Category Archives: growth

The cold mikvah moshul

Once, when the Chofetz Chaim immersed in the mikvah, he found the water to be very cold. He questioned the caretaker, who insisted that he had heated up the water before adding it to the mikvah and even showed him the kettle he had used. The Chofetz Chaim first felt the kettle, then he put his finger into the water of the kettle, and found the water to be lukewarm. He explained to the mikvah attendant, if boiling hot water is added to the mikvah then the water will become warm. However, he noted, if the water is only lukewarm when it is poured into the mikvah, the water will remain quite cold indeed.

Similarly, if we are trying to ignite within our children an excitement and fervor for Yiddishkeit, we ourselves must be piping hot with enthusiasm. If our ardor for Torah and mitzvos is tepid and unenthusiastic, how will our children be energized and invigorated?

-From Rav Dovid Goldwasser, in the Spring 2012 issue of The Klal Perspectives Journal

Manifesto for a culture of growth

We have problems and finally the editorial board at The Klal Perspectives is letting us see the insights of many well know leaders and trailblazers within the frum community. The problem is that many (myself included) are not always inspired to grow in our Avodah.  I offered a solution a few years ago that worked for me here, but there’s not just a “one size fits all” cure (well, there might be, but you’ll have to read all of this post).

I’ve been privileged to communicate with both the editor of Klal Perspectives and two of those that answered the questions posed for this issue.  A commonly recommended suggestion in four of the articles is the establishment of learning groups (some call them vaadim or chaburos) geared towards growth-oriented learning.  This is, in fact, something that the AishDas Society has been doing successful for a number of years.  For me, the vaad/chabura model works, in edition to the Bilvavi seforim. I know of classes based on this model in several shuls and it seems to work for some.  It’s not a THE solution, but it’s a viable option and an established one.  Giving people an option to grow can open up multiple doors in a shul.

Getting people to learn seforim that are growth-oriented is a major challenge.  It’s sort of like exercise. People wo do it regularly love it (so I’ve heard).  I know that I don’t exercise enough, but when I do I feel better.  The “Zumba” craze has become very popular with women who want to exercise because it’s fun (this is based on speaking with people who do Zumba and also based on a very improptu Facebook survey I took).  Zumba’s motto is, “Ditch the workout; Join the party!”


They know that exercise is hard work and often difficult. By putting music and dance moves together they have made it fun. I think growth oriented Judaism needs a similar motto. Maybe it should be, “From pause to Go with the turn of a page” or “If you’re not growing, your not living“.
There are mornings when it’s a struggle for me to get out of bed and daven with a minyan. There are plenty of times I say Shema and don’t feel that I’m fully accepting Hashem as King. There are times that I will choose not to go learn in the evenings so that I can go to sleep or just veg out. I admit it only because I know that I’m not alone. This is just something that people don’t talk about with their friends.  Those that do know me, know that being inspired is something I attempt to work on.  There are days when I successed and days when I can’t wait to try again.


I did write that there might a “one size fits all” cure and I think it’s finding a community (ie- shul, beis medrash, kollel, Rav) that is focused on Torah, Avodah, and Gemilus Chassadim, which are the foundations of our world. These three items are also the driving force behind Cong. Ahavas Yisrael and often mentioned in the writings and comments of Mark Frankel from BeyondBT.  Each of us can connect and grow by our invovlment in one of these three. We can learn, commit to meaningful davening, or involve ourselves and families in chessed. The main point, as Micha Berger mentioned to me in an email, is that our Torah life has to be a growth process.


I think back to the lyrics of the old TV show “Diff’rent Strokes” as proof for this:
Now the world don’t move to the beat of just one drum,
what might be right for may not be right for some.
There’s also a great discussion going on at BeyondBT regarding the current issue of Klal Perspectives, here.

