a few friends – and, of course, our son’s friends and teachers.

There were only three things on the agenda for the evening. My son delivered a d’var Torah, a discourse on a Torah topic, and each of his grandfathers said a few words.

My wife’s father thanked G-d, as he always does at family celebrations, for allowing him to survive the several concentration camps where he spent the Holocaust years, and where he and his religious comrades risked life and limb to maintain what Jewish observance they could.

And my own father, for his part, expressed the deep gratitude he feels to the Creator for protecting him, during those same years, in a Siberian Soviet labor camp, where he and his fellow yeshiva students similarly endured terrible hardships to remain observant, believing Jews. Both grandfathers take deep pride in how their children’s children are continuing the lives and ideals of their parents’ parents, and theirs before them.

And I sat there silently praying that my son would grow further to recognize the mission and meaning of a truly Jewish life, and follow the example of his grandfathers and grandmothers, parents and siblings, uncles and aunts and cousins, many of whom were there to celebrate with him. Thank G-d, he has indeed made us very proud.

The celebration lacked “motivators,” like those in the Times’ article or at the recent Lone Star State lewdness.

But motivators were everywhere.

The Joy of Accountability

A few summers ago, after complaints from local residents, a priest in Tilberg, the Netherlands, was fined several thousand dollars for ringing his church bells just after 7:00 in the morning.

That mid-August, like this one, synagogues around the world – many of them at just about that same time of morning – were sounding an alarm of their own. No complaints were reported about the shofar, or ram’s horn, blasts sounded at the end of morning services. The shofar-soundings began on the first day of the Jewish month of Elul and continue every morning until the day before Rosh Hashana.

The Rambam, Maimonides, famously described the blowing of the shofar on that holiday as a wake-up call – bearing the unspoken but urgent message “Awaken, sleepers, from your slumber.” The slumber, he went on to explain, is our floundering in the “meaningless distractions of the temporal world” we occupy. The shofar throughout Elul calls on us to refocus on what alone is real in life: serving our Creator. And should we choose to hit the spiritual snooze-button, the alarm is sounded the next day, and the one after that.

It is so much easier to sleep, of course, through the alarm clock, both the literal one in the morning and the figurative one that rudely echoes in our hearts as we busy ourselves with the “important” diversions that so often fill our days.

What is more, just as, lost in our morning muddle, we may wish ill on our alarm clocks, we tend at times to resent our life-responsibilities.

How differently we would feel if only we realized the import of obligation – how accountability actually holds the seeds of joy.

The weekly Torah portion usually read near the start of Elul has G-d describing idolatry, the most severe of sins, as bowing down before “the sun, moon or other heavenly bodies that I have not commanded” [Deuteronomy 17:3].

That last phrase was clarified by the Jewish translators of the Torah into Greek, as “that I have not commanded you to serve” – removing any ambiguity from the text; the standard Torah commentary Rashi follows suit.

The Hassidic master Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, however, revealed another layer of the phrase’s meaning.

He noted that there is an exception to the prohibition of genuflecting before something physical: bowing down to a human being. We find, for instance, that the prophet Obadiah bowed before his master Elijah, who, while human, nevertheless embodied a degree of G-dliness. Explained Rabbi Levi Yitzchak: A human being, by virtue of his having chosen and forged a path of holiness in life, is worthy of veneration of a sort that is forbidden to show to any other creation.

What allows human beings to attain so lofty a status, “The Berditchiver” continues, is that we are commanded – creatures intended not just to exist, but to shoulder responsibility. That allows us to become partners in a way with the Divine. And so it is precisely our obligations that exalt us, that place us on a plane above everything else in the universe.

That thought, explained the Hassidic master, lies beneath the surface of the verse cited above. We are forbidden to bow to the sun and moon because “I have not commanded” them – because they are not themselves commanded. They are not charged to choose, instructed in any way to act against their natures.

