emunah, tefillah, a little mussar, and a shmeck of geula

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Testing…Testing




The world is a test.  Everything is a test.  Even for a frum young man or woman.  And our sole business in this life is to withstand them.

That the tests of life are without end was one the main themes to which Rav Avigdor Miller z”l consistently returned over the course of the many decades in which he set the standard for the spreading of Torah in the United States of America.

He taught us never to think about a vacation from the Yetzer Hora because the Yetzer doesn’t do weekends.  It also doesn’t do breakfast, lunch, supper, or coffee breaks.  Or put a different way, a Jew should never sit with his back to the door of life unless he enjoys getting blindsided.

He was also wont to remind us that the temptation of Apikorsis was forever in the air.  And although he articulated this warning many years before the Internet, our wireless connections testify to how prescient his warning was.

But the tests of life to which Rav Miller z”l referred were neither limited to dangerous philosophical abstractions nor to more grounded dangers such as Marxism, which he considered to be the biggest enemy that Klal Yisroel ever faced.  He saw them in every facet of life with no circumstance being so benign as to pass unchallenged under his penetrating gaze.

You had a piece of toast for breakfast this morning?

If you are a cookie cutter example of what usually passes for a frum Jew these days, you first washed your hands according to the Halacha before diving in and you concluded your repast with a recital of Birkas HaMazon.

But did you see the nes (miracle)?!

Yes, even the piece of bread on your table is a test to see if you can eat it while being oblivious to the nes that is inherent within.

And by the nes of bread, Rav Miller z”l meant the literal nes that should be widening your eyes, and nothing less.  Suffice it to say that while the many steps in the bread making process from the planting up until the grinding of the grain into flour and from the flour onward are plausible in that over time mankind could have either figured them out or could have simply stumbled across them, the actual grinding of the grain into flour is a divine gift beyond the collective imagination of all humanity.  But that’s a story for another day.

So how far does this testing go anyway?  Rav Miller z”l took it even a step past the bread to the table.

How does one approach a Jewish table?

Do you gruffly plant yourself down to stuff yourself as you would at an outdoor picnic table or do you approach it with great Derech Eretz as befitting something that is Kodesh.

Do you sit on it or are you zoche to understand that the Jewish table is a mizbeach (an alter)?

Testing….Testing.