Running to the Bakery, Charisma, Suicide, and self- actualization

Why does everyone run the bakery right after pesach. Can’t you wait?

dr hayim solovetchik claimed once that pleasure became allowed to orthodox jews in the 70's (the so called Me decade). I feel as people think they are supposed to always feel happy and if they don’t or even worse than that, don’t feel happy when they hit a major milestone, they kill themselves.

This pursuit of pleasure to find meaning has no end. Glatt kosher sushi is the sort of thing that should make us happy, but it doesn’t. So we than look for glatt kosher pot. But even that doesn’t work. And it gets worse and worse. We look for charismatic teachers and leaders, much in the same vein. We need to feel happy, even in shul and in class. As we can't always be happy, we then get depressed as we think there is something wrong with us for being what is actually normal.

The goal of life is not happiness. It is meaning. And the whole orthodox community (at least in the USA, here I am a neophyte) has bought the lie, along with the West, that the point of life is happiness. Its like the joke that you would think that based on the way the society carries on about it that"one night stands,"make the unemployment rate fall in by half.

Unfortunately 60 years of this philosophy has helped many fewer than it has damaged. Just all the people who have died alone (before this terrible outbreak) because they abandoned their spouse or were too busy finding self- actualization to “settle down” in that petite bourgeois phrase.  As long as your goal is to feel “right” inside, you will never succeed in meeting that goal. Telling even younger and younger people to feel “right” about themselves seem like a good way to help encourage suicide among the young, as we see in social media encouraged suicides or the what researchers call, suicide clusters.

Running for chometz is just another symptom of deep danger. Having said that, I would love a bagel RIGHT NOW.

Israel's Supreme Court. Completely out of line, but What do you Expect?

Jonathan Sumption (former uk supreme Justice) pointed out in his Reith Lectures that the courts fill political vacuums (and usually in way much less satisfying than if they are filled politically). 

I think that by creating a pure unicameral system, Israel left a gap that has been filled by the Court. The question is how can this gap be realistically filled, hopefully in a Madison-esqu way. Direct election of the head of government, did not solve this problem, perhaps because it didn't resolve the problem of checks and balances. Westminster systems (like the UK and Canada) that have diminished the strength of their upper house have seen a similar issue. 

Going forward, how can this gap be filled without an unlikely constitutional convention like event or aggressive FDR-like tactics? The vacuum in the separation of powers is real. Maybe it was masked by much of Israel's early history being dominated by one side. 

However as the tide turned to the Right in power and influence, the weakness of the unicameral system has been revealed. I wonder if the answer is in devolving power somehow.

Charlie Brown, the Chazon Ish, and Bitachon

I have learned a little more about faith in Hashem from an old Peanuts
cartoon during this time of being  at home due to the health
precautions here in Israel. Charlie Brown explains in that comic strip
that security in life is, “sleeping in the back of the car when you
are a little child,” while your parents drive, “you don’t have to
worry about anything, your mother and father are in the front and they
do all the worrying... they take care of everything… but it doesn’t
last, suddenly you’re grown up and it can never that way again.” This
powerful thought is not only the musings of a comic character, but it
is also very similar to the thinking of one our greatest gedolim.

The Chazon Ish in Emunah VeBitachon says that bitachon is trusting
that what Hashem does is the right thing. It is like Emunah actualized
l'maaseh. We
believe whatever happens, good or bad, it is God’s will. Not that we
shouldn’t try to affect our lives and fate, but we must realize, that
in the end of the day, while we can make ourselves more comfortable in
the “back seat,” and adjust our “seat belt,” we are in Hashem’s car
and he does all the “worrying,” and things will turn out not
necessarily the way we planned it.

Sitting at home at the orders of our local government, wondering about
our health, our livelihoods, and the national and global economies,
things out of our hands. Whatever we think about the interventions of
our governments and leaders, we can’t do anything, it is up to them to
solve this problem we now all face. We can worry about stretching out
our budgets, or keeping children occupied, or how to learn over Zoom,
but in the end of the day, everything is in the hands of political
leaders.

Really life is like this, everything is in the hands of the leader of
all leaders, God. Sitting at home is a good time to recognize this.
For thousands of years Jews have sat hurdled in their homes, in fear
of what is outside, waiting for the knock on the door, the screech of
the mob, the horror on the other side but knowing that whatever
happens, it is the will of God. Now it’s our turn to sit at home,
feeling powerless, stuck, and fearful. It is out of our control. We
have to trust in our local governments and more importantly, we have
to learn to trust whatever is the will of God.

We are Hashem’s children, he is in the driver’s seat and while we can
make the back seat more comfortable and remember to put on our seat
belts, at the end of the day, we are not driving the car and to trust,
whatever the end of the journey is, it is the one that God, chose for
us, His children, as he has for thousands of years.

The Madda behind the Torah Curtain.

The Madda behind the Torah Curtain.

Now that we are stuck at home, it is time to start blogging again!

I noticed that many guys from very modern background rapidly rose to the front of shiur in yeshiva, seemingly easily overcoming their weak background.

They leveraged their Hebrew skills, especially their knowledge of grammar and of their wonderful study skills, to outpace products of yeshivah high schools with more robust gemera backgrounds. They even often outpaced those from more “black-hat” yeshivas.

Similarly I noticed that the most successful learners in yeshivish kolleim that I know through family and friends are products of those few yeshivish high school with  secular educations.

Often, I have observed that older successful professionals, who were well educated and worldly, tended more self-motivated learners than their children who were, “full-time in learning,” and less educated.

I have discovered that many of the most impressive rabbanim, in the YU and in the Israel dati world, were those who came from highly educated backgrounds before they devoted themselves to just learning and may even had turned their back on secularism.

Someone I know heard the wife of Rabbi X (one the great American “black hat” torah scholars of today) boost of his high school (or was it college) essays on Shakespeare. He of course had turned his back on anything even remotely secular. One of the premier torah scholars in Israel turns out to not only have a much more secular primary education than any of his peers, but also be an art fan, avidly discussing his yearly visits to museums with an acquaintance of mine.

I have read first person accounts about two of the great posikim of the previous generations, that one was an avid reader of the newspaper and the other was a great reader in his youth.

Most of the great 20^th century “machshava” thinkers and their inoculators had strong secular backgrounds, backgrounds that are often glossed over today, but are not hard to find out about.

I don’t believe that these are examples only of how these people had multiple strengths or just about how they turned their back on (and many did turn their backs) on other things to devote themselves to torah. I also don’t believe that these rabbanom were the only people in the frum world who had the strengths to become who they did.

Rather I believe that – against the way some or even many of these people thought or would argue- it is not despite the secular backgrounds or educations that they became so great or prominent, it is because of it.

Because they know how to organize information, because they know what the antithesis to true values are, because they were trained, often without realizing it, to differentiate between assumptions and facts, and of course, because they understand different worldviews and can appreciate their own better. A feeling for the secular word equipped them to understand the difference between knowledge and faith. Knowing what learning for intellectual stimulation taught them what learning for divine commandant is. They know what reality is and even if they reject reality for faith they know what they are doing.

These are just some of the ways that often madda has a positive but hidden effect on torah.