By: Emmett Gilles, Current Mayanot Student
Among my otherwise
unremarkable luggage, I brought two items of especially personal value to
Mayanot. The first was my bicycle, a ‘cyclocross’
model designed to handle well on a variety of terrains, from road and light rail
tracks to cobblestone and dirt. The second was a slight Robert Frost collection
with dark print, generous spacing, and thick cotton pages. As a returning
student at Mayanot (I first attended in the summer of 2014), I knew from
experience that diving deeply into yeshiva learning, and the consequent
reorientation of a person’s outlook and inner world within an environment of
Torah and Chassidus, requires a healthy oxygen supply of familiar attachments
to bolster the diver’s spirits and lessen the ‘bends’ attendant upon future
surfacing. Biking, with its combination of exertion, balance, speed, and
exhilarating freedom culminating in satisfying exhaustion, afforded a
fulfilling afterlife to my former athletic career, while Frost’s homespun,
thought-provoking poetry maintained a cherished link to my New England roots
and University literary studies. So into yeshiva I plunged, bicycle, book and
all.
Several months later,
pausing for water outside Jerusalem along a Friday afternoon bike ride, I surveyed a vista of meandering stone
walls in the valley below me, marking the boundaries of long-absent neighbors.
The ancient stone barriers brought to mind the boundary-marker construction
cases I’d been studying in Bava
Basra, along with the line “Good
fences make good neighbors,” inherited wisdom a taciturn neighbor invokes in ‘Mending
Walls,’ one of my favorite Frost poems. Biking back to yeshiva, I considered
how the boundaries within which we live, whether simply as neighbors or more
richly as Torah-observant Jews, nourish and sustain us. In the months that
followed, as I gradually progressed at parsing Rashi, then deciphering Tosafos’s articulations, I came to love the Gemora’s language,
arguments, and speakers with a deepening familiarity that rivaled my connection
to cycling and poetry. Meanwhile, I began to see the fruits of my Ulpan
labors in increasing reading competence, and as my study of Chassidus
advanced I made independent forays into the translated Hebrew edition of Likutei
Sichos on the bookshelf beside my seat in zal. Step by step, in chavrusa
and increasingly with only my trusty dictionary, I learned to hear, and love,
the words of the Chabad Rebbeim speaking from the page. With greater authority
than any suggestion of principle or duty, that romance of student and text has
made my learning at Mayanot profoundly real and personal.
My hope and prayer,
for myself, for the Mayanot family, and for the Jewish people as a whole, is
that our common love for our G-d and the G-d of our forefathers, for the Jewish
people, for the eternal covenant we keep in all its cherished traditions and rich
particulars, for our holy texts, our visionary leaders, our promised land, and
our dearest friends and family— that this love should root us in the deepest
sense of who we are and what we are tasked with doing in this world, such that
amidst all the turbulence of the world, we retain “the power of standing still.”