A mailing from the Yiddish Book Center, an Amherst, Massachusetts-based cultural nonprofit dedicated to translating and promoting Yiddish books, is sitting on my desk. The oversized envelope contains a fundraising letter and various enclosures.
Emblazoned across the front of the envelope is the large word “Yiddish,” followed by the legend, its second word highlighted:
“Our last chance to keep it alive forever!”
Someone really should buy these folks a bus ticket to Williamsburg.
The other day, waiting to board a bus, I was moved to think about empathy.
Unfortunately, the prod came in the form of the opposite, crass selfishness. A young woman approached the group of us waiting to step up into the vehicle and insinuated herself at the front of the long line. She had no visible physical impairment, made no request for anyone’s permission, offered not even a perfunctory “excuse me.” She seemed entirely oblivious to the fact that other people occupied the universe at the time, some even in her immediate vicinity.
I could read the minds of my fellow future passengers. Their faces telegraphed my own mental reaction: Who does she think she is? How would she like it if someone cut before her in a line? Yes, she would probably reply in puzzlement. “But that’s not what’s happening. I am the one cutting in here, not someone else cutting in before me.” The lady, in other words, was empathy-impaired.
“My sins I recount today,” as the waiter, just released from prison, told Pharaoh. I recall myself as a small boy armed with a magnifying glass on a sunny day, incinerating individual ants out of sheer curiosity. I even remember watching without pain or protest as my buddy devised creative ways of dispatching grasshoppers, ever-present victims of little boys in early-60s Baltimore summers. Some claim that killing insects as a child presages the eventual emergence of a serial killer. So far, though, thank G-d, I haven’t much felt the urge to commit murder; and when I have, I have managed to overcome it.
Today, in fact, when an insect finds its way into my home, I always try to capture the invader and escort him or her safely to the great outdoors. (All right, mosquitos are an exception, but they are the aggressors.)
After all, I wonder, how would I like it if I were a stinkbug and someone chose to squash me or spray me with poison or flush me down the toilet? Empathy, again.
Being concerned with the wellbeing of an insect, or for that matter a dog or cat or cow, is but one rung on the empathy ladder. The Torah teaches us that animals, in the end, although they may not be needlessly hurt, exist for human servitude and food, things we would surely not wish for ourselves. Our ultimate and most powerful concern for “the other” is meant to be for other human beings.
What occurred to me at the bus stop was that, while some may gauge human spiritual growth by religious meticulousness or proficiency in texts or the ability to deeply meditate, the most essential marker of spiritual progress may well be how far one has progressed from the selfishness that defines us at birth toward true, encompassing empathy. (I have far to go; caring about bugs is easier than truly caring about people, especially some people. But most of us have, over our years of living, grown, to various degrees, to appreciate empathy.) The severely empathy-impaired, like the girl on the bus line, are essentially children, perhaps infants.
It is the import of empathy, of course, that imbues Rabbi Akiva’s statement (in the Midrash, quoted by Rashi) that the verse, “Love your fellow as yourself” (Vayikra, 19:18) is a “great principle of the Torah.” And Hillel’s famous response to the potential convert who insisted on learning the entire Torah on one foot: “What is hateful to you do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and study it” (Shabbos, 31a).
Jews the world over are reading and studying these days about Avrohom, the subject of the weekly Torah readings. It is not insignificant that the first of our forefathers is characterized by our tradition not only as the champion of monotheism – the quintessential Jewish idea – but as the paragon of chesed, or “kindness to others.” His rejection of idolatry, even to the point of risking his life, is of a part with his pining for strangers to welcome and feed even when in great pain from his adult circumcision.
Which points to a deeper truth, one that might be germane to the akeida, Avrohom’s “binding” of Yitzchok his son: Although some choose to see human empathy as a simple evolutionary adaptation that helps protect the species, a believing Jew’s dedication to the other is ultimately expressed in the context of his dedication to the Other, that is to say to G-d. We are born utterly selfish; we are meant to strive toward utter selflessness, to care about and for our fellows, and to be, in the end, selflessly dedicated servants of the Divine.
© 2013 Rabbi Avi Shafran
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.
© 2013 Rabbi Avi Shafran
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.
© 2013 Rabbi Avi Shafran
The very same thought occurred to me and to one of my daughters the night of July 4. I was walking home from Maariv (evening services) in Staten Island; my daughter was looking out into her back yard in Rockland County.
The thought? That fireworks are amazing. But nowhere near as amazing as fireflies.
