I was genuinely surprised by a number of the responses in the first issue of Klal Perspectives a new online journal. The symposium questions asked contributors to identify the major challenges facing the Orthodox community. I expected that they would focus on practical challenges — e.g. the overwhelming financial burdens on Orthodox parents the shortage of affordable housing the shidduch crisis the overconcentration of Torah learning in Lakewood disaffected youth.

Yet Chaim Dovid Zwiebel executive vice president of Agudath Israel of America and the closest thing to a “policy wonk” in the Orthodox community dwelt eloquently instead on “the increasing numbers from across the Orthodox spectrum ... who feel no meaningful connection to Hashem His Torah or even His people.” He made no attempt to suggest that the problem is limited to any particular segment of the Orthodox community or that it is confined to youth. Indeed he explicitly rejected both suggestions.

And Reb Gedaliah Weinberger the chairman of the board of Agudath Israel and the moving force behind a number of public policy initiatives — e.g. wedding takanos and professional training for avreichim in Lakewood in need of parnassah — made a similar point. He identified the central challenge of contemporary Orthodoxy as the need to create a community whose thoughts feelings and actions are fully shaped by the Torah and detailed the many forces working against achieving that goal.

I am sympathetic to both essays. The true measure of any Torah community is the degree to which the members of that community derive sustenance from the Torah and are shaped by it. If that connection is strong all other challenges can be dealt with and if it is not then solutions to the other problems are beside the point.

What caused me to think however was the underlying sense that there is a genuine crisis of faith in the Orthodox world today. I wonder — and I’m only asking because I don’t pretend to know the answer — whether that feeling of crisis is in part caused by an idealized view of the past. Sometimes we speak about the past as if once every Jew possessed the intellectual clarity in all manners of emunah of the Chovos HaLevavos and davened like the Yesod v’Shoresh HaAvodah.

Is it possible that many of our ancestors were born into a traditional society and lived out their lives within the standards of that community but without particular emotional fervor or great clarity in manners of emunah? Perhaps what has changed most over the last several hundred years is not so much the quality of emunah of individual Jews but the external environment in which we live. Until the Emancipation gentile society was closed to Jews. Those who lived out their lives almost exclusively within the confines of Jewish society were inevitably more shaped by Jewish values than those who live in a much more open and permeable society whose messages cannot be kept out.

Another difference is that once faith in a Creator and some basic moral code was widespread in the surrounding non-Jewish society. Today kefirah is the default mode of the outside society and it is impossible to insulate oneself hermetically against its messages.

Again I don’t know to what extent the faith of Jews in the past was so much more rock solid than our own. Rav Yehoshua Geldzahler once told me that in the Antwerp of his youth during the Three Weeks one could see a palpable change on the faces of older Jews. (He added however that the intensity of the older generation was too much for most of his contemporaries and they left observance.) On the other hand I heard once from a talmid chacham that his grandmother told him that the decline of observance in Eastern Europe between the two world wars was so precipitous that she would have been more surprised if calamity had not struck.

The rapid spread of Chassidism among Eastern European Jews in the late 18^th century suggests a widespread feeling that mitzvah observance had grown arid and formalistic. And the mussar movement less than a century later shows that even in the greatest bastions of Torah there was a feeling of something spiritually missing.

Certainly previous generations were not immune to religious doubts particularly in the wake of tragedy. The aftermath of the apostasy of the false messiah Shabbetai Tzvi witnessed a rapid breakdown in faith in many communities. I once interviewed a survivor about life in the DP camps after the Holocaust and he told me that there were few survivors no matter how religious the homes from which they came who did not wrestle at some point with whether to continue as frum Jews.

(I do not mean to suggest for a moment that those today who have never wrestled with that question possess a firmer emunah than those who did just as I would not suggest that the fact that we are shomer Shabbos today proves that our connection to HaKadosh Baruch Hu is more intense than that of Jews who once went to work on Shabbos with tears in their eyes because they feared their families would starve.)

The fact that over the centuries so many Jews from all strata of society both learned and unlearned went to their deaths rather than betray their G-d is not by itself a proof of the greater quality of faith in earlier generations. I suspect that many Jews today whom we would not view as the greatest baalei emunah would nevertheless make the same ultimate sacrifice if put to the test.

Two other excellent contributions to the Klal Perspectives symposium raised the same question about idealization of the past in a different context. Rabbi Shneur Aisenstark of Montreal and Rabbi Yisroel Miller of Calgary both lamented the decline of community-wide institutions and the absence of a shtot rav. Again I am sympathetic to much of their analysis. Many of our challenges — kids and teenagers who cannot find a place in school the lack of batei din with community-wide authority and trust — require a greater degree of communal unity to be addressed.

But we should not imagine that Jewish communities of yore all functioned without friction under the undisputed guidance of gedolim. It is sufficient to recall that as great a gaon as the Sha’agas Aryeh was unceremoniously dismissed from his post as a dayan in Minsk on Erev Shabbos by communal leaders unhappy over a psak he issued in a particular case or to study the failure of communal institutions to deal equitably with the cantonist decrees to know that the historical picture is more complex.

Sometimes over-idealization of the past can distort our evaluation of the present and cause us to despair too greatly.

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Missing My Neighbor

I have a deeper appreciation of the second Rashi in this week’s parshah today than I did a year ago. Rashi asks “Why does the first verse mention [Yaakov’s] departure from Beer Sheva [and not just his intended destination]?” And he answers: “To teach us that the departure of a tzaddik from a place makes an impression.”

Recently a neighbor and the rav of a shul in which I often daven accepted a multiyear appointment at a major institution in the United States. The personal loss goes far beyond that of the rav with whom I discussed most of my sh’eilos.

We all need an image constantly in front of us of a Jew (or Jews) whose entire being is molded by Torah. Whenever I discussed an issue with my neighbor — and I don’t mean those questions that arise just because we are too lazy to open up a Mishnah Berurah — it always seemed to me that he had already thought about it. He invariably brought to the discussion a wealth of Torah sources from a wide range of perspectives as well as his own sechel hayashar. I felt that I was speaking to someone for whom the only question was “What does Hashem want from us in this particular situation?” and for whom it was self-evident that the answer lies only in Torah itself and not in just looking around to see what others do.

I will confess that being around a person who exemplifies what it really means to be a Torah Jew can make one nervous. Though I suspect it was only my imagination or guilty conscience I had the feeling that every time I walked into shul late my rav looked up from his seat facing the congregation and noted my tardiness. When that happened I felt ashamed of myself for being late for an appointment with the Creator and King of the Universe Who had granted me a personal audience because I knew that’s how my rav viewed it. It’s good for a Torah Jew to have around at least one such ish d’mistafina minei — someone who makes us nervous.

Stories of gedolim can inspire us. I’m confident that hundreds of thousands of battles with the yetzer have been won in recent weeks by Jews reminding themselves of how Rav Nosson Tzvi Finkel ztz”l drove himself beyond what seemed humanly possible. But it is too easy to wave away such stories as not fully related to us or our world.

That is why it is so crucial to live in an environment with friends and neighbors who exemplify a Torah life in all its mundane day-to-day details. When we lose such daily contact it makes a deep impression and leaves us feeling that we have lost something very precious.