What We Inherit: Tzidkat HaTzaddik 62–63
My father and I were learning Literally “letters”: the numbered paragraphs of a book like Tzidkat HaTzaddik; singular os. in Tzidkat HaTzaddik (“The Righteousness of the Righteous”): Rav Tzadok’s book of short numbered teachings on spiritual life., where Rabbi Tzadok HaKohen of Lublin (1823–1900), Hasidic thinker and author of Tzidkat HaTzadik. talks about the qualities people inherit from their parents. There are some interesting ideas here. There are also a few places where I had to stop and say, “Hang on. Didn’t you just tell us the opposite?”
He starts with this:
מעלות הרבה יש, וכולם זכו כבר גדולי הדורות ונטלום, וזכו לבניהם אחריהם.
There are many מעלות, qualities or spiritual attainments, which great people in earlier generations acquired for themselves and for their descendants.
The examples are fairly familiar. Yaakov acquired the name Israel: the name Yaakov (Jacob) received after wrestling the angel (Genesis 32:29), and so the name of his descendants.. Yosef acquired the name A righteous person; tradition calls Yosef (Joseph) the tzaddik.. David acquired the name A pious person who goes beyond what the law requires; David calls himself one (Psalms 86:2).. Levi acquired Ritual purity., and Aharon and his descendants acquired Holiness: being set apart for God..
But he means something fairly strong by this. Aharon did something that imparted a quality to his descendants. It became part of what they are. So a A priest: a male descendant of Aharon (Aaron), Moshe’s brother and the first high priest (pl. kohanim). has this aspect of קדושה even if you happen to meet him and find it very, very well hidden.
You could have fooled me, but apparently it’s there.
God knows what’s inside people’s hearts. We know what people do. Those aren’t necessarily the same thing.
This reminded me of a joke.
There’s a fellow whose rabbi keeps trying to persuade him to do something Jewish. He doesn’t do anything, but he keeps insisting, “Rabbi, I’m a Jew at heart.”
Eventually he has some sort of medical emergency. The rabbi comes to visit, and the fellow starts listing everything that’s wrong with him. This hurts, that hurts.
“But your heart,” says the rabbi. “Your heart is great.”
I’m assuming this is a joke. I’d like to think there wasn’t a rabbi who was actually that much of an asshole.
My father told me not to assume.
Anyway.
What gets passed down
The question came up whether Rav Tzadok means that only these people can have these qualities. Can somebody who isn’t descended from David be a חסיד?
My reading is that other people can acquire them. The point is that certain people have them as an inheritance. They don’t have to work for them in quite the same way. That doesn’t mean the quality will be obvious in everything they do, but it’s there.
During the conversation, I called it Heritable changes in how genes are expressed, without any change to the DNA itself.. I’m using that as an analogy; Rav Tzadok isn’t telling us about genes. He’s saying that something a person does can become part of what gets passed on to their descendants.
And he takes this seriously enough to apply it to converts:
אבל הגרים אי אפשר להם לזכות למעלת ישראל כיון שאינו מזרעו של יעקב.
But converts can’t attain the מעלה of ישראל, since they aren’t descended from Yaakov.
A convert joins the Jewish people. He’s a Jew. But he isn’t a biological descendant of Yaakov. Rav Tzadok distinguishes the inherited מעלה of ישראל from bearing the name ישראל through conversion, which he connects to ““And shall surname himself by the name of Israel” (Isaiah 44:5), read as a reference to converts..”
This is an essentialist argument. Virtue, or at least certain kinds of virtue, is being connected to ancestry. Rav Tzadok was not particularly concerned about whether this would go over well in a modern discussion of identity.
He would definitely be canceled.
I should say that I’m explaining Reb Tzadok here, and I don’t find all of this easy to accept. I’m uncomfortable with essentialist arguments, especially when they connect virtue or spiritual qualities to ancestry. Also, this is just a synopsis of a few paragraphs of a much longer work. Rav Tzadok is a complex thinker, and I don’t want to oversimplify him. In other places we make more nuanced arguments about virtue and nature and identity that don’t fit neatly into the categories he uses here. This is a recap of what we studies in 2 sections of a work that consists of 264 sections. The getting cancelled thing is meant to be taken as a joke.
