T he pasuk in Koheles (1:5) states: “V’zarach hashemesh u’va hashemesh — the sun rises and the sun sets” based on which Chazal (Kiddushin 72b) teach that before one tzaddik leaves the world — a metaphorical sunset — another will have risen to take his place in the firmament.
The other week in New York we witnessed this phenomenon come to life. Monday May 15 brought the tragic scene of a fire set by an arsonist a teenage punk ripping through one of the oldest shul buildings in America. The Beis Medrash HaGadol although unused for a decade now had stood majestically for over a century and a half on Norfolk Street in the storied birthplace of so much of Jewish life on the Lower East Side.
It wrenched the heart to see those leaping flames destroy the roof and much else of what remained of the building a national landmark since 1967. To witness a shul in flames always triggers the traumatic feelings stored in the historical memory bank of every Jew from a thousand such torchings over the course of galus all the way back to the destruction of the prototype of them all the Beis Hamikdash.
For me there was a personal twinge of pain in seeing the shul consumed in fire. It was a beis knesses suffused with litvishkeit —it’s where New York’s only Rav HaKollel Rav Yaakov Yosef had tried mightily to bring some of Vilna to America and where a later rav Rav Ephraim Oshry found solace after the horrors of the Kovno Ghetto. And thus it was a magnet for litvishe Yidden.
