Hisorerus, an awakening event, creates an “obligation”

O

n one single day about three weeks ago, I said goodbye to two good friends. I thank Hashem that until then I’d never attended two levayos on one day, and hope never to have to do so again, but that day, I went from the hespedim for one yedid to another.

There were some interesting commonalities between my friends Reb Dovid Schwartz a”h and Reb Yehudah Harbater a”h, but each was ultimately a world unto himself of special qualities. I’m personally still trying to process the double-barreled loss of two chaveirim whose luminous suns set while very much in the midday of their lives.

But this much I know: Something has to change as a result. It just cannot be that one loses two people with whom he shared learning and laughter and life lessons, and that a month later, or six months, the hole punched abruptly in the canvas of one’s life has been papered over, with no continuing discernible impact. Hisorerus, an awakening event, isn’t just about “inspiration” — a much-used, perhaps too-used, word. It is about a mechayev, it creates an “obligation” — a less-used, perhaps under-used, word. It obligates searching, introspection, real change.

But hisorerus takes many forms. One of these is when we learn of an instance of Hashgachah pratis that is so open and obvious, so striking, that it functions like lightening, illuminating a forest for a traveler on a pitch-black night.

Here, then, is a bolt from the heavens that I just heard:

After Reb Yudi Harbater was niftar, Reb Boruch Ber Bender of Achiezer received a call from the office of New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo, asking if they could be of help in any way with Rabbi Harbater’s funeral needs. He thanked them for their concern but said all was under control, with Reb Yudi’s aron ready to depart on schedule for Eretz Yisrael. But then he realized he did indeed need their help, because not long before he had taken a call regarding another bereaved family — that of Rabbi Rafael Wachsman, longtime rosh yeshivah at Milwaukee’s Chofetz Chaim affiliate, the Wisconsin Institute for Torah Study (WITS), who had just been niftar after an illness. His kevurah, too, was to take place in Eretz Yisrael, but the plane carrying his aron had been delayed in Chicago for hours, making it highly unlikely it would arrive in New York’s La Guardia airport with enough time to transport the aron to Newark for the connecting flight to Eretz Yisrael. Reb Boruch Ber used his newfound Albany connection — to this day, he has no idea how the governor’s office came to contact him in the first place — to make contact with the deputy general manager of La Guardia, Anthony Vero.

Mr. Vero allowed a hearse to drive onto the runway to meet the aron, shaving several hours off the normal procedures for deplaning and security clearance, and within 11 minutes the aron was speeding toward Newark, where it was successfully transferred to the Jerusalem-bound flight.

In a remarkable confluence of events, Rabbi Harbater’s petirah had made possible a timely kevurah and preservation of kevod hameis for Rabbi Wachsman. The latter’s own abundant zechusim amassed over decades of harbatzas Torah and chesed surely played their own role as well.

And now for Part Two.

Days later, when the Harbater family learned of Rabbi Wachsman’s passing and how the path of his final journey had providentially crossed that of their father’s, it came to light that there were interconnections between the two families, going back nearly nine decades. Reb Yudi’s father, Moshe Yisrael Harbater, had learned in the Chevron Yeshivah together with Rabbi Wachsman’s uncle, Binyamin Hurwitz. When, in 1929, the local Arabs rose up and perpetrated a monstrous slaughter of scores of the city’s Jews, Moshe Yisrael was grievously wounded but survived. A letter of consolation written by Rav Chaim Zev Finkel to the parents of Binyamin Hurwitz appears to state (although it’s not entirely clear) that young Harbater’s life was saved when another Chevron talmid was killed and fell on top of him, obscuring him from the marauders. The martyred bochur who apparently fell atop Moshe Yisrael Harbater was Binyamin Hurwitz, Reb Rafael Wachsman’s uncle.

It also came to light that after Moshe Yisrael Harbater arrived in the United States, he and his wife settled in Far Rockaway — on the same block as Rabbi Wachsman’s parents, and some in the family recall hearing that the Wachsmans had helped the Harbaters acclimate to their new life in a new land.

The hisorerus that emerges from a story like this one obligates us, because if a tale of middah k’neged middah with bookends nearly 90 years apart can’t rouse us to begin incorporating greater awareness of Hashem’s presence in our lives, what will?

The third-to-last pasuk in Megillas Esther (10:1), which relates that Achashveirosh imposed a tax on his empire, must be one of its most enigmatic verses: Of what possible relevance to us is that fact? The Vilna Gaon explains that many years earlier, in an effort to coax Esther into revealing her identity, he had granted an empire-wide tax holiday, but with Esther’s revelation of her Jewishness, Achashveirosh now re-levied that tax in order to recoup all his precious lost revenue.

Never mind that he had just witnessed over nine years the stunning sequence of Divinely orchestrated events meting out reward and retribution that we know as the Purim story. Achashveirosh had no time for reflection, other than to gaze lovingly at his own. He was preoccupied with only one thing: Where’s my money?

Megillas Esther’s parting lesson is that we can be woken, but whether we shake off our slumber is up to us.

PERSONAL TOUCH Writers for this magazine know their words travel far afield, but every so often we get a reminder of just how far that is. My most recent reminder came last week in the form of what was for me a very touching email from Mrs. Hindi Gersten, who teaches in a New York City program for troubled teens. Many of them have been in and out of the jail system and they are now working hard to attain their high school equivalency diplomas.

Speaking of my recent column about the businessman who has found it to be both effective and fulfilling to respond to emails and text messages with a phone call, she wrote, in part:

I enjoyed your article, “Hear My Lips.” I appreciated it so much, that I read it with my high school class…. When I asked them as a pre-reading activity, “Do you think successful people call or text?” they were all nodding their heads, pretty sure at first that successful and busy people text.

Until one student piped up: “No, they call. Like my lawyer — he will call me, not text,”... and they all agreed. Their successful, pompous, rich lawyers will take the time to call my teenage, delinquent students — not text. We discussed why perhaps this is so, and on target, they guessed what was in the article before reading it: The lawyer wants to be fully engaged, and get a better relationship with these teens as his clients.

The conversation then shifted to the “realness” of phone calls — the tone, the pausing, the “uhms” between words, all of which conveying what texts cannot…. They came to the conclusion that if they wanted to know the truth about something, it was best to call (if not speak face to face), not text.

We shot ideas back and forth, as we read for a good 45 minutes, until it was time to move on. We didn’t even get a chance to finish the piece. Many of the students folded the article to put in their backpacks... as opposed to leaving it on their desks or floor for me to clean up at the end of the day. That’s a compliment!

Your article sparked a lot of good discussion, thought, and analysis among some of the most troubled teens of New York City.

Like I said, far afield.

And yet, perhaps not so far. These young people, troubled as their lives have been to this point, seem to have some surprisingly solid feelings and observations about what makes for good and bad communication, how to distinguish between the real and artificial, and what happens when we outsource our humanity to machines.

Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 700. Eytan Kobre may be contacted directly at kobre@mishpacha.com