An Infinite Moment of Unquenchable Thirst

An Infinite Moment of Unquenchable Thirst:
Thoughts on the End of My Time at Ma’ale Gilboa

By Rafi Bocarsly

/כְּאַיָּל תַּעֲרֹג עַל אֲפִיקֵי מָיִם כֵּן נַפְשִׁי תַעֲרֹג אֵלֶיךָ אֱלֹהִים.
צָמְאָה נַפְשִׁי לֵאלֹהִים לְאֵל חָי מָתַי אָבוֹא וְאֵרָאֶה פְּנֵי אֱלֹהִים

תהלים מב ב–ג -

Like a hind yearns for a water channel, so too my heart yearns for you אלהים/ Thirsty is my soul for אלהים, for the living God; when will I come and reveal myself before אלהים! - Psalms 42: 2-3

This past Friday night I lead קבלת שבת It felt fitting; my last Shabbat in Yeshiva, many friends from my שילוב had returned from all over, including several Americans who had returned to Israel for their semester break from college. Most of us had not seen each other in months. The energy in the room was palpable. We could all feel each other's excitement at being reunited. The Yeshiva was packed to maximum capacity and people were itching to get started.

We began שיר השירים and I realized I was thirsty. I quickly ran out and took a long drink. When I returned, ידיד נפש had already started. I walked up to the Bima and wrapped my טלית around my head. 

As I recited the ברכה I took a moment to reflect. I smelled the faint clear must on my טלית that reminded me of being in Shul with my dad when I was young. I felt the fabric on my cheeks and tightly wrapped my head and thought of all the mornings I had done just this before I put on my תפילין at שחרית. I could hear the muffled voices singing around me and in my chest I felt something that words can't quite capture.

I have barely begun to scratch the surface of what my time at Ma’ale Gilboa has meant to me. I don’t know whether I’ll ever be able to fully grasp the tremendous intellectual, spiritual, and emotional growth I’ve done here. This is where I met teachers and perhaps more importantly friends who mean more to me than anything. This is where I did the most serious learning and thinking and reading and writing I’ve done in my entire live. Ma’ale Gilboa is where I found the God who had been absent from my life for so long, the God that my soul yearned for so longingly and who I finally gained the smallest sliver of access to when I first experienced קבלת שבת and  ימים נוראים here.

But it all starts with the learning. Often, as I sit down to start my day, I am reminded of quote I came across last year from Rav Avraham Yitzchak HaKohen Kook in his book אורות התחיה, as translated by Bezalel Naor. “Every concept and content, every notion and idea, of every spiritual movement, of every vibration,” writes Rav Kook,
  
"Intellectual and emotional, from the immediate and general to the distant and detailed, from matters lofty, spiritual, and ethical according to their outward profile, to matters practical, obligatory, seemingly frightening, and forceful, and at the same time complex and full of content and great mental exertion – all together become known by a supernal holy awareness. The simplicity of faith that is inherent in love of Torah finds its lofty truth and great song, for living, enduring things, that powerful currents of life, full of delight, joy and beauty, pass through and fill, and an infinite sweetness is felt in the palate of the thinker. Your palate is like the best wine that glides down for my friend gently, exciting the lips of those that are asleep. How beautiful and how pleasant are you, delightful love!"
 
I like using this quote to sum up my time at Ma’ale Gilboa. All it takes it to sit in on a few שיעורים with Rav Elisha or to see Rav Bigman smack his shtender during a  שיעור כללי to understand the love and passion that our teachers bring to Torah and to life and that the “supernal holy awareness” is present in their enthused teaching. They, and well as the other teachers and educated we are introduced to in Yeshiva, always try to bring us the “infinite sweetness…in the palate of the thinkers.” And often they succeed.

Because Ma’ale Gilboa is not a place that tells you how to experience the joy and beauty in the world and does not assume that everyone will do it in the same way. Rather, it is a place that encourages students to find their own path to meaning and the רבנים here do their best to help guide you.
   
