Solid Foundation- What is the unifying factor in our lives?

It’s one of my favorite stories in Tanach. Eliyahu HaNavi stands on Har Carmel having demonstrated that God is real, and that the prophets of Ba’al are frauds. As Bnei Yisrael stand there watching, Eliyahu chides them “עד מתי אתם פוסחים על שתי הסעיפים?” In modern parlance we might say “How long do you plan to be a double agent?” Make a choice he tells them. Either serve God or serve Ba’al, but stop serving both. In that situation, at least temporarily, Bnei Yisrael made the right choice.

Until recently, when I heard that story I assumed that they were simply living a double life; at times serving God, and at other times serving Ba’al. Looked at that way, the choice is simple. Pick one of the sides and stick with it, while leaving the false choice behind. What if Eliyahu is telling them

something stronger?

There’s a famous letter written from the great Rosh Yeshiva of Chaim Berlin Rav Yitzchak Hutner to one of his students. The student had written to the Rosh Yeshiva concerned that by leaving the full-time world of the yeshiva in order to earn a living he was living a double life. In a beautiful response, which exudes Rav Hutner’s love for his talmid (one of many examples of this love that can be found in his letters), he says that if one lives in two different locations he is living a double life, but if one lives in a single home with many rooms, he can still live a single life. In other words, if properly focused, even our “profane” activities can be of one piece with our inherently holy endeavors. (See here for more on this theme in the writings of Rav Hutner).

Ah, but there’s the rub. Living in one house need not lead to a double life, but even when it does not, what is the unifying force that ties together all that we do? Is a single house enough?

I look around sometimes and wonder what it is that most motivates us as religious Jews. We have multiple options for learning daf yomi, including on a train heading to work, a plethora of choices for kosher sushi and flavored herrings, and shuls to match every possible hashkafa. Never has it been easier to be “frum”. You can be shomer shabbos and still be the Secretary of the Treasury, wear a sheitel and be a CEO, and be makpid on chalav yisrael and have a successful career in academia. Still, I am curious as to what is the foundation on which our house of many rooms is built. In many cases we live solidly modern lives certified by the OU or even the Kof-K, but where do our loyalties lay? What is the singular lens through which we see all that we do? What is our one, the thing we love most? Towards what do we most aspire? We don’t live double lives, but it is good that we deeply examine what kind of single lives we live and aspire to live.

A Deep and Flowing River- a review of A River Flowed from Eden by Rabbi Ari Kahn

I must admit, that I am not a fan of “vortlach” and thus, many divrei Torah heard around the Shabbos table tend to not work for me. While I understand that a devar Torah said over before bentching is not the place for a long and complicated idea, I still believe that Torah should never be presented in a way that is cute or “shtick-y”. It was precisely for that reason that I was excited to see Rabbi Ari Kahn’s latest book A River Flowed From Eden: Torah for the Shabbos Table. Having been a big fan of Rabbi Kahn’s Torah for many years, I hoped that he could combine his usual erudition and depth, with the brevity that is required for a devar Torah that is said around the Shabbos table. Thankfully, my hopes were realized.

I first encountered Rabbi Kahn nearly 20 years ago. I was learning in the kollel at Aish HaTorah, where Rabbi Kahn taught a beginners class at the time. Occasionally, when I would get a little “gemara-ed out”, I’d go up to Rabbi Kahn’s classroom and listen as he explained a piece of aggadeta to students who had been in the yeshiva for a very short time. I was incredibly impressed with Rabbi Kahn’s ability to translate and explain a fascinating story from the gemara, and make it understandable to newcomers to the world of Torah, while, at the same time, explaining the story in a novel, creative and intellectual manner. While I have subsequently read and heard many of Rabbi Kahn’s shiurim, it was these classes that I thought back to, as I read his newest book. Once again, Rabbi Kahn manages to combine his own creativity (his devar Torah on Noach  is one of the places where he is brilliant and original), and the ideas that he learned from his own revered teachers, Rav Yosef Soloveitchik, Rav Yitzchak Hutner, and Rav Aharon Lichtenstein, zichronam liveracha, and present them in a way that is accessible even for those who do not have the same background.

