Amongst the symphony of voices that fill our Beit Midrash (study hall) each day are an inordinate number of song lyrics from the 1980's. Curious as that may be, the more surprising fact is that many of these lyrics are in line with what we're learning under the very same roof. One such Tears for Fears lyric was brought to us this week, courtesy of your very own Daff Editor: "If you'd let down your guard? I'd really love to break your heart." What exactly does this have to do with Torah, you ask?
Of all places, in an Ulpan class I took over the Pesach break, we read a Rebbe Nachman story. Once upon a time, there was a king who sent his son away to school. After several years, the son returned a wise man. One day, the king asked his "wise man" to move a heavy boulder up to the roof of the castle. For an entire week, his son tried every way he could imagine to move that rock. Pulleys, levers, sheer manpower? but no matter what he tried, the rock just wouldn't budge. At the end of the week, he returned to his father defeated. "I don't know, Abba. You sent me off to this amazing school where I sat and learned and amassed such a wealth of knowledge? but I can't figure out how to complete the task you've set before me." With that, the father extended his hand and held out a hammer to his son. "What's that for, Abba?" "My dear son, when I asked you to move that boulder, I had no intention of you bringing it to the roof in one piece. If you break it into smaller pieces, I think you'll see that you can complete the task."
When I'm moving my house, it would be a lot more time-efficient and a lot less stressful to do it all at once? to just put the whole thing on a flatbed and roll on down the road. But it's also next to impossible (unless you live in a trailer)! So, too, when we're trying to move ourselves to a place that's close to God, it's painful, and almost impossible to do all at once. Instead, Rebbe Nachman says we have to break our hearts? we have to shatter everything that we think we know and "let our guards down" in order to get to the next level of our connection to our creator.
It seems that our teary-eyed British brethren wanted to help us do that. What was their method? "Shout, shout, let it all out, these are the things I can do without?" Looks like it's more than just a catchy tune. When Joshua "fought the battle of Jericho," that exactly what the Jews did, and the walls did, indeed, come tumbling down. That conquest (Says Rabbi Artscroll) was a completely spiritual campaign. Seven Cohanim blew seven shofars as they circled the city seven times on the seventh day. Sounds a lot like all the sevens we have right now in the weeks of the Omer. This week marked the halfway point in our cycling ever closer to receiving the Torah on Shavuot. Pesach is behind us, with all of its liberation, and Shavuot is in front of us, with all of its limitation. On Shavuout, we hear the Ten Commandments and agree to begin a life where mitzvot will be our new binding force. How were we ready to do that after only seven weeks? How were we sure that this new Master would be one that would love us, cherish us, and nurture us?
We knew, because we saw that like us, like our hearts, the Torah we received on Shavuot was also broken. When Moshe came down the mountain and saw us worshipping the golden calf, he broke the Tablets. He knew we weren't ready for that Torah. When he came back with the second set, they were written by Moshe's hand. They were no longer divinely-carved letters suspended within the stone. The letters were hand-carved on one side, showing their form as you looked at it one way, and hiding it as you looked at the tablets from the other side.
"Bind them upon your neck; inscribe them on the tablet of your heart, and you will find favor and goodly wisdom in the eyes of God and man." Those are King Solomon's words in Proverbs 3. Rebbe Nachman quotes them in his "broken heart" Torah where he says that our hearts have an aspect of the tablets. Sometimes you have to break something to understand what lies inside. Sometimes you have to shatter something holy, to find something holier. Like the sound of the glass shattering under the chatan's foot, so to may the sound of us breaking our hearts ring out praises of song into the mountains of Yehuda, into the outskirts of Jerusalem, and into the ears of each member of this holy nation.
Back to Daff List