There Are Two Clocks In The House Of Study
Heilman, Samuel
THERE ARE TWO CLOCKS IN THE HOUSE OF STUDY SAMUEL HEILMAN / hold that each man has a self, and enlarges his self by his experiences. That is, he learns from experience: from the experiences of...
...And so, men who work all day and can only spend their after-hours engaged in study of Torah stop into the bes medrash for mincha on their way home from work, and linger there, lernen, while waiting to complete the day's prayers...
...Time here seemed transformed...
...While everyone else in the chavruse spoke Yiddish, Lippe spoke in German, for that was the language he knew best...
...The room began to buzz with last-minute activity...
...He could, for example, make the biblical Joseph into a contemporary of all in the room and then, just as easily, sweep all of us gathered around him back into time and into a narrative dripping with memories of the Jewish world that perished in the fires of Nazi Europe...
...But the smile with which he had begun his remarks remained forever frozen on his face, as if to say that this small contradiction was of no consequence for an undiscovered but genuine scholar...
...The gabbai also joined the group in the corner...
...So open to page 24, folio b," Reb Asher said...
...On Sabbath afternoons he would hold court in this same room—which would then be packed with listeners— and would review the portion of the week, weaving into it homilies and visions, stories and parables...
...But while the temporal gates of the city were easy enough to find, it seemed much harder, at first, to discover the gateways to lernen...
...And I was told by someone in the Old City that here in Shaarey Chesed I would find a chavruse that would be glad to let me join, and which was steady in its progress through the Talmud...
...Aside from me, Reb Eliezer was the youngest of the group...
...They could know when their prayers were or were not acceptable simply by looking out the window...
...There was no need to say more, no need for a philosophical discussion about the merits and mandates of study...
...So finally, when the Rav reached the same judgment that the redactors of the text had reached generations earlier, his was not simply an echo of that decision out of the past...
...A thump of a hand on a table suddenly announced the time for ma'ariv...
...First came the wind, bearing all of the dust of the Judean Desert in the east...
...it was instead one of those little naps taken in the sure confidence that nothing much would change in the world while he was away...
...Tonight Reb Eliahu still served as the gabbai...
...Composed of verses which appear throughout the Bible, its opening line—"Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One"—is by far its most striking...
...The Rav paused...
...Although they still stood inside the same little chapel, their faces once again had the profane and distracted look of men on the outside The subtle but unmistakable shift caused my involuntary shudder...
...He left even the skeptics yearning for the world of the bes medrash and a past stemming from the traditional Jewish consciousness that they thought they had long ago abandoned...
...And once when a controversy arose between the gabbai and the Rav, it was Yechiel Michl who found the solution...
...But these details of the Temple ritual were not part of lessons to be intellectually assimilated...
...Every word of the exchange had been spoken in the present tense...
...For the traditional Jew it is even more: the object of his prayers and the image of the heavenly Jerusalem whose gates mirror those of the earthly one...
...His own voice necessarily becomes caught up with the voices of the others, and the cries of those sitting nearby extend it...
...We both knew what I meant: I wanted to join a circle of Jews who regularly review Talmud—not for profit or as a vocation but because it is a religious obligation incumbent upon all Jews...
...Rather, compartmen-talization becomes the rule...
...There were commentaries on the Mishna and Maimonidean presentations of the law and copies of The Guide for the Perplexed...
...But then we reached the Kriyat Sh'ma, the recitation of the credo of faith which is perhaps the central article of Jewish prayer...
...Now he offered to show me around the house...
...I knew, however, that his was the garb of the well-dressed traditional Jewish scholar...
...These lines of prayer, at once familiar to me and yet somehow strange, seemed tonight to resonate with an authenticity I was not used to hearing...
...Hishomru lochem...
...My own expectations of prayer seem to have been fixed at a very different stage...
...Many men were reciting kaddish, the memorial prayer often chanted at the close of ritual study...
...Eliahu was without a doubt a child of Ashkenazic Jewry, a European product and an immigrant from the yeshi-vas of Vilna and Volozhin...
...May I join...
...like Ben Zakkai, I would begin my journey at the Temple Mount and then come away from its Samuel Heilman is Director of the Jewish Studies Program at Queens College and author of The People of the Book (The University of Chicago Press, 1983),an analysis of the role of traditional book learning in Judaism and the Jewish community...
...Some did just that as they intoned the line...
...It was, after all, the slowest worshiper who could hold onto his Lord the longest...
...his comprehension completed our consideration of a topic...
...Then it too stopped...
...A cherubic-looking little fat man entered and walked toward these tables...
...The model was clearly no child's toy, for it had been constructed with meticulous care (even the fire escapes were perfect) and was housed under glass...
...The next day I found my way to Shaarey Chesed and to the large synagogue there...
...I soon learned that the clock on the left was set to the time in the outside world, while the other was set to indicate the always-changing time of sunset according to which the times of prayer and study were determined...
