JewsByChoice.Org

My rabbi is not a great scholar and he’d be the first to admit it. (Let me just say right off that he is no slouch either. He knows his way around the Torah, the Talmud, and the Shulchan Aruch well enough to guide me and the rest of his congregants pretty well.) He comes from an old Lubavitch family, but said that growing up he wasn’t that interested in school, in learning from books. He said that he’d often cut classes at the yeshiva and hang out at Chabad HQ in Crown Heights, listening to the Rebbe farbreng with his Chassids. And to tell the truth, he is not very focused, either. This is understandable as he has six kids. The youngest just arrived last Sunday (a boy, mother and child are doing well), the oldest, a very smart young man indeed, is nine. This would make anyone a bit unfocused, if not rattled, but my rabbi seems to thrive on it. He seems most comfortable and relaxed amidst chaos and noise and frenetic action. He’s always on his cell phone (this is as Lubavitch as black hats and beards), always on the go and, frankly, he’s sometimes hard to pin down for a conversation. I write this not to be critical but to give a well rounded portrait, because all that is trivial, totally unimportant. A major reason I am a member of my little shul is because of my rabbi. My rabbi is the kindest man I know.

Part of this kindness must be due to natural disposition. He’s just a sweet, gentle guy with a sweet, gentle sense of humor. But part of it is his upbringing and training. It is part of Lubavitch philosophy, and Chassidism in general, to strive to think the best of everyone. This is hard, as you can imagine, but he does it naturally, easily. I’ve heard him make excuses for some pretty awful behavior in people, behavior sometimes directed at himself, which is remarkable in light of what he was trying to excuse. But it wasn’t forced or put on, it wasn’t some exercise in applied piety. It was as natural to him as breathing. And I think a lot of it has to do with how he approaches his faith.

There is a story in the Talmud about Rabbi Nachum Ish Gamzu. Ish gamzu in Hebrew means “This too” as in, “this too is for the good.” No matter what happened to Rabbi Nachum he would always say, “This too is for the good.” Lubavitch takes off from this story and applies a logic that goes something like this: Everything that happens to us comes from God. God is good. Therefore everything that happens to us is for the good even if we can’t appreciate it at the time. This is a basic, fundamental mindset of Lubavitch Chassidism, and maybe other Chassidic and Orthodox teachings as well.

Now this is a hard philosophy for me to swallow as it makes God complicit in some very horrible things, and my rabbi and I have had arguments about it. One of those arguments happened over Friday night dinner at his house when I got rather emotional and, I’m afraid, kind of ruined the Sabbath mood. I felt terrible about it afterwards, not because I thought I was wrong but because of how loutish I had become around it. I apologized of course; of course he forgave me.

But as hard as this philosophy is for me to accept as true, I’ve found it worthwhile to adopt it as if it were true. When you do that some real and significant advantages emerge.

First and foremost, it transforms our random, everyday problems and frustrations into something positive and constructive. Before when these things cropped up I would think, “God, just what I need. Another rock in my bag.” Now I can think of them as specially tailored life lessons given to me by the Almighty to help me learn, expand, and become a better person. It helps me to separate myself emotionally from my troubles, and transforms them into opportunities for growth and improvement.

It also has the advantage of making one an optimist. If we approach our troubles as if they were blessings in disguise, it makes us seek out the good that lies in the seemingly bad things that happens to us. This of course is easier to do with some situations than others. But the attempt itself helps reframe life’s disappointments, changing them from random, meaningless tragedies to experiences fraught with meaning and charged with the potential to rise above, to overcome.

When you apply this philosophy to people, it makes us seek out the best in them as well. And if we concede that we are all children of God made in his image, then it makes us seek out the God within the people we meet and, by extension, in ourselves as well. It’s this perspective, I think, that is the key to my rabbi’s kindness. His mission is to turn darkness into light, and that means seeking out the light in the people he meets.

My rabbi explained it like this. He says we all do bad things at times, things that make us ashamed. But most of us have a great knack for making excuses for ourselves that mitigate our bad behavior: he hurt me so I hurt him; he’ll never miss it, he has plenty and I have nothing; if he hadn’t done what he did, I would have never have done what I did. On and on and on. Some of those excuses are valid and good, but we can always come up with excuses that seem valid and good for just about anything we do. All fine and good. But if you do it, when you do it, you must remember that you are obligated to cut other people the same kind of break you routinely cut for yourself. That is true kindness.

And that’s why I stay in my little shul and stay with my rabbi, who I like to think of as the Baal Chesed, the master of kindness.