Guidelines || Members' Sites ||Links and Bibliography |Main Menu|
Search This Site By: Author Topic Key Word
Guidelines ||
Members' Sites ||Links
and Bibliography |Main Menu|
Search This Site By: Author
Topic
Key Word
|
Psychohalachah
R’ Zalman Schachter-Shalomi teaching R’ Goldie Milgram, Dec. ‘03 R’Zalman: Now, the big issue is that people would like to define halakhah without having any roots in the past. And the psycho-halakhic process cannot go like that way. When Bultmann and others have said that you have go and demythologize and then remythologize. So there is a situation where, Lo t’vashel gedi b’halev imo, from which we get the whole business of milchig and fleishig. But it also clear, with the exception of the Rambam that no one knew to even say that this had anything to do with avodah zarah. But now we know that the Ugaritic civilization had such a thing, that it was a fertility rite, in which the priest had to do it with two priestesses in public and if he got them both to come, to call out that they both had an orgasm, then it was a good siman for that half a year. R’Goldie: Quite a culture. R’Zalman: Yup. Now you can understand why it says that when you go shalosh p’amim ba shannah year’eh kol zkhurkha et p’nai hashem elohekha, that it should say at that point, you do these pilgrimage holidays but I don’t want you to do this public sex act there. OK, so now, there is a mythology there. The Torah says we don’t want that. So we see that the Torah is setting up some gedarim that have to do with some issues of ervah and while the same situation isn’t likely to occur today, let’s say in a shul on Pesach, nevertheless we have to learn something from it and say that therefore that we would want to learn from it that on one hand the kavannah, which was that there should be l’shem yichud Qudsha brikh hu u’Shekhinteyh, so that the hieros gamos should take place, but it has to be raised to a higher level. So how do we make such a thing become an experience? OK? So the question then becomes, from my point of view, there should be happening such a thing that on Pesach, Shavuos and Sukkos that will bring about greater fecundity, greater fertility for us, but it shouldn’t be in the situation of acting it out in gashmius. OK? Tefillin. The issue that keeps coming up for many people is what about tefillin for vegetarians? And my sense is, l’khathillah even the tefillin that we do have, by right they shouldn’t be store-bought, where somebody else does it for you. So for this reason I’ve been saying to kids way back at Ramah, when I was doing the Ramah thing, write out your mezuzah on a 3x5 card; and make sure that it will be on your door because the Torah says u’kh’tavtam; The Torah doesn’t say it should be on qlaf; qlaf is the technology of the past. So in the past we had to have that technology. What would be if somebody sits down at the computer, and writes out the mezuzah, and justifies it really nicely and prints it out so small that it could go in a small container and puts it on his door? That person has done what he wants to do to fulfill the commandment of u’kh’tav’tam. And if you have been in Israel you’ll see sometimes that on Arab houses that sometimes they have the word Allah on there in Arabic, that’s how they’re doing u’v’ish’arekha, etc. I’d like to see the same thing happening with tefillin. If somebody is a vegetarian, how would you go about doing this? Would you get yourself a router and carve out of very nice ebony wood, make yourself battim? R’Goldie: and use ribbons. R’Zalman: And use ribbons, and if they can weave them themselves, like the kids used to make lanyards. R’Goldie: There are some people who have done ribbon tefillin, they call them feminine tefillin. R’Zalman: It would be good to get photographs of that and put them on the web site. But find out what they are filled with, did they do their four parshiot? R’Goldie: and the compartments. When you lay tefillin is there a psycho-halakhah operative for you? Are you more in the paradigm of where you grew up about tefillin for yourself? R’Zalman: Yes, cause there is an element - It’s really true somehow that in art and in religion you have to go back to an earlier form in which they did it. You could possibly have someone write on a midi an entire symphony and perform it, but who would go to Carnegie hall for someone to put on a machine? You want to have a live orchestra. And nobody needs pots and pans today made from clay, yet some people will want to have a wheel and to throw their own pot. Why is that? The answer is that art always goes to an earlier technology. Sports does the same thing. Many today could use a snow mobile but they are still going skiing or snow shoeing. I don’t need to travel today across the sea in a sailboat, so why am I going sailing? So there is something about going to the earlier situation, because that’s what I started to say, rooted in the past is important. R’Goldie: I want to build on that. I was teaching for JDC in Budapest, Moshe and Shlomit Turpaz, who work for a modern orthodox organization in Israel were on my team. It seemed they had never met a woman rabbi there before; in fact no one on the retreat had ever met a woman