Spectral Clergy, Living Torah, and My Izzet Grieving Process
Instead of writing a 1-page article on the parashah, I decided to write a lengthier reflection on my grieving process over the course of these past seven days. You can decide if it counts as Torah.
The Torah content for this week has been sponsored by Sarah and Moshe Eisen, with the following message: "Dedicated in honor of Popo, who shined bright and brought joy to so many of us. And to Rabbi Matt Schneeweiss who shared her with us and continues to share thoughts, insights, and Torah."
The Torah content for this week has also been sponsored by Nava, in memory of Adira Koffsky z"l, who loved learning and philosophy and was a real seeker of truth.
Click here for a PDF version of this article, and click here for the podcast version.
How I Have Chosen to Grieve
I’ll begin by summarizing my experience on Thursday, February 2, 2023.
At 7:15am I received a call from my mom that Popo – my beloved grandmother, Helen Chang – passed away peacefully in her sleep at the ripe old age of 98.
At 10:15am that same day, I received news that Adira Koffsky, one of the last high school students I taught at Midreshet Shalhevet, was killed in a car accident at the tender age of 18.
Yehoshua, one of my talmidim in yeshiva, kindly offered to use our afternoon chavrusa time to let me to tell him about these two people and what they meant to me, but at 12:15pm he informed me that his mother, Julie Bass, just died.
And towards the end of the day I learned that Martin Pepper – the father-in-law of my friend and teacher, Rabbi Joshua Maroof – was killed in the same car accident that took the life of Adira.
These four deaths impacted me in different ways. I have known and loved Popo for my entire life; without her, I would not be who I am - and I would not even be. I taught Adira for hundreds of hours in seven courses during her first two years of high school, helping her develop into who she became. I never got a chance to meet Yehoshua’s mother, but Yehoshua is a beloved student of mine and my heart goes out to him in his pain. And while I didn't have any connection to Rabbi Maroof's father-in-law, the fact that he and Adira lost their lives in the same tragedy causes me to see his death as related to the others. The news of these four deaths reaching me within a span of 12 hours resulted in a cumulative impact that was as overwhelming as it was surreal. That day it felt like it was raining death.
A few months ago, in preparation for Popo’s imminent passing, I began reading On Grief and Grieving (2005), by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler. If there’s one overarching message, it’s that people grieve in different ways, and that the important thing is to allow grief to take its course. They write:
Be aware that when grief hits in all of its power, we instinctually try to resist the sense of overwhelm. But resistance to pain only serves to amplify it. Try sinking into it and feel it become more spacious. Allow it to wash over you and feel the strength return to your body and your mind. When you surrender to grief, you will discover that you are so much stronger than you ever imagined. Peace lies at the center of the pain, and although it will hurt, you will move through it a lot faster than if you distracted yourself with external outings.
I have done my best to allow the grieving process to run its course. Because I am a writer and a teacher, it is not surprising that my grieving has taken the form of writing and teaching. I have poured out my grief in the form of posts and articles in which I have expressed my personal feelings interlaced with Torah thoughts. I’ve delved into the laws of mourning and other death-related topics with my students in lieu of my regularly scheduled shiur programming. I composed a eulogy in which I attempted to convey what was like for me, as a teacher of Torah, to lose a dear student like Adira. I shared reflections about the two shivah calls I made and the realizations and insights they triggered. I plan to give a shiur in a few of hours on the philosophical question of whether it is possible to die before one’s time, and on the weighty matter of how such tragedies are consistent with Divine justice. All these thoughts I have shared with my friends, students, and peers across different social media platforms.
I am well aware that some might disapprove of the public form my grieving process has taken. They might consider this type of outpouring to be acceptable if kept to oneself and one’s inner circle but deem it inappropriate to talk about in a public forum, especially on social media. Some might look down on my intermingling of Torah teachings with expressions of my own emotions, or my decision to deviate from my curriculum in order to explore subject matter which caters to my present frame of mind, or how I have expressed my feelings about my talmidim. I have no doubt that some will frown on this article, finding it to be self-indulgent, immodest, and unbecoming of a Torah educator.