I just reread the first section and it doesn’t feel genuine. Or at least not complete. It didn’t come out how I wanted at all; it sounds like a long generic quote from a Ma’ale Gilboa pamphlet.
It’s not that anything I said isn’t true. It just doesn’t seem like it even remotely captures what I was feeling when I stood up there with my head wrapped in my טלית. It all happened in split second of thought and feeling and words can only do so much to capture that. Yes, the learning here is important and essential to other experiences we have, but it does not capture the true, vast picture of what has made my time in Yeshiva so special. Rav Kook does a better job of explaining it than I can, but there’s still something missing.

Maybe this picture is missing the people. The people I have encountered here have changed my life. At Ma’ale Gilboa I have met people who come from all sorts of different backgrounds, people who consistently challenge and support me, and forged what I hope will be lifelong friendships. I have met people who seem eerily similar at first glance only to learn that familiar backgrounds don’t indicate familiar opinions and met people with whom I seemingly had no commonalities and instead discovered my intellectual and religious compatriots. People who make me feel loved and cared for and also hopelessly frustrated and desolate (sometimes at the same time.) 

Relationships forged under the guidance and umbrella of shared learning have seemed to take shape and harden more quickly and more solidly than other kinds. Some people I’ve gotten along with and some people I haven’t. But ultimately, as Kurt Vonnegut says in one of my favorite passages in his book, The Sirens of Titan, “A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.” And these words seem to ring infinitely more true when applied in the context of fourteen-hour days spent on a mountaintop with the same people for a year and a half. You learn to love everyone not so much because of similarities or differences or personality traits but just on nothing more than that they’re there. And it turns out that love is the strongest.

These people were such an integral part of what I was feeling as I was about to begin my last Shabbat. It was love for the learning and teachers I have had but it was also a deep love and gratitude for all my friends who were back in Yeshiva. My second year in yeshiva strengthened so many relationships with those who stayed but I felt the absence of those who didn’t. Having so many of them back for that final קבלת שבת gave me a sense of wholeness and book ending-ness to the period in my life which I never wanted to have any ending at all.

So there I was, still suspending in my never ending moment of self reflection standing at the Bima, when I realized the piece of the puzzle that brought it all together. It was the music.
Ten days prior to his death, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel conducted an interview with Carl Stern of NBC news (the footage of which can still be found on YouTube.) In the interview, Rabbi Heschel discussed topics ranging from his writings, to his experiences in the Holocaust, to his theology. At one point he discusses prayer. “The primary purpose of prayer,” Rabbi Heschel says, “is not to make requests. The primary purpose is to praise, to sing, to chant. Because the essence of prayer is a song, and man cannot live without a song.” None of us were asking for anything as we sang ידיד נפש. But we were all reaching for something, even if none of us knew quite what it was. I don’t know if we all got there but the two things I always say are at the center of any meaningful תפילה are willing participants and song. We had both but there was something else that felt present. The reductionism with which I try and condense meaningful תפילה just didn’t seem to cut it this time.
   
I know this all seems a bit ridiculous. I’ve spent the past thousand words or so and however many minutes of your reading trying to explain what I felt during a single instance and I don’t really seem to be getting anywhere. I obviously couldn’t possibly have consciously thought everything I’ve managed to record on these pages so far and I definitely wasn’t quoting Rav Kook in my head during the three seconds or less it took me to say the ברכה on my טלית. It’s hard to say exactly what I was thinking when I went up there but I do know the answers to the questions, Did you really think about the לימוד תורה you’d done over the past year as you prepared to invite in Shabbat? And, How aware was you really of the people and the music? are no and not very.

But what I was aware of was what all those things had come together to create.