rabbi before. R’Zalman: But what, there are some women students in the seminary in Budapest. I met one of them who showed me around the gorgeous shul there. R’Goldie: Oh, yes Budapest is more progressive. The teachers on the seminar were from Serbia, Bosnia, India, Czech Republic, and places like that. The [Turpaz] mentioned they are part of a new trend in modern orthodoxy; they won’t start services unless ten men AND ten women are present. They have separated tzibbur from minyan. So at their shul they say FOR k’vod hatzibbur women must be able to lead services. Today they let women lead Qabbalat Shabbat because they are separating between the two principles. When you say psycho-halakhah must be grounded in the past; How do you differentiate between holding hands with the actual halakhah and finding a loophole or a place of expansion that doesn’t lessen how we’re supposed to stand on the shoulders of the prior generations, as they say inside of a classic halakhic model. R’Zalman: I can’t give you a full answer to that. First of all, I’m delightfully surprised about the then men and ten women and that they make a distinction between tzibbur and minyan. Because the whole notion of minyan comes from qorban pessah. R’Goldie: Tell me. R’Zalman: On the Qorban Pesah, you’re not allowed to eat of the qorban pessah if you weren’t counted in before the slaughter of the animal. So that’s called nimneh. You have to be ehad min ha minyan. That’s where the word minyan came from. Then we spoke of the word ‘edah, and we called the ‘edah, minyan. But their talking about a tzibbur and a different understanding of kvod ha tzibbur in our new social setting. I think that’s wonderful, I’m delighted about it. R’Goldie: Now would you say that’s an application of psycho-halakhah, or a different thing? R’Zalman: No. I would say that they have not created the transformation to say that in this paradigm you must make changes; they’re saying you must make adaptations. Get the difference? Now, by the way, I made a whole bunch of adaptations myself. The process goes from a place of adaptations to a point where you can no longer adapt and then you have to make a shift. R’Goldie: Right. Now, for example I know in gittin you have been at least reluctant to make ‘shift.’ Last time we spoke about this, a while ago, you were still in adaptation. R’Zalman: The difference why I make adaptation and not shift is the following. When the destiny of people might be they will have to come to orthodox bet din at some point in their lives, there I want to do the best adaptation I can. No one can fault me because I have already enough halakhic ground for this, that I should write, for instance when you write a get you have to write in such a way that a name is absolutely clear. Now, if you, say, write Morris in Hebrew letters, and you make Maurice in Hebrew letters, how you going to make the difference? That the reason why I’m writing all these things in English letters. When the hakhamim said a get should be written in a place where the water is known, is because many cities in the past would be located on a river, and so the river tells about Frankfurt Am Main and Frankfurt on the Oder. The river tells about the town. Now we have a system that is muskam by everyone, meridians and latitudes, so I write out the degrees. Now that is adaptation. OK. That the woman makes a counter get, is still adaptation. In gittin I have not made anything else besides adaptation because people will be coming to a bet din. Even the get d’oraita that I did with R’ Ya’aqov Petuchowski, is something such that no one would be able to declare that a child that is begotten by the mother after a get d’oraita is a mamzer. R’Goldie: So, when do you say that psycho-halakhah has to hold hands with the past? I see that sometimes you stay in solidarity with klal yisrael. If a relatively large percentage of the Jewish people would hold that women should be witnesses, and the majority would accept that, why should the pressure be the other way? R’Zalman: Because we cannot exert pressure on people who are holding on to halakhic strictures from the past, they are not going to give in because they feel they are acting under a divine mandate, I also think we are acting under a Divine mandate, but after a paradigm shift and they don’t accept paradigm shift. So, under those circumstances I give an additional ketubah to every couple despite the fact that it’s a sham- 200 silver pieces for a betulim that she doesn’t have anymore; it’s a sham. Never-the-less, that paper I make them always sign with kosher eydus. R’Goldie:
When I work in other countries than America, I do that. R’Goldie:
You are creating both so they can function in both parts of the spectrum. R’Goldie: With your permission I’d like to come back to psycho-halakhah. If you were going to articulate, not just an example, but principles for psycho-halakhah. For example, one of the consequences of allowing travel on Shabbat that I’m discovering is a big downside is from my stepson in Passaic. Because he became frum his worldview constrains him to live in a walkable Shabbos community. So he has one. Now we may not always agree on everything, but I have a little bit of Shabbos community envy, right? To what extent does psycho-halakhah need a communitarian process in order that the individual isn’t diluting the holiness out by not being far-seeing enough about what the implications are of something? R’Zalman: So I’ll tell you what I can at this point. Nobody can claim they are doing psycho-halakhah if they are doing it outside of the consensus of the pious. It depends in which community what consensus of the pious exists. It was very clear, for instance, in the early stages of Jewish renewal, before AIDS came around, that people felt really free if they weren’t in aishet ish, to be with someone that they wanted to be with, without making this a covenant forever. And this was an acceptable norm; nobody would have kicked anyone out for being in that situation; everyone loved one another who were in the early places of that. Today this is not the situation, because the consensus of the pious has shifted and that is not something that, how would I put it - halakhah doesn’t make the consensus of the pious explicit, because they say you always have to go and follow the posqim. Now, it turns out, in some way, that shifts too. Because I’ve seen, for instance, how posqim dealt with things, let me go back some years; there was a centrist orthodoxy at Yeshiva University, before the black hats came. If you figure up to 1939-40 in America, there were some rabbonim that gave you a heter to use an elevator on Shabbos. There was a rav, who was a wonderful guy, a baal halakhah, he started out in the orthodox camp, became a Conservative rabbi, he was the father of Michael , he’s in New York State doing Hillel there, it’ll come. He was talking about how electricity is to be seen like water coming from the sink. It’s a zereh and it’s not a fire, so turning it off is not a problem. But, it came out because the early people who were the posqim, in their day saw that the filament that you put into a bulb those days was made from fiber and became carbonized so it was really aish. So today when you have lights such as LED lights you have seen some of the new flash lights? You couldn’t possibly say that this is fire. R’Goldie: Now, let me ask you, one of the reasons that girls are getting their periods at a much earlier age in our society is due to increasing exposure to electric lights. R’Zalman: Yeah, sure, if they were to go to sleep with the chickens- R’Goldie: So how do we know that by deciding to have the prevalence of light and turning it on and off on Shabbat, and not allowing the encroachment of darkness, that we haven’t lost some kind of encoded biological gift of returning us to that kind of light? R’Zalman: The whole point of Shabbos candles is shalom bayis. And despite the fact that the Torah says, Lo teva'aru esh b'khol moshvoteikhem b'Yom HaShabbat, the hakhamim created the situation we have to say, asher kidshanu l’hadliq ner shel Shabbat, right? Now, how could they do such a thing? Because the answer was that in those days people went to sleep really early in those days, and one candle – candle, you don’t say candle, one tiny oil flame was all that they had during the week in a house after dark. Right? So the hakhamim said hey, you can’t have a Shabbos like this, at least you have to have two of them. And you shouldn’t snuff’m out before Shabbos to fulfill lo teva’ru. So they turned lo teva’ru into lo tadliqu. So there is always a time of great hakhamim who take the chutzpah do to things the way they weren’t done in the past. R’Goldie: So it’s an absolute inversion of what I was saying, you are saying that they were increasing the light in the home. R’Zalman: That’s right, the whole point was shalom bayis. G: That’s fascinating. Z: So there was this wonderful story of this rebbe, Reb Mikhel of Zlochev who always wanted to have 26 lights on Shabbos, because 26, Yud Hey Vav Hey. But he didn’t have the money for it, he was a poor guy. One day a chassid gives him some money, so he’s so happy, it’s Friday he’s going to go buy the twenty-six candles. So he stands by the mezuzah like a good tzadik saying Hineni mukhan u’mezuman, I’m going to go buy these candles for kavod Shabbos and he remembers the purpose of the candles is for shalom bayis, so he says “oops! I will have greater shalom bayis if I don’t go, kids need shoes and my wife will be angry if I spend the money on candles.” So the issue of the kavannah underneath is important in the psycho-halakhic movement. The point I am making is without grounding in the past if anybody says ish ha'yashar b’einav ya-aseh, like some people have said Jewish renewal is ‘Judaism light’ where I can do whatever I want.” I don’t buy that. R’Goldie: I think it’s really important to hear you say that and to hear you say it very clearly. I know that you created the concept of breaking the sefer barrier. I always imagined and at RRC I got myself in some trouble for articulating that it wasn’t enough (in those days) to give us one semester of codes, but how were we supposed to go out and innovate authentically or even teach Judaism with authenticity if we didn’t have a halakhic basis in our curriculum? How could we go somewhere if we didn’t start somewhere? R’Zalman: Well, see, and