I just came back from Pachad Yitzchak. Some of you know to what I am referring – the yeshiva near the entrance to Har Nof with the winged roof. It is the Israeli branch of the more well know American yeshiva, Chaim Berlin.
I arrived at the women’s balcony-section of the Bais Midrash at about 6:20. The official title of the gathering was “neilas ha’chag” closing the holiday Shemini Atzeret-Simchas Torah (which in Israel take place on one day) the completion of the days of wonder and awe, the season that began back in Elul. There were several hundred young (well, mostly young) men and about 25 or so women in the balcony, and a few kids. The Rosh Yeshiva, Rav Yonason David, whose age is estimated as a bit over 90, sat at the head of a large table that extended from one end of the Beit Midrash to the other and held the audience absolutely spellbound for about two hours. He dotted his discourse with niggunim which were as much part of what was happening as the words themselves. I want to share some of what I heard (but with very limited responsibility for its being precise, and with my own examples).
He began by speaking about the famous statement, “A mitzvah is rewarded according to the suffering,” a phrase that is usually understood as meaning that the suffering you may have endured in order to observe the mitzvah is added to the reward for the mitzvah itself. (For instance, a seminary girl with very limited funds who buys a beautiful new sweater for a friend who is on the edge of depression has done a deed of much greater meaning (and greater reward) than if someone with unlimited spending allowed on Dad’s card made the same purchase.) The Rosh Yeshiva took a novel approach to the way we relate to mitzvahs. “There must be genuine simchah, delight, and spiritual pleasure when doing a mitzvah. Even refraining from sinning is a reason for joy, and that is true even in the case of refraining from harming another person! The joy itself in your desire to do Hashem’s will, regardless of what it takes, gives your soul the highest pleasure it can ever experience (although you may not feel it consciously). If you are willing to pay a price for a mitzvah (for instance not feeling “in” when a circle of friends want to hear the “real story” especially when it was juicy) you will receive far greater pleasure both in this world in terms of who you become both at the moment and later, and beyond this world. The more spiritually self-aware you are, the more willing you will be to pay a price, and to do so joyfully. (Imagine purchasing a million-dollar apartment in Har Nof for $25,000.) When you do something worthy and great, you can sometimes feel this happening. There is more to the story. Even when you refrain from something that is spiritually degrading, you are peeling away the external and limited part of who you are. The same way that the menorah in the Bais HaMikdash had to be made of one piece of gold, not many pieces molded together, bringing all of the aspects of your personality together in reaching higher and rejecting what holds you down lets you shed light. (An example could be the way you feel when you recognize that the feeling of becoming part of a group by using lashon hara as your social glue is illusory. You peel off the illusion, so that it is no longer part of your inner dialogue.)
Tell me the truth. Was that sentence really too long? My computer is telling me to revise it for length. Would my human friends have done that? No, they are far too tactful…
Learning Torah is compared to a continuously flowing spring that endlessly fills a pond. And then another pond. And another. It provides you with endless possibilities of becoming closer by changing the way you think and feel so that there is a continual connection to Hashem, the source of all truth and goodness.
What made this experience even more meaningful was that I spent the morning and the previous night in the Boston shul in Har Nof. What I saw there was the Rebbe dancing with such bliss that everything that I heard later was happening before my eyes. His booming tenor carried the men into a different realm. Here was none of the self-consciousness (or perhaps more correctly and generously self-awareness’) that sometimes occurs with group dancing. No one was watching other people’s responses to their dancing or doing anything that even remotely resembled putting on a bit of a show for the crowd. They were absorbed by the experience. I couldn’t have put what I was observing into words. Hours later, Rav Yonosnan David gave me the words to express what I felt earlier: "When the heart and the mind meet as they move higher and are aflame, there is only simchah.”
Have a great rest of the journey,
Love,
Tziporah
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