Also, we learned something rather different just a few paragraphs earlier. In אות נ״ד, Reb Tzadok writes, “עיקר היהדות בקריאת שם ישראל.” He discusses a convert who doesn’t even know that The Sabbath, from Friday sunset to Saturday nightfall. and Literally “strange worship”: idolatry. are prohibited, and asks what makes him a A convert to Judaism (pl. gerim).. His answer: “רק בקריאת שם ישראל די.” Bearing the name ישראל is enough.
Now, in אות ס״ב, that same name is described as a A by-name or epithet: what someone is called, as distinct from what he is. for converts, distinguished from an inherited quality they don’t possess. Maybe these are different questions: what makes somebody Jewish, and which particular מעלות he inherits. But I think the earlier passage needs to be part of this discussion too.
I also brought up “Seed of Israel”: someone of Jewish descent, typically through the father, who is not Jewish by halacha.: somebody can have Jewish ancestry without being Relating to halacha, Jewish law as derived from the Written and Oral Torah. Jewish. Jewish status and ancestral connection aren’t exactly the same question. This relates to what I wrote in Categorically Wrong: halachic categories matter, but I don’t think they exhaust everything real about a person’s connection to the Jewish people.
But there’s another part of the argument that I find interesting. We sometimes talk about these things as though God was handing out goodies a few thousand years ago. Who wants to be the chosen people? Who wants a special birthright? Fine, everyone got their thing, and now that part of history is over.
Rav Tzadok seems to be describing something that continues. A person acquires a מעלה and can acquire it for the people who come after him. That’s how he’s reading the families of the The tribes of Israel, each descended from one of Yaakov’s sons. in the Torah. Each family has something of its own, something the founder of that family acquired. This is something you, here in 2026, have the power to do for your descendants! You can acquire a מעלה and pass it on to your offspring for all time!
He then connects that to the different groups within the Jewish people:
אלו בעלי מדה זו ואלו חפיצים בזו, ולכן אמרו על כל המחלוקת שבישראל: אלו ואלו דברי אלהים חיים.
Some have this trait and some are drawn to that one, and that’s why they said of every dispute in Israel: “These and these are the words of the living God” (Eruvin 13b).
Different people have different Character traits (sing. middah); here, the particular spiritual bent of a person or group. and are drawn to different things. This fits a theme we’ve encountered with him before: there’s the Torah that applies to everybody, and there are things particular to a person or a group. Everybody doesn’t have to be doing exactly the same thing.
Torah is the exception
Then he gets to “Moshe our teacher”: Moses, through whom the Torah was given..
Moshe acquired Torah and Wisdom., but he didn’t acquire them for his descendants. Rav Tzadok brings the statement that Moshe wanted his greatness passed on to his children, and it wasn’t given to him.
ולכן אמרו: כתר תורה מונח לכל.
That’s why they said: “The crown of Torah is set out for everyone.”
Your father can’t do that part for you. Being the son of a Literally “a student of a wise man”: a Torah scholar (pl. talmidei chachamim; abbreviated ת״ח). doesn’t make you a תלמיד חכם. You have to learn the Torah yourself.
That’s also why Moshe can be an אב בתורה, a father in Torah, to people who aren’t his biological children. His relationship to תלמידי חכמים isn’t confined to his own descendants.
Okay. I understand the distinction. There are inherited spiritual qualities, but Torah scholarship isn’t one of them.
Then we turn to the next paragraph.
Sons and mothers
אות ס״ג begins:
הבנים דומים לאם, כמו שכתב בפסחים: ישא בת תלמיד חכם, שאם כו׳ בניו ת״ח; ואלו אם הוא ת״ח אין בניו ת״ח.
