The journey from Basel to Antwerp took seven hours. Mendel, 13 years old, is traveling to the yeshiva, a journey to a place of Torah, as the sages refer to it. We left at five in the morning and arrived at noon, thank G-d. Mendel slept for half of the trip while I listened to various podcasts. During the rest of the way, we talked about the yeshiva and what awaits him there, life in Antwerp, the distance from home, and more.
Although the King leaves His royal palace in the month of Elul to meet the people in the field, Mendel is traveling from the field to the palace, for the yeshiva is the King's palace. There, among the pages of the Talmud and the teachings of Chassidut, the King sits in all His glory.
The car sped along the highways from Switzerland to France, through Luxembourg to Belgium. The roads are smooth, and from the window, the green European landscape of late summer is visible. The sky is clear. Mendel chose songs as if he were an experienced DJ, while my thoughts raced about the world unraveling around us. In just a few years, something has changed, and it seems it will never return to what it once was, at least not anytime soon. Starting with the long lockdowns and cancellations due to COVID, and now the terrible war that weighs constantly on the heart—it doesn't matter whether the Jew is sitting in Basel, London, or on the E25 in Europe.
My thoughts are running wild—what's happening here? Where is all this headed? How is the nation of Israel doing? And how does all of this connect with Mendel going to study in a yeshiva far from home?
Mendel plays and sings a song in Hungarian Yiddish ("Interen"), and I suddenly remember a speech given in rich and eloquent Hebrew by the Hungarian Jew, Elie Wiesel, over a decade ago at Yeshivat Har Etzion (it’s on YouTube). In the speech, he wrestles with the Holocaust and faith, and at one point, he shares: "What saved me, what perhaps saved my sanity—when people ask me and my generation, 'How did you remain mentally healthy?' I have one answer: what helped me was Torah learning, simply learning Torah. I immediately, just immediately, ordered from the principal of the school where I had been in France the tractate I had taken with me to Auschwitz, and I wanted to continue from the very page I had stopped. And I continued, and that essentially saved me."
I didn’t tell this to Mendel—why burden him now with Elie Wiesel and Auschwitz? But for myself, I knew that at the yeshiva, G-d willing, he would find an anchor for life. An anchor that can be mobile and available anywhere, an anchor that provides stability even when everything around is stormy.
When we arrived, there was a father-son learning session planned. The chosen tractate was Tractate Sukkah, a tractate Mendel knows by heart from last year. I also know it well since we reviewed it together every Shabbat. When we opened it and delved into the material, it was, at least for me, a type of anchor, something familiar, something from home.
This is the way of Torah. This is what our ancestors did, and this is what we do too.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Zalman Wishedski