Reprinted with permission from "Anatomy of a Search", by Akiva Tatz, Published by Mesorah Publications, Ltd. Brooklyn, New York l987 (See glossary at end of article for definitions of Hebrew words.)
If you are ever at a wedding in Jerusalem, and as one of the antics that guests perform to fulfill the mitzva of causing joy to the bride and groom, you see a large, lithe figure fly through the air over six or eight crouching people and smash a heavy board in mid-air with karate kick, it is probably my friend David.
A tall, expansive character who always looks as if he is about to spring forward into some kind of action, David grew up in Baltimore where he studied criminology at college and became an outstanding black-belt karate exponent, fighting in tournaments and usually winning. His life had always been dominated by two themes--idealistic awareness of the Jewish people, his people, and a desire to fight for them in whatever way possible. In fact one of his motivations for karate training had been in order to become able to defend himself and other Jews with violence if ever insulted, and he always wore a sign on his karate suit identifying himself as Jewish; thus he felt he was always fighting as a Jew. His formal Jewish education had ceased during his childhood and its last vestige was a pair of tefillin from his barmitzvah.
After college he decided that there had to be a more Jewish expression of his burning feeling of identity, and it seemed that a move to Israel might answer this need. He came on aliya and studied at an ulpan. But driven by a nature that is always seeking the ultimate challenge, the same feeling soon took hold of him again--just living in Israel did not seem to fulfill his constant desire to be fighting for his people, and after six months in ulpan he volunteered for the Israeli Army's paratroop corps, perhaps the toughest branch of the service. The dangers held no fear for him; on the contrary, it seemed to him that to die with a gun in his hand, asserting and defending Judaism, would be worth everything.
He was accepted, underwent the torture of paratrooper training and felt it was all worthwhile when he was awarded his red beret at a ceremony in the shadow of the Western Wall after an all-night, eighty kilometer forced march carrying a man on a stretcher and with no rest. Later he earned his wings with the small proportion of men who completed the course.
But still he was not satisfied. It seemed that there had to be more. Risking his life in defense of Israel and his brothers somehow did not fulfill his desire to be constantly expressing the flame of Judaism, and one Yom Kippur in the army something moved him to put on a kippa. He decided to become religious since that would be a permanent and intrinsic identification with the eternal aspect of Judaism, although he had no idea of what was involved. He would be wearing his kippa and would find himself knowing less than some of his non-religious friends, and soon decided that he had to learn how to be a Jew.
As the date of his discharge from the army approached he considered the idea of going to Ohr Somayach for formal instruction in the mitzvas , but was apprehensive--he wanted to know more and yet felt the prospect to be daunting; there seemed so much to have to know, and he was essentially a man of action. He was also secretly hesitant to take on the obligation of all mitzvas at once, and felt that if he became involved even slightly in structured learning he would immediately be committing himself to a vast unknown system with unforseeable consequences. In fact, he strongly desired an attachment to the deepest level of Judaism and found himself in the dilemma of many would-be ba'alei teshuva in the stage before taking the plunge. On one occasion he saw a group of young men on the street who were offering passers-by the opportunity to don tefillin. He desperately wanted to put on the tefillin and be reminded of the details of the mitzva, but his fear kept him at a distance. After a while he walked by quickly, so that they should not have time to accost him, and yet illogically hoping they would.
The day after his army discharge he went to Eilat for a vacation with the idea of having a few days' peace in which to make a decision: yeshiva, or take up a job which he had been offered as a karate instructor to the Israeli police. He arrived in Eilat and went to the soldiers' home, a hostel for soldiers on post-service vacation, and was given a room to share with one other person. As he entered the room, to his surprise he found a tall, bearded man -- his roommate, who turned out not only to be religious but working at Ohr Somayach at the time. That was enough for David. The next day, his intended vacation entirely forgotten, he returned to Jerusalem and presented himself at the yeshiva.
