On The Derech

On The Derech

Why is the truth so difficult to face?

Do Gedolim make mistakes?

Why do we suffer?

Can Hashem really forgive me?

Our minds are filled with questions. Questions that hit home and hit hard. We want clarity and we need answers. Rabbi YY Rubinstein, popular lecturer, columnist and educator is uniquely equipped to provide the wisdom, insight and inspiration that we crave. With his hallmark candor and compassion he points us towards the derech, a pathway to meaningful Jewish living.

This new book addresses an urgent area for the Jewish people. The topics are both important and timely and will indeed bring answers to thinking Jewish minds.

Rabbi Matisyahu Salamon

Mashgiach Ruchni, Bet Medrash Govoha

Rabbi Rubinstein has had the foresight to present the Jewish community with a new book, both relevant and crucial for our time. Many of our yourth and adults too have difficulty finding answers to questions that trouble them. Most are intelligent, thinking Jews, seeking meaningful answers to meaningful questions. Rabbi Rubinstein steps into these challenging waters and inspires us with his clarity, wit and wisdom. A must read for the contemporary Jew

Rabbi Dr Shimon Russell

Psychotherapist and Lecturer

On The Derech

Answers to Questions that Challenge Jewish Minds

Published by Rabbi YY Rubinstein at Smashwords

Copyright 2010 Rabbi YY Rubinstein

This Book and other titles are available in print at all good Jewish Book Stores for more details see http://www.rabbiyy.com

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal use only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter 1: How Do We Know We’re Right and They’re Not?

Chapter 2: What Is a Jew Meant to Think When Confronted with the Holocaust?

Chapter 3: Why Do Bad Things Happen to Really Good People?

Chapter 4: How Should We React When Things Go Wrong in the Chareidi World?

Chapter 5: What Should We Think When the Outside World Seems So Tempting?

Chapter 6: Where Is the Choice If G-d Knows What You Are Going to Choose?

Chapter 7: Science versus Religion: Who Is the Winner?

Chapter 8: How Do You Make a Jewish Marriage Work?

Chapter 9: Why Are People So Quick to Believe the Worst about Each Other?

Chapter 10: Why Is Facing the Truth So Difficult? How Do We Learn to Do It?

Chapter 11: Don’t Gedolim Make Mistakes Just Like the Rest of Us?

Chapter 12: How Can Hashem Forgive the Worst Things I Have Done?

Chapter 13: What Are the Challenges of Our Generation?

Chapter 14: How Can I Discover Who I Really Am?

Chapter 15: Life After Life: What Comes Next?

Chapter 16: Why Does Hashem Mind If We Do Good or Bad?

Chapter 17: How Can I Become Hashem’s Friend?

Chapter 18: Why Is Judaism So Obsessed with Time?

Chapter 19: Why Doesn’t Hashem Let Us See Him?

Chapter 20: How Can We Understand the Commandment to Wipe Out Amalek?

Chapter 21: When Is Guilt Good?

About the Author

Preface

There is an old Yiddish saying which goes, "Shtarbt min nisht fun a kashe — You don’t die from a question." This is true, even if it sometimes takes a long time to find the answer. (I should add that it took me fourteen years once to find an answer to a question I had about something the Rambam wrote.)

A real question deserves an answer and too often, young Jews in particular are told they should not or are even forbidden to ask them.

This book is for thinking Jews, young or old, who are "on the derech," but who genuinely seek answers to questions that challenge that derech and worry or trouble them.

Rashi reports that Moshe Rabbeinu was told explicitly by Hashem: Don’t let it enter your mind that you will teach the Jewish people a halachah once, twice, or three times till they know it by heart, and that you don’t have to explain to them the reason behind the halachah. The Torah should be presented like a shulchan aruch, a set table with the cutlery, crockery, food and drinks, everything, all prepared for the meal to begin.

Moshe was being told that Jews have to know the reason why.

The mishnah in Avos (2:14) says, Know what to answer a heretic. The Tosafos Yom Tov says that means if someone comes and challenges you and asks you Why? you have to know how to answer. You have to know the why already and have learned what the solution to his question is.

