Find Yourself a Rav

Here’s a trick question: Who said in Ethics of the Fathers: ‘asay lecha rav‘ (find yourself a rabbi).

Answer: Two people!

Yehoshua ben Perachya said: “Find for yourself a teacher (rabbi), acquire for yourself a friend, and judge every person favorably.”

And Rabban Gamliel used to say: “Provide yourself with a teacher (rabbi), free yourself from doubt, and do not tithe excessively by guesswork.”

Doing what our rabbis tell us is an explicit torah commandment, de’ oraita. In Deuteronomy, it says: “You shall not deviate from what they tell you, to the right or the left”. Who is this ‘they’? It’s our spiritual guides and religious leaders.

We see this same idea reiterated in the Rambam’s 13 principles of faith. Number Six states: “I believe with complete faith that all the words of the prophets are true”. Until the Babylonian exile, G-d regularly communicated His wishes to the Jewish masses by way of the prophets. There were literally a million prophets in the Nation of Israel, and the best and holiest of them became, de facto, the spiritual leaders of the Jewish nation.

Moshe Rabbenu was a prophet; Samuel was a prophet; Isaiah, Jeremy, Ezekiel – they were all prophets, and all of them were the spiritual guides of their generation. But then, prophecy disappeared when the Men of the Great Assembly got together to destroy idol worship (it was the ‘good’ side of that terrible ‘bad’).

At that point, prayer was formalized into what we find in our prayer books today, and the spiritual leadership became ‘rabbinic’ as opposed to ‘prophetic’. But these holy rabbis still had some vestige of prophesy, albeit on a lower level, as the Artscroll commentary on Rambam’s principle Number Six explains:

“G-d communicates with man. In order for man to carry out his Divinely ordained mission, he must know what it is. Prophecy is the means by which G-d communicates His wishes to man. It’s a gift that man can attain upon reaching heights of self-perfection.”

If a person is committed to working on themselves, and committed to regularly talking to G-d for an hour a day, even Artscroll agrees that that person can achieve a level of ‘prophesy’, even if we’re just  regular Joe’s. But if we are holy rabbis, completely immersed in torah and spirituality, and talking to G-d for hours every day, then it stands to reason that our level of ‘prophecy’ – that is, knowing what G-d wants – will be even higher.

A lot of spiritual truth-seekers balk at the idea of having to subjugate their independent thinking to someone else. They tell themselves: “I’m just as good as any rabbi! What can he tell me, that I don’t already know?”

Let’s remind ourselves of what Rav Natan wrote in Likutey Etzot (translated into English as ‘Advice‘, by the Breslov Research Institute):

* “The only way to attain faith is truth…If you will only search for the truth with complete honesty, you will eventually realize that you must have faith in G-d, in the true tzadikim and in the holy Torah.

* “The only way to find truth is to draw closer to the tzaddikim and follow their guidance. Do not turn aside from their words either to the left or the right.”

Whether we like it or not, Judaism is a religion where the rabbis – the tzaddikim – make the reality. Take the birth control pill: if a couple is using birth control that’s been rabbinically sanctioned, all well and good. If not – that is, they simply decided for themselves, and didn’t get agreement from an orthodox rabbi – then they are literally committing the worst sin in the Torah of ‘wasted seed’, where the soul power of every ‘wasted’ sperm is directly feeding and creating the forces of evil in the world.

Even from the little we’ve written here, it’s clear that it’s crucially important for us Jews to have a rabbi who we regularly consult with, particularly when we ourselves aren’t clear about what G-d really wants from us. The spiritual consequences of deciding these ‘big’ issues on our own are simply ginormous.

So then, why don’t more of us have a rabbi? Why’s it so hard? What’s stopping us from finding a rabbi, or doing what they tell us? Send in your views to the comments section, and G-d willing next week, we’ll start to unpick what’s getting in the way of us finding – and listening to – a good, orthodox rabbi.