We humans, however, with our many duties that may cause us to chafe or grumble, are elevated beings, infused with holiness. And our responsibilities are what make our lives potential wells of holiness, what make our existences deeply meaningful.

That idea might grant us some understanding of an oddity: Rosh Hashana is described both as a Day of Judgment and as a joyous holiday. Even as we tremble as we stand “like sheep” before the Judge of all, we are enjoined to partake in festive holiday meals and, as on other festivals, to derive happiness from them.

Perhaps the seeming paradox is solved by the recognition that the reason we can, indeed must, be judged derives directly from our accountability. Even – perhaps especially – when the alarm clock interrupts our reveries, our responsibilities should fill us with the deepest gratitude and joy.

Little Is Much

I must confess that I’m a hardened skeptic when it comes to most “inspirational” stories. Unless something has been attested to by unimpeachable witnesses or otherwise documented (and that doesn’t mean it appeared in an inspirational book), I tend to take such accounts with more salt than my doctor would likely approve of.

But that doesn’t mean there can’t be value, even great value, in a tale, whether or not it ever happened.

Take the story of the “Baal HaTanya,” Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liady, the founder of what today is known as Chabad Chassidus, and his encounter with the miser.

A large sum of money, the story goes, was needed to redeem a groom being held for ransom. Along with two venerated Chassidic luminaries of the time, the young man who would become the Baal HaTanya undertook to raise the sum, and they went to the only man in town wealthy enough to underwrite the cause. Unfortunately, though, the fellow was known as a terrible miser.

True to his reputation, when he answered the knock on his door and was presented with the situation, the wealthy man responded by handing the rabbis a single penny. The Baal HaTanya, to his companions’ surprise, expressed great gratitude to the donor for his contribution. In the version of the story familiar to me, the door then closed on the threesome. The Baal HaTanya waited a moment and knocked again. And when the miser cracked the door open, the rabbi asked if perhaps he could spare one more coin for the cause. The fellow hesitated, disappeared for a moment and handed the rabbi… two pennies, which were also accepted with profuse thanks.

The same thing happened again, and a larger coin was handed over, and again. And, like the “penny on the first square of the chessboard, two on the second” puzzle, the sum of money eventually donated by the man was a large one, sufficient to free the groom.

When the other rabbis asked the future Baal HaTanya what had happened, he explained that the miser was not capable of just shelling out the large sum when first approached. He needed to be asked to contribute only a tiny sum, to break through his miserliness. Once that low hurdle was cleared, his generosity muscle, so to speak, had been exercised and had grown stronger, strong enough for a higher hurdle. And the rest was history – or, at least, a good story, one that, true or not, holds great truth.

The month of Elul is here and, with it, the awareness that we are hurtling toward the Days of Judgment.

For those who take this time of Jewish year seriously – and all of us should – Elul’s days can be daunting. There is so much that should be part of our lives but isn’t, and so much that is but shouldn’t be. There are resolutions we accepted at this time last year and fulfilled only imperfectly, if at all. And new resolutions that beckon from a better place.

The Talmud teaches (in unrelated contexts) that “Taking hold of much can leave one with nothing; taking hold of a more limited thing, though, will succeed” (Yoma 80a, for one example). That idea is true of many things, including advancing our relationships with each other and with G-d.

Incremental changes are not insignificant ones. A small undertaking, whether in behavior, study or attitude, can not only be the first in a series but has intrinsic value. Undertaking to learn a new halacha or to recite a chapter of Tehillim each day won’t overly tax most of us. But it will benefit each of us.

Picking a flower to present to one’s wife or adding that hot pepper your husband so likes to the cholent doesn’t take much time or effort. But small things can bespeak, and can help advance, a relationship.

That’s a good word for Elul: Relationship. The month’s name’s initials are famously said to stand for “I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine” (Song of Songs, 6:3). What we seek during the coming weeks, in the end, is a stronger, more healthy, relationship, with our Creator and with His other creations.

