Many of us struggle with the difference between our internal and external lives. Perhaps for baalei teshuva this struggle is harder; the “old us” is always running, somewhere, under the surface. But this is not a challenge unique to BT’s, our tradition assures us. The seder hatefilos (order of prayer) provides an example we may overlook every day.

After morning brochos (blessings) and the Akeidah (the recitation of the Torah section about the “sacrifice” of Isaac) and before korbonos (the recitation of the sacrifices) in the morning prayers, there’s a little tefilla or amira (something you say that is itself not a petition to Hashem) called Le’olam yehei odom — “A Person Should Always Be.” In the Artscroll Siddur, it is translated as follows:

Always let a person be God-fearing privately and publicly, acknowledge the truth, speak the truth within his heart, and arise early and proclaim: Master of all worlds and Lord of all lords! Not in the merit of our righteousness do we cast our supplications before You, but in the merit of Your abundant mercy…

This prayer continues until the recitation of the first verse of kerias shema (recitation of the Shema), and then the brocha (authorities differ as to whether or not to say it as a complete brocha, i.e., with Hashem’s name in it) and, as the siddur points out, someone davening in a situation where he might not get to kerias shema on time should say the whole thing at this juncture.

Now, most siddurim say Le’olam yehei odom yireh shomayim b’seiser u’vagaluy: A person should always fear Hashem in public or in private. But scholars such as my rebbe R’ Aharon Lopiansky (now Rosh Yeshiva in Silver Spring, Maryland, and formerly on the staff at Aish HaTorah in Jerusalem), the author of the Aliyas Eliyahu siddur, point out that the old siddurim have the proper nusach (version) — they say only Le’olam yehei odom yireh shomayim b’seiser – a person should fear Hashem in private. In other words, he should fear Hashem in his heart of hearts, no matter what things seem to the outside world. The u’vagaluy obviously snuck in there (thanks to a local rav? a well-meaning printer?) because someone thought the ancient nusach sounded like “in secret” or something. But that misses the point: it is b’seiser that is really what this section of the siddur is about. This amirah is not about Kiddush Hashem b’farhesia (public sanctification of Hashem) or looking frum or looking not frum. It is about having yirah in your heart as you embark on the morning prayers in preparation go on to your day of living life with all its challenges.

This little thought satisfied me, and I conveyed it recently to a friend who enjoyed it, too, but this morning I saw another angle on this topic that seemed to complement it perfectly. It was in a tribute R’ Chanoch Henech HaCohen Leibowitz, zt’l, on his shloshim (the end of 30 days following his passing) written by Rabbi Yoel Adelman and Daniel Keren, printed in last Shabbos’s English HaModia, and it was an attempt to capture how R’ Henech embodied the ability of his rebbe, the great Alter of Slabodka zt’l, to be at once a grand spirit, a molder of men and the essence of humility:

The Navi Micha summarized the entire Torah in three basic principles: “Asos mishpat, ahavas chessed, v’hatze’a leches im Elokecha” — to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk modestly before Hashem. The Alter of Slabodka commented that to do justice requires one to be outspoken and resolute in the pursuit of justice.

Similarly, the chessed of Avraham was one where the entire world knew of him. His house was wide open in all four directions to all wayfarers. He was recognized [even] by the Hittites as “nesi Elokim — Prince of G-d.” How is it possible to be tzanua — to conceal oneself? Where is there even room for concealment?

The Alter explains that even when one performs the most visible of acts, the purity with which one does them is not visible. Two people can perform the very same chessed, but their intentions may be very different from each other. One might be doing the chessed purely for the sake of chessed, while his friend might be partially influenced by personal pleasure or personal gain. Therefore, one can conceal one’s greatness and purity even when performing great deeds.

The Rosh Yeshiva was always looking for ways to conceal his accomplishments and the purity which he brought to bear on all that he did.

The great man, the yorei shomayim b’seiser, is like the iceberg — called a berg or “mountain” of ice, so large does it tower on the frigid oceanic horizon; yet revealing only a fraction of its scale. He is seldom truly hidden, because a pure soul is typically perceived as such by those around him. But in fact he hides more than he shows. This takes Le’olam yehei odom yireh shomayim b’seiser beyond the mundane conception of “really, truly” holding Hashem in awe within yourself, regardless of what it looks like to others, and elevates it to the level of not only negating the need to include u’vagaluy, but to render it in fact redundant. And it reminds us of how reluctant we must be to believe we are capable of sounding the depths of another person — not only one who seems shallow, but one who seems to loom large as well.

Note: There will be a Community Wide Hesped to mark the Shloshim of HaGaon HaRav Alter Chanoch Henoch Leibowitz zt”l – Rosh HaYeshiva – Yeshiva Chofetz Chaim at the Yeshiva of Central Queens – 147-37 70th Road on Wednesday May 21, 2008 from 8:00pm – 9:30pm – Maariv to follow.

