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Friday Night
IT ALL COMES down to
mentality. I look at someone in wonderment and ask, “How can they do that?”
He looks at me in wonderment and asks, “How
can they not do that?” Both of us assume that because we both
believe in the same God, follow the same Torah, and live by the same Shulchan Aruch, the
differences between us should be minimal. And yet there are some very
fundamental dissimilarities in our approach to certain halachos and matters
of derech eretz.
Some differences are
understandable and perfectly acceptable. Sephardim
are very different from Ashkenazim.
Chassidim
are very different from both. But as long as each group is doing its best
to fulfill the 613 mitzvos
and spirit of Torah, there is nothing to complain about. As long as a Jew
is doing their best to love and fear God, which should show up in the way
they act, especially towards others, there is nothing to complain about,
only to praise.
Where it gets tricky
is when someone thinks they are doing all of this, but really they are not.
They are taking liberties they should not, and perhaps think too highly of
themselves to self-criticize. In their eyes they are doing just fine by
God, but not in your eyes. That’s when someone asks, “How can they do that?”
That’s when mentality can play too major a role in the way a person
approaches Torah, and life in general.
True, Torah is called
Aitz Chaim—Tree
of Life. But it is also called “water,” and though water helps things to
grow it does not necessarily guarantee that what grows will be all good. If
you water a good seed, you get a good tree. If you water a bad seed, you
get a bad tree.
With one major
difference, though. Actual water is really quite neutral, teaching us
nothing (obvious) about morality. Torah may be compared to water, but it is
only about
morality. When you learn it, you “drink” laws about life and social
behavior, which ought to guarantee that a good “tree,” to which man is
compared, grows. How can a person learn Torah and still be corrupt, even
just a little? The answer once again: mentality.
What is mentality,
and where do we get it from?
There are a few
contributors to a person’s mentality, some they cannot control, some they
can partially control, and some they can completely control, if they choose
to. A person’s soul, which they do not choose, sets a person on a certain
path in life before they are even born. Once born, they are impacted by
family and peers that they can choose, somewhat, to reject. And then, once
out in the larger world, they are bombarded by extraneous sources like
social media that they can accept or reject outright.
The truth is, by the
time a person is usually much older and better prepared intellectually and
emotionally to deal with the third category of influence, they have already
been so affected by the first two categories that they are unaware of their
biases because of them. One they were born with and one they were too young
to understand its potential future effects. It had already shaped their
mentality before their first day in Cheder.
Shabbos Day
THIS IS WHY even
children who once promised themselves to not be like their parents later
end up being more like them than they wanted to be. This is also why some
friends remain a part of our way of thinking even long after they stopped
being a part of our lives. This is the reason why so many years later we
can still recall our best and worst teachers. All of them didn’t just get
under our skins. They got into our heads and way of thinking.
And this is also why,
as Rashi
points out in Bereishis,
that God sacrificed some important clarity about His unity to teach us derech eretz:
And God said, “Let us make man in our image,
after our likeness…” (Bereishis
1:26)
Let us make…Even though they [the angels] did not assist Him
in His creation, and there is an opportunity for heretics to rebel, the
Torah did not hesitate to teach proper conduct and the trait of humility… (Rashi)
Hence the motto: Derech eretz kadmah l’Torah—proper
conduct before Torah. In this brief and seemingly side point of Rashi is one of the
most instructive lessons in all of Torah. Technically-speaking, not being
able to teach new “tricks” to old “dogs” refers to at least middle-aged
people. Psychologically, it is actually true from 12 years old and up, and
in some respects, even earlier.
Thus, while many
parents in the world gloss over those very early and formative years, less
so but somewhat also in the Torah world, it turns out that they are the
ones that may seal the fate of their children for the rest of the lives!
Everything a person will ever learn and understand will always be through
the eyes of the mentality that they began to develop even before they ever
opened a Chumash.
There are always
exceptions to just about any rule, but who knows how to be one? And
miracles do happen, especially for people looking to do teshuvah, but who
wants to rely upon them? You can be sure that the 3,000 Jews who joined the
Erev Rav in
their celebration of the golden calf were somewhat destined to ever since
their childhood. You could draw a straight line from what they were doing
at the base of Har Sinai
to their early upbringing.
Similarly, there is a
clash of mentalities happening here in Israel today. The truth is, they
have been at odds ever since the Zionist Conferences at the end of the
1800s, the secular and the religious. Make no mistake about it. There is no
threat to democracy because of the proposed reforms, and certainly no human
rights abuse here. This is why so many Israeli academics publicly support
the reforms.
What there is instead
is a fear within the very secular community to allow democracy to work when
the people who block their initiative to lose the Jewish soul of the
country are in power. They didn’t complain before because the Supreme Court
is mostly left-thinking, which is why they are so against surrendering
their current power status.
The Left saw in the
last election how, even in this day and age of Woke culture, the religious
parties can still take control of the country away from them. The Interim
Prime Minister and his followers were humiliated in defeat, and they worry
going forward that the power they lost will only make it more difficult to
go the way of Europe and America.
While the Right tends
to think independently of world opinion and is concerned about the Jewish
integrity of the state, the Left wants to finally just leave all that
behind and become another Western nation. One trip to Tel Aviv and Haifa
makes that clear. Reading left wing newspapers makes that clear. It’s their
mentality, born and bred on leftist kibbutzim,
and carried over into the secular educational system.
While a two-state
solution is not the way to resolve the Arab conflict, it might be the way
to solve the religious-secular one. Give them Tel Aviv (less Bnei Brak).
