By R’ Chaim Bruk
Last Shabbos I was reading an old Kfar Chabad magazine from 1984. Kfar Chabad is the prime Chabad magazine in Hebrew that has been printed consistently since the early 1980s. I read the following story shared by Reb Shmuel Levitin, the preeminent Chabad rav and mashpia who was sent by the previous Lubavitcher Rebbe to the USSR enclave of Georgia, or, as we called it, “Gruzya,” where he spent years spearheading the survival, and revival, of Jewish life, the fruits of which we still see today.
Reb Shmuel shared how he hired a younger chassid to travel from city to city, village to village, to ensure that the clandestine operation that he worked to establish, which included cheders for children, mikva’os for women, shuls, and yeshivos, were all in shipshape and functioning as they should. When this fellow arrived at a particular village, it was rosh chodesh, and he was chatting with the kids in the cheder. One of the kids asked a question about Barchi Nafshi, Psalm 104 in Tehilim, which we recite on rosh chodesh. The question was as follows: Psalm 104 is full of our praise to Hashem for all the incredible nature that He created in His kindness. It includes thunder and rivers, clouds and fire, trees and mountains, and then suddenly in verse 24, Dovid HaMelech says, “Mah rabu ma’asecha Hashem—How great are Your works, O L-rd! You have made them all with wisdom; the earth is full of Your possessions!”
So, the kid wanted to know, why couldn’t Dovid wait to finish up the last few verses of praise, and then proclaim, “How great are Your works?” Why did he stop smack in the middle and express his amazement with Hashem’s works?
The visiting chassid responded, “Don’t you realize that Dovid HaMelech couldn’t hold it in anymore? He was exploding and needed to scream, ‘Mah Rabu.’”
I read this story and it spoke to me. Chavie and I have been in Montana for over 15 years, and we’ve seen an incredible change in the “frum” observant Jewish world and their relationship with nature. Yes, there were always Jews from the big cities visiting national parks, enjoying skiing, whitewater rafting, hiking, horseback riding, fishing, and everything else nature has to offer, but it wasn’t anywhere close in numbers to what it is today. Just in the past week we had a family from Queens stop by for kosher chicken, a family from Chicago join us for Shabbos, an RV-ing family from Ramat Bet Shemesh parked outside our home, a young woman from Lakewood traversing Montana and Idaho, and a camp of Jewish kids from all across the country camping in Montana and Wyoming. More and more Jews are celebrating the “Mah rabu ma’asecha,” the beauty of the world that Hashem created for us, and that’s a very good thing.
In this week’s Torah portion, Balak, we read about the Moabite king Balak who feared the Jews, and his hired sidekick Bilaam, the rabid anti-Semite, who joined forces with him to attack the Jews with the power of verbal curses. As it happened, the words coming out of Bilaam’s foul mouth were some of the nicest things and prophecies ever expressed about the Jews. Bilaam said the elegiac words of “Mah tovu,” proclaiming, “How goodly are your tents, O Jacob, your dwelling places, O Israel.”
On the verse Mah tovu, the Gemara in Sanhedrin (105b) tells us that it refers to the houses of study and houses of prayer. Rashi comments on the verse that the entrances of their tents were not opposite one another because of modesty. While they seem like two totally different ways of understanding Bilaam’s praise, either about our devotion to prayer and study or our devotion to modesty, they can be fused together in the following manner: Sadly, when one person looks at another, the first thing he tends to see is the negative, finding fault in his fellow. Whereas when a person looks at himself, the first thing he sees is his goodness. The truth is that the opposite should be the case: for ourselves we can find fault because we know ourselves well, while for others we could always give the benefit of the doubt because we don’t really know their soul.
Taking that idea to the two commentaries on Mah Tovu, we can say that when a person sits in shul, he tries to look different from when he is sitting at home, so the Torah is telling us that we should be modest and refrain from looking at our friend as he or she is at home—the entrances are not opposite one another—rather, look at them as they stand in shul and try your best to imagine them at home as you see them in shul.
I feel like Am Yisrael is growing in appreciation for the awe-inspiring beauty of nature, and it’s a good time to start seeing the beauty of our fellow Yidden. We can’t get stuck in seeing what isn’t good in others; rather, we must find the illumination that each individual brings forth to our communities, our world. The Previous Lubavitcher Rebbe writes that when he was four years old, he asked his father: “Why did G-d make people with two eyes? Why not with one eye, just as they have one nose and one mouth?”
“Do you know the alef–beis?” his father asked him.
“Yes,” he replied.
“Then you know that there are two very similar Hebrew letters, the shin and the sin. Can you tell the difference between them?” his father asked.
“The shin has a dot on its right side; the sin has on its left,” the young boy replied.
His father then told him: “There are things which one must look upon with a right eye, with affection and empathy, and there are things to be regarded with a left eye, with indifference and detachment. On a Siddur or on a fellow Jew, one should look with a right eye; on a candy or toy, one should look with a left eye.”
We need to see the beauty in everyone and everything. Bilaam knew that the beauty of Am Yisrael is not only our modesty at home, our devotion to the mitzvah of family purity and tznius, but that we see each other for who we are in our best moments, our most spiritual moments, our most holy hours, not for the materialistic addicts we can be at times. I could find reasons to badmouth any group of Jews, but for what purpose? We complain when anti-Semites speak negatively about Jews; why does that bother us if we say worse about our fellow Jews? I could decide to remain divided with Satmar Chassidim because of what they did in the 1970s and early 80s to many Lubavitcher Chassidim who were studying and teaching Tanya, but carrying a grudge against Jews for 40 years is as un-Jewish as it comes. There is so much we can do together, that keeps us together, that makes us beautiful; why seek fragmentation? We can choose to violently attack a breakaway shul, like has happened in Israel recently, but is that really Judaism? Are there not enough G-d fearing Jews in Yerushalayim for another shul or two?
I struggle with this. Always seeing the good in everyone, always refraining from seeing the negative, isn’t easy, but if we can come together for Bike4Chai to help cancer patients, if we can be one nation to pray for a pious Jew in prison, if we can be united to fight the threats on Jewish education from the “open-minded” souls who seek to secularize our pure education, then can’t we come together on a regular Tuesday in July and realize that we are one?
Our daughter Zeesy travels this week to Camp Simcha Special. They don’t ask us what our affiliation is, nor do they care. We are Am Echad, and at Matan Torah we weren’t divided up into subgroups—we were “one nation with one heart.” You don’t need to travel 2,000 miles to see Hashem’s creations in Yellowstone; you can see His masterfulness in the person sitting next to you in shul, at the sheitel macher, or on the Monsey Trails bus.
Mah rabu ma’asecha, Hashem.
Rabbi Chaim Bruk is co-CEO of Chabad Lubavitch of Montana and spiritual leader of The Shul of Bozeman. For comments or to partner in our holy work, e-mail rabbi@jewishmontana.com or visit JewishMontana.com/Donate.
