Rabbis: Don’t Be Pessimists!

Rabbi Avi Grossman’s advice to rabbis:

… you should, like Rabbi Soloveichik did, offer your congregants as many opportunities as possible to study on an adult level, and to let them ask as many questions as possible. Let them learn to read gemara, and see how the rishonim understood the gemara. See how all of the commentaries until today actually discussed the practical halacha. The way we study gemara b’iyun is entirely alien to anybody who lived before the 20th century. There are two approaches to this. The first approach is to avoid, at all costs, your congregants ever realizing that the practices with which they are familiar do not exactly fit the logical conclusions of the halachic evolution, and the second approach, that of our teachers, is to allow them to realize. It will get them more involved and more interested in their studies. If you are so fortunate, you can encourage many of them to make aliyah after learning enough about the commandments associated with the land. Or take hilchoth tzitzith: study them in depth for a few weeks, and watch how you’ll suddenly have your people become big m’daqdqim, and maybe some will even start wearing t’cheileth. I know many rabbis who will look with dismay and point at how, inevitably, some one will enthusiastically adopt the position that cotton is 100% d’oraitha obligated in tzitzith and another will become mahmir for only wool tzitzith, and think that some horrible damage has been caused. That’s the ultimate in pessimism, because they fail to see the benefit in their increased observance. If only it would be that way all the time. And I understand why they take it so badly, also. When the ba’al habos suddenly becomes a hasid of this way to do the mitzva or that, the rabbi usually becomes alarmed if it is not his, i.e. the rabbi is a wool tzitzith man, and suddenly the congregant is all for cotton tzitzith, or vice versa, and the rabbi sees that the congregant’s new knowledge has only gotten him to adopt the “wrong” opinions. As for yourself, you should be happy about anything that gets your congregants more excited about observance. And if they do things differently than the way you would prefer, then go and study that opinion and learn the arguments for it.

See the rest here…