I'm hardly a reader of the garbage mass-congregation media-star religious leaders on the right put out, but Rabbi David Wolpe, although leader of a large congregation on Wiltshire Boulevard in Westwood, in suburban Los Angeles and a frequent guest in the media, is cut from different cloth. (I have, I know, revealed a bunch of prejudices.) He is truly wise and learned. Below is his most recent Off the Pulpit post, perhaps not his best one, but one that interested me because in the tangential way my mind works, I was led back to yesterday in our Spanish class, where we started talking about Mexicanidad, or Mexican nature/identity. That led me to thinking about differences between living where I do and living where I did in the US, most recently for eight years in San Antonio.
Below, Rabbi Wolpe talks about the value of teaching with a teacher present (especially a wise one) vs.reading his lessons long distance and what you learn about the teachers themselves and not just their scholarship. I agree with him.
Roles Greater
than Rules
BY RABBI DAVID WOLPE
Judaism so treasures words one might think you could get a righteous person out of a book. Yet beginning with the bible Judaism taught that laws come to life in people. Role models speak louder than rules.
Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary Solomon Schechter famously explained to the incoming student and future Chancellor Louis Finkelstein that the purpose of coming to the seminary was not to learn a fact or law; he could learn those elsewhere. The purpose was to study with great men. Speaking of his years as a student my father told me far less about what he learned than about the people with whom he learned. They were not perfect, but they were passionate, learned, marvelously eccentric and they brought the tradition to life.
To the extent that the Internet and the proliferation of long distance learning deprive us of being in the presence of charismatic, kind, scholarly people, it will be a tremendous loss. When a Hasid said that he traveled miles just to see how his master tied his shoes, he was expressing this beautiful idea. What we learn from a great teacher cannot be put into a book, because it is in a look, an inflection, a quirk of personality or a tossed off comment. The greatest human lessons are found in the power of presence.
So now as is its habit, my mind leapt kind of obliquely to thinking about human contact in my current life, and not just or even with sages (except for Jim). Here we have much more contact. We can't just hide in our house and hop in our car and go to a mall or to our cubbies at work, or only shop among strangers...or we could, actually, if we lived in some of the newer, more prosperous fraccionamientos in Xalapa, although even in that case, life is different: houses tend to be right next to or at least near each other, people are out on the streets, etc. etc. etc. I think the actual flesh-and-blood kind of human contact part of life is something a lot of Estadounidenses are badly deprived of (but certainly not all as my friends in the Northampton, MA area could testify to, or my kids who live in Boston's North End). In much of the US we don't brush against each other as we walk down streets, we don't have the water man bringing us our garafones every few days, we don't have neighbors ringing our bells to ask questions or use the phone or invite us somewhere (often done in person since most people in our Colonia at least don't have phones); We don't have kids coming by to use the computer or to ask if we've put up our altar for Día de Muertos yet. We don't have people knocking on the door to sell home-made tamales or chairs or lottery tickets or to ask for a faena for some local project; we don't walk across the street to buy whatever we've run out of at the little tienda or down the street to buy hand-made tortillas. We don't just stop in the street VERY frequently to exchange news with neighbors to the extent that we are almost always a bit late for appointments. In our colonia, on the other hand, if someone tells us, for instance, that someone's house has exploded because of a gas leak, we recognize who the person is, and we recognize the person's family and we know them well enough to at least have been saying buenos días over time....Everything is just more personal. Flesh is real, if you will, contact often unplanned, without make-up, and rarely with strangers. Of course in our Colonia people experience the worst of each other as well as the best. This is good. We can't step over the neighborhood drunks because we know them. They are flesh and blood. Some of the people are grasping and mean but overwhelmingly, most are not. We have a few very, very old women in our colonia, tiny and thin, more like feathers or wraiths. They walk here and there slowly and carefully. One of them lives in a tiny two-story house overlooking the river across from the main part of the colonia. We've seen people helping her fix it up. The woman in the produce market gives these old women less-than-prime vegetables, but they are usable and free, and the transaction is dignified.
We are outsiders and always will be to some extent. But as the life of the community seeps into our being, we also feel more and more like this is home.