Editor’s note: Over the last few weeks, a debate has raged on Soferet – an e-mail group for writers and editors and related positions – on the value of gedolim biographies. Some have championed them while others have argued that they are unrealistic and unrelatable. We invited two women from that debate to expand upon their comments and pen full-length articles on this topic. Their articles follow:
Not Interesting, Not Believable, Not Relatable
By Henye Meyer
Cookie-cutter bowdlerized biographies of gedolim – I already have dozens of them cluttering my shelves. I don’t read them, though. Maybe subconsciously I hope they’ll rewrite themselves if I leave them there long enough.
These books depict perfect gedolim and illuyim with no discernible yetzer hara or individuality who are almost as far removed from me as a malach. How can I compare myself to a malach? If I wasn’t born an illui (or a man), what can I expect to achieve by reading these biographies?
I don’t want feet-of-clay or warts-and-all depictions of our gedolim, but give me biographies of people with human frailties who transcended them! Give me human beings!
And please don’t try to humanize the gadol with apocryphal tales or stories attributed to 17 other tzaddikim. Give me truth. Verified incidents of a gadol’s life will illuminate far better than Jewish fairy tales.
I’m not the only one who feels this way. Here are the comments of other people on this topic:
- Books about “great women” who never struggled while taking care of their family and all of Klal Yisrael are a turnoff for me.
- When I was in 4th grade and I read a gadol book, I remember thinking: He was able to accomplish all of that by the age of 10! I’m already 10 and there’s no way I can do that in my whole lifetime. Guess there’s no point in trying.
- I just couldn’t get over how boring they made the life of such a non-typical gadol. It really did read like a computer-generated form biography. Insert [gadol’s name], doing [good deed #1]. Do not include [any personality at all].
- If we don’t get to the essence of who a person is in a biography, then their goodness is cheapened.
Unquestionably, our gedolim were great men on a level we find hard to appreciate. Yet, at the same time, they were real people. Certainly, some gedolim seem to have been illuyim from birth with virtually no desire to do aveiros on a level we would appreciate. Others, however, rose to prominence because they overcame recognizable obstacles or despite not being blessed with genius.
I know which class of people I can relate to.
The question is: What exactly are we trying to do in presenting a gadol’s life story to the Jewish public?
If we intend to inspire – and by that I mean to generate in the reader an aspiration to emulate the subject – we need to offer ways to understand the gadol as an individual who had human needs but who grew beyond them. Showing the gadol’s “normal” side gives us a role model.
There are arguments against writing this kind of biography. Too much familiarity may lessen the impact of the person’s gadlus (although this argument seems more relevant to living gedolim). There are also concerns of lashon hara.
But who decides what’s lashon hara? If a certain story was widely known in the gadol’s lifetime and he didn’t try to suppress it, why are we second-guessing him? Are we afraid to step out of our frum conformist vision? Is this really what the gadol would have wanted?
So give us little incidents of informality, vignettes that show a sense of humor, or some innocent idiosyncrasy (that was acceptable in his time) – all of which will bring the great personality to life. Tell us that, despite reading a newspaper or smoking a pipe, the gadol spent hours listening to some unfortunate’s maunderings or davened intensely for a seemingly hopeless situation – and rectified it. How he had a fondness for pickled herring but gave his last kopek away to a poor woman and went without herring one week.
Give us more stories like the one of the Chofetz Chaim who as a child did something wrong because “everybody else did it” and then had charata and actually did something to fix what he had done. Doesn’t that encourage us not to go along with the crowd mindlessly? And to think about others? And to do teshuvah?
When one over-sanitizes biographies, one risks losing their potential to inspire contemporary readers. So please! Give us biographies about real-life gedolim (and their rebbitzens) who achieved greatness while dealing with the same yetzer haras we have, who grew up with baseball and bicycles, who preferred playing to learning, who had difficulties in school (or getting into one).
Those are the heroes we need!
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You’re Not Supposed To Relate; You’re Supposed To Be Inspired
By D. Breines
Why do we write biographies of gedolei Yisrael? There are plenty of reasons. For historical perspective. To give the public positive reading material. To provide great stories for the Shabbos table.
