I’m writing this with the experience still fresh in my mind of being an honoree at a yeshivah dinner just days ago. It’s an experience that everyone ought to undergo at least once in a lifetime — and fear not the odds aren’t bad that you will! Here then some musings of an honoree has-been thoughts from On High — the dais that is.

It so happened that the main guest of honor at this dinner truly earned his title doing a phenomenal job of bringing in sorely needed revenue for the yeshivah. A respected businessman with wide family and commercial connections the ads placed in his honor filled page after page in the dinner journal including lots of those colored ones at the front. The ads on my behalf? Let’s just say somewhat less so.

And so sitting next to this fellow on the dais was one of those opportunities one gets in life to actually feel ever so slightly what it’s like to give the accounting that awaits us all after a hundred and twenty. After all we honorees all worked for weeks on end toward a certain goal and now this evening it’s the Day of Reckoning so to speak with the fruit of your efforts plain for all to see in the Sefer HaZichronos. It’s like walking into one of those great stories-with-a-mashal you heard as a kid at Shabbos afternoon Pirchei except that instead of the protagonist being Yankel — who went overseas to collect diamonds and came back with potatoes it’s you.…

Of course I too put in considerable effort for a yeshivah that really deserves all the support I could possibly give it and my time and energy did bear fruit. I’m also heartened by an anecdote that Rav Berel Kanarek shared with me in which Rav Yisrael Salanter approached a poor man for a donation to the Kovno Kollel which the latter was unsurprisingly unable to honor. A bystander asked Rav Yisrael what he was thinking in approaching the man in the first place to which he replied: “Velen darf her velen.” This can be understood to mean that Rav Yisrael felt it important for the man to at least want to give and his request was intended to stir precisely that desire to do so within him.

But Rav Berel suggested that perhaps Rav Yisrael’s intent was to bestow the zchus of giving tzedakah upon a man whose meager means made that mitzvah a largely theoretical one for him. Haven’t Chazal taught us after all that the intention to do a mitzvah even if frustrated by circumstances beyond one’s control is tantamount to performing it? And judging by that standard it may well be that there’s a Heavenly dinner journal in which my list of prospective contributors have indeed placed page upon Gold Page of ads.

We all have moments like mine on the dais when a mundane experience suddenly becomes a parable sprung to life for something deeper. An example of this many of us can surely relate to is being stopped for a traffic infraction: the first glimpse of flashing lights behind the barked command to pull over the momentary pause until the officer approaches the seemingly interminable wait for him to issue his verdict the cars passing by as you sit there with the word “Caught!” seemingly emblazoned in bright red letters on your forehead. It’s all very powerful potentially a mini-Yom Kippur in July or March — but only if we choose to make it so.

WHO ARE YOU? Recently in this space we’ve discussed the opportunity that Torah Jews have if their spiritual priorities are in order to convey to others that meaning and goodness are what matter in life not celebrity and material success. Simply by their living example which is so much more effective than any lecture they can point up the emptiness of the fame and fortune most people spend their lives chasing and prompt people to reconsider their values and perhaps even to give Torah a closer look.

So I was delighted to come across a recent real-life illustration of this idea. Writing in Tablet magazine a secular Jewish writer reports on the recent trip made by a famous female entertainment personality to Crown Heights. Among her stops which were filmed to be shown to her audience was a visit with a Lubavitcher family:

[T]here is something profoundly illuminating … in watching [her] as she struggles with barely concealed shock to grasp her own irrelevance in the lives of these people. [She] may be known for her common touch in interviews yet she sees herself … as anything but common. Before any given chat can begin each interview subject must first pay homage to her fame — weeping hurling themselves into her arms thanking her for the privilege of being permitted to lay bare to her their souls.…

The Chabadniks on the other hand greet [her] with the sublimely cheerful indifference you might display when meeting say the lady who does the restaurant reviews on the little TV in the back seat of New York City cabs. They know she has a TV show they know her name … but they have no idea what [that name] means and one suspects that they wouldn’t think it was any big deal even if they did.…

She even resorts to name-dropping her own achievements hoping for some shred of recognition. “I have a magazine” she tells Shterna who responds with a blankly encouraging nod…. “The kids love to read ” the husband offers gamely and [she] exclaims: “I had a book club!” “That’s good ” he replies calmly encapsulating four millennia of nearly incomprehensible Jewish resistance to assimilation and conversion in an offhand two-word sentence. He might have been talking to [Yoshkah] himself: “So you think you’re the Son of G-d. That’s nice for you.”

It happened to take place in Crown Heights but it could easily have occurred in most frum neighborhoods. Not only are kids not familiar with who the outside world’s celebrities are but they also absorb by osmosis the perspective that greatness is a function of one’s achievements in learning in giving in middos tovos.

That’s not to say we don’t have our own work to do in this regard. Keeping in mind Rabbeinu Yonah’s well-known teaching on the pasuk in Mishlei (27:21) “Ish l’fi mahalalo” that a person’s real values can be discerned from what — and how — he chooses to praise we could all benefit from listening through the ears of our children and students as it were to how we speak to them. To be sure we speak glowingly and often of our chachamim and tzaddikim of past and present; that’s a beautiful thing and we ourselves don’t realize just how this is unique to our society. But does the subtle but unmistakable tone of admiration the body language we use when speaking at other times about this professional or that magnate transmit a very different message?

What made this visit to Crown Heights doubly instructive was the effect the encounter apparently had on the celebrity herself which gives an inkling of the influence we Jews could have on others when we live lives worth emulating. The writer continues:

It all comes to a head … when [she] has her vaunted sit-down with four Hasidic “wives and mothers” in which no question is “off-limits”…. I don’t mean to imply that the Hasidic women treated this stranger in their midst with any disrespect; far from it. They just blithely obliviously refused to be any more impressed with her than she was with them.

Then a wonderful thing happened something I believe attests to the greatness of the Jewish people and perhaps the Queen of Talk herself. Divested of special status [she] did something I haven’t seen her do in years: She began to relate to these women as her equals. She listened to their explanations of their faith their family and their spirituality not just with camera-friendly attentiveness but genuine openness. She allowed them to speak directly to each other; she let them interrupt her she even let them talk over her. At the end of the discussion she looked directly into the camera and solemnly intoned that she had accomplished what she set out to do the mission she had laid out all along: to prove incontrovertibly that “we are more alike than we are different.” It’s even truer than she knows.

And then there’s the effect these women had on the writer of the piece herself. “The greatness of the Jewish people.” That line was written by someone who from what I can tell is far far from Yiddishkeit. Does she even realize what she’s said?