“The greatest way to ensure unity is by strengthening yourself, by reinforcing and fortifying your own commitment”

The Lakewood Fellowship is a program run by Torah Links, an OLAMI affiliate, in which college students from around the country come to Lakewood for their summer break. Torah Links arranges internships for the students at local companies and integrates an intense learning regimen, with Fridays and Sunday morning seders spent in Beth Medrash Govoha, and Shabbosos full of inspiration and speeches.

Last Thursday evening, the students were treated by a local businessman to a gala backyard dinner. After enjoying a custom pizza bar and rocking kumzitz, the highlight of the evening was an open question-and-answer session with the Philadelphia rosh yeshivah, Rav Shalom Kamenetsky. The students’ questions  ranged the gamut from why Judaism places such an emphasis on study to the difference between chassidim and misnagdim, and the Rosh Yeshivah answered each question with his trademark polish, quoting freely from sources spanning Shas and midrashim — even citing the New England Journal of Medicine at one point — with a vocabulary that dazzled every literature major present.

When the organizers announced there was time for just one more question, a student in the back raised his hand: “We’re all growing in our Jewish consciousness and strengthening our commitment to religion,” he started. “In a few weeks, we’ll be back on campus where there are Jewish students from very diverse religious backgrounds and political viewpoints. How can we foster greater unity among the Jews on campus?”

The Rosh Yeshivah considered the question and then answered: “Chazal — our Sages — knew that each and every Yid is represented by their own letter in the sefer Torah. We know that for a sefer Torah to be valid, it must contain every single one of the 600,000 letters. Yet at the same time, the halachah tells us that each letter has to be 'mukaf gvil' — completely surrounded by parchment, and wholly independent of each other. When each letter is fully independent in its own right, then all the letters come together to form a complete sefer Torah. But if each letter can’t stand on its own and is running into the next, you don’t have a sefer Torah — you have a puddle of ink.

“Therefore,” concluded the Rosh Yeshivah, “the greatest way to ensure unity is by strengthening yourself, by reinforcing and fortifying your own commitment. When you are an independent letter, your friends will respect you for that, and a true unity could ensue.”

As we begin the Three Weeks and focus on buttressing our collective ahavas Yisrael, this was a timely reminder that true unity has to come from within.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 920)