When you have teenage boys in yeshiva (we call high school aged school, mesivta) you’re always hearing about this school and that school. Rumors fly.
“Before I came here,” my son said about his mesivta, “ I heard bochurim were davening in closets. None of it’s true, it’s totally normal” he continued regarding the school he attends which has no front office, secretary or proper phone line.
My friends want to know which schools have nice grounds, “do the boys ever throw a ball around or are they learning during the breaks?” a nervous mother asks. “The rumors that the food is rotten and the bread has worms are not true,” I explain, “I heard it was true ten years ago.” [Post turn of the century new world America… long after modern refrigeration hit the scene.]
Today I learned about the “Mesivat DeRakiyah” which means the academy in Heaven. It sounded so nice. It’s a ‘place’ where the celestial beings above study our holy Torah. The phrase cracked a smile on my face. I began to wonder what the acceptance process might look like. Is The Almighty himself the Rosh Yeshiva? What’s on the menu? Do boys get rejected? What are the grounds like?
Initially I figured all mothers would want their sons in such an elevated place, then I threw that thought out of my head as I unfolded the implication of having a child in heaven….
The class I was zooming into continued. The phrase Mesivta DeRakiyah was tossed around and I enjoyed each time it landed. The discussion surrounded the sons of Aaron whose souls left their bodies upon entering the holiest chamber of the travelling temple while intoxicated.
Some desire to leave this world, the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s teaching explained, because of enrapture in Torah. They desperately desire to cleave to The Infinite. In and overenthusiastic quest to quench the deepest secrets of existence – they overlook the importance of existence itself.
Others want to escape the mundanity of it all. Is life really about buying and selling in the market? The feeling that ‘there must be more’, propels a yearning to step outside of the material world. These souls need to be reminded that it’s not always Yom Kippur – life is not meant to be a spiritual balm. You need to hang out in the weeds from time to time.
And then my eyes began to moisten. I wasn’t really expecting it. I had been thinking about that funny Mesivta DeRakiyah that no mother would EVER actually want her child to attend. I was charting out the two types of souls and wondering if perhaps these were two sides of every human being. I wasn’t expecting to get emotional.
Then I glanced at the name of this week’s parshiyot – the same two parshayiot were read 17 years ago when I delivered a stillborn. I had never intended to enroll anyone in the Mesivat DeRakiyah. Perhaps that soul was too enraptured in Gdliness to stay grounded or perhaps it was a desperate attempt to avoid the mundanities of daily living.
I don’t know why this soul had a leap towards the divine without a return, but it did. It seems that the secrets of the universe are not meant to be unfurled.
