Jewish World Review Sept. 26, 2000 / 25 Elul 5760

But in my heart, I judged him

By Rabbi Hillel Goldberg

http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- ELUL IS THE HEBREW MONTH before Rosh Hashanah. It is time for introspection. Preparation. The anthology, Days of Awe, by Nobel Prize winner in literature S. Y. Agnon, cites a source that says even the fish shudder when Elul arrives.

Mine arrived, not like I wanted it. Oh yes, there were the normal thoughts. The realization, Rosh Hashanah, the days of judgement, are just around the corner. Thoughts about additional Torah study and other resolutions. Rabbi J. B. Soloveitchik once said that back in Europe, the rabbinical students remained in the study hall each night a half hour longer beginning the first of Elul. A small marker that made a difference. Denver's Rabbi Yaakov Meyer told me that a contemporary pietist in Jerusalem, Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe, actually begins his Elul regimen on the first of Av, one month early. My own mentor, Rabbi Benjamin Zilber, does not speak between the beginning of Elul and the end of Yom Kippur -- a phenomenal act of abnegation, a ta'anis dibbur. Not a food fast, but a "speech fast." I, too, had begun to think about various resolutions for Elul when I unexpectedly received a sharp message.

The story begins some eight or nine years ago. Names and place are omitted. I was asked to mediate a dispute between a family and a rabbi over a Bar Mitzvah. The family's expectations were unrealistic and the rabbi was losing patience. He wanted to pull out of the Bar Mitzvah or ask the family to go elsewhere, but in this particular place there was nowhere else to go.

This was a family that had had success and wealth and had lost them, had had friends and had lost some of them, and had had self-esteem and had seen that diminish, too.

One of the parents also continued to harbor extreme hostility toward a rabbi who, he said, had wronged him in his youth. This was at least 40 years ago. I could not understand how anything, short of abuse, could affect a person so deeply. Anyway, the rabbi lived thousands of miles away and had not been a factor in this family's life all this time, yet was being dragged into discussions of the Bar Mitzvah arrangements.

Make a long story short. The rabbi withdrew. I negotiated the ground rules with a layman.

Throughout, I kept one thing uppermost in mind, something that a rabbi formerly of Denver told me about the majestic Talmudic sage and orator of Cleveland, Rabbi Mordechai Gifter, dean of the Telshe yeshiva.

Rabbi Gifter ruled on this situation: Parents who could afford to pay a full day school tuition for their children but would not do so. The parents' committee wanted to deny the children admittance. The parents could pay; they didn't; why should other parents who honestly struggled to meet their obligations be put at a disadvantage? Let the children go elsewhere. So said the committee.

Rabbi Gifter said this: Children should not suffer due to parents. If the parents could pay but do not, this is irrelevant for the children. They are to be welcomed into the school absolutely on par with all the other children. The parents? The committee will have to work it out with them. But keep the children out of it. Their right to a Jewish education is inalienable. No committee has a right to deny a Jewish child its destiny as a Jew due to behavior by the parents.

I kept the Bar Mitzvah boy in mind as I negotiated with a difficult parent. The demands made on my time, for which I asked no remuneration, were outsized. It seemed that every time a delicate matter was settled, it was reopened. Over and over. Always beneath the surface was the decades-old hostility toward a rabbi in the on the other side of the country, liberally spiced with complaints against the current rabbi and other people.

We finally worked things out to the last detail. When the Bar Mitzvah came, everything went off without a hitch. Neither I nor the rabbi nor the layman wanted a leave a bad taste, so bad that it would be remembered 40 years later.

After all concluded successfully, I never heard from the father. I expected a simple thank you. It never came. This bothered me, yet not too much, since my expectations were low, and since my main goal was to achieve something significant for the Bar Mitzvah boy. Still, I wondered, then forgot about it.

That was then. Now, this week, in Elul, 5760, almost a decade later, I was reminded. Brutally reminded. The supreme tragedy: The father of the Bar Mitzvah boy took his own life.

I learned that he had been divorced since I had known him. I learned that he had ignored others who went out of their way to aid him. I also learned that he had been a child survivor of the Holocaust. He was in the camps at eight or nine or 10 years old. Who knows what he saw. Who knows how it affected him. Who knows the precise nature of the wall that made it impossible for me (and others) to reach him.

Yet, I judged him. Not to his face. In our negotiations I took abuse and treated him magnanimously, and made certain all others in his Bar Mitzvah scenario did too. But in my heart I judged him. Then forgot about him.

I cannot seek his forgiveness now. Perhaps I couldn't even if I had remembered him. He seemed impenetrable, due to childhood experience beyond my understanding and knowledge. Still, I had no right to judge him. What we keep in the privacy of our hearts -- never spoken -- counts for a lot. It is insufficient not to speak ill of others ("loshon hara"), though this is difficult in itself. Loshon hara hurts others. When we keep bad thoughts of others to ourselves, we hurt ourselves. We distort ourselves.

Perhaps this is why we seek forgiveness of the deceased at every funeral. Perhaps no person can ever be fully understood. However poorly someone might have behaved toward us, perhaps we just didn't understand, so we seek the deceased's forgiveness. Or perhaps we do so because we ourselves behaved poorly in ways we will not admit. Or perhaps, simply, our hearts were not clean.

Elul is the time. We know our wrongs. No one, really, needs to inform us of them. We know only too well. Elul is the time, in Maimonides' phrase, to awaken.

Rosh Hashanah beckons.

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© 2000, Rabbi Hillel Goldberg