The Olympic gold. The real McCoy. The Shacharis That Sorts the Men from the Boys
D
avening on a plane, I rediscovered last week, isn’t for the fainthearted.
I’m not talking about the quickly mumbled Maariv under dimmed cabin lights — the one uttered while sitting down and trying to disguise the muttering by strategically massaging one’s chin.
I’m also not referring to the airborne shtibel on an El Al plane.
I’m talking about the Tefillin Test.
The moment when you have to stand alone in front of a Boeing-load of very awake, very non-Jewish passengers as you wrap yourself in wool and leather.
That, as anyone who’s tried it knows, is the Olympic gold. The real McCoy. The Shacharis That Sorts the Men from the Boys.
On a sunny Wednesday morning last week, I found myself facing that test. The flight was too early for me to have davened at home, too rushed to daven at the gate, and too late to delay davening until after landing.
On a Manchester-Montenegro route (no, I also had no idea where it was), that meant Shacharis alongside rows of Mancunians and Montenegrins.
Sitting in row three of a budget flight, one thing was clear. I was about to be the in-flight entertainment for dozens of gawkers.
For long minutes, I clutched tallis and tefillin and examined my nonexistent options. To stand or to sit? To warn my neighbors that I was about to start swishing around tzitzis strings, or keep shtum?
I played for time. First, I got out my siddur and said Korbanos. Next came a leisurely Pesukei D’zimra. But all too soon, it was either on to yotzros, or it was crunch time.
Clearly, I wasn’t about to enjoy being Exhibit A; equally clear, I wasn’t about to let a few Balkan backpackers have the last word.
The actual event was an anticlimax. When the aircrew vacated their cubbyhole at the front to hawk overpriced coffee, I spotted my chance.
Under the beady eyes of the first two rows, I donned tallis and tefillin, and Shacharis got underway.
And what a davening it was. Tefillah with a helping of clarity. Like chassidim of yore breaking the ice to go to the mikveh before davening, in my own small way I had been prepared to go out of my comfort zone as chazzan for a minyan of Montenegrins.
Rav Yosef Yoizel Horowitz, the Alter of Novardok, had a classification for the spiritual uplift that comes from overcoming one’s environment in this way. In his work Madreigas Ha’adam, he distinguishes between two different motors of spiritual growth, one external and the other internal.
Noach, the Torah tells us, was a “tzaddik in his generation.” Chazal debate whether he was only considered righteous in that wicked generation, or whether Noach would have been considered saintly even among the holy men of Avraham Avinu’s era.
That well-known dispute, the Alter writes, is really a debate about two paths to growth.
A person who finds himself in a spiritually challenging environment has a stark choice. He can either be swept away, or he can fight. If a person chooses the second, then he’ll start a process of growth.
But while one might grow tremendously from swimming against the tide, there’s a downside. The development isn’t organic or internal. True, a person has to reach deep within himself to overcome the challenge, but that growth is ultimately reactive.
So Chazal debate whether Noach was only reacting to his adverse spiritual environment, reaching deep within to overcome it. Transplanted to the warm climes of Avraham’s time, would his engine have flared out? Or was his growth internal, and so even lacking the challenge, he would have risen to greatness?
To complete the rocketry metaphor, if growth despite the outside world is an antiquated 1960s Sputnik, the SpaceX of ruchniyus is to discover one’s own internal engine of growth.
The Novardoker’s piercing assessment of human motivations is a good framework for many aspects of chinuch.
Take the bochur who feels that in a vast system, he’s just a number. The Alter would urge him to find his own unique niche in Torah, where he finds meaning independent of what others are or aren’t doing.
Or take my own aerial Shacharis. What would Rav Yosef Yoizel have said? Perhaps that while finding inspiration at 20,000 feet is good, even better would be finding a way to elevate a regular davening.
This train of thought took place on the way back from the shivah for my grandmother, Mrs. Eva Guttentag a”h. My rocket allusions — a holdover from a youth spent fascinated by anything that flew very fast — would doubtless have drawn her tinkly laugh and a gentle shake of her head.
Winding away my tefillin, it occurred to me that if anyone lived life because of her own internal convictions, it was Granny.
That label was slightly misleading. Because although she was very English, that wasn’t why so many saw her as the quintessential lady.
Her quiet, regal dignity came from her illustrious home. Her grandfather was the legendary Dr. Nathan Birnbaum, who founded Zionism, moved on to head the Yiddishist movement and then, after a remarkable teshuvah odyssey, became a prominent Agudah leader.
She was the last person alive to have met her grandfather. Although he was very serious, she told me, “When he smiled it was like the sun coming out.”
Her father, the linguist Professor Shlomo Asher Birnbaum, had followed his own father’s example and became frum, so my grandmother grew up surrounded by people of fervent Torah conviction.
As I heard for the first time at the shivah, when my grandparents were offered a fridge or a Shas as a wedding present, it was my grandmother who chose the latter. She was never so content as when her husband droned away over that same Shas in his gravelly tones, completing one masechta after another.
My grandmother’s package of supreme middos, sweetness, and grace was seamless. Her goodness was so innate that it seemed effortless. Growing up, I took that for granted — after all, that was just Granny.
But things are never so simple as children see them.
Because there’s a greatness in quiet conviction — the kind that needs no affirmation. Granny would have been the same had she lived on a desert island or lived next door to Ponevezh, instead of a quiet little English side-street.
My grandmother was good to the core because she lived life by her principles. On the Novardoker’s Tefillin Test spectrum, she didn’t live her truths despite the world, nor because of the world — but because she felt to her very marrow that those principles she’d learned at home were hers through thick and thin.
