In the second chapter of Pirkei Avot, “The Ethics of the Father,” which we shall read this afternoon, two great Sages of Israel each ask a question and give an answer about a matter of transcendent importance to all of us. Both the questions and the answers are similar to each other; yet there are slight differences. These differences, I believe, prove significant, and I would like to explore some of their consequences with you. The first statement is by Rabbi Judah the Prince, the famed redactor of the Mishna, who is lovingly called “Rabbi.” “Rabbi” says, ezohi derekh yesharah she-yavor lo ha-adam, “what is the right way that a man ought to choose for himself?” And the gist of his answer is: tiferet – that which is dignified for the one who does it, and is seemly and becoming in the eyes of his fellow men.Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai, several generations earlier, said to his students, tze’u u-re’u ezohi derekh tovah she-yidbak bah ha-adam, “go out and see: what is the good way that a man ought to cling to?” And his students brought him several answers. One said ayin tovah – an unbegrudging generosity. Another said chaver tov – being a good friend. A third answered shakhen tov – neighborliness. A fourth replied roeh et ha-nolad – foresight. But the answer that Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai accepted because it includes all these four qualities is that brought by the fifth student: lev tov – a good heart.Both “Rabbi” and Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai asked how a man ought to live his life. Their answers are not worlds apart. But they are not the same. And the differences are important. For the difference is that between an abstract and theoretical formulation on one hand, and an intensely personal, real question on the other.Look at how they formulate the question. “Rabbi” says ezohi derekh yesharah – what is the right way. Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai asks ezohi derekh tovah – what is the good way. One emphasizes yesharah, rightness, and the other emphasizes tovah, goodness.…

Moses, as he is presented to us in today’s Sidra, finds himself in a state of utter exasperation. He has reached the last limits of his patience, his wisdom, and his tolerance as he faces the ingratitude and the complaints of his people. He came to this slave people and brought them a great faith; they responded by a demand for fish. He came with the message of the Lord; they asked for melon. He spoke of creative freedom; they wanted cucumbers. He preached righteousness and law; they countered with a demand for onions and garlic. I cannot go on this way, said Moses to the Lord. You are simply asking too much of me. Lo ukhal anokhi levadi la’set et kol ha-am ha-zeh ki kaved mimeni. "I cannot alone by myself, bear this people, for the burden is too heavy for me" (Numbers XI:14). Moses finds that his strength is spent, his spirit depleted, his patience gone. It is an all too human reaction.In response, the Lord grants Moses seventy elders who will assist him in his tasks and thus lighten his burden. But if we examine the response of the Almighty with greater scrutiny, we find one puzzle that actually holds the clue to a problem of universal relevance and eternal significance. G-d directs Moses to gather about him seventy of the elders of Israel, and then says: "And I shall take from the spirit that is upon you and I shall place it upon them" (Numbers XI:17).The famed Bible commentator, Chizkuni, asks a simple but direct question: Why did G-d have to take of the spirit of Moses in order to inspire the elders? Why could not G-d have given of His own spirit and thereby raise the seventy people to the category of prophets and leaders, even as He had originally done with Moses?The answer of Chizkuni is one which exhibits great psychological insight. G-d, he said, did not want only to accede affirmatively to Moses' request for more executives to run his government. G-d wanted to teach Moses a deep and abiding lesson about human nature itself. Moses, G-d meant to say to the …

Our sidra of this morning introduces us, rather casually and incidentally, to one of the most important and highly celebrated virtues in the arsenal of religion, that of anivut. We read in today’s portion, ve’ha-ish Mosheh anav me’od mi-kol ha-adam asher al p’nei ha-adamah, “and the man Moses was the most humble, above all the men that were upon the face of the earth.” Whatever may be the particular translation of the Hebrew word anav, the idea that is usually imparted is that anivut is humility, a feeling by the individual that he lacks inner worth, an appreciation that he amounts to very little. Indeed, the author of Mesilat Yesharim, one of the most renowned works on Jewish ethics in all our literature, identifies the quality of anivut with shiflut – the feeling of inner lowliness and inferiority. According to this definition, then, the Torah wants to teach each of us to see himself in a broader perspective, to recognize that all his achievements are very trivial, his attainments mere boastfulness, his prestige a silly exaggeration! If Moses was an anav, if he was humble and able to deprecate himself, how much more so we lesser mortals.However, can this be the real definition of this widely heralded quality of anivut?We know of Moses as the adon ha-neviim, the chief of all the prophets of all times, the man who spoke with God “face to face.” Do the words ve’ha-ish Mosheh anav me’od mean that Moses himself did not realize this? Does the anivut of Moses imply that he had a blind spot, that he failed to recognize what any school child knows? Does a Caruso have to consider himself nothing more than a choir boy, and an Einstein merely an advanced bookkeeper, in order to qualify for anivut? In order to be an anav, must one be either untruthful or genuinely inferior?To a very great extent, modern psychology is concerned with the problem of inferiority. Deep down, people usually have a most unflattering appraisal of themselves. Many are the problems which bring them to …

