EACH summer, as the Hebrew month of Tammuz on the Jewish calendar rolls around, there is a palpable sense of heaviness.
There is a strange feeling in the air we know the time has come to mourn and commemorate painful losses throughout our history, primarily the destruction of the two Holy Temples in Jerusalem.
We are taught that these three weeks, especially their final nine days culminating in the fast of Tisha bAv, are a dark and ominous time. Tragedies strike. Subconsciously, come the three weeks and traditional Jews are a bit on eggshells.
Two of the famous phrases from the Book of Lamentations, read on Tisha bAv, are al eleh ani bochiyah, for these [losses and tragedies] I cry and eini eini yorda mayim, my eye, my eye, is trickling with water (tears).
The first thing I heard this morning was the chilling news: Rav Yosef Shalom Elyashiv, the head of the Lithuanian yeshiva community worldwide, died. Barely processing that, an hour later I learned of the deadly suicide attack on the bus of Israeli tourists in Bulgaria.
Al eleh ani bochiyah. . .
What I believe to be true is this: The world at this time yesterday was a different world from the one we are living in today. Yesterday we were living in a world with Rav Elyashiv. Today we are in a world without Rav Elyashiv. The world is a different place. The world is diminished.
When I heard of the scene that transpired once the word went out of Rav Elyashivs imminent departure from this world, of how hundreds and thousands of Torah students and scholars unplanned, uncoordinated began flocking from all corners of Jerusalem to the Shaare Zedek Hospital, of how the sounds of their Psalms were heard reverberating through the hospital corridors and its eight floors, of how security personnel needed to barricade the hospital from these worried disciples who wanted one last chance to be close, just one more prayer to cross their lips to Heaven on his behalf . . . when I pictured this, I immediately pictured the death scene of Rav Yehuda Hanasi, of Rebbi, compiler of the Mishnah.
UPON Rebbis death bed, on Friday, the eve of the Sabbath, his students surrounded his palace, shaking the heavens with their prayers, pleading with the elyonim (higher beings), roaring in prayer to Heaven above, in order to avert the decree of the angel of death from their beloved Torah teacher the generational Torah transmitter.
Rebbis maid, seeing the pain and torment he was in, and knowing the power of his students prayers, begged them to stop their prayers. She felt his time had come, but that the students prayers were so powerful that they delayed Rebbis death and release from his agony.
The maids pleas went unheeded. What did she do? She let a piece of pottery drop from her hands. The moment it shattered into shards for that split second Rebbis students were caught off guard; their voices of prayer were unexpectedly silenced. In that briefest of moments, when the prayers were suspended, the soul of Rebbi left this world.
The Talmud continues:
Rav Yehuda Hanasi wanted to be buried in Beit Shearim, not Tzippori, where he resided.
A generation of Jews were mourning the loss of the greatest Torah teacher. They all traveled from Tzippori to Beit Shearim . . . but the day was getting late . . . Shabbos was coming. What happened? The bright sun remained in the sky until the last of the mourners returned home only then did the sun set, ushering in Shabbat.
The absence of a person whose entire life was immersion in the Torah is hard to explain. Rav Elyashiv lived in the same, extremely modest apartment for almost 100 years. He was a person almost totally free of the physical, material world. He lived on holy books. He was nourished by them. That was his life the life of the mind, of the spirit, of the soul.
WHEN I heard of his passing, when the full force of who he was, of what his life was, his greatness . . . I felt an overwhelming desire to give everything up, to get on a plane, move into a two bedroom apartment in Meah Shearim with the shirt on my back and a prayer book. I think there is somewhere inside many of us, a part of us that wants a piece of that purity, to feel it and be connected to it.
In my twenties, I went to Rav Elyashiv to receive his blessing. It was dark outside; there were a bunch of us in that narrow alleyway, standing on line along a steep staircase in the courtyard of his Meah Shearim apartment.
Unlike today, there wasnt much fanfare surrounding him.
He was extremely accessible, not yet considered the leader of the Lithuanian yeshiva community.
I had been to him for a blessing before.This time, as luck would have it, his daughter-in-law, Chana, was standing in line with me. Yes, even she waited in line to see him.