Two realities

In an emailed newsletter from Beis Hamussar that I received today was the following:

If we were asked to encapsulate all of Rav Wolbe’s teachings in one sentence, the task would seem impossible. He wrote numerous seforim and gave thousands of discourses over the course of his life. How could one possibly summarize so much in one single sentence? However, Rav Wolbe himself did just that when he sat with a group of former talmidim.He asked them to relay what they understood to be the focal point of all the discourses that they had heard during the years they had studied in his Yeshiva. Each student offered an opinion, but Rav Wolbe was not satisfied. “The message I was trying to convey in all my discourses” he said, “is that we should realize that ruchnius (spirituality) is no less a reality than gashmius (physicality).”

For example, we must believe that just as eating something dangerous is detrimental to one’s body, transgressing a commandment is at least as detrimental to one’s soul. Conversely, performing a mitzvah does more for us (and the world around us) than the food we eat.

This yesod of acknowledging the reality of ruchnius might have been the basis for this idea found in the introduction to Da Es Atzmecha by Rav Itamar Shwartz (the mechaber of the Bilvavi seforim):

I have come to write this sefer  because of an inner mission – an awareness of a particular world that exists, which in reality, is more real than the world we sense, but is very hidden from people. The inner world is enchanting, it is a world of pleasure and connection, but it is not a world of delusions.  It is a world more real than the table.  It is clearer than the familiar world of the table, the chair, and the  lamp.  Sometimes, when we try to enter the inner world, there is a feeling that since it is unfamiliar, maybe it is just our imagination, maybe it is just delusions of people who want to experience all kinds of things, and so they create a whole structure out of all their fantasies.  But you must know that the inner world is more realistic than the world we live in.  However, just as a blind person doesn’t see what’s in front of him, and he might ask, “Are you certain this exists?” 

Both Rav Wolbe zt’l and R Shwartz are teaching us that there are two realities. Most of us want to see the results, peiros (fruits), or the carrot at the end of the stick (even if the carrot is imaginary) in our spiritual efforts. It doesn’t work like that. This idea, the reality that is referenced above, is something that isn’t on my mind enough. Try as I might to be passionate about living a life of Simchas HaChaim, I find it easy to be focused on the reality that is only preceived by my five senses.

I have no idea if the spiritual reality is something that my kids have been taught about.  I know that they understand that each mitzvah we perform perfectly creates a malach that is our advocate in Shamayim.   It seems to me that our acknowledgment of the reality of ruchnius has to be as strong as our acknowledgement of the neshama.  We have a body and a soul, both are real.  This sort of gives a new spin to the phrase, “Keeping it real”.

A Pesach lesson from my son

Photo from here.  Personally this reminds me of
the Scooby Doo Mystery Machine.

Last week during carpool my 12 yr old son shared the following revelation with me:

Abba, did you know that a Mitzvah Tank is just an RV that they Na Nach up Lubavitch style?

I smiled at his his observation, but it also initially bothered me. I have always found it somewhat troublesome when someone copies something from someone else and then they (those who copy) get credit for being creative and original.  I cringed when people would tell me how Blue Fringe had this “awesome new song” called “Hafachta” (originally written and performed by Diaspora Yeshiva Band).  I smirked when teens would tell me that “they came out with another Willy Wonka movie, but that guy just isn’t as weird as Johnny Depp”.  Some remakes of movies and cover songs are not all bad.  I just don’t like it when the originals get overlooked for, simply, being original.

Now, I don’t blame my son.  He’s seen Mitzvah Tanks in Chicago.  He has also seen videos of Na Nachs dancing in Tel Aviv, photos of their Na Nach’ed up vehicles, and even seen some guys selling their swag Motzei Shabbos on Central Ave (in Cedarhurst, NY).  In his mind, the Chabad that copied the Na Nachs, not the other way around.  It’s his frame of reference only because he saw the Na Nachs do it first.

I have been thinking about this for over a week. At first, as I described above, I was bothered. Then, after some hisbonenus  I gained a better perspective on things.  A number of years ago I heard an amazing vort on the chatzatzros, trumpets, used in the Mishkan.  R David Orlofsky quotes Rav Moshe Shapiro, who brings up the point that after Moshe was niftar, the trumpets he used were put away and hidden. Yehoshua had to fashion his own. Rav Shapiro says the reason is that each generation doesn’t aways respond to the clarion call of the previous generation. While the message is the same, the mode for communiting it has to be different.

