This is an article that has been building for some time. While there have been many subtle and not so subtle nudges and prods to sit down and write this essay, the article that gave me the greatest impetus was a recent piece entitled, “How I Lost My Daughter to Religious Fundamentalism.” Considering the article now has over 5,200 shares, and over 400 comments, it seems that I was not the only one to feel the need to act and/or respond.
While I do not say this lightly, I agree with the mother on almost every point. Having personally gone through a handful of both Chabad and non-Chabad Kiruv (Jewish outreach) institutions, aside from covering the hair before marriage and whisking her daughter away to Israel without her mother’s permission, most of what was recounted there, at least to some extent, fell within the mainstream approach to Kiruv.
Separating from the World
To enter most yeshivas or seminaries means to declare at least some aspect of the world you once knew trief, not kosher. In modern orthodoxy this portion is less, and in Haredi settings the portion is substantially more.
The reason the mother is correct is not because Jewish law isn’t important as every Jew should endeavor to take on more mitzvot. The way in which Yoav Hattab encouraged his friend to keep Shabbat before he was murdered is a telling reminder about the mutual care and responsibility that each Jew should feel for his fellow. He did so full of love and care… a role-model for us all.
Upon reading the aforementioned article, however, readers may be led to think that the issue is with observance. The demands for a kosher kitchen, the finest kosher ingredients, etc…
This is not true.
If you read the article carefully and with sensitivity, the pain came not from all the leaps and measures the mother took to assist her daughter’s road to observance, and not even that her daughter left college (although this upset her). What pained her most, more than anything, was that she felt she had lost the emotional connection to her daughter; that her daughter no longer cared for her and her husband.
The reason this is an extreme case is because most ba’alei teshuvah (returnees to God and His Torah) do maintain some sort of relationship with their family. But nevertheless, there is one gaping commonality in Kiruv today—what I call the “two world hypothesis.”
The Two World Hypothesis
Let’s start with modern orthodoxy.
According to modern orthodoxy we are instructed to abide by the realm of traditional Jewish law, and anything that doesn’t ostensibly contradict Jewish law is permissible. You are encouraged to be a doctor, psychologist, even listen to relatively “pareve” (neutral) music if you wish, so long as no explicit prohibition is transgressed.
From four years spent at Yeshiva University, including a few years prior, although there are lengthy books to explain this movement in greater detail, this is what I observed among the non- “black hat” crowd. Students who pursued their interests and passions in one world, and kept a life of observance in another world. Thus I can only speak of how it is practiced, not the theories and philosophy behind this movement.
This is separation.
Separation in the sense that limudei kodesh (holy subjects) are taught in the morning, and after lunch for limudei chol (secular subjects), anything goes.
The basic difference between the Haredi approach and modern orthodoxy has to do with what’s “after lunch.” Whereas the Haredi lifestyle attempts, as much as possible, to extend limudei kodesh through the day, modern orthodoxy has embraced both worlds; both the “before lunch” and “after lunch” worlds of holy and profane.
What Chabad Needs to Do Now
Before introducing my response to the “How I Lost My Daughter to Religious Fundamentalism” article, I thought to first mention a hot button topic within Chabad pertaining to the perceived shortage of new cities to send shluchim (emissaries) to.
As you can imagine, there are Facebook wall feeds hundreds of comments long debating the nature of shlichut today. And while I can’t say that I’ve read every comment, the general consensus is one of vertical growth… more cities, more universities, locations in cities even when there are ostensibly no Jews present, etc…
This is vertical growth because there is still a majority of the Jews (and non-Jews) in cities where Chabad is already active that are not being reached. So while it is good to do more, work harder, tirelessly canvas the streets with tefillin and Shabbat candlesticks in hand, we also need to begin redefining the word “shlichut.”
So now we have two words to redefine—Kiruv and shichut, Chabad outreach.
Horizontal Growth
What is horizontal growth?
There was a time when I was preparing to become the co-director of a walk-in Kabbalah center in Manhattan. It would have operated out of an existing Chabad house (the shliach had offered his space rent free), but the operational funds never came.
What was the approach? That when a person walks in from the street the first statement is not what I have to teach, but what are you interested in? What’s your profession, your hobbies, your interests, your major? And once he tells me a little bit about himself, then we would sit down and I’d tried to find a source in Torah that not only related to his interest, but shed light on it in ways he never thought possible. I was preparing myself to be the “shadchan” not the scholar. Someone who helped to connect the dots between the two worlds of holy and mundane. And when I didn’t know, I would phone a friend.
Once I was exhibiting at Kinus Hashluchim, the annual gathering of Chabad emissaries, and a shliach came up to my booth asking if any of the Kabbalah books I was selling speak about wine. Just then his friend came up, hearing this “odd” question, and asks him to explain? The shliach responded that he has an attendee at his Chabad house that is a wine aficionado, he loves wine. So the rabbi had said he would try to find a book that explained wine according to Torah for him. But before I could think further, both he and his friend left.
Two more examples…
In November of 2005, Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh gave a class at UC Berkeley entitled, “The HebrewLanguage – An Ideal Model for Information Processing and Management,” to computer science majors and others. Ideally, classes like this should be viewed as an introductory “call to action,” with the Chabad shliach encouraging these students to meet-up on a regular basis, and together with the assistance of the rabbi, actually develop this computer programming language.