My first encounter with the legendary Rabbi Moshe Sherer, z”l, the late president of Agudath Israel of America and the man who hired and mentored me as the organization’s spokesperson, was an unexpected phone call offering praise and criticism.
It was the mid-1980s, and I was a rebbe, or Jewish studies teacher, in Providence, Rhode Island at the time. Occasionally, though, I indulged my desire to write op-eds, some of which were published by the Providence Journal and various Jewish weeklies.
One article I penned in those days was about the bus-stop burnings that had then been taking place in religious neighborhoods in Jerusalem and elsewhere in Israel. Advertisements on the shelters in religious neighborhoods began to display images that were, to put it genteelly, not in synch with the religious sensibilities of the local residents, for whom modesty was a high ideal and women were respected for who they were, not regarded as means of gaining attention for commercial products.
Scores of the offensive-ad shelters were either spray-painted or torched; and, on the other side of the societal divide, a group formed that pledged to burn a synagogue for every burned bus-stop shelter. It was not a pretty time.
My article was aimed at trying to convey the motivation of the bus-stop burners, wrong though their actions were. Imagine, I suggested, a society where heroin was legal, freely marketed and advertised. And a billboard touting the drug’s wonderful qualities was erected just outside a school. Most of us would never think of defacing or destroying the ad but most of us would probably well relate to the feelings of someone who took things into his own hands. For a charedi Jew, gross immodesty in advertising in his neighborhood is no less dangerous, in a spiritual sense, and no less deplorable.
Rabbi Sherer had somehow seen the article and he called to tell me how cogent he had found it. But, he added – and the “but,” I realized, was the main point of the call – “my dear Avi, you should never assume that the culprits were religious Jews. Never concede an unproven assertion.”
I was taken aback, since hotheads certainly exist among religious Jews. But I thanked my esteemed caller greatly for both his kind words and his critical ones. I wasn’t convinced that my assumption had really been unreasonable, but, I supposed, he had a valid point.
To my surprise, several weeks later, a group of non-religious youths were arrested for setting a bus-stop aflame, in an effort to increase ill will against the religious community. How many of the burnings the members of the group, or others like them, may have perpetrated was and remains unknown. But Rabbi Sherer had proven himself (and not for the first or last time) a wise man.
What recalled that era and interaction to me this week were the reports from Israel that arrests had been made in the 2009 case of a gunman who entered a Tel Aviv youth center for homosexuals and opened fire on those inside, killing two people and wounding 15 before escaping.
Both Israeli and western media freely speculated at the time that the murderer was likely a charedi, bent on visiting his idea of justice upon people who live in violation of the Torah’s precepts.
What has apparently turned out to be the case, though, is that the rampage at the club had nothing to do with either charedim or religious beliefs. It was reportedly a revenge attack in the wake of a minor’s claim that he had been abused by a senior figure of the club. A family member of the minor allegedly went to the club to kill the suspected abuser but, unable to find him, opened fire indiscriminately. (Unsurprisingly, but worthy of note all the same, none of the media pundits or bloggerei who laid the shooting at the feet of charedim have offered apologies.)
There are, to be sure, unsavory people in charedi communities, as there are in every community. Religious dress and lifestyle are no guarantees of what kind of person lies behind the façade. The Talmud includes a difference of opinion about how “Esav’s personification,” the angel with whom Yaakov wrestled, appeared to our forefather. One opinion holds that the malevolent being looked like “a mugger”; the other, “like a religious scholar.”
But for anyone to assume that any particular crime must have been the work of someone in the charedi community – or in any community – bespeaks a subtle bias born of animus, whether recognized by its bearer or not.
And such assumptions are criminal in their own right.
© 2013 Rabbi Avi Shafran
I was recently privileged to spend the good part of a week on the tree-studded rural campus of my alma mater, Yeshivas Ner Yisroel (the Ner Israel Rabbinical College, according to the sign at its entrance). As always, visiting the place where I studied some forty years ago was an enthralling experience.
There have been changes, to be sure, at Yeshiva Lane, the winding private road that is the yeshiva buildings’ address. What was the main study hall in my day now serves the yeshiva’s high school division; and a magnificent newer beis medrash stands where, in the 1970s, an old house occupied by a faculty member’s family sat on a hill. New housing has risen up for faculty and married kollel students – there is a long waiting list of kollel-fellow families living “in town” (that is to say, Baltimore and its suburb Pikesville) who are anxious to move onto the yeshiva campus. (Kollel fellows who can no longer afford to be engaged in full-time Torah study understand that their campus apartment or townhouse should be offered to a a full-time kollel fellow’s family.)
