Despite the dominance of the Reform in Cincinnati, Ohio, which has its largest training school in the town, there are also Orthodox schools, a kollel, two Orthodox synagogues, and Chabad. When I speak there, I am always hosted by the largest Orthodox shul, which is called Agudas Yisrael. The other shul, Knesses Yisrael, is smaller, and on my last trip I met its rav. We sat together at a bris, and he told me an astonishing tale. He had learned in Lakewood Yeshivah, and his story came from its great founder and rosh yeshivah, Rav Aharon Kotler, zt”l.
Rav Kotler told him about a child prodigy. The boy was an amazing violinist. His abilities on the instrument meant that his father could earn much needed money by letting his son perform in public. On one such occasion, the fund-raiser of the Slobodka Yeshivah heard the young boy play and afterward engaged him in conversation. It became immediately apparent that his genius with the violin was nothing compared to his genius in Torah. The fund-raiser approached the boy’s father, whose name was Pines, and asked him to allow his son to come and learn in the yeshivah. The father explained that the family could not survive without the extra income generated by his son’s performances. The man didn’t hesitate. He offered to pay the father the same amount that his son’s playing would earn. The agreement was made, and the boy went on to learn, and eventually he became a rav.
Rav Aharon’s original family name was not Kotler. It was Pines. He had been that little boy.
It would be impossible to underestimate the contribution made to American Jewry by Lakewood Yeshivah. Generations of talmidei chachamim and rabbanim have sprung from there. Scores of kollels have sprouted from Lakewood and have been established all over America. They have brought Torah to places as far as Mexico. All this because someone saw the seeds of greatness in a little boy with a fiddle and was determined to allow those seeds to grow.
When I heard this story about Rav Aharon, I recalled a question that I once heard from another American rosh yeshivah. When Rav Matisyahu Salomon was still the mashgiach of Gateshead, he would give a shiur in his home every Thursday night to young rabbanim. On one occasion he invited a rosh yeshivah from the States who was staying with him to give the shiur. In the course of his shiur, this rosh yeshivah told us that he had been at school with someone who also went on to become a rosh yeshivah. While at school the boy displayed a phenomenal talent for art. He was astonishingly gifted. “I once plucked up courage and asked him, ‘If Hashem has given you such a gift, isn’t it a pity that you don’t use it anymore?’ ”
It was an interesting thought, and it occurred to me that one could have asked the same of Rav Aharon and the musical gift that Hashem had given him.
One of my own rebbes was offered a place at Cambridge University because he was such a gifted mathematician, and a well-known rosh yeshivah in Eretz Yisrael displayed a tremendous talent for chess as a child, so great that he could easily have played the game at an international level.
At the end of the fifth chapter of Avos, Ben Bag Bag says, “Hafoch bah vahafoch bah d’cholah bah — Turn the Torah over and turn it over again because everything is in it.” The Ben Ish Chai tells a story that explains exactly what the mishnah means.
A father had two sons, and, in accordance with the Talmud’s requirement that one equip his children with a profession, he apprenticed one to a tailor and the other to a carpenter. Apprentices were expected to be utterly dedicated to their craft, and often they would come in to help on their days off. These two boys were swept away with enthusiasm for their professions, and every Shabbos, after lunch, they would go and watch the master craftsmen at their work. The boys’ father was extremely distressed and sought the counsel of his rav. He told the father to bring the boys to see him the next Shabbos.
The following week the rav greeted the boys with “Shalom aleichem” instead of the usual greeting of the holy day, “Good Shabbos.” Then the rav said, “I greet you this way because you are turning Shabbos into a weekday, so that is the appropriate greeting to give you.” The young men protested that they attended shul on Shabbos, and even if they did spend their afternoons at their places of work, they were not expected to violate Shabbos, nor did they. They only sat and observed. One of them recalled hearing the rav himself once explain in a shiur that it is not forbidden to think about work on Shabbos, and that was all they were doing.
The rav replied that they had not understood him properly. To think about work when the thought enters your mind by accident is not a sin. To actively spend time thinking about work is definitely forbidden. Apart from that, being seen entering a workplace on Shabbos inevitably invites people to assume the worst, and that, too, is forbidden.
The rav asked the boys what was it that so attracted them to their workplaces on Shabbos anyway. The boys began to enthuse about the wondrous talents of the craftsmen they were apprenticed to. The apprentice tailor described how the tailors took a simple piece of cloth and, seemingly without effort, cut it and shaped it. By the time the precise and almost invisible stitches were added, a perfect garment appeared that was an ideal fit for the customer.
His brother’s enthusiasm for his trade was just as great. “The carpenter selects some wood and carefully measures and cuts it. Then he expertly carves dovetail joints, and soon all the pieces join together to produce a beautiful table or chair.”
The rav listened and shook his head as if puzzled. “I don’t understand. If that’s what you enjoy, why don’t you come and watch me on Shabbos. That’s exactly what I do!”
The young men were baffled.
“Open that Gemara over there on the table and read out loud from whatever page you come to.” One of the boys did this. The Gemara was opened to the tenth page of Bava Basra. He began to read aloud.
“Ten hard things were created in the world. A mountain is hard, but iron cuts it. Iron is hard, but fire melts it. Fire is hard, but water extinguishes it....”
The boy finished reading all ten things, and then the rabbi said, “There is a chapter in Avodah Zarah that deals with the laws concerning a mountain that was worshiped as a god. In the Talmud’s discussion a question is raised.” The rav carefully explained the complicated question to the boys and then continued, “The answer to this question is found in another tractate of the Talmud, in Yevamos. It is in a section called ‘Iron Sheep.’” Again the rav explained the Talmud’s argument there and how it solved the previous problem. “This piece of Gemara, though, contains a problem of its own, and the answer to it is contained in another tractate, in Bava Kama, in a section dealing with someone’s liability if a fire he kindled damaged someone else.”
And so the rav went on, stitching the gemara together and fitting them perfectly to the “ten hard things” spoken of in Bava Basra. The boys realized that the skill of their trades was more than matched within the Torah, and subsequently they attended the rav’s “workshop” on Shabbos instead.
The answer the rosh yeshivah received from his friend when he challenged him about neglecting the artistic gift of Hashem was that he hadn’t abandoned it at all. “I see symmetry in the Gemara’s argument,” he replied.
No doubt Rav Aharon Kotler would have said that he heard harmony between the gemaras. My old rebbe would see logic and structure in the Torah, and the rosh yeshivah in Eretz Yisrael would anticipate the “next move” of a talmid challenging his argument in his shiur as he and the talmid struggled to check and then checkmate each other.
One of my very closest friends is a maggid shiur in Yerushalayim. Once, a lifetime ago, he played the flute in the Boston Symphony Orchestra. When I last visited, I notice a small black case lying in a corner beside his bookshelves, gathering dust. I asked him if that was his flute. He confirmed that it was. I asked him if he ever found time to play anymore, and he said that sometimes he’d take out the instrument for relaxation. In his shiurim, though, he often used music to illustrate a point and take a difficult idea from obscurity to comprehension.
Most of us have been given some unique skill as a gift from Hashem. It may lie in artistic talent or intellectual ability. It may lie in a natural gift for a certain middah so that Avraham’s chesed or Moshe’s humility finds a special resonance within one person that another person may miss. The true significance of such gifts lies beyond their usual boundaries. They can serve as a key and an approach in Torah.
The violinist can create a symphony with Torah, and the artist can paint the Talmud’s pictures so that thousands can see and appreciate them for the first time.