An article of mine about the limits of empathy, the historical revisionism of The New York Times and the endangering of Jewish lives by activists intent on establishing a Jewish presence on the Temple Mount appears in Haaretz and can be accessed here .
Buried Treasure in Tokyo
At a news conference last week, Satoshi Omura, a Japanese researcher and one of three scientists who had just won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, made a comment that was not only modest but, properly considered, profound.
I’ll get to the comment in time. First, though, some background:
The scientists used modern laboratory techniques to discover anti-parasitic drugs that, in the Nobel Committee’s words, “have revolutionized the treatment of some of the most devastating parasitic diseases” in the world.
Dr. Omura’s work was on the development of a medicine that has nearly eradicated the dreaded disease “river blindness” and radically reduced the incidence of the disfiguring disease known as elephantiasis. Dr. Omura’s work has already helped hundreds of millions of sufferers of these diseases, and has the potential of eradicating the ailments entirely.
Parasitic diseases are a threat to an estimated one-third of the world’s population, particularly among the poor in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America.
The work of Dr. Omura and the other scientists consisted of identifying and isolating a compound, which they called Avermectin, that occurs in nature – in this case soil collected by Dr. Omura from a golf course near Tokyo.
Anti-parasitic agents are not the only blessings concealed in plants and soil. Many anti-bacterial and anti-viral compounds have also been found hidden in plain (if microscopic) sight, and successfully treat dangerous infections common in the Western world.
The most famous one is penicillin, which was discovered in 1928 when an airborne mold infected a petri dish in the lab of Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming. But there are scores of substances in nature that have become effective treatments for myriad maladies.
The bacterium that causes clostridium difficile colitis, or “C-diff,” for instance, a serious intestinal ailment, is prevalent in hospitals and, in 2011 resulted in about half a million infections and 29,000 deaths in the United States alone.
One of the most effective treatments for C-diff is a drug called Vancomycin (which also is the treatment of choice for complicated skin and bloodstream infections and some forms of meningitis). The drug was first isolated in 1953 from a soil sample collected from the interior jungles of Borneo.
Many scientists, upon isolating such compounds and identifying their properties and uses, proudly accept credit for their accomplishments. How many, though, I wonder, stop to think about just what it is they did and didn’t do?
To be sure, much credit is due for the painstaking work of cultivating biological agents, experimenting with them, compiling data, and then collating and interpreting them. But such cures for diseases, in the end, are merely discovered by the men of science, not created by them.
Do the researchers give thought to the Creator of the cures, Who secured them in unexplored places, until the arrival of the right time for their discoveries? Have they considered how odd it is that there even are cures for dreaded diseases in soil and plants?
So much of what is heralded as astounding scientific achievement is simply accessing the miracle of nature, of Hashem’s gifts. When a sheep was first successfully cloned a number of years ago, what was essentially accomplished was the coaxing of genetic material to do precisely what it does naturally all the time: code for traits, replicate and direct protein synthesis. Those things, not the clonings, were, and are, the miracles.
And when they were first performed, heart transplants were amazing. But, at least to thoughtful people, never remotely as amazing as hearts.
Dr. Omura seems to have the requisite sensitivity to recognize, despite the great impact of his accomplishment, the limitation of the role he played.
We don’t understand why diseases are necessary (although they point, like nothing else could, to the fragility of our bodies, and the many miracles we are beneficiaries of when we are healthy). But it should astound us that Hashem has planted cures for ailments in the world He created for us.
Dr. Omura’s comment? After expressing his surprise at having won the Nobel Prize (“I never imagined I would win. If I had, I’d have worn a nicer necktie.”), he offered an assessment of what he had done.
“I merely borrowed,” he said, “the power of microbes.”
He didn’t cite the Creator of microbes (and everything else), and I have no idea of his religious beliefs. But his words, all the same, should serve to remind every maamin of the manifold miracles we routinely, if obliviously, experience, and of the fathomless debt we owe Hakadosh Baruch Hu.
