BackTo Be in the World
By: Rabbi Dr. Abraham Unger
Religion is often viewed as a restrictive approach to life. It implies limitations on our involvement in the physical world around us to direct us towards a spiritual path. However, that kind of monasticism is not the Jewish way.
In this week’s Torah portion, we are told the laws of the Nazir, a person who voluntarily withdraws from much of the physical world. One might at first think that lifestyle is the most favored in the eyes of G-d. Judaism differs.
While the Rabbis of the Talmud do allow for those who take a vow of refraining from the world around us, they do so with a grain of salt. The noted Israeli yeshiva Kerem B’Yavneh has published that “as a way of serving Hashem [G-d], nezirut [withdrawal] is something negative, because the ideal is that a person should sanctify the mundane, and not live in a manner of abstention and separation from the material world.”
Rabbi Dr. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, the foremost theologian of American Modern Orthodoxy, wrote that the Adam of Genesis is one who conquers nature by furthering the technological and developmental progress of humankind.
I repeatedly tell my sons, “Go out into the world, and take your Torah with you.”