Institutions Inform - Individuals Inspire
Summary of a Derasha delivered on Shabbat Chol Hamoed Pesach at Shomeir Shabbos Congregation, Toronto.
The Tragic Loss of Rabbi Akiva's 24,000 disciples
- Doesn't the tragic loss of Rabbi Akiva's 24,000 disciples between Pesach and Shavuot caused by their failure to treat one another with dignity,[1] reflect poorly on Rabbi Akiva as an educator? After all, the way we treat one another sits, especially according to Rabbi Akiva himself, at the very core of Torah. Treating each other with dignity is one of the first principles of a Torah life.
- What does that episode have anything to do with this particular period of the calendar, the period of Sefirat ha'Omer?[2]
- Why do we commemorate this tragedy every year more than we do other tragedies of even bigger proportions? What insights can we glean from observing the Sefirah? How does Sefirah improve our own lives and service of Hashem?
The death of the students did not result from a failure in their teacher. Rabbi Akiva is one of the greatest scholars and teachers we have ever had. Neither did the tragedy's root cause lie in the personal inadequacies of these 24,000 great students of Torah. This tragedy was the failure of an important educational experiment by Rabbi Akiva, and turns out to have been one of Rabbi Akiva's most important teachings: Although we always have and always will need institutions of learning and teaching, the soul of Torah and the character development it commands, can only be taught by individuals, not by institutions. No institution irrespective of how perfect and grand it is, can successfully transmit Mesorah (authentic tradition) the way an individual can.
Institutions: Their strengths and their weaknesses
Rabbi Akiva was the Rosh yeshiva of what was probably the greatest and largest Yeshiva ever to have existed. 24,000 exceptional scholars sat at his feet and studied. He structured his students in thechavruta[3] system we still use in Yeshivot today. (This is why they are referred to as 12,000 pairs rather than 24,000 disciples.) To create this mammoth Yeshiva, Rabbi Akiva had to institutionalize the educational process. He was probably the first Torah teacher to truly scale the educational system and leverage his own teaching capacity to optimal quantitative advantage. As successful as Rabbi Akiva was in the building of this massive institution, the institutionalization of Torah was in and of itself the very cause of that institution's downfall.
An (educational) institution, for the purposes of this discussion, is a structure designed to transcend the life, influence and charisma of its founder or leader. An institution is imbued with its founder's values and mission and conveys his or her messages without the need for their personal input. This allows for more people receiving the message than one person could teach, and for the teaching to outlive the teacher. Institutions are populated with faculty and administrative staff. Power is vested in positions irrespective of the individual occupying those positions. But, wherever power is vested in positions, politics can spread. And this is why Rabbi Akiva's institution did not survive.
The reason why even the best institutions (both within Torah and without) are potential breeding-grounds for politics, is because in the institutional world of organizational and social structures, influence is the result of positional status more than personal stature. In these structures, people carry influence by virtue of the positional, educational, financial, social or religious status they possess, rather than by virtue of their human greatness personal stature.
People of great stature carry enormous influence with or without the support of status and office. It is true that most leaders need the power of status to support their effectiveness, but great leaders do not rely on that status to lead, they lead by their own greatness. This is the thesis of my forthcoming book, Lead by Greatness, in which I will share methods, gleaned both from Torah and my experience consulting to Leaders around the world, by which individuals can access their greatness, grow it and use it to lead by.
The Brisker Rav's greatest period of leadership for example, was after his immigration to Israel. There he held no position of status. At that time Brisk was not an institutionalized Yeshiva, but just a small group of the Brisker Rov's disciples who met at his home each day for a shiur. There was no building, no secretaries, and no structure. The Chofetz Chaim had no status; he held no official position, but he lead the Jewish world. People of stature do not compete with one another, there is an endless supply of stature for anyone willing to invest in acquiring it.
Influence by means of status however, is a zero-sum game: one person's gain of status is generally the other person's loss. There is not an unlimited supply of status. Status has value because it is rare: there can only be one president, CEO, or Rosh Yeshiva, for if titles were to be dished out liberally they would lose their value. As a result of the rarity of status, people pursue it and compete for it. They conspire to achieve status and they protect their status from being taken by others. This is the stuff of politics, and educational institutions, even the best of them, are seldom if ever free from these games of politics.
