I know a few married couples that break all the rules (of any accepted school of thought) and have great Shalom Bayis (yes, I do know).
How is this possible? Simple.
The couple doesn’t come to the marriage with much spiritual “baggage”. Either that or they do full Teshuvah for prior sins.
Fine, this comes across as reactionary. Sue me (and also name as respondents the Arizal, Netziv, Chida).
I am pretty reliably informed (but can’t confirm) Rabbi Chaim Greinemann zatzal has ruled an Ashkenazi need not differentiate Alef and Ayin, even לכתחילא, even for reading the Shema.
I assume he was asked despite Mishna Berurah stating in 53 and 128 “כתבו האחרונים דבזמנינו שרוב בני עמנו אין יודעים להבחין בין הברת העי”ן לאל”ף מותר”, because we live among Sefardim, as well.
But here is an interesting story. I just heard an Ashkenzai yeshiva student (nowhere near a beginner!) commit the following “טעות הדומות”. (I corrected him.)
The man recited:
“השמרו לכם פן יפתה לבבכם וסרתם ואבדתם מהרה מעל הארץ הטבה…”
“Guard your hearts against straying“, indeed!
The actual text is thus:
השמרו לכם פן יפתה לבבכם וסרתם ועבדתם אלהים אחרים והשתחויתם להם.
וחרה אף השם בכם ועצר את השמים ולא יהיה מטר והאדמה לא תתן את יבולה ואבדתם מהרה מעל הארץ הטבה אשר השם נתן לכם.
The first with an “Ayin”, the second an “Alef”.
Short version: Ilan Ramon acted more traditionally Jewish in outer space, was killed on reentry to earth.
From Wikipedia (edited):
… He was the first spaceflight participant to request kosher food and mark the Sabbath.
The STS-107 mission ended abruptly when Space Shuttle Columbia was destroyed and its crew died during re-entry, 16 minutes before the scheduled landing.
Ramon, whose mother and grandmother were survivors of Auschwitz, was asked by S. Isaac Mekel, director of development at the American Society for Yad Vashem, to take an item from Yad Vashem aboard STS-107. Ramon carried with him a pencil sketch, Moon Landscape, drawn by 16-year-old Petr Ginz, who was murdered in Auschwitz. Ramon also took with him a microfiche copy of the Torah given to him by Israeli president Moshe Katsav and a miniature Torah scroll (from the Holocaust) that was given to him by Prof. Yehoyachin Yosef, a Bergen Belsen survivor. Ramon asked the 1939 Club, a Holocaust survivor organization in Los Angeles, for a symbol of the Holocaust to take into outer space with him. A barbed wire mezuzah by the San Francisco artist Aimee Golant was selected. Ramon also took with him a dollar of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson…
Also:
Ramon’s miraculously recovered diary “contained the handwritten Sabbath prayer of the wine – the kiddush – which Ramon had written out in order to be the first Jew to recite the blessing in space.”
But why?
Surely not fear of death for a seasoned pilot, who volunteered for this mission as well. And no reason to assume this was all genuine (an obtuse Y. Leibowitz missed one opportunity long ago).
Why did Ramon go to such lengths, then?
I take him at his word, again quoting Wikipedia (before the first ellipses above):
Personally nonreligious, Ramon performed traditional observance while in orbit: “I feel I am representing all Jews and all Israelis.”
He thought he represented the Jewish people, who are mostly traditional. This was reciprocated in the genuine, universal wave of grief in Eretz Yisrael when he died (beyond the usual pain of a Jewish terror casualty and the like), including by my quasi-Neturei Karta friends.
So what? What are the two lessons you promised?
First of all, cheer up! Instead of the bad old days of “Yom Kippur Balls” we see even the likes of Leiberman and Lapid selling themselves by explaining how they, in fact, represent Judaism better (right or wrong is not the point).
Anti-Zionist perma-pessimists are wrong!
Secondly, there is some reason to hope an average Jewish king, even if not an ideal candidate (unlike a grasping, bare-voting-majority politician), seeing himself representing the nation as a whole (not to mention, “before God”!) would likely take a similar course of at-least external observance of some known mitzvos.
Restore monarchy now!
Quoting the opening of “The Revolution Was” (1938) by
There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom.
