I was privileged to have had several informal conversations with a well-known sage from a previous generation. I will share two of those conversations with you, dear reader, but since they were "off the record," I will not mention his name.

Our discussion centered upon one of his favorite topics, Jewish education. He felt that there was much to be proud of in the then-current state of early elementary education, for students of age six to ten years. The problem, he insisted, was from that age onward through the range of stages of human life.

"We cannot allow teenagers to remain with the understanding of the stories of the Torah that they first heard when they were kindergarteners. They then heard what the world refers to as 'Bible stories,' and teenagers cannot take 'Bible stories' seriously. We must teach them a more mature understanding of the stories of Chumash if their Torah studies are to have an impact upon their minds and souls."

He went on to argue that if the lessons learned in early grade school are irrelevant, at best, to teenagers, those lessons can certainly not satisfy the intellectual appetites and moral sensitivities of individuals in their twenties, thirties, sixties, and seventies.

I vividly recall leaving his apartment after that conversation. From that moment, I resolved to assure that my lessons, to adolescents as well as to senior citizens, would contain interpretive material adequate to their developmental stages. I would no longer limit my lectures to the surface meaning of Torah texts but would search carefully for deeper meanings, meanings that would resonate with my students “where they were at.”

At a much later conversation, the aforementioned sage told me that he had something to add: "It is not just in teaching texts that we must adjust our teaching to the maturity level of our audience. We must do so all the more when we discuss the nature of the divine. Very young children are taught to do good deeds, and that then the Almighty will reward them. They come to think of the Almighty as a grand old candyman who distributes candies to good little boys and good little girls. We cannot allow the kindergartner's perception of the Almighty to persist into adolescence, adulthood, and beyond. Our understanding of the nature of the Lord must grow as we grow older."

I took this conversation even more seriously than I took the earlier one. It was then that, in my own teaching and writing, I began to speak of the need for "spiritual maturity."

Since then, I have discovered numerous texts which speak of "spiritual maturity," albeit in a different terminology. Let me share some of these texts with you.

One text is authored by the great medieval moralist, Rabbenu Yonah of Gerona. His classic work, Shaarei Teshuvah, or "Gates of Repentance,” contains these words:

“…Say not to yourselves, ‘The Lord has enabled us to possess this land because of our virtues…’ It is not because of your virtues and your rectitude…” (Deuteronomy 9:4-5). We have hereby been exhorted not to attribute our success to our righteousness or the uprightness of our hearts, but to believe and to know within our hearts that it derives from the lovingkindness of the Exalted One and from His great goodness, as Jacob our father, may Peace be upon him, said, “I am not worthy of all the mercies and of all the truth” (Genesis 32:11).

Note that this marvelous teaching has its roots in the words of Jacob in this week's Torah portion, Parshat Vayishlach (Genesis 32:3-36:43). There Jacob returns to the Land of Israel after years of exile. He prefaces his prayer of gratitude with these memorable words: “Katonti—literally, I am too small—to have merited all of the mercies and all of the truth that You have bestowed upon me…”

Rabbenu Yonah insists that these words in Deuteronomy are not merely spoken to the generation of the Children of Israel near the end of their sojourn in the wilderness. Nor are Jacob's words just for the historical record. Rather, there is a message here for each of us for all eternity. As the author of the work known as Sma"k (Sefer Mitzvos HaKatan) states so clearly: “One must never be a tzadik in one's own eyes.”

In the eloquent words of the author of the Derashot HaRan (Sermon 10): "When the Children of Israel are victorious against a mighty enemy, the Almighty is not concerned that they will attribute their victory to their own might. After all, the enemy was much mightier than they. He is much more concerned that, although they will concede that their victory was due to His intervention, they will credit themselves for His assistance, believing that it was their piety that caused Him to perform miracles on their behalf… Man attributes his successes to himself, one way or another.” 

Rabbi Bahya ben Asher comments on the verse in this week’s parasha: "We must all reflect, in our prayers, upon our own insufficiencies and deficiencies in contrast to the Master whom we serve. We deserve nothing. He owes us nothing. Whatever we receive from Him stems from His pure lovingkindness."

The Almighty is not just a "candyman" who doles out goodies to us because of our paltry piety. The successes we experience are drawn from His otzar matnat chinam, His treasure house of freely given gifts.

In our contemporary jargon, we must recognize that our successes are from His “pocket full of freebies.” Then we achieve “spiritual maturity.”

“Spiritual maturity” also informs our personal prayers. We must understand that we need the Lord's help not only for our physical requirements, our health, wellbeing, and material success. Additionally, we need His help to achieve “spiritual” benefits. We need His support to control our darker passions. We need His encouragement to become better people. We need His help to untangle difficult passages in the course of our Torah studies. We must pray for His succor as we struggle with the moral, ethical, and, yes, political challenges of our times.

Rabbi Avraham Godzinsky, a Holocaust victim, said it well in an essay written shortly before his murder, posthumously published in the collection of his writings, Torat Avraham:

One must never delude himself into thinking that the spiritual aspects of his life are in his control, that he is the one who improves his behavior, that he is the one who repairs his character, since after all he has free will, and he chooses his way in life on his own. The truth is that all a person can do is to will and to commit to the good. But good actions are ultimately not in his control. Life and health are necessary for effective action, talent and skill are necessary to perform mitzvot, inner strength is necessary to overcome the evil urge. But for life and health and talent and skill, man is utterly dependent upon divine assistance.

After all, we pray daily and give thanks for our intelligence, for our mental capacity to study Torah, for our ability to articulate prayers, for our courage to repent, and so man recognizes that even the spiritual part of him is not his. Man directs his eyes upwards to the Lord as he says in his prayers, “Enlighten our eyes in Your Torah, connect our hearts to Your mitzvot, and direct our hearts to love and to fear Your Name.”

Is it not poignantly painful, but profoundly edifying, that we owe these elevated words describing “spiritual maturity” to a man whose life was brutally extinguished soon after he wrote these words?

May we all take to heart the need to mature spiritually. Hopefully, we will do so with the help of the words of both a Holocaust martyr and a deliberately unnamed sage who escaped the Holocaust.

Each taught me of the urgency to grow spiritually as we age physically.