© 2015 Hamodia
Where “Objective” is Defective
I’m not among those who grow apoplectic at the New York Times’ reportage from Israel. There are, to be sure, occasions when, in misguided attempts to achieve what passes these days for “evenhandedness,” the Old Gray Lady misses the mark. But I have found most (I wrote “most”! – please hold off with the angry letters!) of the dispatches from Eretz Yisrael to be informative and objective.
What isn’t either of those things, though, is how the paper has repeatedly chosen to characterize the Har HaBayis. In fact, “misleading” and “deceptive” are the most descriptive words to come to mind.
After a recent clash between Israeli police and Palestinians at the site, for instance, a September 16 New York Times report referred to the holy place as the site where the Jewish temples were “believed to have once stood.” Another story, three days earlier, described it as a site “revered by Jews” but “one of the three holiest sites in Islam.” Why not “revered by Jews and Muslims,” or “Islam’s third holiest site and Judaism’s holiest one”? Something is rotten in the state of New York.
Similarly, two years ago, a Times video referred to the Har HaBayis as the place “that Jews call the Temple Mount…” and that “Jews widely believe was the site of the Temples.”
Call the Temple Mount? That’s what it is. Believe? Yes, like we believe the sun is hot.
No historian, at least in a state of sobriety, entertains the slightest doubt that the Bayis Sheini stood on the mount for centuries, having been built there nearly 1500 years before Islam’s founder’s grandmother was born. Both Jewish and, l’havdil, Roman sources recount that korbanos were offered on the mizbei’ach there. (The historicity of the Bayis Rishon is part of our mesorah, but the lack of contemporary non-Jewish writings from the time deprives historians the documentary “proof” they demand.)
That the Har HaBayis was conquered by Christian, and then Muslim, forces, and that churches and mosques were built upon the site, is undeniable. Equally undeniable, though, are the site’s true Jewish origins – brightly reflected in the life and prayers of Jews over the course of known history.
Every observant Jew recalls the Beis Hamikdash every single day of the year, in each of his or her tefillos – recited, of course, facing in the direction of what we “widely believe was the site of the Temples.”
Then there are our holidays, like the one just past, where our Mussaf tefillos include a lengthy bemoaning of those Temples’ destructions.
The words “Yerushalayim” and its synonym “Tzion,” the city whose holiness derives from the holiness of the Makom Hamikdash, pass our lips at least ten times every morning. Before breakfast.
There is “shabchi Yerushalayim” in Pesukei d’Zimrah, “ohr chodosh al Tzion to’ir” in birkas Krias Shma, Boneh Yerushalayim in Shemoneh Esrei, another reference in Tachanun, and others throughout Shacharis. And let’s not forget Korbanos.
And then, after breakfast, well, if one had a bowl of cereal, his Al Hamichyah would mention Yerushalayim two more times. And if bread was consumed, one of the brachos of Birkas Hamazon, of course, expresses our hope that Hashem will be “boneh b’rachamov Yerushalayim.”
What distorts the vision of the “paper of record” is, of course, a deep commitment to fairness and objectivity. There is, after all, a “Muslim narrative,” too, a claim to the Makom Hamikdash by another religion, indeed one that, at least in numbers of adherents, dwarfs the Jewish one.
But fairness, of course, doesn’t mean considering every claim to be the equal of every other one. When the New York Times refers to the events of September 11, 2001, it describes them as a concerted attack by Al Qaeda on the United States, not as “a series of plane crashes believed by Americans to have been Islamist attacks but considered by many in the Arab world to have been the work of the American government or a Jewish plot.” At least it hasn’t done so yet.
It’s an unfortunate reminder of our galus that the Bais Hamikdash isn’t standing where it once did. But we must accept that sad fact. It is wrong to seek (other than through our tefillos) to change that current reality, halachically wrong to walk onto the Har HaBayis, and doubly wrong to endanger Jews by offending those who occupy the site.
