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OUR NOBEL PRIZE WINNER
We were all thrilled, gratified and emotionally touched at seeing Professor Yisrael Auman receive his award as the Nobel laureate in Economics for 2005. All of the other awardees, significant scholars that they may be, paled in comparison to the Jew with the big white kippah and the long white beard to match whose smile enlivened an otherwise overly somber and very formal affair. Naturally, all Israelis (or almost all Israelis) have received an added boost to our national pride by Professor Auman receiving this award. But understandably most Israelis and Jews the world over are not in the fortunate position that we at Beit Knesset Hanassi are in of knowing Professor Auman as a fellow member and worshipper in our synagogue. I am not going to indulge myself in a paean of glory to Professor Auman from this humble sheet. Suffice it to say that we are all blessed having him with us (and this was true even before he was a Nobel laureate) and that our blessings go forth to him, his wife Batya, a great person in her own right, and to the entire Auman family in all of their generations. May there be many more families like the Auman/Schlesinger family in the midst of Israel and may they only enjoy further good health, happiness and continued achievements on behalf of Torah, Israel and humanity at large.
Professor Auman's achievement and award allows me a platform to say a few words about the struggles that the observant Jewish society faces in this world of modernity, personal autonomy and breathtaking technological and scientific creativity. Rabbi Samson Rafael Hirsch addressed the problem of Jewish participation in the general world and the surrounding society of modernity in his writings and in the creation of the unique Orthodox Jew that his kehilla in Frankfurt am Main represented. His advocacy of a rational Judaism, intellectually oriented, open to secular knowledge and Western culture, created a cadre of Orthodox professors, physicians, lawyers, merchants, trades people and artisans, all of whom were punctiliously observant of the laws, rituals and customs of Judaism without compromise. They were the products of his Torah im Derech Eretz approach and vision of Judaism. Rabbi Hirsch in effect beat Reform at its own game by producing the cultured German intelligentsia figure of that time. While Reform attempted to create this as well, they ended up producing assimilated Jews susceptible in droves to conversion to Christianity. Rabbi Hirsch did not feel, as later Orthodox revisionist historians have sometimes made it out to be, that his view of Torah im Derech Eretz was a temporary expedient necessary to meet the exigencies of the time. Rather, he was convinced that this was a normative form of Judaism and Jewish practice and that in the face of modernity it was perhaps the normative form of observant Jewish behavior.
For various reasons, social, economic, cultural and societal, Torah im Derech Eretz did not take deep root in Eastern Europe. There Chasidut on one hand and Haskala on the other end of the spectrum controlled the debate and movements of change in the struggle against the Czar's tyranny and anti-Semitism and the new ideas of modernity that swept eastward from England, France and Germany. Orthodoxy, the yeshiva world and Chasidut, to a great extent sought to defend itself from the onslaught of the new ideas of modernism, Marxism and secularism, by isolating themselves from the struggle of ideas. Thus was created a pretty much all-or-nothing situation in the relationship of the Eastern European Jewish world towards such subjects as secular knowledge, the struggle for Zionism and Jewish nationalism (it should be noted that Hirschian Jewry in Germany was in the main also anti-Zionist) and the shunning and banning of all technology and ideas that were considered to be "modern." This attitude, in differing degrees and depending where Jews live (America or Israel for instance), claims to be mainstream Orthodoxy today. As a natural reaction to the destruction of Torah institutions in the Holocaust, the great rabbis of the time concentrated on exclusively rebuilding Torah learning within the Jewish world. Sixty years later, their dream of thousands of Torah scholars populating the Jewish world has been realized, perhaps beyond even their own visionary expectations. But this does not mean that Torah im Derech Eretz should have no place in our Orthodox society. Professor Auman and his accomplishments and the kiddush Hashem involved in his receiving the Nobel prize comes to remind us of the different and noble ways that Jews can serve their Creator, the cause of Torah and traditional observance.
Shabat shalom.
Berel Wein
