Jump the Line

One of my still-strong memories of my years in the Yeshiva of Staten Island is of the atmosphere of intense spiritual focus that pervaded the yeshivah during Elul. Some years ago, while writing a biographical sketch of Rav Dovid Kronglas, the unforgettable mashgiach ruchani of Baltimore’s Ner Israel, I came to understand the roots of that Elul ruach.

Rav Chaim Mintz, menahel ruchani in Staten Island who was close to Reb Dovid, told me that “one who didn’t see Rav Dovid’s Elul, never saw an Elul. You could see the awe of the approaching Yamim Noraim on his face, which only increased as those days drew closer. On Rosh Hashanah itself, you didn’t talk to him, you didn’t think to approach him, such was the aura of eimas hadin around him. And he imparted this spirit into the whole yeshivah.”

Understandably, then, when a group of ten boys, including Reb Chaim, went to Toronto to help establish a branch of Ner Israel there and then returned to Baltimore for Yom Kippur, they hesitated to approach Rav Dovid. It was the Aseres Yemei Teshuvah, when his intensity reached its apex. “But when he saw us,” Reb Chaim recalled, “he smiled broadly and gave us the warmest shalom aleichem, and inquired into how we were all doing. In his eyes, we had gone to be marbitz Torah and deserved no less, even if it was in the very midst of the Yemei Hadin. As Rav Yisrael Salanter used to say, ‘the other person doesn’t have to suffer because I’m working on my fear of Hashem’s judgment.’”

Perhaps there is a way to extend that to apply not just between one individual and another, but within each person, too. That is to say, can each of us somehow find a balance between cultivating a sense of awe appropriate to the magnitude of the period, while not having a healthy awe turn into immobilizing dread?