All these objections have merit. In fact, I was in conflict as to whether to take this course at all, or whether it would be better to just keep these all these thoughts to myself. But in the end, I made the decision to follow this course on the basis of three considerations: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Popo & Adira (their common denominator), and the awareness of my own mortality.
Emerson and the Soloveitchiks
Last Friday I had planned to give a shiur to my women’s “Machshavah Lab” group entitled “Emerson’s Advice for Clergy and Religious Educators.” I intended to focus on an excerpt from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1838 address to the senior class of the Harvard Divinity School. Towards the end of the speech, he identifies two defects in Christianity which he believes to be responsible for the “universal decay and now almost death of faith in society.” My plan was to conduct a “close reading” of this excerpt in shiur and to consider the relevance of Emerson’s remarks as applied to Jewish clergy and educators, in light of Torah sources. Unfortunately, I had to cancel this shiur so that I could attend Adira’s funeral.
One of the excerpts I hoped to discuss has been the primary impetus for the way I’ve been grieving. Emerson bemoans the phenomenon of the preacher who is a “formalist” – one who presents the teachings of his religion to his congregants as dead formulas rather than as the living words of the living God:
Whenever the pulpit is usurped by a formalist, then is the worshipper defrauded and disconsolate. We shrink as soon as the prayers begin, which do not uplift, but smite and offend us … I once heard a preacher who sorely tempted me to say I would go to church no more. Men go, thought I, where they are wont to go, else had no soul entered the temple in the afternoon. A snow-storm was falling around us. The snow-storm was real, the preacher merely spectral, and the eye felt the sad contrast in looking at him, and then out of the window behind him into the beautiful meteor of the snow. He had lived in vain. He had no one word intimating that he had laughed or wept, was married or in love, had been commended, or cheated, or chagrined. If he had ever lived and acted, we were none the wiser for it.
It is not enough for the clergyman or the religious educator merely to convey the teachings as they are written, nor is it sufficient to expound on their meaning. In addition, he must imprint them with his own soul – by living and breathing the truth as he sees it and experiences it in his very person, and must do so in a manner readily discernible to all. As Emerson puts it:
The spirit only can teach. Not any profane man, not any sensual, not any liar, not any slave can teach, but only he can give, who has; he only can create, who is. The man on whom the soul descends, through whom the soul speaks, alone can teach. Courage, piety, love, wisdom, can teach; and every man can open his door to these angels, and they shall bring him the gift of tongues. But the man who aims to speak as books enable, as synods use, as the fashion guides, and as interest commands, babbles. Let him hush.
The same problem Emerson saw in Christianity has plagued Judaism as well. I do not say this based on my own assessment, but on that of the Rav, as recorded in a conversation by Rabbi David Holzer in The Rav Thinking Aloud: Transcripts of Personal Conversations with Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (pp.28-29):
Judaism has never been open about sharing its own personal experiences, preferring to hide under layers of abstractions … As a result, it is perceived by the masses as being cold and intellectual, when in fact it possesses a strongly beating heart. Behind the tough exterior, a tender soul hides. This was a historical mistake on the part of the Jew, one which I hope to correct now.
But it is a trait of our character. I know many rabbis of the “old school” who were like that. I know my father. I was very close to my father, and my father was close to me. I suffered from a “father complex” – in a positive sense, of course. [Yet] he never kissed me. I would have never heard from him any endearing word. He never embraced me. Everything was so rigid, so cold.
I remember once I left Warsaw, no one knew when I would come back, or whether I would. When I met my father in New York, he shook my hand and said “all right.” He just shook my hand and said, “Bon voyage”, "לך לשלום", [when leaving Warsaw].
If a stranger had observed this scene, he would say there is no feeling in this person. But I know there was a volcano in him, covered up, though no eruption has ever taken place. Good or bad, this is indicative of the Jewish community.