To cite one example from parashat Shelach, this week’s parsha, Rav Kahn notes that when Moshe delivers instructions to the meraglim at the beginning of the parsha, his words indicate that, in fact, Moshe knows that the land is good. This can be seen from the fact that he instructs them to bring back fruit after asking if the land has fruit trees. If he were unsure of what they would find, Moshe would not have been able to say that. Quoting his rebbe Rav Soloveitchik, Rav Kahn suggests that the meraglim misunderstood their mission. Through the use of an analogy, Rav Kahn explains the sin of the meraglim as being that they saw themselves as spies, whose job was to to ascertain whether the land of Israel was good.. In the space of a few pages, Rav Kahn manages to combine depth, scholarship and creativity, while sharing Torah that will be enjoyed by everyone sitting at the Shabbos table.

Alec Goldstein, of Kodesh Press has done a wonderful job of publishing English Jewish books that are both thoughtful, readable, and attractive. It is my hope and wish that he will continue to have success doing so and that books like “A River Flows from Eden” will find the large audience that it deserves.

To order this book, please click here.

Tzamah Nafshi- A second attempt at articulating my thoughts on mysticism for moderns

One could, if he so desired, break down the idea of love, to a combination of biological and physiological urge. Mix in some psychology and some evolutionary development, and love could be stripped of all of its romantic tendencies and notions. Thankfully, for those of us who are romantics, such reductionist thinking would be correctly understood to be missing the forest for the trees. I would contend that Modern Orthodoxy, in emphasizing rationalist approaches to Judaism, to the exclusion of mystical approaches, has made the same reductionist mistake.

Allow me to begin by making one thing clear. I do not believe in the metaphysical or theurgical claims of Kabbalah. I do not learn Torah to create heavenly worlds, and I do not see myself as a puppet whose strings can manipulate the Puppeteer. Still, I have come to believe that in rejecting the factual claims of mystical thought, Modern Orthodoxy has gone to far and thrown out the creative and passionate language of Jewish mystical thought.

Rambam describes the mitzvah of Ahavas HaShem as being analogous to a man who is in love with a woman and can’t keep her out of his mind. Echoing the words of Dovid HaMelech, he says that a person reaches the level of “taavah”- desire, to know HaShem. Even parts of the Moreh Nevuchim have language that can be called mystical, and Rambam’s son, Rav Avraham, certainly went in that direction.

Professor Shalom Rosenberg has gone so far as to suggest that the difference between rational and mystical notions of Ahavas Hashem, as being analogous to the difference between romantic and erotic love. While the latter term may seem, to some, to be out of place, in a religious discussion, the desire for ultimate closeness to God may be experienced and felt  through the singing of Lecha Dodi, Yedid Nefesh, or Tzamah Nafshi, the latter of which was written by Ibn Ezra (!).

I would suggest that, living in a post-modern era, the recognition that we can never objectively know Truth (with a capital T) frees us us up to use language that talks of God in ways to which we can better relate. Rav Solovitchik once noted, after it was made clear to him that his talmidim did not want to hear shiurim from him on Tanya, that his students only wanted his brain, as opposed to his soul. Since that time, for most of the Modern Orthodox world, things have moved even more in the overly-rational direction. One does not have to look to Kabbalah to find mystical language within our tradition as it can be found in parts of Tanach, and within some words of Chazal. To the degree that we keep such ideas and language out of the classroom, we cheat our students out of a possible way to engage passionately with God and his Torah.

Although much of Modern Orthodox thought speaks to me, too often I find it expressed in overly clinical ways, devoid of passion. By ignoring the mystical language that can be found in Tanach, Chazal, Rishonim and some of the greatest and most creative modern Jewish thinkers such as Rav Tzadok, Rav Kook and Rav Hutner, we run the risk of making Torah and mitzvot into a scientific and dispassionate pursuit. We have already seen the costs of such an approach, and it is time to turn things around before more damage is done.