A couple of yeshiva students passed through Harford County recently. As people met them for the first time, you could see a certain reaction forming. These young men were warm, unhurried, and entirely at ease. There was a look in their eyes that's hard to describe. Someone said it kindly, with a slight edge: "They seem so… innocent." What they meant, and didn't quite say, was naive or sheltered. Like life hadn't gotten to them yet.
I wanted to explain what they were actually seeing, yet couldn't find the right words. Then I remembered that someone else had this exact reaction seventy years ago, said it out loud, and got an answer I've never forgotten.
In the 1950s, a Reform rabbi named Herbert Weiner spent several hours in private audience with the Lubavitcher Rebbe. He later wrote about it in his book Nine and a Half Mystics. At one point, Weiner got bold. He told the Rebbe that all his Chassidim seemed to share one thing: a kind of open, naive look in their eyes. A sympathetic person, he said, might call it t'mimut, purity and a less generous person might call it something closer to emptiness and simple-mindedness.
It was a rude thing to say to a man's face about the people who loved him. However, the Rebbe didn't take offense. He leaned forward and said: what you see missing from their eyes is a kera, a split.
Most of us, the Rebbe explained, live divided. Part of us is in the "spiritual" world and part of us is in the "real" world. The two are constantly pulling against each other. That tension, that internal tug-of-war, is what reads on a face as depth and seriousness. The look of someone who has struggled. His Chassidim didn't wear that look because they didn't have that split. Their lives weren't cut in two. Where there's no war going on inside, there's no war to see on the outside. What Weiner mistook for emptiness was actually the opposite: wholeness.
And then the Rebbe did something remarkable. Weiner had mentioned, earlier, that he had trouble sleeping. The Rebbe gently turned the whole conversation around and suggested that Weiner's restlessness came precisely from trying to live in two worlds at once. The thing he'd diagnosed as missing from the Chassidim’s eyes was the very thing keeping him awake at night.
I think about that exchange every time I catch myself, or someone else, mistaking a divided life for a deep one.
This is exactly the word at the heart of this week's parsha, Shoftim. The Torah warns the Jewish people, right before they enter the Land, against imitating the practices of the surrounding nations: the sorcery, the omens, the séances, the attempts to contact the dead. And then it lands on a single instruction: "Tamim tihyeh im Hashem Elokecha" - "You shall be wholehearted with the L-rd your G-d" (Devarim 18:13).
Tamim. Same root as tam, the "simple son" of the Four Sons at the Seder. The one we quietly assume is the slow one.
Is the Torah's ideal really to be a little dim? To not think too hard?
No. Weiner's story is the key to why not. Tam doesn't mean unintelligent. It means undivided. Whole. Not the person who knows less, but the person who isn't at war with himself. He's not naive; he's just not split. He doesn't try to outsmart his own destiny or go digging in the dark corners of the universe for answers he was never meant to have. He isn't standing with one foot in each of the two worlds, forever negotiating between them. He's in one world, G-d's world, all the way.
Those yeshiva students aren't sheltered. They'd simply been spared a war that most of us fight every single day: the low-grade tug between the person we are in shul and the person we are in the parking lot. Between what we believe on Shabbos and how we live on Tuesday. That war is exhausting. It's also, if we're honest, what a lot of us have quietly come to call "being deep."
We should all notice one place where we're living split. One world in our head and another in our hands. Let’s try, just for a moment, to close the gap. Bring the Shabbos version of ourself into the Tuesday moment. You may find that what you'd been calling depth was really just fatigue. The wholeness you mistook for someone else's naivety is available to you too.
Good Shabbos,
Rabbi Kushi Schusterman