Part of the president’s Jewish love-in involved a visit to the Conservative house of worship that’s the trendy place to be for Washington’s power elite. The in-house clergyguy Gil Steinlauf wrote a piece in the Jewish Week describing the visit which he called “not only historic but sacred.” Actually it was neither.
A more accurate word based on Steinlauf’s own account might be “awkward.” He writes that as part of the grand tour of the premises he took the president into the “Beit Medrash ” explaining it means a “House of Study ” but that “it’s far more than a library but a place where people come to study Torah in chavruta with a study partner in a very special relationship….”
The president asked Steinlauf “to elaborate on the concept of chavruta. He asked is it obligatory? I explained that the value of Torah study is considered the most basic and essential Jewish act….”
Unfortunately Steinlauf didn’t see the next thing coming: “So ” the president asked “I know that your children have to come to Hebrew School and study. What about the adults? Is there a requirement or expectation that the adults come here and study as well?” I imagine the clergyguy briefly considered telling Mr. Obama that he just remembered he was late for a previously scheduled dentist’s appointment but thought the better of it. Instead he answered the President this way: “In our times it’s difficult to bring many people to Torah by holding an obligation and expectation over them in a hierarchical way. Instead think about the metaphor of this moment: We are standing here and the Torah is in front of us and it is literally an open book. And here now we are in havruta. In the immediacy of relationship with the Torah literally before us we are seeking a deeper understanding together. This is our goal for our Beit Medrash. Both literally and metaphorically our job is to open up the books the texts the ideas and the values for people so that together we can learn them question them challenge them and each other. And then it is up to us to find how our discourse motivates us to live our lives more fully and deeply.”
I presented the “answer” to the president’s innocent question in full because therein lies the entire tragedy of contemporary heterodoxy. Mr. Obama had asked a simple logical question: Were the congregants expected to show up — daily? weekly? monthly? ever? — in what is surely a very expensive state-of-the-art “Beit Medrash” to engage in what Steinlauf had just described as the “most basic and essential Jewish act”?
Instead what the president got was a 140-word non-answer that began with the risible claim that we can’t “bring people to Torah” by “holding over them” a “hierarchical” expectation and then descended into a 140-word circumlocution of obfuscation and doublespeak that could be read as a comedy routine were it not so tragic.
I was rooting for Mr. Obama to come back with “But how about just inspiring people enough to want to come on their own by showing them the beauty and depth and relevance of Jewish wisdom and beliefs? And anyway why can’t you have expectations of mature adults to show up the same way we feel entitled to have expectations of people in other important areas of life?”
But I suppose that would have been too much to expect.

A FEW WORDS ABOUT SPEECHES This month is often blessed with an abundance of Yiddishe simchahs — baruch Hashem! — and with the joyous thought of happy occasions to celebrate comes the somewhat less joyous thought of the speeches that inevitably accompany them. My wife still reminds me occasionally of one particular sheva brachos we hosted for a family member many years back at which there were eight speeches. When supplemented by the multi-minute euphemistically termed “introductions” I provided for most of the speakers — which I felt obliged to do in conscientious performance of my duties as master of ceremonies — they resulted in a final tally of orations in the mid-teens and a total word count of… well I’d just rather not “go there.”
That sorry spectacle (never again duplicated but repeated over the years in lesser form) illustrates an issue that I know lots of readers can relate to because many of you are regularly subjected to sitting through the speeches of the many others in our community who struggle a with chronic disorder. Scientifically it’s known as “logorrhea ” defined as “excessive and often incoherent wordiness.” Colloquially it’s known as the maddening inability to get the guy gripping the shtender at the front of the room to finally sit down despite the repeated passing of “five minute warning” notes the sending of smoke signals and the progressively more frantic gesturing of someone in the back (often his wife).
A while back I attended a simchah at which after several speakers had already honed their considerable homiletic skills on the ears of the assembled an uncle of the bar mitzvah bochur rose to “say a few words.” He proceeded to deliver brief but heartfelt words of brachah in under two minutes and sat down.
The palpable reaction of the guests I was seated with was twofold. First there was astonishment when the realization dawned that this man had actually meant what he said about offering “a few words of brachah.” This was something they clearly were not accustomed to and understandably so. The phrase “a few words” often turns out to have had the word “thousand” inadvertently deleted from it and the promise of “and I’ll end with this” usually translates in the listener’s mind into “settle in this guy’s got a good 15 minutes to go.”
And the guests’ second reaction silent but completely audible to all present? “Yes!!!”
I’ve often thought of initiating support groups for those of us afflicted with this malady. In my mind’s eye I see myself opening the very first session: “My name is Eytan Kobre and I suffer from logorrhea.” Problem is I don’t know if anyone else present besides me would get a word in edgewise once I’m off and running… We’d offer strategies designed to help those of us who desperately want to rein in our loquaciousness and exit gracefully from a speech that began long long ago with so much promise but haven’t the faintest notion of how to do so.
Among the potential offerings would be a primer on how to prepare a derashah. It would enlighten prospective speakers that it’s not absolutely necessary to shoehorn this week’s parshah into every single speech (oh if parshiyos could talk…). It would explain that a speaker who hasn’t thought about how to end his remarks isn’t all that different from a pilot who can handle being up in the air but was absent for his flight-school class on bringing the plane in for a landing.
There’d also be a workshop to help the would-be darshan recognize those telltale clues that he’s gone way past his allotted time: when the soft snoring coming the entire time from Uncle Izzie’s direction begins to turn louder; when the guests having used the speech time to consume every last morsel on the table start in on the juice remaining in the pickle tray; when the hired cleaning help having stacked all the unused chairs and finished sweeping the rest of the hall asks the speaker to lift his foot so they “can get all the crumbs.”
There’s a time-honored minhag in Klal Yisrael to end every derashah with a reference to the coming of Mashiach and it has occurred to me that this is an ingenious way to help Jews truly look forward to – and I mean desperately pine for – that arrival. We’re talking real redemption here. Not to mention that once it’s all over the noise of the chairs and the rising din of conversation bring an observable form of techiyas hameisim to various slumped figures around the room.
I’ll end with this: May all the little redemptions we experience every time one of the afflicted blessedly emerges from his forest of words and the zechus of all of the inaudible “Hodu LaShem Ki Tovs” uttered as a result help bring about the ultimate great day of redemption when the Speech of all Speeches will be made to the world by the King of all Kings consisting of just two words: Ani Hashem. —