R Micha Berger puts it like this on his blog:

The call of the shofar is eternal, and thus a shofar is not invalidated by age. However, in contrast to the raw, natural, shofar, the silver chatzotzros are man-made. Their message changes as people do. The call of the chatzotzros is distinct for the generation.

If each generation has to be approached differently then, kal v’chomer (even more so) for each person.
We know that, ” A person is obligated to see himself as if he were leaving Egypt.” (Pesachim 116b)
The way that I might perceive my own freedom from Mitzrayim is, in fact, totally different than how anyone else sees it.  This obligation totally makes sense based on my son’s observation about the Mitzvah Tank.  My son has no choice but to see things from his perspective.  Hopefully he will experience Pesach in a very personal and meaningful way.  Hopefully I will, too.


"The Pesach Plan"- by R Avi Shafran

The story below is being posted with direct permission for Rabbi Shafran. His father’s memoir, Fire Ice Air: A Polish Jew’s Memoir of Yeshiva, Siberia, America is available for purchase here and was also just released for purchase as an e-book (only $3.99) at Jewish e-Books, here.

I bought this book last year before Pesach and found it to be a fascinating story of survival, determination, and family.  There are amazing first-hand accounts of yeshiva life prior to the Shoah and how much impact one person can have on family, friends, and a community.

THE PESACH PLAN
Rabbi Avi Shafran
The group of Novardhoker yeshiva bochurim and their rebbe (and his rebbetzin)—along with a number of families—were packed into the train’s stock cars in the summer of 1941. Since Rav Yehudah Leib Nekritz, zt”l, and his talmidim, then in Soviet-conquered Lithuania, had declined the offer of Russian citizenship, the Soviets were providing them an all-expense-paid trip to Siberia. Occasional pieces of bread and cups of water were also offered at no charge during the weeks of travel. Not to mention the cruise across a lake on a barge to the work camp where my father, may he be well, the youngest of the yeshiva group, and his rebbe and friends, would spend the years of the Second World War.
The Siberian summer is oppressive; insects left the exiles at times unrecognizable for their swollen faces. Winter in the taiga, of course, brought challenges of its own, including 40 degree below zero temperatures.
In his short memoir, “Fire Ice Air,” my father recalls that even as the yeshiva exiles arrived in the East, Pesach was already on their minds.
And so, as they worked in the fields, some of the boys squirreled away a few kernels of wheat here and there, carefully placing them in their pockets—something that was “entirely against the rules, and very dangerous.”
“The Communist credo, though,” he writes, “was ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’ and so we were really only being good Marxists. Our spiritual needs, after all, included kosher for Pesach matzo.”
They put the kernels in a special bag, which they carefully hid where no one could find it.
The winter was brutal but the Novardhokers all survived it, as did the bag of grain. When the end of the cold season was rumored to be near, they ground the kernels into flour with a small hand grinder intended for coffee beans. My father remembers that the flour was coarse and dark, but resplendent all the same.
The next part of the Pesach plan was to arrange for the actual matzo-baking. Although the yeshiva boys were barracked with non-Jewish locals, there was one hut in the area that was occupied solely by a Jewish family, the Beckers, who had come from Kovno. Arrangements were made for some of the boys to come to their house in the middle of the night, when all the town’s residents were asleep, and fire up their oven on full blast for two hours to make it kosher. Then they would bake matzos for the family and themselves.
Since matzo dough is traditionally perforated in rows to ensure that it is “baked through,” the young men improvised a special tool for the purpose by whittling a piece of wood so that it could be fitted with gear-wheels borrowed from a clock. The apparatus was rolled over each matzo-dough quickly before the baking. 
“When Pesach came,” he recalls, “we all gathered at the hut and all of us—the Nekritzes, we yeshiva boys, and the Beckers—were able to fulfill the mitzvah of eating matzo on the first night of Pesach, in remembrance of our ancestors’ release from the outsized prison that was ancient Egypt. Understandably, it was a mitzvah that resonated strongly for us.”  The four kosos could not so easily be addressed; there was no wine and there were no grapes to be found in Siberia. But, to at least undertake some semblance of that mitzvah, the exiles managed to obtain milk—an expensive delicacy in its own right—and used it instead. To them, my father writes, “it tasted of the finest wine.”
The group even bartered some of their possessions for a few eggs, traditionally eaten at the Pesach Seder. Some of the eggs were frozen, he recalls, “but that was nothing that a bit of roasting couldn’t cure.”
As we all prepare for Pesach this year, cleaning our homes and polishing our silver and shopping for our personal plethoras of pesachdikeh products, accounts like my father’s—whether from Siberian exiles, concentration camp inmates, or Jews in hiding—should be required reading, and required pondering, for our children and for ourselves.
They provide something priceless: perspective.
© 2012 AMI MAGAZINE
The above essay may be reproduced or republished, with the above copyright appended.

