We Will Never Be the Same

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hazal tell us that Torah should be taught k’nisonoso, in the manner it was given at Har Sinai. It has always seemed to me fitting, therefore, and most accurate to say, that it was at Har Sinai where I first came to know my rebbi, Rav Shmuel Yaakov Weinberg ztz”l. By that I mean that my first encounter with him was on Shavuos, at a mesibah in Yeshivas Ner Israel, where I was a talmid. At the mesibah, Rav Weinberg spoke about kabbalas haTorah. I don’t recall what he said; I do recall the impact it had on me. When he finished his talk, I stumbled out of the beis medrash in astonishment, encountering a friend and older bochur, and I exclaimed, “I have got to make this man my rebbi!”

What touched me that day wasn’t the content of what he said. It was who he was while he said it. He wasn’t talking about Torah; he was Torah. He was the truth of Torah, the energy of Torah, the bond between Klal Yisrael and Hashem that was Torah. In that one talk, the Torah was transformed for me from a Torah to a Toras Chayim. Before he spoke, I knew there was Torah, and I was committed to following it. After he spoke, I knew there was Torah, and I knew it was mine. Before he spoke, there was a Torah and I was required to learn it; after he spoke, I knew that a life of relationship and connection to the mekor hachayim was in store for me — no, was a gift of love, directly for me, from HaKadosh Baruch Hu. Having a future like that become yours is exhilarating and transformative. It is the experience of being at Sinai for kabbalas haTorah.

What I did not know then was that he was destined to give me no less than the entire Torah a second time. By the time I entered his shiur a year later, I had become oriented to thinking of serious talmud Torah as the property of the gifted few. Listening to the shiurim of the then-rosh hayeshivah, Moreinu v’Rabbeinu Harav Ruderman, and other talmidei chachamim, whose mastery of Shas and Rishonim was almost supernatural, I dreaded the day I would leave the yeshivah, knowing that I lacked the head of these giants and could never mimic their approach to learning. I would have to settle for a rudimentary level of learning for the rest of my life, always looking back wistfully to the heydays of my learning career in yeshivah, never feeling fulfilled.

Rav Weinberg changed all that. He showed us that through rigorous discipline, by abandoning preconceived notions, through formulating our questions properly, by listening to the nuances of language embedded in the holy words of the text, we could come to “hear” the Torah, unadorned and unadulterated by what we might want it to be saying, and successfully plumb its depths. What all this meant for me was that, no matter where I was located geographically, the freshness, excitement, and creativity of talmud Torah would come with me, as long as I was willing to do the work. The keys to accessing the fullness of Torah were embedded in the Torah! For a talmid who would be willing to leave the yeshivah to serve in a community where there was not even a beis medrash, that is a priceless gift. Sinai would be with me wherever I was.