But what’s also wrong (attention: New York Times) is to pretend that its history isn’t established and clear.
© 2015 Hamodia
Two-Way Traffic on the Haredi Highway
Have you ever wondered why, in light of the slew of “I survived Orthodoxy but saw the secular light!” essays and books, there no counter-flood of similar writing by some of the many who came from other Jewish places to Orthodoxy?
Why are there are no vivid descriptions of what impelled some Orthodox Jew toward traditional Jewish observance? Why no accounts of the emptiness of secular lives they experienced, or the inadequacy they perceived in less observant ones?
Are there no tales to tell of parents who deprived their children of even a rudimentary Jewish education? Who responded negatively to their progeny’s explorations of their Jewish roots? Or who lived lives that contradicted what they preached to their young?
My thoughts on the matter can be read here.
Enjoy!
Each year, sitting in the sukkah on the first night of Sukkos, with my wife and whoever among our children and grandchildren we are fortunate to have with us for Yom Tov, I feel a particularly intense elation. Part of it, no doubt, is the result of having managed to erect the sukkah on time. But most of it is born, simply but powerfully, of having so many family members around the table. For many years, though, ironically, my joy also bothered me.
After all, I reasoned, simchas Yom Tov, the happiness we are commanded to feel on a holiday – particularly on Sukkos, “the time of our happiness,” is meant to be, well, simchas Yom Tov, not delight in one’s family.
But then, one year, I reached a more refined understanding of simchas Yom Tov. And I’ve never thought about it quite the same since.
The first hint that there was something here to discover lay in Chazal’s description of how we are to fulfill simchas Yom Tov. The Rambam (Hilchos Shvisas Yom Tov, 6:18), basing his words on the Gemara (Pesachim 109a), instructs a man to buy his wife new clothing and jewelry, to give his young children nosherai and to himself enjoy meat and wine. (Before splurging on that special Cabernet, though, bear in mind the Kaf Hachaim’s admonition that precedence here should be given to one’s wife’s pleasure.) So it’s clear that simchas Yom Tov is defined as taking joy in plainly physical pleasures. What gives?
The Sefer Hachinuch on the mitzvah of celebrating Sukkos echoes the oddity. “The days of the holiday,” he writes in Mitzvah 324, “are days of great happiness to Jews, since it is a time of gathering into the house the grain and fruit, and people are naturally happy.”
But then he subtly addresses the issue of how physical pleasures can constitute simchas Yom Tov: “And so Hashem has commanded His people to celebrate at that time, to allow them the merit of turning the essence of the happiness to Him.”
A striking Midrash (cited by Rashi) on a chapter of Tehillim we recite twice daily this time of year, elucidates the passuk “For my father and mother have abandoned me, and Hashem has gathered me in” (27:10). Dovid Hamelech, says the Midrash, was stating that his parents’ focus was on their personal relationship; it was about themselves, not him. In that sense, explains the Midrash, they “abandoned” him.
But stop and think a moment. Dovid’s father was Yishai – one of the three personages who Chazal tell us (Shabbos 55b) “died by the counsel of the nachash,” the serpent in Gan Eden. In other words, he was personally without sin. And yet he is being described as, in some way, selfish?
What occurs is that there is an inescapable aspect of self-awareness (the result, likely, of the nachash’s “success” in Gan Eden) and self-concern that is part and parcel of being human. To lack it is to be an angel. Or, perhaps better, a mere angel. Angels, after all, Chazal tell us, are static; humans, dynamic.
Even the most sublime of human beings have selves. Even the ideal talmid chacham, represented by the Aron in the Mishkan, who is “gold” within and “gold” without, still has a core of wood – a symbol, it may well be, of the Eitz Hadaas, which bequeathed self-awareness in the first place.
