The Quarrel

I’ve been having some difficulties writing these little talks – writer’s block, insomnia, sundry infirmities – so I was going to do something a little different this time.  Rather than putting together another stream of altered consciousness, I would read a story by Chaim Grade: “My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner.” There’s not that much plot, but it does cover some issues I’m interested in, and much more eloquently than I ever could.  I got the go ahead from our dear leader, who said: “It’s all Torah.” Alas, the story was longer than I remembered, leading me to settle on coming up with brief introductory thoughts and a summary.  I popped a week’s dose of Adderall and let loose at the keyboard.

I seem to be overly focused on the tension between modernity on the one yad, and tradition on the other.  Sometimes I must come across as a broken record – for those of you who are too young for that metaphor, think corrupted mp3.  In my last missive, I quoted from “A Treasury of Yiddish Stories.”  Here’s another: “‘My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner,’ which draws upon Grade’s own experience, might be described as a philosophical dialogue, its main source of interest being the conflict of ideas between the secularized narrator and his believing friend. Grade has succeeded, however, in lifting the dialogue from the level of abstract colloquy to that of emotional confrontation.”

Pretty esoteric stuff.  But before I get into it, I want to discuss another Grade story: “Laybe-Layzar’s Courtyard.” It’s about Yoel Weintraub, a Lithuanian rabbi who got so fed up with adjudicating disputes in his congregation in Zaskowicz that he just chucked it all, moved to an obscure courtyard in Vilna, intent on spending the rest of his days studying Talmud.

Still, even as a reclusive porush, he couldn’t avoid being drawn into the communal turmoil that occasionally engulfs Jewish communities.  Of the many characters Rabbi Weintraub must interact with, one who stands out most is Heskiah Teitelbaum. A master locksmith, he was wealthy, pious, erudite, and a total shmuck. I’m sure we all know the type.

At one point, Reb Heskiah publicly humiliates a young woman.  Rabbi Weintraub puts him in his place by calling him, get this: “a Shabbos and Yomtov Jew.”

Coming back to modern day Metuchen for just a moment – you can insult somebody by pointing out that he shows up to shul on Shabbos and Yomtov?  Perhaps we could use a few more folks like that.

Obviously, the rabbi was accusing the miscreant of being sort of a Jewish Oreo – outwardly observant, but inwardly missing the point completely. Unsurprisingly, Reb Heskiah backs down.

At the end of the novella, a delegation from Zaskowicz arrives to implore Rabbi Weintraub to return.  Reb Heskiah just can’t understand how they can show the rabbi such respect. But in the rabbi’s absence, the observant and enlightened factions of Zaskowicz could no longer live together in peace. The rabbi returns home, hopefully to live happily ever after. Cue the tears.

As a young man, Grade attended a yeshiva heavily steeped in the Mussar tradition, but ultimately left that cloistered setting. Mussar is beautiful, a striking counterpoint to Jewish mysticism.  Whereas a lot of Cabala is about rescuing sparks in higher worlds, much of Mussar is focused on how our actions impact everyday life. Still, it’s easy to understand Grade’s attraction to the intellectual activity that was engulfing East European Jewry.

I don’t know enough to go into detail about Mussar philosophy, but I did read some wonderful stories in Rabbi Chaim Zaitchik’s “Sparks of Mussar.” These tales are not very different from those in Artscroll’s “Introduction to Talmud” or Bialik’s “Book of Legends”, just a bit more contemporary.

Rav Yisrael Lipkin, also known as the Salanter, lived in the nineteenth century, and is generally considered to be the first Mussar Master.  Some date the movement to have gotten its start nearly a thousand years earlier with Rabeinu Bahya’s “Duties of the Heart.”  I offer no judgement on that score, but I will return to the Rabeinu shortly.

The Salanter was popular with both Chassidim and Mitnagdim.  Given the antagonism between those groups, we can only speculate how vast his powers of persuasion and empathy must have been.  Rav Yisrael also put the conducting of interpersonal relationships on a par with Divine obligation. What’s not to like?

The Salanter was always eager to learn, and he took his inspiration from wherever he could find it. He was once walking late at night when his shoe ripped open.  He looked around, and he found a cobbler whose shop was still lit by a candle.  He asked the cobbler if it was too late to get his shoe fixed, since the candle would soon burn out.  To which the cobbler replied: “As long as the candle is burning, it is still possible to work and repair.” Rav Yisrael was impressed and made this story into a tagline of sorts: as long as we are alive, we can still work on our souls.

This lines up nicely with something I like very much about Jewish tradition.  The Gentile world tends to remember people on the anniversary of their births:  for example, George Washington’s birthday, Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, and Martin Luther King’s birthday.  But what can be known about someone just as they’re born?  Well, there’s time, place, and ancestry.  That’s not nothing, but it’s also limited.  Compare this to a Yahrzeit:  at that point, we know about the dearly departed’s entire life.

