Life of Yeshiva Guy

I can’t take my eyes off of them. Their simple movements, so deep, so awkward, so graceful. Their actions, so completely without guile, are not performances, like ours. Their eyes mirror the merry of their shadows, their spirits sunning the room with carefree joy.

It is Friday night, and it is magical.

The fifteen or so bochurim, aged seven to fourteen, were part of a program that brings autistic children to yeshivos and communities in throughout Eretz Yisroel. This Shabbos, they had joined the hesder yeshiva kehilla that my hosts were affilaited with. Having joined the yeshiva meal along with my hosts in the dining room, I’m  and alternately enjoying the food and schmoozing with my host and his whip sharp bochurim, themselves in elite hesder yeshivos. But I’m not really there. I’m watching the children, watching them eat, watching them breathe, watching them watch.

I feel almost as if what I’m doing is wrong, somehow. I can’t take my eyes off of them, and I don’t know why.

The dining room isn’t much anymore. It has the timeworn, slightly shabby look of yeshiva cafeterias everywhere. The plastic chairs, uncomfortable and unaesthetic, clearly weren’t selected by an interior designer. The seudah is served much like Shabbos meals in any other yeshiva. The same nominally paid or volunteer bochurim functioning as waiters, the same disposable white tablecloths, and the same punch, of course, with the same horrid aftertaste. I feel right at home. But I can’t take my eyes off of these children.

Finally, I break my trance and turn back to the host, a Rebbi in the yeshiva and no small talmid chacham. I ask him, why I can’t stop staring; what accounts for this, what is the depth behind the surface here?

His answer was delivered off the cuff and without preparation. I paraphrase:

When us ordinary people interact with others, we use our minds as a filter. Everything we do, everything our neshama wants us to do, is sifted through our minds. They don’t do this. And so, you are watching neshama, and only neshama, at work. Of course it is magical. Of course the impure are entranced by the pure. Of course us ordinary people are hypnotized. Extraordinary.

So that is why I can’t take my eyes off of them.

I’m hypnotized by neshama.

Nowadays, we’ve got many Rabbis without semicha. We even have some semichas without the Rabbis. -Anonymous

The below audio is an excerpt of Shlomo telling over the story of how got semichah from HaRav Hutner ZTZ”L. He did this at the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s insistence. Classic matzav.

Shlomo Gets Smicha from Yeshiva Guy on Vimeo.

Direct download link here.

“As if you could kill time without injuring eternity”.

-Henry David Thoreau

News, in its pure form as a medium of delivering information, has always been a wonderful idea. Indeed, the musag of having a grasp of the events that shape the world around us was, to various degrees, was encouraged by our sages.

Lately, however, the proliferation of the 24 hour news cycle, in conjunction with the dual Israel/USA frum news teams, has people gasping for breath. Bochurim, yungeleit… even baalebatim can hardly keep up. And one wonders, is this the way we are meant to consume information?

But that isn’t what this is about.

Take a look any one of the “big three” “yiddishe” internet news outlets, and find laughably idiotic tidbits, videos, and yes, even audio shiurim that have no business being published on a mainstream media outlet catering to the frum public. I deliberately avoid the term yeshivish public, being that true Bnei Torah avoid the web like the plague. (No, I am not completely oblivious to the irony of that statement.) Scan the headlines of these sites, if you will, and you might find it more of a challenge to spot an item containing real news than not. Arbitrary opinion pieces (not that much unlike this one) written by random people, cutesy poems authored by high school kids, and an odd assortment of what can only be termed eclectic informationals that do more to uniform the informed than the reverse have become the norm over the past few years.

I don’t understand how this came to be. How is it that watching clips of little children laughing, gorillas smoking, and high speed police chases became a legitimate form of spending time? Yiddishe culture, as a result of our religion (and being the same as), has always maximized what available time we had left after parnassa and Torah study. Putting aside the question of if and when that time even exists at all (lo yomush, etc.), it certainly was never spent viewing inane and insane media, without purpose or innate growth involved.

Traditionally, as far as this uneducated yeshiva bochur is aware, our forebears spent little time on what today is labeled “entertainment”. We were a busy folk; occupied primarily with learning Torah, communal work, charitable endeavors, and diverse fashions of enterprise, as permitted by our host countries.

True, one must, as the legendary Rebbi R’ Yerucham Kaplan ZTZ”L used to say, “chill zich”. But we were never meant to substitute the ikkar for the taful, to make it a matarah in of itself, and certainly not to prioritize it above all else. In reference to such lifestyles- the mislocuted “Western Civilization”- did Ghandi say “Western Civilization? I think it would be an excellent idea”. In contrast, our sundry spiritual spices of life were wholesome, constructive activities. Things like going on nature walks, appreciating fine architecture, and even botanically based edification.

At this point, the initiate might be wondering…what makes the above activities any different than watching YouTube, or indeed than the endless hours combing every nook and cranny that canny Zuckerberg himself never knew existed? Why should one’s subjective position on an individual’s preference as to how to spend his or her leisure time be more or less right than someone else’s?

To such questioners, I can respond only with what may come across as rhetoric, but should ring true to all who listen for the truth. To the question of what differentiates the mind numbing hours of cyber trawling- crawling might be more accurate- from soul expanding diversions such as nature walks, I say only this.