We began chatting, enjoying a friendly conversation. Chana shared a lot about the essence of Rav Elyashiv with me, as well as her experience of being part of his family.
She filled me in on basic facts of his life that at the time I did not know.
She filled me in about his lifelong, solo Torah study, about his being an only child born to his parents after close to 20 years of childlessness, about his wife being the daughter of the famed Reb Aryeh Levine, known as the tzaddik of Jerusalem or the father of the prisoners (referring to the Jews imprisoned during the British Mandate in Palestine).
I remember her regaling me with stories about the phenomenal powers of concentration that Rav Elyashiv possessed while studying Torah, evident even while he was only a child.
One of the stories involved his mother hanging laundry on the line. Rav Elyashiv, then but a young child, was downstairs, outside in the courtyard studying. As his mother was hanging the laundry, a gust of wind blew it to the ground, but Rav Elyashiv was oblivious.
Another story involved an ice popsicle. Most children would interrupt studying for such a treat in a heartbeat actually, come to think of it, most children would not be self-motivated to study on their own in the first place but as little child Rav Elyashiv was unaffected by such distractions or temptations.
They didnt interest him. Since childhood, when Rav Elyashiv studied he was absorbed; he was in a different sphere.
Most stories of great rabbis are of their human evolution, of how they became great over a lifetime of hard spiritual work.
From the beginning though, Rav Elyashiv was different. There really is something mythic about him. He was a maverick in that he never studied with a Torah partner. To achieve Torah greatness in this way is unique to him.
This may make him sound like the oblivious scholar who does not care about humanity or is unaware of the plight of others. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Yet, as Chana emphasized to me, Rav Elyahsivs mother did her best not to disturb him because she wanted to cultivate his love of learning and his powers of concentration.
SO, as the line moved up and it got closer to our turn, the gabbai saw me shmoosing with Chana, who, of course, he knew, and unlike the previous time when I was granted just enough time to be whizzed in and out, this time, the gabbai automatically granted me, relatively speaking, a pretty nice long audience with Rav Eliashiv.
We had a conversation. Now I cherish it even more than I have through the years. There was a severity, a raw authenticity, absolutely no barriers, between him and the truth, between him and what is real.
This and a tangible humility and modesty pierced the conversation.
He wasnt the one to sugarcoat and just bless things away. No, he was not. And there was something so plain, so simple, so human and unadorned and ordinary about our brief but interactive dialogue.
Rav Elyashiv was the last of the generation of that Yerushalayim Shel Mala, that Heavenly Jerusalem, that transcendent ethereal Jerusalem of last century.
The Jerusalem of Rav Kuk, of Rav Zonnenfeld, of Reb Aryeh Levine.
Rav Kuk, the first chief rabbi of Israel, was a mentor to Rav Elyashiv, and introduced him to his wife, the daughter of Reb Aryeh Levine. Rav Kuk officiated at their wedding.
An intimate interconnectedness to these beloved and holy people of that transcendent Jerusalem lived within Rav Elyashiv. Now we are permanently even one step further removed from that.
Its interesting how in Rav Elyashivs long life he was a part of both the Zionist and the anti-Zionist communities. Up to the early 1970s he served as a judge on the highest rabbinic court of the Israeli rabbinate, until he resigned over a controversial ruling that he thought was wrong and publicly disagreed with. Funny how things turn out. Many of his followers of today rejected him just 40 years ago.Yet, Rav Elyashiv rose to be the one whose rulings they accept today.
Always the halachic decisor, toward the end of his life, in an unexpected move, Rav Elyashiv recently ruled on the painful subject of child abuse. For a more sheltered community accustomed to dealing with issues internally, he broke ground in ruling that when there is reason to believe there is abuse or molestation, it should be reported to the authorities. It is a very complicated nuanced ruling, beyond the scope of this column.
With the passing of Rav Elyashiv, the ever modest embodiment of what a living sefer Torah is, we lost a leader. We lost the leader of the Jewish people, whether you felt close to him or identified with him or not, because he was a leader in the sense that he carried on his shoulders the burden of the Jewish People.
Al eleh ani bochiyah.
Copyright © 2012 by the Intermountain Jewish News