Some Mussar adherents practice extreme asceticism and were particularly suspicious of anything resembling materialism. Rav Nosson Finkel of Slobodka was said to have no concept of private property. He didn’t have all that much, but he kept giving away whatever he had.  More than once, he startled his wife, coming home shirtless or gloveless on winter nights.  It seems he kept running into schlimazls who needed his clothes more than he did.

Then, there was Rav Yisroel Meir Hacohen, whose wife financed his studies by opening a store to sell fish.  For what it’s worth, I tried suggesting to my own spouse what a mitzvah it would be for her to support me, but she didn’t quite take to the idea.  But back to Rav Yisroel:  he was so popular with his disciples that they all rushed to buy his wife’s fish.  He had her close the store early just to allow others to get some business. I can only hope that the competition appreciated his magnanimity.

Now, if you’ll look at my waistline, you can see that much of my life has been given over to gluttony.  In my younger days, I was focused on the pursuit of hedonism as well, but I did not get much cooperation from Eve’s daughters on that score. There’s no doubt that I would have benefited from a little more focus on real essentials.  But I’m reminded of the sacrifice that Nazarites used to perform upon ending a period of abnegation.  It was once explained to me that this was to atone for the time spent not enjoying some of Hashem’s gifts.  I don’t know if this is a majority view, but I’m going with it.

Mussar warns against any distractions from Torah, and some of the Masters urged their disciples to avoid idle speech at all costs.  Obviously, they viewed Haskalah and the Reformation Movement as antithetical to all things Jewish. And who would read or write anything that didn’t have an approbation from an esteemed rabbinical authority?

Leaving Chaim Grade aside for the time being, how would I have fit in?  How about, not at all? Avoid idle speech? Start with cutting out my tongue and wiring my jaw shut.  But that’s probably the least of it.  I occasionally read about some Jew being shunned by a traditional community after being caught listening to radio or having a copy of “Sports Illustrated.” What would they make of my reading habits? Cue the fainting couch.

These days, most of the books on my bucket list are histories, typically from academic, and Hashem help me, secular authors.  But many decades ago, when I finished school and started on my illustrious career in bit counting, I pretty much limited myself to fiction.  And of course, Jewish fiction: Chaim Potok, Leon Uris, and various others.  These were all written in English.  At my mother’s urging, she should rest in peace, I started on authors whose Yiddish work had been translated into English:  Chaim Grade, Sholom Aleichem, and Isaac Bashevis Singer.

As a young man, Singer was influenced by that bête noire of Orthodoxy, Baruch Spinoza. Although Singer moved away from Spinoza later in life, many of his characters reflected his younger self.  These were yeshiva boys with Talmud as far as the eye could see.  But a peek at German literature here, a gander at a Zionist newspaper there, and then straight down the expressway to apostasy.

It was when I was absorbing all this dime store trash that I first met up with some strictly Orthodox Jews.  I guess there must have been something about actuarial work that attracted all those landsmen. One of my older colleagues – Shlomo – was aghast that I was so into Singer.  In particular, he said that it was, get this: “not authentic.” Really? How could something my beloved Yiddishe Momma recommended not be authentically Jewish?

Leaving that aside for the moment, Shlomo was a great guy.  He invited me several times to spend Shabbat with his family, and that was when I met Rabbi Avigdor Miller, his memory should be for a blessing.  I didn’t get to know him very well, but he was certainly the most learned Talmud scholar I’ve ever met.  He was also deeply immersed in Mussar. This was the first time I’d been in a shul where the rabbi was so overtly revered.  Face it, Conservative rabbis just don’t get that kind of respect.  We all stood up when he entered the room, there was absolute silence when he spoke, and they fell over themselves to open a window if he complained about the heat.  He had a way of bringing scripture alive that was a wonder to experience, although I did not always agree with his conclusions.

Artscroll published a biography of Rabbi Miller written by his long-time aide Rabbi Mordechai Dolinsky. It is chock full of stories of the rabbi bringing Torah to struggling communities, convincing young men to continue with traditional studies, as well as some near miraculous happenings in the Rabbi’s life. He also followed in the Salanter’s footsteps as far as bringing peace between Jews.  At one point, no less a luminary than the Satmar Rebbi had to reach out to Rabbi Miller for help in an urgent matter.  It seems that some elements of the Orthodox world wanted to put the Satmar into cherem.  We can only speculate on what these Yids were fighting about, but whatever it was, the rabbi was able to smooth the waters.

Rabbi Miller shared the Mussar suspicion of all things secular.  Thus, it was a bit of a surprise to his followers that he was very much taken by “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie.  This set off a rush of sorts to worldly bookstores, until the rabbi announced that although this was in fact a fine book, there was really nothing in it that wasn’t already written in Torah. For what it’s worth, his biographer also praised the book, but urged the purchase of the earliest edition, which had important information that the Women’s Liberation Movement had objected to.

