One Sunday morning while I was drinking coffee at my favorite Jerusalem sidewalk café, a gentleman sat down at the table next to mine and sipped his coffee while remaining engrossed in a book. I am always curious as to what other people are reading, so I could not resist the urge to peek at the cover of his book in order to ascertain its title. Lo and behold, it turned out to be one of my personal favorites, a lesser known work on the fine points of the Hebrew language by the eighteenth- century philosopher, poet, and mystic Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, known by the initials of his name as the Ramchal.
The fellow was immersed in his reading, but I rudely interrupted his concentration by commenting that I knew that book and that I became familiar with it as a very young man. He lifted his eyes from the page, looked at me carefully, and said, “I know. You and I discovered it together on one of our frequent forays into that old bookstore on the Lower East Side of Manhattan!”
I didn’t recognize him, but he sure recognized me. He was Bernie back then, a classmate in our yeshiva who had moved to Israel soon after we both received rabbinic ordination. He was now Baruch.
A long conversation ensued, during which we caught up with each other ’s lives and with the whereabouts of other old friends who had moved to Israel long ago. It was his idea to organize the reunion.
We met several weeks later. There were five of them, and I was the only “American.” Two of them had gone to Israel to study immediately after high school and never returned to the United States. The other three had made aliyah a bit later, in their early twenties, after college and after marriage.
We spent quite a few hours together reminiscing about the “good old days,” laughing and reliving the pranks of our youth. Eventually, the conversation became quite serious as they each in turn described their decisions to leave “their land, birthplace, and house of their fathers” to come to Israel and create new lives there.
The five of them related five unique stories about their journeys. Two had become quite prominent rabbis and authors of noteworthy scholarly works. One had been a musician and now earned his living by giving music lessons to retired adults. One was a physician, himself now retired and, coincidentally, taking music lessons from our mutual friend. The fifth was a very successful businessman who was able to take advantage of the housing construction boom in Tel Aviv.
These were very different personalities with very different stories to tell. But they had one story in common. Like Abraham, but at a much younger age than Abraham, they each heard God’s call, “Go forth from your native land and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you.”
Unlike Abraham, they knew where they were going. But as one of them put it, “We knew where we were going but did not know what we were getting into.”
Unlike Abraham, they had no divine assurances that they would be blessed. But they all now felt they had been abundantly blessed. They each had left family behind, in some cases never again to see their own parents. But in every case they built new families, large and diverse, and they all had grandchildren in the Israeli army at the time of this reunion.
Not one of them had the slightest regret about his decision and they all gently teased me for not having chosen the path in life that they courageously chose. I must confess to some guilt and shame, and not a little envy, that I felt in their company that evening.
However, those feelings were outweighed by the admiration and respect I felt for them, and for all the many others who, to this very day, follow in the footsteps of Abraham and Sarah and take seriously the words of God that open Parashat Lech Lecha: “Go forth, and you shall be a blessing.”
The above is adapted from Rabbi Weinreb’s newest book, “The Person in the Parasha: Discovering the Human Element in the Weekly Torah Portion,” published by Maggid Books (a division of Koren Publishers Jerusalem) and OU Press.