Each morning of this month, until the day before Rosh Hashana, the shofar is blown in shul.

Rabbi Nosson of Breslov writes that the shofar itself is illustrative of repentance. We blow into a small hole, he notes, and what results is a powerful sound.

Small things, in other words, can make big things happen.

A Time for Stringencies

Chumros, or efforts to go beyond the letter of Jewish religious law’s requirements, have gotten a bad name over the years. And it is true, some stringencies can be unwise, even counterproductive. Some are even silly.

I recall a letter to the editor of a now-defunct Jewish magazine whose writer was deeply upset that an advertisement for a dairy product in an earlier issue had run face-to-face with one for a meat product. Many readers, I’m sure, like me, first thought it was meant as a joke. But it wasn’t Purim time and it didn’t carry any indication of wryness or satire. The writer was serious, and, of course, deeply misguided.

But when a stringency is adopted, either by a community or an individual, for a good reason, it should not be resented or mocked. Sometimes a person may feel a need to draw a broader circle than the next guy’s around something prohibited; sometimes a particular era or community will require the adoption of special stringencies. Generally, chumros present themselves in realms like kashrus or the Sabbath, in the form of refraining from eating or doing even something technically permitted. Other stringencies, though, consist of adopting as one’s norm the example of a great person.

Among the greatest Jews who ever lived was the spiritual head of the Jewish people at the time of the destruction of the Second Temple, the famed Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai. The Talmud (Brachos 17a) relates that no one ever greeted him first, as he was always the first to offer greetings, “even [to] a non-Jew in the marketplace.”

Now there’s an unusual – unnecessary, to be sure, but clearly laudatory – conduct worth considering these days, when civility seems on the wane. Obviously one can’t walk through a busy pedestrian area greeting every person one sees. In any event, doing so might not endear one to those serially accosted.

But there are many times when one finds oneself in the presence of another individual or two when the option of a “good morning” or “good evening” hovers in the air, easily ignored but entirely available.

Taking the opportunity to convey the wish, the Talmud teaches us, is something praiseworthy.

And for Jews, the more “Jewish” one looks, I think, the more desirable it is to consider taking on the chumra of emulating Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai. Because in addition to the inherent goodness of acknowledging another human being, there is the unfortunate fact that some people, for whatever reason, are quick to think of Jews, especially Orthodox ones, as “stand-offish.” And our insular lifestyles, even though they are not intended to insult anyone, can inadvertently reinforce that impression. But it’s hard to maintain a bias against Orthodox Jews when one’s head holds the image, too, of a smiling such Jew offering a greeting.

On a fifteen-minute walk to shul a few Shabbosos ago, I met: two other shul-goers, a Muslim family, and a young man of indeterminate ethnicity. I also passed a fellow washing his car. I wished the identifiable Jews a “good Shabbos” (actually, one of them a “Shabbat Shalom”) and offered the others a smile and a “good morning.” All the greetees returned the good wishes, as did a large man with dreadlocks standing in line with me at the kosher Dunkin Donuts a day later. That’s usually the case. Rarely does someone greeted ignore the greeting; and when he does, it’s usually because he didn’t hear it (or couldn’t believe his ears).

Whether my “stringent” behavior made the world any more civil a place I don’t know, but all any of us can do is our own small part.

Some religious Jews, who – rightfully – value modesty and reticence, may feel that it’s somehow not proper to engage strangers in public places. And in some cases that may well be true. But in many, even most, cases, it’s certainly not.

At least it wasn’t in Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai’s eyes.

The Truth About Trayvon

Could there possibly be anything else to say about the George Zimmerman trial that hasn’t already been said?

After all, the supporters of Mr. Zimmerman, who killed teenager Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida last year, have made clear all along their belief that Mr. Martin assaulted Mr. Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer, and that the latter shot his alleged assailant in self-defense. Of course, as everyone knows now, the jury found no reason to endorse a different scenario.

