Life of Yeshiva Guy

He looks up, startled out of his otherworldly focus on the sefer in front of him, pulled back to the small shteeble room by the staccato beat of the teenaged chazzan’s repetition of Shemonah Esrei. Reverently closing the dusty tome, he caresses it with a gentle, feather-like touch, and places it carefully back into the seforim shrank, sandwiched between a standard Sefard siddur and a small sefer on the intricacies of the Birchas HaChamah.

Now swaying back and forth slowly to the niggun of the nusach, he is raptly attentive to the Chazaras HaShat”z. Kedusha comes, and with it I watch this Saraf say the “…sarfei kodesh…Kadosh, Kadosh“. He’s burning all the while.

Forehead beaded in sweat, hands clasped together in front of him, and eyes closed but not squeezed shut, he’s totally…somewhere else. I wish I knew where, exactly. What that place looked like.

After davening, I hang around. I want to observe him in a regular atmosphere. How he “firs zich” when he’s me’urev bein habriyos. Everyone seems to know him. He offers his hand to all, regardless of age. An average, not particularly illuminating or otherwise noteworthy smile crosses his face when he does so. Of middle age, his jet black beard, smooth skin, and standard reckel don’t offer me any clues as to who he might be, or why he seemed so… holy during davening. Gathering my thoughts and disregarding them at the same time, I walk up to him.

I ask him in the softest, most non-confrontational voice I possess:

“Mi atah“?

He stares at me for a moment, confused.

“Ani hashamash“.

Asked and answered.