...The man who entered glanced at me and then at the book in my hands and gave me a nod and a smile...
...It was the Maggid...
...For my partners around the table did care...
...once he had reached his place, the gabbai nodded to the man leading us in prayer, signalling him to commence...
...I had always associated their creviced, serene faces with the true face of faith...
...I had arrived at the best time to find men engaged in study in theObes medrash—that twilight hour between the afternoon mincha and the evening ma'ariv prayers...
...For the most part, the effort is not taken...
...Reb Asher seemed to take in the world obliquely, to master reality out of the fringe of his consciousness...
...I still looked upon liturgy as a vehicle for requests from some divine parent—and once I no longer believed such requests to be efficacious or even conceivable, I had ceased praying with devotion and continued mostly out of inertia...
...Once we entered the world of the Talmud, it was rather easy to forget the cold and the present and become wrapped in the heat of talmudic disputation...
...it was that they luxuriated in the past—not just their own but the Jewish people's...
...But while he might have been a rav elsewhere, in this room and at this hour, he was simply another of those who lerned...
...But for the other men, that was no problem...
...It was one of those elongated oral pauses that gave him time to get his bearings in a complicated page...
...A thin man with an equally thin beard that ringed his face, he wore a small fedora with barely a trace of a brim, a hat unlike any other in Shaarey Chesed...
...The idea was not altogether new to me, to be sure...
...Look, it's not too hard to see it my way too, and the majority isn't always right...
...to me such things were archaic beyond imagining...
...It was the time of day when men on their way home from work stop into the shut—much as their counterparts elsewhere might stop into the pub—to share some time with friends in an atmosphere of cultural intimacy and warmth...
...Reb Tzvi was something quite different: He was the great audience to whom everyone wanted to play...
...His was not a deep sleep during which he lost full consciousness of where he was...
...The holy books were of a different nature...
...I wanted to join a circle of students for whom the review of Talmud was not simply a duty to be performed but a pleasure to be embraced, for whom the world of the page was ineluctably connected with life...
...The final kaddish was recited and the men began to drift out of the room...
...On the one side— the one with the opened eye—the Maggid was attached to the people he saw before him, trying to satisfy their craving for a spiritual and Jewish experience...
...He and I spoke the same language, lived in a universe of like moral obligations and worshiped the same God...
...But this memory was of course not theirs in origin...
...Instead, they seemed to dwell upon and within their prayers as if the very act of praying were sufficient compensation, even more important to them than any anticipated godly response...
...Some pamphlets and holy books were lying about...
...What better time, then, to review the sacred texts than a time which is both day and night...
...All stood, each man with his feet together, only the torso swaying, and recited individually the devotion's 19 blessings...
...It was late afternoon, the time of the mincha prayers...
...A year after I left this circle, I returned for a visit and found Eliezer firmly entrenched in the senior ranks...
...Shaarey Chesed—literally, the Gates of Kindness—is a section of town that lies between the market district and the high-class neighborhood of Rehavia...
...Hearing footsteps, I picked up the Tanya...
...Surely not a bad way to begin...
...It did not matter whether or not the listener had actually known that world, for under the Maggid's spell, one could see and experience it with all the nostalgia usually associated with personal reminiscence...
...Whatever the source of the attraction, it urged me forward, pushing me to move further and further into the heart of this Jewish Quarter...
...It happened that night...
...chuckling, chubby Moses, on the other hand, was, underneath, a serious and exacting scholar...
...The other walls were covered with memorial tablets and inscriptions...
...Lamps burned everywhere, and fluorescent lights, the tiny black letters along their edges dedicated to the memory of former rabbis and teachers, illuminated the study areas...
...Then was now and now then...
...To be sure, I had always told people that was why I prayed, but what had simply been a logical argument had now become a psychological reality...
...The discussion in the Talmud dealt with the proper size of the sacrifice of thanksgiving, and what happened if that offering turned out to be blemished...
...We shared the small talk of Jerusalem's Jewish Quarter: what had brought him here, how grand it must be to be housed so close to the Temple Mount, the splendid way the Jewish community had re-rooted itself in the land of its forebears, the great merit of studying Torah in the "special atmosphere of the holy city...
...rather, it seemed a display of the division in his being...
...There was no real distinction between the arguments on the page and those in the class...
...Reb Eliahu had a presence which only the presence of the Rav could limit...
...Here was the chain that, as we learn in Pirke Avot, begins with Moses at Sinai and runs through Joshua, the Elders, the Men of the Great Assembly and generations of others, finally reaching the countless little circles of Jews who continue to review a Torah they believe was once divinely revealed...
...They threw themselves into the text and through it, travelled back into time...
...It helped me, too, especially when the Rav's pace exceeded my own capacity to follow...
...Long minutes passed as each word of the Sh'ma was cried out...
...He was no ordinary student, for each day before joining our circle, he would lead a similar study group in the room across the hall.There he received all the honor—and was assumed to possess all the wisdom— that was here accorded Rav Moses...
