"R. Hutner devoted the first discourse of Pachad Yitzhok on Purim to the ethos of leitsanus. His point is that leitsanus, by its very nature, is destructive. It expresses the desire to negate, to deny significance; it cheapens the world. In permissible leitsanus, the destructive element is secondary to the creative impulse; negation and denial of significance are in the service of affirmation. Value is enhanced.
R. Hutner’s remarks force us to consider how we are to know when derision is secondary to a positive goal and thus useful in enhancing that goal and when derision and disparagement become primary and are to be shunned. It seems that one-sided denigration, in its failure to appreciate what is valuable and admirable in the object satirized, is liable to become an end in itself and thus is essentially destructive of meaning. Many in our Orthodox society resemble, and sometimes outdo secular society in their cynicism and constitutional inability to appreciate and revere.
In our generation, if we are to nurture the fundamental religious impulses of praise and gratitude and sheer appreciation of innocent human achievement, we must be especially anxious to avoid feeding a culture of bittul.
When Caliban, the savage in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, who has become an emblem of the baleful effects of colonialism, turns against the veneer of civilization to which he has been subjected, he accuses his would be mentor, the magician Prospero: “You taught me language, and my profi t on ‘t / Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you / For learning me your language!” We who would benefit the younger generation with our wisdom and gestures, we who would instruct them about the society in which we are embedded, and lead them on the path to reverence and love for the good, should beware of cheering ourselves too uncritically, lest one day the message will be flung in our face: “You taught me Musar, and my profit on’t / Is I know how to sneer!”
