In a recent blog post (referenced at the foot of this piece), Rabbi Steven Ettinger wrote this:
While describing his early
yeshiva years …, Rabbi Wein ztz’l fondly recalled what he learned in ninth
grade from Rabbi Mendel Kaplan. Along with Talmud, this famed disciple of the
Mir Yeshiva and Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman taught his young student “how to
actually read the newspaper, spotting its unintended lessons in life.”
Spotting unintended lessons in life was something Rabbi
Berel Wein got down to a fine art. He was a kindred spirit of Dayan Gershon
Lopian ztz’l, who quipped that one good Sunday newspaper would provide him with
enough divrei Torah for the entire week. Learning unintended lessons is very
much within the spirit of Pirkei Avot, where Ben Zoma opens the fourth perek
with this advice:
אֵיזֶהוּ
חָכָם, הַלּוֹמֵד מִכָּל אָדָם, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר: מִכָּל מְלַמְּדַי הִשְׂכַּֽלְתִּי,
כִּי עֵדְוֹתֶֽיךָ שִֽׂיחָה לִי
Who is wise? One who learns from
everyone. As it states (Tehillim 119:99): "From all my teachers I have
grown wise, for Your testimonials are my meditation."
The Babylonian Talmud goes even further, where the Amora
Rabbi Yochanan teaches (Eruvin 100b) that, had the Torah not been given, we
could have learned the principles of good behaviour from animals, birds and
even insects.
I had a small insight into how a Torah teacher might pluck
instruction out of the most unexpected opportunities when I managed to do it
myself last Shabbat. The occasion was the making of announcements at the end of
mussaf concerning davening times and events for the coming week. Our
shul’s Women’s League had organized a trip to an art museum followed by lunch
(and a little browsing time) at IKEA, the legendary home of stylish flat-pack,
self-assembly furniture. It suddenly occurred to me that there was a lesson to
be learned. I said (more or less) the following:
“I’d like to say
something about this trip to IKEA, because there is so much that this chain of
flat-pack furniture emporiums can teach us as Jews. Indeed, IKEA carries a
great message as we head towards the Yamim Nora’im [the Days of Awe—Rosh
Hashanah and Yom Kippur].
If you have ever purchased any self-assembly
furniture from IKEA, you will know that it comes with a set of instructions.
You never see these instructions or have a chance to read them till after you
have bought the product, taken it home and removed the packaging. This is what
it means to say na’aseh venishma: just as we agreed at Sinai to follow
the instructions in the Torah even before we heard what was in it, so to do we
commit ourselves to following the self-assembly instructions even before we
have even read them.
Now, like the laws of the Torah, the IKEA furniture assembly instructions are not always easy to understand. Some don’t appear to have any purpose. And sometimes, even when they are easy to understand, it’s actually quite hard to follow them. But we have been given free will. It’s up to us to follow those instructions or to ignore them and do our own thing. And just as with the instructions in the Torah, so too with the IKEA instructions, if you don’t carry them out to the letter, you may well come literally unstuck.
On the Yamim
Noraim we confirm the validity of God’s instructions and then atone for those
we have failed to carry out, whether deliberately, negligently or through our
own incompetence. Most importantly we have to accept the reality that, with our
Torah observance no less than our flat-pack assembly, it is we who are
responsible for the consequences of our own acts. Please bear this mussar
in mind when you visit IKEA and your trip will not have been an idle one”.
I was speaking on an impulse—and
admittedly I might not have said any of this if our Rabbi had not been on
holiday. But the temptation was too great to resist.
If any readers have had similar
experiences, I do hope they will feel confident to share them with us here.
Rabbi Steven Ettinger’s piece, “Learning
to Read the Torah”, can be accessed in full here.
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