Two for One

"Judaism leaves other disciplines to teach that by renunciation of this world one wins the next world. It reserves for itself the teaching that by a life of God-acknowledging duty one can attain beatitude in this world and Paradise, life in the next world can begin here in this one. And this teaching preached by the Succoth Festival for Israel throughout the ages makes itself the universal prospect for the future of all nations by its group of Moed·offerings. From the summit of its national joy the People of God look to the future happiness of all mankind. According to the Jerusalmi Succa V.I it was also just the summit of joy of this Festival of Succoth embracing the hopes of Israel and the whole of mankind, on whose heights the "Well of Happiness and Salvation" sprang out of which the young disciples of prophecy drew the spirit, which enabled them to prophesy. (see on V.19). " (R' Samson Raphael Hirsch, Commentary on Bamidbar 29:13)

Here we find two points of Torah Im Derech Eretz that are very important to me: the idea that happiness is for this world too and the idea that we care about the happiness of the rest of the world. With gratitude to the Almighty for directing me to this commentary which I found simply by opening a Hirsch Chumash.

Maestro Luciano Pavarotti : Nessun Dorma Olympic 2006

Maestro Luciano Pavarotti : Nessun Dorma Olympic 2006

Already 71 here but you have to enjoy his singing before his proud countrymen and before the world.

The queen of Bais Yaakov: The story of Dr. Judith Grunfeld (Great women, great stories)

 by Miriam Stark Zakon


Dr. Grunfeld was one of the founders of the Bais Yaakov movement. She was educated at Hirsch's realschule and was the wife of Dayan Grunfeld, the famous translator of Horeb and Judaism Eternal II.

Contains this gem:

In many ways, Frankfurt was a lovely place to live, and judit had good friends and good times there. But one thing upset her very much, and that was the way many of her friends talked about the "Poylisher," the Polish Jews who had moved to Germany.Life in Poland was very hard for the Jews at that time.There was a lot of anti-Semitism. Polish Jews did not have a lot of opportunities open to them, and many of them were very poor. To escape the hatred and the poverty, many Polish Jews made their way to Germany, where things were better.

There were many differences between the Polish and German Jews. The Polish Jews spoke Yiddish rather than German. Their dress was more old-fashioned, and they were- usually much poorer than their German brothers and sisters. German Jews generally were quieter and more disciplined, and some of them looked down on the high spirits and loud voices of the Polish refugees.

In Judit's home there were no prejudices against the unfortunates who'd come from Eastern Europe looking for a better life. When Mama was a young girl, her parents ran a guest house, and some wealthier Polish Jews came to stay there. As a teenager Mama often watched these Polish chassidim. They talked with their hands. They stroked their beards. They yelled at each other as they learned a piece of Gemara. On Tishah B' A v, in contrast to the German Jews who sat quietly reading about the Temple's destruction, the Polish Jews cried out loud and wailed and lifted their hands up to Heaven, begging for Hashem's mercy. Mama didn't find these strangers disgusting or primitive or silly. She thought they were interesting, and she liked their open, friendly ways. 
Now that she was a grown woman, Mama still respected the Polish Jews. She felt sorry for many of them, too, since most of the refugees were very poor. Every Shabbos the Rosenbaum home was full of Polish Jews enjoying a good, hot meal. Some of the poor people were dressed in ragged, dirty clothing that looked strange next to the sparkling, starched white tablecloth and gleaming silver candlesticks. 

Quite often the refugee children, who didn't eat well and whose parents couldn't afford doctors, had runny noses-or ugly sores. Mama Rosenbaum, always polite, never seemed to notice anything unpleasant. She would simply urge the little ones to eat more of her steaming chicken soup. Later,
after Shabbos was over, she might offer some of her children's outgrown clothing to a poor Polish mother and add on a basket of eggs or a special medicine as a gift.

From her end of the table Judit would watch her mother speak cheerfully and pleasantly to these guests. Mama never made them feel that they were not as good as she was. Judit, following Mama's example, went out of her way to be friends with the Polish girls. Like her mother, Judit didn't see the differences between her and the poor refugees. Instead, she saw what made them the same. They were all Jews.

Judit's school friends soon learned not to ask her why she insisted on playing with the ragged Shlomowitz children or why she shared her schoolyard treats with the Katzenstein girls, who spoke German so badly.

Around her crowded Shabbos table, Juditt learned important lessons in tolerance and true ahavas Yisrael, love for a fellow Jew. It was a lesson that would serve her well in years to come, when she faced a challenge her Frankfurt friends would never have imagined. 

pp. 21- 23

You see this shining example of the Frankfurt community caring about the needs of Jews in general and Eastern European Jews in particular.

Hester Street

Tonight, I am taking the long way home after work, feeling no strength to board the commuter train as I do night after night, sitting with people to whom I have never spoken despite years of travel together, each of us alone in our seats hiding behind newspapers that continue to shock us as the world raises the ante on sin. I read last night what seemed like the fourth article this month about a cannibal not in the Amazon jungle but in an American city. America, the most advanced society on earth. Where have we heard an expression like that before?

