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January 15, 2022
Author(s): Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz,
Parshat Beshalach
January 15, 2022 — 13 Shevat 5782
The Gift of Gifts
by Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
Last Saturday night Shira and I had friends over for dinner, a lovely couple we had come to know after Shira had met the wife on a CJP mission to Israel. They walked through our front door bearing gifts. A lovely bouquet of flowers. Very nice. And then something else. Something we had never before received from any guest ever. The husband walked into our living room and presented me with this: a collection of gorgeously bound, all Hebrew, very religious looking, books, a five-volume set, the kind of books one would find in a yeshivah.
These books are the collected halachic works of one of the greatest rabbinic authorities of the 19th century, Rav Yitzchak Elchanan Spector, who was the rav of Kovno in Lithuania for over 30 years. Rav Spector was the go to rabbinic authority for all questions of Jewish law from all over the Jewish world. And he held that position because he was famous for two things that made him a beloved, and sought-after, legal authority. One, he knew the sources cold. He had total source mastery. Two, he was known to be a mensch. He was known to apply Jewish law in a compassionate way that recognized the humanity of the people before him. For example, the most common case before him, in 19th century Lithuania, was the case of agunot, women who had been married, but whose husbands had fought in the czar’s wars, and they had simply disappeared. There was no proof that they had died. They did not come back home. Their whereabouts were a mystery. The legal question was: could the wife remarry, or was she an agunah, a woman chained to the unsettled status of her husband the soldier missing in action. Rav Spector was famous for doing his best for deciding these cases in favor of the wife’s ability to remarry and to build a new life. The combination of Rav Spector’s source mastery and menshlikeit inspired Yeshivah University to name its rabbinical school after him.
Why did our guest, a secular modern Jew in 2022, have the collected legal works of a 19th century rabbi, and why would he give them to me?
It turns out that Rav Spector is a family relative, his grandmother’s great uncle. And then, in a move that I will never forget, he shows me a newspaper article with a picture of Rav Spector. He asks for his wife’s cell phone. On her phone is a picture of his father. He compares the face of his father to the face of Rav Spector and—other than the rabbinic beard on the latter—it is truly the same face.
These books are a family heirloom of a noted rabbinic authority that bears a strong family resemblance. Why then didn’t they just bring flowers? Or maybe flowers and a bottle of wine? Why bring a family heirloom?
That is where things get interesting. That is why I am telling you this odd tale now.
This fine gentleman explained that they have great pride in this famous rabbi, but they cannot read or understand these books, which are written not only in 19th century Hebrew, but in Rashi script, doubly inaccessible to the non-scholar. I can’t use them, he said. I am hoping you can.
This story embodies a truth taught in the Talmud that is simple to state, but not so simple to apply: gadol hame’aseh yoter m’haoseh, the person who enables a deed, who facilitates a deed, is greater than the person who does the deed.
There are things that we cannot do. But can we enable other people to do them?
The descendant of this great rabbi cannot read the sources. But he can be an enabler of those sources being read, used and lived. Indeed, we are going to Israel, at long last, to see our father, and I fully intend to bring a volume or two and study them with my father and brother-in-law in Jerusalem. Had these volumes stayed in his home in Brookline, they would have been unread. By giving them to me, these volumes will live. The enabler is greater than the doer.
The power of enabling if we cannot do was seared into the souls of generations of our parents and grandparents. They did not have money. They did not have an education. But they worked, and scrimped, and saved, so that their children and grandchildren could have the education, the job, the future that they themselves could not have. The enabler is greater than the doer. That was our people’s story. That was my family’s story. That is my story. That is the story of generations of Americans who come from different places to live the American dream.
The question is not only what can I do? The question is also what good can I help other people do when I can no longer do so myself? In a time of danger and uncertainty, such as the time in which we live, what good can I enable in others?
Which brings me back to Rav Yitzchak Elchanan Spector, who left not only these books, but a legion of stories about his menschlikeit. One of the most famous stories has to do with his last hours on earth. As he was nearing the end of his life, a wealthy communal leader came to see him. Rav Spector knew that this wealthy man had a poor relative who could not afford a dowry for his daughter, and in that time and place, the inability to fund this dowry impaired his daughter’s marital prospects.
On his death bed, Rav Spector was still worrying about and trying to help others. He whispered to this man: Your relative Hershel is trying to marry off his daughter. He does not have money for a dowry. Please help him so that his daughter can get married, and so that Hershel can have the nachus of seeing his daughter married. If you can do this kindness for your relative, and for his daughter, I promise you I will be an advocate for you in the heavenly court. This man promised to do so, of course. What else could he do? Before the great rabbi passed, his last act was to facilitate generosity, love, and blessing for other people. He could not give the dowry. But he could enable it. The enabler is greater than the doer.
The broken world beckons. What good can we enable? Shabbat shalom.