To be honest, this is the sixth time I've begun this article. Everything I try to write, I look at again and ask myself "Are you sure? How do you know that?" Rather than fight it one more time, I give in and agree to explore it. The problem is, I am making big assertions, trying to take specific life experiences and make them fit into a piece of Torah that can be digested by others (hopefully in a witty and entertaining way). What I really would like to be discussing, if I could find any words, is Yitzhak-consciousness. But Yitzhak consciousness is not discussed - it inherently dismantles the process of discussion. Yitzhak subjects all the words he uses to severe scrutiny - does this express my feeling properly? When a thought comes up he doesn't say it, because he doesn't know for sure that it's true. So he likes to be alone, to take himself apart and explore each piece, to break everything that can be broken until he finds something that is certain and unbreakable that he can stand on. And he wants to stay on that spot and build slowly, ever so slowly. When Yitzhak is playing with his band, he hits one note again and again, listening to deeper and deeper levels - and he won't play another note partly because he's afraid it won't be as good, but mostly because he hasn't yet reached the ultimate depth of this one. Whereas Avraham is so sure of the integrity of Hashem that he knows that no matter what rock he looks under, Hashem will be there, Yitzhak doesn't want to move without having that certainty first. Once he stands on that spot, though, with that certainty, once he knows that note to his satisfaction he brings it with him everywhere. He can be counted on because everything he says, he feels, everything he does has integrity. He is the one who learns the piece of Gemarra to such depth that he'll never forget it because it is part of him. The way he practices guitar is like so: he's not trying to have a good jam, he sees where his weaknesses are and he works them again and again, he isolates the specific motions of the action and works them individually until he IS them. He is the guy who makes vocab sheets and memorizes them. Why? Here is the deepest secret, and really it's blatantly obvious. When he comes across a word in Gemara he doesn't know, he looks it up and then memorizes it because next time he finds it in a different context, he doesn't want to have to look it up again. And when he is playing his guitar and he hears something in his head that he wants to be able to play but he cannot, and then he breaks it down into its specific parts and works each one individually, it is not so he can learn how to play that specific figure that he heard in his head, but so that he can have the technique down and can play inifinitely many figures that require that technique. He doesn't really care if he reaches moments beyond himself once in a while - he wants to be on the level where his entire life is those moments, where there is no fall because there is nowhere to fall to, because he is not intent on being somewhere high unless he feels like he can be with his entire being forever. He'd rather pick apart his motives for wanting to be there, examine them and learn from them about himself in a way that will benefit him forever - and in that picking apart, I assure you, people, he gets SO high, because there is no high like knowing yourself, like knowing the LAWS of how Hashem runs the world. And then there are no mistakes, nowhere to fall from. For anyone who wants the blessing, I bless us all we should have the eye to see the parts of who we are and what we do, and we should have the patience to work them through, so that we might be dependable and consistent conduits for Hashem's will in the world.
Rav Gavriel Goldfeder
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Rav Gavriel Goldfeder is one of the first semicha recipients of the yeshiva. A graduate of Drew University in Religious Studies, he came to Bat Ayin after stints in other yeshivot and found a spiritual and intellectual home. Here he met his wife, Ketriellah, who was a student in our short-lived Women's Yeshiva. Upon graduation, Gavriel took the position of rabbi of the Aish Kodesh Congregation in Boulder, Colorado and together with Ketriellah and their growing family, they are busy creating (in Gavriel's words), "a community infused with Torah values, passion for learning and prayer, consideration of one another, and action, as well as deep celebration of the joys of life." |