“In the Way that They Grow”: An Old-New Approach to Building a Community of <em>Mitzvot</em> and Obligation
Guy Austrian
Credit: Kurt Hoffman, Shutterstock
Guy Austrian is rabbi and spiritual leader of the Fort Tryon Jewish Center in Washington Heights, New York.
I didn’t grow up with traditional observance in the sense of keeping Shabbat or kashrut, or participating in regular prayer, so when I started exploring observance as an adult, I had to grow into it. Along the way, I always had a nagging voice in my head saying, “All or nothing. If it’s obligatory, then you have to do it all, and until you do, you’re failing. Dive in all the way, all at once, or don’t bother.”
Having grown into it to the extent of having become a congregational rabbi, I now see similar dynamics with people in the community that I serve. Our shul’s “independent traditional egalitarian” ethos means that we have a culture of observance within a holistic halakhic framework. Yet as a decades-old shul in a local neighborhood, plenty of members have joined for reasons that are local and personal, not philosophical or ideological. The private and home-based observance of our members varies widely from quite liberal to quite traditional, and their Jewish educational backgrounds span from nearly nothing to advanced degrees in Jewish Studies. Some were raised with little education and are slowly building up a base of knowledge and practice. Others grew up in traditional communities but have passed through periods of disillusionment, searching, and experimentation while reconstructing a new normal for their Jewish lives as adults.
As a community, we teach and value a thick and rich observance of mitzvot over non-observance, and our institutional policies and communal spaces often reflect traditional stringencies. Yet we also affirm the equal respect due to every member at wherever they may be in their life’s journey of relating to Jewish practice. We treat the diversity of our members’ own practice not as an unfortunate reality but as a positive strength of the community.
What is the Jewish basis for an approach that respects such a wide range of individual practice? Relating to all people with dignity and without causing embarrassment are certainly Jewish values. And it is empirically true that all Jews are on a journey in their personal religious lives. Yet over the last few years, I’ve been searching for a satisfying approach, one grounded in traditional Jewish sources, to reconcile a commitment to total obligation with a reality of partial fulfillment of those obligations. Below, I’ll outline some of the options, ending with the Talmudic idea of derekh gedilatan, “the way that they grow,” which is the orientation I’ve come to embrace as I serve my community, and which I hope can serve others as well.
When we think about obligation in the modern era, I find that we are caught between two sides of the conventional rabbinic model of the covenant at Sinai. In the first part of this paradigm, the people stand at the base of Mount Sinai, while God holds the mountain over their heads and warns that if they do not accept the Torah, the mountain will be their grave. The people reply, na’aseh venishma, “we will do and obey” (Ex. 24:7). As one rabbi in the passage notes, this means that obligation is coerced, and therefore its fulfillment is suspect.
In the sequel to this episode, generations later in the time of Queen Esther, the Jewish people turn the mountain upside down with the phrase kiyemu vekibelu, “they established and accepted” (Esther 9:27), voluntarily taking upon themselves the obligations of the covenant (bShabbat 88a).
While the difference between being coerced into the covenant and volunteering for it has moral significance, the obligation is total and binding either way. Strictly speaking, any degree of incomplete observance puts the individual Jew in default for failing to live up their commitment and obligation. Though inevitable, this failure can generate feelings of guilt and inadequacy in Jews who grow up in traditionally observant communities. It can afflict gerim (converts to Judaism), baalei teshuvah (those new or returning to traditional practice), and others—including those with socially marginalized identities—who enter the slow process of learning or reclaiming a share in Torah observance. It also complicates the work of rabbis and teachers who engage in kiruv (outreach) to help Jews gradually adopt an observant way of life.
One modern response to this quandary, taking a more fundamentalist approach, has been to urge such Jews to plunge fully into an insular community of intense and totalizing compliance. But this kind of shock treatment can cut people off from their previous family and friends and community in harmful or unhealthy ways. It can also make a person’s hastily constructed observance so unstable that it crashes before too long.
Another modern response, this one taking a more liberal approach, has been to release the modern individual from the halakhic system, making a virtue and a principle out of the practical reality that each person has autonomy to choose which mitzvot to observe and which to disregard. But by undermining obligation and isolating some mitzvot from the rest, this approach can leave individual Jews without the spiritual discipline and opportunity to see each practice through to its full potential effect in their lives, including how it interacts with other parts of an integrated system of spiritual practice that is developed and lived out by a supportive community of practitioners.
