On June 12, 1954, Temple Bnai Moshe, a Conservative shul in Brighton, Mass., celebrated the opening of their new sanctuary on Commonwealth Avenue with a dedication dinner. The attendees included almost all of Boston’s Jewish leadership. The dinner also honored the spiritual leader of the congregation, Rabbi Joseph Shubow. He was a leader of the American Jewish Congress and Bnai Moshe’s rabbi for twenty years, and had served as a captain in the U.S. Army.
Any shul would have been lucky to have such a prolific man at its helm and he was well-respected throughout the non-Orthodox Jewish community. There were a number of letters in the Journal dinner wishing him congratulations, including from President Eisenhower, Professor Louis Finkelstein, Abba Eban, and, probably most surprisingly, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik.
He wrote:
I cherish my long association with Rabbi Shubow and I consider him a dear and distinguished friend whom I hold in great esteem because of his many talents and qualities.
To anyone familiar with Rabbi Soloveitchik’s attitude toward non-Orthodox Jews in general, the fact that he would contribute this statement is itself shocking. In 2001, Rabbi Seth Farber wrote an article about Rabbi Soloveitchik’s attitude towards the larger Jewish communities in New York and Boston. He describes how Rabbi Soloveitchik had contributed much to education and kashrut in the Boston Jewish community, but had also alienated himself in his staunch opposition to any validation of non-halakhic practice. In this one sentence, we find the nuance we would normally expect from someone of his stature.
Rav Soloveitchik is often considered the founder of Modern Orthodoxy because he was the most prominent, vocal, and talented proponent of the idea that Judaism does not exist in a vacuum. The Torah interacts with the world we encounter and our understanding and practice of Jewish law cannot be achieved fully without engaging in the greater academic and social world.
Many of us are aware of the fact that the Torah commands us to take four species of plants on סוכות. A famous מדרש attempts to explain the symbolism of this enigmatic ritual. Each plant, says the מדרש, represents a segment of the Jewish community. The אתרוג is a fruit with both a tart taste and a pleasant scent. Its edibility represents engagement in Torah learning, the substance of Jewish law. Its smell represents the observance of מצוות, the expected effect of learning, something that can have an impact on multiple people and is less quantifiable. So an אתרוג represents people who have both Torah and מצוות.
A לולב comes from a date palm, a plant that has a taste but no smell, therefore representing those who learn Torah but do not engage in מצוות and acts of kindness. A הדס, the fragrant myrtle branch, is often used at Jewish weddings and other occasions as a source of olfactory pleasure. It represents those who are engaged in good acts but are not particularly familiar with the substance of Torah. And the ערבה, the willow branch, has neither taste nor smell, representing those who engage in neither Torah nor mitzvoth. The Midrash implies that the message of holding these four species together is that all Jews must be held as one, are one organic whole, despite their differences, and atone for one another.
Tomorrow, however, we will single out the ערבות and use them during our last collective petitions for forgiveness during this holiday season. We will then hit the ground with them. Why? What is the message of this strange practice in light of this מדרש? Rav Moshe Sternbach, in his book מועדים וזמנים, takes one approach, one I find troubling. He writes as follows:
When the ערבה is taken alone, we are obligated to beat it on the ground, to hint to us that those sinners who separated into their own groups, such as the Reform, Conservative, Nationalists (le-umi’im), and the like, since they come by themselves, we are obligated to “beat them” until they surrender and are lowered, and not to bring them closer at all, and certainly not to bind ourselves to them.
For Rav Sternbach, the message of הושענא רבה is the rejection of anyone who doesn’t practice Judaism in the same way we do. When I first arrived at college, everything was confusingly new to me. One of the primary challenges I faced as I became acclimated to my new environment was the need to quickly become familiar with and find my place in a pluralistic world. During my first Shabbat dinner on campus, the female rabbinical student made Kiddush. Instead of assuming everyone would do so, the organizers of the dinner announced: “Now is the time to wash for bread for those who accustomed to do so.” I found myself just trying to keep up with the differences between denominations, who belonged to each, and how I felt about my relationship with each.
Over time, my views changed and developed. I started to understand better what makes someone Reform or Conservative or Orthodox or Reconstructionist. Most surprisingly, I found that for many people my age, these categories were fluid and not particularly helpful. I became friends with the very observant Reform rabbinic intern. There were numerous people my age who attended both Orthodox and Conservative services based on the people with whom they wanted to hang out that particular week. An Orthodox friend of mine started to attend the Reform Friday night services during the Spring because they took place before Shabbat began and were accompanied by a guitar. By the time I was a senior, I had a completely different view of Orthodoxy’s place in the Jewish People. Already in 1967, Rabbi Lamm pointed out the contributions that non-Orthodox Jews have made to the Jewish identity and observance in the United States should lead us to reconsider Orthodox rabbinic attitudes towards other Jews.
Let me demonstrate that by returning to our earlier discussion of Rabbi Sternbach’s answer to our question about ערבות. First of all, the משנה never mentions the practice of beating the ערבות on the floor. The משנה quotes one opinion that in the ערבות ,בית המקדש would be taken on הושענא רבה. ר׳ יוחנן בן בתירא argues with that historical claim and says that it was the lulav, the palm branch, that was beaten on the floor. Following Rabbi Sternbach’s analogy, then, ר׳ יוחנן בן בתירא believes it is those who know a lot of Torah but who do not act kindly based on their knowledge from whom we should distance ourselves.
Rav Kook takes a different approach to solving the problem of ערבות. He notes that the language of the Rambam is not that we beat the ערבות on the floor. He says that חובטים בה, that we beat the floor with it. Explains Rav Kook, the point of taking the ערבות on הושענא רבה is to highlight precisely the opposite idea to that of Rav Sternbach, that we cannot achieve atonement without including every single Jew.
It occurred to me during my last year of college that as an Orthodox Jew, and rabbinical student to boot, I had only participated in social programming with Jews of other denominations. I dreamed of an event that would highlight our shared spirituality, our shared love of Judaism, not just Jewish identity, in a neutral space. A few of my ideas were shot down but ultimately, we organized a tisch with singing and chulent where the Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox rabbinical students each gave a דבר תורה. We may not have been able to daven together formally but we could sing together in a different form of prayer and share Torah together.
In my experience then and continuing until today, I have found that I believe that there is almost no one who can be considered an ערבה, lacking in Torah or mitzvoth. Certainly, one’s identity as Orthodox or Conservative or Reform or secular cannot determine that status. But I emphatically agree with Rav Kook’s point nonetheless; we must be confident and clear about what we believe and what we do. Halachic observance is non-negotiable for us as Orthodox Jews. But that should not hold us back from recognizing the essential importance and value of every Jewish person. Tomorrow, as we hold our אתרוגים ,לולבים, etc. and then take the ערבות, let them remind us of the intrinsic equality of all of the people of Israel and the role we all play in the destiny of the Jewish People.
דורש לנפשי 