Book Review | Everything Matters: A Surprising Take on Spirituality, Ethics and Daily Life

Jewish Ethics: The 10 Greatest Ideas & 10 Leadership Lessons to Actualize Them
By Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz
176 pp.

This book surprised me, and I imagine it may surprise other readers as well. It is written by an Orthodox rabbi, and yet it draws from the wisdom of thinkers across the denominational lines within Judaism, from Christian and Buddhist thinkers and from secular thinkers as well.

Also surprising, at least to me: The book shows a familiarity with all of the classic Jewish sources, as we would expect from an Orthodox rabbi, but it also takes the basic beliefs of the Jewish tradition and applies them to the issues that face all people today, not just Jews. And this is something I have not usually found in books by Orthodox Jewish writers in our time.   

Let me share a few examples. My stereotype—which I now realize is probably wrong—is that if you ask the typical Orthodox rabbi to state his fundamental beliefs, he will mention Torah and mitzvot (commandments). This book begins with its author’s list of his most important beliefs, and the first one is neither Torah nor mitzvot but the  belief that everything matters!

To say that the belief that “everything matters” is the starting point of our faith seems counterintuitive to the modern reader, because we have grown accustomed to thinking of religion as something spiritual, as a way of transcending the petty and trivial things that weigh us down. 

This is why a book called Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff became a bestseller a few years ago. The title caught our attention because it spoke to our desire to transcend the minor things that occupy so much of our time. For many modern people, being spiritual means watching a sunset, a waterfall, a sky full of stars or a rainbow. Working all day as a bookkeeper or salesman seems anything but spiritual. 

And yet, Rabbi Yanklowitz argues that it is just the other way around. He says there is nothing more spiritual than being concerned with what we eat, with how we use our words, with what we do with our money and our property and other such mundane matters. 

For example, we are used to thinking that the Jewish tradition cares about the kashrut of the food that we eat. This rabbi does not deny the importance of keeping kosher. But he raises questions about the food we eat that most of us do not think of as having anything to do with kashrut.

For example, he asks: Is the food we eat grown in an environmentally sustainable way? He asks us to think about whether the animals that we eat are crowded together in cages and fattened up with harmful foods before they are killed. And he asks us to question the kashrut of fruit and vegetables if the farmers who harvest them and package them are not paid a living wage. If these questions cannot be answered properly, he asks, how can we say that our eating is a sacred act?

I know many liberal Jews who care about these kinds of questions, and I know many Orthodox Jews who care about kashrut, but it is surprising and encouraging to find someone like this rabbi who cares about both these matters and, moreover, considers them both to be an essential part of keeping kosher. And this same balance between two worlds that many see as separate can be found in his discussion of how we spend our money or our time or how we look upon our property or the property of others.

One more example: Pesach is the most Jewish of all the holidays. It is the time when we gather together with our families and retell the story of how we were once slaves in Egypt and how God took us out of Egypt. It is the time when we focus on our people and our story. But Yanklowitz reminds us that Pesach is not meant to be just a Jewish holiday. It is a holiday whose purpose is to make us aware of those who are still living in slavery. It is a time when we must think of the strangers and the immigrants, such as those who have walked barefoot for hundreds of miles in order to escape poverty or repression in the hope that they will be allowed to enter this country so that they and their children can live in freedom. 

Again, I know many liberal Jews who feel an obligation to help the stranger and to speak up for the immigrant, and I know many traditional Jews who keep the laws of Pesach carefully, but it is rare to find a book like this one that reminds us that they are both essential parts of what it means to keep Pesach. There is a division between the seats where men and women sit in many synagogues, but there is an even greater division between our people’s own concerns and our concern with the problems of the rest of the world. It is this barrier that the author sets out to break down. He insists that the division between us and them that is found in so many minds across all religions is something that needs to be looked at in a fresh way.

I came away feeling that this book ought to be read by all kinds of Jews, Orthodox and non-Orthodox, and by non-Jews as well.

There are all kinds of provincials in this world. When Communism was in its beginnings in Eastern Europe, a group of Jews came to Rosa Luxemberg, one of the most passionate leaders of the movement, and asked her to do what she could do for the Jews in her country who were suffering from antisemitism. And she answered them: “Go away and do not bother me with the problems of the Jews. I have the whole world to worry about!” That kind of thinking is as narrow and as parochial as any other kind, even though she would have said that she was a universalist. 

Wherever there are people who work for the betterment of the world but who neglect their responsibilities to their own people, and wherever there are people who are loyal to their own people but do not feel an obligation to those beyond it, this is a book that will challenge them to question their positions. It has the power to teach us that many of the things that we thought were “either-ors” are really “both-ands.”

I recommend it to people who do not usually read Orthodox books, because they assume they are parochial, and to those who do not usually read liberal books, because they seem concerned only with the welfare of the world and not with our own people. This book has something to say to both groups.

Rabbi Jack Riemer is the author or editor of six books of Jewish thought, including Finding God in Unexpected Places and The Day I Met Our Father Isaac in the Parking Lot.