Many Banners, One Mishkan

In 1980, soon after I entered Ohr Somayach in Jerusalem, Rabbi Mendel Weinbach z”l, co-founder and co-rosh yeshiva, invited me to his office.

I was thirty-three, already a psychologist, and beginning to find my way into a religious Jewish life. Rabbi Weinbach looked at me with clarity and kindness and said something I’ve never forgotten.

“Michael,” he told me, “you’re going to fall in love with the scope and beauty of Torah, with Jewish thought, with Shabbat, with the holidays, and with the depth of our tradition. That won’t be your problem. It’s what you’ve been searching for.”

“The problem,” he said, “will be Jews.”

He didn’t say it with contempt. He said it with the realism of a man who loved the Jewish people enough not to romanticize them.

We are, after all, the people the Torah itself calls stiff-necked. The same stubbornness that helped us survive exile, persecution, dispersion, and war can keep us from hearing one another when fear takes hold.

Forty-six years later, as we approach Tisha B’Av and the disdain between Haredim and non-Haredim over the draft grows more poisonous, I know Rabbi Weinbach was right. Sinat chinam has become so familiar that it may no longer disturb us.

The rabbis taught that the Second Temple was destroyed because of baseless hatred among Jews. The warning is clear: a people can be threatened from outside yet still be destroyed from within.

I entered the religious world through the Haredi community. I didn’t remain there, but I never fully left it either. I’ve learned there, prayed there, admired and resisted it, and spent much of my professional life listening to its private pain.

For decades, rabbis referred clients to me, including their own children. Hasidic rebbes sent family members. I was trusted with marital struggles, children in crisis, abuse, and wounds rarely shown to outsiders. That proximity taught me gratitude and caution: I have been close enough to see the Haredi world’s humanity and commitment from the inside, yet far enough to see its shadows.

At its strongest, the Haredi world has preserved a distinctive seriousness about Torah: the sense that Torah is not one part of life but the atmosphere in which life is lived. That does not diminish the Torah commitment of the dati-leumi world, where Torah, army, family, work, and public responsibility have been joined in extraordinary ways. But the Haredi world has guarded one indispensable expression of Torah: the insistence that every detail can be brought before........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)