And that’s it. The most amazing part, the part that I don’t really understand and don’t think I ever will, is that none of these processes I have been discussing are distinguishable from one another. What I felt when I went up there (and while I may have made the rest of it up I promise you as we were about to begin what would turn out to be one of the most moving and powerful תפילות I have ever taken part in, I did actually feel something) was a culmination of everything I have written so far. The reason it has all seemed so unsatisfying and insufficient is because it is unsatisfying and insufficient; it was not one of these things I was feeling when I went up there but rather a combination and a culmination of this all plus an infinite number of other factors I didn’t even realize that all came together to make my time at Ma’ale Gilboa what it was. It was the result of over a year and a half’s worth of building relationships and ideas with a group while studying our religions formative texts under the guidance of brilliant educators. It was the result of having the lines blurred between לימודי קודש and לימודי חול. It was the result of everyone in the room wanting to come together and sing in a way Rabbi Heschel believes we cannot live without with the simplicity of faith that Rav Kook believes exists in us all. 

I have learned as much from the people I have been surrounded with as by the texts we immerse ourselves in and my learning has informed my רוחניות as much as my תפילה has impacted my לימוד תורה. And at times that has been confusing and at times it has been complicated and at times it has been absent and lonely but the one thing it has always been is breathtakingly beautiful. And the truth is even that doesn’t feel complete. I guess I don't really know what it was, whether it was the Yeshiva, or the land, or the relationships, or the Torah. I don't know and I can’t know what made it all happen or what I did to deserve any of it. You can call it God or chemical reactions or intellectual curiosity or radical amazement or spirituality. I call it home.

And the second I realized that the תפילה began. And while I can’t speak for anyone else in the room, like I said for me it was something I won’t soon forget. Together we came together to do what my teacher Rabbi Shai Held often refers to as, “desperately groping clumsily at something beyond.” It wasn’t perfect. It was messy and I was off key sometimes and I’d be lying if I said my voice didn’t crack once or twice and there were those moments of self-conscious, over-conscious doubt when I wondered whether we weren’t just a bunch of teenage boys screaming at nothing for no reason other than screaming but above all else, it was all so right. It was the right group of people in the right place on the right mountain in the middle of nowhere in the right country with the right songs and the absolutely perfectly right atmosphere. For the first time in a long time I felt home. I felt content in a way I have only ever felt at Ma’ale Gilboa; I didn’t feel thirsty.

By the end I was sweaty and horse and wiped out. It was a never-ending moment that had several lifetimes packed into the blink of an eye. After תפילה ended people started to gradually descend from the collective high we had reached together. They started to wish each other Shabbat Shalom and head down to dinner. I stayed back. I wanted to take a few minutes to soak it all in. I looked around the empty מדרש בית and suddenly I became profoundly sad. 

Because now I’m leaving my home and it’s scary and I don’t want it to end. For the first time in a long time, the future is a giant question mark for me with the one thing that is all but guaranteed being that college will be much, much harder in the ways that count. I try to be positive but it’s hard, especially now. For encouragement, I look to a passage from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night,

"You will walk differently alone, dear, through a thicker atmosphere, forcing your way through the shadows of chairs, through the dripping smoke of the funnels. You will feel your own reflection sliding along the eyes of those who look at you. You are no longer insulated; but I suppose you must touch life in order to spring from it."

This is the end of living in the warm cozy bubbles I’ve lived in for close to my first twenty years. And while that is nerve wracking and it makes me feel exposed and vulnerable and insecure about all sorts of things I didn’t even know I could be insecure about but it is also exciting. “I suppose you must touch life in order to spring from it.” It’s a hesitant statement but a true one. Leaving this place, the comfort of my home, is the only way I can spring from life and get to wherever it is I plan on going, even if that journey leads right back to Ma’ale Gilboa. So as I look at the empty בית מדרש I smile and take solace in knowing that everything is going to be all right, that new doesn’t mean bad. 

I start to walk out to join my friends and turn around to take one more look. It has been a long year and a half and at the end of it all the most I can do is say I gave it my best. I swallow hard. I want this moment to last forever too but for some reason this time it doesn’t. I turn around to leave and that’s when I realize that I’m thirsty again; only this time I don’t know when my next drink will come.