He stayed for three and a half years. He had come expecting a course in practical observance of the mitzvas and discovered a whole world. He soon began to feel a deep sense of home--here was that rich depth he had been sure must exist, here he felt immersed in his Jewish people, not only in the present but eternally, stretching back millennia and still going, a nation whose identity was far more than much of modern day Israel with its cheap copy of Western culture; a nation of fighters in the deepest sense, like himself; a people who had fought to the death for much more than mere survival again and again, amazing heroes who had carried the battle both externally to Canaanite, Philistine, Greek and Roman legions, and far more difficult, into the inner recesses of the self. He was moved to tears as he came to know the true face of his people and came to understand the meaning of his blind drive to fight for them. He began to feel excruciatingly that each one was his brother or sister, from Rabbi Akiva being tortured to death by Roman legionnaires, his flesh raked off his bones with iron combs and yet enraptured at the opportunity to say Shema Yisrael with his last breath, to the young mother herded by leering German soldiers towards her death with a newborn baby boy in her arms, who asked the German officer for his knife as a last request, which he happily granted--her suicide would be entertaining--and instead who knelt on the ground over her baby, recited the blessing and performed his circumcision as her last act on earth.
He was angry at his own lack of knowledge and misinformation about distant Jewish history and wept bitterly with trembling indignation at his shameful miseducation about recent events--he had always heard that six million Jews gave their lives like lambs, passive nondescripts who deserve the indulgent sympathy of modern Jewish warriors, and discovered the opposite, that those butchered saints had withstood carefully planned torture intended to dehumanize them, to show the world that the Jew is an animal like anyone else, and had fought with each other to give away their last scrap of bread, had given their shoes away when called out for execution so that warm shoes should not be wasted but be used by another living Jew, had refused to bribe agents for a prized passport for a child because some other unknown Jew's child would die as a result, had fasted on Yom Kippur although assured of torture if they did; and quite incidentally, when they had been able to fight physically had done so with a fierceness which had caused the whole organized, mechanized and well-fed German army heavy losses. He spoke to people who had been there and heard about how Jewish girls had fought for their modesty no less bravely than the legendary young woman during a medieval German pogrom who was dragged through the streets by her hair behind a horse--as she was being tied to the horse she borrowed long hairpins from an old lady bystander and pinned her skirts to the flesh of her thighs so that she should not be exposed during her ordeal.
These insights moved him to a rage at the modern distortion of values. Scripture and Talmud both explicitly and kabbalistically associate beauty with the effort to remain far from immorality; today's world associates beauty with indulgence in the immoral. Jewish girls had died for their virtue; in modern-day Baltimore and Tel Aviv they are giving it away free. Those had scrupulously covered their bodies and these are advertising all. Like all ba'alei teshuva, he began to understand a major key to growth in Torah outlook, that the truth is the opposite of its immediately available superficial version, and that whatever one's secular grasp of an issue, the spiritual concept will be the opposite. Not only are the Jewish people physically in exile, on a deeper level truth is in exile, and if one learns something in today's ambience without much searching and effort, it is probably wrong. The redemption will be more than geographical, it will be the most fundamental revision of values imaginable.
David gradually worked through all the basics, unlearning and re-learning, constantly opening new dimensions in his Jewish identity and pride.
Like many ba'alei teshuva, particularly in Israel, he came to the point where he could not understand how he had ever thought differently, and in fact began to wonder how irreligious Israelis identify at all since the current concepts are so diametrically opposed to those of genuine Judaism, but an interesting experience reminded him that the deepest root of Jewish feeling is not dependent on correct intellectual understanding only. It happened during the war in Lebanon. After some time in yeshiva he was called into action and during the fighting he discovered a deep-rooted and very Jewish feeling in many of his fellow soldiers --on one occasion he was putting on his tefillin by the roadside deep inside enemy territory, those same tefillin which he had kept from the time of his barmitzvah. Soldiers around him whose units were mobilizing to move on and who had no time to put on his tefillin themselves, ran over and clutched onto the straps, shouted "Shema Yisrael!", some of them for the first time since their youth, and ran on into battle. He wondered how much the charged emotions of the battlefield were responsible but later became aware of similar scenes involving Israelis not under pressure--one of his friends in the yeshiva had been an educational officer in the army and had come to yeshiva because he realized he knew nothing about Judaism although his task was to educate and motivate others about it, and he told the following story:
He and a friend had been on the train to Haifa on a particular occasion when they found themselves surrounded by dozens of undisciplined Israeli high school students--loud, aggressive and looking for trouble. It was time to don tefillin and the two of them began to do so. One or two of the youngsters in the carriage jeeringly asked what they were doing, most had never seen tefillin before. They quietly explained something about tefillin and their spiritual significance, hardly expecting to be heard, much less understood. Suddenly the carriage grew quiet, and after a pause, two of the boys approached and asked if they could try to put on the tefillin. They did. The rest of the trip to Haifa was taken up by all the boys on the train coming over in two's and three's and donning tefillin, seriously and with awe. Experiences and tales like these mellowed David and he was able to immerse himself in his studies with a mixed and semi-healed picture of his secular environment.
