Yochanan Gordon

I have often been puzzled by the notation in Chumashim when we’ve reached the midway point in verses, words, letters, and so forth. This is so significant that there is an entire dialogue in Kiddushin dedicated to this topic. While I am not going to delve into the reasons or the significance behind this, I raise it here specifically because we have reached the midway point of the summer and it would seem noteworthy enough just to point that out.

My father has written in his “Catskills Diary” about the round-robin way our family has spent time upstate in Ellenville. This was the first time in quite a long time that I’ve spent an extended period of time upstate. While for me it was work, work, work during the days, we tried as best we could on weekends and evenings to immerse ourselves in the Catskills experience. I’ve learned that with tens of kids in tow, all we needed was a pool, a pizza shop with ice cream, and Dougie’s, and pretty much all was set.

With Dougie’s on Tuesdays, pizza on Thursdays and motzaei Shabbos, and an occasional night out at a restaurant, the crown jewel of the mountains experience for me was easily the Woodbourne shul under the auspices of Rabbi Jungreis, shlita, the Nikolsburger Rebbe. Having davened many tefillos there throughout the month, I can tell you that there is something otherworldly about the place that leaves a lasting impact upon my soul, if not on everyone else who enters its gates and emerges from there.

I had heard a lot about Rav Jungreis over the years, but never previously had the opportunity to meet him. We have featured him, his shul, and his Chaim Berlin classroom in this newspaper, but because my last full summer spent upstate was at least 20 years ago, I never had occasion to meet the Rebbe. With all the talk of brotherly love and achdus as a cure for the long exile that we continue to endure, during these nine days leading up to Tisha B’Av, a trip to the courtyard of Rav Jungreis is in order to see what ahavas Yisrael really looks like.

From a pedestrian perspective, what goes on daily at the Woodbourne shul is a novelty. It flips convention on its head. In Kabbalistic parlance, the difference between experiencing essence versus a mere revelation or ray of light emanating from the essence is that essence is indivisible. As such there is no head, middle, or end. The first sign upon entering the shul is that the row of chairs along the eastern wall, which would normally represent the mizrach vant, generally reserved for the important guests, is conspicuously labeled everyone’s row, where the Rebbe implores guests looking for a seat to choose any open seat to daven.

Aside from the hundreds of yellow sticky notes-turned-pidyonim (petition notes), I came across a sign larger than most of the others that surrounded it, requesting that people daven for the well-being of Reb Avraham Portugal, zt’l, the previous Skulener Rebbe who passed away in April 2019. And although the chances are that no one bothered removing that particular sign, when you take in the scene as a whole it’s easy to conclude that the ground you stand upon transcends the limitations of time and space.

These reflections kept swirling around my mind, with the intention of writing about it, but I was seeking a moral, perhaps a message to impart relevant to the time of year we are in, right before yet another Tishah B’Av. And then it hit me.

A heaviness usually begins to set upon the world with the arrival of the Three Weeks. The level in mourning intensifies progressively from the 17th of Tammuz through Tishah B’Av, unlike the mourning period for a relative, which eases as time continues its march forward. With every passing day, the heaviness becomes more cumbersome. If we didn’t sense it on our own, the ads for each year’s Tishah B’Av video presentations, despite trying to give them a ring of positivity, highlight the imperfections that require fixing that the featured scholars and educators see as the key toward leaving exile and embracing redemption.

It’s a logical notion that exile and redemption are two different places, necessitating a leave of exile into the space of redemption, but it’s worth dwelling upon for a moment or two. There is an interesting Chazal associated with the significance of mourning on Tishah B’Av as a prelude to unlocking the light of redemption. Chazal say, “Kol ha’misabel al Yerushalayim zocheh v’roeh b’simchasah — anyone who mourns over Yerushalayim merits and sees its joy and consolation.” The question that many grapple with is the interesting syntax of that sentence. It would be more appropriate to say, “Anyone who mourns over Yerushalayim will merit and see its joy and consolation.” Why the present tense if we are describing an exilic existence punctuated by mourning and destruction?

I have, for a long time, dwelled upon the word “avel,” which in Hebrew means “mourner,” and noticed that with the adjustment of the vowels, the word changes from “avel” to “aval,” which means “but.” It occurred to me, the laws of mourning notwithstanding, that the avodah of a mourner is to adjust their perspective and to connect to the person they have lost, beyond the limitations of time and space, where we would normally require the physical comfort, security, and succor of our parent or significant other to elevate us from within the doldrums of mourning, and really in everyday life, to reach a place where that person is felt by us despite not being here physically. I believe this idea is right there within the word aval, as if to say that our situation may seem one way but the reality is much more hopeful.

When my father was sitting shivah over the petirah of his mother a few years ago, he was sitting for a day with his siblings in the home they had grown up in on Montgomery Street in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. Rabbi Manis Friedman, whose wife is my father’s first cousin, was there paying a shivah call. He explained that the Lubavitcher Rebbe once said that when people intensify their feelings of loss and mourning over a loved one they lost, it is not a positive omen for the soul on high. It occurred to me, in light of this, that we may be observing Tisha B’Av wrong all these years, which may explain why we are still doing this so many years later.

Instead of watching videos instructing us how to be better, an even more G-dly people, or perhaps a Holocaust video, which has become the minhag in some shuls, putting us in a sad and mournful state of mind, we should try to envision ourselves within exile on the day of Tishah B’Av becoming extricated from that self-arresting frame of mind and flying, in our consciousness, as if to another place and another time.

There is a Gemara that states, “From the forest itself comes the handle for the axe.” This says that the key to turning Tisha B’Av into the yom tov that it is, essentially, is accessible on the day of Tisha B’Av itself, amidst mourning the loss of the holy Temples and the light and life of our national soul. “Kol ha’misabel al Yerushalayim zocheh v’roeh b’simchasah” says that the consolation and mourning of Jerusalem converge at the same time and in the same place. Like the Zohar states, sadness rooted in the heart from this side and joy rooted in the heart from the other side. We need to graduate from the melodramatic look of mourning we paint across our faces and leave all the shackling experiences of our past behind and pine to connect ourselves to our homeland and Beis HaMikdash from within the most chaotic time period of the year.

These were the thoughts bottled up inside of me when I saw Rabbi Jungreis in his shul in Woodbourne late one night toward the end of our stay upstate. The Rebbe’s son, who acts in tandem with his esteemed father, filling in when he isn’t around, approached me and said that his father was in shul from 5 a.m. Thursday morning until 3 a.m. on Friday morning. He told me that he threatened to call the cops on his father unless he agreed to leave to get some sleep. But the Rebbe was busy making sure all who would come to daven on Shabbos throughout the day would have some hot cholent. That is what ahavas Yisrael looks like.

May we merit this year the fulfillment of the prophecy “a great congregation will return there” and a time when we, like Rav Jungreis, feel right at home amidst the throngs of our people, with the coming of Mashiach, speedily in our days.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here