My family and I experienced an eye-opening exhilarating Shabbos two weeks ago. But before I go any further permit me an admission: I get enthused by revolutionary movements. Perhaps I delude myself but I sometimes think that had I lived in prewar Europe I’d have joined the Novardok network of yeshivos which was a band of true revolutionaries. It was headed by a visionary the Alter Reb Yoizel who demanded radical things of himself and his followers and sought to transform Jewry by seeding scores of communities with his “operatives.” In this sense Novardok was a unique phenomenon a movement of bnei Torah yet also of a piece with the spirit of those times in which all manner of revolutionary causes distant from or opposed to Torah were capturing the imagination of young Jews and carrying them far from their roots.
Rav Noach Weinberg ztz”l was another Jew who thought in revolutionary terms and acted on those thoughts too. He would talk with a kind of admiration about what there was to learn from the old-time revolutionaries about the ability of a committed calculating group of guerillas to overcome daunting odds and change the world. And his movement too came of age in a time when the staid and stolid institutions of Western society were being challenged and shaken and in some cases toppled as the cry of “Viva la revolución!” echoed on campuses and in the streets. Whether these late-20th-century rebels were true idealists or just glorified draft-dodgers and pleasure-seekers is for another day but the whiff of revolution was undeniably in the air and Reb Noach turned that to Torah’s advantage.
This is all so authentically Jewish. It’s no accident that from the early 20th century and on Jews have figured so prominently in both the leadership and rank-and-file of all kinds of countercultural movements and causes with grandiose missions to reform and transform societies. They’re just being faithful to their spiritual-genetic heritage as offspring of the greatest revolutionary of them all Avraham Avinu who faced off against the whole world — founding and leading according to the Rambam a movements of tens perhaps hundreds of thousands across many countries who joined him in rejecting the polytheism and cults of human sacrifice that held sway everywhere to embrace instead Hashem and His plan for humanity.
And so it’s supposed to be throughout history. Chazal call the Jewish People the azim sheb’umos the most contrarian of nations whose members in the spiritual realm buck authority challenge convention and march to their own beat. We’re intended to do so in the way our zeideh did as a means of bringing G-d and goodness to the forefront of societal consciousness and when that happens we fulfill our mandate as a light unto the nations. But when we express these revolutionary tendencies in non-Torah ways bad things happen and we risk being a blight unto those same nations.
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