Rabbi Akiva Grunblatt, Rosh Yeshiva of Yeshiva Chofetz Chaim gave an important shiur focusing on understanding what life for a Jew is about. The short answer is that life is about growing in our mitzvos and service of G-d on a day to day basis.

He discusses the origins of Rav Yisroel Salant’s thirteen attributes and points out that the thoughtful author of the attributes, Ben Franklin did not understand the need for a lifelong approach towards self-protection. Only Torah gives us the tools to pursue this perfection.

There are a number of other important foundation points and we hope you will download and listen to this mp3.

The four reasons people are attracted to Torah Observant Judaism mirror the four dimensions of the human experience:

Physical – the lifestyle is enjoyable
Emotional – the relationships are meaningful
Mental – learning Torah is deep and challenging
Spiritual – connecting to G-d is sublime

Unfortunately for many BTs, after the initial attraction the following occurs:

Physical – it’s expensive to support this lifestyle
Emotional – it’s difficult to find a really good group of friends
Mental – learning is hard and our world of distraction makes it harder
Spiritual – mitzvos and prayer becomes rote, so the G-d connection is weak

These problems are real, and unfortunately they drive many people to the negative, critical and cynical groups within Torah Judaism.

So here are four ways to start renewing your appreciation for Torah

Physical – focus on the pleasures of Shabbos with its meals, sleep and other great pleasures
Emotional – share some of your joys or tribulations face to face with a fellow Jew
Mental – spend a few minutes this week working on a difficult piece of Torah
Spiritual – say one “asher kidshanu” beracha slowly with concentration

Let’s face it, appreciating Torah takes work and it’s a lot easier to stay distracted and involved in negativity. However, if you put in the effort in renewing the four dimensions, the rewards are tremendous.

Rabbi Label Lam often explains that when someone comes back from vacationing in a warm climate, everyone knows that they have been away because they can see their tan. Rabbi Lam continues that when you come back from Eretz Yisrael you have the “inner tan”. When I was a kid, my mother used to have this cream called “After Tan” that you would “apply liberally after showering” to prolong your tan for weeks after your vacation memories had faded.

Having recently returned from Eretz Yisrael, I’ve been contemplating how to prolong my “inner tan”. In EY, I was on a high. Waking up for shachris on three hours of sleep was not that difficult. Running to the kosel to daven a midnight maariv in the rain, a privilege. Now, back home, exhausted, pushing myself to the 9 o’clock shacharis on purim morning was not easy. What happened? And how did it happen so fast?

In actuality, this is not something limited to a trip to Eretz Yisrael, it is something that, IMO, happens to every growth oriented person and perhaps more particularly to BTs. After the initial excitement of an event or an inspiration, people tend to slink back to their previous “less inspired” self. What serves as the “After Tan” for the inner tan?
Read more Prolonging Your Tan ›

My, how I have grown. I don’t mean “how much.” I mean, “how,” as in the manner or progress of a thing.

One of the cliches we hear, and learn to repeat, as baalei teshuva is the idea that you have to always be moving forward, growing, or else you’re doing something other than staying the same. “Growth,” improvement, development, are necessary components to an ongoing, meaningful life as an observant Jew. This is the mussar imperative, and perhaps also a concept also found in chasidus, though it is not obvious from a casual study study of Judaism. To some extent the implantation of this idea early on in our development as orthodox Jews is the placement of what may propel most of us to “the right.” But this description of movement is facile… one dimensional.

On a graph along the X and Y axes, one would think that — if there were some way to quantify it — one’s avodas Hashem would be represented by a nice, smooth curve of upward spiritual growth. But we have discussed here many times how seldom it is that the experience is an unadulterated parabolic delight — or perhaps more accurately how the experience can be perfectly parabolic, in the less felicitous sense of featuring both the up and the down side of the curve.

Really, we should use integral calculus when measuring our ups and downs. As we all know, integral calculus means measuring the area under a curve, defined by f(x), between two points (say a and b). The area under a curve does not care what the shape of the curve is; its value is absolute. This value we may hypothesize as actually being the true measure of a meaningful Jewish life. Any life. Your life. (Yes, I recognize this steps a little on the toes of my most recent post on a related topic. Let us call this a… refinement.)

