In Memory of Rav Yerucham

This blog post will be a bit shorter than usual because all I want to do is introduce you to my grandfather – not my biological grandfather, but a very important spiritual progenitor of mine.

One of the realities about being a spiritual orphan – the plight of most Jews of our generation, me included! – is that we were never introduced to our own Jewish spiritual lineage. Rabbi Yerucham Levovitz stands tall in that lineage and is a major ancestor who is well worth getting to know.

Rav Yerucham, as he is called by all who were not his direct students – they called him simply “the Mashgiach” – was born in Belarus in 1873 and died in 1936. This Wednesday, June 3^rd, marks the 90^th yahrzeit(anniversary of the death) of this great Mussar teacher who merited the privilege of studying at two of the primary centers of 19^th century Mussar learning and practice, the famed yeshivas of Slobodka and Kelm. His teachers were Rabbi Nosson Tzvi Finkel (the Alter of Slobodka) and Rabbi Simcha Zissel Ziv (the Alter of Kelm), two of the three second-generation leaders of the Mussar movement that emphasized what has been so absent in our generation, which is awareness and cultivation of the inner life in a Jewish context.

Rav Yerucham joined the yeshiva at Mir, in Belarus, in 1908 and served as the Mussar supervisor (mashgiach) there until he died, 28 years later. His son Simcha Zissel Levovitz (named after the Alter of Kelm) gathered together and published his lectures and helped extend the Mussar heritage into the post-Holocaust worldwhere they are available to us still today, though only in Hebrew.

I have been learning my way through Rav Yerucham’s Daat, Chochmah u’Mussar for a number of years now, meeting consistently with my loyal and wise chevruta, Robert Barris. We meet for an hour every week and work our way through several paragraphs of the book, translating, discussing and applying what we are studying. As soon as our session ends, I sit down to write out the translation in English, with footnotes and sources. We are currently on page 226, just over halfway through.

I try to get as close to an accurate translation of Rav Yerucham’s thought as I can. I try to capture the p’shat, the straightforward meaning of the words on the page. After all, what I am interested in and will benefit from is Rav Yerucham’s thought, and so I strive to be as true to his ideas as I can get, with Robert as a partner in this endeavour.

This seems to me to be a very fitting approach to learning from him, since his thought centers on living with da’at, which he understood to mean perceiving reality honestly as it is. He pointed out that we tend to live superficially and reactively, and from habit, and as a result, we might see only the surface of life, without recognizing the deeper spiritual processes that go on and with which we can engage, to the benefit of ourselves and the world.

Rav Yerucham’s Mussar talks were not abstract sermons. His students described them as revealing “maps of the human soul.”

Here are a few of the gems I have encountered in studying his teachings:

• “The greatest danger is that a person becomes accustomed to everything.”

• “Most people are asleep, though their eyes are open.”

• “The yetzer ha’ra does not first seek to make a person wicked. It seeks to make them inattentive.”

• “A person can know something with complete clarity and yet live as though they never heard it.”

• “The inner world of a person is built specifically in silence.”

My favourite teaching of his, though, is one I have already shared on this blog. He said that if you see a baker who is baking matza and you ask that person “What is your work?” and the baker answers, “I’m baking matza,” that’s the wrong answer. It reveals that the person is conscious of worldliness but not of the corresponding internal reality where we also have to work. The correct answer, says Rav Yerucham, would be, “I am working on caution and alacrity, precision and patience,” or the like.

Steeped in Mussar, he understood profoundly that the pursuit of a spiritual life involves cultivating the inner traits [middot] and so no matter what worldly activity you find yourself engaged in – baking matza or driving a car or protesting in the streets or raising a child, or whatever – the eyes of your consciousness should always be focused inwardly, on whatever traits you are working on that could be honed or strengthened in that moment, within that context.

I’ll give the final word to Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe (1914 – 2005), who saw his years studying under Rav Yerucham in the Mir yeshiva as the central formative influence of his life. He said that a single Mussar shmuess(discourse) from Rav Yerucham was so powerful that it became the source of the strength and fortitude that allowed him to survive the terrible years of World War II.

May that influence live on, growing stronger as we probe and cultivate his teachings in our time. And may hisneshama have an aliyah.

I’ll ask a question: Do you identify with the idea with which I began this post, that Jews of our generation are, by and large, spiritual orphans? Is that true of you, do you think?