...That little machine gave me the chance to take a second look at the world I entered each time the books were opened and the men gathered around them...
...The Maggid did not just tell his stories...
...To my right was a small sign marking the entrance to a Chabad House, one of the outposts of the Lubavitch Chassidic movement...
...And in front of these shelves sat two long tables laden with a variety of books not yet worn enough to be shamos but no longer sturdy enough for constant use...
...For women there was a little brochure about the importance of lighting Shab-bat candles and for men on why and how to don t'fillin, phylacteries...
...Please," and I was then motioned to sit next to the Rav...
...As we chatted in Hebrew, he told me that he was a French Jew who, at the Rebbe's urging, had emigrated several years earlier from Strasbourg and had been assigned responsibility for the house...
...Reb Zanvil made no such claims for himself...
...Eliahu was referring to the majority of great scholars, but he might just as easily have been talking about himself and us...
...Once his eyes are covered, he calls aloud, for all to hear, that the Lord is one...
...Gazing out at the Old City, with its impressive walls and imposing history, I imagined myself following in the footsteps of Yochanan ben Zakkai...
...I could feel it in the room and around the circle...
...rather, the learning I did came in through my imagination...
...It was a complicated business...
...That was exactly where we had begun—with two versions of the line...
...the right-hand clock told them when they could linger over the pages of the prayer book or the folios of the Talmud...
...They were of all sizes: Large tomes of Talmud sat alongside pocket-sized psalters and worn prayer books...
...In his, that answer would only be the case under specific circumstances...
...Logic has nothing to do with it and consistency is avoided like sin...
...scholarly forebears...
...they were almost composing them afresh...
...Downstairs from the main sanctuary were four or five rooms which together constituted the shul and bes medrash, the house of prayer and study that served the day-to-day needs of the worshipers...
...When I returned home, I rewound the tape to the place where the little exchange took place...
...What's this...
...Perhaps it was all of my years of reiterating in my prayers that Jewish longing for Jerusalem, perhaps simply the lure of the new...
...To be sure, I was never really certain when Zanvil was asleep and when awake, for he had found a way to wedge himself between me, Reb Eliezer on his right, and the table and wall, so that he could not fall over...
...All the g'dolim, the great scholars, see it Rashi's way," Yechiel Michl noted...
...And only he could stand in for the teacher on those rare occasions when the former was absent...
...Then came a clear day, when the dampness of winter fairly clung to the cold...
...A few stopped to chat with the Maggid...
...Sometimes he would stop at some particular word that charmed him and repeat it in a variety of voices and melodies until everyone in the room seemed as lost in and fascinated by it as he...
...To tell the truth, I had always been rather bored by those sections of Leviticus describing the order and detail of the priestly activities and sacrifices...
...It might be the gabbai who turned off the lights, but it was Reb Tzvi who turned off our attention...
...And then I saw it...
...And then, of course, there were some volumes of Bible and Talmud...
...I had seen many models of the Holy Temple all over Jerusalem—in schools, synagogues, toy stores and even at a hotel...
...Just when everyone seemed ready to begin the prayers, one last man wandered in...
...He was, by then, the gabbai...
...Reb Eliahu, however, had found an alternative reading of the text...
...they were walking into the page and onto the Temple Mount with all the assurance of old hands...
...Indeed, he seemed never to fully accomplish it, for each day he would cue and echo almost every sentence the Rav read or spoke...
...This prayer—which normally lasts less than five minutes—stretched out for closer to 10...
...Here I would find a group of people for whom Jewish study is as much a part of their lives as eating and sleeping—and sometimes indistinguishable from them...
...Sometimes 1 would notice one eye closed and the other carefully watching for his audience's reactions...
...But on the other—the side of his closed eye—he looked inward, and from there, upward to heaven...
...For a short while everything seemed to proceed normally...
...it makes one feel instantly at home...
...But he can learn from their inner experience only by entering it, and that is not done merely by reading a written record of it...
...Finally we reached the Amidah, the silent prayer that is the heart of all Jewish liturgy...
...he simply settled himself comfortably on the bench next to me and nodded off to sleep...
...his coat, his black velvet yarmulke, his beard and earlocks were relics of a world undreamed of on these streets in the days of Yochanan ben Zakkai...
...When he paused after the last word, "echod," the room was totally silent for a moment—as if everyone in the room had to swallow hard before continuing—and then the congregants resumed the silent hum of their prayers as they completed the three paragraphs of the liturgy...
...But his performance was not a cynical effort to dazzle those around him...
...I had always assumed that that principle affected only the written page, but now, as it had in America, it began to dawn on me that the students of the text could become likewise swept up in this same turbulence of time...
...The text described a man who was about to eat a minimal quantity of his sacrifice, as mandated by the law...
...But it was more than that...
...Now, suddenly and, I confess, overwhelmingly, I had stepped into the photograph and found myself among them...
