“Don’t write the 800th book on anti-Semitism, or on the Rastafarians. Write something original”

During these difficult days, sometimes we learn only through a newspaper obituary or brief email that someone we know has fallen victim to the coronavirus. That’s how I found out that Dr. William Helmreich a”h had passed away at age 74 in his Great Neck, New York, home. May Hashem comfort his wife and children and speedily show Divine rachamim to His people.

My interview with Bill Helmreich six years ago for a Mishpacha feature article was one of my most fascinating ever, five hours in which we ranged over a great many topics. He was such a pleasure to speak with: open and honest, probing and straight-talking, and a genuine mensch. A highly regarded sociologist and the author or editor of 18 books, one of his last volumes was based on a singular feat of his: walking over the course of five years all 121,000 blocks in New York City — totaling 6,163 miles — and wearing out nine pairs of Rockports in the process. Writing books that broke new sociological ground was a Helmreich specialty, and he’d tell his City College students, “Don’t write the eight hundredth book on anti-Semitism, or on the Rastafarians. Write something original.”

That’s what Dr. Helmreich did in 1982 in publishing The World of the Yeshiva: An Intimate Portrait of Orthodox Judaism, still today the only thorough sociological study of the yeshivah world. Although he led a Modern Orthodox life and wasn’t quite a yeshivah-world insider, before writing the book he spent two full years learning first seder in a yeshivah gedolah.

He had an unusual combination of affability and frankness that enabled him to break down needless barriers between people. “Of course,” he told me, “the three-and-a-half hours of learning was a prelude to the fifteen minutes of batalah and schmoozing with guys that constituted the sociological aspect of what I was doing.” Perhaps never before or after has coffee room hock served such an important function.

Unlike some academic “specialists” on the frum community, Dr. Helmreich had no chip on his shoulder. He said to me, “I have a profound respect for the yeshivah world,” he told me, “because I believe that they are responsible for building up Torah in America. These people came from the lands of the gedolim and didn’t know about making compromises with their principles. I don’t have one ounce of animus toward the frum world. They’re my world, they’re all my relatives. Their simchahs are separate seating and mine are mixed, but so what? I understand where they’re coming from, I know what they’ve accomplished, and for me that’s enough.”

He convinced a non-Jewish editor at MacMillan to accept his manuscript by explaining, “The yeshivah is the oldest educational institution in Western civilization. Don’t you think it’s important for people to understand what that institution is like?” To which the fellow said, “I’m sold.”

The book, based partly on interviews with and surveys of current and former yeshivah students, offered a warm, balanced portrait showing that the overwhelming majority of yeshivah graduates stay true to their beliefs as adults, experiencing spiritual and intellectual fulfillment and a sense of personal belonging to a community of believers and a venerable chain of tradition. But, he said, “Nothing is perfect, not even the yeshivos, and for people to believe the 80 percent that’s positive, we’re going to need the 20 percent that’s critical, or they’ll say it’s not objective. I wrote with sensitivity because I didn’t want to write a book just for the rest of the world, but for the yeshivah world too. My job as a sociologist is to tell it like it is, but that doesn’t mean you can tell it crassly. Truth can be a game too, and I have to balance my criticism with an understanding of the context.”

Most fascinating of all were the 14 interviews he conducted with the first rank of gedolei Torah of that time, who gave him unprecedented time and access to their yeshivos because, as he put it, “They knew I love the yeshivos and would never say anything that would harm them.” The result was a series of touching and insightful vignettes of a kind I’ve never seen anywhere else.

Dr. Helmreich concluded our interview by reflecting on his good fortune in interviewing “these great men. These were not stage-managed discussions,” he told me. “The yeshivah world is a very, very unusual world, and these people are its leaders. It never left me, no matter where I go or what I do… the inner respect, the inner understanding of what this all means.”

Yehi zichro baruch.

PEACE NOW

An itinerant maggid once began a derashah in Brisk, recalled Rav Dovid Soloveitchik, by asking his audience: How it was that in Noach’s teivah, fierce lions and tigers spent an entire year just a few feet away from meek sheep and cows, yet peace reigned between them? The answer, he said, is that they all understood that with a Mabul raging just outside the teivah’s walls, it was not the time for strife. They didn’t change who they were, but they made their peace.

Today I can write without hyperbole that there’s a mabul of fear, of death, of potential horror, raging outside. Are we, too, willing to make our peace, to finally put aside the animosities and attacks between brethren that have ravaged the Torah community in recent years?

In a deeply emotional shmuess two weeks ago, Rav Asher Arieli pleaded with his listeners to remove the plague of intra-communal hatred from our midst. Sobbing at times as he spoke, he beseeched us to realize that different communities of Torah Jews can be entitled to follow divergent paths and leaders, without those differences — sharp though they may be — giving rise to acrimonious words and hostile deeds.

And yet. An American-based online news site popular in the frum community recently reported on the funeral of a great talmid chacham, a close talmid of Rav Shach ztz”l, which took place in Bnei Brak and was attended by hundreds, clearly violating the strict health ministry guidelines prohibiting gatherings of such size.

Fair enough. But what was deeply unfair — shockingly so — was that the story’s headline made gratuitous mention, irrelevant to the story, that the funeral attendees belonged to a particular segment of the frum community. The report also informed readers that the great niftar — who had left the world less than 48 hours earlier — was also associated with that group.

I was taken aback. As we sit confined to our homes, listening as the news of yet another frum victim, and another, and another, continues to cascade in, is this really the time to be attacking entire communities of Jews, led by great talmidei chachamim, with whom we disagree, even sharply so?

Many of us sense the footsteps of Mashiach are becoming ever louder as the weeks go by. But Chazal teach that when Moshe encountered Dasan and Aviram engaging in slander of fellow Jews, he began to wonder whether that sin alone might impede the redemption from Mitzrayim. Ought we, too, not be afraid that we are perhaps missing a historic opportunity to leave the galus behind forever?

Without doubt, it can be so very difficult to let go of long-standing grievances, ingrained prejudices, and learned habits of negative speech and deed. And yet, one question hangs in the air, crying out for a response: If not now, at this moment of pristine clarity about Who is truly in charge and what this world is really all about, then when?

Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 806. Eytan Kobre may be contacted directly at kobre@mishpacha.com