Torah life and study, and children, permeate Yeshiva Lane. Students and staff members walk to or from the study hall, often in studious conversation with one another; and parents driving cars and vans shuttle their children to schools “in town.” After school hours, the bevies of bicycles lying near the entrance of each of the apartment buildings welcome their owners back. A small playground suddenly comes to life, echoing with the sweetest sound in the world, happy kids at play.
On the Sabbath, the scene is idyllic. With no traffic, carpools, appointments or any reason to rush, a special calm settles over the campus. The songbirds that must have been there the entire week suddenly stand out, adding avian Shabbos songs to the ambiance. In the afternoon, after services and the festive Shabbos meal, parents sit on the balconies of their homes, watching their children at play, or study or just relax. A special lecture is offered for women, and husbands take a break from their studies to allow their wives to attend. Everyone looks after everyone else and everyone else’s children. The community is a model of caring. Every neighbor is neighborly.
Life on Yeshiva Lane unmistakably revolves around the study halls, where a total of close to 900 boys and men delve into the Talmud and other Jewish sources, usually studying in pairs. And the dynamos that are the batei medrash operate on Shabbos no less energetically than during the week, and are filled with young and not-so-young men from early morning until late at night.
I took the opportunity to spend a couple hours in one of those study halls; it was hard to find a seat. I applied myself to my own studies for most of the time, and then listened in to several of the pairs of students studying in my vicinity. It was as if I had been transported four decades into the past; the material and method of learning were more than familiar. And four decades hence, I realized, the room’s walls would hear the same sort of academic conversations, about the same texts. The Torah has been the focus of Jewish minds over millennia; and always will be.
Like all good things, though, my visit came to an end and I returned to a very different “ultra-Orthodox” world, at least a very different depiction of it than the one I had just experienced.
My job immerses me in the media. And awaiting me were the usual reports and blog postings about Orthodox Jews’ real or imagined crimes and misdemeanors, and the regular opinion pieces equating Orthodox belief and standards with backwardness, sexism, “phobias” and intolerance.
A special welcome-back “present” was a long frothing-at-the-mouth diatribe in a respected Jewish periodical, written by a self-described “polymath” angrily decrying the growth of the charedi community and its “Jewish fundamentalism,” which, he contends, “threatens the fabric of American Jewish life.” The would-be dragon-slayer railed against “the coercion and ignorance prevalent in American ultra-Orthodox communities”; asserted that charedi lives are “a distortion of Judaism” and fuel an “apparatus of fear, manipulation and power mongering”; sees something sinister if not criminal in the acceptance of Pell grants by yeshiva students who qualify for them; and sounds a dire warning that, because of charedi Jews’ generally large families, “New York Jewry, within a generation, will be fundamentalist, poor, uneducated and reactionary.”
Two depictions of the same subject, one a Rembrandt, the other a Picasso. What comes to mind is the famous musing of the Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu. “Last night I dreamt that I was a butterfly,” he told his students. “Now I do not know if I am Chuang Tzu, who dreamt himself a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he is Chuang Tzu.”
No, reality wasn’t what I returned to last week, but rather what I left behind. The portrait painted by a jaundiced media and the precious polymath is the dream, a fever dream. What I saw in Baltimore – which is duplicated in every charedi community I’ve lived in or visited – is the reality.
© 2013 Rabbi Avi Shafran
It might not be quite up there with the first day of spring or grandchildren, but one of the undeniably wonderful gifts the Creator has bestowed on mankind is the ripe avocado.
The buttery consistency, the unique pastel coloration, and the divinely subtle taste all combine to make it truly a fruit to be thankful for. I have a few slices each morning, joined by lettuce and tomato on toast; a wondrous, nutritious and flavorful start to the day.
And most every time I open one of the fruits and gently rock the point of a sharp knife into its pit before easing it out, I think back at how clueless I was as a teenage yeshiva boy in Israel forty-odd years ago.
I had never eaten – or even seen – an avocado at that point. If supermarkets in my childhood’s Baltimore even stocked the fruit, my mother had never bought one. We did fine on Jewish food, the Eastern European kind, and had our share of American fare too. But exotic fruits weren’t part of my family’s culinary offerings.
