It suddenly hit me last week as I was reading Rabbi Moshe Grylak’s latest piece on emunah how terribly unappreciated he is. Because he has been turning out penetrating columns on a regular basis for over forty years we have come to take him for granted. In our minds, that’s his job: to force us to think a little more deeply and clearly. And after a while one just comes to expect him to keep doing his job.
It suddenly hit me last week as I was reading Rabbi Moshe Grylak’s latest piece on emunah how terribly unappreciated he is. Because he has been turning out penetrating columns on a regular basis for over forty years we have come to take him for granted. In our minds that’s his job: to force us to think a little more deeply and clearly. And after a while one just comes to expect him to keep doing his job.
And because he does not write with titles like HaRav HaGaon in front of his name it is easy for us to ignore the depth of his thought and the magnitude of his impact. Perhaps only the hundreds of groups of ba’alei teshuvah whom he has addressed over the years fully appreciate him because they are totally unprepared for a chareidi who speaks at once from a stance of one thoroughly grounded in the mesorah and as a thoroughly modern man – and with passion humor and common sense all added.
Last year prior to Pesach Rabbi Grylak provided a full blueprint on the acquisition and maintenance of good middos with his Introspection. And this year before Pesach he appears to have single-handedly decided to wage war with the torpor of our avodas Hashem and restore an intensity of faith to those for whom “chareidi” has become the description of a lifestyle not of a fully examined and contemplated life.
His call last week to cast aside the answers to the fundamental questions of Jewish life that we were given when we were five years old because we lacked the capacity at that age to understand anything deeper echoed laments I have heard from Rav Moshe Shapiro shlita about the fact that so many still learn Chumash with their five-year-old conceptions intact. But Rabbi Grylak does not just come to criticize; he also shows us the way. His reflections on the niflaos habrios reminded me of a brilliant series of articles (later published in book form I believe) by Rabbi Avrohom Katz dean of the New Seminary in Gateshead on that subject. How valuable it would be if our children were the beneficiaries of science courses that exposed them to the uncanny precision of every detail of the Creation.
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