...These were for those who already had been persuaded of the value of a traditional life and wanted to plumb its spiritual depths...
...Zanvil belonged in the circle just as he was...
...True, when I walked through the door I left the Jerusalem of the 1980s behind me and entered what appeared to be pre-war eastern Europe...
...It did not really matter...
...I do know that it was not many days before I began to lose myself in prayer and recite the familiar words of the Sh'ma with an attachment that I had not experienced since those days in grammar school when the first conscious motives of prayer invaded my adolescence...
...The previous few days had followed the Jerusalem weather pattern to which I was quickly growing accustomed...
...It was good to feel at home...
...They were so different from me, and yet in a very short time I felt that my presence in the circle was taken for granted, a part of the natural order of things here in the bes medrash...
...In fact, they often argued about exactly where the text could take them...
...Delving into the details of sacrifices no longer brought to a Holy Temple no longer standing was by no means easy for me at first...
...Many of the men are old, my guide warned me, but they would readily accept me into their circle, for to them, the study of Torah is a haven into which all—no matter whether young or old—must be welcomed...
...What had changed...
...The Temple was about to be destroyed...
...As the worshiper begins the words, "Sh'ma Yisrael" he lifts a hand to his eyes...
...In the usual rush of my own prayers, it was not something I often had the chance to do...
...So began our encounter...
...It was Reb Tzvi who handed out the snuff at the start of each session, its smell mingling with the aroma of the dusty room and the yellowing pages of the open books...
...I realized later that all the men had once come aboard that way, for that was precisely how the circle extended its life—by taking in a young man and aging him through the process of lernen...
...Now, all present stood to bow—this time in the direction of the holy ark and not to any mortal—as ma'ariv began...
...The Maggid sat somewhere between his audience and his own imagination...
...And I, like it or not, had—in a way—become one of these...
...Here, he seemed to find the source for tne words the outer world elicited from his mouth...
...With those few words of mine, this man, whom I had never before met, knew me, knew who I was and where I wanted to go...
...Like all of the Old City, the Jewish Quarter is a maze of narrow streets and alleys, many with names that resonate with Scripture, Talmud and Jewish history...
...So, while the temperature rarely dropped below 40 degrees Fahrenheit, it always seemed colder than a New England winter because those 40 degrees remained clattering around in the body until spring...
...He alone knew how to appreciate a good question or a sharp answer, the blood and tissue of lernen...
...I was never quite sure he was completely present in or aware of his circumstances—but every so often when I was certain that he was dozing or lost in a senile reverie, he would make some piercing comment that swept away any doubts I had about his consciousness...
...Only Eliahu could challenge Moses successfully, but he rarely did...
...There were doorposts commemorating a lost child and bookcases named after a departed teacher...
...Inside, even specific time had a different quality...
...How about joining the boys upstairs...
...We walked from room to room, through the nursery, where children were learning the ways of Judaism with the guidance of Chassidism, until at last we came to a small room which seemed to have all the makings of a shrine...
...The gleam in his eye whenever the Rav produced some flash of insight was what signalled the rest of us that a "good word" had just been offered...
...it was a memory acquired from the text...
...Instead, I simply watched to see what would happen next...
...Lubavitch, led by its charismatic rebbe/leader...
...I opened the door and found myself in a small courtyard with doors leading off of it on all four sides...
...Chabad is the acronym for chochmah (wisdom), binah (understanding) and da'at (knowledge)—the three great rungs of Jewish study which Lubavitch has adopted as its motto...
...His were daydreams behind closed eyes...
...I learned exactly what sacrifices could and could not be brought, who had to bring them, and how they were to be handled...
...For the last 60 years, without exception," he answered...
...The words on the page seemed to flow in and out of them: They drank in the page with their eyes, absorbed it through their fingers, moved it through their consciousnesses, echoed it in their voices...
...It was nothing formally established, but it was, at the same time, clearly understood...
...Reb Lippe distinguished himself in two ways: by his language and by his unabashed claims of talmudic expertise...
...J. Bronowski Jerusalem is more than simply a city, a place on the map...
...soon the light inside would exceed that outside...
...Beware lest your heart be deceived, and then you turn and serve other gods and worship them...
...Better the old who are at home with their lernen than the young who are obsessed by it, I thought...
...Another approached the bookcase, consulted one of the largest books, returned it to its shelf and then quietly left the room...
...These often pictured pious-looking old men with long beards and black velvet yarmulkes or hats seated around long tables and poring over the old holy books...
...All the rooms faced toward the Old City and the Western Wall...
...With whom did Eliahu stand...
...Orthodox Jews who try to live lives attached to the past yet embedded in the present often find themselves forced to overcome time in this way...
...Generations earlier, he had left a doomed world of Temple sacrifices in favor of a yeshiva in Yavne...
...None seemed to object to the little machine that lay on the table and swallowed up their speech...
...The tz'dakah collectors tried to complete one last transaction before everything stopped for prayer...
