Finding Maylos Hatorah in our day-to-day vs. Chochmas Yavan

Shiur 13 – Finding Maylos Hatorah in our day-to-day vs. Chochmas Yavan

Let us discuss a basic concept which will shed light on a fallacy we have been living with.

Our life and the Torah are not connected

Our dilemma is this: we all deeply desire that the Torah should permeate and sanctify our lives, yet we struggle to understand how the Torah can truly connect to and transform our daily experiences. This is evident in the way we often approach the fulfillment of Torah and mitzvos, assuming that simply performing them will automatically and inevitably influence and elevate our lives without further effort or reflection.

Within this approach, our life stays outside of Torah in one of two ways;

1. As a background for Torah, because without being alive we cannot do mitzvos.
2. As a challenge to Torah, because our day-to-day life presents us with challenges which we need to overcome in order to fulfill our Torah obligations. 

The literature which we consume in the form of biographies of the gedolim (spiritual giants), influences us to presume the former approach, i.e. that their internal life is not in the picture at all. I call gedolim biographies  “shulchan aruch with comics” meaning these biographies are simply an illustrated story of the gedolim being mikayem shulchan aruch! Or any mussar sefer.

In the infamous biography “Making of a Gadol” the author tried to present the latter approach, i.e. that the gedolim also had their struggles. Yet this is also problematic, because our life is not primarily meaningful due to it presenting a challenge to Torah. Rather our life is here so that Torah should be a part of it!

Sadly in our generation when we want to know our life, we run away from the Torah and run to the pop psychology books or go to a therapist! It is unfortunate that we say narcissism, social incompetence, and all other middos are just challenges to fulfilling Torah.

How our life and the Torah connect

The right approach to our life and the Torah is as follows: 

We need to believe that everything which is in Torah is actually by us already!

“I am a ganav (thief) and I am a holy person.”

“I am a murderer and I am connected to Hashem.”

“I am an adulterer and I have the great mayla (virtue) of truth.”

“I am a baal chesed (giving person) and I am an achzar (cold hearted person).”

This is the great insight of the Torah in Devarim Chapter 30, verse 14:

כִּֽי־קָר֥וֹב אֵלֶ֛יךָ הַדָּבָ֖ר מְאֹ֑ד בְּפִ֥יךָ וּבִֽלְבָבְךָ֖ לַעֲשֹׂתֽוֹ

“No, the thing is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to observe it.”

The sages teach us that the Torah is telling us that it is already in our mouth, we just need to take it out.

The depth of this principle is that we are all composed of 613 body parts parallel to the 613 mitzvos in the Torah. Meaning, the Torah is all by us already to fulfill!

Personal examples of this principle

Here are two personal examples of how I saw the fruitful consequences of this proper Torah attitude in my day-to-day life:

I am a murderer!

One night, I couldn’t sleep because I had recently read something in a biology book that revealed to me that I was a murderer! What happened was that a while back I was standing by R’ Yonasan’s Purim hemshech seuda (continuation of the feast), a man vying for space pushed me hard, and I instinctively pushed him back even harder. After reading the biology book I reflected on the incident and realized that even though the man I pushed seemed fine, I am willing and able to emphasize my presence to such a degree that the other person’s presence is absolutely irrelevant and I want him to disappear now! That means that within me is a murderer.

I am a kadosh elyon!

I am a kadosh elyon (holy and lofty individual). This doesn’t mean that at 2:00AM I can be found floating a foot above my bed for thirty minutes each night! That is superficial! Rather I found my kedusha in the world of bein adam lechaveiro. By my office, construction was underway on the neighboring property with the relentless noise of a jackhammer. I simply could not take a nap due to the noise! I brought earplugs, hoping to block out the sound and get some rest, but I still couldn’t fall asleep. Then, I reframed my perspective. I thought to myself: for my neighbor, every boom boom of the jackhammer is music to his ears, because he is building something which will bring in money for himself. Why not share in his joy? If he is happy, I can be happy for him too. “I am happy because my neighbor is happy!” This shift in mindset worked, and within a day I was able to sleep through the noise! This is a kadosh elyon, I do not live exclusively in my sensual life, I have another part of myself which transcends this, that is the sechel (the intellect), I can live with my sechel and not the feelings, rather the feelings will follow the sechel! That is kedusha. This is how the Torah was connected to my life! Not by actually completing the entire ladder of ascent laid out in the Mesillas Yesharim and reaching “kedusha,” but rather by seeing that the kedusha is already in the here and now by me. This is the taryag (613) mitzvos of the Torah for which I, as a human being, are a parallel to because I am composed of 613 parts! The Torah is literally built to be this parallel which can reveal itself in our life. The Torah is built in such a way that we should take all of its maylos and throw them on our life to reveal that we are actually expressing these maylos; kedusha, chesed, perishus, etc. Practically speaking, our work is to choose a mayla to dig into and find where we see it in our lives. It takes work to understand what each of the maylos of Torah mean on a deep level, only then will we find it in our life, sometimes in the most unexpected of places!