Those who are familiar with the broad spectrum of the Rav’s teachings know that he made good on his promise to correct this “historical mistake on the part of the Jew.” His lectures and his writings are replete with words of the heart alongside words of the intellect, and equally permeated by his inimitable Torah spirit. And despite what the Rav related about the “old school” approach of his father, he mentions elsewhere (Halakhic Man 1:12) that his grandfather – Rav Hayyim, founder of the Brisker method of Talmudic analysis – utilized his Torah study as a vehicle for coping with his own emotional turmoil and existential dread:
My father related to me that when the fear of death would seize hold of R. Hayyim, he would throw himself, with his entire heart and mind, into the study of the laws of tents and corpse defilement. And these laws, which revolve about such difficult and complex problems as defilement of a grave, defilement of a tent, blocked-up defilement, interposition before defilement, a vessel with a tight fitting cover upon it in a tent in which a corpse lies, etc., etc., would calm the turbulence of his soul and would imbue it with a spirit of joy and gladness.
I know there are Briskers out there who prefer to imagine Rav Hayyim as a lofty genius who coldly gazed upon everything and everyone through the stony lens of clinical halachic categories – but that’s not how the Rav describes him. I prefer to believe that when Rav Hayyim spoke about halacha’s treatment of death, he did not do so in the “spectral” manner condemned by Emerson, but as a radiant angel whose words dripped with deep wisdom and deep feeling.
As I debated whether or not to write what I’ve written this week, Emerson’s words continued to echo in my mind: “A snow-storm was falling around us. The snow-storm was real, the preacher merely spectral.” I have chosen to publicly share my grieving process through my teaching because I want to be real – not merely spectral. If I were to only teach abstract ideas disconnected from my life, or if I were to conceal how my Torah forms and is informed by my inner world, then I would be doing a terrible disservice to my students. “You shall keep My statutes and My judgments, that a person shall do and live by them” (Vayikra 18:5). Hashem didn’t give us His Torah merely to think about, but to live by. How can I call myself a teacher of Torah if I only elucidate His word but fail to model how it shapes my life? I want to be as real as the “snow and vapor, stormy wind fulfilling His word” (Tehilim 148:8).
The Common Quality of Popo and Adira
The second impetus for my decision to publicly share my grieving process in this manner emerged from my thinking about what Popo and Adira had in common. To my mind, the quality they shared is that they were both unapologetically themselves. Both cared deeply about other people but neither particularly cared what others thought of them. Both embraced the things in life that gave them joy, even when doing so was not conventional.
In Popo’s case, this expressed itself most visibly in her fashion. She always dressed in colorful clothing that made her happy. When asked why she wore matching outfits and jewelry when it wasn’t a special occasion, she explained that she bought these adornments because she likes them, and it would be a waste not to wear them. More importantly, Popo was one of the two most open, unpretentious, and unabashedly loving people I have ever known. (The other one is my mom.)
In Adira’s case, this quality expressed itself both in her intellectual independence and in her default mode of “letting her geek flag fly.” It didn’t matter to her that others would see her as “weird” for the opinions she held, or for liking fantasy, writing imaginative stories, and playing Dungeons & Dragons. Like Popo, Adira was perfectly content to be herself and let others think what they may.
Taking a cue from Adira, I am going to let MY geek flag fly by declaring myself a member of the Izzet League. What? You’re not familiar with Izzet? Well, let me tell you. In the ecumenopolis of Ravnica, there are ten guilds – one for each two-color combination of the five colors of magic (white, blue, black, red, and green). Each guild has its own philosophy and profile which are manifest in myriad ways. I will indulge myself by letting head designer Mark Rosewater explain the significance of the red/blue color pairing, and what it means to be in Izzet:
For Red and Blue, it's a classic conflict: emotion vs. intellect (a.k.a. the head vs. the heart, thinking vs. feeling, speculative vs. intuitive, the mind vs. the gut). On one side we have Red. Red is the color of impulse. It follows its heart. It does what feels right. It lets its emotions be its guide. Blue, on the other hand, is the color of the intellect. Blue likes to think. A lot. About everything. Blue makes its decisions on logic and forethought.
Their styles could not be more different. Red acts impulsively in the moment. Blue waits until it has examined every side of the issue before it gets involved. Red comes out swinging. Blue avoids conflict, if it can. Red acts. Blue reacts. Red is focused on the present. Blue is focused on the future. Each color acts in a way that is the antithesis of the other.
So how does a guild encompass both sides? Easy. By taking aspects of each. Red/Blue is a thinking guild, but unlike other guilds with a Blue element, Red/Blue embraces the tools of emotion. They think, but they think passionately. Their emotion allows them to leap to ideas and thoughts that their logical cousins would never encounter. They find rationality in the heart of irrationality. They make intuitive leaps. They slay sacred cows. They connect things that no one else would think to connect. In short, they embrace creativity.
