JERUSALEM In the Holy City, even the silly rises to the saintly; how much more so the saintly itself.
Technology cannot mask the silly; indeed, the Holy City has become a marvel of technology.
The new train system is sleek and efficient. Countless thousands of cars no longer ply the streets and plug the traffic. Countless tons of pollution are obviated by this new train, which, at one point, soars above the city on a curved bridge, reaching into the heavens that define Jerusalem as they define no other city in the world.
And yet. Here is the scene. Silly? Absurd? Endearing?
The young woman with her toddler in a stroller is riding along Jaffa Road, squeezed between other passengers, minding her own business. Suddenly the conductor appears and orders her to fold up her stroller. There is, of course, no room for that, nor would it be safe to do so while the train is moving and swaying along its path.
The conductor, insistent but not raising his voice, is not to be denied. Its no different from the bus, he tells her.
It is not immediately clear what he means. A few volleys back and forth, between the pushy conductor and the resistant mother, make it clear.
It seems that on the bus, if a passenger wants to keep her child in the stroller, the child is considered an additional passenger and the mother has to pay an additional fare.
The mother on the train looks like a scofflaw.
But here is where technology fails the conductor. The train, sleek and swift, cannot answer her claim:
Actually, its not like the bus, she tells him. On the bus, you get on, and if there is no room for the stroller you fold it up, and if there is room, you pay the additional fare.
But on the train, you have to pay before you get on. Am I a prophet? Standing outside the train, buying a ticket before the train even arrives, I cannot tell whether the train is crowded or not. I do not know whether I need to pay an additional fare. I only know that once Im on the train then, theres no one to pay the additional fare to!
The conductor, whose role is to check the tickets not to take the money demands once again that she fold up the stroller. She doesnt. Nor is there anyone to pay an additional fare to.
Before you know it, the conductor has departed the train at the next stop. The mother has triumphed, protecting her child and her pocketbook.
AM I a prophet?
I felt like one, scanning the vast panorama of the Holy Land beyond and beneath me, viewing, among much else, the Road of the Patriarchs stretching beneath me. Remember, as Judah ha-Levi pointed out in his famous work, the Kuzari, Biblical prophecy was impossible outside the Holy Land.
I stand at the edge of the village of Alon Shevut and peer to my left, taking in the Jewish village of Rosh Zurim, perhaps a mile or two away. To my right is Elazar, another Jewish village, also a mile or two away, and in back of it one can espy the tallest building in still another village, Nevei Daniel. To the right of Elazar is Efrat, and to its right, seen out of the right corner of my eyes is Migdal Oz. And in the other direction, seen faintly in the distance, between Rosh Zurim and Elazar, is the city of Betar.
Beneath me are sloping, rolling fields, tilled fields, planted in calming, parallel rows of grains or grapes or vegetables, Arab-owned fields, which like the Jewish villages they surround, stretch as far to the right and to the left as the eye can see.
It is Shabbos.
The land and the people are at rest.
No vehicle is seen on the roads.
Nothing moves.
The sky hovers, it seems to touch the fields and the villages, as the sky seems to do only above G-ds promised land.
In all of these villages, in front of me as well as in Alon Shevut in back of me, the people embrace the Sabbath, live by the rhythm of shomrei Shabbos.
I am pulled up short. Among the countless pressures, tensions and challenges facing the Jewish people daily, sometimes we forget how far we have come. Not even 100 years ago, let alone 1,900 years at the time of the destruction of the Second Holy Temple and the exile from the land of Israel, could one have imagined this scene. Jewish villages. At peace. At rest. Tens of thousands of Jewish residents, rising naturally from the land like leaves on a plant, at peace. Intermixed with Arab fields, without incident.
Shabbos in the Holy Land.
Shabbos.
Foreseen by the prophets of old.
SOMETHING about Shulamit Ezrachi, more than 30 years ago, conveyed a subliminal message: my teachings transcend my position, outlast my job, create connections beyond the memory of names and faces of my students. Somehow, it seemed perfectly natural to call her up, sight unseen for more than 30 years, to request a meeting.