And if a sense of self is an inherent part of being a human being, experiencing physical or emotional pleasure at times is normal and inevitable. What the Chinuch may be telling us is that simchas Yom Tov means acknowledging that reality, embracing the pleasure of the harvest – and the joy born of the new clothing and the wine and the meat – but “grafting” it onto the spiritual, conscripting it toward the service of Hashem. By doing that, we elevate the self. We turn the things that make our “selves” happy toward the holy.
What happier moment could be imagined than when Yaakov Avinu was reunited with Yosef after 22 years of not knowing what had become of his beloved son. The Midrash, brought by Rashi, has Yaakov reciting Shema at that moment. Was he not overjoyed at the reunion? Of course he was. But he saw fit to graft his joy onto kabbalas ol malchus Shamayim.
So we should enjoy our meat and our wine, our wives and daughters their new clothes and jewelry, our young’uns their nosh. And we should all consciously try to channel our enjoyment toward its Source.
© 2015 Hamodia
Eliyahu’s Double Plea
The Rambam’s logic, as always, is unassailable. Miracles, he informs us (Hilchos Yesodei HaTorah, 8:1), simply cannot be bases of belief. What appears to us as miraculous, he explains, could always be trickery or magic. Or, we might add, as per the late science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, a “sufficiently advanced technology,” that will always be “indistinguishable from magic.”
To be sure, a miracle can be temporarily impressive, as the Rambam goes on to clarify; and, more important, if sourced in the Divine, can be (like Krias Yam Suf, the be’er and the mann) vivid demonstrations of Hashem’s love and concern for His people. But what lies at the root of Jewish belief, he states, is no miracle, but rather the revelation at Har Sinai, when Klal Yisrael experienced direct communication with the Creator.
The assertion that what appears miraculous cannot in itself prove anything about its source, though, seems frontally challenged by the narrative of the confrontation between the nevi’ei habaal and Eliyahu Hanavi at Har Hacarmel, recounted in Melachim I 18:1-39 (the haftarah of parashas Ki Sisa).
There, we read of how Eliyahu, in order to convince the Jews of the time to stop vacillating between Hashem and a false god, challenged the idolatrous priests to offer, as he would himself, a sacrifice. A heavenly fire that would descend on one of the sacrifices would serve as Divine testimony. Despite efforts of the idolaters to artificially create a “heavenly fire,” as a Midrash describes, and despite Eliyahu’s soaking of his own sacrifice with water, a fire descends from heaven and consumes the Navi’s offering. The people are overwhelmed, and cry out “Hashem, He is G-d! Hashem, He is G-d!”
How, though, to square that account with the Rambam’s words about the limitation of miracles? The answer may lie in a Gemara in Berachos (6a). Eliyahu’s tefillah before the miracle includes the plea Aneini Aneini!– “Answer me! Answer me!” The double entreaty, explains the Gemara, refers to two separate requests, to “cause a fire to come down from heaven” and to “let not the people say that it was the result of magic!”
Far from a challenge to the Rambam’s contention, then, the Gemara’s elucidation greatly supports it. It required a special request of Hashem that the people not dismiss the miracle as meaningless – which they, logically, had every right to do. In other words, that the people regarded the miracle as meaningful was, in a sense, itself something of a miracle.
And, in fact, the conviction to which the people gave voice when the fire descended did not prove lasting. Soon thereafter, Eliyahu despairs at the nation’s slipping back into its wrong ways. Their inspiration at Har HaCarmel was powerful but, in the end, ephemeral. It was based, after all, on a mere miracle.
The declaration “Hashem, He is G-d!”, of course, is what we call out seven times at Ne’ilah, at the very close of Yom Kippur. How odd that a declaration that turned out to be short-lived should conclude our holiest day.
Could it be a subtle warning? A reminder that “spiritual highs” cannot in themselves ensure their own perseverance, that even a state of deep emotion requires “follow-up” determination if it is to be maintained?