What is left, then, for those who do understand the covenant of Torah and mitzvot as a unitary whole, with practices and prohibitions that interact in a living community to create a beautiful and cherished religious system? Where does it leave us if we believe that halakhah does have a claim even on those who do not currently fulfill every mitzvah in all of its details, yet we also remain enthusiastically engaged with general society, and we recognize and respect how long it can take both to learn traditional Jewish observance and to integrate it in a healthy way with modern life? How should such Jews understand the partial fulfillment of observance, whether their own or someone else’s? How do we build and sustain committed halakhic communities of mixed observance?
Some have suggested recourse to the notion of tinok shenishbah bein hagoyim, a term in halakhah for Jews who were “captured as babes and raised among gentiles” and thus never properly learned to observe mitzvot (bShabbat 68a; Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Mamrim 3:3). This category offers traditionally halakhic Jews a way to excuse fellow Jews from punishment or ostracism, and it has been valuable to an extent in helping to facilitate coexistence in local and national Jewish communities. But because it pities Jews for not knowing better, it is inevitably patronizing at best. At its worst, it can be stigmatizing, because the reality is that many modern Jews do know differently and still make choices that traditional Jews have no way to countenance.
Many have embraced a more positive approach as found in the aspiration of the philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, who reportedly responded to the question of whether he practiced a particular mitzvah with the words “not yet.” The power of “not yet” is that it both rejects shame and declines to indulge in defiance. It offers instead a potent mix of candor and longing. It admits to falling short, while yearning for completion. Although its tone can be sheepish, its orientation is hopeful. It also serves learners well by cultivating a spirit of possibility and desire as they continue forward on their path.
However, Rosenzweig’s “not yet” has a certain weakness in that it lacks a clear referent in the Torah tradition. He makes an effort in this direction by naming his famous essay, “The Builders,” after a Talmudic passage from Berakhot 64a that serves as the essay’s epigraph: “‘And all your children shall be learned of Hashem, and great shall be the peace of your children (banayich)’ (Isa. 54:13). Do not read banayich, your children, but rather bonayich, your builders.”
In the Babylonian Talmud, this passage means that Torah learning contributes to peace in the world, because those who learn Torah become peacebuilders. Rosenzweig takes it homiletically to refer to an expansive vision of Jewish law and teaching and of how this approach will build up the realm of what is considered Jewish about a modern Jewish life. He calls for the modern Jew to regard halakhah not with a traditionalist’s sense of legal obligation but rather with an internalized sense of being directly addressed by the commandments: “We have only to be sons, in order to become builders.”
Critical as this sort of “building” may be, it doesn’t quite amount to an understanding or justification for a person’s partial and unfulfilled observance of mitzvot. “Not yet” seems to be grounded more in the imperfect exigencies of an individual’s modern life, and not in terms of the Torah tradition itself.
I want to suggest that such a grounding may be found elsewhere in the Talmud, in a dramatic teaching from Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai:
כׇּל הַמִּצְוֹת כּוּלָּן, אֵין אָדָם יוֹצֵא בָּהֶן אֶלָּא דֶּרֶךְ גְּדִילָתָן “All the mitzvot, all of them, a person does not fulfill these obligations except in the way that they grow, derekh gedilatan” (bSukkah 45b). After tracing the context of this proposition, we can begin to see the possibilities that it offers for Jewish life and learning.
This teaching has its roots in Exodus 26:15: וְעָשִׂיתָ אֶת־הַקְּרָשִׁים לַמִּשְׁכָּן, עֲצֵי שִׁטִּים עֹמְדִים “You shall make the planks for the Mishkan [out of] acacia wood, standing.” The phrase atzei shitim omdim is well-translated as “acacia wood, standing,” but the plural word atzei suggests “acacia trees, standing.” That is, the verse indicates not only the material for the planks, but also their origin as actual trees that stood upright.
Elsewhere in the Talmud, Rabbi Chama son of Rabbi Chanina quotes the verse, and explains: שֶׁעוֹמְדִים דֶּרֶךְ גְּדִילָתָן, “that they stand in the way that they grow” (bYoma 72a). As Rashi comments on that page: הַתַּחְתּוֹן לְמַטָּה וְהָעֶלְיוֹן לְמַעְלָה, “the lower part down, and the upper part up.” In other words, the planks of the Mishkan stand upright, with the wood aligned as it grew on the tree, from down to up.
In bSukkah 45b, during a conversation about the proper fulfillment of the mitzvah of arba minim, the lulav and etrog with myrtles and willows, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai builds on Rabbi Chama’s exegesis, taking it to a new level:
Chizkiyah said, Rabbi Yirmiyah said, in the name of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai: All the mitzvot, all of them—a person cannot fulfill these obligations except derekh gedilatan, in the way that they grow. As it says: “acacia wood, standing” (Exod. 26:15). So too it was taught (in bYoma 72a): “acacia wood, standing”—that they stand in the way that they grow.
