Of Sheitels and Chandeliers
“Speak unto the congregation of the Children of Israel and say unto them: Be holy, for I, the L-rd your G-d, am holy.” (Leviticus 19:2).
It is not an easy thing to be holy, and there is not a man alive who has not stumbled as he has walked down the road of life, and fallen – even if but for a moment – into impurity. It is not an easy thing to be holy and in the Jew’s climb up the difficult sides of the mountain of sanctity there are always slips and falls. But it is holiness and sanctity that remain the ultimate goal and purpose of the Jew, for to be holy is to approach the Almighty who IS holiness, while to emulate Him is the reason for man’s being.
Holiness. To willingly deny oneself material pleasure; to sacrifice a desire; to give up a delicacy; to weave this into a philosophy of life with its value dominating those contradictory ones of materialism and transitory riches; to take one’s ego and self and “I” and bend it beneath the yoke of sacrifice and denial. To become richer by far with far less, to become stronger with the ability to do without. This is holiness, this is sanctity, this is the purpose of all the individual mitzvot.
And how, when we grow in an atmosphere of supposed Judaism, in which there is no conceptual Judaism, when we merely load ourselves with mitzvot as a donkey laden with sacks, when we strew our mitzvot helter skelter without plan, blueprint or program, we end up with structures that are technically Jewish, but that in reality are empty and barren of everything that is holy and meaningful. The mitzvah becomes a thing to be done because of habit and ritual, while its purpose and reason are lost in the mists of a background that never understood the concepts and values that are the heart of the individual Torah commandment.
Little wonder that the Ramban – Nachmanides – found it necessary, when commenting on the commandment “Be holy!” to warn against the meticulously observant Jew who could be a “naval b’rshut haTorah,” an abomination within the limits of the Torah, within the permission of the Torah!
It is almost inconceivable if we did not see it every moment of the day. To be a scrupulously observant Jew, one who carefully and technically follows every nuance and custom and yet who qualifies as a naval b’rshut haTorah, an abomination within the permission of the Torah …
I do not even discuss, at the moment, the painfully obvious reality of supposedly religious, Orthodox Jews, who are as capable of sheer hate as any Sabbath violator. All of us know, to our sorrow, the “religious” Jew who – not merely because he or she stumbles and errs every so often, but as a matter of total, continuous practice – mixes mincha, the afternoon service, with the most vicious lashon hara, character assassination. All of us know how many fraudulent business deals have been planned over a glatt kosher lunch. The fact that this enables the irreligious Jew, who is just as bad, to point an eager finger at “religious Jews” and brand Torah Judaism as a whole as hypocritical, is only the least of the results. For the irreligious Jew does not understand and prefers not to understand that if violating the Sabbath takes a Jew out of the category of “religious” or “Orthodox”, so too does his planned and deliberate and permanent pattern of lying, stealing and lashon hara. Such a person is no more a representative of Torah Judaism than the desecrator of kashruth.
AlI this, however, stems from a definite cause. It has its roots in a particular evil. The irreligious Torah Jew, that phenomenon noted as far back as the days of the prophets, has his source in a particular philosophy of life that is as un-Jewish as that of any gentile’s and that is the product of an utter lack of conceptual, ideological and philosophical study and thought. What emerges from the irreligious “religious” society is a culture that can best be described as Accomodation Orthodoxy, Comfortable Compromise, or the World of Sheitels and Chandeliers.
It is the world of the glorious ability to enjoy everything that the gentile does with a veneer of “yiddishkeit.” Vacation in this kind of a world becomes not a time when one is finally free to learn Torah without the oppressive interference of work, but a glorious opportunity to go on a trip to Puerto Rico, where one is promised the chance to gamble all night under the auspices of a glatt kosher tour. Indeed, the world of “modern orthodoxy” stamps everything right down to the night club with the obscene jokes and half-naked dancing girls – KOSHER, if the word “glatt” is prefixed to it.
It is the world of the meticulous observance of the law of covering the married woman’s head with a gorgeous sheitel from the salons of Paris and London, that turns the simple woman not into a paragon of holiness, but into a thing far more physically attractive than she ever could be with the natural qualities given her by Heaven.
It is a status symbol, an effort to become more desirabIe than less so, a thing that becomes an object of vanity rather than modesty, a total contradiction of the spirit of the Law.
It is the world of the chandelier and the desperate, neurotic and un-Jewish value system that places materialism and desire for wealth and status at the top of the priorities. The throwing of fortunes into fancy homes; the following up of additional fortunes into their renovations; the expensive clothes and vacations and all the things that mark the conspicuous consumption that Torah always condemned in the world of gentiles and secularism. Yet, here they are, in “religious” garb, in the form of the meticulously observant Jew whose table is graced with only glatt kosher and who delights in taking to task the Conservatives for their hypocrisy and compromise and twisting of Judaism. The sad truth is that the irreligious religious Jew is just as guilty of comfortable accomodation, and the world of sheitels and chandeliers is his world as well.
