This New York Times Story Explains Everything

A Torah Anytime original series. One of the best ways that a company or an organization or a book could convey its mission statement is by choosing a good name, a name that encapsulates the very essence of the company or the team or the organization. Hatala, in one word, it sums up exactly who they are and what they stand for. Or Home Depot. It's exactly what its name says it is. It's a store for all your household needs or Tesla, new, exciting, electrifying. A good name is often essential in conveying the purpose you're trying to achieve. So when you look at all the names of the books of the Tory, they all do a great job in encapsulating what's contained inside. For example, boratious, the entire safer boratious is in essence the physical and spiritual beginning and development of the world. Pretty good pretty good title word. or Vayikra, the entire cypher, Rashi says, is a loving call from Hashem, teaching us how to properly serve him with carbonos. Or Bidbar, it is the entire story of the Jews in the desert. Or Dvarim, it is the entire speech that Moshe gave in the last day of his life. But then comes Shmos names. How does that encapsulate the entire cafer? What does names have to do with the exile in Mitz? What does she have to do with getting out of Egypt and going into the desert? What does names have to do with camping around Harena and receiving the Tyra? What does she shmemise have to do with building a mishkun? So the Balatim says something fascinating on the words shemise which can perhaps shed a little bit of light on our question. He says that the word is really an acronym forum. This refers to the obligation for every male to learn the Tyra twice each week with the translation. Now there's an obvious question. Why is the Tyra suddenly right at the beginning of safer sham telling me about the mitzvah to do? Shouldn't had shouldn't the reminded me like a long time ago somewhere in safer barious? Shouldn't the Tyra allude to this mitzvah somewhere closer to the beginning of the year when we begin our cycle of Tyra reading? Like, isn't it a little bit late in the game to be reminding me of? So perhaps there is a rhyme and reason for choosing to place the reference to Schneera right at the beginning of Shmise. Perhaps it's to tell us a powerful message. Perhaps the Tyra is telling us that you want to know the key to surviving exile. Do you want to know the secret to making it out of persecution alive? Do you want to know how to thrive in a desert? It's the week in and week out consistent learning of Tyra that will keep us and protect us throughout this long trek we are embarking on. The Tyra specifically waits until safer Shemise to tell me about the mitzvah of learning the weekly Tyra reading. For Schmise begins the gullis. Schmice begins our journey into the desert. Schmeice begins our voyage that will eventually crisscross the entire world. Schmice begins our trek that took us to Iran and Iraq, to Spain and Portugal, to Yugoslavia and Yemen and to France and to Germany and to Morocco and Russia and Egypt and Africa and Australia and Austria and China and Norway and Bosnia and Croatia and Chile and Mongolia and everywhere in between. Precisely there do we need a reminder about the mitzvah of Schneay Mikra because it is the secret. It is the key. Keeping the Tyra close by is the antidote to the poison of exile. Week in and week out, month in and month out, year in and year out, century in and century out. No matter where our journey takes us, the Tyra must be by our side if we want to survive. Ever wonder why the Tyra was given in a desert? Why did Hashem choose to give it there of all places? Why not wait a few more days? Walk us calmly into Arantis and give us the Tory Ana Maria, a mountain already drenched in holiness instead of some random obscure barren harina in the middle of nowhere. I think the answer hit me one night while I was rocking my baby to sleep. If you ever held a newborn at 2 in the morning, you know the drill. You rock, you sway up and down, side to side, back and forth, and somehow it works. The baby settles, the crying fades, and he falls back asleep. Now, imagine trying that with a 40-year-old man who just he woke up in the middle of the night and he couldn't fall back asleep and you pick him up and you start rocking him. He wouldn't drift off. He'd probably slap you across the place. So, why does it become a baby? The answer is because for 9 months that baby lived inside of motion. The mother's womb wasn't quiet. It wasn't still. It was constantly moving. It was rhythmic up and down. It was alive. The rocking doesn't disturb the baby. It reminds the baby of home. And that's the key. The Jewish people were born in a desert. It was no natural food. There was no natural water. There was scorching heat. There was enemies on every side. Nothing stable, nothing predictable, no safety net, no comfort, no common. That's exactly where we received the Tyra. Not in peace, not in comfort, not in quiet, not when everything was finally set up. Hashem didn't want us to wait until we get into the land and we set up our bagel stores and our coffee shops. No, he wanted us to get the Tyra in the desert to make something abundantly clear for all generations. We were born into difficulty and Tyra became our oxygen inside of it. That's why we survive. We survived things no other nation survives. That's why no condition ever stopped us. We learned Tyra in places where it was illegal. We learned in basements and cellers and caves and forests and addicts under the threat of prison under the threat of death with guards outside with enemies watching with nothing but a flickering candle and a safer. Empires tried to crush us and Tyra kept breathing. Regimes outlawed us and Tyra kept growing. Poverty, exile, persecution, none of it became an excuse. None of it became a reason to stop. No desert was hot enough to stop us. You want to know why? Because we were born in one. We didn't wait for ideal circumstances to learn. We don't need silence or safety or comfort. We learned Tyra when the world was shaking because that's the world we were born into. You want to know why we can learn anywhere. Why Tyra survives every exile? Why no amount of pressure ever breaks it? Because we were born in a desert. And deserts don't produce comfort. They produce people who don't need it. We were born in a desert. And therefore, we don't wait for conditions to be right. We make them right. Ever wonder where the word yeshiva comes from? People assume it means it's a place to sit and learn. But that can't possibly be right because there have been yeshiva since the times of and yet it says that from the days of Moshe until was learned only standing up. similar to the way that we say. So clearly the word yeshiva doesn't mean sitting because we weren't sitting at all. So then what does it mean? The answer is the word yeshiva