By Janis Siegel, JTNews Correspondent
The whole world, it seems, wants to bring light into the night during the dark winter months.
But a weekend of mystical Jewish light will infuse the Northwest when Torah scholar and Kabbalah teacher Rabbi Shlomo Yaffe joins the Chabad-Lubavitch community for several events around the greater Seattle area, including a tribute to longtime Jewish educator Esther Morhaime.
Morhaime has been teaching at the Menachem Mendel Seattle Cheder since 2000, after decades of teaching at the Seattle Hebrew Academy.
“The teaching of Jewish children is what has carried the Jewish people all these years,” said Rabbi Yosef Charytan, the principal of MMSC for the last four years. “On a daily basis, when you walk into the classroom, seeing the light bulb go on in a child’s mind is the greatest reward of being an educator. It lies at the core.”
MMSC is a dual-curriculum day school open to all Jewish girl and boys. They have 100 students enrolled this year. In early December, Morhaime will be lauded as a “lamplighter.”
In the classic Chassidic tale, passed on by the late Chabad Lubavitch leader Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, lamplighters would travel anywhere and everywhere each evening to light the street lamps in a town, no matter how difficult the terrain.
“She’s just a wonderful teacher,” said Tziviah Goldberg, an MMSC Day School board member. “She’s an amazing ball of energy. She exudes this energy that is unflappable.”
Rabbi Yaffe will speak at Chabad of the Central Cascades in Issaquah on Dec. 1 before he honors Morhaime at the University District Chabad the next day.
“He’s globalizing the Chabad education,” said Goldberg.
Yaffe, creator of the Leeds Open Yeshiva in England, is also the founder and director of the Institute for Jewish Literacy at Chabad of Greater Hartford, Conn. and the rabbi for Congregation Agudas Achim there.
Speaking with the JTNews from his home in Hartford, Rabbi Yaffe said his message is that we must all focus on the same goal— unity.
“Each of us must make a renewed commitment to our oneness,” said Yaffe, whose topic in Issaquah will be “Where Goes the World? Fear and Hope in the Era of SARS and Terrorism.” The talk will target the unease that many feel in the face of a number of dangerous global threats.
“Judaism doesn’t believe in dichotomies,” he said. “The power of good is intrinsically more real than evil. Darkness is not a separate identity. Once you know that, then you know it can be overcome.
“When we see more darkness, we must look in the mirror,” Yaffe continued. “On a very profound level, the good that we do can make a difference. History shows us the incredible difference an individual can make. No one’s work is more important than another’s.”
In addition to founding a Kabbalah Circle and the Women’s Intensive Textual/Torah Study Program, Yaffe lectures around the world. His talks integrate Jewish mysticism with more down-to-earth concepts in the areas of science, religion, history, and law.
His deep appreciation for science includes a worldview that in all of nature and even in the scientific method, God is not only present but is revealed.
“Nature is just another way that God expresses itself,” said Yaffe. “Every drop of rain, every leaf growing is a quintessential expression of God.”
Yaffe believes that public education and its reliance on scientism, as opposed to science, is a force that seeks to eliminate the idea of God — and is ultimately dangerous.
“The hubris of the scientific community is that we can manipulate science at will and that you can replace the laws of God,” said Yaffe. “Science is just another way of knowing God — knowing his handiwork.”
A child of Holocaust survivors, Yaffe’s love of history was framed by the stories his parents shared with him.
The lessons he learned about scientism and the Nazi era resonate within him today.
“Without an absolute being, it’s very easy to justify the worst things,” he said.
Ultimately, it is Jewish education and Jewish teachers that have sustained the Jewish people over the years, said MMSC’s Charytan. They play a vital role, he said, in sustaining and strengthening Jewish life.
“When people are educated in a Jewish day school,” he said, “they feel more of a connection to Judaism. We’re really building a community through the school.”