(Sh)tender Thoughts

Thirty-five years ago, at an informal shiur in Boston before Tisha B’Av, a fellow student asked our Master Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik a question. It seems that the Geonim [period after the completion of the Talmud in Bavel] actually forbade the practice of saying Birkhot HaTorah, the blessings before Torah study, on the 9th of Av. After all, the learning of Torah is itself forbidden on this day. But our custom is to say these blessings. The Rav’s answer, as I recollect, is that our custom is based upon our formal reading of Shemah, Psalms in Pesukei D’Zimra and biblical references in the Kinot [liturgical reworkings of Lamentations]. But the Geonim were right, the Rav said. The central blessing on Torah study is La’Asok BiDivrei Torah – to engage in Torah study. It is this Hit’Askut, engagement, that signifies a full mental involvement, rather than a cursory reading, which is forbidden. For such an engagement produces joy when one has grasped an issue, a page of Talmud or a verse. And joy is in direct opposition to mourning – the key mitzvah and ethos of the day!

So what are we doing today at Pardes, where we are spending considerable intellectual energies on texts? The Rav comes to our rescue. Following the lead of his grandfather (the famed Reb Chaim of Brisk), he explains that the one exception to the prohibition of learning Torah is to study those aspects of Judaism that themselves are indicative of mourning: Lamentations, Job, sections about the destruction in Midrash and Aggada, and the like. When one learns these subjects and learns them deeply, one is plunged mentally and hopefully emotionally into mourning. Instead of being prohibited, it is actually a mitzvah.

As I reflect upon the Rav’s teachings, I ask myself what it is about learning that is essentially oppositional to mourning. The reason seems clear to me – in learning we have the experience of controlling and possessing an issue or verse. This experience of control produces a great joy and satisfaction. Even when we deeply study mournful subjects we are also likely to experience a similar feeling of control. If so, we have only fooled ourselves. We have not learned deeply enough. We must transcend the illusion of control and allow the material to overwhelm us and for us to lose the control we so usually seek.

And that is the heter – halakhic permission – to study a verse and an issue with you. To understand it and then to lose control. The verse is from Eicha 3:26

Tov LaGever Lisah Ol Binurav
“It is good for a young person to bear the yoke in his/her youth.”

The Midrash explains:
Ol Torah, Ol Isha, Ol Melacha
“The yoke of Torah, the yoke of marriage, the yoke of work”

The young people we remember today were our Pardes students: Matt Eisenfeld and Sarah Duker, Ben Blutstein and Marla Bennett. They were all remarkable and greatly loved in Pardes. Matt and Sarah were murdered in a terrorist bus bombing in the fall of 1996. Ben and Marla were murdered in the terrorist bombing of the Hebrew University Cafeteria on July 31, 2002.

Let us remember them, for even if you are learning at Pardes for only one day you are their havrutot (study partners).

Matt was a brilliant student who went to Yale and was involved with Camp Ramah. He was a Pardes graduate and was a rabbinical student at JTS. He was properly described as a “scholar, gentleman and a mensch.”

Sarah was an effervescent, adventurous ecologist and scientist who went as far as Siberia for her research. She was very committed to Israel, Torah and our people, as was Matt. They were an “item” and many of us took pleasure in contemplating their future happiness – together.

I and my family were very close to Ben and to Marla, two separate individuals who were Pardes year graduates. Ben was subsequently a Pardes Fellow, and entering the Pardes Educators Program. Marla was entering her second year of PEP.

Ben was unusual. He was a charismatic, large guy with a big kippah on his head, tzizit out, who spun as a D.J. in the coolest night spots in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. And he made it to minyan every morning. He had conquered his demons of addiction and had the clarity of insight of someone who had seen both sides. Ben had the sharpest sense of humor and wasn’t afraid to employ it. He loved music and at your Shabbat table he would sing every zemer in the book. He loved his parents and family and especially his little sister Rivkah.

And he began to learn. When he was accepted to my shiur – he wrote a friend that for him this was a yom tov. He worked hard and I made him sweat. He soon became enamored with applying the Rambam to the Talmud page. The Rabbi in Harrisburg told me that on a visit Ben worked on a contradiction that he found between two sections of Maimonides’ legal code, the Mishneh Torah. And he found a workable solution. “For him, that resolution was better than gold,” the Rabbi reported.

It is good for a person to bear the yoke in one’s youth – Ol Torah, the yoke of Torah. Ben was bearing that yoke and was pulling his share.

We can report the same about Marla. Beautiful and radiant, a Southern Californian (San Diego) who went north to study at Berkeley. And there as an intellectual, she became a fervent Zionist! Marla had the greatest positive energy of anyone I ever met. She enveloped you with kindness, protectiveness, and great intellectual energy. Somehow we would meet at the upstairs door at Pardes whenever one of us was leaving – “One more point, Rav Landes!” And an incredible insight would emerge – either hers, or even mine inspired by Marla. She was full of love for her parents and for Lisa, her dear sister, and her family.

What a Beit Midrash (study hall) we had. Marla would sit here in the middle, diagramming and coloring her Talmud page; Ben would sit on the left, drumming a rap beat with his fingers while poring over the daf. At some magical point, the wondrous Jerusalem light would reflect Marla’s colors through the room, while half of the room was shaking (swinging and rocking) to Ben’s beat.

When the Rabbis stated the three-fold yoke, commentators rushed to explain why it was crucial to bear it during one’s youth. Basically, they have two solutions: either one needs to do it when you have the ko’ach, strength, which is when you are young; or, if you don’t occupy yourself meaningfully when you are young, then you might likely to be poreik ol, throw aside the yoke of heaven. I believe there is a third reason – that when you assume these yokes, you become an even better person. The real you emerges. This I saw in both Ben and Marla.

And this is the source of mourning. The promise of who they were becoming was just amazing, and it was taken away from them and from us.

Ol Isha – the yoke of marriage. Matt and Sarah would have been a great match. Marla was totally loved by a wonderful young man who was also a Pardes student. Ben was single. But all four were not to be brought to the chuppah by their parents.

Ol Melachah – the yoke of work. We all know that legally melachah refers to the creative act. All four were creative people. Ben and Marla were in the midst of learning the melachah of teaching, so that they would be the Ba’alei Mesorah – the carriers and transmitters of Torah for their own students.

Ol Torah, Ol Isha, Ol Melachah – we mourn, for the promise of their Torah study, their familial fulfillment and their mission in life was cut short. Tisha B’Av is not a therapy session designed for us to feel better and comforted in the afternoon as night closes. This may be a result. But we are within the mourning. All we learn plunges us deeper into our sadness. Seven years have passed and a cycle, one would think, has turned. It has not. The loss of all our students is our Churban – our destruction. We mourn.

Oy Mah Hayah Lanu
Woe – for what we possessed.

Yehi Zikhram Baruch.
May all their memories be for a blessing.

Rabbi Daniel Landes

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