Toward the end of my college career, I went over to Professor Karl Weintraub, whose two-semester course on autobiography had first introduced me to the concept of individuality. I told him that the graduate school program I had hoped to start in order to at least delay law school had closed, and it appeared that fate had destined me for law school after all. “But I haven’t even read Huizinga and Burckhardt,” I whined, referring to two great cultural historians about whom he had written.

Professor Weintraub, a large, Germanic man, looked slightly bemused, and then quoted another of his favorite cultural historians, Ortega y Gasset, “The charm and insolence of youth is that it is everything in potentiality and nothing in actuality.” For good measure, he added that neither Burckhardt nor Huizinga were likely to be uppermost in my mind on my deathbed.

The relationship between potentiality and actuality was a recurring theme of, l’havdil, Rav Moshe Shapira ztz”l. On the cosmic level, he would explain, everything begins with tohu, defined by Ramban as undifferentiated matter (chomer), lacking all form (tzurah). Only with Hashem’s first command, “Let there be light,” does Creation begin to take form.

The 2,000 years of tohu (desolation) end and the 2,000 years of Torah begin with Avraham Avinu. The Torah reveals the true form of the world, the ideal for which each thing was created. And although Avraham did not receive the Torah, he was able to discern its commands from the world around him; he read the world. The products of heaven and earth remained, as it were, in a state of desolation, until Avraham called in the Name of G-d — i.e., he attributed those products to their Creator.

Subsequently, Avraham’s descendants went down to Egypt, a land that is described in terms of undifferentiated matter, chomer, and whose people are compared to the chamor, donkey. The entire being of every Egyptian, Rav Moshe would say, was focused on expanding its options, and when those options reached their limit, the Egyptians resorted to sorcery to expand them even further. Into the depths of Egyptian depravity, Hashem brought the sons of Yaakov. And from there, He would take them out — one nation from the midst of another — to receive the Torah, and through the light of the Torah reveal the true form of existence.

At the beginning of Sefer Shemos, the verse states, “These are the names of the Children of Israel who came to Egypt.” A name reveals the essence of something, and each member of Bnei Yisrael descended to Egypt in order to eventually reveal some individual aspect of Hashem.

AT THE INDIVIDUAL LEVEL as well, each of us has the task of actualizing potential, and turning it into a unique identity, a name that reveals some aspect of the Creator. But there are many today who are unwilling to do so. Like Ortega y Gasset’s perpetual youth — unwilling to go through one door because doing so means forgoing other doors — they remain stuck at the level of potential. Such a person has no name, no identity.

“He never defines himself,” Rav Moshe would say. “He remains forever in the realm of the potential. As a consequence, every moment of his life he is someone else.”

One indication of the extent to which one has left the realm of potential for that of the actual is fidelity, the ability to form permanent bonds. Thus Egypt, whose citizens sought to live forever at the level of maximum possibilities with no commitments, was a land filled with zimah (licentiousness).

At the societal level, people who have a constant need to remain in a state of potential make community impossible. They can never band together for a collective purpose, because each member is ever ready to take off in some new direction without the responsibility of commitment.

WE LIVE IN A GENERATION in which most people can be little bothered to think deeply about what makes them distinct from the next person. In a world where everyone strives to be and think like the next person, individuality falls away.

Social media encourages people to spend their lives comparing themselves to others — even, or perhaps especially, among those attending elite institutions, where there is an increasing readiness to salute the flag of the regnant political correctness. Go along to get along.

Of course, that trend did not begin with Facebook. Nearly half a century ago, the late literary critic Lionel Trilling devoted his Norton lectures at Harvard to tracing the shifting cultural ideal of “sincerity” to one of “authenticity.” Sincerity characterizes the well-made man who fashions his unique identity by setting goals, establishing a hierarchy of priorities, developing particular talents, and pursuing certain options and eschewing others. All of these require the exercise of moral judgment.

Authenticity, by contrast, comes closer to the Egyptian focus on maintaining all the options, keeping open all the possibilities at every moment. The hedonism to which that cult of authenticity gives rise, and which characterized Egypt, is foreign to Torah Jews. But we, too, can fail in the task of giving our lives form and coherence, in our failure to think about what is unique about ourselves and how our individual mission differs from that of the person at the next shtender — in short, by not being brave enough to create our own true name.

Recently in this column, I mentioned a series of pamphlets written by Rabbi Yechezkel Schulvaks, promoting ways to create warm family discussions. I’ve since learned that he is a 40-year-old father of nine, who was for many years a maggid shiur in the yeshivah ketanah of the Pittsburgher chassidus of Ashdod. More recently, he has begun traveling throughout Eretz Yisrael speaking to small groups of bochurim, which was the impetus for those pamphlets. He discovered that fewer than ten percent of bochurim have any real discussion with their parents beyond, “How are you?” and “Baruch Hashem, b’seder.”

But Rabbi Schulvaks made another discovery through these conversations, one that relates directly to our topic. He says that he has spoken to hundreds of bochurim who struggle, as we all do, to overcome their negative middos — anger, taavah, jealousy. But one negative middah that is rarely mentioned is gaavah — pride.

Could it be that in order to suffer from pride, one must first have a sufficiently strong sense of one’s self to which that pride can attach? If one lacks the self-knowledge to distinguish oneself from others; if the decisions one makes are dictated exclusively by the social consensus and societal norms; if one has no clear goals and defined priorities; then one has no name, no “I.” Every day, as Rav Moshe put it, that person is somebody else.

And without a name, how can one feel any pride? The inability to make choices, to go through one door and not another, at some point ceases to be “charming” and is merely pathetic.

Value of the Hike?

Israel is not the same small country it once was, but even today, with a population of over eight million, when tragedy strikes it becomes personal.

Adding to the tragedy of the ten high school students killed last week in a flash flood was the knowledge that the Bnei Zion pre-induction academy they were slated to join had just the day before signed an agreement with Kesher Yehudi’s Mechinah program, which would have likely constituted the first exposure to Torah for most of those lost.

But that was not my only personal association triggered by a tragedy that appears to have been the product of unconscionable negligence. In September 2014, Ariel Yitzchak Newman, the 18-year-old only child of Mark and Ellen Newman of Great Neck, NY, died of exceptional heatstroke on a hike in Israel in which nearly every safety rule for hiking was broken. Having just arrived in Israel, the hikers were not properly acclimated to the climate, there was inadequate water, the hikers were not advised about appropriate clothing, and they had not had adequate sleep prior to the hike. Moreover, the strenuous hike took place with inadequate rest stops, on a day so hot that had the Israeli Society for the Protection of Nature been contacted, the hike leader would have been advised to cancel the plans. Most egregious, Ariel Yitzchak’s cries that he was burning up were ignored.

For four years, the Newmans have been pressuring Israeli authorities to adequately investigate the circumstances leading to their son’s death and to bring criminal prosecution against those responsible. The most recent response from the State Attorney’s office cited a 40-year-old Supreme Court case extolling the importance of hiking to the Israeli ethos, and the value of physically strenuous hikes with an element of risk.

That was precisely the attitude that led to last week’s tragedy. One of the victims sent out a prescient WhatsApp early in the day: “We’re all going to die.” But the organizers insisted that it would be “wet and fun.”

Had Israeli authorities taken more seriously the death of Ariel Yitzchak Newman, perhaps last week’s tragedy could have been prevented.

Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 708. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com