Refined

This post is coming to you from Los Angeles as I continue to visit communities to talk about my new book, The Shabbat Effect. I don’t quite live up to the Johnny Cash song, “I’ve been Everywhere,” but I’m working on it. Tomorrow, I head to New York where I will do three talks before moving on to New Jersey. You can see my tour calendar here. Maybe I will be in your neighbourhood. Please check it out.

I’ve been speaking to audiences across the Jewish spectrum, and I admit that I do not give the same talks in Orthodox circles as I do in the liberal Jewish world. The talks I give to both those audiences are very related, and both the difference and the relationship are revealed in the symbolism of the cup and the wine that are the key symbols in the kiddush ritual we do to sanctify Shabbat.

In the liberal Jewish world, I am emphasizing the importance of having not just spirituality but a vessel to hold it, which is the religious dimension of Judaism. And in the more observant world, I am cautioning against having an empty cup – all structure, no content.

The spiritual and the religious are both integral to lifting the cup of wine to sanctify the seventh day and, to my mind, both are integral to living a spiritual life. I’ve been emphasizing everywhere I speak that there is a big difference between a spiritual experience and a spiritual life, and Judaism offers us a pathway that emphasizes the spiritual life. After all, the blessing to sanctify Shabbat is entirely about the wine; the poor cup, essential as it is, doesn’t even get a mention!

There is another point that I stress in all my talks and that is the notion of personal refinement, which in Yiddish is ehrlichkeit.

The liberal world has been so consumed with tikkun olam as to make that a synonym for Judaism. There is good in social action, and it is evident how much it is needed, but when one’s focus is entirely set on the outer world, it overlooks the parallel track of the inner work we are called to do.

I adapt the teaching of Rav Yerucham Levovitz here, who said that if you see a baker baking matza and you ask, “What is your work?” the baker should not say that “I am baking matza” but that “I am working on caution, patience, alacrity” or whatever inner traits that person sought to refine.

Similarly, a person engaged in tikkun olam activities who only sees the social need they are trying to meet is failing in their obligation to refine themselves. There, too, the answer should be “I am working on patience, compassion” or whatever inner traits that person knows to be on their personal spiritual curriculum.

This same message plays out in the Orthodox world in the form of a critique of frumkeit, a term literally meaning “piety” but used as a measure of a person’s adherence to the letter of Jewish law, and not just the minimum law, but increasingly an aspiration to add stringency upon stringency (chumros) to the legal requirements.

Of course, no one is advocating for breaches to halacha, but this is calling out a Judaism that is all action and no heart. There is a saying attributed to many sources that says, “Frum iz a Galach,” which means that being pious is for the priest. But Jews, “A Jew is not meant to be frum – a Jew is meant to be ehrlich” – refined.

Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe emphasized the same message. He pointed out that the word frumkeit is only one letter removed from krumkeit, a Yiddish word that means “warped,” “twisted,” or “crooked.”

You don’t hear the concept of ehrlichkeit / refinement being promoted in any corner of the Jewish world nearly to the extent you hear tikkun olam or frumkeit. I attribute that to the more general phenomenon that spirituality was pushed to the side everywhere in our Jewish world in the second half of the 20^thcentury, and so we who succeeded in finding our way to drink at the spiritual wells of our own tradition got there, for the most part, on a path of personal search and wandering. For us, the notion of being ehrlich is generally not intuitive. We must learn anew for our generation.

If you do a Google search of the words “ehrlich” and “ehrlichkeit” you will find, as I did, that the place they show up most commonly is in obituaries. Less than discussing refinement (which would be helpful to us), people get praised for having that quality (which is nice for them).

What might be helpful to us is to note that the modern Hebrew word for “refine” is צֹרַף – to be refined, to be purified, to be cleansed – shares its root with the word for “jeweler,” i.e., someone who refines metals. That word shows up in Isaiah 41:7 and in discussing it, Rashi gives two interpretations:

1. The tzoref is the one who beat gold to form a vessel.

2. It refers Abraham, who refined people to draw them close to the divine.

Our world is so coarse. The trend toward debasement in outlook, speech and action seems to accelerate and reach new depths every day. Against that background, the call to refine ourselves takes on the proportions of a major challenge, one that gives meaning to our lives and hope for our future, as individuals, communities and a species.

Does someone come to your mind as an exemplar of the quality of ehrlichkeit / refinement as I’ve been discussing it here? I’d love to read your description of such a person, and I am sure others would as well.