Now back to Rabeinu Bahya’s “Duties of the Heart.”  You may have thought that I mentioned him a little earlier just to make myself seem more well-read than I actually am.  And of course, that’s true. But I can tie this to Rabbi Miller.  From the section “Proper Trust in Matters of Sickness and Health”, here’s an aside from the translator:

“Rabbi Avigdor Miller would say that in ancient times bloodletting was a popular medical procedure. Today it is neither accepted nor effective.  This does not mean that it was not effective back then. Actually it was. The science of the times had logical reasons why it should work, and people believed in those reasons. Therefore G-d healed them through bloodletting. So too today, medical technology makes us believe certain medicines and medical procedures work, and therefore G-d heals us through those.”

Should we be opening the Shul of Moshe Scientist?  I’ll have to get back to you on that.

Rabbi Miller used to spread his teaching recording his talks on cassette tapes.  For any youngsters still paying attention, think podcasts.  However, he would not allow his first recording to be released, since some of his musings were not for general consumption.  Understandably so.  In his “Introduction to the Mishnah”, Rambam mentioned something about concealing hidden wisdom in order “to blind the eyes of fools whose hearts would never be enlightened.  As far as Rabbi Miller, aside from being anti-Zionist, he had some peculiar thoughts about the Emancipation Proclamation, the Kent State shooting, and police brutality.  Suffice it to say that these ideas were not particularly woke.  Comatose might be a better description.

And then there’s this on the Shoah:

“Hitler was not only sent by Heaven, but was sent as a kindness from Heaven... Because assimilation and intermarriage are worse than death ... and the German Jews and others ignored the Torah-teachers and refused to desist from their mad race into assimilation, the Nazis were sent to prevent them and rescue them before they were swallowed up by the nations.”

So, the Holocaust was all my fault?  The notion that Hashem punishes us for our collective sins goes way back in Jewish thought.  We can also look forward to rewards in Olom Habah to make up for suffering in Olom Hazeh.  Even so, I have some trouble wrapping my head around the idea that Hitler, may his name be erased, was a “kindness from Heaven.”

A few years ago, I attended Shabbat Shacharit at an Orthodox shul not far from here.  Since I was always early, I rummaged through the library and found a small book on the Ashrei.  It was a deep dive, and the author credited much of his thinking to Rabbi Miller.  I pointed this out to one of the regulars, who was impressed that I had met the rabbi.  I asked him about the “kindness from Heaven” business, and he just shrugged.  The rabbi, it seemed, just started with Torah, and went from there.  Or something like that.  I didn’t really have the vocabulary to pursue the matter.

Now that I’ve given my short introduction, let’s proceed to the quarrel.

Grade’s alter ego, the narrator, also named Chaim, returns to Bialystok in 1937, several years after he left the Mussarists. He had by this time become a regularly published author in the Yiddish press and had come back to his old haunts to give a lecture. A select few of his old schoolmates had attended his talk, and others visited him secretly.  None of them wanted the head of the yeshiva to find out that they purposely crossed paths with the malcontent.

Chaim felt that his old friends had lost some of their zeal, perhaps regretting their detachment from the wider world, and particularly their avoidance of all temptation. That struck me as a bit of projection on Chaim’s part, but not to get too meta, that might just be projection on my part.

Chaim was disappointed that he could not find one companion, Hersh Rasseyner. He was the brightest of Chaim’s old acquaintances, and probably his closest friend. Finally, they run into each other on the street.  At first, Hersch seems to take no notice of Chaim, but then locks eyes with him, castigating Chaim for giving up spirituality in a search for pleasure.  To which Chaim responds that he hadn’t been seeking pleasure, but truth.

Hardly, “hail fellow, well met”, but that’s all we get until our antagonists meet again in two years.  By this time, the war had broken out, and they meet at a bread line in Soviet occupied Ukraine. As before, their discourse is quite brief, with Hersh blaming Chaim for the presence of the Red Army. Or something like that.  I couldn’t quite follow.

Nine more years pass, the war is over, and while Chaim is riding the metro in Paris, he is surprised to see a familiar face. Hersch had been captured by the Nazis, and after the near destruction of European Jewry, could it really be possible that he survived?  And what’s more, Hersh is happy to see Chaim and greets him quite warmly. No doubt, both are chastened by the horror of the last years and are now able discuss their differences amiably.

It seems that Hersh made good use of his spare time in the concentration camp.  He gathered about ten students and started an impromptu yeshiva.  Now that the Nazis had been defeated, he was active in reigniting Torah study, supplying religious texts all over Europe, and indeed, around the entire world.