The first opportunity to follow up, so to speak, after Ne’ilah is the Maariv that ensues after the thunderous “Hashem Hu HaElokim!”s. A kehillah that davens that first post-Yom Kippur tefillah meticulously and with kavanah is one that has had a successful day.
You may know the story told of the Baal Shem Tov’s horses. The two animals were hitched up to the Besht’s wagon for a trip, but were unaware of the kefitzas haderech, or miraculous “shortening of the way,” that would take place on their journey. When only a few minutes had elapsed as they passed a point that should have taken them a full day to reach, one horse said to the other, “Hmmm. I’m not even hungry. We must not be horses but men!”
Then, when a second landmark unexpectedly went by, the other horse commented, “No, we’re even more than men. We must be angels!” And so the horses proudly trotted on, until they reached their destination ten hours – but many days’ journey – away. By this point, they were famished and, led to a feeding trough, enthusiastically dug in to sate their hunger.
And so, the story ends, it was then that the horses knew, without any doubt, that they were horses.
On Yom Kippur, we withdraw from human activities and stand like angels. When the day ends, though, tired and hungry, we know we are mere humans.
But, if we manage to carry our Ne’ilah recognition into Maariv and beyond, better ones.
© 2015 Hamodia
The King and Us
One of the findings of a recent Pew Research Center report about Orthodox Jews was that for the vast majority of them – are you sitting down? – “religion is very important in their lives.”
Well, yes.
The study contrasts that with the situation in the non-Orthodox community, where only 20% of its members make a similar claim about themselves.
It’s all too easy for many of us to look down our noses at fellow Jews who express their Jewishness only on occasion, to consider them to have missed the point of the Jewish mission. Judaism can’t, after all, be “compartmentalized.” It is an all-encompassing way of life and needs to inform all the choices we make.
And yet, as always, there’s more to be gained by not looking at others but rather inward. Our Orthodox world, after all, “knows from” compartmentalization too.
There are, unfortunately, Jews who, while they wouldn’t ever dream of eating food lacking a good hechsher or of davening without a proper head-covering, seem in some ways to be less conscious of Hashem at other times.
How else to explain an otherwise observant Jew who acts in his business dealings, or home life, or behind the wheel, or the way he speaks to others, in ways not in consonance with what he knows is proper?
When we experience such dissonance, it’s not, chalilah, that we don’t acknowledge Hashem. It’s just that we tend to compartmentalize; we feel HaKodosh Baruch Hu’s presence in our religious lives, but less so in our mundane ones.
Some of us struggle to maintain a keen awareness of Hashem not only out of shul but even in it. We don’t always pause and think of what it is we’re saying when we make a brachah (or even take care to pronounce every word clearly and distinctly). We allow our observances, even our davening, to sometimes fade into rote. I’m writing here to myself, but some readers may be able to relate.
Many of us – certainly I – must sadly concede that when it comes to compartmentalizing in our lives, there really isn’t really any clear “us” and “them,” the Pew report notwithstanding. There is a continuum here, with some of us some more keenly and constantly aware of the ever-presence of the Divine, and some less so.
Obviously, Jews who are entirely nonchalant about religious observance are at one extreme of the scale. And those who are not only observant but think of Hashem and His will even when engaged in business or navigating a traffic jam are at the other end. But many even in that latter category can still fall short of the ideal of Hashem-consciousness, can compartmentalize their lives.
This is a thought that leads directly to Rosh Hashanah. The first day of a new Jewish year, the start of the Aseres Yemei Teshuvah, is suffused with the concept of Malchus, “Kingship.” The shofar, we are taught, is a coronation call, and the concept of malchiyus is prominent in the days’ Mussaf tefillah. We might well wonder: What has kingship to do with repentance? The answer is: much.
By definition, a king has a kingdom, over which he exerts his rules. There is little escaping even a mortal monarch’s reach, and none of his subjects 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 is to be our Ruler, then there are no places and no times when He can be absent from our minds.
