Some things, like dedication to Torah, don’t change. Not in a year, and not in millennia

PHOTO: AARON JETTLESON

Living Higher

Each morning, Rabbi Shmuel Y. Friedman takes the train from Brooklyn to Manhattan for work. He uses his time traveling through the hubbub of the Empire State to traverse the transcendent echelons of Rava and Abaye. One day last week, a man approached him and held up his phone. “Is this you?” he asked. Rabbi Friedman looked at the phone’s screen. It was indeed him. He nodded, uncertain what the man wanted.

“I took this picture last year,” the man explained. “Now I’m back on the train and see that you’re doing the exact same thing.”

Because some things, like dedication to Torah, don’t change.

Not in a year, and not in millennia.

The Lens

Yeshiva Darchei Torah of Far Rockaway spends the last month of the zeman in Camp Oraysa, the yeshivah’s sprawling campus in Upstate New York. While the sedorim and shiurim and kol Torah continue unabated, Rav Shlomo Altusky, the rosh yeshivah, also uses the opportunity to meet individually with each bochur in second year of beis medrash to discuss his progress, offer personal guidance, and help his talmidim navigate the sugyas of learning and the sugya of life.

HAPPENING ON... The New Jersey Turnpike

At the Vince Lombardi Service Area on the New Jersey Turnpike this past Sunday, a bus full of Karlin chassidim pulled in after experiencing engine trouble. The driver called his company to dispatch a replacement bus, and the passengers disembarked.

As they waited, a secular-looking driver got out of his own vehicle, offering them a hearty, “Shalom, mah nishma?” The man explained that he was Israeli, and had just received a text from friends reminding him that it was the first yahrtzeit of a dear friend who fell in Gaza. The text also mentioned that the soldier had left no male relatives, and there was no one to recite Kaddish in his zechus. Would they be able to stick around for a moment while he recited Kaddish?

The chassidim were happy to comply and cried out, Amen, Yehei Shemei Rabbah in Karlin’s typically explosive style, a minhag derived from Rav Aharon of Karlin zy”a, who was renowned for his passionate davening.

And so as a Kaddish was recited in a Sabra accent, multiple fiery Yehei Shemei Rabbahs boomed out in a service area on the New Jersey Turnpike, as a zechus for a soldier who fell defending his people some 5,000 miles away.

Hashem yikom damo.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1071)