Rabbi Joseph Telushkin spent the weekend at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles as the annual Abner & Rozlyn Goldstine Scholar. In his concluding address, before more than 300 people, he spoke on “The Ethics of Speech: How to Use Words Wisely and Fairly.”
Here is my introduction (a more detailed biography is here and a list of his 15 books is here):
Earlier this year, I received a small object lesson about using words wisely, ironically while I was reading Rabbi Telushkin’s monumental new book [“A Code of Jewish Ethics: You Shall Be Holy”]. I came across a point I thought was particularly insightful — that the way to do unto others the way you would have them do unto you is to tell them the truth, rather than simply what you think they might want to hear. You would be doing them the favor that you yourself would want in that same situation.
I thought that was a particularly interesting application of a general principle we all know but don’t always know how to apply, and I stopped reading the book to tell my wife Judy about it. And she looked over at me, lowered her own book, and said: “Well, I have one question for you — does this dress make my butt look big?”
I would have been a little better prepared for that discussion if I had read a lot further into Rabbi Telushkin’s book, because later on he devotes more than 50 pages to a section entitled “Truth, Lies, and Permitted Lies.” It is a vastly more intricate subject than I had thought, and had I read the entire book, I might not have had my simplistic understanding of it punctured by a single, well-placed rhetorical question.
And that is what you learn from reading his entire book — that there are principles, applications, considerations, sensitivities, and knowledge necessary to be an ethical person in the Jewish tradition, that it requires almost a lifetime of Jewish learning, and that a lifetime of learning is what you possess when you hold Rabbi Telushkin’s book in your hand.
And that would be enough — but in fact, it is even more than that: it is the first major code of Jewish ethics to be written in English, compiling 3,000 years of Jewish wisdom. He draws on the Torah, the Prophets, the Talmud, medieval codes of Jewish law, contemporary Jewish scholars, popular writers, his friends and family, and others.
I want to give you just one brief example of his methodology. He begins his chapter on “Reducing Envy” by urging us to accept that “a certain level of envy is natural, and cannot be entirely eliminated” — that the Talmud itself warns that “if you try to grasp everything, you will grasp nothing.” So it cannot be wholly eliminated.
And then he illustrates his point about the eradicability of envy with a story from Sholom Aleichem, who wrote that whenever he went out to the market and did well, selling everything at a good profit, and returning with his pockets full of money, he never failed to tell his neighbors he had lost every cent and was a ruined man. That way, he said, he was happy, and his neighbors were happy too.
And then Rabbi Telushkin notes an insight about envy from his mother — that the only people she knows who are happy are people she doesn’t know well — and he concludes with some practical advice: If you are going to envy the success of others, consider whether you would be willing to assume their problems as well.
So here is what he has done: in just a few pages, he took some precepts from the Talmud, and joined them to a story from a modern Jewish writer, and linked both of them to an insight from his own mother, and then created a rule of thumb for us that puts envy into its proper place.
We often say that we stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before us, but you cannot go more than one chapter into Rabbi Telushkin’s book without realizing that what he has done is in many ways more difficult than what his forbearers did, because he has taken so many more sources, so many more books, so many stories and writings, so many ancient and modern insights, and integrated them into a single text that is both scholarly and practical, and a pleasure to read.
A tradition, Leon Wieseltier has written, “is not reproduced. It is thrown, and it is caught. It lives a long time in the air.” What Rabbi Telushkin has done is put in our hands, and into the hands of future generations, a book that enables us to catch what might otherwise simply have fallen to the ground.
One day, because of this book, when a future generation looks back at the giants on whose shoulders they stand, he will be one of the giants they are referring to.
And so, due to the extraordinary generosity of Abner and Roz Goldstine, whose work, wisdom and wealth have been given so many times to this synagogue, and who are walking examples of many of the precepts in Rabbi Telushkin’s book, we are the beneficiary this morning of still another of the Goldstines’ many contributions to us — the chance to hear a giant in our midst: Rabbi Joseph Telushkin.
Rabbi Telushkin’s book is over to the right of this post, in the “Recommended Reading” Section. All the copies at Sinai Temple sold out yesterday. But you need only click on the icon at the right, and it will take you right to it.