This week's Pshat is dedicated to the memory of the eight young men murdered learning Torah last night at Yeshivat Merkaz Harav, two of whom were my son's classmates through eighth grade: Segev Avichayil and Avraham David Moses.
Y'hi Zichram Baruch, Hashem Yikom Damam.
The last cold snap has barely lifted, but outside, the almond trees have no time to wait. They are so suddenly filled with beautiful, fragrant white blossoms that it is hard to believe that little over a week ago, they weren't there. Even harder to believe that by the time Nisan comes and we can say Birkat HaIlanot, they will be long gone. What's their rush? Where are they going? Can't they wait for the other trees?
The word for almond in Hebrew is shaked, which means "quick and diligent". Yeshivah Letzi'irim, popularly known as Yashlatz, is the high-school branch of Yeshivat Merkaz Harav, the yeshiva founded by Rav Kook almost eighty-five years ago. It's know as being hard to get into. Only the quick and the diligent of eighth-grade graduates apply, often those whose fathers learned at the senior yeshiva before them. Last night, while the almond trees continued their silent explosion under cover of night, there was a burst of explosions in the library of the yeshiva compound in the heart of Jerusalem, only a couple of blocks from the entrance to the city. At first, many thought it was firecrackers shot off as part of festivities for Rosh Chodesh Adar, anticipating Purim in two weeks. Instead, it was a terrorist, a former driver for the Yeshiva, an Arab from Jerusalem, who shot off well over four hundred rounds, killing eight young men, injuring ten, three seriously or worse. Some of the boys were in the library, learning, the books shown on the media bloody from their wounds. Avraham Moshe and Segev were Yinon's friends, the serious, studious ones, they were at his Bar Mitzvah, Avraham Moshe I remember a bit better, he had a smile that could light a room. Once Segev came over to play with Yinon when they were seven years old, as the afternoon wore one, Shoshana discerned that Segev was getting fidgety, she asked what was the matter. "I have to davven minchah", he said. She encouraged him to go ahead and davven in the house. "But I always davven in a minyan!", came his worried reply. Seven years old....
Promising young men have traditionally been referred to as Pirchei, flowers, similar to the English expression, "flower of youth". But plucked so soon, so soon... Where are you off to, you beautiful flowers, what's your rush, you were so diligent...
But the young men at such institution are indeed shakdanim, they are diligent in discharging all their obligations. Just this week, the defense minister, Ehud Barak, refused to authorize a list of new yeshivot for exemption from army service. The Charedi response was immediate and dismissive. The former stood firm on the need for everyone to bear the defense burden of the country, the latter insisting that Torah study cannot be compromised if the Jewish people is to have a hope of a claim to its land and heritage before G-d and the world. Two truths - for they are both truths, butting up blindly against one another. In the meantime, within the walls of yeshivot like Mekaz, thousands of young men sit who are determined that they will learn and fight. How did they come to put it together, when the rabbis and the generals just don't get it?
It hasn't been lost on anyone that the target of the attack was the ideological fount of the renascent religious-Zionist enterprise. Foolish, superficial people who believe that everything is political noted that Merkaz was long indelibly associated with Gush Etzion and the movement to restore Jewish life to our ancestral lands in Yehudah and the Shomron. (The word "settler" has become so pejorative, so poisoned for so many people that have never really encountered the wide variety of people living here that I would never use it). But those same people are probably unaware of the teachings of the yeshiva's founder, the master to whose life and insights I am repeatedly drawn and who never fails to astonish and encourage me, Rav Avraham Yitzchak Hakohen Kook. I ask your forbearance as I try to apply one of Rav Kook's seminal to this week's parashah, Pekudei.
Pekudei, "accountings", continues relating the story of the actually construction of the Mishkan in the desert. Last week, in Vayak'hel, we read about the construction of the MIshkan per se; this week, we read about the crafting of the priestly garments. Interposed between the two is an accounting of the materials collected, especially the precious metals - gold, silver and copper. The silver collected was comprised in part by the half-shekel set aside for each adult male so that plague would not smite the people when they were being counted. The instruction to count in this fashion, by half-shekel, was given two weeks ago in Ki Tisa, and now it is carried out. The Torah is careful once again to tell us that it is precisely one-half shekel, the words being "Beka Lagulgolet". Literally, "a split for a skull". Money back then had value by weight, and it wasn't uncommon to literally split a coin if you needed a coin half the value of a given standard weight.
But splitting skulls is another matter. You may recall from high-school biology that there are fissures in the skull, jagged lines from where the parts of the skull fused like continental plates smashing into one another, creating places like the Beka'a valley of Lebanon, held tight between two mountain ranges, and issuing forth so much pain. It's astonished to think Hashem created the skull of the infant from pieces that, while still soft and malleable, would press together to allow the passage through the birth canal, but then separate again for a while. Every parent remembers that wondrous, worrisome "soft-spot", sometimes looking backing longingly and wistfully when they've had a quarrel with that "hard-headed kid" How did those pieces fuse together? Did those jagged fissure lines match perfectly from the start? Or, could it be that the process had its share of violence on a cellular level?
Rav Kook teaches: When pieces of truth encounter one another, they attract and repel. The repulsion is a failed attempt at self-definition in terms of self-sufficiency. The attraction is born of the intuitive clarity that the "whole-part" which is my I is also the "part-whole" which is We. When I see myself in depth, in truth, I can bring it as the "whole-part" to be fused by the painful but oh-so-real process of butting up against the Other. I see the good in his good (which corresponds to my vision of the good and useful) and I see the good in his bad (for which I give thanks that, in its incessant, expansive attempt to encroach on my realm, it keeps me in check from the same egregious error - an error for which I have no eyes myself). As we wrestle, the advantage shifting back and forth, a river of pain and enlightenment meanders between us, fusing us as one. The parts are set together, perfectly and beautifully, like the the nesting designed ornaments of the menorah in the Mishkan, meshukadim, "almond-blossomed", or, with Rashi, as engraved on a silver cup. The skull is whole, firm the mind . . . is safe.
Haman said, "there is One people, scattered and separated". Let me weight out money for the right to destroy them. Esther said, "Go and gather all the Jews. GATHER ALL THE JEWS. It cannot be that we remain apart, aloof. It cannot be that we gather into clusters, each laughably content to cling possessively to his own pitiful fragment of truth. This Shabbat, as we read the words, beka lagulgolet, we say, Hashem, split our tortoise-shell skulls and knit them anew in the almond-frenzied freshness of a youth each one of us has begging to be released inside. Each one a piece of a precious coin, just a piece, but so whole, so holy. Take us, make us one. Let the only indication that there ever was a split be the lazy meandering line of when I conceded to him and he conceded to me. And in that crevice, hidden in its recess, bonding us more firmly that matter itself . . . YOU.
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