Join the Club

Phrases like that one have the instinctive effect of pressing the invisible button on my psychic dashboard labeled “Beware of Mass Anything.” That button gets pressed more and more frequently in today’s frum world, in which initiatives and projects to get thousands of us — no, all of Klal Yisrael, in unison! — to do this or learn that or definitely not do something else, are commonplace in a way they weren’t in times I can still remember.

It’s a tricky topic, because on the one hand, one can’t gainsay the importance of Jews joining together in numbers for a good cause. The halachic concept of berov am hadras melech and Chazal’s statements like eino domeh merubim ha’osim es haTorah l’mu’atin ha’osim es haTorah convey that clearly.

And yet. While the proposition that “the more, the better” has its place in regard to ruchniyus, so too does the one that says “less is more.”

In this season of mass, record-setting events, we need to thread the needle between feeling pride in our growing ranks without getting intoxicated by them. Chazal teach that the first Luchos didn’t last because of the highly public way in which they were given. Just because something is important doesn’t mean that the value of tznius, of understatement and privacy, is to be cast aside with impunity. Ever since the Torah declared (Devarim 7:7) that we were beloved and chosen by Hashem “not because you are the most populous of nations… for you are the smallest of nations,” we Jews have never played the numbers game. In his work Jewish Woman in Jewish Law, Rabbi Moshe Meiselman makes the important observation that “the high points in the lives of the major male figures of the Bible occurred in private.” Yaakov’s night-long struggle with the guardian angel of Eisav, the Akeidah, Yosef’s taming of temptation, Moshe’s communion with G-d, the avodah of the Kohein Gadol in the holiest place on the holiest day —all took place in splendid seclusion.