In a sidra replete with the stories of Israel’s backsliding, of protest and pettiness, of gossip in high places and unrest in low places, there appears at least one bright spot. It is the story of the first Passover celebrated by the Israelites after their exodus from Egypt. After this happy and joyous celebration, we read that a number of people approached Moses with a complaint: ויאמרו האנשים ההמה אליו, אנחנו טמאים לנפש אדם, למה נגרע לבלתי הקריב את קרבן ה’ במועדו בתוך בני ישראל. They said to Moses, we are impure (ritually defiled) because we had contact with a dead body before the holiday, and one who is in a state of impurity may not partake in the Passover sacrifice; why should we be deprived from offering the sacrifice of the Lord amongst all other children of Israel? Do we not deserve any part in the celebration of the Passover?Moses did not know what to answer, and he turned to God for guidance. The answer from the Lord was the law of פסח שני, “the second Passover.” In response to the complaint, Moses was commanded to declare for all generations that in the event a person is prevented from participating in the Passover in its usual time because he is distant from Jerusalem, or in a state of defilement, he may offer a sacrifice and celebrate the Passover one month later.The Jewish tradition had only praise for these anonymous individuals who presented their petition to Moses. We are told that whereas almost all other portions of the Torah are ascribed to Moses, this particular section concerning “the second Passover” is credited to these petitioners: מגלגלין זכות ע”י זכאי – if one is inherently worthy, then worthy events occur on his account. The Pesikta taught that מלמד שהיו בני אדם כשרים, צדיקים, וחרדים על המצוות – these people were decent, righteous, and anxious to perform the commandments properly!Now the Rabbis are usually sparing in their compliments. Is not, therefore, their praise here somewhat extravagant? Are not these panegyrics somewhat inordinate…

I have spoken several times in the last few weeks on what I consider is and should be the philosophy of modern Orthodoxy: a total commitment to the Halakhah while living in this world and participating in it fully – culturally, economically, and politically. We spoke critically, even if warmly and lovingly, of a new tendency noticeable in Orthodoxy in recent years to recoil, to recede from the larger community and ignore all those whose interests do not coincide with ours. Our thesis was that this withdrawal from the world, this refusal to confront contemporary life, is not a viable philosophy for Orthodox Judaism in our times. I believe that this is a theme that needs constant reiteration, continuous consideration, and deep reflection.Today, however, I wish to emphasize the other side of the coin: the caution that we must exercise never to lose ourselves in the world, not to be overly impressed with the great culture in which we live.This point is made with consummate skill in a comment by the Kabballistic Midrash Ha-ne’elam on a famous passage in today’s sidra which we will all recognize from our prayerbook: va-yehi be’neso’a ha-aron, and it was when the ark set out, that Moses offered up a brief prayer, asking God to rise (or: reveal Himself), and that His enemies scatter before Him. Those who paid careful attention to the Torah reading this morning will have noticed that this brief passage of two verses is surrounded, on either side, by a special mark – the inverted Hebrew letter nun. These two nunin hafukhin, inverted nuns, are part of our Masoretic tradition. What do these strange symbols which appear nowhere else in the Torah – mean? The author of Midrash Ha-ne’elam spares no words in describing their enormous significanWce. They are, we are told, kevodo shel ha-Kadosh barukh hu mammash, ve’hem ikkaro shel olam hem ikkaro shel olam, the very glory of God, and the foundation of the world. It is because of this that Jacob blessed his children with them; for o…

