If one is blessed with many friends who write books and expect you to read them one hopes they will write books worth reading. I am doubly blessed.

The Legacy: Teachings from the Great Lithuanian Rabbis is the combined effort of popular historian Rabbi Berel Wein and South African Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein to crystallize the central principles of Lithuanian Jewry in the form of a collective ethical will to future generations.

They are well-suited for the task. Rabbi Wein’s father Rabbi Zev Wein was a talmid of Rabbi Shimon Shkop and Rabbi Wein himself learned under many eminent products of the leading Lithuanian yeshivos.

Like over 90 percent of South African Jewry Rabbi Goldstein is of Lithuanian descent. The Ponevezher Rav famously predicted in the 1950s that the South African Jewish community would one day witness a resurgence in Torah observance because its members retained so many of the qualities of Lithuanian Jewry — erlichkeit honor for rabbanim and a deeply ingrained sense of communal responsibility. Rabbi Goldstein is both a product of that resurgence and today its leader. Through his rosh yeshivah Rabbi Azriel Chaim Goldfein a leading talmid of Rabbi Mordechai Gifter he views himself as an adherent of the Telzer derech.

In alternating chapters Rabbi Wein establishes the historical context of Lithuanian Jewry — e.g. the Mussar movement the growth of the yeshivos — while Rabbi Goldstein sets forth and defines the essential concepts upon which Lithuanian Jewish life was based: erlichkeit yashrus mentschlichkeit yuhara (ostentation something to be avoided at all cost) and frumkeit (also negative) in a series of stunning essays interweaving classical and modern sources with real life examples.

The longest chapter in the book not surprisingly is entitled “Torah Learning: the Basis of Everything.” The major non-chassidic yeshivos today all claim descent from the great Lithuanian yeshivos. And it is important to know what has been maintained as well as what has been lost.

The relentless push in the yeshivos to identify the underlying Torah concepts and plumb their depths — i.e. to view the world through Hashem’s eyes — risked leading to arid intellectualism and elitism. That intense intellectual striving however was balanced by an equally great emphasis on character development particularly the avoidance of external show. (Rabbi Goldstein devotes 15 pages to the “yuhara principle.”) Rav Moshe Feinstein for instance writes in one response that even though there are good halachic reasons to avoid drinking blended whiskey and that is his practice when he is in public and someone offers him such whiskey he does not refuse out of a fear of yuhara.

Not fooling oneself as to one’s true spiritual level was even more important than not deceiving others. Quoting Mar Ukva’s statement “I am like vinegar the son of wine compared to my father; if my father ate meat now he would not eat cheese until the same time tomorrow whereas I … would eat it at the next meal ” Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak Bloch asks: If Mar Ukva found his father’s behavior praiseworthy why did he not emulate it? He answers that one should not do anything that is not commensurate with the spiritual level reflected in all his deeds and Mar Ukva knew he was not at his father’s spiritual level.

Daas the weighing of multiple factors including derech eretz and darchei noam determined every aspect of conduct including psak halachah itself. In a notable passage the Alter of Novardok points out the fine balance involved in public leadership: “Sometimes the matter requires that a person behave with pride and sometimes with submissiveness; sometimes with cruelty and sometimes with compassion; sometimes with modesty and sometimes with publicity; sometimes to teach new things and sometimes to protect old things; sometimes to speak close to the natural inclination and sometimes far from it …”

The Lithuanian approach to psak halachah was sensitive to every nuance of time and place. Agudas HaRabbanim of America sought Rav Chaim Ozer Grodzenski’s opinion on whether it was appropriate to participate in a celebration being organized by the Spanish government on the 800^th birthday of the Rambam. Rav Chaim Ozer responded that the misgivings about participating in such celebrations were certainly well-founded as those who meditate daily on the Rambam’s teachings need no such ceremonies to honor him. Yet on balance he would be “inclined” to participate lest the absence of the Orthodox rabbinate become a source of astonishment to the “multitudes who do not understand our reasoning.” Further the event might be an opportunity to strengthen Torah.

Yet even the greatest of poskim such as Rav Chaim Ozer avoided paskening for communities with which they did not have personal familiarity. (Not undermining the communal rav was another important consideration.)

Recently I was accused in another publication of advancing “syrupy proposals” and worse for advocating treating our fellow Jews with respect and showing gratitude for their sacrifices. Nonsense — if not heresy — wrote my attacker. I wonder what he would do with a well-known story involving Reb Chaim Ozer.

