All night long

Plato’s “Symposium” has Nothing on Mishmar at the Yeshiva

I learned the truth at seventeen. Until then, assimilated ignoramus of all things Jewish that I was, my assumption had always been that the black-suited young men inhabiting the dilapidated old building abutting Philadelphia’s magnificent Catholic seminary – where the be-collared neophytes also wore black – were just a poorer class of priests-in-training. When it was revealed to me at the beginning of the twelfth grade that these earnest looking adolescents were in fact active members of the same tribe with which I was so passively affiliated, and that they spent their days in prayer and especially in the parsing of ancient Hebrew and Aramaic texts, my curiosity was piqued. I put on my best pair of ripped jeans, donned my favorite Grateful Dead T-shirt, walked the ten blocks from my house to what I had newly discovered was called a yeshiva, and burst rudely into the Beis Medrash (Hall of Study).

The first thing to impress me was the din. I had expected a refined, subdued atmosphere akin to that of a library, where sequestered scholars pore over dusty tomes in genteel silence. What rushed upon me instead when I opened the double doors of the Beis Medrash was nothing short of earth-shaking, window-rattling pandemonium. Three hundred teenagers cavorting with lecterns, swaying and ducking and rolling and gesticulating, pounding their palms on the pages of their Talmuds and execrating the obtuseness of their un-bowed interlocutors, dashing to bookcases to prove their positions, howling with exhilaration at a well-argued point, shaking their fists at heaven and then bringing them down upon their own heads – or upon the heads of fellow students – when frustrated by a recondite rabbinic passage. The scene bore a closer resemblance to a bar-room brawl than a high-school classroom. I liked it.

I asked for and was assigned a study partner or “hevruta” of my own, who had time for me only on Thursdays at midnight. During our third such nocturnal rendezvous an incident occurred that I will never forget. Meir and I were sitting in the Beis Medrash, struggling to decipher what was for me – even after translation into English – an incorrigibly difficult bit of Talmudic ratiocination. Several minutes into our session, I noticed from the corner of my eye the doors of the giant hall slowly opening: two diminutive, rosy-cheeked faces peeked in and surveyed the lay of the land. Convinced that the coast was clear, the owners of the faces – a couple of boys no older than ten or eleven toting tomes almost as large as themselves – darted into the room, made a beeline for a remote corner partially concealed by a bookcase, sat down, opened their codices, and began rocking, swaying and studying together in eager whispers.

A few more minutes passed, and again the doors of the room swung open, this time to reveal an older student, a bokhur from the koylel, who cupped his hands to his mouth and called out in anxious admonition: “Mashgiach! Mashgiach!” The mashgiach was a rabbi who oversaw student behavior, and the moment the kids in the corner heard him mentioned, a look of sheer terror crossed their faces. They slammed their volumes shut, stood up, and tore out the back door as fast as their spritely little legs could carry them.

Then the second story wooden floor began to shake. An increasingly deafening thud drew nearer and nearer, and the water in my cup jiggled, like in the bloodcurdling approach of Godzilla, or Tyrannosaurus Rex in “Jurassic Park.” Boom, boom, boom…

Finally, through the doors of the Beis Medrash exploded one “Rabbi Gobrovnik,” a man of gargantuan, ogre-like proportions the upper half of whose torso was completely concealed, Hagrid-of-Harry-Potter-style, by a forest of black beard. Sweating, wheezing, beet-red and shaking his melon-size fists, he roared out: “Vi zeinen di kleyne shretlekh, a kholeriya oyf zeyere hayzen!” (“Where are those little demons, may the Cholera take them!”), and lurched with thunderous steps across the hall and out the back door in hot pursuit.

The students in the Beis Medrash returned to their Talmuds – most had barely raised their eyes from the page – but I was curious, so I queried my study partner. I said: “Hey, Meir – what in the hell was that, man?”

Meir explained to me, nonchalantly and apathetically, that “lights out” for the younger students is at 11:00 pm sharp, and that the yeshiva directors, following the lead of concerned parents, take this curfew restriction very seriously and mete out dire punishments to anyone found violating it.