Mesorah: A One-on-One Educational Process
Institutional education has never been the ideal way of Torah teaching: Torah has traditionally been passed down from one individual to another in the extremely intimate relationships of Rebbeand Talmid. Some of the great Rabeim had merely a handful of authentic talmidim, yet it was those talmidim who changed the world. The Mussar Movement is a misnomer. It never was a movement. It was Reb Yisrael Salanter with his three close Talmidim (The Alter of Kelm, Reb Itzelle Petterburger and Reb Naftoli Amsterdam) and only a handful more. Reb Chaim Soloveitchik launched modern learning methodology with ten or so great talmidim who became the RosheiYeshiva of the next generation. Reb Chaim-Ozer Grodginsky opposed the founding of the Rabbanut Harashit[4] in Israel because he feared the politics that an institutionalized Rabbanut would spawn.
The great Yeshivot of the world were not institutions at all. They were vehicles through which individual Gedolei Yisroel (Torah luminaries) could pass their Torah on to a select group of disciples who learnt from them in person. They ranged in number of students from a few dozen to a couple of hundred. But even in the Yeshivot of a couple of hundred students, each student was privately mentored, and the faculty was primarily made up of the Rosh Yeshiva and members of his family. Yeshivot were unashamedly family affairs rather than institutionalized organizations. When they became institutionalized,machloket (dissent) and politics inevitably seeped into the institution eroding its glamour and sometimes destroying it.
A student chose a Yeshiva not because of the institutional qualities of the Yeshiva or the city in which it was but for the Rosh Yeshiva under whom they would learn. In Lithuania one went to Grodno for Reb Shimon Shkopp, to Kammenitz for Reb Boruch Ber, to Brannovitch for Reb Elchonon Wasserman. When I went to Yeshiva as a young man I chose Gateshead for Reb Leib and Reb Avrohom Gurwicz and Reb Leib Lopian, I chose Kefar Hassidim for Reb Eliyahu Mishkovsky and Mir for Reb Chaim Shmuelevitz. I made certain to develop a deep personal relationship with each of those Torah giants who not only taught me, they mentored me too. When Reb Eliya Lopian was active in Kefar Hassidim he too would meet with every boy in the Yeshiva weekly in groups of no more than a dozen at a time and he would have hard and very personal mentoring conversations with us. None of these centers of learning were really institutions. Rather within a loose institutional structure, one-on-one mentoring relationships flourished; and that is the way Torah was transmitted. Even the traditional Shul (synagogue), was not an institution. It was the platform for a number of families to access the influence of a single Torah giant who was often its only paid employee.
In my own Beit Midrash in Johannesburg, I strove for a non-institutional model. We had no staff, membership was determined byshiur attendance and not by fees, I myself taught Torah to every member, both men and women, and I spent hours each week in one-on-one consultations to help them integrate that Torah and apply it. This was both its strength and its limitation.
iAwaken.org is an attempt to use technology to leverage my teaching, rather than organizational structures. iAwaken too employs no staff, and each member has the opportunity to learn Torah and a single, consistent, integrated world view from one teacher; its founder. I try to encourage iAwaken members to reach out beyond the technology and try to help me forge real and authentic relationships with them too. I have spent my life fleeing from institutional politics, in the belief that it can too easily undermine the purity of Torah thought and teaching.
The Politics of Institutions
When an institution confers formal or informal status upon people based on position and title, or access to people of position and title, it opens itself to the potentially destructive force of politics. Even Rabbi Akiva's mega-academy, possibly the greatest Yeshiva institution of all times, spawned politics. This is evident from Rabbi Akiva's own warnings to his seven (or five according to the Gemarrain Yevamot) new talmiddim after the loss of the 24,000: "The previous ones died because they were spiteful one to the other. Pay careful attention not to conduct yourselves as they did." (Midrash Rabbah B.R. 21:3) The perplexing mean-spiritedness (when it came to honor) of the 24,000 scholars, may have been a function of the rarity of easy access to the Rosh Yeshiva in an institution of 24,000 people. When Rabbi Akiva started again, he restricted the size of his academy to less than ten people including himself. And it is from that latter micro-academy that the world refilled itself with the power of the Torah it earlier lost.
Rabbi Akiva's inability to inspire his first set of students with the midotof treating one another with dignity was not a failure in him as educator. It was and is a flaw in the institutional model he tried to build. Institutions are artificial structures. Structures can impart information and knowledge but they cannot inspire individuals with wisdom and character. Wisdom and character can only be transferred from one individual to another in an intense, deep, authentic personal relationship. Institutions can support those relationships and facilitate them but we should never allow institutions to substitute for intimate relationship.
Let's be clear: We desperately need Torah institutions today. Most institutions do amazing work and their leaders and founders toil selflessly for the good of the community and the health of its future. I am suggesting though is that we should not expect the relationship between an institution and a student to spark greatness in the student. Students will only become great when either within the walls of the institutions in which they study or beyond them, they find great Torah personalities to mentor them personally, coach them and guide them.