My curve in the last few years has been… funny. It wasn’t what I thought it would be. It wasn’t, perhaps, what I would have thought it ought to have been. The route it has traced along those famous axes has taken me places that I am sure if you had asked me ten or even five years ago I would not have volunteered to go. Life is full of surprises, though.

In my case, at a certain point I was in a holding pattern. I had not really continued growing. The pressures of family life, making a living, all those standard excuses, as well as laziness and, if I may use the term here, jadedness had probably kept me more or less meandering spiritually for a decade.

My curve dipped. It peaked; it valleyed. I needed to know, to feel, even to hurt more in order to be more, and God provided me with a number of extraordinary opportunities to learn more, some of which came at some risk to the safe and happy mental life in which I frolicked. For one, I got involved in new and different kinds of kiruv — don’t worry; all fully “sanctioned.” Also, through my professional life, I moved “up” in frum society, and thereby also gained behind the scenes looks at the sort of reality, sometimes squalid, sometimes glorious but necessarily anonymous, that does not get taught in beginners’ seminars. And, off a less beaten path, I chose to establish genuine friendships — not kiruv files — with people who had views about the Torah world and even the Torah itself with whom I previously would not have ever had anything to do, and I engaged them sincerely, as equals, and listened to what they had to say, and then some. In short, I exposed myself to the rough edges. Some pointy-rough edges, in fact, which were encroaching on me stealthily, anyway. But this engagement is what they tell us, as we leave BT school, we’re not supposed to do. And what I wrote in these very “pages” I would not do. But I did it.

The sort of engagement I took up, really, may not be for everyone. You have to have quite a bit of self-confidence, and ego, to follow the curves I have in this latest stage of my “growth.” I had to do it. I have to still. With my characteristic modesty I will remind those not already bored of hearing it that I was an early success, a quick learner, almost literally a poster boy for the movement. So I got “there” fast — and then what? After a period of stasis, I had to open the doors again (were they the same doors?) and walk through them and see who I really was, and who and what I could yet become. And I did.

And I am still here, never more sure of who I am, and the decisions I have made. I learned through these encounters to appreciate more than ever the world in which I have ensconced myself, — even if some of my new friends (and they will always be that, I hope) shake their heads more in wonder than ever about my choices, knowing me and my views and where we might agree about what they think are crucial things. They may not understand what they have done for me — how their passion, their honesty, the blood from their wounds they have bled on me and the gall of their own devices with which they have splashed me — have nourished who I am now, and what I can yet become as a Jew, if only because I opened my heart a crack … as a Jew really should do. I would never have dreamed, if you had told me about where I would “go” emotionally and psychologically in this process, how much stronger, deeper, wiser I would be at the end of it, how much more meaning there is in my choice, how much more love there is in my life.

Maybe my particular wrestling matches were not for everyone, but there is some juncture… some moment… some challenge… some “hard” or obnoxious question, from which each of us, depending on who we are, and where it is, and when, should not walk away. For our own good, our own eternity. That encounter is different for all of us, but at this time in history, in our place, each of us must, at some point, engage this world.

The formula that defines my curve is mine alone. The measure of it all is, I say, what is accumulated under the curve and, with God’s help, in its continued progress… yes, upward. Because of where my formula has taken me in the last few clicks along the x-axis, I will never be the same, after too long of being just that. Is there any other way to define growth? For me, there was not.

Originally Published April 2, 2008

Right now (although by the time you read this it would have been Sunday afternoon), I should be mired in preparation for a multi- defendant enterprise corruption trial which is scheduled to begin tomorrow morning. Yet the more I try to delve into transcripts of the hundreds of recorded telephone conversations and thousand of documents, the more I am distracted over some perplexing phenomena. Perhaps I am just procrastinating or maybe I’m in denial that the trial will actually start, but it troubles me that the more stressed out I become while attending to my daily mundane pursuits, the more spiritually disconnected I become.