“So, what – did those kids have to cram for an exam or something?” I ventured.

“There’s no school tomorrow,” Meir pointed out, “and besides, we don’t have exams here. They just wanted to finish the sugya, the passage they were studying. It happens all the time.”

I sat there stunned, my mouth agape. It happens all the time?

“Wait a minute,” I interrogated my unimpressed hevruta. “Let me get this straight: you mean to tell me that these little pishers snuck out of their beds after midnight, got dressed again in their shirts, pants, shoes jackets, ties and hats, defied the authority of their teachers and their parents and risked incurring severe retribution, stole out of the dorms and into the Beis Medrash like the spies of Moses or Joshua son of Nun, all in order to continue wrestling with an intellectual problem – solely because it interested them? They hadn’t finished figuring out some logical-legal conundrum in the tractate they were studying earlier this evening, and this fact drove the sleep from their eyes? Is that what you are trying to tell me, Meir?!”

“Uh-huh,” answered Meir, visibly bored and itching to get back to our own sugya. “We did the same thing when we were their age.”

Wow. This I had never encountered. I remember that at that moment I closed my eyes and prayed fervently to a God I did not believe in that someday my own children would rebel against my authority…like that.

The thirst for knowledge, the passion for puzzle-solving, the burning inquisitiveness, the fierce love of learning: these proclivities have ever been the Jewish People’s hallmark, and have served as our nation’s shield and buckler since the time of Rabbi Akiba, who scorned the Roman ban on Torah study and climbed up mountains and hid in caves in order to continue teaching. And when they caught him, may their names be blotted out; and imprisoned him, and tortured him, and flayed the skin from his body with pincers; and his bereaved students missed his wisdom and guidance terribly, and at a certain point in their learning they encountered, and were stymied by, a particularly abstruse passage, and decided to send one of their number, Yohanan HaSandlar, to find his way to the prison and attempt somehow to communicate with their rabbi and master. Yohanan arrived at the jailhouse dressed up as a peddler of sewing items, and he walked back and forth under the walls chanting: man ba’ei makhtin, man ba’ei makhtin – khalitza bayno le-veyna mahu? – man ba’ei makhtin… “Needles for sale! Needles for sale! – What is the status of the ceremony of shoe-unlacing in place of levirate marriage when there are no witnesses but the participants? – Needles for sale!” And then was heard the hoarse, cracking voice of the dying Rabbi Akiva from deep inside the dungeon: It lekha kishurin? “Do you have any thimbles?” – the play on words indicating that such a ceremony was…kosher.

The People of Israel has survived and flourished throughout the lengthy ages of an incomparably hostile history not just because of faith and loyalty to the law, but also, perhaps even more so, as a result of its profound devotion to books (not for nothing did Muslim tradition bestow upon us an honorific unmatched in the annals of human history: ahl al-kitab, “The People of the Book” — and indeed, what other people on earth actually dances with a book?). We have made it this far despite the tidal waves of adversity and endless depredations, primarily because of our commitment to the life of the mind, because of our penchant for pilpul, because of our love of contemplation, interpretation, analysis, deliberation, controversy, argumentation, imagination (not for nothing did that same Muslim tradition crown the Jews with another cognomen: as-haab al-mas’ala, “The People Who Ask Questions”).  These are the ingredients that fused together to engender the proverbial yiddische kop, our dearest treasure, our secret weapon, the rudder that has steered us through the stormiest seas. Only such a kop could have performed the incredibly complex operation of substituting national law and lore for a forfeited national life at the beginning of our exile, and only such a kop, two thousand arduous and tumultuous years later, could still have been keen enough to plan and execute the most audacious experiment in the political history of humankind: the resurrection of a dead nation, the reinvention of its ancient language, the revival of its fighting spirit, and the massive relocation of its far flung exiles in the land of their ancestors.

Back home in Israel after eons wandering in the wilderness, the Yeshiva still remains, and will continue to be in any possible future, our national motor, our CPU, our mind, and heart, and soul.