In 1940 Rabbi Eliezer Silver sent Dr. Samuel Schmidt to Vilna on behalf of the Vaad Hatzalah to assess the needs of the yeshivos gathered there. He later wrote of how Rav Chaim Ozer asked him many questions about himself and listened “with rapt attention.” After a while Rav Chaim Ozer sought permission to address Dr. Schmidt as “Reb Shmuel ” despite the nonobservant doctor’s protestations that he was unworthy of such respect. Rav Chaim Ozer brushed aside the protest: “Heaven forbid! For a Jew living in the security of America to undertake a dangerous mission and travel under wartime conditions to a faraway land in order to assist his fellow Jews and rescue the yeshivos —this is proof of his worth!”

The next day Dr. Schmidt recorded “I donned a tallis and put on tefillin for the first time … and I became observant of Torah and mitzvos in all their fine details.” There are no more Rav Chaim Ozers. But we can try.

The Legacy is a treasure trove of such material upon which I will surely draw in the future. It not only analyzes the Mussar movement but is itself a mussar sefer based on the teachings of the Vilna Gaon Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin and Rabbi Yisrael Salanter down to more contemporary giants such as Rabbi Yerucham Levovitz Rabbi Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler Rabbi Chaim Shmulevitz Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe and a long-line of Telzer roshei yeshivah.

At which University will Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Teach?

You could get pretty long odds these days on the likelihood of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev ever being released from prison. The blood of the three killed immediately and the dozens including many children who will go through life without limbs calls out too powerfully. Boston Mayor Thomas Menino an opponent of capital punishment expressed the common revulsion “I might think it’s time this individual serves his time with the death penalty.”

Tsarnaev should take comfort however from former Weatherman Kathy Boudin. Boudin was in the Greenwich Village townhouse destroyed by a 1970 explosion when nail bombs being prepared for a noncommissioned soldiers dance atFortDixand for the Butler Library atColumbiaUniversityprematurely detonated killing three of the bomb makers. One of those killed was Diana Oughton the friend of Weatherman leader and laterHyde Parkfriend and mentor of Barack Obama Bill Ayers.

Until 1981 Boudin remained a fugitive. That year she was the get-away driver for a heavily-armed group of Weathermen and Black Liberation Army radicals who robbed a Brinks Truck of $1.6 million killing one of the security guards. When the U-Haul Boudin was driving was stopped by police she approached the arresting officers. They lowered their guns — at her suggestion surviving police officers testified and she denied — and her comrades burst out of the U-Haul and killed two cops in the first hail of fire. The Brinks security guard and two police officers left behind nine orphans between them. Boudin 38 pled guilty to first-degree murder.

Twenty-two years later Boudin was paroled after telling the two black parole board members that she was driven to her crime by “white guilt.” Since 2008 she has been an adjunct professor at Columbia School of Social Work and director of one of its clinical programs. She was recently appointed a scholar-in-residence at NYU Law School.

Boudin is one of close to a dozen former violent ‘60s radicals most with years as fugitives and/or in prison including Bill Ayers and wife Bernadotte Dohrn who have gone on to teaching positions at universities. So Dzhokhar should study hard in prison. He too may end up as an Ivy League professor though probably not in Boston.

One need not be a spokesman for one of the Muslim Brotherhood front organizations accorded “mainstream” or “moderate” status by successive administrations in DC to conjure up a more sympathetic case for Dzhokhar 19 than for Kathy Boudin. The former was a tag-a-long little brother following an idolized older brother on his path of Islamic radicalization the latter a middle-aged child of privilege salving her guilt on visions of violent revolution without giving thought to the human cost of her fantasies.

Actually Dzhokhar sympathizers are sprouting like mushrooms if only to distract attention from the Islamist motivation for his terrorism. Dean Marcelo Suarez-Orozco and wife Carola Suarez-Orozco of UCLA’s Graduate School of Education garnered space in the New York Times to urge Americans to reflect “whether we do an adequate job assimilating immigrants who arrive in the United States as children or teenagers.” That the Tsarnaevs lived comfortably in America with no visible sources of income will not suffice.

I wonder if the Saurez-Orozcos realize that they have made a powerful argument for dramatically cutting immigration — as simply too dangerous — at least until America discovers the magic formula for assimilating new immigrants without any difficulties in adjustment.