Then, suddenly, in a new and very different clime, avocados were everywhere. I didn’t find much beyond tomatoes and falafel in the Israeli diet to sate me, and, skinny as I was to begin with (ah, the thin old days!), I lost weight during that first post-high-school year of study. Although the more cosmopolitan Americans in the Israeli yeshiva I attended, like the natives, devoured the avocados that were provided us each day, I took one look at the mushy, slimy, greenish stuff they spread on bread and my only reaction was pass the leben please.
Why am I sharing this? Stay with me, please.
I came to realize, only many years later, married and living in northern California, how wondrous avocados are (and, in the 1980s, they were four for a dollar at any roadside stand!). What a fool I had been, the smarter, older me realized, to have once shunned the wondrous food (not to mention to have gone so hungry for being so finicky).
Similarly, when later that decade my family and I moved to New England, I was chagrined to discover that homes in our Providence neighborhood had steam heat, with each room sporting a heavy iron radiator that I half-expected to one day explode. I had always associated such metal monstrosities with lower-class living, and modern life as a forced-air world.
It took only a short while (as I aged, apparently, my stubbornness waned) to appreciate the wonderful warmth – second only to a fireplace – that a steam heat radiator provided. The occasional spurts of steam humidifying the air, the place for the children to place their snow-drenched mittens (and all of us, assorted clothing, to become comfortably warm) to dry. A strange Shafran kids custom was placing Corn Chex on the radiator cover to “toast” them. Even the cacophonous clinging and clanging of the steam pipes became, to my ears, magnificent music, the notes signaling that the house would soon be cozily warm.
And so I arrive, at last, at my point, which is a simple one. What was true for me about avocados and radiators is likely true about many other things in all of our lives. Not just things, but people and places too. Instead of wasting precious moments – and sometimes years – grumbling to ourselves about what seems unpleasant, we do ourselves a great favor to wonder if the generators of the grumbles may in fact be blessings well-disguised. Considering that might just lead us to complain a little less and to, rightly, appreciate our here-and-now worlds a little more.
© 2013 Rabbi Avi Shafran
Olivewood is beautiful. It reminds me of Eretz Yisrael and little carved camels; it has a delicate, calming hue. And silver, well, it is pure and shiny and smooth, and brings sefer Torah ornaments to mind. The esrog boxes made of ornately carved olivewood and elegant, glimmering silver are most fitting containers for holding an objet d’mitzvah. My personal preference, though, is cardboard.
Not any cardboard, that is, but my cardboard, the white heavy-paper stock box in which an esrog of mine, many years ago, was packed when I bought it. These days, the standard-issue boxes tend toward illustrated green affairs. The old-fashioned white ones were more bland, but also better canvases on which a child’s imagination could assert itself.
And so my old esrog box—or at least its panels, re-attached now to a more sturdy modern box, covering up the garish green—is unique. Its sides and top feature a young child’s rendering in colored markers of, respectively, an esrog and lulav; a sukkah; a smiley-face;and (inexplicably but endearingly) a turtle whose shell is a sukkah covered with schach). The artists are now either mothers or “in shidduchim,” but some of us like, on occasion, to time-travel. We look at our grown children and see five-year-olds where they stand. The artwork was beloved to me many years ago when it was created; it’s no less beloved to me now.
And so, in my own personal ritual, I yearly unpack my new esrog from its sale-box and delicately place it in the one whose panels have enclosed each of my esrogim over nearly twenty years. It’s not olivewood, and not silver. Not even gold or platinum. It’s more precious than that.
I admit I get some stares in shul. Some may think I’m a cheapskate, unwilling to shell out a few dollars for what they think would be a more respectable container for a holy object, or insufficiently aware of the importance of hiddur mitzvah, the ideal of “beautifying a commandment.” Others, though—at least I like to imagine—understand the ethereal beauty of my unusual esrog-box, and perhaps are brought to some memories of their own, and even to some thoughts appropriate to Sukkos.
The word sukkah, sefarim note, can be seen as rooted in “socheh”—“to see” or “to perceive.” A sukkah, it seems, can afford us a deeper perspective on life. Most people—and Jews are people too—go through life trying to “get stuff.” What storehouses of gold and silver once conferred on their owners is today bestowed by new-model cars and luxurious homes built on the ruins of less luxurious predecessors. But stuff is stuff.
And even those of us who buy used vehicles and live in modest homes are far from immune to the “get stuff” societal imperative. We may apply it differently, limited as we are by reality. But we still feel the push to add to the inventories we’ll never take with us.
