A Tale of Two Siyumim

Like most people I have been blessed with the good fortune of having had the opportunity to participate in many siyumim over the years some even my own. There was one twenty-four-hour period however in which I participated in two siyumim that both celebrated a completion of sorts but were otherwise as different as could possibly be.

The first siyum took place on a recent Motzaei Shabbos at Yeshiva Darchei Torah. Two hundred forty-seven talmidim completed the masechta they had learned in yeshivah the previous year. To the hundreds of participants and observers it was truly a “grand” event as it was billed. Hundreds danced through the streets to the yeshivah some holding brightly lit torches and some their Gemaras. When they reached the beis medrash the dancing and ruach reached an even higher level of intense joy.

As at every siyum one could not help but be inspired and uplifted by the simchah shel Torah. But after I left the thoughts that poured into my mind were not joyous ones but rather thoughts of painful realization. As images of those youthful faces radiating with pure simchah flitted through my mind I was overwhelmed with envy. I longed to feel the joy that enveloped these young future talmidei chachamim. While the middle-aged body can no longer dance with the vigor and abandon of youth the soul still longs for the joy that these young boys exuded.

I was particularly struck by one seventeen-year-old boy who was dancing with uninhibited joy while embracing his Gemara. It reminded me of something I heard from Maran HaRav Shach’s grandson. Several years before his passing Rav Shach’s eyesight began to fail and it caused him great distress. His grandson showed him a computer image of the Rashba that could be greatly enlarged but he wouldn’t hear of learning from it. “When I learn” he explained “I have to be able to hug the sefer and if I can’t then I cannot learn from it.” In this bochur’s exuberant dancing while hugging his sefer I saw that Rav Shach’s legacy lives on.