Those who know know. Those who don’t yet know really ought to try it.

I’m speaking here about that delectable experience of tasting — even just nibbling around the edges of — the multitude of Torah that exists regarding a Yom Tov specifically in the days leading up to that Yom Tov and of course throughout the holy days of the Yom Tov itself. It’s an experiential delight without compare one that words mere dry one-dimensional words simply cannot convey.

The Torah I speak of comes in so many different flavors: lomdus halachah machshavah drush and various combinations thereof. There is a huge and still-growing treasure trove of thousands of seforim in each of these areas by hundreds of mechabrim in many different historical eras from Matan Torah up to and including this very year each with his own unique style based on his acquisition of Torah which can be yours too if only you make it so. The main thing is not to be left standing at the counter so to speak nonplussed by the array of choices but instead to make a selection and plunge right in. You’ll never ever regret it.

But there’s more to this still. For a long time I have had a certain experience when Yom Tov — it makes no difference which one — comes around. It is an experience in which the boundary between the intellectual and the sensory fades and those two normally distinct areas of human perception meld together.

In simple words: Sometimes when I learn Succos topics in the days following Yom Kippur or as I sit listening to a shiur by yet another phenomenal maggid shiur in the program my shul hosts each day of Chol HaMoed through the yeoman efforts of our rav Rav Menachem Feifer I will begin to taste and smell the esrog and the other minim to sense that one-of-a-kind feeling of sitting in the succah on the first night of Yom Tov.

Pesach time one doesn’t have to wait for afikomen to have the taste of matzoh linger on; immersing oneself in a geshmakeh shtikel Torah on any of dozens of Pesach-related topics achieves a comparable effect. Of course finding oneself confounded by a difficult Tosafos can partake of the experience of eating maror — but then again eating maror itself is a sweet experience. (But that’s for another day…)

Ditto for Shavuos the Yamim Noraim Chanukah and Purim. The essence du Yom Tov is distilled and captured in its Torah and it is only natural then for it to be ingested imbibed inhaled by those fortunate to learn that Torah. I’ve never polled others about this but I don’t have any doubt at all that my experience is utterly commonplace.

But until recently I assumed that it stemmed from the sanctity of the holiday and its corresponding mitzvos whose emanations radiate out and envelop the Torah that relates to those days and their particular mitzvos.

Then I found the following passage in Rav Chaim Volozhiner’s Nefesh HaChaim (4:30) which teaches that the connection between mitzvos and Torah runs in precisely the opposite direction. In an earlier passage Rav Chaim had stated that “although if one fulfills all 613 mitzvos in the most complete manner in all their details and with pure and holy intention the person in his entirety becomes thereby a receptacle for the elevated kedushah of all these mitzvos nevertheless there is no comparison at all between the kedushah and ohr of the mitzvos and the great kedushah and ohr of the holy Torah that dwells upon a person who studies it properly.…”

Then Rav Chaim writes this:

Not only that but even that kedushah and the chiyus and ohr of the mitzvos that sanctify and bring life to the person who fulfills them derives and emanates only from the kedushah and ohr of the holy Torah because a mitzvah has no inherent chiyus and kedushah and ohr of its own at all only by virtue of the kedushah of the letters of the Torah that are written regarding that mitzvah.…

Certainly study of Torah without fulfilling the mitzvos at all chas v’shalom is also nothing … because without fulfilling the mitzvos chas v’shalom there is nothing the ohr of Torah can take hold of and connect to so that it can rest and remain upon him similar to a flame without a wick. But the ohr itself is received by the mitzvah from the letters of the Torah that are written regarding it.

What an immense revelation Rav Chaim has granted us with these words! The path for us to absorb the sanctity and the vivifying enlightening effect of the mitzvos runs through the Torah of that mitzvah. At the same Rav Chaim teaches us it is essential for the symbiotic Torah-mitzvah relationship that there be a mitzvah performance upon which the kedushah of its Torah can descend. This is important for all of us to know but especially for those who have had difficulty connecting to a mitzvah or a Yom Tov or wish to help their child or talmid do so. 

So what to do next? Put down this magazine (for now…) and pick out a sugya or a sefer (preferably in lashon hakodesh if your skill level permits) and jump in. And if you don’t want to keep all the good times for yourself help start a learning program in your shul over Yom Tov. Our rav often marvels at how readily the rabbanim and rebbeim he approaches — all busy people who one might think would want to use Yom Tov to relax — agree to deliver a shiur for our shul’s Chol HaMoed program. Apparently Klal Yisrael is blessed with Yidden who above all want to help other Yidden learn Torah and truly experience the light of a Yom Tov too.

ALONGSIDE THE HEROES The upcoming Yom Tov of Pesach bears messages that are essential for infusing Jewish pride into the many young people and far too many adults too living externally Jewish lives that are sadly devoid of inner feeling and meaning.

But isn’t “Jewish pride” something that secular Jewish groups or JDL types claim to promote? Although we don’t usually think of it as a frum concern nowadays it’s precisely what’s lacking for some in our world.

When the Jews of Shushan went to the seudas Achashveirosh although the kashrus was l’mehadrin they joined in a feast celebrating the passage of the prophesied 70 years of galus with no redemption in sight so that the Jews could now be consigned to the ash heap of history. That evinced an utter absence of pride in being members of the Chosen People and for that Chazal taught they deserved annihilation.

As Rav Grylak so compellingly wrote recently we must help our spiritually disoriented fellow Jews to see themselves for what they truly are: members of a nation with a unique exalted mission to represent Hashem and His values on the world stage. We became that nation upon emerging from Mitzrayim and we were given that greatest of missions seven weeks later at Sinai.

But more: we have always been a nation of heroes. Some were people who combined great learning and rarified character to become humans of a level this world has never elsewhere seen; others were more “common” folk who led lives of devotion to G-d and man in the face of abject poverty and relentless persecution. But they were heroes all and although they’ve left this earthly existence they yet live and they and I are still part of one indivisible nation.

And “imagining myself leaving Mitzrayim” means envisioning myself even in this bewildered last generation of ours walking alongside those heroes.