Thoughts from Our Shabbos with Rabbi Yoni Rosensweig

This past Shabbos we were privileged to host Rabbi Yoni Rosensweig, and he shared two ideas I haven’t stopped thinking about. I want to pass them along.

Rabbi Rosensweig has spent years educating our communities to destigmatize mental health. He shared that whenever he describes this work, people respond the same way. They tell him how important it is. Then he turned the question back on us. Why? Why do we all feel that it matters so much?

His answer has stayed with me. Halacha is often more comfortable with human struggle than people are. When it takes up a question about anxiety, or depression, or grief, it answers the way it answers anything else, and that tells the one who asked, and the rest of us listening, that there is nothing shameful in the question.

Before we learned to speak openly about trauma, depression, addiction, anxiety, halacha already had an approach. It was asking the practical questions. How does this person keep Shabbos? How does he daven? Fast?

Those questions matter, and not only for their answers. If halacha takes up a struggle, then that struggle has a place within the human experience. It belongs inside a Jewish life, not outside of it.

A person who brings his depression, or his anxiety, or his grief to a posek will not always walk away with a solution. The weight may not lift, or only for a moment. But something else happens. He hears that he is not out of bounds. Halacha-ize, and you destigmatize.

But halacha is one thing. The community is another.

Because a person lives amongst other people. One davens beside me, another is right behind me, a child fidgets in the row in front. And while halacha may already have made room for him, our hearts are sometimes slower to follow.

That gap, between halacha and the heart, is where Rabbi Rosensweig’s second idea landed, and he shared it later on Shabbos.

The story has many iterations. In this one it is the Baal Shem Tov’s shul on Ne’ilah, the holiest and most intense moment of the year, and the entire shul is in it. A boy walks in, a boy who cannot read and does not even know the alef-beis, and right in the middle of davening he begins to whistle. The room recoils. And the Baal Shem Tov tells them that this whistle is the highest tefillah of all.

It is a beautiful idea. We all belong, each of us on our own level, each of us with something to give to Hashem, no matter what.

And then Rabbi Rosensweig pushed back. That may be true for the Baal Shem Tov, but how would the rest of us have reacted? Picture walking home after Ne’ilah and sitting down at the table with the family. Can you believe there was a boy whistling in shul? At Ne’ilah, of all times? Is that really allowed? It was so distracting.

That is the honest version, and it is ours. The story asks more of us than that.

And yet making room is not the same as having no walls. A shul that bends without limit stops being a shul. There has to be a balance.

Rav Moshe Feinstein was once asked whether a blind man could bring his seeing-eye dog into shul. Keep him home, and he is cut off from the minyan and from krias haTorah. Bring the dog in, and what becomes of the beis knesses? Rav Moshe held both ends at once. The shul should let him in. And the man should take a seat near the door, so that his presence does not pull the room away from its davening.

The same balance lives closer to home. A woman with ADHD may need to stand, to pace at the back, to step out and come back in. A shul should make room for that without a second thought. And the one who is pacing can do it quietly, in a way that lets everyone around her stay in their own davening. A shul can hold a great deal. It still has to stay a shul. There is room for the child who cannot sit, and for the person who cannot stop moving. There is no room to take the davening away from everyone else.

Most of us, when we are well, do not want a shul rebuilt around our hardest day. We want it to hold us on that day. That is not too much to ask of a shul. It may be the whole reason we built one.

For years I heard this story and pictured myself standing beside the Baal Shem Tov, hearing the holiness in the whistle. Rabbi Rosensweig made me ask a harder question. What if I am not the Baal Shem Tov? What if I am one of the people in the seats? I am the one who hears the whistle and immediately wonders whether it should be allowed.

Halacha may already have made room. The question is whether we have. The boy and the people around him each have a part to play. And most days, if we are honest, we are still sitting among them.