Rather, I wander west on Chambers not sure why, but then realizing why as my heart warms to the sight of street signs that mean something so different to me than they do the current residents on Hester, Essex, and Delancey.

I think of my bubbe who walked these streets upon her arrival to these shores shortly after the Russian Revolution. I think of the elderly Rabbi Eisenbach who sold me my first pair of tefellin a lifetime ago. I am old enough now to feel no shock in being called Sir other than the shock that young people even know the term anymore. Few do.

The world marches along with its sub-molecular engineering, seedless watermelon, and gay marriage but I retreat, spending a good portion of my day in the decades before I was born, trying to be with people who are no more.

I recall my grandparents bemoaning the changing world, sometimes with anger at the wildness and recklessness that characterized the only world that I knew with its neon lights, push button phones, and bucket seated cars. I confess they sounded like aliens to me, my grandparents, who always looked like they didn’t quite belong. Only now, half a century later, I too am an alien in this place and my grandparents and even their grandparents and I have become Mahjongg partners, our values all lined up like tiles. My sole concerns in life are to earn a living while battling the pressure to login on during Shabbos and to keep the children frum. Some things change and some do not change at all.

People on the street are chatting away and I don’t understand a word. It is Chinese? Maybe it’s Korean. I can’t read the signs either. I don’t know a lawyer’s office from that of an accountant. I feel this way in shopping malls too, despite the English, lost, out of my element as the rap music pounds my ears and the new fashions bring me nearly to tears.

In the office it’s the same. I pass the cubicles and overhear chatter about reality television and layoffs. I hear gossip. I hear betrayal. It might as well be spoken in Chinese because it makes no sense to me how this society treats the people who comprise it. Earlier tonight, I passed a homeless man who was screaming at the sky, “I am a human being!” And I muttered, “I might be one too, but don’t tell my boss I said that.”

I’m trekking down East Broadway now. The neighborhood is 99% Asian as far as I can see. I’m passing a building that clearly was a shul back in the day, but now houses Buddhist statues.

Yes, I know we moved on to new places and such nachas I feel when I visit Lakewood, Monsey, Passaic, Teaneck, Flatbush. “The Jews are the most tenacious people in history,” wrote gentile historian Paul Johnson. We’ll never quit. If Moshiach doesn’t come for another 150 years, we’ll carry on building day schools. But my feeling is what’s the point? Haven’t we proved ourselves by now, surviving everything the world has thrown at us, including the ikvisa d’meshicha, modern times, the quintessential wolf draped in sheep’s wool? We have shown the goyim what happens when a people says twice a day “Hashem Echad” and means it. We have shown ourselves too.

Any Orthodox Jew today can list the reasons why we need Moshiach now, why we can’t live with these people anymore, why it’s time to go home and end this long, long workday. It is time for Shabbos and for me to see my grandparents again and to say, Bubbe, Zeyde, we made it across the finish line. Moshiach is here and we have kippas on our heads.

I’m sitting in MTJ now, just outside the beis midrash, near the Pepsi machine. Reb Moshe can you hear me? Will you tell Tate that we want to come home? We’ll carry on if we must, but must we? We want to come home.

A voice enters my head and says that I should tell Him myself. So I do.

(written in 2013)

KAJ WH - Praise and a little criticism

"Hirsch was not moved to formulate the policy of Austritt in the 1870s because of disinterest in the welfare of the nonobservant. His teachings and writings were addressed to that constituency and his concern for them was very real. However, if there is a shortcoming to be ascribed to the remarkable kehillah in New York City that has inherited the traditions of Frankfurt: am Main, it is an insularity and isolationism, which is not the cause, but the product, of Austritt. Lack of contact over a period of years is bound to decrease a sense of concern and ongoing interest. With the passage of decades the kehillah has increasingly focused in an inward direction and has had little contact with individuals of different religious outlook and orientation. The result has been a sad loss for the wider Orthodox community. The standards, integrity, cohesiveness, and faith of the kehilla have produced outstanding educational and communal institutions greatly benefiting both residents of its environs and the entire city. But the general Orthodox community in the United States, not to speak of those beyond the pale of Orthodoxy, has not had the benefit of its guidance or leadership. On the other hand, the ability of the kehillah to recreate itself on these shores after dislocation and war, despite relatively meager financial resources during its early years, and to develop into a community that is a model kehillah, stands as a tribute to the staunch advocates of Torah im derekh eretz among its adherents and to their total commitment to its religious ideals. It is a singular community in which the word of Rav remains unquestioned law, k’vod ha-rabbanut is a meaningful phrase, and the label of the community, K'hal Adas Jeschurun, stands for a level of religious probity and reliability that is acknowledged by the entire spectrum of Orthodox Jewry."

Judith Bleich, “Rabbinic Responses to Nonobservance in the Modern Era,” In J. J. Schacter (Ed.), Jewish tradition and the nontraditional Jew (pp. 37-115), Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson Inc. (1992), p. 93, footnote 123