But the overarching reason for writing – and reading – biographies of gedolei Yisrael is to be inspired by greatness. And when we tarnish greatness, we exponentially reduce its power to inspire.
Some say contemporary biographies of Torah giants are one-dimensional. They’re unbelievable. We don’t see the whole person. We don’t see their internal struggles. We need to know about their flaws, their mistakes, their failures.
Actually, we don’t.
The term “gadol b’Yisrael” implies that the person was so much greater than we are that seeing the whole person is virtually impossible from our perspective. A gadol isn’t simply someone who has spent an inordinate amount of time studying Torah. A gadol is someone who has made it his life’s work to perfect himself, to expand his definition of himself to include every single Jew possible, and to become as close to Hashem as humanly possible.
And a gadol not only achieves what he sets out to do, but is rewarded with knowledge above and beyond what he has actually learned.
So when we try to bring gedolim down to our level to feel connected to them – when we think we need to know their flaws to be able to relate to them – what we’re really doing is missing the point. We’re not meant to relate to gedolei Yisrael. We’re supposed to follow and emulate them.
No musician who studies Beethoven, lehavdil, can relate to the musical genius that enabled him to compose his Ninth Symphony or the Emperor Concerto while deaf. But that doesn’t stop musicians from studying Beethoven.
We don’t need to make gedolei Yisrael relatable. We read about their lives so we can get a glimpse of the potential of the human spirit. It doesn’t mean we need to reach their heights. But we need to aim high.
So it’s okay for us to feel the gedolim were unbelievable – because they truly were. Rav Aharon Rokeach, zt”l, the previous Belzer Rebbe, would on occasion tell his gabbai to “go outside and tell everyone to go home.” The gabbai would open the door and see… nobody. But he knew enough to tell everyone he couldn’t see that they should go home – because if the Rebbe said they were there, they were there.
This story is truly unbelievable, but it gives us a glimpse of a person who lived in an entirely different sphere, on a level of holiness and spirituality that few, if any, of us will ever attain.
The point of these biographies isn’t for us to attain the level of the gedolim. It’s for us to be inspired by them. The Belzer Rebbe’s dedication and attention to every single Jew who came to him can give us pause: If someone so lofty, so seemingly removed from this world, could still give his undivided attention and love to every single Jew, maybe I’m capable of giving a little bit more to the people who need me. Maybe I’m not as busy as I thought I was.
The Belzer Rebbe’s contemporaries testified that he never sinned. But even if he had, what would writing about that accomplish? As Rabbi Nachman Seltzer, an author and biographer, has said, “These are people who worked on themselves their entire lives. They killed themselves in the tents of Torah. And so now I should go and find the one flaw they didn’t manage to overcome? Why? And who am I to make that kind of decision?”
Biographies of gedolei Yisrael aren’t novels. They are portraits of greatness, meant for us to get an idea of who these men were, to taste what being in their proximity might have been like. Rabbi Shimon Finkelman, a prolific biographer, relates that the Chazon Ish, zt”l, regarded stories of gedolei Yisrael as mussar sefarim. They can and should be enjoyable reads, but, above all, we’re supposed to learn from them.
And countless people do. Rabbi Finkelman relates that when he interviewed Rav Dovid Feinstein, zt”l, for the 25th anniversary edition of Rav Moshe Feinstein’s biography, Reb Dovid told him the following story:
A stranger once came to my office at Mesivta Tifereth Jerusalem and told me that he had become a ba’al teshuvah from reading the original “Reb Moshe” book. He had received it from the yeshivah in a mass mailing. He said, “When I finished the book, I said to myself, ‘This is what a human being should be; I’m not a human being.’ So I became a ba’al teshuvah.”
This man had never seen Reb Moshe or any other gadol. He had never learned Torah. For him, that biography must certainly have been unbelievable. But it was precisely that “unbelievable” element – it was precisely reading about someone who was so obviously not like you and me – that inspired him to become something more than he was.
That’s the point of reading about gedolim. It’s not only to come away with an appreciation of them, although that’s a worthy goal too. It’s to come away with an appreciation of what a Jew can become, and to use that appreciation to become better Jews ourselves.