One other awareness during the Lebanon campaign also left its mark and contributed to his faith. He had always thought that Israelis win wars because they are good, well-organized fighters, but in Lebanon he saw God's hand clearly, firstly in his own deliverance from great danger on more than one occasion, and secondly when he realized that these soldiers functioning correctly, these tank drivers obeying orders to drive into the fire with no regard for their own safety, are in civilian life the taxi drivers of Tel Aviv who will not take orders from anyone, will not cooperate on the road or in fact obey any rules at all. Here one might assume that they would think of lots of convincing Israeli arguments about why they should retreat instead of advance, and yet they do not. They advance; they become heroes. On Dizengoff they may be used to hustling for themselves, here they risk their lives to save others.
Forty days later, he came out of Lebanon and returned to yeshiva. He married a girl whose father had been with the Mir Yeshiva in Shanghai during the Second World War, and settled in Jerusalem. Today he learns in yeshiva and feels, strangely, that he is only now really beginning to fight; fighting with the few against the many to recapture the real spirit of Israel, to re-awaken the love of Jews for God despite the derision of the majority, fighting to lift them from an abyss of agnostic dissolution to unity as the people of God.
His prime motivation in life had been his love for his people, and it remained so. But in yeshiva he began to search for an intellectual understanding of the "specialness" of the Jewish people -- why should there be a "chosen" people in the first place? Emotional and quick to act, he had never stopped to work out the rational aspect of this question and now he felt the need to do so. As with so many other issues, the parable was provided by Rabbi Wasserman. Once a week Rabbi Wasserman would visit the yeshiva for a question-and-answer session devoted to beginners, and on one occasion he illustrated the subject along the following lines:
In any large-scale business operation there are various departments, such as advertising, maintenance, manufacturing and so on. But the one which justifies all the others is the sales department. In fact, if the business is profitable all other departments may actually cost money to run, as long as the sales department delivers the goods and makes a profit for the organization as a whole. Now the Universe is God's business investment. There is therefore human endeavor in the world which generates no profit in spiritual terms but provides maintenance only, as it were; vast sections of mankind may be involved in upkeep of the physical world and its social infrastructure, but if the whole of humanity were purely self-maintaining and produced no output other than its own perpetuation, where would be the achievement of purpose? (Of course, the same question is valid on an individual level too: a person who works in order to eat in order to continue working in order to eat and so on, as so many people tragically do, is devoting the prodigious capabilities inherent in a human existence to no more than maintenance, ignoring his potential for producing that which goes far beyond mere survival and which is actually the purpose of his existence.)
On the universal level, there must be a segment of humanity which shows a profit, which generates from the physical infrastructure that which rises above it and justifies it. The Torah nation is given that opportunity--Torah is the very definition of purpose, the ultimate profit, and if the world is brought to its moral and spiritual perfection by the force of Torah learning and practice, all is justified.
In explaining the role of Torah as the absolute purpose, Rav Wasserman, quoting Maimonides, gave a striking illustration. Just as when a rebbe gives a young cheder boy honey as he learns in order to induce in him a love for learning, God provides us with reward for Torah; no less than the infinite sweetness of the world to come. But the amazing thing is that the motivations of the giver and the taker are opposite: the cheder boy learns because he wants honey, while the rebbe gives honey because he wants learning to result. And if one can grasp the cosmic implications, it is the same with God and us--we live and learn Torah in order to merit a share in eternity, but God, as it were, gives us a share in that eternity because He wants Torah!
* * *
When I last saw David he was trying to re-organize his day to squeeze in a few more minutes of learning. He is still fighting. And winning. Behind that flying side-kick is a hero.