In recent years, months, and weeks, the violence that lies latent at the heart of the American character has begun to surface. The recent spate of assassinations has brought into the open and into real life the celebration of violence in American myth and folklore. In hypnotic fascination, as if we were watching what has been previously but a bad dream suddenly turned into real life, we have seen the myth of the cops-and-robbers game and the cowboys-and-Indians battles transformed into the reality of political and social violence.Of course, it is true, as many commentators have told us, that we must see the problem in perspective. Violence is not a particularly American quality. The killing in our days in Biafra and in Indonesia, the mutual slaughter of the supposedly peaceful Indian Hindus and Pakistani Muslims, and the wholesale massacres in Nazi Germany, were just a few instances of the universal phenomenon of violence. Furthermore, it is not just now that Americans have learned the art. Attempts had already been made on the lives of Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Harry S. Truman. But the successful assassinations of Kennedy and King do bring the whole problem into sharper focus. And we must admit that it is no tribute to us that it is just now that we have become concerned with the problem. It seems that we have, all of us, indulged in the national sport of sweeping unfavorable aspects of American life under the national rug, and that is why violence failed to attract our attention when the Ku Klux Klan was on its great rampage of pillage and murder.Yet, whether it is universal or specifically American, new or old, the recent assassinations of important people in American life represent a tragic and serious blot on our civilization and society. It is a reminder to us that we should never desist from pondering and attempting to eliminate or diminish violence.Today I wish to speak about the problem not as a psychologist or a sociologist, but a…

Recent reports about Soviet Jewry are of the utmost historical importance. What has happened these past several months, or year, marks a watershed in the story of this community. Not everything can be discussed publicly. But even what has been reported in the press is a testimony to the irrepressible Jewishness that has survived more than half a century of communism and has now suddenly come to life in a spirit and courageousness which we did not dare dream of only a few years ago. Last year, Yaakov Kazakov, a Russian Jew, wrote a letter to the Supreme Soviet in which he declared forthrightly: “I am a citizen of Israel.” Three months ago, a Moscow Jew, D. S. Drabkin, similarly declared publicly: “I consider myself a citizen of the Jewish State of Israel.” And now, most dramatic of all, as reported some four weeks ago in the Christian Science Monitor, and this past week in the New York Times, a young Jewish radio engineer, age thirty, Boris Kochubiyevsky of Kiev, smuggled out to the Western world a letter which he wrote Brezhnev, and for which he has now been sentenced to three years of imprisonment. It is a document that will live in Jewish history as a tribute to Jewish determination and responsibility, to Jewish hope and obstinacy, to Jewish heroism and courage. The relevant passages, which it is an honor to recite from this pulpit, read as follows: I am a Jew. I want to live in a Jewish State… I want to live in Israel. This is my dream. This is the goal not only of my life, but also of the lives of hundreds of generations preceding me that were expelled from the land of their ancestors. I want my children to study in a school in Yiddish. I want to read Yiddish newspapers, I want to attend the Yiddish theatre. What is wrong with that? What is my crime? Most of my relatives were shot by the fascists. My father perished, and his parents were killed. If they were alive, they would be standing next to me: Let me go! …As long as I live, as long as I am capable of feel…

One of the most popular and beloved prayers of Judaism comes from today’s sidra, where we read: ויהי בנסוע הארון… “And it came to pass that when the Ark set forward, Moses would say, arise O Lord and let Thy enemies be scattered, let those who hate Thee flee before Thee. And when the Ark rested, Moses would say: return O Lord to the myriads of the thousands of Israel” (Nu. 10:35-36)In the Torah, these two verses are set off from the rest of the text by two strange orthographical symbols, the נונין הפוכין, the inverted nuns. This indicates that, somehow, the entire passage is out of place. Indeed, the Talmud (Shab. 117) declares explicitly that the passage is not in its right place: אין זו מקומה, ולמה נכתבה כאן להפסיק בין פורענות לפורענות. This is not the proper place for these two verses. Why, then, were they written here? – in order to separate between disaster and disaster. The two puranuyot or traumatic misfortunes between which the passage of ויהי בנסוע הארון serves as a welcome interruption, are, first, the episode of Israel’s complaining and murmuring. ‘ויהי העם כמתאוננים רע באזני ה, “and the people were grumbling and it was evil in ears of the Lord.” The first unhappy crisis was that of the excessive complaining of Israel, their desire for more and more. The second disaster is expressed in the words ויסעו מהר ה’ דרך שלשת ימים, “and people traveled from the mountain of the Lord for a journey of three days.” The Talmud (ibid.) interprets this as a spiritual wandering, not a physical one: ‘סרו מה. So the passage concerning the progress of the Ark interrupts between the story of Israel’s grumbling and Israel’s wandering away from the mountain of the Lord. What is the significance of all this? An important insight is offered by the late R. Mordecai Rogov, author of Ateret Mordechai. The portion of the mit’onenim is a common phenomenon in life. It is a rather normal characteristic of people that they grumble and complain. They want more money, more status, more f…

