“The great task of the first 50 years after the Holocaust was to rebuild a world of Torah learning almost entirely destroyed by the war. The task of the next 50 years will be preserving what was built. And I’m not sure that the task of the second 50 years will not require even more siyata d’Shmaya than the first.” So I heard recently in the name of a major chassidic rebbe.
From this we can deduce that the second 50 years cannot be just a matter of continuing to do everything that was done in the first 50. The challenges are different.
The growth of today’s Israeli Torah world from the group of no more than 500 bochurim or so at the time of the Chazon Ish’s passing can only be described as miraculous. The total number of yeshivah students and kollel yungeleit in Eretz Yisrael today dwarfs the numbers of those engaged in full-time Torah learning in prewarEurope. The battle to build a community around the preeminent value of Torah learning has been won.
BUT IT IS CRUCIAL to recognize that Israel’s present-day Torah world is not simply the post-Holocaust group of dedicated idealists who rallied to the Chazon Ish’s banner writ large but something entirely different. That original group was composed of self-selected young men of almost uniformly high spiritual and intellectual caliber who were bucking the trends.
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