Chochmas HaTorah vs Chochmas Yavan

This is the nature of the fight between Chochmas HaTorah and Chochmas Yavan. Chochmas Yavan has very nice ideals but they never actualize in our life, they always stay “above and beyond” and then Chochmas Yavan says “you must run and strive” for it.

Here is a personal example where this distinction between Chochmas HaTorah and Western Values i.e. Chochmas Yivanis reared its head for me: 

My daughter works as a manager for a kidney donor transplant service, and they recently held a Shabbaton (weekend retreat). One of the events featured a panel discussion of leaders, including a government ethics spokesperson who stated that the ultimate form of giving should be altruistic and to elect to give to a Jew or a religious Jew, is against the law and against ethics. People began to hum and haw about how to deal with this new issue which was raised.

I could not hold myself back, and I raised my hand to share my perspective: We are not struggling here against the law or ethics; the issue here is that Judaism takes issue with this Latin world, ‘Altruism.’ I explained, ‘it is a completely goyish concept. In Judaism, we don’t focus on abstract altruism; we focus on chesed – acts of kindness. When we do Chesed, it does indeed bring tangible benefits, such as the joy of seeing a smile in return.’

Altruism, as the government ethics spokesperson described, is detached from human experience. In their ideal, a computer would decide where the kidney goes, completely removing personal connection or personal humanity from the equation. This abstractness is what the Non-Jews keep returning to in their ethical weltanschauung. We however specifically deal with the nature of humanity, wherein the Torah definition as we described above, allows us to find the mayla’s, such as that of chesed, within ourselves through our personal life.

The Rambam says tzedaka (charity) is done best anonymously, but we have been saying that chesed cannot be altruistic like Chochmas Yavan says. The distinction here is that tzedaka is done with money, and is best done anonymously, but chesed, like that of the father of chesed, Avraham, was of course always done face-to-face as a relationship. 

Examples of the Taryag parallel in our personal lives

We must be very careful because in our chinuch, we always tell ourselves and others that we need to “run – run – run” but we never tell them the Taryag parallel that all of the 613 mitzvos and aveiros in the Torah are already by us and that we need to recognize we already have kedusha (holiness) and dveykus (spiritual connection) and recognize we already are a rotzeach (murderer) and a ganav (thief)!

R’ Wolbe never forced me to speak, I always wanted to have him speak and not me. Once he pushed me to speak in regards to interpreting the story of when R’ Yeruchom gave an illustration of yiridas hadoros (the spiritual degeneration over time) to R’ Wolbe.

R’ Wolbe told me that at that time R’ Yeruchom had personally told him regarding the famous occurrence when the Altar from Kelm left a room when he saw money on the table because of the issur yichud (sin of being alone with someone, or in this case, something else) in order to avoid stealing it. R’ Yeruchom told R’ Wolbe “If I had been there I would have stolen it!” R’ Wolbe asked me what I think the explanation of the statement of R’ Yeruchom was. I hesitated to speak but R’ Wolbe demanded I speak my mind. I said “R’ Yeruchom did not mean he would put the money in his pocket, he meant he would touch it, arrange it, count it, organize it.” R’ Wolbe said “yes, that is what he meant!” This was considered gneiva (stealing) by him.

Now we can also finally understand the well known story about R’ Boruch Ber who said “if I had not wanted to be like R’ Akiva Eiger, then I would never have become R’ Boruch Ber.” This was always a stressful story for me because it sums up R’ Boruch Ber’s life as a “failure to be R’ Akiva Eiger.” However now we understand that sixteen year old R’ Boruch Ber saw in R’ Akiva Eiger’s life that: R’ Akiva Eiger did not give up in learning and would forget to eat due to his learning Torah, and that R’ Akiva Eiger was a honest man full of integrity, and that he, R’ Boruch Ber, was in the present, R’ Akiva Eiger, and that is what he, R’ Boruch Ber wanted to nurture and make grow!

In conclusion

So to apply this practically, we must take a mayla of the Torah and try to see where it is in our life. Not “as potential” because that means we see something which is not yet there. Rather we see that we actually have the mayla of the Torah in a microcosmic way albeit overshadowed by other things, and we need to bring out the mayla and make it grow!