this is where Eisenstein and company left Kaplan behind. Because Kaplan was somebody who insisted on lomdus, he wanted to make these things come out of a real understanding of where you are with Yiddishkeit and learning and so and so forth. R’Goldie The beauty of Sami (R'Sami Barth) at the Academy, he had me co-teach counseling in halakhah and responsa courses with orthodox faculty, so I got seven years of it, and that felt like a tikkun on the RRC education. R’Zalman: So that’s really important. Along with the thing about the past, you have to have the sense of the right kind of public policy, of how the Shekhinah would like to deal with the next generation. R’Goldie: Say more. R’Zalman: The thing is, imagine for a moment, if you’re looking at the situation of social mobility, and not enough people live within walking distance to a shul. And so I say alright, if you buy/get your gas and everything else settled before Friday, then you can use it to shul and to friends but not to go outside of the city limit cause it’s t’hum Shabbos, and by that I mean it would not be cool to go from the Bronx to White Plains despite the fact that it looks like one city. R’Goldie: So that’s challenging. When you met me first at RRC I was going through a divorce. And so, I didn’t hear you say that, but I made a rule I wouldn’t go outside of Mt. Airy on Shabbos, thus creating a clear Shabbos practice. Small problem, my children were living with my, I call him wasband, at the Jersey shore and I had them at my home every other weekend. I couldn’t see them the whole weekend, which is really the only time children fully have off. So I couldn’t see them if it wasn’t my weekend to have them, unless I would go down there to spend some hours with them. R’Zalman: So here’s a wonderful story. I was reading the other day that somebody asked the question: What happened if someone forgot to make an ‘eruv’? But they built a sukkah, and they didn’t make an eruv. The father of the late Lubavitcher Rebbe of Reb Menachem Mendel, his name was Reb Levi Yitzchak, when he came to Reb Chaim Brisker for smichah, they raised that question. And he said you don’t need an eruv, because the sukkah itself is an eruv. You understand? If all the people had agreed to eat in the sukkah. From the point of view of the dynamics of what an eruv is about, if you don’t look at it, how would I say, blindly, saying ‘‘eruv, got to have an ‘eruv.’ To ask the question, what’s the function of the ‘eruv? The function of the ‘eruv is people have agreed that this is an ok place for people to walk and talk and carry and so on. So Reb Chaim Brisker agreed with that. My sense is when the children are at the shore, that the children are your ‘eruv. Right? R’Goldie: Yes. R’Zalman:
Now it’s different that way. For instance, we have one telephone that we
answer on Shabbos but don’t give that number to anyone else but family.
So, the point was that in the past you always wanted to make those
discriminations, that would say R’Goldie: Right, the slippery slope concept. So I’m thinking about how to list the criteria for the psycho-halakhah point of view. So far they include: One would be to identify the stakeholders in the decision and the foreseeable consequences. Another is to deeply try to find what were the roots of this practice in Judaism and not imagine what they were or meant, but really know. Because there might be a lot more room in there, like the example you gave from Shabbos candles, than from any of our introjects about the reasons for these practices that were learned when growing up. R’Zalman: One more item has to be in there: Is it conducive to avodat haShem or not? R’Zalman: The person who is going to be the poseq, if he cannot place himself nokhah p’nai haShem, at the time he will be doing the last thinking about it to make a pe’sak, has to ask ‘will this be pleasing to the Ribbono shel Olam?’ R’Goldie: You mean will the G*d-field flower or will we get scorched earth. Not so dramatically perhaps. R’ Zalman: But this is really clear, does it create an increment in what they call koah of the pamalya shel ma’lah - it says if you do certain aveyras you weaken the heavenly family, the mal’achim, the whole kingdom of God, the Shekhinnah. This is a point, will it strengthen the Shekhinnah or will it weaken the Shekhinnah? R’Goldie: I had a mashpiah come teach for my students one day at the Academy for Jewish Religion, it was a course on Spiritual Mentoring. And they asked him: Where do you get the chutzpah to imagine that we should be in the position to spiritually advise people? And where do we get the chutzpah?” And his answer was “shiflut”. It’s when you open yourself to that Koah Elyon, is there a feeling coming back at me that this is unselfish and transmitted in a way that feels pure, or coming from what you want so much that your ego is leading? R’Zalman: Right, so the question is that you are bribing yourself because you like this outcome or that outcome. I think that when they are saying shiflut means just to have a healthy ego, not a weak ego, not an overbearing ego. Sometimes you have to have- out of the ego to make a certain statement that I take this on myself. I go back to R’Yochanan