It had been a somewhat emotionally, rhetorically exhausting couple of weeks for active BT bloggers. Or, at least, for this one. Let me explain it this way: I’m a member of a little chevra who email each other on a weekly basis talking about what they’re doing in terms of outreach. (Yeah, an Aish thing. I know.) Not usually having much to say, I finally cooked up a corker of an email talking about my Jewish blogging work of late. It ended with this paragraph:

This is time-consuming work, and I doubt that I will be able to keep up with all the mischief. It is also very depressing, and tremendously challenging; I am not a kiruv professional, after all. I don’t have all the answers, but I do have over 20 years of being frum and learning in my pocket and thank God a good bit of dialectical and analytical skill. It’s really important to balance this sort of swim in the muck with a healthy dose of Jewish family life, davening and learning — because it does not provide the kind of feel-good chizuk you get from a Partners in Torah chavrusa or the like. I sincerely welcome any sort of suggestions or support . . .

Well, how nice for me. In fact, I didn’t get any “suggestions or support” from the group. No one responded to my email. In fact, a few people on the email list whom I met within the next week told me I was probably wasting my time. They thought getting the email addresses of strangers on airplanes and secretaries’ Jewish boyfriends was a better use of effort. Maybe they’re right. It’s hard to tell if anyone’s listening, especially when people you think perhaps are listening the hardest — the intense, brilliant, conflicted friend who introduced me to this blog, for instance, and who recently announced a jump off the deep end of frumkeit — are not moved at all.

Thank God for Shabbos.

Shortly before Shabbos we got a call from the new Aish yeshiva that opened a few blocks from my house. Could I help shore up the minyan erev Shabbos? I have never davened there. I… don’t like BT davening, okay? I worked hard for years so that I could sit at the adults’ table. I now pass for a lifer wherever I go, and I traverse the Internet with my “brilliant,” purple-tinged encomia to and defense of frum life, a self-appointed dean of orthodox Internet polemics. But of course I couldn’t say no; there was a need and I was duty-bound to do what I could to meet it. (My eighth grade son begged off.)

I got there and my heart sank. It was exactly what I thought I’d left behind. Gosh, have kids forgotten how to put on a coat and tie since the mid-80’s? These haircuts! Where do you even get a hat like that?!

But little by little I melted. It just started to feel right. They asked me to daven kabbolos Shabbos, and — for Heaven’s sake, yes! — in no time at all there they were, dancing in a circle! Dancing in a circle! I would have run for the door if I were in their place — but they didn’t! They were so enthusiastic! No one was making them do it. It was spontaneous excitement, and dancing was something they knew how to do. They were young, they were full of, yes, spiritual energy. They had gotten here themselves, they could walk out any time they wanted, but they were spending Shabbos here, and I was at the front of the room leading them.

All the nasty remarks, the cynicism, the blackness of the Internet attacks and the angry emailing; all my coiled up responses, triangulations, rationalizations — this is what it really is: People who want joy in their lives, want to get closer to Hashem, want to be better people. They are not interested, not today, in the anger and bitterness of those who have left this behind and are aghast that others could find it satisfying… the politics of frum institutions, and not so frum ones… the battles of virtual egos in the ether… the hunger for scandal, hypocrisy and failure. And I am not merely pointing fingers at other people’s “bitter” blogs. I generate plenty of this myself. What percentage of my contributions here is angry, disappointed, cynical? How have I gone from enthusiastic beginner, to perfectly presentable professional BT, to scowling, tired old cynic? Is that progress?

These young guys were pounding the table with excitement and joy and love because with the help of Aish HaTorah they were getting the chance to reconnect with something good they knew was in them and that they wanted passionately to let out and to live. They may have had disappointments ahead, clashes with reality, dashed expectations, broken hearts. But that’s not about becoming frum. That’s about life. But a life with all these things, yet with meaning, and hope, and spirit, and a relationship with one’s Maker — that’s a life, with all its reversals, that is worth living.

In fact, the one thing I got right in my email was that it is all hopeless — all the blogging, all the crossed pens, all the melodrama — if you can’t or won’t log off and live a real brick-and-mortar Jewish life. Living it in the moment, turning off the hyperspace drive, taking in what Hashem has given to me, is in fact my hardest challenge.

And sometimes I try so hard to write something special, something by which I hope certain readers will be touched and affected. Yet from time to time the work and the strain and the artifice show through in the piece, all too readily. I want those people to cry when they read it, but that does not work.

It only works if you cry when you write it.

What are we left with when that last of the nine lights on our dining room window ledge flickers out?