Rosh Hashanah is our yearly opportunity to ponder that thought and internalize it, to try to bring our lives more in line with it. To better comprehend, in other words, that Hashem is as manifest when we are sitting behind a desk, cooking or sending kids off to school as he is when we are reciting Shemoneh Esrei, as present on a December morning as He is during the Yamim Nora’im.
On Rosh Hashanah, we will all be collectively focused on “de-compartmentalizing” our lives, on coronating Hashem over all Creation. May the zechus of that effort bear fruit not only in our personal lives, but in history – may it lead, in other words, and soon, to the day when v’hayah Hashem l’melech al kol ha’aretz.
© 2015 Hamodia
Govrov Selichos, 1939
This time of year in 1939, in a Polish town called Ruzhan, a 14-year-old boy had his plans rudely interrupted. The boy, who, fifteen years later, would become my father, had made preparations to travel to the Novhardoker yeshivah in Bialystok, but the German army invaded Poland before he had the chance, and the Second World War began.
My father, shlita, his family and all Ruzhan’s townsfolk fled ahead of the advancing Germans. That erev Shabbos, they found themselves in a town called Govrov, just before the Germans arrived there. Motzoei Shabbos was the first night of Selichos.
Several years ago, I helped my father publish his memoirs, about his flight from the Nazis, his yeshivah days, his sojourn in Siberia (as a guest of the Soviet Union), and his subsequent emigration to America and service as a congregational rav in Baltimore for more than 50 years. He is currently the mazkir of the Baltimore Beis Din and the rav of a Shabbos minyan.
In his book (“Fire, Ice, Air,” available from Amazon), he movingly describes how he insisted on taking leave of his parents to go to yeshivah, his banishment, along with Rav Leib Nekritz, zt”l and a handful of other Novardhoker bachurim to Siberia; and his being shot while being smuggled, after the war, into Berlin’s American sector.
About that Motzoei Shabbos Selichos in Govrov, he writes:
… My family and I were lying on the floor of a local Jew’s house when we heard angry banging on the door and the gruff, loud words “Raus Jude! Raus Jude!” – “Jew, out!”…
The SS men chased us from the houses, prodding us with bayonets to raise our hands and join the town’s other Jews – several hundred people – in the middle of the town’s market area…
Some of the Germans approached the men among us who had beards and cut them off, either entirely or purposely leaving an odd angle of beard, just to humiliate the victims. One man had a beautiful, long beard. When he saw what the Germans were doing, he took a towel he had with him and tied it around his beard, in the hope that our tormentors might not see so enticing a target. But of course, they went right over to him, removed the towel and shaved off what to him and us was a physical symbol of experience, wisdom and holiness. He wept uncontrollably.
We stood there and the smell of smoke registered in our nostrils, becoming more intense with each minute. It didn’t take long to realize that the town’s homes had been set aflame. Later we heard that a German soldier had been discovered killed nearby and that the SS men had assumed that the culprits were Jews… We Jews were ordered into the synagogue… the doors were locked and SS men stood outside to ensure that no one managed to escape … The town had been set afire, and the Nazis clearly intended to let the flames reach the synagogue. Houses nearby were already wildly burning…
The scene was a blizzard of shouting and wailing and, above all, praying. Psalms and lamentations and entreaties blended together, a cacophony of wrenched hearts. Everyone realized what was in store and there was nothing, absolutely nothing, that any of us could possibly do.
The smell of smoke grew even stronger… And then, a miracle occurred.
How else to explain what happened? Those in the synagogue who were standing near the doorway and windows saw a German motorcycle come to a halt in front of the building. A German officer – apparently of high rank – dismounted from the machine and began to speak with the SS men guarding our intended crematorium. The officer grew agitated and barked orders at the other Nazis. After a few minutes, the doors to the synagogue were suddenly opened and, disbelieving our good fortune, we staggered out…
What made the officer order them to release us we did not know and never will. Some of us suspected he was not a German at all, but Elijah the prophet, who, in Jewish tradition, often appears in disguise.
