I heard a comment from a formerly frum woman that the most troublesome part of Orthodox Judaism for her was tefillah. She said that she watched in jealousy and confusion as the other girls wept into their siddurim.
The comment doesn’t surprise me. It has been my observation that parents and schools generally fail to teach children about Hashem, about G-d. And what is tefillah if not talking to Hashem? If you have no sense of who you are talking to, there’s not much point in talking.
While Chumash and Gemara are designed to connect us to Hashem, they don’t necessarily readily talk about Him. In my observation, most of Chumash discusses klal Yisroel -- first the Avos and Imahos and later their descendants -- the incidents in their lives, and mitzvos.
What about G-d? He makes appearances but not necessarily flattering ones at first blush. He comes across as punishing. Always punishing. Angry. And Klal Yisrael seems to be failing all the time. They don’t come across in a flattering way either.
Yet, the Avos come across well. So what happened to the kids?
And, if you read Tehillim, you hear about G-d’s compassion and love. You hear about His incredible abilities, His power, His creativity, His wisdom. It’s confusing. Are we good or bad? Is G-d kindly or mean?
Well actually, many of the best questions from the Torah start exactly this way - reconciliation between ideas that seem to conflict. And so it goes, that the Chumash can be read in the spirit of Tehillim, should be read this way. And that’s where teachers come in. They have to explain, as Rabbi Avigdor Miller did, that the generation of the desert was the greatest of all societies. Their sins are magnified. If one person sins a little, the Chumash will say, “You are a faithless people.” It’s like a football coach calling his players old ladies. Of course, they are not old ladies. They are athletes and very tough ones. The coach is trying to motivate them. That’s what G-d is doing. He is loving and caring, just like it says in Tehillim.
The Chumash is the word of G-d. And G-d is humble, so He doesn’t talk all about Himself. He doesn’t brag. He is like a parent who talks about his kids. He is so proud of his kids, so concerned with his kids. Dovid the King and a few others wrote Tehillim. So there, the topic is Hashem. He talks about us and we talk about Him.
All of this needs to be explained. There are many basics of Judaism that need repeated explanation. In my experience, this rarely happens. Most people are caught up in the details and don’t know how to give the big picture. I wonder if many of them even possess the big picture. I suspect that many are frum because they were raised that way. It’s like an American playing softball in the park and eating hotdogs. It’s how he grew up.
Arguably, people today are very weak in faith. This could explain why so many really are just not nice people. I’m sorry to say it. As it says in shir ha-shirim, the bride has a blackened face. And people who are not nice are not people from whom you want to learn Torah. What some do is read the Chumash straight, without the explanation, relishing in the harshness of it. They beat you up with portrayals of G-d’s harshness. They enjoy terrifying you. But their task was to do the opposite, it was to fill you with feelings of warm faith. That’s the difference between a reader and a teacher. The former just reads the book to you -- which is what goes on in many shiurim -- and the latter explains.
The Gemara originally was only oral. Part of the reason for that was to foster a connection with teachers who explained. The Gemara certainly needs explanation and in that way is still oral. It speaks in an abbreviated way. Like the Chumash it mentions Hashem but explanation is quite necessary. Few teachers can explain the aggadata. And that’s tragic because the halachic portions connect us to Hashem but that only works if you know there is an Hashem. And knowing doesn’t just mean in a general sense. You get the idea, sort of. It means full intellectual understanding such that you can talk about it for hours. It means feeling, conscious feeling. It means actions that are built on these thoughts and feelings. It takes years if you work hard at it. Otherwise, it takes eternity. But we don’t have eternity for this task. We have 120 years maximum.
In my view, the schools succeed at many things but perhaps not in the most important thing which is teaching emunah and bitachon, teaching about Hashem Himself. With schools for BTs, this is most tragic because BTs will not stay frum out of the habit of youth, which is how most FFBs do it. BTs need to be taught the basics, which is different than being taught how to be a scholar, which is what the schools try to do.