Let them run it autonomously. Let them turn it into the Sdom they want it
to be, and America has already become. Then God will have to take care of
it as He sees fit. We have a history of golden calves, and this one is
alive and well and bleating.
Liberalism has its
place in society and history, but a bleating-heart liberal is not only not
a Jewish thing, but a dangerous thing. What to do?
Seudas Shlishis
THE TORAH IS a
template for life. Some would like to believe that the past was the past,
and therefore you can read Torah and perhaps even enjoy it, but there isn’t
much to learn from it in terms of life today. Orthodox Jews obviously
disagree, but is that because they’re just hanging on to the familiar, or
because they truly think differently.
By the way some Torah
Jews live, it is not always so clear. But certainly, in principle we
believe that Torah is eternal, meaning that it is always relevant
regardless of how irrelevant people try to make it. If God wrote it, and He
also made the world, then it can be assumed He took all of history into
account.
Besides, has man
really changed that much since thousands of years ago? His yetzer hara is the
same yetzer hara
it has always been. Just the ways to be trapped by it have changed over
time, and thanks to technology. For all of modern man’s material
sophistication, he is actually less sophisticated today spiritually. But
does he care so long as God keeps to Himself in the meantime?
They tell the story
of Rav Shimon Schwab (1908-1995) who, as a young man, spent a Shabbos with the Chofetz Chaim
(1838-1933). The Chofetz
Chaim at some point asked his young guest if he was a kohen or a levi. He answered that
he was neither.
The Chofetz Chaim, who was
a kohen,
told his guest that it was a pity. He said that Moshiach would come soon, and that only
the kohanim
and levi’im
would serve in the Temple, not the rest of the Jewish people.
Then he asked the
future Rabbi Schwab:
“Why aren’t you a kohen?”
The young man
answered the obvious: “Because my father was not a kohen.”
But the Chofetz Chaim pressed
him, “Why wasn’t your father
a kohen?”
By that time, Rabbi
Schwab realized that the Chofetz
Chaim was teaching him something that had nothing to do with his
lineage, so he waited for the real answer, and it came.
“Do you know why your
father was not a kohen
and my father was?” the Chofetz
Chaim asked. “Because when our teacher Moshe called out, ‘Who is for God—let him come to
me,’ my great-great grandfather came, and your great-great
grandfather did not. That is why my father was a kohen and your father
was not a kohen.
The message was
clear: Next time the call goes out to fight on behalf of God, in whatever
form it may take, answer
it. Don’t hesitate, even for a moment, because moments come and go quickly,
and with them, eternal opportunities. A person has to have already
developed the right mentality to make truth more important than anything
else. That way, when a crisis comes that tests our resolve, we can make the
correct choice decisively.
Ain Od Milvado,
Part 42
HISTORY IS A lot more
sophisticated than most people know, because for some it can seem so
simple. There are plans being actualized that are older than Creation
itself, souls being rectified in ways we can’t imagine, and opportunities
being thrown at us that many do not recognize. It’s all rather kabbalistic, which
compelled me to write a book about it called, “Highest Knowledge Ever.”
History is about
either exile or redemption. The Jewish people in particular are always
going in one direction or the other, in our case, in the direction of
redemption. We’ve been in this fourth and final exile for thousands of
years now, so it’s about time it ended.
But the end of
anything important is rarely a case of just picking up and walking away.
There are things to do and processes to complete, and exile is no
different. Exile could transition smoothly to redemption, but it rarely
has. Just not enough people do teshuvah
to make that happen.
Hence the following
dialogue in the Gemora:
Rebi Eliezer said:
“If the Jewish people repent, they will be redeemed, and if not they will
not redeemed.”
Rebi Yehoshua said to
him: “If they do not repent, will they not be redeemed at all? Rather, the
Holy One, Blessed be He, will raise up a king for them whose decrees are as
harsh as those issued by Haman, and the Jewish people will repent, and this
will restore them to the right path.” (Sanhedrin
97a)
Does this mean that
Haman, and all the other enemies of the Jewish people, will be able to
argue before God, “Why blame me? I was minding my own business when you
involved me in Your plan to push the Jewish people to teshuvah!” The Gemora answers that
question by saying that Haman’s original name was Memuchan because he was muchan—ready—for the
job. God just had to plug him in at the right moment and in the right way.
We’re all a bunch of
plug-ins. History was scripted long before we came onto the scene but for
our sake. Different things have to happen at different times to bring the
master plan for Creation to fruition, and each of us has been given
potential to participate in that process in one way or another, for good or
for “bad,” for right or for “wrong.”
At the end of the
day, it seems, the world’s population comes down to three groups. The vast
majority that seem to live their lives like extras on a set, necessary but
very secondary. They help Creation reach its goal, but significantly on an
individual basis.
The other two groups
are opposites. These are the people who make a difference, either in the
direction of Torah or against it. They’re either allies of God or against
Him. They may have never made the choice consciously, but that is how they
have ended up for one reason or another. They have either been blessed or
cursed with a specific mentality, and it is difficult, if not impossible to
know at this time why. How can we, if we don’t fully understand how God
works or why?
To which group do you
belong. That will depend on if you are blessed enough to hear the call, “Who is for God—let him come to
me,” and if you’re even more blessed to respond to correctly.
This close to the final redemption it is all that matters and what is going
on. The media will focus on the events and the people making them happen.
But the maskilim,
the truly spiritually astute people will look past all of that and see God
making and shaking history to allow us to prove what kind of mentality we
truly have.
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