To what mitzvot is Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai referring? Rashi takes a minimalist approach, explaining: “All the mitzvot—such as the planks of the Mishkan and its posts, and the lulav, myrtle, and willow.” In other words, just like the planks of the Mishkan stood upright as the wood grew on the tree, so too, we hold the arba minim in the way that each plant grows: the palm, myrtles, and willows with their tips pointing upward, and the etrog with its stem in and the pitom pointing away, just as it grows out from its tree branch. Many other commentators follow Rashi’s explanation and examples.
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But something is missing here. Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai said: “All the mitzvot, all of them”! This is the same Rashbi of some of our most fantastical midrashim, and to whom the authorship of the Zohar was traditionally attributed! We ought to read him as expansively as his words suggest.
Yet it seems that for centuries, no one in the rabbinic tradition took up this invitation, this “all.” The Sefat Emet (Yehudah Leib Alter of Ger), writing in the late 1800s, noticed the phrase but found it perplexing, writing in his commentary on the Talmud, “but we have to investigate how we know that this applies to all the mitzvot” (bSukkah 45b). The comment indicates that he knew of no prior interpretations.
It was his contemporary, the Baghdadi scholar known as the Ben Ish Chai (Chacham Yosef Chayim) who seems at last to have elaborated on Rashbi’s teaching. He offered two different interpretations, a few years apart, in both cases expressing that he was not aware of anything prior by presenting his comment as an idea that came to him besiata dishmaya, “with the help of heaven.”
First, in his Talmudic commentary Ben Yehoyada on bSukkah 45b, published in 1900, the Ben Ish Chai recalls a mystical teaching that the four letters of the word מִצְוָה (mitzvah) refer indirectly to four steps in the sequence of performing one: thought, intention, speech, and action.
“A person needs to manifest the wholeness of the mitzvah (sheleimut hamitzvah),” he writes, by first forming the thought and the intention to do so, then speaking the blessing for it, and finally performing the action. In other words, this is the way in which a mitzvah grows within us and emerges from us, and this is how we must perform it, sequentially, in order truly to fulfill the obligation.
A few years later, the Ben Ish Chai returned to Rashbi’s words in a second compilation of his comments on the Talmud, Benayahu, published in 1905:
With this, we resolve the words of this teaching. Every item with which a mitzvah is done, we hold it derekh gedilato, in the way that it grows, i.e., when it was planted in the earth, to hint that a mitzvah needs to resemble a tree that is planted and remains established in its power and strength. So too, a mitzvah needs to remain established in its power and strength from start to finish, to be done with full kavanah and with great and strong enthusiasm (hitlahavut), so that it does not just ebb and dissipate in the person who does it, from beginning to end.
In these two passages, the Ben Ish Chai points toward two options for understanding how all mitzvot could be considered derekh gedilatan. First, he suggests that derekh gedilatan refers to the way that they grow from within our consciousness and emerge into the world of action: from thought to intention to speech to act. In the second teaching, derekh gedilatan refers to the way that mitzvot should be rooted in the life force of our intentionality, like a tree still connected to its roots, so that we do not waver in their performance or let them fall away as dead and meaningless gestures.
These readings track with a crucial aspect of Rashbi’s thought more generally: in the great debate about whether a mitzvah must be performed with proper intention in order to fulfill the obligation, he holds that it must. He exempts people from transgressions that they did not intend (bSanhedrin 79a), and does not give credit for good deeds done with false or malicious intent (bShabbat 33b). The essential thing for Rashbi is the inner mindset. (See bPesachim 25b: “Rabbi Shimon goes according to kavanah.”)
With emphasis on kavanah, we find that Rashbi’s approach can provide a foundation for Rosenzweig’s “not yet.” In “The Builders,” Rosenzweig takes up Martin Buber’s notion of “inner power” and applies it to halakhah, arguing that halakhah needs to be transformed from an inert corpus of law into a “living reality.” If we understand “inner power” here as a cognate term for kavanah, then we can read Rosenzweig as providing a robust understanding of personal intention as not merely “will,” but as “ability”—a spirit of feeling personally commanded and addressed by a mitzvah such that a person not only can act upon it but actually will. Kavanah becomes a principle of selection whereby certain mitzvot emerge for a person from the entirety of halakhah as the ones which that person can do with intention and integrity. “The Law is built on such commandments,” Rosenzweig concludes in his essay, “and only on them. The growth of the Law is thus entrusted once again to our loving care.”
From the context of Rashbi’s thought, with the elucidations by the Ben Ish Chai and Rosenzweig, derekh gedilatan as a principle speaks both to the need for personal kavanah and to the organic development of personal integrity as a practicing Jew.
