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.
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