Rabbi Carmy
From the standpoint of contemporary social and economic attitudes, serious Torah study, like the humanities, is condemned to hopeless “inefficiency.” Our late capitalistic society wants to save time and minimize labor costs: we prize the short cuts that offer us more of the information
we want for less effort and less personal engagement. Growth in Torah
study, as opposed to information gathering and processing, is about gaining wisdom and deepening personal involvement. It demands the intensive investment of time. One of our greatest educational challenges is to overcome the utilitarian mentality of our culture. If this is true for Torah study in general, it is even more so for Jewish thought, precisely because
the kind of thinking typical of the ba’al Aggada calls attention to understanding more than to quantitative knowledge, and cannot ignore the individual. The Jewish thinker is committed to self-understanding, however painstaking and painful, and to understanding others. What makes
our lives worthwhile? What really makes our lives worthwhile? How can
we live with serious failure or anxiety about failure in our religious or
worldly preoccupations? How can we live with our failures and disappointments and with those of the people we are devoted to? These are not questions with simple answers we can look up in a book or extract from a congeries of texts. These are not even questions we can formulate accurately without thought. One size does not fit all. Such matters of life and
death do not become routine, even if we think we have dealt with them
again and again.
All this helps explain our community’s shortage of substantial theological existential reflection. Torah educators are burdened; congregational rabbis are even more heavily overextended. When days are long, sometimes impossibly long, the hours devoted to reflection are short. Parents,
too, feel the unrelenting pressure of maintaining the upper middle class
income and allegiance to the material lifestyle that culture makes virtually
obligatory. Nor is it guaranteed that pursuing the reflective life will yield
externally measurable and recognizably rewarding results. If the benefits
are uncertain and not appreciated, why make the effort?
...... Several years earlier the Rav invited me to assist him in
preparing some of his writings for publication. The first installment was
the special edition of five Tradition articles that appeared in 1978. This
series included the Rav’s eulogy of the Talner Rebbitzen, in which he
depicted the dual aspect of our religious tradition, the essential role of the
Jewish father and the Jewish mother.
A few months later the Rav handed me a letter he had received. His
correspondent had read the article carefully and appreciatively. What
replacement, however, could the Rav propose for people who do not have
the benefit of the ideal father and the ideal mother whom the Rav so
eloquently extolled? We spent some time weighing possible responses,
none of which the Rav found satisfactory. Did the Rav intend to write
back? No, because he didn’t have a good answer. In that case, I asked,
why did he give me the letter? The Rav looked me in the eye and said,
very deliberately: “Carmy, I want you to think about this.”
This anecdote adds one more ingredient to the profile of the Jewish
thinker adumbrated above. He or she must not only articulate Jewish
convictions, insights, and arguments but must also be sensitive to questions
for which we do not have clear-cut solutions. This is as true for the
septuagenarian as it is for the young student.
As for me, forty years have passed and I am still thinking.