When we sit in our primitive week-house, though, outside the homes that harbor so many of our possessions, we may find it easier to realize that our accumulations are not essential. We can exist without them. They do not define us. They will one day be left behind for good.
It might seem odd, but that thought—after all, Sukkos is zeman simchaseinu, “the time of our happiness”—is a joyous one. For true happiness begins with the realization of what doesn’t really make us happy. Possessions may provide a rush but, like any drug’s, it quickly wears off. The soul is not satiated, which is why, as per Chazal, “No man dies with half his desires in hand.”
True joy comes from things more rarified than what can be purchased. It comes from our relationships not with things, but with people—our parents and our children, our teachers and our students, our friends and our neighbors.
What we really have in life is not what we own, but what we are.
Some who have seen me walking to shul on yomtov with my reconstituted cardboard esrog box proudly in hand may have wondered why I hadn’t opted for a hiddur mitzvah. What they failed to comprehend is that I did.
© 2012 AMI MAGAZINE
I snitched on some fellow Jews not long ago. To a government agency yet. It did leave a strange taste, but I think it was the right thing to do.
What prompted my unprecedented role as informant was the sight of an advertisement on the side of a New York City bus. It featured, if that’s the right word, the face of a wizened woman in a sickbed, oxygen tubes protruding from her nose, her eyes seeming to gaze at the angel of death himself. The caption read: “Dying from smoking is rarely quick… and never painless.”
The ad was strikingly diametric to the usual bus-ad fare, the touting of consumer goods, entertainment, diversions and worse. And its tag line appeared not only in English but in Spanish too. Which is what got me thinking about becoming a stool pigeon.
There was a time when smoking was regarded as a harmless pastime—even a healthy one. (“More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette!” boasted one 1940s ad.) And even in less distant times, the inhalation of burning tobacco smoke has been seen as an unhealthy habit but not a potentially suicidal one.
These days, though, no one denies that smoking is a major risk factor for an assortment of dire ailments, including heart disease and lung cancer. According to the Centers for Disease Control, more deaths are caused each year by tobacco use than by illegal drug and alcohol abuse, vehicular injuries, suicides, and murders. Combined.
“Smoking,” the CDC notes, “harms nearly every organ of the body” and contributes not only to heart ailments and a broad host of cancers, but to strokes and reproductive problems as well.
And yet there are parts of the observant Jewish world that seem impervious to the fact, or at least late to the realization, that smoking not only takes a medically measureable toll on all who indulge in it, but causes many people to die much sooner than they would have had they not come to nurture the bad habit.
There is a well-known responsum from the revered Rav Moshe Feinstein, of blessed memory, in which the renowned decisor stopped short of forbidding smoking as a matter of clear-cut halacha. But not every inadvisable act, not even every dangerous one, is necessarily forbidden by halacha. What is more, the responsum is 30 years old, dating to a time when dangers of tobacco were suspected but their full gamut and seriousness not yet fully appreciated.
Perhaps more germane, the halachic rationale for not forbidding smoking is a Talmudic principle: When it comes to common (hence not necessarily subject to prohibition) but foolish behavior, shomer pesayim Hashem—G-d protects fools (Psalms 116:6).
And so, to return to my first and likely last act of stoolie-hood, shortly after seeing the bus ad, I contacted the New York City agency responsible for it and informed a bureaucrat that the Orthodox Jewish community in, among other places, southern Brooklyn and Williamsburg, harbors a good number of smokers—with a fairly high collective intelligence quotient. Might it be possible, I asked, for buses servicing those areas to sport ads similar to the one I saw and, in order to seize the attention of the local population, with Yiddish translation rather than Spanish?
I don’t know if my suggestion fell into fertile soil or on deaf ears. I’m not even sure if the bus ad campaign is still active; I haven’t seen the wizened lady of late.
But every time I see people—especially yeshiva students, who may soon be married (or may have recently been) and who have their lives ahead of them and are not yet likely nicotine-addicted—sucking on cigarettes, I fantasize the bus of my dreams suddenly materializing and driving slowly by. And, seeing the ad on its side, the young men are reminded that with every inhalation of carbon particulates, tar, carbon monoxide, nicotine, formaldehyde, ammonia, hydrogen cyanide, arsenic, and DDT, they are not only flirting with, G-d forbid, prematurely widowing their wives and orphaning their children but are proclaiming themselves for all the world as fools.
© 2011 AMI MAGAZINE