By Chaim M. Goldberg
AWE-inspiring.
90,000 people exclaiming their loyalty to G-d in unison with the roar of Shema Yisrael.
For this alone, the price of admission was worth it.
This being my second Siyum HaShas, though, I found it interesting that the reverberations of the indoor crowd of 20,000 at the 2005 Siyum HaShas rivaled the sound of 90,000 in the open-air MetLife stadium.
The overwhelming theme of the night was unity. For once however, it wasnt just talk. Just three days after the mournful Tisha bAv, every minute spent there was an assertion of ones dedication of unity among all Jews. Alongside the many dressed in suits and black hats, there were others with all varieties of head coverings or even no head covering.
But there was talk about unity as well, as many of the evenings speakers captured the essence and purpose of Jewish unity, some with pithy phrases, and others with deeply profound thoughts.
Elly Kleinman, chairman of the event, drove home the point that with Jews across the world learning the same page (daf) of Talmud every day, there is common, productive ground for conversation among any two random Jews at any given encounter.
We are on the same page.
And the hope is that being on the same page physically will ultimately lead to us being on the same page spiritually as well.
Building on this point of the Daf Yomi being the source of unity, the Novominsker Rebbe took on Mark Twains challenge of What is the secret of his [the Jews] immortality?
The world does not understand us, the Novominsker Rebbe said, And the world cannot understand us.
The source of our eternity is the verse, For it will never be forgotten from your offspring (Deut. 31:21). It is the Torah. Without a comprehensive knowledge of the Torah and its history, the world will never explain our inexplicable continuous existence.
Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, former chief rabbi of Israel, quoted a midrash that Jerusalem makes all its inhabitants friends.
This stadium, he then said, has made us all brothers tonight!
A reporter for the AP I spoke to confirmed as much, saying she was most impressed with the multitudes of people that showed up, and not even to celebrate their own accomplishments!
Indeed, Jews of all stripes were in attendance to celebrate their brothers accomplishments.
WHILE some might have viewed the Siyums location in a football stadium as necessary but not preferable, others believed MetLife stadium truly brought out the greatness of the evening.
Shlomo Rechnitz, master of ceremonies, recalled a famous passage in the Talmudic tractate of Berachot.
We toil and others toil. We run and others run. We toil and receive reward, others toil and do not. We run toward eternal life, others run toward a bottomless pit.
Never before had this excerpt been so vividly clear to me as I stood thinking about the enormous effort athletes put into their success, only to have their physical decline render them all but worthless in the eyes of their former admirers.
Particularly unfortunate, I thought, is the trajectory of the football players who play on this very field for only a few short years, whereupon their retirement proves to be full of debilitating diseases and, often, an early death.
Yet, in front of me on the dais sat dozens of elderly Jewish scholars, revered by the capacity crowd because of, not in spite of, their longevity and knowledge.
The Siyums location in a secular venue brought with it a tremendous sanctification of G-ds name as well.
After spontaneous dancing broke out that had numerous people crowding the dais, Rechnitz made a 10-second an-nouncement asking them to disperse. Within a minute, all was orderly.
One police officer, referencing the Super Bowl scheduled to be held at MetLife in 2014, commented he would well remember the effectiveness of our riot police.
Of course, the effectiveness stemmed not from fear of punishment, but from the extraordinary respect of the crowd.
Exactly 76 years earlier on Aug. 1, Adolf Hitler inaugurated the 1936 Olympics in front of a crowd of 100,000. How sweet it was to have a similarly large crowd gathered in a sports venue once again, on the same date, to celebrate the everlasting unification of Torah.
THE other main theme of the night was the future. What did John Elway do on Feb. 1, 1999? Whatever it was, it surely didnt come close to the thrill of winning the Super Bowl the previous day. What did all those who completed the entire Talmud do on August 2, 2012? They turned the page. And with that, they began the marathon toward even further accomplishment and another celebratory siyum to be held Jan. 4, 2020.
A plan.
Addressing those in the crowd who had not finished the Daf Yomi cycle, Rabbi Yissocher Frand implored us to formulate a plan to transform the inspiration filling the air into concrete spiritual growth for the days, months and years ahead.
Deviating slightly from the idea of Daf Yomi, a folio page of Talmud a day, he stressed the aspect of yomi, doing something every day. Study any subject, for any length of time just make Torah study a part of your daily life, he said.
For studying Torah is not something to be compartmentalized; rather, it should be a constant.
In the video featuring Heroes of the Daf, numerous participants exclaimed how their Torah study has become the consistent thread throughout their year, around which everything else is scheduled.
When one participant was told by his friend that there simply is no time in his schedule, the response was, Do you have time to brush your teeth? The message was loud and clear: One has time for whats important to him.
Another key word people skim over is cycle. The Daf Yomi Cycle. The significance of this is that it is never truly over; it recycles. As Rabbi Shmuel Kamenetzky suggested, if one is doing the cycle for the second time, add an additional commentary. If one were to follow his suggestion to its conclusion and learn an extra commentary each cycle, it would probably be a thousand years before he got through all of them. Torah learning is never finished.
THIS year, two new elements were introduced to the program.
First, there was a movement to have kids complete a section of Torah to coincide with the Siyum. At the Siyum, selected kids were then given the special opportunity to ascend the dais and shake hands with the main speakers as Baruch Levine sang in their honor.
To see emphasis put on the people who will be the leaders themselves in just a few decades gave validation to the source of our eternity as spoken about by the Novominsker Rebbe, For it will never be forgotten from your offspring. Even in their youth, the importance of their commitment is instilled within them in a powerful way.
Focusing on the youth became even more meaningful in light of the second new element, remembering the Holocaust. Rabbi Lau, a survivor, gave unique meaning to the events magnitude in the wake of the Holocaust.
How beautiful it was, he said, to see a multitude of Jews gathered on their own to celebrate Torah, and not, G-d forbid, against their will at the mercy of others. Tonight, the G-d of revenge has appeared! he proclaimed.
Witnessing the spontaneous dancing of 90,000 brought tears of joy to his eyes, as he processed how far weve come in the last 70 years; however, they quickly changed to tears of sorrow as he realized how many would be friends and colleagues of his did not survive to witness this momentous occasion.
As the event came to a close in the wee hours of the morning, I reflected on its magnificence. Its myriad details of planning and flawless execution. Perfection, right?
Well, nearly perfect. Maybe by 2020, MetLife stadium will have a retractable roof so that the reverberations of Shema Yisrael will echo back in full force, and remain ringing in our ears until the Siyum Hashas of 2027.
Copyright © 2012 by the Intermountain Jewish News
