When Piety Becomes the Minimum

I’ve recently been thinking of a phenomenon I have defined as piety creep: the process by which a practice associated with particular pious people becomes something that every ordinary religious Jew is expected to do.

Sometimes the starting point is quite particular. A certain person did something, for a certain reason, in a certain circumstance. Eventually, it becomes a practice of especially devout people. Then it becomes the practice of anyone who takes Judaism seriously. At some point, people barely remember that there was ever a distinction.

By pietistic practices, I also mean practices associated with mekubalimKabbalists: scholars and practitioners of Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition. and particular traditions of mystical devotion. I have in mind the way a specialized form of avodahDivine service: prayer and religious practice understood as serving God. can become an expectation of ordinary Jewish life, even for people who have little connection to the spiritual framework in which it makes sense. That is part of the concern here, particularly in prayer, alongside the other forms of personal piety discussed below.

I have no objection to piety. There are things we do because they help us develop a relationship with God, even though we aren’t strictly required to do them. That seems to me to be an important part of religious life. My concern is what happens when those practices become the minimum, and when failing to adopt them becomes evidence that someone doesn’t really care.

And this has a very practical consequence. When we fall short of that expanding minimum, we can end up feeling much worse about ourselves than we should. Understanding the distinctions ought to help us be a little kinder to ourselves.

From a particular person to everyone

Take the practice of Jewish men keeping their heads covered throughout the day.

The GemaraThe rabbis’ extended discussion of the Mishnah; together the two make up the Talmud. tells a story about the mother of Rav Nachman bar Yitzchak. Astrologers told her that her son would become a thief. She therefore made sure that he kept his head covered, telling him that it would help him have fear of Heaven, and that he should pray for mercy.¹

This is a story about a mother trying to help her particular child overcome a particular inclination. It isn’t presented there as a requirement that every Jewish man must keep his head covered all day.

There are other Talmudic references to head covering, of course. Rav Huna bar Rav Yehoshua’s care not to walk four amot bareheaded is another example. Significantly, the BachRabbi Yoel Sirkis (1561–1640), known by the acronym of his commentary on the Tur, Bayit Chadash. understands that conduct as middat chasidutA measure of piety: conduct beyond what the law requires, praised but not obligatory.: the Gemara singles out what this person did, rather than announcing a general prohibition.²

And then there is a history of how these practices came to be understood and incorporated into ordinary Jewish life. But describing that history doesn’t answer the question I’m raising. That history is the thing I’m talking about. How did an individual practice become an expectation of everyone? What happened to the distinction along the way?

TzitzitThe fringes the Torah requires on the corners of a four-cornered garment (Numbers 15:38). raises a related question. The Torah requires tzitzit on a qualifying four-cornered garment. Going out of your way to wear such a garment so that you can fulfill the mitzvah is an additional step.

The story of Rav Ketina and the angel in Menachot is often brought into this discussion. But there is a difference between arranging your clothing to avoid a mitzvah in a society where the relevant clothing is normal, and simply living in a society where people ordinarily wear shirts and pantss.

TosafotMedieval Talmud commentators of France and Germany (12th–14th centuries), printed alongside Rashi. makes precisely this distinction. In Moed Katan, they distinguish the earlier period, when four-cornered garments were ordinary dress, from their own period, when they were not. They still encourage seeking out the mitzvah. But encouragement to seek it out and criticism of avoiding an obligation are distinguishable things.³

That distinction matters even if we very much want people to wear tzitzit.

Anyone with a little Torah

Waiting six hours between meat and dairy provides a particularly revealing example within Ashkenazic practice.

There are different interpretations of the sugyaA self-contained passage or debate in the Talmud. and different halachicRelating to halacha, Jewish law as derived from the Written and Oral Torah. positions about the necessary interval. For the point I’m making here, though, look at the RemaRabbi Moshe Isserles (c. 1530–1572) of Kraków, whose glosses on the Shulchan Aruch record Ashkenazi practice.’s description of the practice in his own communities. He records one hour as the prevailing custom, under the conditions he specifies. He then says that some particularly careful people wait six hours, and that this is the proper thing to do.⁴

The ShachRabbi Shabsai HaKohen (1621–1662), whose commentary on the Shulchan Aruch is known by its acronym, Shach., citing MaharshalRabbi Shlomo Luria (1510–1574), Polish Talmudist and halachic authority., adds that this is appropriate for anyone who has reiach Torah—even a scent of Torah about him.⁵

That expression is revealing. There may still be a distinction on the page between the established custom and the recommended stringency. But once the stringency becomes a criterion of having any Torah about you, how much room is left to follow the less stringent practice without feeling that you are declaring something unfortunate about yourself?

