After a recent speech in Los Angeles a local kiruv person with whom I spent a Shabbos dinner a few years back approached me and leveled a critique at some of my recent writing. “You used to be the first person I would recommend to thoughtful newcomers for an understanding of the Torah viewpoint. But lately you’ve been writing too much about politics and I can’t show your columns to the graduate students I work with anymore.”
I was stunned. But I’m one of those people whose natural tendency is to agree with any criticism — a far cry from the mask of self-confidence and omniscience behind which columnists often hide. And I could not deny that there was something to what he said.
One would need a lot more Torah than I possess to be able to illuminate another aspect of life every week from a Torah viewpoint. Recourse to larger societal issues and intellectual trends is in that sense often an easing of the burden of multiple weekly columns. (At least I try to avoid writing about politics as a spectator sport or as if I were a racetrack handicapper.)
Yet over Pesach I found in Rabbi Moshe Antebi’s recently published Reflections and Introspection — a 650-page collection of Rav Moshe Shapira’s profound shiurim on Exile and Exodus — a new way of looking at my forays into contemporary intellectual discourse and the potential value thereof.