We were ordered across a nearby brook… And so there we sat, all through the Sabbath, watching as the synagogue in which we had been imprisoned mere hours earlier was claimed by the flames and, along with all the Torah-scrolls and holy books of both Ruzhan and Govrov, burned to the ground…
That night was the first night of Selichos…
I have often contrasted in my mind my father’s teenage years and my own, during which my biggest worries were lack of air conditioning in my classroom and tests for which I had neglected to study.
And each year at Selichos, I try to visualize that Selichos night in Govrov.
© 2015 Hamodia
Musing: Opinions Gone Wild
I’m greatly pained by much of the reaction in the Orthodox community to what has come to be called the Iran Deal. To be sure, there are elements of the agreement that are less than ideal. And there is nothing remotely wrong with pointing out those things, even without acknowledging the deal’s positive elements.
But there is something wrong, terribly wrong, tragically wrong, in assuming that anyone who dares to see the positive as outweighing the negative is ipso facto “anti-Israel” or, if Jewish, a “traitor” or “sellout.” That opinions other than one’s own are not just misguided but evil.
And there is something particularly ugly about ads – like those that an unnamed person or persons placed in several Orthodox newspapers – that stoop to the basest sort of character assassination (aided by Photoshopping a Congressman’s face to make him look like an ogre), and are reminiscent of how true enemies of Jews have portrayed us all in centuries past.
Similar ads demeaning elected officials who are opposed to the deal would be no less obnoxious. The issue isn’t what “side” one is on. It is how a Jew expresses himself, as a mensch, or as something else.
At this introspective time of the Jewish year, I hope that the person or people behind “American Parents and Grandparents Against the Iranian Deal” and the papers that hosted its offensive ads will give some thought about whether name-calling and insults are the Jewish way to express a political opinion, even about an important issue.
Musing: Atticus and the Yomim Nora’im
The American 1960 classic “To Kill a Mockingbird” was in the news this summer, the result of the publication of an earlier version of it, a sequel in reality, that its author, Harper Lee, had written, and which was apparently only recently discovered.
Millions have found the 1960 book inspiring, and it is indeed a rare work. It wonderfully captures Southern American life in the 1940s, and deals thoughtfully with themes like racism and friendship. What’s more, it is suffused with subtle humor.
And it has provided American culture with a hero, in the form of “Atticus,” as the father of the narrator, a little girl at the time the novel takes place, is called. Atticus, a lawyer, is a paragon of honor, rectitude and compassion, and, although a mere fictional character, has been an inspiration to many a living lawyer and judge. The Alabama State Bar even erected a monument to him.
Were I a literature teacher and had assigned the book to students, a question I would ask them would be to identify Atticus’ most heroic act. Some might point to his acceptance of the legal case at the heart of the book, defending a black man against a white accuser. Others to his standing up to a crowd intent on a lynching of the suspect. Some might even respond with his facing down of a mad dog, which he kills with a single rifle shot.
My own answer to my question, though, would be something very different. At one point in the book, it is recounted how a character, Bob Ewell, a wretch intent on seeing the defendant found guilty and executed, approaches Atticus on the street and spits in his face.
Atticus, who has every reason and ability to lay the scoundrel low, instead, in the words of the woman recounting the incident, “didn’t bat an eye, just took out his handkerchief and wiped his face and stood there and let Mr. Ewell call him names wild horses could not bring her to repeat.”
In Hebrew, the closest word to “hero” is gibor, often translated as “a strong man.” And its definition is provided us in the fourth chapter of Pirkei Avos: “Who is a gibor? He who conquers his evil inclination, as it is said: ‘Better is one slow to anger than a strong man, and one who rules over his spirit than a conqueror of a city’ (Mishlei 16:32).”
Heroism and strength in Judaism are evident not in action but in restraint, not in outrage but in calm. Something to think about as the Days of Judgment grow closer.