Shabbat Shalom to all the holy Jews! A letter out lest people think we're just living on our spiritual hilltop, here for ourselves…
I hope people can sense the inherent tension in the Bat Ayin Yeshiva-on one hand, we really want to help fix Am Yisrael and change the world for the better, and yet on the other hand, we have wandered off into a blissful spiritual life and it would be too easy to never look back. God forbid. My love, thoughts, prayers, and dreams are for this world and all those dedicated to its fulfillment of Hashem's vision. But let us heed the warning of Chazal and refrain from beginning to teach before our times. The Rambam says not to eat unripe fruit. I don't think I we can't underestimate the damage arising from unripe expressions. A friend recently lavished me with praise for not telling a story that I did not know all the details to-despite the conversation's pull to share it. These warnings share a commonality with Chanuka and Am Yisrael, the descendants of Jacob.
Avraham Avinu uncovered the most gevalt discovery of mankind--that there is one Creator beyond us all. With news like that in your pocket, you just gotta tell everyone. And Avraham dedicated his life to just that, educating and defending all of mankind. It was the right move in its place, but this unbounded sharing led to some mistakes. As they say, Silly Rabbit, Tricks are for kids. Or rather Torah (that fuller contractual revelation of our Creator) is for Yids.
In the next generation, Am Yisrael receives a lesson in constriction and emphasis on a particular. This the dialectic of Yitzchak with his father Avraham. Yitzchak constricts. He never leaves Israel, his name is never changed, he marries with only one woman unlike the other Avot. There is clearly no reduction in the awareness of Hashem for Yitzchak-in fact his is arguably much clearer than Avraham's, but Yitzchak's story is not about unbounded sharing of Hashem's love. Of the many nations to come from Avraham, only one will receive the Torah. The Torah is given and is composed from the "mouth of Gevurah"; and at first it seems we are simply the reciever of Hashem's word. …Maybe all there is to do is follow exactly what it says… the Tzadukin (Sadducees) did just that. But Tzedek, R. Nachman among others write, is judgment without mercy, and this is unbearable. Yitzchak can't be the end of the dialectic evolution. The constriction of Yitzchak is only for the sake of greater revelation, a greater revelation requiring that the sharing Avraham wanted to do be done in a fixed manner.
Ya'akov is a yeshiva student who struggles with applying God's revealed will into the "non-Torah" world. He is the example of how Jews must strive to be. Ya'akov grows from the place of his fathers, a sturdy foundation of Y'irah inside the tent, and then he goes out carefully into a foreign land, the world of Lavan who is a spiritual heir of Bereishit's snake. Ya'akov, who is made with the likeness of Adam, struggles through 20 years of laboring under Lavan and he comes out with his family and some material blessings. This is the first family in the TaNaKh which doesn't have a seriously problematic offspring (like Ishmael or Esau). Jacob is able to work in the real world, like Avraham was driven to, but he can do the work without giving us more Ishmaels.
Yisrael, the name Jacob grows into after engaging and shining through the problems Hashem gives him, is our legacy as people. We must walk with the light into the dark places and turn others on without losing what we started. That ability to express inner glory, is the Chanuka lesson--the lights of the menorah can illuminate the truth. The Greek attack on us was very subtle. They didn't destroy all the oil in the temple, they merely impurified it. The halachah even tells us that if mamash EVERYTHING is impure, then it's okay to do the temple services in impurity. The Greeks are taunting us saying, all you need is the flame, just light it with this stuff. But in the way of Yisrael, the inheritor of TRUTH (Titen Emet l'ya'akov), that outer shine is not what we're after. We'd rather struggle for a little bit of pure light than an easy fix of the alternative.
This is what our our yeshiva learning on the hill is all about. We're trying to distill and internalize a pure light of Torah in order to light up Am Yisrael in the right way. Gut Shabbes! Love, Shaul
Shaul David Judelman
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Shaul David Judelman currently resides in Jerusalem. After growing up amongst the Douglas Firs of Seattle, Washington, he came to Israel on a quest for Judaism alive in its land. He spent six years in the Bat Ayin Yeshiva Rabbinical program and now teaches at Yeshivat Simchat Shlomo while working on several different environmental initiatives in Jerusalem. He is the founder and coordinator of Simchat Shlomo’s Eco-Activist Beit Midrash, a program offering holistic in-depth Torah study around issues of ecology. |