doesn't mean to sit. It means to dwell to settle yourself to plant your feet eternally to build a cocoon that blocks out the noise. A yeshiva is the ability to create yeshiva inner clarity and calm so terra can live inside no matter what's happening around you. chaos outside, stability inside. And we mastered that because we were born in a desert, a place with no quiet, no comfort, no control. And yet that that's where the Torah took root. That's why we don't need perfect conditions to learn. We don't wait for silence. We don't wait for comfort. We create a yeshiva wherever we are because a people born in a desert learned how to carry Torah without needing the world to cooperate. Listen to this story. I heard the following story from Rab Aaron Groomman and it never left me. Steve Goldman was the son of an extraordinarily wealthy executive and he went to Harvard. He graduated second in his class. He was a sensational tennis player. You couldn't design a brighter future if you tried. Money, prestige, talent, access. The whole world was opened in front of him. And then his kidneys failed. And suddenly the trajectory cracked and the dreams narrowed and the ceiling came down. And he left Harvard and he went to change scenery in Princeton University. And one day while giving a class at Princeton, Rebe Groomman met Steve and he befriended him and he invited him to spend a shabas in Bmedish Gavaya in Lakewood, New Jersey. This was 1990 back when BMG really had only one building, the Yashan. And on Friday night, Rabbi Groomman gave him a tour. the basement, the dining room, and then the basement, the er, the library. And it was winter. Friday nights were long, and the room was packed. People crammed in there learning under piles of ancient sarim, old binding, yellowing pages, books stacked on tables and shelves and chairs. And there was no polish. There was no glamour, just raw and alive. And Steve just froze. He couldn't move. He just stood there staring. And Amote Shabas says they were about to leave Lakewood. Steve turned to Rab Groomman and asked quietly almost nervously if they could go back down to the one more time and they went and again Steve he just stood there silent transfixed. And finally Rabbi Groomman couldn't hold it in anymore. He turned to Steve and he said I don't understand. At Harvard and Princeton you have some of the largest, most impressive libraries in the world. Endless resources, perfect lighting, pristine shelves. Why are you so overwhelmed by a basement filled with old falling apart books? Steve looked at him and said words that go straight to the bone. He said, "Because at Harvard, you walk into the library and you see people reading books. Here I see people living them." That's what Tyra is. Tyra is not a subject. It's not information. It's not culture or nostalgia. Tyra is life itself. It's not something we visit. It's something we inhabit. It's not something we add. It's what everything else is built around. It's not one value among many. It is the engine that gives value to everything else. That's why we can learn in basement. That's why we can learn in exile. That's why we can learn when it's uncomfortable and inconvenient and costly. Because Tyra isn't what we do. Tyra is who we are. And that's the secret that has carried us through every generation. When Tyra is your everything, no circumstance can take it away from you. You don't protect Tyra for comfort. You protect it by living it. And that's why no matter how dark the world gets, there will always be Jews in a corner of this globe somewhere under a pile of old Sarin, quietly keeping the world alive. Listen to this story. For decades, year after year, every Friday, tucked into the bottom right corner of the New York Times, there was a small, unassuming box. It read, "Jewish women should light the Shabbat candles in such and such a time." Week after week, year after year, he was there decade after decade. That box was faithfully there every Friday. And then one day it vanished. The sponsor who passed away, the sponsor had passed away and the paper moved on and the world kept spinning and that quiet Friday reminder disappeared as if it was never there. Years later, on January 1st, 2000, the New York Times released its much anticipated Millennium edition. The front page was split into three sections. One-third reprinted the front page from January 1st, 1900. One pa one-third showed the present day, January 1st, 2000. And then the final third imagined the future, January 1st, 2011. And that future pays with strange. One headline debated half seriously whether robots should be allowed to vote. But what caught everyone's attention wasn't the headline. It was the bottom right corner there in a famili familiar little box. There were the words no one expected to be there. Jewish women shall light Shabbat candles at such and such a time. And people were stunned. It hadn't had appeared in years. So I had it suddenly returned on page predicting the future. So the editor-inchief at the time, an Irish gentleman, was asked, "What is that box doing there?" And his answer was extraordinary. He said, 'When we were sitting in the boardroom trying to imagine what the world would look like in a hundred years, we realized something humbling. We can't predict anything. Not politics, not technology, not culture. We don't know what the world will be. But there's one thing we do know, and that is that Jewish women will be lighting Shabbat candles on Friday night. I don't know how, but they've been they've been doing it for the last 3,000 years, and they'll do it for the next 3,000. You hear that? That's not nostalgia. That's certainty. And here's the secret behind it. Our nation has something the world doesn't fully understand. We have something called the Tyra. A Tyra that guided us and challenged us and carried us and refused to let us go. A Tyra that walked us through the darkest chapters of human history. That has held our hand in ghettos and in concentration camps and prisons and caves. It bent down and it picked us up and it dusted us off and it carried us on its wings across continents and centuries and oceans. It has been our pipeline to heaven, our connection to infinity and we in return don't treat it like a book. We learn it. We love it. We sing it. We cry over it. We dance with it from the very beginning of our exile. The Tyra gave us the antidote to exile. It revealed the formula for Jewish survival and that is to stay attached to Tyra. Learn it again and again. Return to it week after week. Be there for it and it will be there for you. That's not a slogan. That's not poetry. That's a survival strategy. Empires predict the future with charts and algorithms. We predict it with shabas candles. Because as long as Tyra lives in Jewish homes, as long as candles are lit on Friday night, as long as we keep choosing eternity over trends, the Jewish future isn't a question. It's a guarantee.