Why All Mishkaneers Should Be Amateurs

B"H

Before I go offline for Shabbos, I just want to whip out a cheer for all the Baaley T'shuvah -- whether you were born frum or not. :) I've been thinking a lot lately about a pattern that runs parallel between the Academy, the Arts, and Orthodoxy: the systemic denigration of amateurism and, therefore, of amateurs. A question I often get, with respect to my eclectic education, is "But what do you want to be?" I started wondering why my favorite answer is, "A professional amateur." So I went back to the etymology of the word, "amateur." It means, in essence, one who loves. Or, more to the point, one who does, or commits to something, out of love for it. It makes perfect sense, then: I want to be someone who acts and invests out of love, for my community, for Torah, for haShem. And I want to make home with a family and a community of others who do the same.

I heard said recently, by an unorthodox orthodox rabbi, that the gradual eclipse, in modern times, of various traditions of arranged marriage by marriage-for-love (see: Fiddler On the Roof) might actually represent an elevation, or a maturation, of the notion of marriage itself. It's not just selfishness or the latter-day rise of individualism and Ego; it's actually a sign that we're knitting the cosmos tighter and stepping that much closer to Moshiach. So if, as I tell my students, the bar or bat mitzvah simchah is really an arranged wedding, between the bar/bat mitzvah and Torah, then the "t'shuvah" in baal/at t'shuvah is an elective marriage of the same partners, for love. Where it is distinguished from lust -- no small feat, I know (and how many religious Jews have we seen come to Torah in lust? so many...) -- such love may actually be the realization of G!d's will. Therefore, submitting to true love, which is a major cultural struggle for religious Judaism in our time, could be one significant dimension of submission to the ultimate arranged marriage: that which is arranged by haShem.

If we can, B"H, bring our centuries' accretions of skill at maintaining and sanctifying arranged marriage, to the ascendent prospect of marriage-for-love (t'shuvah), then perhaps we can build a Mishkan entirely of Baaley T'shuvah.

If this is so, then the time has come for an evolutionary step in the definition of "Baal/at T'shuvah" itself -- away from the current Johnny-come-lately, someone who was a bad Jew and is now scrubbed up and with the program (so they're okay for padding shul membership or doing kiruv but we still don't want them dating our kids), and toward the more expansive holy ameteur, the Jew born secular, Reform, frum, or Christian, who has let go his parents' idols, electively stepped out of the narrows (mitzrayim), and accepted in his heart the perspective to know Torah from the outside, to know Torah from the inside, and to love its Words in utter dedication (laasoq b'divrey Torah). I think this should be a basic tenant of Mishkaneering itself, that it must be performed by a community of Baaley T'shuvah, so defined. And so may we be blessed, and bless ourselves, to tempt Shekhinah by taking whatever we've got as individuals, no matter our backgrounds, and invest it in the building of a Mishkan as it is right there in Sh'mot, the tent raised by a community of holy amateurs.

Shabbat shalom!