By RABBI STEWART WEISSHolocaust survivors read Torah at the Kotel 370(photo credit: REUTERS/Baz Ratner)
“A Jew always lives in two worlds,” the late Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik was fond of saying. As one of the primary proponents of “Torah U’Mada,” (literally, “Torah and Science”) the Rov – as he was famously known – passionately believed that Jews must interface with the world at large, while at the same time be expert navigators upon the sea of Jewish knowledge.Rabbi Soloveitchik and his family certainly practiced what they preached; the Rav earned a PhD in philosophy from the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, and went on to become the pre-eminent Torah scholar of his generation. His wife Tonya also earned a PhD, in education, from Jena University, while his younger brother Rabbi Ahron Soloveitchik – who led my own Yeshiva in Skokie/Chicago for many years – earned a law degree from New York University.Nor were they the only examples of such a diversified intellectual experience. Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, arguably the greatest halachic decisor of the past century, commanded wide knowledge in numerous fields, including science, medicine, politics and sociology.At his funeral in 1986, one of his eulogizers made the statement that “Reb Moshe was so completely devoted to Torah study that he never spent a single moment in any secular pursuit.” His son-in-law, seething at this blatant fabrication, set the record straight at Rabbi Feinstein’s shloshim (30th-day) memorial ceremony.There he recounted how Reb Moshe’s students had a “competition” over who merited bringing him The New York Times each morning, which he read from cover-to-cover, including the sports pages.“For my father-in-law,” said Rabbi Moshe Tendler, “there was no ‘secular’ knowledge! All information was valuable, and it was precisely because of his encyclopedic grasp of the world at large that he was such an outstanding posek [decisor].“He knew people, he knew society, he knew the world, and he knew Torah. It was that rare and diverse combination which made him so uniquely qualified to guide his generation.”Myriad other examples of this “two-faced” phenomenon abound throughout Jewish history. Trapped within the confines of the Exile in a hundred countries, Jews almost always, with rare exceptions, found it necessary to coexist with non-Jews and cooperate with secular governments.Even within the confines of the shtetl, making a living often involved dealing with the native population, while the laws and strictures of the ruling authority impacted upon Jewish lives every day.Ignorance of what was transpiring in the real world was not bliss – it could be downright dangerous.But then a miracle occurred. Prophetically, painfully, providentially, the aftermath of the Holocaust resulted in the arrow of Jewish history suddenly changing direction, and we found ourselves back in Israel, the eternal homeland for which we had prayed so long.The return to Zion was, as King David wrote in his Psalms, “like a dream,” and we could hardly grasp the new reality, so far removed was it from our active consciousness over the centuries. In the blink of an eye, we had to re-order our thinking, integrate the new reality and learn to live as a nation all over again.And now, it seems to me, we Jews no longer have the luxury of living in just two worlds; now we must simultaneously inhabit three worlds.Now, our lives rest upon a three-legged stool, made up in equal parts of Judaism, the world at large, and Israel. Take away any one leg, and we teeter and invariably fall. Yet the combination of all three gives us a solid footing in the universe of nations, and establishes us as a complete, fullfledged citizen of the world.FIRST AND foremost, in my evaluation, there is the Jewish leg.Torah. Tradition. God and Gemara. It is who we are, what we do, why we exist at all. It embodies the highest wisdom known to Man; it is our “Magna Carta,” our “Great Letter” that describes our character and our calling.However we define it, Judaism is more than just the “uniform” our nation wears – without which we would be naked and non-distinctive – it is the very soul of our body politic. It is the crucible in which we started our eternal journey, the faithful vehicle which carried us throughout history and prevented us from fragmenting completely. It is the original – in many ways the strongest – bond which unites us beyond borders and backgrounds.The cooler we are toward it, the more we melt away. But the more it fires our passion, the less likely we are to be frozen out of history. It places us squarely at center-stage as we move through time, connecting us to the past heroes of the Bible while re-affirming our belief in a Messianic redemption.Then there is the second leg, the world in general. We have a well-known “love-hate” relationsip with it, for this world has singled us out for persecution even as it has sustained us throughout all our many wanderings. We know that it is not our destiny to be completely a part of it, yet we cannot be completely apart from it, either. It is a dance at arm’s length, a reluctant partner yet a partner nonetheless.We cannot, we should not be an island unto ourselves. While self-reliance is a virtue we must certainly strive for, our Divine mandate is to change the world while still retaining our own core values – a tricky mountain road if ever there was one.And so even while we acknowledge our largely bitter experience in the Diaspora, we fight the urge to cut all ties with it. And even as we do battle with half the world’s population (I’m being kind here) that is determined to defame and destroy us, we extend an outstretched hand to the other half.Which brings us to the final leg: Israel, Zionism.More than a political movement, it is a bold declaration that we are no longer willing to be the victims of history, no longer its passive subjects, but rather masters of our own fate, decisors of our own future. It is the concretization of our belief that Judaism is more than a religion, it is a complete, all-encompassing way of life that lives outside the Beit Knesset as well as within it, that flourishes beyond the Beit Midrash as well as inside its walls.It is a conscious decision to confront the community of nations on our own terms, the willingness to leave the seeming comfort of someone else’s home, gambling it all for the prize of reclaiming our sovereign identity. “Israel,” in Zionistic terms, is a people, a country, a movement, a land, an audacious, even somewhat arrogant statement that we have turned the page of history and are broaching our final frontier.EACH LEG, as stated above, is defective without the others. A people without a culture, a language and a tradition are doomed to assimilation.Yet without a land of our own, we remain in a perpetual, precarious “holding pattern,” flying around and around until, all too often, we run out of gas. Because of our emphasis on Jewish values and learning, we were generally distinctive among the nations. But that was of little comfort when we were slaughtered by hostile governments or forced to pull up roots and run.In our own state, we can finally fashion our own army, agriculture, political system and persona, like any other country. But not just like any other country; the Jewish component insists that we are not here just to pass the time or to “break even.” We have a sacred mission not just to join the world, but to change it for the better.A Religious Zionist has to master a challenging juggling act. He has to revere the traditions of the past, while staking out a radically new future. We often are maligned from both sides – the secular may view our religiosity as archaic, outdated and even fanatic, while the ultra-Orthodox may condemn our Zionism as heretic, rebellious and even Godless.But we plow on, undaunted. We know that this old-new ideology is a work in progress, still working out the kinks, but we believe, with perfect faith, that time, history and God are on our side. We hear our fellow citizens’ critique, but we are unmoved, because we are convinced that we have the best of all worlds. ■The writer is director of the Jewish Outreach Center of Ra’anana; www.rabbistewartweiss.com; jocmtv@netvision.net.il
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