It is not very difficult to be an observant Jew in the America of 1978, if one defines “religious” as the practitioner of Jewish folklore and ritual. The almost universal five-day work week and the presence of the OU, OK and an increasing alphabet-soup kashrut business, combined with the college education that makes every Jewish mother beam and every graduate guaranteed shelter from poverty, make the modern Orthodox, whether in Flatbush or Boro Park garb, eminently comfortable.
But religion and religious conviction are eternally measured by the yardstick of deep faith and true commitment, and that yardstick is a concrete, not an abstract one. It is in the area of genuine sacrifice, where the Jew is called upon to truly give of himself and give up of himself, that the real religious Jew is tested – and so woefully found wanting.
The mitzvah of living in the Land of Israel and leaving the abomination and impurity of an Exile that our rabbis called a place of G-dlessness and idolatry; the obligation to honestly and sincerely look at our failure to adhere to the mitzvah that the Sifri calls equal to all the combined mitzvot; the need to lift ourselves up and leave the fleshpots (albeit glatt) of the comfortable and warmly soothing Exile, and make the sacrifice, the very real sacrifice, of a lowered living standard, and an apartment rather than a house, an apartment that may not have a chandelier – if it is difficult to live in Israel, what does that matter to a Jew who really knows that it is difficult just to be a REALLY RELIGIOUS JEW? The Jew who never misses mincha and dedicates himself to the difficult observance of the eating of hot chulent on the Sabbath in the comfort of the gentile Exile, is not a religious Jew so long as he willingly and deliberately fails to bend his neck beneath the yoke of Torah that demands the doing of the real sacrifice. It is not hard to pray the mincha service or to wear the luxurious sheitel. It is very difficult to give up comfort and fulfill the mitzvah of living in the Land. Those who cannot bring themselves to obey the mitzvah are the ones who fail and who fail Judaism.
The mitzvah of dedication to the Jewish people. If one is obligated to wash one’s hand of impurity before eating (and what religious Jew would ever overlook that?), then surely one is obligated to wash one’s hands of the blood of a fellow Jew – and one’s hands become tinged with blood, not through active assault or murder, but through passive acceptance and refusal to prevent that evil. The finding of a murdered corpse under unknown circumstances called for the elders to go out to the spot and declare: “Our hands did not have a share in the shedding of this blood.” No one for a moment accused the elders of the actual murder, but they were declaring that they had not allowed the victim to go homeless or without accompaniment. For the Torah decreed that mere passivity in the face of danger to a fellow Jew is a shedding of blood!
And if so, how many religious Jews are shedders of blood and violators of the cry: “Thou shalt not stand by the blood of thy fellow Jew”? How many of the Comfortable Accommodation set are unwilling to risk their time and bodies and endanger themselves for fellow Jews? How many were as silent and indifferent as anyone else to the plight of poor and threatened Jews in the inner city areas, to Soviet Jews and Syrian Jews? How many refused to allow their children to attend demonstrations and to get involved? How many are adamantly opposed to their children living in Israel, desiring rather that their offspring share their sin of living in Galut under the bizarre theory that the family that sins together shares fate together?
How many wavers of the Torah banner become hysterical when their child declares his desire to give up a college career and, instead, learn in a Kolel, a yeshiva for married men, for a number of years? How many are obsessed with the new Orthodox status symbol, “my son the doctor-rabbi,” and how clear it is that it is the physician that is the healthier of the two titles in the minds of the doting parents? How many pay lip service to the importance of total dedication to Torah study and the virtues of the talmid chacham, scholar, just so long as it is not their daughter who has to marry the man who cannot give her the chandeliers and the French sheitels?
Judaism is not a game we play. It is based on that awesomely difficult faith that demands risk and exposure to danger when the Torah so demands. Never will I forget the words of the nationally known Orthodox Jewish leader who said to me, concerning Israeli withdrawal from the liberated lands: “Of course we must have faith, but let’s be practical.” Such people have no faith. Judaism without faith, without sacrifice and without real values and concepts, rots away and becomes a ritualistic corpse. The practitioner of such an irreligious religion truly becomes the naval b’rshut haTorah, the abomination within the technical limits of Torah. That is the very antithesis of kedusha, holiness, and not of this did the Almighty speak when He called out: “Be holy!”
(From The Jewish Press, 19 Shevat 5738 – January 27, 1978)