The classic work Mesillas Yesharim begins with these words:

"The fundamentals of chassidus and the root of being a true Jew is when you have clarified and made certain what your role and responsibility is in the world..."

You have to ask the question Why?

I have heard rabbanim decry this and argue that emunah peshutah, simple faith, is the correct approach and will suffice. Shtarbt min nisht fun a kashe or even a thousand kashes!

That has been their approach for generations and is too now.

I have only respect for this view. This book is "for thinking Jews, young or old, who are ‘on the derech,’ but who genuinely seek answers to questions that challenge that derech and worry or trouble them." If emunah peshutah is your outlook and you are untroubled by questions, you need not read further.

Still, I admit to some concern and expressed this in an article I wrote not too long ago in Hamodia, and that is why On the Derech came to be written. It was called Keeping Up with the Times. Here it is...

* * *

Lakewood officially became a township in 1893. As you drive into downtown Lakewood you can see signs hanging from lampposts at the beginning of Clifton Street. They display a picture of a carriage being pulled by a horse and announce proudly, Historic Downtown Lakewood. Underneath the picture of the carriage and horses is another claim to fame: Little League Winners 1975!

I was surprised that someone had thought this fact important and significant enough to display there. After all, the sign is really saying that the town has failed to win the Little League for the last thirty-three years, and that is not cause for too much rejoicing by anyone, except of course the teams that play against Lakewood in the Little League.

I looked at the sign and its celebration of small town America and recalled the words of arguably the United States’ greatest president, Abraham Lincoln, The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves and then we will save our country.

A conversation with two of the town’s most successful activists turned to a topic that sits heavily on today’s religious Jewish hearts: teenagers at risk.

All of our communities are struggling with this phenomenon. All of us see its victims on a daily basis. If you think that you have not seen it, then I assure you that you are moving through your own chareidi neighborhood with your eyes wide shut.

Last year in Manchester, the Novominsker Rebbe, shlita, came to honor the U.K.’s project SEED, as it celebrated twenty-five years of success in the field of kiruv rechokim. At the end of his address he paused, changed direction, and grew pensive. "Today we are witnessing a new phenomenon. It is something that we have not witnessed before, children in large numbers going off the derech." He offered no reason why it was happening. He felt that some of our best thinkers would have to devote themselves to discerning the causes and the solutions.

About seven years ago, I was invited to the excellent AJOP convention to deliver a keynote to this huge gathering of kiruv professionals. (AJOP stands for the Association of Jewish Outreach Professionals.)

The topic I chose was called "Helping them going up, catching them falling down: How appropriate is the kiruv professional in kiruv kerovim?"

Kiruv kerovim is an infinitely more complex field precisely because we are, as the Novominsker said, not exactly sure why it is happening. There are of course some glaring reasons that are part of the problem.

The Internet and cell phones clearly have played a terrible role in undermining the fabric of Jewish homes and families. The gedolim have made their concerns on this subject very clear. Lakewood in particular stands out for playing a courageous and pioneering role. It simply banned the Web and all of its strands from the town.

Yet there are many other factors at work.

Unhappy families and marriages unsurprisingly give rise to children at risk. But still we must ask why the model of Avraham and Sarah, Rivkah, Rachel, and Leah is not taught or understood enough to inspire those in similar situations to overcome and succeed despite their backgrounds.

Then there is the epidemic of schools and mosdos rejecting children for the flimsiest of reasons. That also creates wounds and pain that fuels the chareidi teenage exodus.

As Rabbi Matisyahu Salomon, shlita, puts it, There is no such thing as a dropout...only a push out!

But there are good homes whose children went to good schools, who are still talking the talk and then walking the walk...away from Klal Yisrael. As one of my closest friends said, No one is immune, we all have to daven.

The mishnah in Avos says that one of the ways that Torah is acquired is by being nosei b’ol im chaveiro — sharing someone else’s burden. Before doing this, you have to understand what someone else’s burden is. They have to feel confident that you do.