Sons resemble their mother, as it says in tractate Pesachim (49a): “A man should marry the daughter of a תלמיד חכם, for if [he dies or is exiled], his sons will be תלמידי חכמים.” Whereas if he himself is a תלמיד חכם, his sons aren’t תלמידי חכמים.
Wait a second.
You literally just finished telling me that this isn’t something you inherit. Now you’re telling me that it comes through the mother?
My father suggested a distinction that I think is reasonable. You don’t inherit being a תלמיד חכם, but you might inherit qualities that help you become one. The disposition and the actual accomplishment aren’t the same thing.
I can hear that. If we’re assuming Rav Tzadok didn’t forget what he wrote a paragraph earlier, it’s a reasonable way to read him. I still think it’s the sort of distinction you should say explicitly when you’ve just told us you can’t inherit something and are now explaining which parent you inherit it through.
He goes on to say that daughters resemble their fathers. That’s how the daughter of a תלמיד חכם comes into it: she resembles her father, and her sons resemble her.
That math is clear.
But a daughter also spends time with her mother, so she’ll resemble her mother through habit:
מצד ההרגל ולא מצד התולדה.
From habit, not from birth.
That’s nurture rather than nature. He’s distinguishing what you’re born with from what you pick up by spending your life around somebody.
At this point, after the discussion of converts and inherited status, we’re also dividing up character traits between men and women. We were doing a good job of giving everybody something to be annoyed about.
I never quite know what to make of claims like these. Even when the The rabbis’ extended discussion of the Mishnah; together the two make up the Talmud. says something about which relatives people resemble, I’m not inclined to build an empirical model of human inheritance around it.
My father compared it to the line from The Big Lebowski: “Well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.”
Which is a little hypocritical of me. I’m quite happy to entertain all sorts of claims about spiritual things that I couldn’t possibly check. Then somebody tells me where a child gets his personality from, and suddenly I want to know how we know that.
But yes. I do want to know how we know that.
What is hidden in the father
Then Rav Tzadok adds something else:
ולעולם האבות ניכרים בבניהם, כי מה שהוא סתום במעמקי הלב של האבות מתגלה לפועל בבנים.
Fathers are always recognizable in their sons, because what is hidden in the depths of the fathers’ hearts becomes actual in the sons.
He ends:
וכך קבלתי כי הבנים מעמקי לב האבות.
And so I have received: the sons are the depths of the fathers’ hearts.
So now we have another thing to account for. The sons resemble their mothers, but they also reveal something deep within their fathers.
My father asked whether the first claim was about personality, while this was about something more inward. That’s possible. Rav Tzadok does seem to be talking about different things, although keeping them all straight takes some work.
There’s the מעלה an ancestor acquires for all his descendants. There’s the character a child inherits. There’s what the child learns through habit. And then there’s whatever was hidden in the father’s heart that comes out in the child.
The example I started playing with was a father who always wanted to be a great pianist. He never became one, but suddenly his child is the next Mozart.
Obviously, this has nothing to do with making the child practice from the age of three. Or piano recitals. Or arranging the child’s entire life around becoming a pianist. Totally beside the point.
It’s because, deep in your heart, you wanted to be a pianist.
Likewise, if you wanted to be a great mathematician and sent your child to schools that forced him to study advanced math, we shouldn’t get distracted by the schools. The important thing is that mathematics was hidden deep in your heart.
I don’t know why you’d think the mild child abuse had anything to do with it.
The child abuse helps, but apparently it’s not enough.
I’m joking, obviously. But it does bring me back to the distinction he made himself: what comes from תולדה, and what comes from הרגל? What was passed on, and what did the child acquire from the life the parents built around him?
Rav Tzadok is making a further claim here, that something can be hidden in the father and become visible in the child. I can understand what he’s saying. I don’t know that I understand how to distinguish that from all the other things we’ve just been talking about.
That’s about where we left it. Some of the ideas I can follow, some need distinctions that aren’t spelled out, and some I still don’t know what to make of.
Text: Tzidkat HaTzaddik 62 and 63.