Asei Lechah Rav: Create for yourself a mentoring relationship
In many of my father z"tzl's shiurim(http://iawaken.org/shiurim/rabbiAHLapin.asp)
you will hear him talk of the intimacy of relationship in the greatYeshivot of Lithuania: the relationships between Rebbe and Talmid, mentor and mentee, and between the student and the landlord and landlady with whom he lived. Boys were not housed in clinical barracks (as he called them) but in warm and loving homes populated with functional Torah families. As a young boy I remember my father taking us to meet the family he boarded with for all the years of his stay in Telshe Yeshiva Lithuania, the Holtzberg's. Like my father, they had escaped the war and were living in centralYerushalaim at the time. I couldn't help but be amazed at the love and warmth they showed each other after not having met for so many years. Telshe Yeshiva was an institution only in as much as it outlived any individual Rosh Yeshiva, but it did not outlive the family of its founders. It was an institution in that it facilitated relational intimacies but never substituted them. Other Yeshivot were no different.
Parents who believe that even the very great institutionalizedYeshivot of today can inspire their children with nobility of character and deep wisdom of Torah are living in tragic illusion. Our educational institutions today can at best teach the mechanics and even the motivation for frumkeid (religious adherence and fervor), information and factual knowledge. They can instill discipline and good habits; but they alone cannot inspire greatness.
There are only two ways for a young man or woman in Yeshiva today to be inspired to greatness. The first way is for them to find personal role-models who are themselves great in stature irrespective of their societal status. These individuals may not even necessarily bereabbeim in the institutions they attend. They need to forge authentic, deep and lasting relationships with these mentors, and demonstrate their willingness and capacity to "be mekabeil," to "receive with humility" the wisdom of their teachings. They must demonstrate their willingness to be directed, mentored and coached by these individuals. And, these individuals must have the time and the will to take the student on as a serious Talmid. Failure to engineer these relationships will guarantee the student a place only on the ever-growing scrap-heap of educational mediocrity that our institutions (Torah and general) are inevitably producing.
The second way a young person can be inspired to greatness is by his or her parents, provided they have not abdicated the role of inspiration to an institution. Active, engaged parents who are themselves involved every day in the pursuit of Torah greatness are still the best hope a child has of being great.
If you are a student: in addition to an institution of learning, find yourself a great mentor, a rebbe who is a human being of profound intellectual and moral stature, and put yourself in his hands. Allow him to coach you and mold you. If you are a parent, do the same for yourself never mind for your child. You will then be a role-model for your children. They will see what the pursuit of greatness means. They will see what it is to have a coach and a mentor. They will see greatness in you, more and more each day as you grow and progress on your own journey to greatness. Your children will naturally adopt you as their rebbe, their own coaches and mentors. And who is more worthy of coaching your children than you? Do not worry if you lack knowledge. Your children can get that at school and at Yeshiva. Just make sure that you are learning and that you are building your character, wisdom and stature, for that they will find it harder to access anywhere else.
Between Pesach and Shavuot
By the time we left Egypt we were long since stripped of all institutional and societal status. We had nothing to respect in ourselves and in one another other than our true stature and our greatness as human beings. This was the perfect opportunity to build a society that was not an institution but an intimate collection of even more intimate families, led by Rashei Beit Avot (heads of households) and Nesi'im (noble leaders of elevated human stature) not governments, mayors and presidents. This society was bound not by a land or even a government. It was bound only by an unswerving commitment to the service of G-d.
On several occasions the people tried to default to institutional structure. Yitro introduced institutional structure to the legal system, and that was a success. It was a success because the legal system is meant do be depersonalized. It is there for objectivity not for the passion we associate with education and need in our teachers and Rabbis. There were other less successful attempts: Korach tried it, the Golden Calf too was an attempt to create a more tangible structure. Certainly the desire for a King and a government was the manifestation of the imperative to have structure. The Meshech Chochma suggests Moshe destroyed the Luchot (tablets) so that they would not become the foundation of a religious structure instead of being the embodiment of an intangible Divine will.
What better time is there than the time between the Yamim Tovim ofPesach and of Shavuot to be reminded of these lessons? Shavuot is a chag without structure and with no specific ritual. Between our freedom from slavery and our receiving of Torah at Sinai we remind ourselves of the need to keep the transmission of Torah pure of politics, personal and intimate.
This is what we learn from the tragedy of Sefira in the academy of Rabbi Akiva: Institutions can inform, they cannot inspire. Only inspirational individuals dedicated to the wellbeing of those they love can inspire them to greatness. You are one such person: Go, grow and inspire the people you love, each and every day; and through you, they will become greater.