The end of today’s sidra describes an incident which is as intriguing as it is disturbing, as fascinating as it is saddening. Apparently a domestic crisis caused a rupture of relationships in the leading family of the Israelites in the generation of the desert – the family composed of the two brothers, Moses and Aaron, and their sister Miriam. The domestic situation was soon transformed into a kind of spiritual contest, which required the intervention of God on behalf of Moses, and the subsequent punishment of Miriam.All we are told in this passage, in which it is obvious that the Torah deliberately disguises and conceals what happened, is that Moses was criticized by Aaron and Miriam because of his Kushite (Ethiopian) wife. What the criticism is – that we are not told, but we can assume that it has nothing to do with modern forms of racial bigotry. Any attempt to read such bigotry back into the Bible, as the motive for the criticism of Moses marrying Zipporah, is an anachronism of the most unintelligent sort. Whatever it may be, the criticism of Moses's wife was quickly elevated into invidious comparisons of spiritual competence: Aaron and Miriam felt that they were as close to God, prophetically, as was Moses. Moses remained silent, and God took up the cudgels on behalf of Moses. Miriam was stricken with leprosy, and Moses was vindicated. The closing words of that vindication remain an eternal testament to the stature of Moses: בכל ביתי נאמן הוא, “in all My household, he is most trustworthy.”What did God intend by this honorific reference to Moses as נאמן, what might be translated as “an old, reliable friend?”This Divine accolade was interpreted by Rabbi Isaac, one of the בעלי התוספות, in a volume of Bible commentary published from manuscripts not many years ago (the מושב זקנים). According to this interpretation:Miriam insisted that Moses divorce Zipporah, his Midianite wife, and marry someone else. Moses, however, refused. Since he had married her when he was po…

Are conversions successful? Do proselytes who come into the fold, with sincere promises to observe the tenets of Judaism, really keep the Halakhah, the Jewish “way?” The question is one that many Orthodox Rabbis are now asking themselves. I do not refer to those of my colleagues who on principle will never perform a conversion, and instead consistently refer them to their colleagues; I have no respect for such cowardly souls. Nor, certainly, do I refer to those few Rabbis who treat conversion lightly, as if it were merely another ceremony; for such people I have nothing but undisguised contempt. But what of those of us who are cautious and careful – do we succeed? The criteria of “success” are clear enough: the observance of the commandments, genuine piety, and a sense of identification with the people of Israel. In looking back on my experience of 23 years in the rabbinate, I find that I have refused most candidates who came to me for conversion. Either I talked them out of taking the step, or I rejected them as spiritually weak or ethically insincere. But what of those whose conversions I did preside at – how have they fared?  Before answering, I should like to point out that Jewish history offers no clear answers. We can point to illustrious successes – and to dismal failures. For every Shemaya and Abtalion, for every Onkelos, for every progenitor of Rabbi Meir, for every Graf Pototsky, there were probably a hundred who fell by the wayside. For every statement in our sacred literature that is positive, such as ואהבתם את הגר, “and ye shall love the stranger,” which (as Maimonides pointed out in his famous letter to a proselyte) the Torah repeats some five times, emphasizing it much more than love of one’s (Jewish) neighbor, there is another statement such as קשים גרים לישראל כספחת, that proselytes are as difficult for Israel as a scab on the skin.Perhaps this ambivalence can be found concentrated in the conflicting attitudes of the tradition towards an incident m…