The Rav was always impressed by teachers of young children in their formative educational years. Whereas the older students arrived in his class with formed ideas, the younger students represented amorphous and malleable material, like the primordial building materials of Tohu and Bohu that Hashem fashioned into a functioning productive world. The young children beginning their education must be molded carefully into an inquisitive mind that will burst onto the world stage expressing his creativity and Tzelem Elokim. Such a teacher is Boneh Olamot, taking the physical and spiritual, Eretz and Shamayim and fusing them together effectively. A teacher who is incapable of, or unsuccessful at, molding his students is considered a Mashchit, a destroyer of worlds as the child will never reach his potential and will eventually require much Tikkun and correction to remold his basic intellectual and humanitarian composition.
We can apply this same idea to the Jewish people and their odyssey through history. We have experienced the heights of being close to Hashem at Sinai and with the Tabernacle that accompanied us in the desert. The heights of the Mishkan in Shiloh, the Temple twice built in Jerusalem, and the lows of their destruction. Yet after each devastating experience we picked ourselves up and rebuilt ourselves. Our worlds have been destroyed by many Holocausts that scorched the millennia since the destruction of the first Temple, from Beitar to the terrible Holocaust perpetrated on our people by the Nazis and their many willing collaborators, Yimachu Sh’motam, to the present day enemies of the Jewish People who seek to destroy us physically and religiously by any means possible. We are the same Jews who approached Rabbi Akiva after the destruction of the second Temple and despaired of attaining atonement on Yom Kippur without the service of the Kohen Gadol in the Holy of Holies. Yet Rabbi Akiva lifted their spirits and showed them there was still another path they can embrace to attain an atonement that was no less effective than that of the Kohen Gadol. When the same Rabbi Akiva lost 24,000 students in a short period, the cream of our people who represented the next link in the generational chain of the Mesorah, he did not despair. Instead he set himself to rebuild Torah to its former glory with a handful of students who survived and succeeded. Who taught Rabbi Akiva how to respond to these situations? He fulfilled V’Halachta B’Drachav and rebuilt a world that was destroyed.
While building from scratch is challenging, rebuilding something can be even more difficult. Perhaps we can apply this idea to assist us in appreciating the difficulty, power and importance of Teshuva. A person who repents must acknowledge his sin and express remorse at how bankrupt his life and actions are. He reaches the state of Ki Yamuch Achicha. The Teshuva process disassembles the sinful individual into his basic components, the raw physical and spiritual materials Hashem used to form him and reconstructs him. As Rambam says in Hilchot Teshuva, the repentant person standing before Hashem is a new individual, with a new name and relationship with Hashem. Man builds an initial world for himself (Boneh Olam), tears that world down when he realizes its foundations are faulty and riddled with sin (Machrivan) and rebuilds a new world (Boneh Olam Acher) through Teshuva. Where Hashem says to man’s original world Dayn Lo Hanya, I am not satisfied with the original version, after destruction and reconstruction through Teshuva, Hashem exclaims, “Dayn Hanya Li! I approve of this rebuilt version and accept you back.”