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| R' Moshe Feinstein's Gadol card (Lehrhaus) |
One might think the idea of collecting baseball cards is a
frivolous undertaking. Even for young people. Are there not getter ways of spending
one’s time and money than collecting cards with pictures of popular sports
figures on one side and their statistics on the other? The answer is that of
course there are better ways of doing that. But that doesn’t mean that doing so
has no value at all.
What if there were cards that had pictures of Gedolim on
them? Would that be a worthy enterprise? Would it be better or worse to collect
them than to collect baseball cards? In my view it would be worse.
But wouldn’t they be educational? That ‘stats’ on the back
could be a list of he Seforim they had written or the Yeshivos they founded… or
even movements they founded. Like the TIDE movement of Rav Samson Rephael Hirsch. Isn’t collecting
Gadol cards a better use of a child’s propensity to collect, accumulate, and
trade than it is baseball cards?
Well, no. There are far better ways of educating our young
about the value of our great religious leaders than to put their picture on a
trading card with a small list of their accomplishments on the back. It might
even be harmful.
But this did not stop that phenomenon from happening. There
is a fascinating and informative article by Rabbi Dr. Zev Eleff, Academic Director
of HTC in the latest issue of Lehrhaus. He tells us about the history of
Gedolim cards The genre was invented by
an ultra Orthodox Jew by the name of Arthur Shugarman. And the first set of Gedolim
cards were produced in 1980 by the Youth Division of Agudath Israel of America.
One can guess who made it into the original 35 card series. They
consisted of black and white pictures of European greats that were in some way
connected to Agudah. The stats on the back
were written in ways that were compatible with the Agudah philosophy. This
resulted in a least one descript tion of a past great religious figure. Rav Samson
Raphael Hirsch was described as follows:
“(He) Met the formidable challenge to the very basis of Jewish living posed by the ‘modern era’ with the religious philosophy of ‘Torah Im Derech Eretz.’ This maxim was the proclamation of the sovereignty of the Torah within any given civilization…”
This completely ignored Rav’ Hirsch’s positive view of the
great non Jewish figures whose views he publicly extolled as compatible with
Jewish philosophy… a key component of Torah Im Derech Eretz!
Presenting a distorted picture of great rabbinic figures on
the back of a trading card for purposes of furthering your own agenda is not
that different that writing a biography about that same person that omits
truths about them which are incompatible your Hashkafos.
Not only is omitting the truth a
problem, that these cards do not include other great rabbinic figures is another sin of omission.
By omitting great rabbis whose Hashkafos
they do not approve of, they reinforce the antipathy they some of their Mechnchim express about these
great figures in the classroom. After all if Rav Soloveitchik is not on a card,
he cannot possibly be a Gadol. Nor can any
religious Zionist Rabbonim. Or Centrist Rabbonim.
Agudah might argue that they have a right to say who is and
isn’t a Gadol for their own constituents. This is true. But when applied to trading cards that are
widely distributed it contributes to that notion far beyond their own membership.
The Gadol card also makes the very idea of a Gadol into someone that larger
than life; someone that is beyond human;
someone that should be worshiped and idolized like baseball heroes.
Ironically building up selected rabbis as icons via trading
cards also has an opposite effect. It cheapens the very idea of what a Gadol is
supposed to be. They are reduced to a form of currency by collectors assigning trading
value to them. Is Rav Moshe really worth a Rav Gifter and a Rav Ovadia?
It is for these reasons that I am opposed to Gedolim cards. And yet I am not opposed to baseball cards. In an ironic
twist of fate, the speakers at this year’s Agudah convention which focused on normal
behavior had one speaker telling parents that it was OK for a young student to
follow baseball in his leisure time. In
that vein there is nothing wrong with collecting baseball cards… and learning some
stats about the players.
The genie may be out of the bag. I don’t know if you can
still buy Gadol cards. But whether you can or not, I can still have an opinion
about them. And it is not favorable. If they are available, I would urge
parents to as much as possible - discourage their children from owning them.