You see, creativity mixes elements of logic and emotion. It finds connections in things that most people wouldn't have given a second look. But Red/Blue lives to find those connections. To them, life is about seeking knowledge and freedom. And how better than by examining the knowledge that no one else will explore. Thinking things that no one else would dare think. They search for the knowledge that cannot rationally be discovered.
My students and those who know me will understand why I identify with this guild, and why I am drawn to the Rav’s brand of intellectualism over the “old school” approach of his father. (I can’t help but chuckle at just how “Izzet” this article is: an intellectual analysis of my emotional relationship to intellectualism’s stance on emotions, and how I feel about all that!) But while I have always had these Izzet tendencies, I haven’t always trusted myself to follow them wherever they lead.
The changes in my professional trajectory brought about by the pandemic afforded me more freedom to explore and expand my own style of teaching and learning beyond what I was able to do as a high school rebbi. A couple of years ago I saw a fantastic quotation from Dolly Parton: “Find out who you are and do it on purpose.” This is an accurate description of what I’ve been trying to do over the course of these past two and a half years.
Likewise, the advice given by Rainer Maria Rilke about poetry in Letters to a Young Poetresonates with me regarding the quest to blaze my own path in my learning, teaching, and writing:
You ask whether your verses are good. You ask me. You have asked others before. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are disturbed when certain editors reject your efforts. Now (since you have allowed me to advise you) I beg you to give up all that. You are looking outward, and that above all you should not do now. Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write. This above all – ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple "I must," then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it.
Whenever I have grappled with the decision whether to write or share any part of my grieving process this week, I’ve asked myself: “Is this something I must do?” and the answer has always been a strong and simple: “I must.” And so I have.
The Shortness of Life
The third factor which clinched my decision to embrace this course of public grieving-teaching-writing is a truth that was underscored four times last Thursday and can be expressed in as many words: life is too short.
Life is too short for me to hold back my thoughts and feelings out of fear of how I will be judged.
Life is too short for me to not take risks in my teaching.
Life is too short not to experiment by pushing the boundaries of my intuition in search of my authentic voice.
Life is too short not to share how I felt about Adira, and how I feel about all of my students.
Life is too short for me to refrain from showing my students, through my words and my actions, how much I care about each and every one of them.
Life is too short to stifle personal epiphanies and transformational insights which might benefit others, simply because I’m afraid of being vulnerable.
Life is too short to be spectral.
Life is too short to not be real.
I will conclude with one of my favorite excerpts from Emerson’s Self-Reliance (hat tip to Amor Towles for introducing me to this excerpt in The Lincoln Highway: A Novel). This passage articulates the stage of development I am currently working on in my personal and professional life:
There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.
Rambam (Hilchos Avel 13:12) writes that the death of a person in your social group should be an impetus for teshuvah. The standard editions of the Mishneh Torah state that this encounter with mortality should cause a person “to prepare himself (le’hachin atzmo), to return [in teshuvah], and to wake up from his sleep.” However, the critical editions of the Mishneh Torah say otherwise: that this brush with death should cause a person “to understand his own mind (le’havin da’ato), to return [in teshuvah], and to wake up from his sleep.” My brush with death has left me with a greater understanding of my own mind, which has led to teshuvah and awakening.
My hope is that the four deaths of last week – and particularly, the deaths of Popo and Adira – will mark a turning point in my development as a writer, a teacher, and a person. I have attempted to capture in writing here the “waking up from my sleep” and the nature of the teshuvah I hope to do in response to these deaths.
To those who have provided consolation and feedback to what I’ve shared this week – thank you. Although I’ve written what I’ve written primarily for myself, it means a lot to me that my words have been meaningful to others, and this has reinforced my judgment that this was the right course to take.
May Hashem provide comfort to all the mourners of Tzion and Yerushalayim, and may He help me to better serve Him in my own, unique way.
Recording of Popo and our family friend, Melveen Leed, singing Clarence 'Frogman’ Henry’s “(I Don’t Know Why) But I Do.”