The aspect of personal integrity is taken up in another teaching about the planks of the Mishkan, those beams of acacia wood that were supposed to stand in the way that they grew. Rabbi Moshe Chaim Ephraim of Sudlikov, in his 18th century Degel Machaneh Ephraim, cites a saying which he heard from his grandfather, the Ba’al Shem Tov: “כִּי קֶרֶשׁ הוּא אָדָם, the plank is a human being.”
He points out that the word for plank, קֶרֶשׁ (keresh), is an anagram for two other words. One such word is קֶשֶׁר (kesher, connection). In doing a mitzvah, our intention is to become more connected to the Holy Blessed One. The other anagram is שֶׁקֶר (sheker, falsehood). A mitzvah done with improper intention is a lie. This suggests that our charge is to build the Mishkan not simply of kerashim (planks), and certainly not from shekarim (lies), but rather to build it of kesharim (connections). An entire edifice, the entire Mishkan, is built for the purpose of connecting humans and the divine (Degel Machaneh Ephraim, Terumah).
In other words, we ourselves are the planks of the Mishkan. It’s we who need to be standing “in the way that we grow” in order to fulfill a mitzvah with the proper kavanah and motivation, and in order to construct ourselves as a container for the Divine Presence.
Some would say that a person needs to build the entire Mishkan in order to serve God: to observe all of the interlocking mitzvot, fitting perfectly together, each one in its finished form, precise in every detail, all at once.
But Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai’s principle of derekh gedilatan tells us that although the ideal form of the entire edifice has been laid out before us, we can only truly take our place within it if we fulfill our obligations as we grow into them. We must learn how to practice them derekh gedilatan, in the way that they grow, and in the way that we grow. The mitzvot need to be rooted within us organically, and to emerge from within us authentically, always connected to our own inner life force and life experience. Na’aseh venishmah, then, comes to mean not the coercive “we will do and obey,” but rather, “in the process of our doing, we will come to understand.”
We may also say that derekh gedilatan refers to the way that the mitzvot themselves continue to grow and develop over time, in response to new situations and new human beings, as part of the ongoing conversation of Oral Torah, of halakhah and aggadah in the praxis of the Jewish people.
Some of this growth has come from the impact of feminism and from a wider understanding of gender identity, sexual orientation, mental health, power, and authority, which are influencing emerging halakhah in areas as diverse as prayer, speech, fasting, and marital relations. Yet derekh gedilatan also invites us to ask how to grow into mitzvot that may seem less dramatic and more mundane. What would it mean to give tzedakah “in the way that it grows”? What would it mean to observe kashrut “in the way that it grows”? Or to return lost objects, to study Torah, or to fulfill any other mitzvah?
All this is the work of a lifetime, whether we are new to Jewish practice or already have a fairly robust observance. None of us were born with a silver Shulchan Aruch in our mouths! Each of us has room to grow in observance, thank God. Each of us has areas of practice that we don’t fully understand, or that we aren’t yet able to observe with true intention and subtle discernment.
This truth needn’t be a cause for disappointment and despair. Nor can it be an excuse to be stagnant and complacent about our current observance. Rashbi does not offer us permission to fall into either stance.
The concept of derekh gedilatan offers us Jewish language and a Jewish conceptual framework for the possibility that growing into observance is neither a failure nor a deferral, but in fact an authentic and valid way of fulfilling mitzvot. It offers an affirmation of growth and integrity, rooted in the soil of Torah and bearing fruit in varied and plentiful expressions of Jewish life and practice.
When we live into the approach of derekh gedilatan—taking on the practice of mitzvot as they grow, as we grow into them, and as we grow into ourselves—we are, in fact, like the planks of the Mishkan, standing upright. We are, in fact, building the Mishkan of our Jewish lives.
The origin of this teaching in the Mishkan points us to the necessary context for this kind of individual growth: community. It is in community that individuals learn and experience the how and the why of spiritual practice. Regardless of our own learning or observance, we all learn from one another. We encounter mitzvot that we hadn’t yet considered, or different ways of practicing the ones that we do. We hear new perspectives on Torah and mitzvot from people whose life experiences differ from our own. We inspire, challenge, and encourage one another in equal measure.
This is why a diversity of education, observance, and religious perspective can be a strength for a spiritual community, even when it collectively values a full and holistic observance of Torah and mitzvot. In such a community, every point along an individual’s Jewish journey is worthy of respect, so long as they are in fact on a journey. The privilege and pleasure of being part of such a community is the opportunity to accompany one another along the way, growing as we go.