For chemistry majors there is the Period Table according to Kabbalah, and so forth…
Recently, Aleph Beta Academy came out with an animated video entitled, “Va’era: Seeing God in Science.” While there has been some back-and-forth on the content, the basic concept that the Divine Name Shakai relating to the finiteness of our universe is a sound one. And while this video was made presumably with elementary school-age children in mind, if a mathematician wanted to delve deeper into the numbers, they could progress onward to this video.
Kiruv’s Exodus from Egypt
What I envision is a Kiruv world beyond the “until here and no further” approach. As mentioned, this does not, God forbid, mean that the mitzvot are less important. What it does mean is that the dichotomy is dissolved. That the world be perceived as a place filled with Godliness, instead of a place filled with piles of manure to be avoided. And while the piles are maybe a little bit smaller or more spaced out according to some approaches, currently the mainstream approach to Kiruv is that a life of observance means that you have to be careful not to come close to or step into the manure of the world.
To explain the approach I am now suggesting, I thought to quote from the recent Hayom Yom entry from 25 Tevet. For those who are unfamiliar, Hayom Yom is a collection of daily teachings and/or aphorisms compiled by Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson before he became the seventh Rebbe of Chabad.
To Quote:
From [Rabbi Shalom DovBer Schneersohn’s, the fifth Chabad rebbe’s] talks:
“…The Chassidic exodus means purification and correction, stepping out of worldly limitations and bounds while remaining in the world. This means, while functioning within the world we must transcend its limitations. We are to remove the limitations and bounds, and perceive the truth–that the world per se is truly good, since, after all, the natural world is what God intended. This is attained through the Divine service of Chassidut.”
Perceiving Godliness
The dissatisfaction that we feel from the present state of the Kiruv movement, and from Jewish observance today, comes from this sense that it too is in exile. That even the most well intentioned rabbis—and this is most of them—stop short of relating the Torah to our worldly interests, passions, pursuits, dreams… This is a limitation, a constraint of exile or Egypt, and the reason why so many of us feel constricted by the “boxes” of the current system built around a life of Jewish observance.
But as Job declared, “from my flesh I perceive Godliness.”i The more we work to perceive the natural world around us as essentially good, as the natural world that God intended, the more we make our exodus from the “until here and no further” mentality, and the more each of us will feel liberated and inspired to live an observant life past dichotomy and division.
Leaping Past the Schism between Worlds
Conflicts arise not from seeing the world as an essentially good and Godly place, but from rubbing against external experiences that we don’t know how to process. For instance, once I was screamed out of the study hall because I was reading a secular newsletter.
There are two reasons why I was screamed at: The first that reading a secular newspaper in the study hall is not respecting the sanctity of the place, and he is right. But to scream in a frantic way, the impulse to scream “get out, get out,” derives from the inability to reconcile these two worlds… the holy study hall, and the profane paper.
Now 15 years later I co-founded a site with the intention of unifying these two—the headlines people are currently interested in, and the timeless lessons and messages of the Torah.
This still doesn’t make reading a secular newspaper in a study hall okay, but at least now, I see at least within myself what motivations were latent at that time.
One of the thoughts for this article was to call it Torah U’Madda (Torah & Science) 2.0, but this article is more than answering the “two world hypothesis.” To one extent or another, we have all experienced the “until here and no further” approach to Judaism, whereby at least some portion of the world was deemed beyond the scope of a Torah dialogue.
Knock ‘em down
Before I was speaking about the world, now I thought to end with the individual. Ideally, no one should say “until here and no further” to ourselves. Meaning that we shouldn’t attempt to suppress our desires and interests in the hope that they will just go away. Instead of putting down secular newsletters, I learned over time to conceptualize these contemporary headlines, and place them within a Torah context. For me, my desire was to see what was new. It was only when I realized that I wasn’t searching for what was new in the world, but what was new within myself, how this story can enhances Divine service, that I began to become at peace with the world around me.
Thus when I say to knock down the blockages and barriers to the world, not to view it as a place filled with manure piles, I am expressing the hope that we should feel at peace with the world because we feel at peace with ourselves. That the world is essentially a good place, and that we are essentially good people; and because we are so good and holy, we don’t need the blockade in front of the non-kosher restaurant, non-kosher website, and so forth, because we would never think to do such a thing. Not because this is what we were told, that there is a red figure with a fork waiting to prod and scold us if we do, but because it goes against our essential and innate holiness.
From Two Worlds into One
Simple faith is what both the mother and daughter above have equally in common. They are both equally believers in God. This believer awareness unites the two worlds of religious and profane—of the ”frum” (דָּתִי) and “secular” (חִלּוֹנִי)—together with the oneness of the aleph of the “faithful” (אֱמוּנִי). The initial letters of these three words themselves spell “one” (אֶחָד), teaching us that only when all three perspectives on reality are united, can the Jewish people reach the state of being “one.”
This is a good meditation to have in mind when saying the Shema prayer.
Contemporary Writing Contest
While I am not specifically involved with this initiative, a contest was recently launched to foster, in part, was now presented. The initiative was launched by the Meaningful Life Center, and they are asking for original essays which apply a concept in Chassidut to solve a contemporary life issue. The winning submission receives $10,000, with 2nd and 3rd place prizes as well.
Hopefully this is a good indication of more good things to come (hopefully with art and music as well) in this brave new world called the neo-Kiruv movement.