“Bo el HaTeiva” are the three words G-d told Noah to “come into the Ark.” Teivah is Hebrew for Ark, but it also can mean Word. The Baal Shem Tov (see #13 of our Twenty Baal Shem Tov teachings) used this play on words say: We ought to get inside the words of Torah.
Being that a group of us is, G-d willing, headed to the Chabad on Campus NYC Shabbaton next weekend, I thought I’d share examples of 3 Crown Heights Jews, images from my youth, none of them Rabbis, and how they each “get inside” words of Torah.
1) Zelig Rivkin had a car garage on Troy Avenue in Crown Heights. Today his garage is gone and on that site OK Kosher Certification has built their new headquarters. But back when I went to Yeshiva, he still had a busy car shop there. Our Yeshiva was located on the bottom of Troy Avenue near Empire, but our lunchroom was in a house up on Carroll Street. So we walked up and down Troy past Zelig’s shop a couple of times each day. One of our teachers, Rabbi Gerlitsky, was a noted scholar and publisher of Torah insights. And he had a lousy car. I think it was a small green boxy Chrysler, maybe a cheaper edition of the New Yorker. It was struggling, and therefore it was in Zelig’s mechanic shop every few weeks. Here’s the strange thing. On our way to or from lunch, every now and then, we’d see Rabbi Gerlitsky sitting in his car halfway into the shop, with his door open, and Zelig leaning over the door. They were speaking animatedly! Rabbi Gerlitsky in his fedora and suit, Zelig in his jump-suit and oil-soiled hands, conversing passionately about something. What were they talking about? One day we mustered up the courage and asked Rabbi Gerlitsky what he was discussing with Zelig? Turns out that Zelig enjoyed studying Rashi. He read it carefully and had lots of questions. He would save them up for when Rabbi Gerlitsky came in with his car and then they’d discuss it.
2) In the mid-1980’s the Rebbe began to encourage the daily study of Rambam, Maimonides Mishne Torah, to be completed either in annual cycle or every three years. One of the things that distinguishes Rambam’s Mishne Torah from other works of Jewish Law is that he covers ALL of Torah laws, whether they remain applicable today or not. Even without a Temple, he discusses the laws of sacrifices in detail. And even now with a fixed Jewish calendar, he discusses the calculations for determining the new moon. The laws of the moon calculations are known as Kiddush HaChodesh and are very complicated. Most Rabbis are not at all familiar with it. But now that the Rebbe said to learn it, there had to be a way to understand it. There was a great under-utilized genius in Crown Heights named Rabbi Sholom Morosow, who was learned in many areas of Torah that most people knew little about. But he wasn’t as accessible or easy to understand. Enter Yosef Losh, a earnest hard-working family man, who drives a truck. He was determined to figure this astronomy stuff out. So he sat down for a long time with Rabbi Marasow, I don’t know how long it took, until he figured it out well enough to teach others. And then – an unusual sight: Every year, when the time came to study these moon laws in the Rambam, Yosef Losh would animatedly lead classes in these complex laws with many senior Rabbis and white-bearded elders as eager listeners.
3) The third story I heard recently at alumni Bar-Mitzvah. A great-uncle of the Bar-Mitzvah boys realized I was a “Chabadnik” and told me he wanted to share with me a warm memory of his. In the late 50’s or early 60’s he spent two summers at the Camp Gan Israel in Swan Lake NY. He asked me if it was still there, I told him that place had been sold to be an airport and the camp relocated to Parksville NY where I myself spent many summers. He told me that his father sent him to Yeshiva for 8 years, or maybe it was 12, but he never experienced Judaism like he did those two summers in camp with Chabad. What was the difference I asked? He said the difference was learning vs. living. In the Yeshiva the people and the learning were often two different things, but in camp, they lived it, it was who they were. To use the metaphor of the words, in Yeshiva they learned the words, they looked at them from the outside, but at Camp Gan Israel they got inside the words, they became part of it. He credits whatever Yiddishkeit he has today (he’s almost 70) to those summers. And he remembers some of the mentors and counselors he had! One was Yisrael Shemtov (of the “Tire Tracks” story I like to share). He said the guy was alive, full of passion and warmth. And he also remembers that the buses bringing them home stopped at 770, and the Rebbe came out to greet them.
Let’s get into the words!