Yonason Goldson
I'm a Talmudic scholar and professional speaker, as well as a former hitchhiker and circumnavigator, applying ancient wisdom to the challenges of the modern world. I've published seven books, including, Proverbial Beauty: Secrets for success and happiness from the wisdom of the ages.
Homepage: http://yonasongoldson.com
A Tribute to Dr. Lester Zeffren
Posted in Culture on December 23, 2013
The Time Machine
When Yonason ben Shaul, heir to the throne of Israel, witnessed both the heroism of Dovid as he faced the giant Golias and the humility of Dovid after his victory, we read that “the soul of Yonason became bound to the soul of Dovid.” Yonason had never even spoken to Dovid, but he could not fail to recognize the nobility of spirit that was the essence of the future king.
Such was the persona of Dr. Lester Zeffren, who projected the qualities of majesty and humility so forcefully that no person of spirit could resist his magnetism or not devoutly wish to revel in the splendor of his presence.
How does such a person flourish in a world of spiritual and moral mediocrity?
Dr. Zeffren loved to recount how his mother would become deaf whenever he began complaining about his teachers in school. She didn’t argue, lecture, or rebuke; in fact, she didn’t appear to notice at all, thereby silently overruling his objections.
It was hard to imagine that Dr. Zeffren, whose head resembled a cue ball, could have ever sported a stylish chup. But it wasn’t hard to imagine how, when he phoned home from yeshiva to complain that his rabbis were violating his rights by insisting that he get a haircut, the connection suddenly failed so that his mother heard none of his protests.
But parents only lay the foundations. True character must be cultivated and fashioned from within.
In his short story The Time Machine, Ray Bradbury writes of two young boys who visit their wizened neighbor, listening to reminiscences so vivid and detailed that they felt they were transported back to another age. Lester Zeffren was such a time machine, taking us back not to places or events but to a world where integrity, respect, discipline, gratitude, and human dignity were not merely ideals but part of the fabric of civil society.
“I’m sorry you didn’t get to hear me speak in shul yesterday,” he said to me one Sunday morning. “I talked about the time I joined the board of the Academy. We were young, eager, idealistic, and committed to making a difference. We were going to overhaul the system and make big changes. We had the greatest of intentions.”
He paused for dramatic effect, then continued:
“And we knew nothing!”
Of course, youth is wasted on the young, as is the wisdom of experience that the young have yet to acquire. But Lester’s voice, a lone echo holding back the gathering darkness, filled me with hope. What else could I do but step forward and wrap my arms around him?
Lester never passed up an opportunity to express his admiration and appreciation for teachers of Torah, and he constantly admonished me to persevere against the community’s growing inexplicable resistance to instilling Torah values in their children.
“Your father is a great man,” he told my son in shul. “He holds this community together. Do you know that?”
My son, about seven years old at the time, nodded solemnly, without an ounce of comprehension on his face.
But Lester wasn’t finished yet.
“And he suffers! You’re lucky to have him as a father.”
Of course, that was the way Lester talked to everyone. But unlike so many who seek to ingratiate themselves through flattery and empty compliments, you knew that Lester meant every word he said.
Which is not to say that Lester Zeffren had a pollyanna outlook on the world. He was as critical in his views as anyone, and never shy about arguing his position. But he did so with such sincerity and authenticity, such intellectual and moral authority, that even those who despised his opinions couldn’t help but admire him. He was from another age, and even at that an anomaly: a man who could fearlessly speak his mind and retain the respect of all around him.
Even in medicine, he was a rare breed. When I mentioned my reliance on chiropractic — a sure way of drawing the scorn of “real” doctors — Lester simply remarked, “If it works, it’s better than conventional medicine.”
But there could be no compromise in the way he administered his practice. “Lester will never become rich,” commented one medical colleague. “He cares too much about his patients to shortchange them.”
In an age of non-judgmentalism, political correctness, and touchy-feely educational philosophy, in a generation of moral equivalence and moral anarchy, Lester Zeffren was our lifeline to a saner and nobler time. Now that he’s gone, our connection with the past grows ever more tenuous, and our hope for the future grows ever more desperate.
May his family take consolation from the giant footprints he left behind, and may they be comforted among the mourners of Tzion and Yerushalayim.
Rabbi Yonason Goldson
The Staff of Leadership
Posted in Philosophy, Weekly Parsha on December 20, 2013
By Rabbi Yonason Goldson
Published in Jewish World Review
Parshas Shemos
And Moses responded, saying, “But [the people] will not believe me and they will not heed my voice, for they will say, ‘G-d did not appear to you.’” And G-d said to him, “What is that in your hand?” And he said, “A staff.” (Exodus 4:1-2)
It’s easy to understand why Moses was anything but eager to accept the onus of leadership. After 210 years of Egyptian bondage, what possible reason would the Jewish people have to believe Moses when he claimed that the Almighty had sent him to redeem them? How would he convince a broken nation that he had either the authority or the ability to lead them out of slavery?
