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1957

To Strengthen Our Heritage (1957)

Faith Prayer Torah & Technology India
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Even Those Who Presume to Do Good – Must Do God's Will (2000)

Very often, those who believe, sincerely, that they are following the dictates of their conscience and are dedicated to what they conceive to be right and truthful and just, make egregious errors. Often, their idealism degenerates into ideology, and then the criterion of right action and fair conduct is to be found outside the realm of morality and in the area of ideology. Sometimes the conduct is, indeed, acceptable from a general ethical point of view, yet as Jews we know that more is required than the generally accepted moral norms of the societies in which we live. All too often, we have learned to our dismay that genuinely held values that were considered liberal, humanistic, progressive – turned out to be harsh, unjust, counter-productive. Who can forget the horrors visited upon us by Communists who began as idealists searching for the ideal society, the perfect world? Who can forget the thousands of young Jews in the Pale of Settlement fired by the visions of a classless society and the utopian dreams of Marx and Engels who became the obsequious apologists for Stalin, one of the two most bloodthirsty tyrants of the 20th century?מיד אחרי ברכות השחר אנו אומרים תפילה קצרה: ויהי רצון מלפניך... ואל תשלט בנו יצר הרע... ודבקנו ביצר הטוב ובמעשים טובים וכף את יצרנו להשתעבד לךNow, the language used is noteworthy. We identify quite clearly the יצר הרע and then the יצר הטוב. However, the third mention is of neither; rather, the neutral, unmodified term יצרנו is used. Why so?I suggest it is because the יצר הטוב can, if given free and unsupervised rein, become as dangerous as the יצר הרע! Both urges have to be responsible to the Almighty. Let loose, the יצר הטוב can morph into its dialectical opposite, and under the banner of goodness and progress and decency it can become a vastly destructive force.ואהבת את ה׳ אלקיך בכל לבבך וגו׳ – בכל לבבך: בשני יצריך, ביצר טוב וביצר הרע. As the Rabbis of the Talmud put it, both urges, the good and the evil, have to be controlled by the…
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To Be A Jew (1963)

It was never easy to be a Jew, but it was never as hard as it is to-day. I do not refer to the restrictions and prohibitions that limit the activities of the observant Jew. For the Jew who believes, these practical regulations are a joy, an expression of love. Nor do I mean the exposed political position of the Jew in modern society, a role that has, to some in extent, become even more difficult for him in the Diaspora because of the State of Israel. For the Jew who chooses to identify himself with his people, these obstacles are all part of the unfolding of the great and long-awaited drama of redemption.I mean, rather, that it is hard to feel like a Jew, to experience the depth of Jewish religious emotion that scans the spectrum from fear and awe to love and joy. It becomes more and more difficult seriously to engage G-d in a dialogue which will lift us above the commonplace and the pedestrian to a new level of vision and purity. Oar hearts have run dry. The spirit is parched. The soul is overladen with the dreaded dust of despair.Our society and culture are composed of many elements, and all of them conspire against us. Protestantism tells us to look Into ourselves first for the source of religion. And so we look and we find nothing. The pay-chologiats tell us to consider only the experience of religion, rather than its practice or creed, but we experience nothing. Scientists present us with a cold, depersonalized world, in which man's eyes turn heavenward only to follow the orbit of the newest satellite. And 80 it 18 not worth looking at all. G-d seems to have vanished from dis world, to have packed a suit-case filled with all the pleasures and agonies, the awe and the ecstasy, formerly reserved for Him by His people, and to have left without so much as saying "Goodbye.”What, then, are wo to say to the Jew, enstranged from the sources of the Jewish tradition, one who feels himself awkward in the milieu of maximal Jewishness but yet pines for some sensation of pi…
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To Be A Jew, Part 2 - Mebasser Reprint (1963)

The way out of the dilemma, then, is to reverse the order to which we have become conditioned by modern life. First live like a Jew, so that later you may love like a Jew. Begin with a full life of Torah and Mitzvot, so that afterwards you may experience the mighty range of feeling that is reserved for the truly devout. One cannot possibly be uplifted by the majesty and mystery of the Shabbat until he has first fully observed its regulations. The pleasures and the wonders are incommunicable; we can only talk about them, we cannot transmit them themselves. Only a personal participation can accomplish that. So, he who waits for inspiration to pray—will not pray. He who prays anyway may yet rise to full inspiration. The Halakhah does not demand full kavvanah before one begins his prayer (except for the beginning of the Shema and the first blessing of the Amidah); it demands only that nothing be present which will hinder kavvanah should it arise.But we must go one step further. In order to be a Jew, one must not only act like a Jew in practice. One must also act as if he were experiencing the emotional wealth of Judaism. In other words, what is recommended is a bit of conscious self-delusion. We must emulate the outward manifestations of religious experience in order to arrive at the experience itself. We must convince ourselves that we have kavvanah so that we may indeed ultimately possess it. We must, in good conscience, tell ourselves that we love G-d and fear Him, that our hearts are filled with awe and joy, so that in the end they really will be.Norman Lamm
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