And defenders of Mr. Martin have, both before and after the verdict, made their own, different, version of the happening known – that the teenager was an innocent victim of a trigger-happy, racist cop-wannabe who targeted Mr. Martin because of the color of his skin.

Pundits have since tirelessly trumpeted their convictions, either that the verdict was a triumph of justice or a travesty thereof.

But there is indeed something else to say about the case, and it may well be the most important thing to say. And that is: No one alive but George Zimmerman actually knows what happened that night. And so “taking sides” on the subject is the height of ridiculousness.

Somehow, that self-evident fact seems to have become overwhelmed by all the reaction to the verdict. President Obama came closest to reacting reasonably, stating that Mr. Martin’s death was a tragedy but that “we are a nation of laws, and a jury has spoken” and asking that “every American… respect the call for calm reflection from two parents who lost their young son.” More recently, he added “context” to his reaction, saying that the dead teen “could have been me 35 years ago,” and that even though “somebody like Trayvon Martin was statistically more likely to be shot by a peer than he was by somebody else,” the rallies and protests that have followed the verdict were “understandable,”

Those rallies and protests, thankfully, didn’t degenerate into riots, as some had feared. There were, however, gatherings of outraged citizens chanting slogans about justice; and, in some cities, vandalism of cars and bottle-throwing at cops (nice justice there). Al Sharpton, never one to squander an opportunity to capitalize on tragedies in the black community, announced that he will lead a national “Justice for Trayvon” day in 100 cities to press for federal civil rights charges against Mr. Zimmerman (which, unless new evidence somehow emerges, seems like a futile effort).

And for their part, the usual talk-radio pontificators did their usual pontificating, holding up the verdict (a reasonable one, considering the dearth of evidence) as evidence itself, somehow, that Mr. Zimmerman’s account must be true.

All the surety-silliness leads, or should lead, to some serious thinking on the part of people given to such endeavors – especially Jews, who pride themselves on being thoughtful people.

There are certainly certainties in most people’s lives, convictions that are rightly embraced for any of a number of valid reasons. They include fundamental things, like belief in a Creator, and that the world has a purpose, and that human beings are privileged to find their roles in that purpose. And derivative truths, like the rightness of treating others kindly, and the wrongness of things like murder or theft.

And then there are things we know to be true because we experienced or witnessed them. But to proclaim our certitude about an occurrence removed from our personal experience, and about which we have been served conflicting claims, is senseless. We’re entitled (at least sometimes) to our suspicions, but suspicion is not knowledge. The truth about Trayvon? That we don’t know what transpired.

And even in cases where we can make “educated guesses” – where we possess some, but incomplete, knowledge – it is always beneficial to keep in the backs of our minds (or, even better, their fronts) acceptance of the fact that, for all our intelligence and gut feelings, we still might be wrong.

That’s true not only regarding things like Trayvon Martin’s killing but in myriad realms, like politics and public policy, where all too many of us all too often feel compelled to take unyielding positions based on incomplete knowledge, and see any other position as obviously misguided.

Doing so, though, telegraphs a special sort of ignorance – ignorance of our own ignorance.

Missing the Joke — And the Message

The lack of a sense of humor may not totally disqualify one from being a good teacher, but in, as they say, my humble opinion, it comes close.

I had recent occasion to watch the recorded presentation of an Israeli professor who seemed, regrettably, humor-impaired. That he exhibited no sense of cleverness wasn’t so terrible. That he failed, though, to even recognize humor – in this case a poignant pun – was.

The lecturer was soberly providing his audience what it had come to hear, namely a scholarly assault on the contemporary “Ultra-Orthodox” world and its leaders. And, as has become de rigueur, in his effort to portray the charedi world as hopelessly close-minded, he invoked the famous dictum of the Chasam Sofer (Rabbi Moshe Schreiber, 1762-1839) that “chadash assur min haTorah” – “what is new is forbidden by the Torah.” But he presented it as some sort of absurdly pilpulistic application, not seeming to realize – or, certainly, not communicating – that it was, in fact, ingenious wordplay.