Chaim is stunned.  How could Hersh still believe in a providence that had permitted such suffering?  Hersh listened patiently, and then suggested that it was time for Chaim to think about repentance.  There was no meeting of the minds; still, it was quite friendly.

The dialog goes on for pages and pages, with references to scripture, history, art, and with no agreement in sight. And though I promised a summary, I’m not even going to try.  Let me just repeat the last thing Chaim says to his old friend:

“Reb Hersh, it’s late, let us take leave of each other.  Our paths are different, spiritually and practically.  We are the remnant of those who were driven out. The wind that uprooted us is dispersing us to all the corners of the earth. Who knows whether we shall ever meet again? May we both have the merit of meeting again in the future and seeing how it is with us.  And my I then be as Jewish as I am now. Reb Hersh, let us embrace each other.”

I was struck by the civility of the quarrel between Grade’s narrator and his interlocuter.  I am concerned that my bias might be skewing my perspective.  Not that Grade’s alter ego got the better of the exchange, but he did seem more open to the other’s argument.  Still, I’ve started to wonder about my objectivity.

About a year ago I read a story about the same topic, but by a different author:  Mordecai Zeev Feierberg’s “Whither?”  It was also about a young man who spent his youth imprisoned in cheder and yeshiva, only to break free at last into the larger world.

Except, not so much.  I recently read an analysis of the text, and it seems I missed the point entirely.  It didn’t surprise me that a lot of the story got lost in the translation from Hebrew to English.  I expected that.  The story was also drenched with references to Talmud and Midrash that didn’t register with me at all.  Worst of all, the protagonist didn’t see himself as released, but rather totally lost.  At the time, the Haskalah movement had faded, and Zionism hadn’t really taken off.  His modern studies had alienated him from tradition but didn’t give him a place to land.  There was no place to put his feet.

So, how did I get it so wrong?  Let me finally get to my point, assuming I have one. When I first described this chat to our dear leader, I told him that it would be “one of my tradition vs. modernity diatribes.” Now that I’ve written it, I see that’s not where I’m going at all. Rather, I seem to be leading into a fancy term I read about recently: epistemic closure.

I am probably misusing this fancy term, but I’m trying to refer to the information silos we all seem to have burrowed ourselves into, never going to sources that contradict what we already believe. On this one score, I am confident that the minions of modernity are more open-minded than the minions of tradition.

If only my friend Shlomo had read some Isaac Bashevis Singer, he would have seen that many of the seculars regretted how heartless they became and how some of the most admirable characters are the stay-the-course Talmudists.

And what about apparent contradictions in Tanach and Talmud?  I’m not talking about the philosophical or Midrashic stuff that is way above my head. For example, in Kings we read about Solomon transferring ten villages to Lebanon, while in Chronicles we learn that Solomon captured ten villages from Lebanon. Did something go wrong during scribal transmission?

For some real fun, read Solomon Zeitlin. He was an American Jewish scholar who was an expert on the Second Temple period. He digs into a lot of Talmudic legends about some sage meeting this or that king, or various adversaries having a confrontation, and then demonstrates from historic records that these folks lived in different centuries. Indeed, I’ve had some folks warn me away from these types of books.  Perhaps they’re not authentic.  They certainly don’t have solid rabbinic approbations.

But I do need to get bent a bit. For all this dissing I do of the Orthodox, I need to remember how warmly I’ve been welcomed to their shuls.  And as much of my reading paints the rabbis as a scholarly caste who, in league with the upper class, exploited the Jewish poor, there can be no doubt that these same rabbis preserved our traditions in ways that the Conservative Movement has not.

There’s something I once heard about Rabbis Hillel and Shammai, may their memories be for a blessing. In all the Tanach, Talmud, Midrash, and Bubbe Meises, if only one thing is true, I hope it’s this story. Why did Hillel win all those disputes with Shammai?  Easy answer!  Before Hillel would even let Shammai speak, he would painstakingly recite Shammai’s argument until Shammai agreed that Hillel had expressed his opinion correctly.   Only after Hillel really understood Shammai’s position would he begin the delicate task of explaining his own. So none of this “if you disagree with me, you must hate freedom” business.

If you’re saying things like “all lives matter”, “lock her up” or “everyone who’s in favor of abortion has already been born”, then you’re probably not emulating Rabbi Hillel.

As Winston Churchill put it: “When fascism comes to America, it will be called anti-fascism.” Or maybe it was Sinclair Lewis. Or Huey Long. The internet doesn’t really know who said that, but it doesn’t make it any less true.  Just saying. I report, you decide. Unless this is just more fake news from the lamestream media.

It makes me wonder – with all the reading I’ve been doing, what have I learned? Am I that incapable of absorbing new and possibly contrary ideas? Who knows? Maybe Trump really did nothing wrong with all his perfect phone calls.  And maybe Hillary really did run a trafficking ring for pedophiles and cannibals.

Now, go and study.