Isn’t this counterintuitive? Shouldn’t it be the exact opposite? Aren’t we at our spiritual zenith during challenging or difficult periods in life? Isn’t that when, more than any other time, we achieve focus and clarity by crying out with fervor and sincerity to connect with Hashem? Why then, when it comes to the daily hustle and bustle, it seems that we’re just “too busy” to daven or learn
? Funny, but we don’t seem to have that problem with kashrus. When was the last time you said to yourself, “Gee, I’m too swamped to eat kosher. I better eat some treif.” I know what you’re thinking. Hey Kirschner, that’s not the same thing. Eating treif would require you to do something when you’re already too busy doing something else. It’s an entirely different matter to omit davening or learning because you’re too busy to stop doing what you’re doing. Somehow though, being armed with this knowledge doesn’t seem to prevent us from repeatedly falling into this abyss. At first glance, the obvious answer is that such is the very cunning work of the yeitzer hora. Fair enough, but simply recognizing that, by itself, doesn’t necessarily mean we will escape its grip. Frankly, if it were that easy, we would have little difficulty overcoming many of our challenges just by understanding that it is the work of the yeitzer hora.

Unlike many things in life, where a lack of clarity precludes us from sifting through the fog of the yeitzer hora, it really shouldn’t be that tough here. If anything, the busier and heavier our daily secular pursuits become, the need to spiritually connect with the Borei Olam becomes clearer. This is true if for no other reason than from a selfish desire to throw up our hands and beg Him to relieve us from our burdens. We seem to have little, if any, difficulty doing it for Shabbos. Why then is it so difficult to take the time out to daven, find a minyan or learn even for a few minutes each day to fulfill the mitzvah of kvias itim – setting aside a fixed time for daily Torah study?

Sure, the yeitzer hora relentlessly attempts to convince us that it is a mitzvah to miss a mincha or a maariv because we need the parnussa to pay yeshiva tuition. He tells us, “Don’t worry, while performing one mitzvah, you’re exempt from performing another mitzvah. It’s okay if you miss your shiur or cancel your chavrusa (learning partner) because you’re very tired, you worked very hard and you need your rest to be fresh for work tomorrow. You have to pay the bills, don’t you? You have to work hard for that promotion which will bring your more money with which to perform more mitzvos.”

It’s all quite perplexing. We can actually feel ourselves becoming disconnected the more we buy into that gibberish. Even if we overcome it and go to minyan or daf yomi, we do so by ruminating over that which still needs to be accomplished. And that’s if we’re awake!

Some years ago, I observed a well-respected rabbi in shul take out his pocket date book and make a few notes (that was before the PDA) after completing his shemonah esrei. After davening, I commented to him that it surprised me to see even rabbis have things pop into their head during davening. He responded, “Of course, that’s the best time for the yeitzer hora to disrupt us.” Then he shared with me a very effective tactic. Speak to Hashem and tell Him your thoughts during the day when you’re in the middle of your mundane pursuits. It doesn’t take much time, you can connect with Hashem in mere moments and best of all, by the time the yeitzer hora figures it out, you’ll be done. That, in turn, will provide the impetus to make minyan, attend shuir and learn with your chavrusa.

Now, if only I can figure out a way to “connect” with the judge tomorrow and beg him to adjourn that trial.

Originally Published on Dec 6, 2006

A few months ago in a post called From Healing The Hip To Strengthening The Soul, I discussed a secular friend’s desire to develop his spiritual side. I mentioned that I can’t identify a tried and true path for Jewish people who want to grow spiritually, but are not necessarily on a path to full Torah observance in an observant community. This is the second 3-minute-read post of the series I mentioned there.

Let me explain the hip connection. I’ve been a 3-4 times a week, 40 minute runner, for most of my adult life. About 5 years ago, I was getting pains in my hip joint area. I went to my medical doctor and his recommendation was to take over-the-counter anti-inflammatory medication. This is a standard medical response for chronic joint pain. And it worked. I was able to function and even run on the medication.

About 18 months ago, I took two of my kids to an amusement park with roller coasters. The next day, before Shacharis, I had an intensely sharp shooting pain in my hip joint which caused me to buckle over my car. I hobbled to Shul and the intense pain would come back periodically. I mentioned this to David (Linn) and he said there was a PT in Great Neck who had done wonders for a number of people in our neighborhood. I went to see him.