...The wind was followed by the rain, which washed all of the dirt out of the air and spread a light layer of mud over everything and everybody...
...Tonight it would help me to discover what had been so momentous about Rav Moses's judgment...
...In fact, everyone seemed intent—especially at first—on getting himself into the record...
...His bushy moustache covered his mouth completely and so I could never be quite sure of his expression, but it often seemed to me that behind that moustache lurked a smile that liked to play across his face unnoticed...
...In his late 60s, his beard streaked with gray, his shape reminiscent of a down-filled pillow, he walked languorously toward the front of the room and took his place along the eastern wall, the spot reserved for the most honored among the worshipers...
...Today, the Temple is still destroyed, and for the followers of the Lubavitch Rebbe, it is still the Yavne of 770 Eastern Parkway that protects the Jews...
...Twin pendulum clocks with roman numerals on their faces rested on a handsomely carved shelf across from me...
...I suspected that if I was seen holding this text—so venerated by the Chabadniks—I would be greeted as one who appreciated, or at least knew, what Lubavitch had given Judaism...
...The booklets were in English and French, and were filled with what could best be called advertisements for God—pitches pushing the observance of those commandments that the Rebbe had decided were key to getting Jews back onto the proper religious path...
...Instead, it carried with it all the freshness and novelty of the original decision...
...I asked him, although the answer was obvious...
...Now, however, these feelings were more absorbing, for they seemed to come out of the more secure consciousness of maturity...
...The aroma of perfumed snuff, mixed with the pungent odor of rotting leather emanating from the bindings of old books and old ffillin, filled the air...
...I sat down at an open spot around one of the tables...
...I waited for a cue, an opening...
...It took a while for me to find my way around the Temple Mount through the medium of this class, but in time I learned exactly where I could and could not go...
...Tzvi was always the one who recited the kaddish at the end of the class hour...
...But, because I believed that giving up the demands of tradition was far more dangerous than holding on to them—even if that meant carrying out practices that were often opaque or even devoid of meaning for me—I kept on praying, hoping that someday my prayers would once again acquire meaning...
...Rabbi Menachem Schneerson of Brooklyn, is one of the few groups of Chassidim that enthusiastically welcomes Jewish seekers...
...But I was not at all sure how to find these people of the book...
...I shuddered: The moment that prayer stopped, the spell was broken...
...In the rooms themselves were long wooden tables and matching benches, smoothed by generations of men who had sat, worshiped and studied there...
...Aleichem shalom," I responded...
...My focus shifted from the pulpit in front to a corner in the rear of the room, where a few of the men were moving together some of the tables to form an L-shape...
...This alone marked the formal end of our gathering, and he took obvious pleasure in his role as symbolic gatekeeper...
...He would remove the large tin from his pocket, tapping it carefully with the middle finger of his left hand while holding on tightly with the right so that the powder inside would settle and not spill when the box was opened...
...The men who stood in this room seemed to me in those moments a single standing mass, one with the house of prayer and with one another, indistinguishable one from the other...
...There was no place to go to really warm up in the city, since no one kept the heat on for more than a few hours each day—it was simply too expensive...
...When I had first come upon these men, I had seen them as hopelessly archaic, charming throwbacks to another age...
...Sitting there in the little ground-floor chapel in Shaarey Chesed, we looked out not on the streets as they are today, but on a world of a distant past now magically made present...
...What might for others have been an archaic controversy between two alternative versions of an ancient text was for these men a fresh argument...
...The Talmud had always found ways of shredding and collapsing time...
...Later, I would learn that this man for whom we had been waiting was the Maggid, known throughout Jerusalem as one of the last who still maintained the tradition of true preaching...
...But as I reviewed along with the others each move the ancient priests would take in their ritual preparations of the sacrifices, I began to see the rush of activity a bit more clearly...
...Much of this was on my mind when I arrived in Jerusalem in pursuit of Jewish sacred literature and its people...
...It occurred to me then—as never before—that some people pray less to their God and more for themselves...
...Although he always listened to Rav Moses and the others who claimed to know the text well, Reb Lippe seemed to believe that only he truly understood what the page was all about...
...Then it flowed back into the room, filling the air, and entered them again...
...It made me glad that Zanvil was wedged against me on the right and the Rav on my left...
...It can't be right," Yechiel Michl cried, gesticulating with the pen he used as a pointer to keep the place...
...I waited a few minutes, wondering if the room were ever completely abandoned...
...That is, he learns from experience: from the experiences of others as well as his own, and from their inner experiences as well as their outer...
...at the front of each stood a small ark made of carved olive and beechwood...
...Others finished up conversations, replaced books on shelves and positioned themselves in favorite prayer nooks in one or another of the room's corners, all the while behaving with respect and deference for their betters...
...The sociologist in me suggested that the displays were for the benefit of their partners in prayer, efforts to demonstrate a holier-than-thou commitment to liturgy...
...To the uninformed, he looked like he was dressed in a bathrobe and slippers...