“Chaval al d’avdin v’lo mishtakchin“.

For years I couldn’t figure this out. Anytime anyone would happen across me garbed in the traditional costume of yeshiva bochurim (namely: black hat, jacket, white shirt) anywhere from Dan to Beersheva, people with even the most peripheral shaychis with yeshivaleit would assume they know which yeshiva I’m in. The Mir. I know this mistaken tendency isn’t davka related to me or my brand of hat or jacket; bochurim from every major yeshivishe yeshiva report this curious misfingerprinting of chevra.

Personally, I’ve been misidentified this way more times than I can remember, by people from all walks of life. Just as examples; a secular lady from Tel Aviv, a chosid from Ashdod, a Tzioni from up north, all united in this singular form of achdus.

I used to think that perhaps the Mir simply had a better PR machine than the nonexistent one(s) of their Soleveitchik led brethren. But then I discovered the origins of the Chelm legends. And it all made sense.

Everyone is familiar with the fables of Chelm. In heimish circles, Chelm is classically associated with the fool. Stories abound of the wild and wacky things Chelmites have performed in their untiring pursuit of the very pinnacle of imbecility. While the origins of the extreme denseness is apparently a source of much good natured debate among Jewstorians, my personal favorite goes as follows:

The people of Chelm were in fact a brilliant lot. Lovers of the book, and sincere rodfei chochmah, the batei midrashim there didn’t have light switches; the lights were simply kept on all the time. And yet, being a shtetl in Europe, there did exist a proportion of the populace whose intelligence levels were lower than the municipal average. Causing no end of grief to their more enlightened townsmen, eventually a movement formed with one purpose: to evict those townsmen in Chelm that had difficulty keeping up with the Rav’s weekly hashkafa shiur, with the Rosh Yeshiva’s blatt shiur, and conversation in general.

This movement, known as ACHZURIM (Association of Chelmites Having Zeal and Umbrage Relating to Idiocy in Men), finally gained a majority in the local legislative body. Presently, the great day came, and all Chelmites with an IQ of less than 120 were summarily evicted from the shtodt. They were, of course, given double recompense for their homes and possessions they did not wish to take with them. All of the townsmen, fools and wise men alike, mourned the day, but at the same time all accepted it as being the wisest course of action; the former in deference to the latter, and the latter being the wise men knew it as the wisest course. Most of the fools, utilizing the sage advice of their erstwhile brethren, converted the cash into diamonds and other forms of high value, mobile currency. Since, however, these yidden were more or less unskilled, they became doomed to roam the hinterlands of Europe. An endless trek through the yiddishe shtetlach of old, they sold various odds and ends, making a living even as they lived a life patterned after their forefathers in Sinai of old.

This, of course, gave rise to Chelm’s eponymous association with fools. Being that whenever people would meet one of these peddler Chelmites, and would ask where these fools were from, the peddlers would proudly provide the name of their hometown. Before long, Chelm had acquire the unfortunate reputation of being a city of total fools.

And that, my friends, is why I think people so often identify bochurim as belonging to the Mir.

I look up at the precious face of the precocious yingeleh before me. Framed not by dangling waxed peyos, nor crowned by the familiar sheen of velvet ebony, his azure blue eyes match the navy blue needlepoint on the sruga. The black locks of hair that curl around his forehead are swept neatly to the side, and his freckled face seems just as cute as his counterparts of Meah Shearim, if not more so.

It is midway through Shabbos afternoon, and I am three quarters of the way through a rare volume; R’ Nosson Kaminetsky’s book, “Anatomy of a Ban”. An absorbingly true tale if there ever was one, it does an excellent job of whiling away that magical time between mincha gedolah and shalosh seudos, time I’d normally be chapping a shluf. But back to my interruption; the young fellow in front of me demands my attention, riveting as the book is.

“What are you doing; want to play a game-checkers, chess?”, he asks hopefully. Indeed, I would enjoy playing chess with the child, but at the moment have more pressing matters at hand; with only a half hour or so until shalosh seudos, I know it’s unlikely I’ll have a similar opportunity in the future to finish this limited edition, scarce sefer.

“I wish, but I’m reading this book, and really want to finish it before Mincha,” I tell him with no small measure of disappointment.

The boy inquires further. “What is the book about”?

Well now, there’s a question. The book, a chronicle of the events leading up to the official cherem (ban) issued on the author’s earlier work, “Making of a Godol,” and the circumstances causing the unofficial one declared on the author himself, is a tale of woe, frustration, and much emotional pain. The protagonist of Anatomy of a Ban, much like his heroes of Making of a Godol, invested much of his life, throughout various stages of it, towards a single goal. Upon completion of said goal, instead of the accolades and admiration he was hoping for, he achieved acclaim of a different sort. Some say he could have, or should have, foreseen the consequences of publishing a book containing the sort of stories his two sefer set did, and indeed deserved what he got; others defend the work, saying nothing that shouldn’t have been said was printed, and indeed that it was what the gedolim referenced would have wanted.

But how to explain this to a nine year old, and an unyeshivish one at that?

After a reflecting a minute, what I end up telling him is as simple as it is true.

“It is the story of a Yid who got hurt.”