By Esti DeAngelis, Staff Writer
“I sometimes wonder what it means to be a talmid chacham, not in Torah, but to be a talmid chacham in the Jewish people,” Rabbi Dr. Dovid Bashevkin said in a discussion at Stern last month. “That your expertise, instead of being in dafim (pages) of Gemara or perakim in Nach, your expertise is in Klal Yisroel itself.”
This shouldn’t be too radical of an idea. In fact, it should be an obvious one. The Jewish people are one family, and we ought to celebrate those who act on this fact. Those who, simply put, try to get to know their family members. And yet, it’s unfortunate that Rabbi Bashevkin’s statement may hit you in the face as a totally original idea.
This is not because there isn’t anyone who fits his description. There are certainly people who are experts in the story and the history of our nation, who are exhilarated at the discovery of another Jew in a crowd of strangers, no matter his garb or observance level.
Rather, by many, this expertise is not considered significant because a well of pure, beautiful commitment to halacha and Torah values has been laced with a drop of poisonous misconception: that we cannot learn from Jews who do not practice like us. Or, to be more charitable, that anything we can learn from them is something we can learn from a religious source anyway, so why bother.
There is a particular genre of religious “man on the street”-type videos in which an Orthodox Jew attempts to persuade men in Tel Aviv to put on tefillin. These initiatives are beautiful as they help Jews reconnect to their heritage through such a holy mitzvah. But there is one element about some of these videos that makes me pause; what happens when someone does not want to wrap tefillin? Is that the end of the interaction? Is there further attempt at connecting to this person’s Jewish soul, if not through tefillin, then through simple conversation?
It is almost as if the act of putting on tefillin is the only thing that would qualify this person as a valid source of inspiration, as someone from whom we can learn. Without tefillin, Shabbos, kashrus, or any other mitzvah one would say qualifies a person as religious, nothing else about him seems to matter. Not the chesed he does, nor his middos nor any number of other mitzvos he performs, maybe without even realizing it. If one does not keep these few core mitzvos, it seems, his other mitzvos do not count.
This, of course, is absurd and untrue. A mitzvah is inherently a mitzvah and does not depend on other mitzvos to make it so. But knowing this logically is not enough; the Jewish world must radically reexamine what our community looks like and whom we include and exclude from it.
If we fail to do this, we will pay a tragically high price because we do not realize the incredible people from whom we are cutting ourselves off. Think of the heroes that have emerged in the past year. We listen to their stories, the captivity survivors, the soldiers, the hostage families and those who have lost loved ones.
Do we listen just to sympathize or do we listen for inspiration too?
The answer should be the latter, but I am afraid it is often not. If I’m being honest, it makes me angry that there are people who can listen to the stories of those like Sapir Cohen and not come out viewing her as a role model. It makes me angry that there are people who, instead of focusing on the heroism of the countless people who lost their lives saving others at the Nova festival, focus on the fact that these people weren’t keeping Shabbos. (I have heard one too many people make this point and truthfully it has caused me to burst into tears.)
We must remove the barriers of separation that keep Jews unlike us at arm’s length. Yes, many of the heroes of this year do not keep Shabbos or kosher, but this fact does not exist as a caveat to their heroism. Nothing can minimize the sacrifices they made and continue to make. We can acknowledge that halacha is crucial and that these mitzvos are holy and ought to be kept, but at the same time, these Jews have reached heights we cannot fathom.
“What we associate with being shtark and being frum, if we hold it to close examination, can oftentimes, sometimes, be very shallow,” Rabbi Bashevkin said. “[It] does not include people who have literally given up their lives, who have buried children defending the State of Israel.” It seems privileged to declare from one’s comfortable, safe home in America that those in Israel who have literally thrown themselves on top of others to shield them from terrorists should have tried harder to keep halachos they were not born into keeping.
There is a deep irony in closing oneself off from learning from every Jew: it is something at which religious Jews’ biggest role models excel. Our gedolim and religious leaders, historical and present, are better than perhaps anyone else at loving and being inspired by every Jew. How can we, those who try to emulate these tzadikim, not see the hypocrisy in cutting ourselves off from large swaths of our nation?
This problem is an internal one on the Beren campus as well. This school is full of incredible individuals of all backgrounds and all levels of observance, but we will not benefit from this community if we are not open to benefiting from it. Too often we draw imaginary lines separating ourselves and those who dress, act and practice Judaism the way we do from those who act differently. We create smaller communities within what should be one large one. Like the Jewish community at large, we often do not see the value in learning from those whose religiosity is different from ours. We view our differences as more significant than what makes us the same.
But what makes us the same is far more important. Our enemies know this, and they hate us for the sole reason of our Judaism. Sapir Cohen recalled a terrorist telling her in captivity, “When all the Jews are [united], it’s strong, strong, strong. We’ll wait a bit, there will be chaos among you.” Sapir reflected, “While there’s talk of dismantling Hamas, we seem to be moving towards dismantling the unity of Israel itself.”
I am afraid of what will happen if we cannot turn things around, if we cannot look past our differences and just see a Jew as a Jew. I am afraid of what will happen if we cannot recognize what each individual has to contribute to our great nation. I fear what will happen if we cannot be inspired by those who do not do things the way we do.
The heroes of our nation are as diverse as our nation itself. We must celebrate expertise in knowing these people, in being excited to be family members with every last Jew.
Photo Caption: The memorial at the Nova Music Festival site
Photo Credit: Chloe Baker