G-d’s answer, however, is even more difficult to comprehend. Seemingly, G-d wanted Moses to cast his staff upon the ground to show him its miraculous transformation into a snake – the sign by which Moses would prove himself to the people. If so, why did G-d not simply say, “Cast your staff upon the ground.” Why did the Almighty first ask Moses to identify the object he was holding?
In his classic commentary, Rabbi Meir Libush Malbim explains that Moses could have answered in one of three possible ways. As a shepherd, he could have identified his staff as a makeil, a shepherd’s crook. As an eighty year old man, he could have referred to it as a mashenes, a cane or walking stick. Finally, he could have called it as he did — a matteh, which means staff, but which also can mean scepter, a symbol of sovereignty and leadership.
Moses had directed his objection not solely at the people’s unwillingness to follow, but at his own lack of distinction as a leader. Who am I, he questioned, that the people should put their trust in me? And so, G-d presented Moses with a test.
Latkes with Cranberry Sauce?
Posted in Holidays, Philosophy on November 21, 2013
Published at Aish.com
Will Rogers couldn’t have said it better: “No nation has ever had more, yet no nation has ever had less.” And it’s easy to understand why the two go together.
The Talmud describes a person obsessed by the dream of becoming rich. If only he had a million dollars, he would be happy. So he labors tirelessly, clawing and scratching to amass his fortune, until what happens? The moment he finally makes his million, he immediately sets his sights on two million.
Human nature dictates that the more we have, the more we want. And the more we believe that we are entitled to have whatever we want, the less inclined we are either to be grateful for what we have or to recognize our obligations to others.
It’s somewhat heartening, therefore, that Thanksgiving has retained so prominent a place in American culture, even if most of us rarely give a passing thought to the Puritan ideals that gave birth to the holiday.
Handle with care
Posted in Education and Parenting, Philosophy on October 16, 2013
Published in Mishpacha Magazine, 9 October 2013
Returning from a tour of Europe in the 1930s, the American humorist Will Rogers reported on the governments that had sprung up out of the chaos that followed World War I. Among his observations was this comment regarding the newly established Soviet Union: “In Russia, they got no income tax. But they also got no income.”
Given more time, Mr. Rogers might have had a chance to observe how government-imposed poverty affects the moral fabric of a country and its people.
I was able to witness those effects for myself, up close and personal, in 1993. That was the year my wife and I taught high school in Budapest, Hungary.
We had been warned what to expect, and had been told anecdotally of a soap factory in which dozens of workers colluded with management to dilute the soap formula by adding 3% water. The result was the production of an extra 30 bars of soap per thousand, which were divvied up among the employees to be sold on the black market.
The proletariat living in the communist bloc “workers’ paradise” were thereby able to supplement an annual income that supported them for only a fraction of the year. And if an average bar of soap lasted only 33 days instead of 34, who was going to notice?
Arriving after nine years in Israel, my wife and I discovered that the Talmudic classification of tinok she’nishba – a kidnapped child raised in a society of thieves (Shavuos 5a) – is far more than a theoretical construct. The children we met, who had grown up behind the Iron Curtain with little exposure to basic moral values, were frightening examples of their environment. An alarming percentage of them had raised lying, stealing, and cheating to the level of high art.
Click here to read the whole article.
Gaining entry to the Glorious Kingdom
Posted in Holidays on September 9, 2013
Aharon shall place lots upon the two goats: one lot “for God” and one lot “for Azazel.” Aharon shall bring close the goat designated by lot for God and make it a sin-offering. And the goat designated by lot for Azazel shall be stood alive before God, to provide atonement though it, to send it to Azazel into the wilderness.
Vayikra 16:8-10
One of the most puzzling and disturbing rituals in Jewish practice is the goat “for Azazel.” During the afternoon of Yom Kippur, two goats are brought before the Kohein Gadol, the High Priest. By lot, one is chosen to be placed upon the altar as a sin-offering, while the other is taken out into the desert and thrown alive over the edge of a sheer cliff. What purpose could such a practice possibly serve? In truth, the symbolism of this ritual is astonishingly simple and frighteningly relevant. The two goats, identical in every way, symbolize the two possible futures that stretch out before every single human being. Like these goats – which appear indistinguishable from one another – many of the paths open to us in our youth seem equally attractive and filled with opportunity. Every child demonstrates both qualities of virtue and qualities of selfishness. Whether our higher or lower nature will win out in the end can never be reliably predicted.
To read the whole essay, click here.
