Yeshiva University Observer

Issue date: 5/5/09 Section: Thoughts of Student Leaders

"I am always impressed by people who are actually misers, who are stingy, who cannot give, who don't spend much money on themselves, but when it comes to charity, you feel their hands tremble, shake, for you feel the man experiences excruciating pain [from giving money], but still [he] gives...I like people who worked on themselves and conquered themselves. I don't like born saints. A person who is born a saint, who from early childhood walked on earth as a little saint, never appealed to me. But people who remade themselves [do]."

~Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik in The Rav: Thinking Aloud by David Holzer, pages 186-187

~

Perhaps you grew up the way I did, and thought that holy people were born, not made. People were born prodigies and saints, and if you had not been born that way, well, why should you bother to try to change yourself?

The schools I attended and the many Artscroll books I read did nothing to dispel me of this notion, which left me feeling unhappy and inadequate. I was a person who was totally unable to be of any use to my fellow men or to God, because I had not been born holy. Convinced and persuaded by others of my many flaws due to my innately materialistic nature (living in America was considered sin enough, let alone owning a cell phone), at times I became very angry. Who were these sages who looked down at me from the tops of their noses, unwilling to see me, unwilling to hear me? Who were these men with their long white beards who were anxiously desirous of running my life without sharing anything in common with me?

And thus I began to hate the sages. I hated the Rabbis, the sages, all those who effectively controlled me, and, I thought, did not like me because I was bad, a sinner, someone who was just not pure enough for them.

Rabbi Akiva felt this way as well. In BT Pesachim 49b, he asserts that when he was an Am-Ha'aretz [an unlearned person] he would exclaim, "Would that I had a Talmid Chacham [learned person, sage] before me and I would bite him like a donkey!" His students inquired: "Why like a donkey? Say like a dog!" "No," asserted Rabbi Akiva, "for a donkey's bite shatters bones, whereas a dog's bite merely wounds the flesh."

Continued...

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