Dr. Weisberg said my hip was so lacking in mobility that I was headed straight for a hip replacement. He took me off anti-inflammatories and taught me the proper way to use icing. He gave me 10 minutes of stretches to do twice a day. I’ve done the stretches religiously, and I haven’t taken an anti-inflammatory in 18 months; I no longer need icing; and my hip is gradually getting stronger and stronger.

What I’ve learned is the power of proper repetition over time. And proper repetition will strengthen our spiritual side as well. Saying Berachos, Shema, Shomoneh Esrai and doing mitzvos repetitively are meant to help us develop a deep spiritual connection to G-d. However it’s clear that the vast majority of observant Jews don’t have such a deep connection. Certainly Torah Observance leads to some connection, but it’s not a deep spiritual connection because we’re not doing the mitzvos properly with mindfulness, focus and kavanna.

If I’m going to help my friend really develop his spiritual side, I need to work on using the mitzvos properly to develop a deep spiritual connection to G-d. (End of part 2)

Originally Posted on Dec 11, 2006

(OK, I’m not a know-it-all, these are just some things I THINK are extremely helpful, certainly not the last word.)

1. Don’t become irreligious. Not even for a short while. Not even to get back with your old boyfriend/girlfriend for one last fling.

2. Cut yourself some slack. You can’t keep the exact same standards in all places at all times. While in Israel and in Yeshiva life is easy, keeping kosher, doing all the mitzvos is easy. Once you leave, the real test begins. You need some wiggle room.

3. Your relationships with your family members are more important than whether or not they join your brand of observance. Don’t sever ties with your family. Don’t flaunt your stringencies to “teach” them. The people who have you over for shabbos won’t travel across the world if you’re in the hospital, your family will.

4. Learn enough halacha to know when you can be lenient. Difficult situations often can be alleviated with knowledge. Learn the difference between a Torah prohibition and a rabbinic one. Learn the difference between a minhag, a chumrah, and ikkur hadin.

5. Find a Rav who is sensitive to BT situations. The Rabbis with the most halachic knowledge and clout aren’t necessarily the best judge of how to deal with irreligious family and friends. Your local Orthodox Rabbi might be a better source than the gadol hador for certain questions.

6. When you ask a Shailph that may end up with a major family rift, make sure you inform the Rav (you ask) of the consequences of your following his psak. Don’t just ask, “Is it permissible to go to an intermarriage?” Explain how not going may mean your entire family will disown you and never speak to you again. Ask “Is there any type of compromise I can make for them?”

7. Remember that nothing is a coincidence. Always question why Hashem put you in this position. Why did he pick you of all people out of the millions of uneducated Jews to come close to His holy Torah? There must be something special about you and what you offer to the already observant and the not yet observant. Fulfill your mission.

After Modeh Ani: Realize that I need to be concerned only with this day before me and not what I will do tomorrow.

After kissing the mezuza when leaving home: Remember that it is Hashem who decides what happens to me during the day.

Before Davening: Remember that I will be talking directly to the Ribbono shel Olam

While Davening: Remember that the second I open my mouth and daven that Hashem is right there listening to me.

Before and During Learning: Remember that I am not just studying any old book, rather it is a sefer that is precious and holy.

After Learning: Say a quick personal prayer that I am able to put my learning into practice.

Before Eating: Take time to slow down and realize I am thanking Hashem for the food and that without Him I would not even have it to begin with.

After First Bite/First Sip: Say a quick personal prayer that I use the energy from the food or drink for mitzvos and not aveiros.

Before saying Birkas Hamazon: Remember that bentching after I eat ensures that the channel of blessing that enables me to support my family is unobstructed.

Before Seeing Another Person: Ensure my eyes smile at them and that I greet them with a kind word.

After Work: Ensure I leave a bad mood outside before I enter the threshold to my house. Imagine that someone is going to pay me my entire yearly salary if I can refrain from expressing my anger for just that evening alone.

Originally posted here.