Best Left Unsaid
Posted in Holidays, Jewish Unity on August 30, 2013
Try to imagine the standard of ritual purity and cleanliness held by the Kohein Gadol, the High Priest, the spiritual envoy of the Jewish people to the Almighty whose role demanded that he never come in contact with a dead body, prohibiting him from escorting even his own parents, spouse, siblings, or children to their final resting places.
Nevertheless, if the Kohein Gadol encountered a meis mitzvah — the unattended corpse of an unidentified stranger — while on his way to perform the service in the Beis HaMikdash, the Torah obligated him to provide a proper and immediate burial, even if that meant an underling would have to assume his duties in the Temple. The honor of his fellow Jew and respect for the divinity that resides within every member of his nation had to take precedence over virtually any other concern.
The Chofetz Chaim, Rabbi Yisroel Meir HaKohein Kagan, applies this precept in an unexpected direction.
Read the whole article here on Block Yeshiva’s new blog.
Irena Sendler: Profile in Courage and Conscience
Posted in Culture, History, Philosophy on July 24, 2013
First they came for the communists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak for me.
Martin Niemöller, the Germany clergyman who authored these words, was one of the few who did speak out against Adolph Hitler in the early days of the Nazi party. While the majority of Germans traded conscience for convenience by closing their eyes to the atrocities perpetrated upon their own countrymen, his solitary cry for reason still echoes amidst the silence.
For his troubles, Martin Niemöller was arrested in 1937 and eventually interred in Sachsenhausen and Dachau until his eventual liberation in 1945. He lived until 1984, a voice of penance among the German people.
Among lesser known heroes is Irena Sendler, who risked her life to save some 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto between 1942 and 1943. Working secretly as a member of Żegota, the Council for Jewish Aid, and using her position as an administrator for the Warsaw Social Welfare Department, Irena first tried to divert food, clothing, and medicine to Jews in the Ghetto, subsequently going door to door offering Jewish parents a chance to save their children’s lives.
“In my dreams,” she said, “I still hear the cries when they left their parents.”
One by one, Irena smuggled the children out in ambulances, gunnysacks, and body bags, finding families of Polish gentiles willing to take them in. She recorded the name of every child and hid her lists in jars she buried in a neighbor’s yard. After the war, she dug up the names and attempted to reunite the children with their families, most of whom had perished in the death camps.
On October 20, 1943, Irena was arrested by the Gestapo, who broke her legs and feet trying to force from her the names of the families who harbored the Jewish children. Refusing to divulge her secrets, Irena eventually escaped imprisonment and lived out the remainder of the war in hiding.
In 1965, Yad Vashem recognized Irena as one of the Polish Righteous Among the Nations. In 2007, she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. The prize was awarded that year to Al Gore for his movie on global warming.
Few people had heard of Irena Sendler until 1999, when a high school history teacher in Kansas came across a passing reference to her in U. S. News and World Report. Three students began a research project that culminated in their award-winning play, Life in a Jar, which has since been performed hundreds of times across North America and Europe.
Authentic heroism arises from intolerance for evil, from an unwillingness to stand idly by in the face of injustice no matter how improbable the odds and no matter how dire the consequences. Like Moses, who struck down the Egyptian he found beating an innocent Jew, a person of conscience may at any moment find himself facing a critical decision between common sense and common decency, where action appears pointless but where inaction amounts to an alliance with evil. A true hero is one who recognizes that such a choice is no choice at all.
“I could have done more,” Irena said. “This regret will follow me to my death.”
Sources: The Irena Sendler Project and the Jewish Virtual Library
For more information about other unsung heroes, visit the Lowell Milken Center.
My intolerance of faith
Posted in Culture, Jewish Unity, Philosophy on June 10, 2013
The moment the rabbi walked through the door all the students jumped to their feet… and I looked about desperately for a way out of the room.
The rabbi wore a long coat, a wide, antiquated black hat, an untrimmed beard, Coke-bottle spectacles and, incredibly, sidelocks. I knew — I just knew — what was going to happen next: the rabbi would lecture us in a thick German accent and tell us we were all damned to hell. There was no way I could sit through such an ordeal.
Read the whole article here.
Why we are unhappy
Posted in Culture, Education and Parenting, History, Philosophy, Weekly Parsha on May 28, 2013
The Israelites have been showered with benefits — and now the complaints begin.
The Jewish people are in possession of a perfect and comprehensive system of laws which is destined to have a tremendous positive influence on their spiritual, intellectual, and cultural development. Livelihood is no problem; all their physical needs are provided, and their food descends miraculously from the heavens daily. And then “it came to pass that the people were like complainers, evil in the ears of G-d.”