An aspiration can become a social requirement before anyone formally calls it an obligation.

I’m not trying to establish that one sentence single-handedly explains the spread of six-hour waiting. I am interested in the kind of appeal it makes, and in how readily an additional practice becomes a test of whether someone is a serious Jew.

The growing siddur

Prayer is where I feel the problem most directly.

A siddurThe Jewish prayer book. gathers together prayers with different histories and different statuses. There are obligations, established communal practices, and additional devotional texts. On the printed page, and especially in the way we learn to use that page, those distinctions aren’t always clear. The next paragraph is there, so presumably we are supposed to say it too.

It is easy to accumulate things this way. Something is meaningful to someone, or recommended in a particular source, and it gets added. Over time, the experience of ordinary prayer becomes more extensive, while the person praying may have very little sense of which parts are required and which are opportunities for additional devotion.

The Shulchan AruchThe code of Jewish law by Rabbi Yosef Karo (1565), with the Rema’s Ashkenazi glosses. itself says that a little supplication with concentration is better than a great deal without it.⁶ But do we actually allow that principle to affect the way we teach people to pray?

Rav TzadokRabbi Tzadok HaKohen of Lublin (1823–1900), Hasidic thinker and author of Tzidkat HaTzadik. writes in Tzidkat HaTzadik, section 31:

אין להתפלל במקום שאפשר להתבלבל באמצע אלא תפלה קצרה שלא יתבלבל בה. כי טוב מעט בכונה מהרבות בלא כונה.

In my translation: one should not pray somewhere that one is liable to become distracted in the middle, but should offer a short prayer that will remain undisturbed. A little with concentration is better than much without it. He then extends the principle to other circumstances in which a person cannot maintain concentration throughout the prayer.⁷

What I take from this is that the quality of the prayer ought to determine how we approach its length. There is a positive value in recognizing what we can actually do properly.

But we seem to speak out of both sides of our mouths here. We tell someone that a little with kavanaConcentration and intention, especially in prayer. is better than a great deal without it. Then we explain how terribly important it is to say KorbanotPassages about the Temple offerings, recited at the start of the morning service., how important every part of Pesukei DeZimra“Verses of song”: the psalms and praises said before the core of the morning service. is, and how much depends on getting through the whole order of prayer. By the time we have finished explaining the importance of everything, what practical meaning does the original reassurance have?

The message received is that you should say less with more attention, provided you don’t actually leave anything out. You are allowed to recognize your limits in principle, but each particular limit turns out to be unacceptable.

The tension becomes sharper when the warning is expressed in mystical terms. If omitting something is presented as damaging the channels through which divine blessing flows—interfering, so to speak, with the plumbing of heaven—then we have attached enormous consequences to the very choice we seemed to allow. Telling someone to be kind to himself afterward won’t undo that. He has already been told that his ordinary limitations may have cosmic consequences.

If we mean that a little with kavana can be preferable, there have to be actual circumstances in which we are prepared to say what can be left out, and to stand behind that guidance without immediately making the person feel that he is doing something spiritually disastrous. Otherwise, we should admit that we haven’t given him much of a choice.

A level of sophistication we cannot simply assume

There is also a level of sophistication involved here that I don’t think ordinary expectations of observance adequately allow for.

A person immersed in a particular kabbalisticKabbalah: the Jewish mystical tradition, whose central text is the Zohar. tradition may have a framework for understanding claims about the spiritual effects of prayer: how the different passages fit together, what the language means, how the teachings relate to halachic obligation, and how they apply to different people and circumstances. You cannot assume that all of that understanding travels with a practice when it becomes an expectation of everyone.

What may travel much more easily is the frightening part: leave this out and something above goes wrong.

