December 11, 2008
This already dark month just lost a little more light: Rabbi Michael “Mickey” Rosen, who founded a network of synagogues in Israel and his native England, died in Jerusalem Sunday. The obituaries said Mickey had succumbed to “injuries sustained three weeks ago in a fall.”
Mickey called his synagogues “Yakar,” an acronym of his father’s name as well as a Hebrew word meaning “dear” or “precious.” Yakar managed to combine the heady spirituality of neo-hasidic Orthodoxy with a down-to-earth commitment to social activism and political engagement. Those who’ve prayed at Yakar in Jerusalem know the services can be intensely emotional (the last time I was there I saw a sign reading “No banging on the walls”), and there were few more heavenly sounds than when Mickey harmonized at the bima with one of his sons.
Yet typical of Mickey’s approach, the davening was divided neatly in two by a study session, where you could choose from among a few prominent teachers (including Mickey’s radiant wife and fellow scholar, Gila) and feed your head as well as your heart.
I had the privilege of studying with Mickey when I was living in Jerusalem in the late ’90s. Yakar’s Jerusalem branch held a learning program for adults, and according to Mickey’s plan we traced a single concept through all the levels of Jewish text: Humash, Midrash, Talmud, Jewish law, hasidic thought.
The theme my year was “tochacha,” the ability to rebuke one’s friends and neighbors without destroying a relationship or a community. The key text was Leviticus 19:17: “You shall not hate your brother in your heart; you shall surely rebuke your neighbor, and not bear sin because of him.”
What was the connection, if any, between not hating someone and rebuking him? If the opposite of hate is love, is it an act of love to correct a neighbor’s faults? Do you “bear sin” because of your neighbor’s unchecked wrongdoing, or because you failed to point out his shortcomings? Doesn’t everyone hate a scold?
Mickey was a role model of tochacha inside and outside the study hall — he could gently chide you for sloppy thinking, just as he took his fellow Orthodox and Israelis to task for their own failings. (That year he was deeply critical of the Israeli officials who dealt arms to apartheid South Africa and of the fervently Orthodox who were stoning Jerusalemites who dared drive on the Sabbath.)
Still, you never doubted the wisdom and generosity behind even his toughest words and never felt worse off for having heard and taken to heart his advice.
An ethic of tochacha seems more necessary than ever. Israel is at a crossroads, and everyone has an opinion about the right direction. Yet many Americans still remain reluctant to criticize Israel or any of its constituent players.
Tochacha suggests that communities are strengthened when neighbors engage with neighbors, in honest — even painfully honest — ways. Leviticus doesn’t allow neighbors to rebuke neighbors — it commands them to.
So good for the American Jewish organizations that spoke up against the settlers who violently defied an Israeli court order and refused to evacuate a building in Hebron. The groups backed the Israeli troops who evicted the squatters from their perversely named “House of Peace.” If you accept the idea that peace depends on the creation of a viable Palestinian state, then you have to be willing to confront a settlers’ movement that now seems willing to do everything it can to prevent it.
If you stand for justice and revile vengeance, then you are obligated to speak out when settler vigilantes target Arab-owned olive groves and ransack Arab homes. According to the ethic of tochacha, we do our fellow Jews no favors by remaining silent in the face of their wrongdoing.
Mickey took the idea of engagement even further: If we are obligated to criticize our neighbors, we are also duty-bound to talk with our enemies. Writing in 2006, Mickey was critical of fellow Israelis who say “there is no one to talk to” on the other side. Such thinking, he said, led to a victim mentality — and worse, to the idea that “our side” is absolved of any blame.
There are many Jews who turn all shades of purple at the idea of Israel at least calling the Arabs’ bluff on their so-called Saudi peace initiative. Or at the notion of an American administration that is willing to sit down with its antagonists, or that might encourage Israel to do the same.
Responding to folks like these, Mickey would quote Rabbi Simha Bunim of Przysucha, the Polish hasid about whom he wrote a book, The Quest for Authenticity. Bunim was asked how Moses could have sent “words of peace” to Sihon, the Amorite king, when two lines earlier God expressly told Moses to make war against him.
R. Bunim, Mickey said, answered that the pursuit of peace is important even when you know the other side will not respond. Seeking peace is its own dynamic, wrote Mickey, which will bring its own reward. “No knee-jerking negative response here,” he summed up. “On the contrary, someone who has a degree of self-confidence, an inner-strength of identity, can engage the other.”
With words like these, Mickey Rosen spoke to the head and the heart — and the heart of the matter.