My life was transformed when I was offered admission to what seemed to be the greatest college in the world, well before U.S. News & World Report started saying year after year that, indeed, it was just that. For me it appeared to be not just the greatest college, but the greatest place. Indeed they sing there that it is “the best old place of all” — for it is so transformative to so many. Certainly to me it was more of a generalized place than a mere educational institution. I could not really imagine what it meant for a university to be a great college, because no one in my immediate family had ever graduated from college. Although we lived about ten miles from this one, it may as well have been ten light years.

And light did flood the world, it seemed, the day my parents brought me to the campus for the first day of Freshman Week. It was a bright day at the end of August, and perhaps it was the harsh sunlight that made my father, an orphan raised by his immigrant grandmother on the Lower East Side, cry as we walked around the country-club like setting where I would spend the next four years. I was not so emotional. I used blue sticky-gum to pin my Israeli flag to the plaster walls of the gothic dormitory, unpacked my bike and my six pairs of jeans and few other physical possessions, and got ready for the ride that would eventually lead to my present, very different, place in life.

But as summer faded and autumn settled on central New Jersey, the light, a little at a time, began to ebb.

This first semester did not go well. On the first day of school, bicycling across campus to the math building, I fell into a puddle of mud. I may as well have stayed there; I was soon on track to failing calculus even after a year of it in high school, and wisely bailed out during the add/drop period. Other classes were puttering along decently enough, with grades reflecting the considerably tougher standards and competition I was now encountering. But having no oral tradition of college, and having already been shot as from a slingshot across the universe far from the only world I knew, I was aimless. Most of the extracurricular things I probably should have done, given my talents and strengths such as they seem in retrospect, I did not do. All the things I wanted to do, the things I had been a high school star in, I resolutely failed at that fall. My high school girlfriend, off at another campus, abandoned me, too, in the process of what seemed at the time of abandoning herself in her new “place.”

And as September yielded to October, the sun, putting distance between itself and my place, grew dimmer. And I grew lonely. In my dormitory, I seemed to be entirely alone as November enveloped the campus. Everyone was at a … sport. I was not an athlete; but this time of year I should have been rehearsing a play or any number of other things that I was not doing, that they would not let me do, in this place. I looked out the drafty leaded glass dormitory window to the freezing quad below, illuminated by garish green lamps and a few other lit windows, and waited until it was respectably late enough to trudge of to the commons dining room to eat alone with hundreds of my classmates. After dinner, at least, the other guys would come back to the dorm, and I would have society, and life, and light.

But through those long, dark afternoons of late fall and early winter, loneliness — a feeling I had never experienced for even a moment in my life — overtook me. The onset of winter, and the draining of light from the world with the advent of December, has haunted me ever since. Now this is not about me. I won’t save for the end the fact that each and every failure that I experienced at the best old place of all that fall was, over the course of the next four years, reversed in spades. Indeed, all the things I wanted and could not grasp then, I had in embarrassing abundance by graduation, and thank God for that, because a baal teshuva who leaves behind what passes for “everything” for a life of Torah and mitzvos makes a much better “BT blog” contributor than the (mainly mythical) “loser at life” who “can’t hack it” in the “real world.” No, I had it all; yet every approach of the solstice still chilled me, and my soul. The emotional hurt of that fall still does not let me go, but this is not about me, right?

Zos chanukah. I always found it odd that people think Chanuka was fried up as a Christmas alternative in order to “brighten up your winter solstice.” What kind of present is that? When that last candle goes out on the last day of Chanuka, yes, any astronomer can tell you that you have more or less turned the corner along with the earth in its orbit, and that the days are imperceptibly beginning to wax long again. But in fact, if the descent into darkness chills your soul as it does some people’s, at the midway point all you have is a promise of another six weeks of the dark misery, and all that much colder, as well, for your money. And yet they say that “zos chanukah” — this last day of Chanukah — encapsulates the whole of the holiday before it. How is this?

We know that eight days — the days of Chanukah, the days before the bris — represent the transcendence of the supernatural over the natural. But while the eight days of the bris are essentially a waiting period, the eight days of Chanuka are each of them a day of yomtov, an improvement over the previous day, a brighter day than what preceded it, another day of miraculousness. To start them any later than the time of ultimate darkness over the world would be to ask too much of us in fighting despair. But to continue them beyond eight — that is not a favor. How will we ever glitter and irridesce by ourselves if we do not bring that light inside, and use it to kindle something of our own?

Some people hang colored strings of lights, keeping them up seemingly forever into the winter, hoping, it seems, to just outlast the cold night, to drive it away by luminous force. Artificial light never warms, however. It does not teach. It does not reach. The pure light of the menorah, however, at least gives us hope that we can weather the harshness of mortal life.

I have not assimilated all the lessons of the lights. Every year December still brings its dread to me. A Jew should never feel alone; he should not, but being human, and maybe wanting too much in this world, he may yet do so anyway. But every year I hope that, at least when I look out the window into the dark of night, the lights — and the clear glow they leave after they are gone — reflect, refract and reach into me just enough to keep the the light inside burning till spring.