There are those who have never ceased to say very earnestly, “Something is going to happen to the American form of government if we don’t watch out.” These were the innocent disarmers. Their trust was in words. They had forgotten their Aristotle. More than 2,000 years ago he wrote of what can happen within the form, when “one thing takes the place of another, so that the ancient laws will remain, while the power will be in the hands of those who have brought about revolution in the state.”
Worse outwitted were those who kept trying to make sense of the New Deal from the point of view of all that was implicit in the American scheme, charging it therefore with contradiction, fallacy, economic ignorance, and general incompetence to govern.
But it could not be so embarrassed, and all that line was wasted, because, in the first place, it never intended to make that kind of sense, and secondly, it took off from nothing that was implicit in the American scheme.
It took off from a revolutionary base. The design was European. Regarded from the point of view of revolutionary technique, it made perfect sense. Its meaning was revolutionary and it had no other. For what it meant to do, it was from the beginning consistent in principle, resourceful, intelligent, masterly in workmanship, and it made not one mistake.
The test came in the first one hundred days.
No matter how carefully a revolution may have been planned there is bound to be a crucial time. That comes when the actual seizure of power is taking place. In this case certain steps were necessary. They were difficult and daring steps. But more than that, they had to be taken in a certain sequence, with forethought and precision of timing. One out of place might have been fatal. What happened was that one followed another in exactly the right order, not one out of time or out of place.
Having passed this crisis, the New Deal went on from one problem to another, taking them in the proper order, according to revolutionary technique; and if the handling of one was inconsistent with the handling of another, even to the point of nullity, that was blunder in reverse. The effect was to keep people excited about one thing at a time, and divided, while steadily through all the uproar of outrage and confusion a certain end, held constantly in view, was pursued by main intention.
The end held constantly in view was power.
In a revolutionary situation, mistakes and failures are not what they seem. They are scaffolding. Error is not repealed. It is compounded by a longer law, by more decrees and regulations, by further extensions of the administrative hand. As deLawd said in The Green Pastures, that when you have passed a miracle you have to pass another one to take care of it, so it was with the New Deal. Every miracle it passed, whether it went right or wrong, had one result. Executive power over the social and economic life of the nation was increased. Draw a curve to represent the rise of executive power and look there for the mistakes. You will not find them. The curve is consistent.
At the end of the first year, in his annual message to the Congress, January 4, 1934, President Roosevelt said, “It is to the eternal credit of the American people that this tremendous readjustment of our national life is being accomplished peacefully.”
Peacefully if possible — of course.
But the revolutionary historian will go much further. Writing at some distance in time he will be much less impressed by the fact that it was peacefully accomplished than by the marvelous technique of bringing it to pass not only within the form but within the word, so that people were all the while fixed in the delusion that they were talking about the same things because they were using the same words. Opposite and violently hostile ideas were represented by the same word signs. This was the American people’s first experience with dialectic according to Marx and Lenin.
And see this blend of interviews with Germans on the Nazification of Germany:
“To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.”
…
“How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, *Principiis obsta* and *Finem respice*—’Resist the beginnings’ and ‘Consider the end.’ But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men?”
…
“But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.”
― Milton Sanford Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45
See in more (but not enough) context here…
Must I mention modern parallels?
מתוך ספר ברכת אשר להרב אשר וסרטיל:
“ולא ימחה שמו מישראל”. זכורני שעמדנו פעם – היה זה בשנים תש”ב־תש”ג בערך – קבוצה של חברי קיבוץ הנוער האגודתי שבכפר סבא מסביב ל”חזון איש” זצ”ל. דובר במעשה או באמירה של אחד ממנהיגי השומר הצעיר, ומישהו מן החבורה הפליט: “ימח שמו”. שאל אותו ה”חזון איש”: “אילו היה מת בלא בנים, אחיו היה חייב בייבום־חליצה?”. ההוא הבין את הרמז, ואני, מאז, נשמר מלהשתמש בביטוי זה לגבי יהודי. זו היתה דרכו המיוחדת של ה”חזון אי”ש” – אין מוסר או דרך ארץ, יש תמיד הלכה. (פ’ כי־תצא תשס”ז)…
וראה ההמשך של הרב העורך.
לא מכיר את הספר והרעיון עצמו מוכר מכבר אבל ההגדרה של החזו”א נפלאה.