The Chasam Sofer, venerated by Orthodox Jews to this day, was a strong opponent of the nascent Reform movement of his day, which had begun to attract adherents in his native Austria-Hungary and beyond. It was his influence and determination that kept the Reform movement out of Pressburg, the city he served as rabbi for more than three decades. And it was his determination to preserve what we today call Jewish “Orthodoxy”– namely, commitment to the entirety of classical Judaism – that impelled him to humorously hijack the “what is new is forbidden” phrase.

The phrase’s original context is the Biblical prohibition of consuming the “new grain” of each Jewish year until the second day of Passover, when the Omer sacrifice was brought. Rabbi Schreiber employed the phrase as a pun (oh, what injury we do to a joke by explaining it!), to express his entirely unrelated-to-agriculture feeling that even a seemingly innocuous innovation to Jewish life – “what is new” – must be regarded with skepticism, and scrutinized to ensure that it will not prove an inadvertent step in a bad direction.

Some innovation-minded Jews, including some who are fully committed to halacha, find the Chasam Sofer’s approach discomfiting. What they don’t seem to appreciate is that he was not, in fact, offering a blanket rejection of all that is “new” for all time, as people like the humor-compromised professor profess. To begin with, the revered Torah leader of his generation was confronting an immediate and formidable challenge to the mesorah, or Jewish religious tradition, a movement that rejected its very theological foundation. And so, even minor changes in liturgy or synagogue practices represented – at least to a deeply perceptive mind –a potential Trojan Horse. Or, perhaps a better metaphor, a slippery slope.

And secondly, he was not saying that every change in Jewish life or practice is dangerous. The fact that sermons are delivered from Orthodox synagogue pulpits in English, that there are schools and seminaries for Orthodox girls and women, that organized efforts exist to encourage Orthodox Jews to reach out to their non-Orthodox fellow Jews all reflect that fact that what is “new” is sometimes not only permitted but necessary.

What allows the novel to be embraced by Orthodoxy, though, is the considered judgment of the most experienced and learned religious leaders of the Orthodox world. That Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch sermonized in German, that the Chofetz Chaim endorsed the Bais Yaakov movement, that “outreach” was characterized as a Jewish obligation by Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, all demonstrate that the Chasam Sofer’s pun was not intended to promote some sort of spiritual Luddism.

What it was intended to do was to sensitize his generation to the existence, and danger, of slippery slopes, a recognition our own times require of us no less.

In truth, at least with regard to secular beliefs, most American Jews readily understand that small departures from a path can eventually lead to larger, more disturbing, deviations. Any “new” idea, for instance, that that would ever-so-slightly modify First Amendment rights in the United States, like freedom of speech or religion, is rightfully seen as a threat to those high ideals. Not to mention that every teacher – and parent – knows that there are times when making a small allowance can be an invitation to anarchy, when giving an inch begets the loss of a yard, or a mile.

Yes, of course, there are limits to what sort of Jewish “newnesses” should be regarded as wrong. There are many great jokes – speaking of humor – that we charedim tell among ourselves about taking stringencies or “the way it has always been done” too far.

But as a wise man (or wise guy; I think it was me) once said: Just because elephants don’t fly doesn’t mean birds don’t exist. Excessive insistence on fealty to the way things have always been is unwise. But so is pursuing, without the blessings of true Jewish leaders, shiny, happy innovations whose trajectories we cannot know. That was what the Chasam Sofer meant, and expressed in an amusingly creative way.

It’s unfortunate that the Israeli professor wasn’t able to recognize a joke – or the possibility that a venerated Jewish sage might be more prescient than he.

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Reflections on Jews, Judaism, Media and Life