10/6/08

Working Stiffs – Why We Cannot be Litvaks without Blowing our Brains Out: Part II


Second Rate Jews? Pheh!

The Words of our Rebbe, and the Rebbe of all the World (including Snaggim, whether they know it or not):

"From the point-of-view of plain parnasah, you know intellectually that it’s part of a Torah life, because God made me in a way that I have to be an ish yotse ha-sadeh – that’s Hashem’s ratson. A guy who makes a living and supports a wife and children – right away he’s doing a mitsvah. So you have to look at it, at least intellectually, as a mitsvah. Don’t think that you’re a second-rate citizen, a failure. You’re not a failure. You have your mission: to make a kiddush Hashem outside the beit midrash. Is that going to give you aspiritual feeling when you do it? Probably not. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not a mitsvah. As we said before, there are many mitsvot you can do without a spiritual feeling.

In hasidut, we say a remarkable thing. If you are forced by life to do a mitsvah where there is no spirituality, something difficult which is made even more excruciating because there’s no immediate spiritual payoff, hasidut says that’s really the greatest mitsvah. Hashem is testing you to see whether you are so loyal to Him and to the Torah that you will do it without an immediate payoff. So when a guy goes into general studies, he has to know that Hashem wants him to serve Him in that way. He’s not going to enjoy it on a spiritual level. He’s not going to come home and say that he had an aliyah. He may even say he went down, but he has no choice – he has to pay the bills and take care of the children. In the end, then, it might be an even greater mitsvah."

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