Many of the superb professionals working in kiruv rechokim themselves trod the path that they are trying to encourage others to tread. They are familiar with conflicts with nonreligious parents.

They know exactly how hard the struggle is to translate Chumash and Rashi.

But these same outstanding individuals will not have an answer if a young man from a good home, now wearing an earring and sporting a tattoo, asks, "What do you know about my life and struggles? Were you brought up frum?"

As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.

Klal Yisrael now needs variations of the outreach professional. We need those who walked away and joined the non-Jewish world and then found it to be empty and bankrupt and returned again.

That asks a lot from those willing to volunteer for this fight. After all, someone from a background where they knew nothing about Torah and became a Torah Jew and even a talmid chacham, is someone who has become a person we admire and applaud. It demands a much greater sacrifice to ask someone to admit in public that he was frum but gave it all up, even if he did subsequently return. What will his children think if his own teenage rebellion is known? Can we really expect a frum woman to admit that there was a time when tznius meant nothing to her?

In many cases it is possible to stop the problem developing. There are some young frum boys and girls that really do have questions about emunah and hashkafah. Frankly, they are often discouraged from expressing them. Sometimes their teachers are simply not equipped to supply the answers. They may hide that fact with expressions of displeasure or even anger. The kid is condemned for asking.

The son of a rosh yeshivah came to me at the urging of his parents about two years ago. He had questions. The questions were honest and sincere, not attempts to justify another agenda. We eventually began to learn together, so he could see his answers in their original locations, Chovos HaLevavos, Sefer HaIkarim, Moreh Nevuchim.

When I was last in his hometown, he told me a story. He had gone to a well-known yeshivah on Friday night to learn. As he left the restroom, he met three boys standing outside. Although they

came from chareidi homes their dress and body language declared them to have started the journey away from Klal Yisrael.

One of them issued him a challenge. "We have asked lots of rabbanim questions and no one can answer them. Wanna see if you can do any better?"

My young friend told me he was shaking in his shoes. He silently davened to Hashem for help. The four argued for three hours and he found he had the answers they needed to hear. They told him, We have looked and looked for these answers, but no one has been able to give them until we met you.

I was very proud of my young chaver and congratulated him. Oh, no! he said. I just taught them the things you taught me. It was your answers that satisfied them! Perhaps it was, but it was the fact that he gave them that made them listen!

There is a new generation of heroes who are working with those who have already left.

Typically the approach is to work in small groups and to lavish lots of individual attention. Many, after all, have indeed suffered difficult family backgrounds, rejection by schools, or worse.

But there are many who have not left and who just want answers to questions.

There is an apocryphal story of a man who became an apikoros by learning the Alshich HaKadosh! The Alshich’s style is to ask perhaps as many as forty questions on one pasuk. The man was given the Alshich as a gift and sat down after Shabbos lunch to learn it. After twenty questions, the cholent had its effect and he dozed off. The same happened the following Shabbos and the one after that. After a year the man had over a thousand questions and no answers. He became an apikoros!

People with questions need to have them answered!

Perhaps discreetly publicized and packaged in the right way, Shabbatonim can be created that cater precisely to frum kids with questions. They can hear the answers to their questions. They can be sent by teachers or parents who know they need to hear answers.

Some might be horrified at this, but that is to pretend there is no problem and to keep our eyes wide shut.

It will take an alliance of experts in kiruv rechokim and kiruv kerovim. I suggested exactly such a program recently to one of America’s leading outreach organizations. As a wise president once said, As our case is new, so we must think anew...and act anew.

* * *

So this book is for thinking Jews, young or old who are "on the derech" but genuinely seek answers to questions...answers to today’s questions, which challenge that derech.

Some may need answers for themselves. Some may need the answers so that when they walk into a yeshivah one night and see a bunch of boys at risk who ask if you can answer their questions, you are equipped.

Of course this book does not claim to have all the answers and certainly not all the questions. Hopefully, though, there will be