Nesivos Shalom on middos

Rav  Shalom Noach Berezovsky zt’l, the Slonimer Rebbe 

In is series of seforim, Nesivos Shalom, the Slonimer Rebbe zt’l writes (in one of the many sections on Tikun HaMiddos):

One needs to feel the joy of acquiring positive traits and realize how miserable he is as long as he is mired in negativity. A person of positive traits is happy—at peace with others, at peace with God, at peace with himself. The opposite is true of one whose traits are negative—he is irritable, not at peace with others, God, or himself. It is contention within your gates—within your own personal gates there is contention: He fumes with anger at himself; he is depressed and lethargic; he is full of jealousy and animosity toward others; he doesn’t like to be around people and they don’t like to be around him; he is full of bitterness at the Almighty concerning his lot. Once a person comes to the clear realization that his happiness actually depends on the rectification of his character, he will spare no effort in pursuit of his own happiness. The whole of a person’s life and times hinges on his character. (Translation by R Jonathan Glass)


Where MO might need to be headed

Find this here

Dr. Rabbi Alan Brill has a great post about a recent discussion with Rabbi Shlomo Einhorn here.  The observations by both Dr. Brill and Rabbi Einhorn are revealing and seem to be very on target towards my generation.  Here are a few great quotes:

Einhorn describes the need for his age group, the younger gen x and older gen y rabbis to seek the experiential. They grew up with a strict halakhic diet and a rationalist worldview which did not sustain their cravings for religious experience that they were taught to value in Israel.

Rabbi Einhorn is absolutely sold on Tony Robbins’s program for fire-walking to be transformed and to release the potential within.

I commented on the actual blog post and recommend you check it out what Dr. Brill posted and some of the comments.

Are you living a religious routine or a religious life?

Poster from here

I was listening to this discussion panel, titled “Igniting a Spiritual Passion” (black hat tip to R Mordechai Torczyner) today on my drive to work and I was struck by the following question:

Are you living a religious routine or a religious life?

Keep in mind that in the sefer זריעה ובניין בחינוך by Rav Shlomo Wolbe zt’l (translated and published as Planting & Building), the Mashgiach mentions that those children who don’t, “possess any internal vitality” or “individual initiative” will become “human robots”.  I ask you to think about the question above and how it relates to your own avodah.

Sunday’s mussar morsel

Photo of R E Lopian from here
Rabbi Eliyahu Lopian zt’l:
The verse says, “And let them make Me a sanctuary, that I may dwell within them” (Shemos/Exodus 25:8), upon which our rabbis comment that since it does not state “within it”, but “within them”, it means within the heart of every single Israelite.  Thus the heart is the site wherein dwells the sacred divine presence, i.e., one must feel Godliness in the heart; the source of faith is the heart, i.e., one must feel faith in one’s heart. (From the sefer Lev Eliyahu)