1.
Amid the present tumult of our lives, with the war in the South drawing on and the war in the North drawing closer, I decided to return to first grade. Not to elementary school, but to the high yeshiva where I spent several years long ago. There are situations in which the soul finds itself fighting across several fronts, without sufficient strength to meet all one's challenge, and so Rabbi Kook (1865-1935) proposed the possibility for a person "to insert the dispersing lines [of the soul] into their point," to retreat inward from the personal (and national) flood, and, as in the story of Noah's Ark, to conduct an internal reckoning and "recalculate the route." After doing so, the soul may be released: "However, after a short while the lines will be restored to their nature, and they will rejoice at their return to their maternal home and their parents' room from a distant land. His pain, sense of inferiority and depressions will then be eased."
On Rosh Chodesh Elul (this year it was September 4), I traveled for a week to Yeshivat Shavei Hevron. In the Elah Valley, I turned eastward and ascended, seeking to breathe in the mountain air. In my imagination, the massive satellite dishes, replaced, Goliath, the Philistine giant who – in that same place – for forty days, insulted the army of Israel, led by King Saul, until the young David arrived and struck him down with sling and a stone (see: 2 Samuel 17). At the gas station at the Gush Etzion junction, I saw the extent of the damage from the car bomb that blew up there less than two weeks earlier. Workers were busy with repairs. The people of the mountain continue with their daily lives, deepening their roots in the good land on behalf of us all.
2.
In the city of Hebron, the Herodian stone building of the Tomb of the Patriarchs loomed before me, and I recalled phrases that the Rosh Yeshiva, Rabbi Moshe Bleicher, used to say to us repeatedly: We do not live in Hebron because our forefathers and foremothers died and were buried here, but because they lived and created here, and dreamed here of a nation that would fulfill their vision. I continued to the yeshiva. In the mid-1980s, we were about thirty boys in a massive stone building built in 1875 by Haim Yisrael Romano, a wealthy grain merchant from Istanbul (then Constantinople). Since then, the yeshiva has grown, adding new floors, and today, some 400 students study there. Initially, it was considered a part of the Merkaz HaRav yeshiva (before the split) in Jerusalem. Unlike the gentle demeanor of the Jerusalem yeshiva, however, the atmosphere in Hebron was pioneering and projected physical strength. It was no coincidence that many of us came from Midrashiyat Noam (a famous yeshiva high school in Pardes Hana), whose spirit is still felt here. Thousands of graduates of Shavei Hevron yeshiva are spread throughout the country and the world, many in key positions; it is, to use the poet Bialik's words, truly a "workshop for the nation's soul."
What did we know then about ourselves, about the world? We were curious and wanted to learn Torah in a way that was different from what we were familiar with. Not only Talmud, legal decisors, and Halakha, but also ethics, philosophy, the Bible, poetry, faith, army and state, and history. Over all this hovered the revolutionary teachings of Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaKohen Kook (Hara'ayah), which grabbed us by the locks of our hair and lifted us to heights, from which the conflicted and complicated Israeli reality appeared as a glorious chapter in the long historical chain of the eternal people. We saw no event as a final chapter, not on a personal level at the national level; everything was rather part of a process.
3.
Our official study day spanned 16 hours, from seven in the morning until eleven at night. I discovered that this has not changed. The heart is invigorated at the sight of hundreds of young men studying with such fervor at such late hours. Most of the time is devoted to Talmud, to in-depth discussion, and to proficiency, but the innovation Rabbi Kook introduced was the addition of subjects unknown in the yeshiva world, intended to broaden the worldview of the students beyond institutional religious frameworks. There was a struggle for the hearts of the younger generation, who were swept away by the spirit of the times and the socialist idealism of the early twentieth century.
After the official study day ended at 11 p.m., I would turn to the books I chose. I was with the prophet Isaiah in eighth-century BCE Jerusalem, with Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi and the Mishnah he edited in Beit She'arim in the second century CE, with the Midrash Tanchuma in the eighth century, with Emunot ve-Deot by Saadia Gaon in tenth-century Baghdad, with The Kuzari by Yehuda HaLevi in twelfth-century Toledo, with Gevurot Hashem by the Maharal of Prague in the sixteenth century, with Meshech Chochmah by Rabbi Meir Simcha of Dvinsk in Latvia at the end of the nineteenth century, and with the letters of Rabbi Kook from the time of the Second Aliyah at the beginning of the twentieth century. These were just a few examples.
4.
That was back then. Later, army service, university, family, children, work, representing the country overseas, writing, farewells and beginnings, and in all of them, the spirit of the yeshiva was present. Now I sat in the Beit Midrash and gazed into the eyes of the young men, searching for the boy I had been just before we crossed the great sea of our lives. On my first day, they approached me with a shy smile: "Hello, have you eaten? Do you have a place to sleep?" When they got used to my presence, they came and asked that we study together. We studied Rabbi Kook's eulogy on the death of Herzl (He died on July 3, 1904). Only a few years into the beginning of the Zionist revolution and the leader was gone. A tremendous crisis. Rabbi Kook had arrived in the Land of Israel only two months earlier and settled in Jaffa. The eulogy is a historiosophical analysis of Zionism, not as a rebellion or as severance [from Judaism], but as a necessary stage in national revival as foretold by ancient sources. In his way, the Rabbi encouraged his contemporaries not to despair.
We then moved on to his 1906 article, "The Generation," a socio-historical analysis of the pioneer generation. Its essence: the process of secularization is an unprecedented phenomenon because it is not associated with moral decline but rather with idealism and the feeling that the Torah had been perceived as a repressive remnant of exile, with didactic laws, and regulations devoid of spiritual and intellectual force. In another essay, Rabbi Kook described the educational and intellectual revolution he sought to bring about: "to moisten the dry bones of the revealed spiritual world that remained in such a stupor." One hundred and eighteen years have passed, and parts of this article seem as if they were written today.
5.
After the Kabbalat Shabbat, the Rosh Yeshiva, Rabbi Hanani Etrog, taught about the responsibility of the elders in the Torah portion Eglah Arufah (Decapitated Calf. See: Deuteronomy 21:1-9) regarding our responsibility for society and its members. The students danced and sang, "And thy children shall return to their own border" (Jeremiah 31:16) and "When the Lord restores the fortunes of His people, Jacob will exult, Israel will rejoice" (Psalms 14:7), just as we used to sing in my days. During the Seudah Shlishit, they sang Yehuda HaLevi's poem "Zion, will you not ask after the welfare of your prisoners?" to the same melody I taught my friends over 35 years ago. One night, I stumbled upon a group of students preparing schnitzels, the yeshiva version of a barbecue. They invited me to join. We ate and talked about history and study, settlement, war and redemption, and camaraderie. Twenty-year-olds with a spirit of two thousand years old.
On Shabbat, I visited the Tomb of the Patriarchs. In ancient times, Muslims forbade Jews from entering the building and allowed them to pray only up to the seventh step. The late General Rehavam Ze'evi demolished those stairs, a reminder of our humiliation. Now, I found an open synagogue there. On the rock opposite us sat a young Arab boy watching with interest as the Torah was read and lifted. When we stood for the Amidah prayer, he came and stood among us, hesitantly mimicking the bowing movements of the worshippers. There are many descendants of Jews in the area who converted to Islam about a thousand years ago. Who knows? Isaac and Ishmael come to their father Abraham's grave (Genesis 25:9). Soon, I will return from the mountains to the lowlands. I just hope I won't be troubled again by the tumult below.
