About five years ago the Bergen Record ran a story in the Real estate section. An owner of a Frank Lloyd Wright home had a 1950's kitchen and wanted to modernize it. he was faced with the following alternatives:
- Don't touch a thing. This is a piece of art! One cannot improve on "near-perfection.
" Would you "modernize" a Mozart Concerto? But, faced with this choice, how could he function in the 21st century with an obsolete kitchen?! - Fuhgeddabout Frank Lloyd Wright. You godda do wahtcha godda do! Just rip out the kitchen and put in a brand new modern state-of-the-
art kitthcn and don't give a hoot about teh consequences. Well, that would make the kitchen more livable, but it would devalue the house completely on the market place AND destroy a part of history.
What to do?
Baruch Hashem there was a third choice. There are specialists, architects who are steeped in the traditions and the mind-set of FL Wright who can visualize how to make a 21st century kithcen in the Frank Lloyd Wright Tradition. The new kitchen will not be the exact replica, but it will be congruent with the house in general. It will be BOTH Modern and Traditional - and preserve the beauty, the history, and (hopefully) the resale value. It won't come cheap, though. Balancing the tension between tradition and modernism would require a lot of extra effort. The owner felt that this was worth the price.
3 comments:
If the owner of the house was Charedi, he's go with your first option and then look at you with your new-fangled kitchen and tell you your roast beef could never taste as good as his.
If the owner was Reformative, he'd go with your second and then wonder why you don't treat his new kitchen with the same awe and respect as the old one and refuse to recognize it as a "classic" too.
Unfortunately, neither of those two owners have any interest in being friends with the guy who invests good money in the third option.
Again well put.
Nevertheless, I would claim, that as a thinking person influenced by Maimonides - and others such as Rema- that the middle-of-the-road "Centrist" Approach is usually the superior approach!
We cannot throw out Tradition completely, that would almost certainly incur "Throwing out the Baby wtih the Bath Water!
OTOH [on the other hand] being mired in the externals [hitznoiyos] of tradition is missing the point!
In order to eat the fruit we must discard its peel [klipa] and get to the fruit inside!
I humbly submit: We need Modern Rabbinical leaders who are both steeped in our Traditions, texts, etc., yet who are not afraid of making the requisite changes needed for each and every generation!
And we "Nishma-types" who take a serious, analytical, reasonable view of issues must ever be cognizant of this tension between knowing the past and living in the present moment!
No, I think you Nishma-types (me, I'm a chocolate sundae with extra fudge, lots of it! type) need to move a step further. Any good movement that isn't out to conquer the world eventually decides it has found its little corner of the universe and settles down in it. Hence the lack of leadership seen by Yeshivah University as the Chareidi world progressively delegitimizes everything it stands for.
Nishma needs to move a step beyond. It needs to open a central location, a yeshiva/beis medrash location, in a small town away from large communities and their stpuid politics. It needs to form a nucleus with which to produce material which will influence the frum community around it and draw thinking people towards it.
Otherwise, it won't really make the impact it wants to.
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