We then expect an ordinary person to reconcile several different kinds of teaching. He is supposed to distinguish halacha from minhagCustom: an established communal practice, which carries its own weight in Jewish law., minhag from personal piety, and a mystical account of a practice’s significance from a ruling that everyone must perform it. He is supposed to know when a statement is an aspiration, when it is addressed to someone at a particular spiritual level, and when it describes his own obligation on a Tuesday morning.

That is a considerable interpretive task. Yet the everyday standard of observance is often communicated as a simple expectation to do everything. We demand the practice universally while leaving the distinctions to people with the learning and confidence to work them out for themselves.

If sophisticated distinctions are necessary to keep the demands reasonable, those distinctions need to be part of what we teach. They cannot remain an explanation available only after someone has become overwhelmed.

And this is where being kind to yourself means more than forgiving yourself afterward for not getting through everything. If we keep adding prayers until we feel put out by the whole business, we should ask whether that is a good way to pray in the first place. We should be trying to give God the attention we can give, and to undertake additional prayer in a way that sustains that attention rather than turning it into resentment.

You’re not doing God a favor by praying. If an additional prayer helps you turn toward Him, that has value. If you are pushing through it resentfully because you assume that everything printed in the book must be completed, what exactly are you accomplishing?

There is something valuable about knowing that you can do a little properly. There is also something valuable about being able to choose to do more. Both become harder when the additional material is simply absorbed into the baseline.

Accumulating doubts

There is a related tendency that I think of as the LitvakA Lithuanian-style Jew; here, the analytical yeshiva tradition that came out of Lithuania. version of piety creep. You learn a sugya, work through the poskimHalachic decisors: the authorities whose rulings define practice., and develop a new point of doubt. To be yotzeiHaving fulfilled an obligation. To be yotzei by every opinion is to satisfy all of them. according to both possibilities, you incorporate another stringency.

Of course there are doubts that require us to be stringent. But we also have to ask whether we are resolving the halachic question or continually expanding the range of things we feel unable to permit. If every possible concern leaves behind a permanent additional requirement, the cumulative effect can become considerable.

I am not suggesting that identifying a practice’s origins automatically settles what we should do today. Customs have weight, and later halachic developments matter. But we should be able to explain those developments honestly, and preserve the distinctions that remain, rather than teaching everything as one undifferentiated package of what a Jew must do.

Be kind to yourself

What I’d like is a religious culture in which people understand what is required of them, understand their communal practices, and have room to develop their own avodah beyond that. But I also want that understanding to affect how we treat ourselves on an ordinary morning.

By being kind to yourself, I don’t mean that you should stop doing these things, become lax, or simply do whatever makes you feel good. Avodat Hashem involves commitment, discipline, and sometimes doing things we don’t particularly feel like doing. Additional practices can be deeply valuable, and there is good reason to make an effort to sustain them. The point is to understand what we are undertaking and why, and to respond proportionately when we fall short.

In prayer specifically, that discipline should help us become present to God. It should also help us recognize when adding more is making us resentful and less able to attend to what we are saying. Learning to do what we can properly is itself a serious task.

Someone might find a particular additional prayer deeply meaningful. Someone else might find that the best thing he can do is give more attention to the prayers he is already saying. Those are judgments about how to serve God, and they require some awareness of what we are doing and why.

Maybe you skipped parts of Pesukei DeZimra or Korbanot. Maybe you didn’t manage everything you hoped to do. Before turning that into a judgment about what sort of Jew you are, it helps to know what you actually left out, what its status is, and what you did manage to do.

The distinctions matter because they allow us to have some proportion. An omitted passage, a missed opportunity for additional devotion, and a failure to fulfill an obligation shouldn’t all produce the same undifferentiated feeling that we aren’t doing Judaism properly. And even when we have fallen short of an actual obligation, we can acknowledge that without making contempt for ourselves part of our avodah.

If you said less this morning, give some attention to what you did say. If you want to do more tomorrow, let that grow out of a desire to serve God rather than a conviction that whatever you manage will never be enough.

So be kind to yourself when you find yourself cutting corners (pun intended). There is room to take your avodah seriously and still recognize that you are a person with limited time, attention, and energy. The things you did manage to do don’t stop counting because there was more you could have done.