She had, in the interim, written a moving, unembellished, elevating memoir of her father, replete with unpretentious and on precisely that score compelling excursions into wise reflections on life, by her and by her father. He, Rabbi Meir Chodosh, had escaped death at the hands of anti-Semites during World War I and escaped again, this time the Arab pogrom in Hebron in 1929. He had held tight to his precious study of Torah throughout, and after 1929 guided hundreds and thousands of students in the Hebron yeshiva as it relocated to Jerusalem.
His daughter Shulamit recounts in her memoir the Arab siege of Jerusalem in 1948, her visit to Hebron after the Israeli victory in 1967, and her and her husbands foray into Moscow immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, in order to bring a touch of Yiddishkeit to Judaism-starved children of communism. Hers has been a life of adventure, impressively yet quietly, modestly told.
Having recently read this memoir, I wished to reconnect with the author, the teacher of one of our daughters long ago. Something told me she had not changed, and I was right.
She received us in her Jerusalem home, and kindly introduced us to her husband, the eminent yeshiva dean Rabbi Baruch Mordechai Ezrachi. He and she regaled us with stories of the yeshiva and of life all these years in the Holy City.
Shulamit Ezrachi spoke with grace, clarity, refinement, her Hebrew both idiomatic and classical. I recalled her in the classroom: One could no more imagine a discipline problem than a rock tossed into a pond that made no waves. She made no waves; it was her substance, her easy and deep familiarity with the material that held her charges attention as she imparted mounds of information, and more than information as she imparted feeling.
Now in her eighth or ninth decade, she, like her husband, looks to the future suitable, and natural, in the land of the prophets.
EACH in his own way, each stretching the definition of integrity way beyond the common grasp, is inspiring just for being.
Eight days ago I had the privilege of praying in the morning with the elder sage of the generation, Rabbi Yosef Shalom Eliashiv.
He, 101 years of age, has since been hospitalized, and as I write I pray for his complete recovery.
But as of eight days ago he was able to enter his synagogue at 6:15 a.m. and pray from beginning to end without the support of the people standing at his side, just in case. As the moment of the blessing by the kohanim approached, he moved out of the way, as required, without incident. His voice was clear and strong as he had an aliyah to the Torah. At the conclusion of the prayers, he received perhaps 30 people, one after the other, to bless each one individually.
I left his small, somewhat makeshift synagogue to walk the 200 yards or so to Tiferet Bachurim, which had been his fathers shul and his own place of prayer for all the decades, before he could no longer easily walk there each morning. He has asked his son, Benjamin Eliashiv, to keep that shul going, which he does not only with daily prayers, but with five separate kollels or Torah-study fellowships.
In the son is the face of the father. The son sits there simply, in study. One would not know that he is the author of several learned tomes. One would not know that from his father, through him and through his siblings, have come an astonishing family of six living generations and over 1,000 descendants, including leading Torah scholars in their own right.
Each in his own way: Seven days ago, I had the privilege of praying on Friday night and Shabbos with the elder sage of another segment of the Jewish people, Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein, dean of the yeshiva in Alon Shevut.
It becomes an impossibility to ascertain which is more striking: Rav Aharons intellect or his middos, his integrity, his humility.
As it happened, no one praying in the yeshiva on Friday night was obligated to recite the kaddish. So as not to let it remain unsaid, Rav Aharon recited it. Never in my life have I heard a kaddish so haunting, capturing the suffering, and glory, and eternity of the Jewish people; its achievements and its yearnings, its closeness to and distance from the Holy One Blessed be He; recited slowly, slightly undulating, alternately loud and soft, and deep, quarried from a higher place, above and beyond.
From the place of prophecy, the place linking the generations, from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, stretching backward over the shoulder and forward as far as the eye can imagine, until the coming of the Redeemer.
Copyright © 2012 by the Intermountain Jewish News
