In a recent Inbox letter a reader observes that the special tribute issue of Mishpacha marking the yahrzteits of Rav Yaakov Kamenetsky and Rav Moshe Feinstein zt”l is one antidote to the problem of weakened emunah that has been aired recently in these pages. The articles showed in his words “how two men of flesh and blood rose to the level of angels. You took us into their world and showed us what Torah does to a person and what those people in turn can do for the world around them. Thank you.”

And thank you dear reader with whom I concur wholeheartedly. The fact that throughout Jewish history our nation has consistently produced the individuals of towering moral excellence whom we refer to as gedolei Torah is for me a powerful demonstration perhaps the most compelling one of the truth of Torah. It is a bedrock of my worldview one I share with my family at every opportunity and that informs my writing.

People all people have a need to live lives of meaning and of goodness -- although that’s actually redundant for only goodness and giving provide authentic maximal meaning. And so when we see people whose entire lives are ordered around and bound up with fulfilling every last jot and tittle of Torah and emerge thereby as ethically exalted as we know them to be that conveys two lessons to those who are open to learning them.

One is that whosoever is the author of this Torah had peerless insight into what precisely it is that makes us humans tick. He knows what we need to do to achieve rarified ethical heights and the happiness that awaits those that scale them. That Torah is such a unerring guidebook for man’s inner workings strongly commends it as the handiwork of not just another author but an Author.

 But more: that faithfully following Torah’s directives brings such blessed results means that Yahadus is that rarity -- no singularity -- among the multitude of life philosophies that clever creative man has devised: a tested eminently usable system for success in the enterprise of human living.

Dr. Avraham Meyer of Manchester England is a globe-trotting field supervisor for the OU’s kashrus department. Born in a Scottish fishing village to a Presbyterian family he attended MIT on a Fulbright Scholarship and continued on to receive a PhD in chemical engineering. It was there that he also discovered Judaism eventually becoming a Bostoner chossid. “[Conversion] seemed the logical thing to do at the time ” he says. “I used a simple engineering approach to choosing a religion. I’m an engineer.... I researched for the truth and a working system built upon it and found one.”      

“The truth and a working system built upon it.” That second clause is crucial because the world stage has seen so very many ingenious thought systems and dazzling religious credos come and go.  But where they inevitably falter is in their ability to produce consistently and in significant quantity specimens of angels on earth of the best that human beings can be within their corporeal limitations. Of this these others know not.

But we Jews indeed do.

It can be quite disillusioning when Judaism appears not to spare its seemingly dedicated practitioners from the foibles of sin and smallness that ensnare the rest of humanity. But then we encounter the adam gadol literally a “towering human being” walking among us and in one clarifying instant we realize that it is he (or she) not those flawed spiritually schizophrenic others who truly lives Judaism to its fullest and thus best exemplifies the transformative effects of full-strength Judaism on the human heart and mind.

He is in a word proof sprung to life that Judaism contains “the truth and a working system built upon it.” And we know that to be so with first-hand knowledge for our greats have always lived with and among us not cloistered within gated compounds and shielded from the unwashed masses by a phalanx of handlers as are the “greats” of society at large.  

What makes the moral example set by our gedolim all the more powerful and relevant to our own lives is the fact that theirs is a hard-won greatness. While many though far from all gedolei Torah exhibited matchless intellectual prowess already in their precocious youth the same is surely not the case regarding their development of ethical character.

Rav Moshe Feinstein who was capable of the remarkable statement that “I have never hurt another person” also once told a student that by nature he possessed a fierce temper but had worked ceaselessly to sublimate and constructively channel it.  In another vein when Rav Elazar Schach was asked whether Rav Chaim Ozer Grodzensky’s sterling middos were inborn or the result of his toiling to transform them he replied that Rav Chaim Ozer was indeed innately placid and good-natured but that he’d also worked his whole life to preserve and nurture those gifts.

But what sets the ethical qualities of great Torah leaders entirely apart is the fact that they possess them so plentifully despite circumstances that would and do corrupt lesser people. Thus in secular society an individual’s genius outsized talent fame and power are generally inversely proportional to his moral sensitivity and humility -- the litmus test being what those closest to him think of him -- as a visit to the biography section of any public library will quickly bear out.

Not so our gedolim who to the contrary place their great intellects in the service of their deep caring for their fellow man fusing sensitive heart and penetrating mind to better their world. They have power yet exercise it in wisdom and kindness; are famed for their brilliance yet remain genuinely humble; millions in charity funds pass through their hands yet they lead lives of utter material simplicity. Is it any wonder their nation loves and venerates them so?

My friend Yonason Rosenblum reports being asked by former Haaretz editor David Landau how a Yale-educated professional like himself could have become charedi. One of the things he mentioned in response was the effect on him of meeting tzadikim whose lives display such internal consistency and the ability to rise above all considerations of self. Landau who comes from a family of Gerrer chassidim thought for a minute before replying "Yes. That's the hardest thing for me to deal with."        

Indeed.