A few experiences in recent weeks have me thinking quite a bit about kiruv. I know the full term is kiruv rechokim but I have something of a hard time using it. I can’t imagine anyone who has ever learned a bit of mussar being totally comfortable with the way the latter phrase seems to divide our people in two groups and implicitly bestows the term kerovim upon us.

All I can think of when I hear kiruv is the words of Rav Tzaddok in Pri Tzaddik that Hoshana Rabbah is called this because all Succos long we’re mispallel ‘Hoshana!’ Save us! And then when this last day of Succos arrives and we realize that we still haven’t merit that yeshuah a great cry wells up within the heart pleading for an even greater yeshuah — a ‘Hoshana Rabbah’! He adds that this day is the ushpiza of Dovid HaMelech who bore a constant great cry within because it always seemed to him that he was forever just outside on the doorstep looking in.

So “kiruv” it is. In any event one of my thought-inducing experiences was writing a feature article about Rabbi Pinchas Stolper and the heady early years of NCSY. I’ve written here before of my affinity for the revolutionary and that group was at the center of an authentic American revolution that took the Jewish community by storm transforming thousands of young people into committed Jews and thereby helping to invigorate innumerable stolid or even dying Orthodox shuls.

Much of this success can be traced to NCSY’s decision to actually trust its young charges to believe they’d possess the maturity and clarity to choose Torah Judaism rules and all over the pallid and counterfeit alternatives on offer. In so doing these teenagers stepped into a quintessentially Jewish role — that of fighters for a cause and respectful dissenters to the belief systems of their parents clergymen and teachers.

Ever since UrKasdim Jews have been facing off not with guns and knives but with Torah and emunah against the intellectual and cultural forces arrayed against them. It’s not merely a mission we have. It’s woven into the warp and woof of our personalities. Yisrael azim shebe’umos — Jews are the most fierce and contentious of peoples. And willy-nilly this nature of ours will manifest itself whether in the bruising rough-and-tumble of the marketplace the forefront of all manner of political and cultural movements — or in our role as standard-bearers for the truths of Torah.

In Torah we Jews have the perfect product which stands in diametric opposition to most of contemporary society’s core beliefs. Thus our times are ripe for another uprising which would speak to Jews’ innate need — no matter how far afield they’ve traveled from home — to challenge authority and buck trends. The question is whether we can harness and channel that need by getting large numbers of unaffiliated or mistakenly affiliated Jews to embrace Torah as a manual for revolution.

But perhaps the more complex question is whether we in the frum community too might benefit from a dose of revolutionary fervor and if so how to achieve that. For the prospective baal teshuvah it’s easy to buck the establishment. But as for the frum community we are the establishment and over the long run that can be spiritually stultifying.

We Jews always need to be pushing back against something and someone and the problem arises when circumstances require us to live our lives as if there simply is no one else and nothing else out there. Put simply the insularity of our communities and the individual homes and mosdos that comprise them is a thing of beauty a modern-day manifestation of the age-old appellation that Bila’am HaRasha first bestowed upon us: Hein am l’vadad yishkon. And of course apart from the principle of the matter as surrounding society goes ever more morally haywire our isolation turns from desideratum into dire necessity.

But is there a way to maintain our separateness while yet keeping alive in our midst the revolutionary spirit of Avraham Avinu? Can we still reap the benefits that come with seeing ourselves as the world’s Divinely designated teachers — the sense of responsibility that role models feel while under scrutiny the sense of purpose that can infuse our every action with meaning — when we live our lives in thought speech and deed as if there are no students interested in or capable of being taught?

Are there times when we convey to our children and students too great an attitude of bittul towards our societal neighbors in the sincere belief that doing so is a bulwark against the blandishments of that society when ironically we might better serve our charges by empowering them with a self-perception as Hashem’s ambassadors and teachers albeit from afar to both those who acknowledge our roles and those who don’t admit it but know it to be so nevertheless? The scoffers will indict us even then as paternalistic but no matter. The point is not to mollify them but to become the best ovdei haBorei we can be.

The question is whether that great objective involves treading a fine line and if so where to draw it.