...It was late morning and the place was mostly empty...
...Taking a moment to turn off all the lights in the room except for the two that illumined the corner, he stepped over to the bookcase in the back and took out seven volumes of the talmudic tractate Z'vachim...
...This text deals with the sacrifices brought by all believers who, centuries ago, came to worship at the Holy Temple...
...Crossing a large square near Yeshivat HaKotel, the talmudic academy set almost in the shadow of the Temple Mount, I found myself walking along a street called, simply, Jews' Street—Rechov HaYehudim...
...He asked me where I was from...
...It's the Rebbe's yeshiva," my host explained...
...In a corner a stone staircase led up to the sound of voices engaged in study...
...Why were the men satisfied with a judgment that returned us to the status quo ante...
...In my youthful fantasies, these old men were among the 36 righteous men who, according to legend, secretly save the world through their acts of devotion and piety...
...Meditate upon thy Torah day and night," God commanded Joshua upon Israel's entry into the promised land...
...So rather than ascend the stairs, I turned to my left and entered a large office...
...Even their pendulums seemed set to move in opposite directions, with one swinging to the right just as the other swung to the left...
...Although worlds away from Boston and the lines of my life there, these little old men seemed part of the Jewish universe I also inhabited, in my consciousness even though never in my presence...
...If you want to say it that way you can, but I read it this way," Reb Yechiel Michl remarked, confirming the Rav's interpretation of how things were done...
...Where once the bleating of sheep going to slaughter on the Temple Mount must have filled the air, the voices of Jews reviewing their sacred texts could now be heard through the windows of the yeshivas and houses of learning that dotted the Jewish quarter of the city...
...Inside, the foreignness of the surroundings together with the familiarity of the names made me at once anxious about continuing on my journey and reluctant to turn around and leave...
...For that long, a group had gathered around these tables every night after the conclusion of ma'ariv, to review the Talmud...
...When they came to a discussion of the sprinkling of blood on the altar and wondered aloud if the priest bent his wrist or not in that act, it took only a quick look back into their own memories to see precisely how the ritual was carried out...
...I picked up a few to get an idea of just who visited this place...
...Whenever Lippe raised what he was convinced was a truly critical question or offered a sharp response, it was systematically dismissed by the others as either fallacious or wrong-headed...
...The men who spoke them inhabited a land that depended on rain, the very land promised and described in the verses they were reciting...
...His "robe" was a brocaded gray kaftan, called a kapote, indicative of a certain nobleness of character...
...for then the Lord's anger will blaze against you, and He will shut up the skies so that there will be no rain...
...I was used to this sort of devotional infection...
...But the Jew in me wondered if perhaps these men were not in some way trying to shake their God into at-tentiveness...
...In this I was not alone...
...No one of those present had been in the circle all that time, but each one could be linked to another who was linked to someone else who ultimately was tied to one of the originators...
...All this became apparent to me one evening as I sat down to review Z'vachim with my chavruse...
...I had been using a little tape recorder to capture as much as possible in each class session...
...I had not noticed him during the prayers, but now, from the way those remaining greeted him, it became clear that just as the Maggid and his congregation had been the heroes of the ma'ariv story, Rabbi Moses—as I later learned he was called—was to be the center of the new drama that was about to unfold in this room...
...I wanted to be treated with the warmth afforded an insider...
...relic remains to the living temple that had been created in the world of Jewish study...
...I began to see that perhaps it was I who was hopelessly trapped in my own time...
...Is there a chavruse here...
...Standing before the model, I turned to my guide and said: "I really came here to find a chavruse...
...I really didn't care...
...Then, passing the sweet-smelling stuff first to the Rav, he saw to it that everyone seated around the table got a pinch between his fingertips...
...But I was sure that there had been a change...
...The man next to me handed me a volume of the Mishna Brura, the codex of Jewish law, and bade me open to the proper page...
...First came Reb Asher, with his gray goatee and big black hat that was somehow a cross between a homburg and the biberhat wom by most pious Jerusalemites...
...He rarely smiled, yet the serious demeanor which at first put me off was, I soon discovered, only veneer...
...Now, sitting with them and watching them chart their way into a past which they and I shared, my perspective began to change...
...They were not simply citing divergent texts...
...Yah, this is true," the man I would later come to know as Reb Zanvil answered...
...I looked around and listened to others...
...The left-hand clock told men when they had to get to work or leave for home...
...At first this struck me as a kind of idolatry, an obdurate denial of Jewish history...
...It was as if he carried on his own class, nearly synchronous with ours but never identical...
...But, the text asked, what happens if one part of the sacrifice is ritually spoiled...
...Underneath hid the same cherubic personality that was immediately apparent in our teacher Rav Moses...
...His fingers slipped along the page almost automatically and only the most attentive eye could tell when he was there and when he was out...
...But I knew that he was aware of me, for he would answer the questions I had raised even as he addressed his remarks to the Rav...
...In order to join them, I would have to move backward with them...