ben Zakkai, could you imagine ,standing before Vespasian who asks, so what can I do for you? And he doesn’t ask for the beis miqdash. What chutzpah did he have at that time? But he couldn’t write to R Moshe Feinstein and ask him for shayleh and tshuvah how to handle Yiddishkeit after the hurban habayit, He had to look around and say there is no one else I can trust like that. The strange thing that I feel, and I want to say this about myself at this point, there are some people who say I am going way beyond where I should be going and it’s not right and so on. So, what right have I got to take this on myself and so on - they are asking this kind of question. And I feel that-how would I say it- I’ll do a little detour, Imagine I want to go and talk to a rebbe about the state of my soul. If I go to any of the rebbes that I know today in Yerushalayim and Brooklyn and so forth, they would tell me something but they would not be telling me what I need to know for my own soul. I wish I had a mashpia for my soul because I wish everyone at Ohalah would find themselves a mashpia, which would be like a spiritual director, a good friend with which to talk about your soul issues. And I have that, because before every Rosh HaShannah I talk to three haverim about my soul issues because I don’t want to be so blind-sided by my own desires that I figure I got it all clear. On the other hand, I can’t go outside of our circle, because some people who understand a lot of hassidus do this academically, some are wonderful about psychological insights, Buddhists and so forth, and they can help me out in some things, but in the place of where I stand as a committed Jew, sometimes have to talk to R’Zalman, because who will grasp the range on which I have to make my decisions? So this is a problem. With psycho-halachic stuff we have two big issues. The people who have come from orthodoxy have already in their template the right kind of behavior; so like this Israeli who says to me how dare you teach kabbalah to goyim and he keeps his store open on Yom Kippur, because it’s so ingrained on him that he can’t get out of that. I was doing something with some yoga people on Shabbos in Yerushalayim, and I called women to the Torah. A woman was there in some Lycra outfit in which you can see everything, and who shried: “How can you call women to the Torah?” So you have that element, because those who have come from the inside, if they have the learning, that’s good, they are going to make a different kind of demand as to how we should deal with things. When I look at Dennis Beck-Berman and how he treats the kids in his house, and his issur about klei rishon on Shabbos. I say kol hakavod, he comes from a good background, and he knows what to say. But there are a lot of people who have come to Jewish renewal, for whom I did the translation of the siddur and tehillim, who are coming so far from the outside, how shall I put it, they are more this kind of vague protestant than they are Jews. They will want to go with the kind of ‘what I feel like, what my heart tells me and this and that’ even if they were to do this the likelihood is they will not have milah and not have a second generation. So there is something, that’s why I keep saying that has to be between the past and the future. The future has to be a place where malkhut shamayim is going to be part of what the world is going to be like and the past is where we are coming from. The other element that goes into that is a question is of the organicity, where I say we are all part of this great organism and we are each a vital organ. So in order to help the world most, we have to be the best Jews we can be. Like, heal the liver, if the liver will be good then the heart will get better. R’Goldie: Yes, long ago when we first met, I wrote a paper for you calling the Jewish people the baking soda of creation. When we get too many of us too close together we implode on each other, so when we’re dispersed we are carrying certain principles and ways of shaping a person through our practices that is shaping the cake of creation. R’Zalman: Yup. Somebody once said if you have a lot of fertilizer in one place it eats up the soil, if you spread it thin it makes everything fruitful. Jews are like that. R’Goldie: I totally agree. I used to teach at Kripalu for some years, after guru Dev was there. I don’t come from that g’sheft. I stayed because they wanted people with healthy boundaries to lead regular workshops there who could also work with people guru Dev had invaded. I’ve always been Jewish-Jewish, didn’t do Buddhist, I didn’t do Hindu. I didn’t even know what a guru Dev was. I worked there for several years and stopped when they put a life-size Hindu idol in each of teaching rooms, almost bigger than me. I started to have Jews who were coming to learn from me, though of course, I learned more from them. R’ Zalman: That’s very clear, then you had to be able to say "listen, in my room this cannot be. You cannot have an iconic image of that level, I know you don’t mean to say that this is God, but ‘v’lo taaseh l’kha pessel’ is, but if you have to do it this way I can’t teach authentically here.” R’Goldie: And that’s why I left. If they came thinking, oh I’ve never been to Kripalu before, I’ll also take some courses and sanghas and this and that. In-reach can turn out to be exit. R’Zalman. Yes. But here’s where you have to watch out. That’s been a tahyneh that a lot of orthodox people have had. They say the way in which you are breaking ranks with the forms of halakhah is the slippery slope and everybody will go down, the loopholes will allow people to get out. Every Jew in the ghetto had no choice but to be a Jew, and so he wasn’t a Jew by choice. Now-a-days every Jew is a Jew by choice, and if that is the case, you have to allow not only egress but allow also for them to come in. That’s why I did this thing about ‘halakhah in the red.’ Halakhah in the red was also accommodation; it was the beginning of how to move from accommodation to psycho-halakhah. Do you remember that? R’Goldie: No, I don’t think I was exposed to that. R’Zalman: Well, imagine a guy goes to a restaurant and they tell him the special today is pork. He says: “Sorry I don’t eat of unclean animals. Do you have any beef?” She says, “Yes, we have beef. How would you like your steak?” “I Want it well done, because I don’t eat blood.” She asks: “Do you want a pat of butter on your potatoes?” “No, because I don’t mix meat and milk.” The guy’s still eating trefe but he’s doing ‘halakhah in the red’, not ‘halakhah in the black.’ Then she says, ‘Wait a minute, I forgot to tell you we have trout today.” He says, “So give me the trout.” So the guy isn’t within the system of halakhah, but he is trying. If someone gets to the place where they can’t do ‘halakhah in the black’ and they drop the whole halakhic thing, then I think we are in trouble. But, if, for instance, people start making all kinds of choices, for example this choice of ‘I want a mezuzah but I want to write it myself, well that wouldn’t fit with halakhah l’mosheh mi Sinai, in the way in which people talk about that. But, so what. R’Goldie: What about the issues of employment and parnassah? We would reduce the ability of scribes to function. R’Zalman: I’m not suggesting that all the mezuzahs in the house should be removed, because very few people would do it, but at least one mezuzah should be done by the person himself. When we are talking about tefillin before, can you imagine what people would have to do in order to get a pair of tefillin like this? That isn’t bought and that doesn’t go through animal hide? R’Goldie: A very substantial process with integrity and depth. I think, when we go into psycho-halakhah, I’m responding from little bit inside a halakhic world-view. That system has all kinds of checks and balances so that the village lives. I’m not telling you something you don’t know. R’Zalman: I want to say something about soferim. When the Aquarian Minyan first got their sefer Torah, I was so blown reading from that sefer Torah because I could feel the kavannot of the writer which were lofty beautiful kavannot. Recently when I looked at a sefer Torah that was a recent sefer Torah, all I could see was the obsessiveness of the sofer who wants to be m’dayeq. G: That’s sad. R’Zalman: Do you see what I am saying? There’s a wonderful story about my grandfather who was a shohet. He was in the slaughterhouse and there was a cow on the trefe side of the slaughter house that was crying. My zeyde says to the butcher: “Do me a favor, I want to buy that cow and I want to kill it for kosher.” So he says, “I decided not to buy it because she doesn’t look so healthy, I’ll lose money, people won’t like that meat.” He says, “Do me a favor, buy it, I will pay you for anything that you will lose.” So the guy buys the cow and the cow stops crying on the kosher side. He slaughters the cow, meets the butcher a few weeks later, and asks “How much do I owe you for the meat you were unable to sell?” He says: Not only was I able to sell it, but people said it was the best meat.” But when you have a tight-assed shohet he wouldn’t have a neshamah-feel for the animals he is slaughtering. R’Goldie: I forget the name right now, there was a teacher from the seminary (R’Reuben Poupko) in Morristown, we were teaching responsa together, he told about a mohel whose hand shook. The people said now he can’t be a mohel anymore. The ruling was, since he had never done any damage and was the only mohel who cried when he did the mitzvah, that they had to trust that, until proven otherwise, the kavannah of this mohel was what mattered. R’Zalman: And Agnon tells this wonderful story about a Ukrainian man who was a chicken plucker and the shohet came. When he was honing his knife and spitting on the stone, the plucker shook his head like he didn’t like it. Finally he asked him, what am I doing wrong with this? He says, when I was young there was a guy here named Yisrulik (meaning the Baal Shem Tov) when he had to sharpen the knife he would take the stone and weep on it. So you see the issues when halakhah doesn’t want to integrate the mussar, and the hassidus and the kavannah into its total picture then something is missing, then it’s doing the whole thing in a wooden way. So the gishah, the approach, is a very important one here. So this is very helpful. Glossary:
|