A few weeks ago I mentioned the installation ceremony of the Reform movement’s new president Richard Jacobs at aBrooklyn temple. At the risk of triggering some irate reader’s letter about my giving Jacobs even more coverage in these pages than his own movement accords him I’d like to add a postscript that sheds light on the impact we frum Jews can have for better or for worse on the non-observant Jewish brothers and sisters with whom we interact.

In a recent article profiling Jacobs he recalled his first experience inIsrael while spending his junior year of university atHebrewUniversity. He had been inspired by an Orthodox teacher whose class he attended and decided to spend six weeks living on an Orthodox kibbutz in the north of Israel. This is what he found:

Since it was Passover I thought Here with this kibbutz family I’m going to celebrate the most authentic Pesach of my whole life. During the Seder one of my kibbutz “brothers” had a sour expression on his face and when I asked him “What’s the matter?” he replied “It’s boring. It’s the same every year.” I said “You’re not supposed to think that. You’re an Orthodox Jew!” At that moment I realized that inspiring religious life can be found in any place just as uninspired religious life can be found in any place.

Jacobs returned to the United States and enrolled in a Reform seminary because as he put it “I was … put off by the other seminaries which required that I first sign a document declaring my level of Jewish observance. That I felt was between me and a much Higher Authority.” Imagine that: those other schools had the temerity to actually insist on standards of observance for their clerical graduates.

In any event the rest is history. Jacobs was effectively lost to our People and now many decades later has risen to the leadership of a movement that ironically is abandoned by droves of Jews each year precisely because the warmed-over stew of political activism with a pinch of Jewish platitudes which it offers is boring trite and devoid of any sense of the Divine. How painful to read how one Jew’s uninspired practice of Yiddishkeit conveyed a message to his searching brother that there was nothing further here to see.

But there’s another side to the coin of a frum Jew’s impact and it’s illustrated most powerfully by the most recent chapters of the life story of a dear friend of mine. In the column in which I wrote about Jacobs’ inaugural sermon at thatBrooklyntemple I mentioned that he touched upon the interplay between ritual and ethics and I found that quite ironic. It was after all only a few years ago that I had been invited to give a talk on Judaism at the very same house of worship inBrooklyn’s chic Park Slope neighborhood where Jacobs held forth.

I’d been invited there by an acquaintance a board member of the temple who although intermarried had developed a keen interest in mussar and asked if I’d come share some mussar-related teachings as part of the temple’s adult education program. My talk which took place in an annex across the street from the main building was attended by about fifteen to twenty people and the topic I chose was one that in Reform terms is pure heresy: the way that halachah and ethics interrelate to form a seamless whole. Indeed among the attendees was one of the temple’s several assistant clergymen and I had the distinct feeling that he was there as a “minder ” on vigilant duty to interject whenever necessary to ensure I didn’t say anything too theologically outrageous for his flock’s sensitive ears.

I was joined at the talk that evening by a friend for whom this temple was not totally unfamiliar territory. Until just a few years earlier he had lived in the area and while not a member had sent his kids to its nursery school. But he was no longer in the same place he’d once been both geographically and religiously and for him it was fascinating to come as a silent observer of a milieu from which he was now worlds apart. His journey to religious observance had begun in much the same way Jacobs’ had ended: through an encounter with a religious Jew. But in his fortunate case it was an outreach rabbi for whom Judaism is nothing if not deeply meaningful and engaging.

It was all a set-up literally. My friend had provided his professional services to a frum client and at the wedding of the latter’s daughter the father of the kallah made sure to seat my friend at the “wrong” table — the rabbis’ table. The aforementioned outreach rabbi struck up a conversation with my friend which was followed in the coming months by many more conversations then slow changes.

That’s not to say all was smooth sailing for him; there were still many twists and turns to come along my friend’s pathway to Torah. But today I can say that for my friend that first encounter with a religious Jew was as critical as it had been for Jacobs. In this case thankfully the religious Jew in question was one on fire for G-d and Torah.

And for my friend too the rest is history. He too has ascended to the presidency — of my shul.

NO SHORTCUTS An item in last week’s Inner Circle reported that when someone who’d just finished Shas twice approached Rav Aharon Leib Steinman for a brachah to be able to remember his learning the sage responded by asking whether the supplicant had already reviewed all he’d learned 101 times. This reminded me of a long-ago experience I had visiting Rav Binyomin Zilber ztz”l at his Bnei Brak home. I owe this renowned poseik and ba’al mussar known as “Reb Binyomin Hatzaddik ” a personal debt of gratitude for having anonymously authored a work called Binyan Olam on the various aspects of learning Torah which influenced me significantly in my early yeshiva days.

Having been ushered into Rav Zilber’s modest home I approached him with a list of needs for which I sought his brachah. The rav took the list from me and began perusing it. On it were bakashos for many different things such as success in parnassah in raising our children in learning in shalom bayis. He stopped at that last one turned to me and said emphatically: “Fahr shalom bayis?! Iz doch mevateir mevateir mevateir! [for shalom bayis? One must give in give in give in!].”

The brachah of a tzaddik — that great person at the peak of life’s mountain who can guide those of us at its foot — certainly has its place. But there are no shortcuts no fast tracks to success that dispense with the hard work of tikun hamiddos and ameilus b’Torah.

Indeed the number 101 that Rav Steinman mentioned references the gemara in Chagiga that speaks of the chasm that exists even between one who has learned something 100 times and one who has done so just once more than that. And seforim point out the name of our arch-enemy Amalek can be read as the phrase “Amal” (toil) plus the letter kuf (the equivalent of 100) implying some sort of connection between Amalek and one who toils through 100 rounds of review of his learning — but no more.

What could that possibly mean? I once suggested that Chazal speak of someone learning a piece of Torah 100 times in the same vein that the number 100 is used elsewhere in Shas to denote the outer limits of one capability. Thus for example Chazal ordained that the finder of another’s lost object must keep returning it to its owner “even 100 times ” meaning as repeatedly as is humanly possible.

What then does it mean to learn something 101 times? Such an individual has broken through the barriers of nature has transcended his limitations his very self. And there’s nothing Amalek hates more than transcendence of any kind because that implies there’s something that goes beyond the finite material universe we see around us; that there’s meaning that there’s a soul that can express that meaning and a G-d Who created that soul. All of which Amalek simply cannot abide.

We ought to be mindful of all this as we drink in the unparalleled inspiration of the Siyum Hashas of this year 5772 whose four-letter acronym is “t’hei sh’nas ameilus b’Torah.” Whether one will find his ameilus by delving deeper into the daf or by adding on other sedarim in which to do his “heavy lifting” it is that straining to understand that stretching of the mind to achieve clarity that is the indispensable key to success in learning.