...So, even had I been able to fallow every nuance of the Yiddish with which my chavruse reviewed these matters, I would have been hard put to get it all straight...
...Those who have criticized the Jews as being part of some separate order, "a state within a state," unwilling to be absorbed by the surrounding non-Jewish world, were correct in their perceptions, even though few Jews remain who fit this contra-accultura-tive model...
...often it set him to swaying back and forth or nodding his head up and down, as if he were being buffetted and pulled in both directions, toward this and other-worldly concerns at the same time...
...Now it became clear: Here was a replica of the Lubavitch World Headquarters, the apartment building at 770 Eastern Parkway...
...The men who sat around this table were of my grandfather's generation...
...And between each word—no, each syllable—there were pauses, as if the worshipers needed to rest and breathe and consider the philosophical possibilities before continuing...
...Anyone who refuses this reality runs the risk of becoming overwhelmed either by the irrelevance of the texts—as I often had been—or by the importance of the present...
...He took a mouthful from the lamb and an equal amount from the breads, both of which constituted his sacrifice...
...It can not have been altogether easy for Reb Yechiel Michl to pass through this shift of role each evening...
...His laughter confirmed that a joke was funny...
...after all, "There is no earlier or later in the Torah" is one of the primary organizing principles of exegesis...
...I now live in Jersualem," I answered...
...From the start I had explained to the others that for me each word they spoke was important, for this, as well as the texts themselves, was what I hoped to study...
...Their many years of review had allowed them to construct that ancient Temple and altar in their minds, and people it with priests and worshipers...
...His judgment did not change anything at all, I thought...
...It is also—especially for the Jewish people—the embodiment of an idea, a symbol of Israel's glorious past and hopes for the future...
...Moreover, from the way he held his head, it was impossible to tell whether he was simply looking down into the Talmud or was in fact dozing...
...Even their controversies did not take them away from the world of the Talmud, but rather, kept them immersed in it...
...But it was a different authenticity that struck me most forcefully that night, for most of those I watched did not look for the rain or any other sort of instant, divine quid pro quto...
...His slippers were the shoes only a scholar—who does not spend his day at manual labor or in the world outside the bes medrash—could wear...
...When I was a boy, my family used to receive calendars around Rosh Hashanah time, sent from Jewish old age homes in America and Israel...
...I painstakingly wrote down the words of the discussion and began to review them as carefully as my chavruse partners had reviewed the sacred text itself...
...And often I would notice my partner on the left watching the little green light that flashed as the recorder took in various sounds to see if it would catch even his coughs and snorts...
...A small vestibule housed some shelves filled with shamos, remnants of holy books too worn and torn to be used any longer...
...This, for the faithful of Chabad, was the new shrine, the new Temple...
...For Reb Zanvil this was something to be done furtively...
...Now, however, as I stood in the small synagogue surrounded by weekday worshipers, I did not yet know about the Sabbath talks...
...It can't be right...
...With that I was pulled into the study circle in which I would dwell for over a year...
...He was a master storyteller, an actor who animated his stories with heart-cries of "oy yoy" that could turn even the most hardened cosmopolitan into a parochial...
...Well," he went on, "there's a place in Shaarey Chesed where some men are always sitting and lernen...
...I can, when I wish, be among them—and today, I felt particularly fortunate...
...But there's another version in the Shita Mekubetses," Eliahu argued...
...We must have the gift to identify ourselves with other men, to relive their experience...
...Rashi," he said finally, citing the great authority, author of the primary commentary on the page, "reads it like me...
...In the liminality of the beginning, however, I found myself gone from the present but not yet arrived at the past...
...This article is part of a forthcoming book describing a spiritual quest for a house of study...
...I thought, therefore, that here was a door through which I might find the way, if not to lernen itself, then perhaps to wisdom, understanding or knowledge...
...But tonight, my first night at Shaarey Chesed, my prayers were not yet ready for enthusiastic extension, and so I finished with plenty of time to spare...
...These were simple rooms...
...It depends on when he eats it, the teacher explained...
...This does not mean that all of those seated around the table entered into the pages as one...
...Here in the Talmud class compartments collapse, and rooms open into one another...
...It helps surmount anxiety about place and people...
...It was a December evening...
...This left only Reb Yechiel Michl...
...Ehhh," the Rav intoned...
...But these were the young voices of yeshiva boys reviewing their texts, not the sort of circle I was prepared to enter...
...The convergence of the two was startling—and unsettling...
...the second read 12:00...
...Slowly, the murmuring of prayer dwindled, and finally one solitary voice remained—the Maggid's...
...Last among the voices I heard was a very deep one, a bass so profound it seemed less a product of the larynx than an echo of a sound deep within the chest cavity...
...It was not simply that they were older...
...Look,why make it hard for yourself," the Rav answered...
...It was always a masterful performance, and often I would walk out not quite sure precisely what he had said—but all the same, deeply impressed by having heard him say it...