The verse doesn’t specify what their complaint was; in fact it implies that they didn’t say anything specific. They were “like complainers,” murmuring discontentedly under their breath, showing vague feelings of dissatisfaction. They felt what they had was no good anymore; they wanted more, although they themselves had no clear idea of what “more” exactly they wanted. Whatever the case, this state of mind indicated a lack of gratitude, giving rise to a sense of deprivation. To put it bluntly, they were whining.
What caused them to whine? The Sages’s answer is incisive:
“They weren’t complaining; rather they were resentful. They were looking for an excuse to break away from G-d” (Yalkut Shimoni, Bamidbar 732).
Several verses later, we see another outbreak of grumbling:
“And the riffraff among them started having strong cravings.”
Again, we aren’t told what they craved. They were experiencing discomfort; they felt something was lacking, but didn’t know what. One thing was clear: they were not satisfied.
Only after this mood of discontent spread, encompassing a larger portion of the people, did their demands take on a definite form:
“And the Israelites, too, sat down and wept, and they said, ‘Who will give us meat to eat?’”
At that moment, the craving for meat became the central goal, the be-all and end-all for the people of Israel, those same people whom G-d lifted out of Egypt in order to bestow a unique, eternal legacy. But they talked themselves into a craving, and to fulfill that craving, they needed to agitate with all their might. This became their raison d’être, revealing their weak nature.
The craving for meat distorted their mental function; it clouded their memories, causing them to make claims that a person would be ashamed to voice under normal conditions. What were they saying?
“We remember the fish that we ate in Egypt for free, the cucumbers, the watermelons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic.”
What sort of mechanism was at work here? Is there a logical explanation for their behavior?
The secret of all this is found in the world chinam — “free.” It was a Freudian slip, pointing to what was really bothering them on a deeper level, the real complaint they were ashamed to talk about. The truth was that they were complaining about the yoke of Torah and mitzvos that had been placed on their shoulders, a yoke meant to restrain their wild human impulses, which had run riot in Egypt, even as they were being enslaved and oppressed. The transition from external subjugation to a state of freedom that required character training and self-restraint was too much for them. It made them feel rebellious and conjured up fanciful memories of the delights of Egypt and the fish they ate there for free.
Yes, it was absurd of them to be demanding meat when they had manna from the heavens, offering them the taste of every food in the world. But when the source of their rebellion, the subconscious rationale underlying it, is revealed, then their behavior becomes comprehensible — and considering where they came from, even understandable.
Perhaps we can see something of ourselves here, something of the permissive society that never stops demanding meat, and destroys all that is good in our world.
Read Rabbi Grylak’s full article here.
The thought police widen their net
Posted in Culture, Education and Parenting on May 23, 2013
Thank you, Glenn Garvin, for paying attention. The Miami Herald columnist reports what the rest of us were too preoccupied to notice:
In an order to the University of Montana that they labeled “a blueprint for colleges and universities throughout the country,” Obama’s Justice and Education departments created a sweeping new definition of sexual harassment as “any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature,” including “verbal conduct.”
(Or, as those more familiar with the English language call it, speech.)
Who gets to define “unwelcome”? The listener and the listener alone — no matter how high-strung, neurotic or just plain pinheaded that person is. The feds’ letter is quite explicit: the words don’t have to be offensive to “an objectively reasonable person” to be considered harassment.
Given that standard of guilt, it’s perhaps not very surprising that the government says anybody accused of harassment can be punished even before he or she is convicted.
Mr. Garvin goes on to identify a partial list of authors whose provocative works stand in danger of censorship under these new edicts: Shakespeare, Harper Lee, Tennessee Williams, Robert Frost, and Anne Frank, to name a few. He then continues:
But surely, you say, surely nobody will take the letter of the law to such absurd extremes. And surely you are wrong: They already have. Brandeis University went after a professor for uttering the word “wetback” during a lecture — no matter that he was criticizing its usage.
A janitor at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis was disciplined for reading a disapproving book on the Ku Klux Klan. Marquette ordered a graduate student to remove a “patently offensive” quotation by Dave Barry from his door: “As Americans we must always remember that we all have a common enemy, an enemy that is dangerous, powerful, and relentless. I refer, of course, to the federal government.”
So what do we have here? If someone takes offense, even where any “objectively reasonable person” would see no cause for offense, the perpetrator is guilty without recourse to due process or appeal.
In a land of political correctness run amok, feelings are the ultimate currency of social interaction. Reason, logic, intellectual discipline, objective reality — none of these mean a thing if there is the slightest risk of hurt feelings.
Or perhaps there is a deeper fear. Not the pain of hurt feelings, but the pain of having to think, the pain of developing a work ethic, the pain of personal accountability. Apparently, the truism of no pain, no gain applies only in the gym and not in the halls of academe.
Is this really what we want for our children? Is it really what we want for ourselves? Or are those questions simply too painful to think about?
Read Glenn Garvin’s full article here.
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