...It has also become the custom to extend the intonation of this line...
...Later that year he would grow a beard and appear to join the ranks of the wizened, but on this first night and for many thereafter, he looked like a relatively young man who had somehow or other—perhaps mistakenly?—gotten attached to this aged chavruse...
...Siman lamed-ches, din mem-heh, hachayavim b't'fillin v'hap'turim"— "Chapter 38, law 45, the laws of who is required to don phylacteries and who is not...
...Recited originally, according to tradition, by Jacob's sons as they stood at his death bed and promised to follow in the faith of their father and his forebears Isaac and Abraham, it has become the single most memorable verse in the liturgy...
...When someone asked Rav Moses a question, Reb Yechiel Michl was always ready with the answer...
...Here one remained aware of the time on the left clock, but was attached to the time on the other...
...I cannot say «xactly which of these motives moved me...
...He was dark-complexioned, but not so dark as to be mistaken for a Jew whose forebears came from the Middle East...
...He stood on the shoulders of his...
...I listened again to the tape to be sure that what I saw in this transcript was what I could have heard in the class...
...An old man who was not part of the Eastern European cultural milieu from which the others had sprung, he was nonetheless now bound together with them through the ties of this chavruse...
...Indeed, it seemed that every light bulb and shelf had been consecrated to someone's memory...
...And everywhere—books...
...The laughter I had heard in reaction to the Rav's decision was the delight these men felt in being able to work out their different opinions along the same pathways, the tried and true pathways of their antecedents...
...the future lay with those who would study in the yeshiva...
...But I wanted something a little less formal and institutional...
...But even amidst all of this apparently-chaotic activity, I sensed a rhythm tying it all together, a beat that had begun with the gabbai's thump and would end with the opening words of ma'ariv: "Bless the Lord who is blessed...
...One read the same time as the watch on my wrist...
...And so, although I cared little for sacrifices and all they implied, I found myself wanting to travel back with them by way of the texts...
...That I could still be so moved by old prayers was a surprise to me...
...This confidence was, it appeared to me, simply a comfortable fantasy...
...He was the overseer, the gabbai of the housed He was dressed all in black...
...Those whose faces had been transformed during prayer became once again simple men...
...he suggested...
...It struck me then, as it often has on other occasions, what a splendid thing it is to be a Jew who can feel at home within the precincts of tradition...
...Only if I allowed myself to see the old as if it were fresh and new could I too share in the delight, could I come to care about sacrifices at the Temple...
...literally, he sang them...
...In a way the two men were mirror images of one another: Eliahu, the thin man with the serious expression, suppressed the humor hidden just below the surface...
...That, of course, made it even harder for me to tag along...
...Each worshiper seemed intent on extending his time in the Sh'ma beyond that of his neighbor, as if they were vying with one another for the attention of heaven...
...There is a transformative power in prayer that is far more important to them than any response to their supplications...
...But as I stood there, it slowly dawned on me that the building in Brooklyn was no different from the talmudic academy Yochanan ben Zakkai had established in Yavne when he sought refuge from the besiegers of Jerusalem...
...maybe it was the sound of Hebrew that echoed from the windows of the quarter and the steady rise-fall cadence of Talmud study that I heard when I passed near the doorway of Yeshivat HaKotel...
...Only to me— the outsider—did it seem that they were looking into their own memories...
...But here, literally in the shadow of the Temple Mount—to find a model of a Brooklyn tenement...
...I closed my eyes as I listened and tried to place myself back inside the room, around the L-shaped table...
...Wherever that sort of Jew goes and whatever strangers he meets, when each identifies the other as a Jew bound by the same religious bonds, both feel as if they are old acquaintances...
...Sitting around the tables in Shaarey Chesed, I could still feel the rain, wind and cold of the last few days...
...As he passed through the room, the others stood or bowed forward...
...past is past and present is present, and one simply learns to dim the lights in one room while passing into the other...
...He was a presence even though he was not a voice...
...The nature of what we lerned was such that it denied continuing contact with the world as we knew it, outside this room...
...A few men closed their books, a few began to chat with one another...
...I watched the men around me...
...Shalom aleichem," he said, greeting me with the traditional words...
...The prayers were swiftly paced, as weekday services commonly are...
...Here was a copy of the Tanya, a collection of the wisdom of the founder of Chabad, filled wtih homilies, moral teachings and epigrams about Scripture and Jewish mystical texts...
...What I was unprepared for, however, was the intensity of the call I heard this night...
...In this little room—to my surprise—sat a scale model of what appeared to be an undistinguished brick New York tenement...
...For the seven months that I stayed in this chavruse, Reb Asher never once directly acknowledged my presence...
...With that version, the whole argument has to be changed...
...and then nothing will hold together...
...And I say," Rav Moses announced, cutting short the controversy with a voice of judgment, "that you can read it this way and that...
...I am not sure how I found a way to fit in among these men...
Vol. 8 • October 1983 • No. 9
