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HaRav Chaim Zeitchik: The Burning Bush of Novardok
by R' Yaakov Friedman
This was first published in 1994.
For Part II of this series click here.
Part 1
"I was enlisted to the army, to be a warmonger. The summons arrived while I was in the midst of delivering a shiur. I revealed my feelings and everyone burst into vociferous weeping... All the students fasted for two days, from young to old.
"The mouth cannot convey nor can the pen portray the weeping and wailing that carried on when I took leave of each and every student. Emotionally disheveled, their hearts torn asunder with deep longing... each one fell upon my neck with scalding tears until my heart was aboil, molten, and their voices rent the heavens. They wept and I wept in one solidified unit of love and G-d- fear.
"I made one last round, stroking and kissing each wall and pillar of the beis medrash, each corner where we had studied and seeded Torah, yir'a and mussar. And I exclaimed: Woe unto me for having to leave a place where the Shechina rests and to go live among gentiles..." (R' Chaim Zeitchik zt'l: Science and Life, p. 321).
*
"A bochur appeared in our town one day, oldish and nattily dressed with frock coat and Homburg, the typical Slobodka attire which was so different from the Novardok dress. R' Mordechai Stolman was fleeing an army draft which, in those days, was a serious thing. He had been told that in Novardok, one found ways to circumvent it. How? The Alter possessed three exemption passes which were used for hundreds of men. It was not the passes which saved, but the sheer bitachon and the atmosphere of bitachon.
"It defied logic. The yeshiva was surrounded by troops. A unit would enter the hall to examine the certificates. The students would duly present themselves, one after the other, bearing the same three certificates which changed hands rapidly.
"And so, Stolman came to Novardok and the Alter undertook to protect him from the draft on condition that he be mobilized into the `Novardok army' and go forth to establish a yeshiva... He made him commit himself by giving the token kinyan..." (R' Chaim Zeitchik).
*
Novardok Yeshiva 1920
"How dear to me is the memory of that night, Shavuos night of 1941, which we spent in continuous study in the Chortkov shtiebel. We sat around the tables in orderly fashion, illuminating the night with the glow of Torah, our mouths spouting chidushei Torah and mussar insights with a powerful sweetness..." (R' Chaim Zeitchik: "To Remember the Miracle").
*
"I was studying with my students in Botschatsch when suddenly, some soldiers appeared and handed me a draft summons... In this manner the Russians succeeded in enlisting two hundred thousand men and made them march into the Russian interior... The conditions were atrocious. The goyim comforted themselves with liquor, drinking themselves into a stupor. We subsisted on half a kilo bread a day... Men were dying off like flies. We paved roads, slept in trenches, entered into water up to our necks to build bridges. But our roads were swept away into the river. Those were nightmare days. The waters were polluted and we had to lug drinking water in pails from a distance of three kilometers in the Siberia frost. We were disheveled, neglected, ragged and beyond the point of exhaustion.
"One day I volunteered to bring water from deep inside the forest. I offered to do this because I had heard that at the far end of the forest was a village with Jews. I reached it frozen and debilitated and knocked on a door. The women who opened it saw me and became frightened. She offered me a slice of bread: a treasure! Gold! I told her I was a Jew and that I didn't want bread. I wanted a sefer. She called her husband and he said that all he had was one gemora. `I am a Jew, too!' he said.
"I began weeping and begged, `Give me only one page. Give me the title page. Don't leave me like this.'
"This was the ultimate and only request. Always. His gemora contained the two tractates of Niddah and Nozir. He ripped it in two and gave me half. I returned to the camp, dancing for joy with my two full pails." (R' Chaim Zeitchik).
*
This was Novardok.
Novardok. The whipping rod of the mussar movement. Novardok — the wrath of perfection, which meant trampling and crushing every stumbling block that lay in the path of dominion over Torah.
Impediments to the mastery of Torah were nonexistent in face of the ironclad Novardok determination. Nothing, not the powers of evil, electrified barbed wire fences or bloodthirsty guards, nor troops with a clear-cut aim to extirpate every revolutionary seed — and Novardok qualified admirably! "If it is impossible to go by," went the Novardok motto, "you must go by."
"To go by" meant to go forth and establish new yeshivos. Nothing from nothingness. In graveyards, forests, prisons, even in the bloody cellars at the gates of the Kremlin itself, the very hub of the battle against Torah. Yeshivos were established with a mighty hand and with great fear, in unreachable places where man feared to tread, in the very dungeons of human evil.
"To go by," went another Novardok saying, meant to shatter windows, hijack trains and to shed the blood of the essence for a single command of Torah, to hunger for a sugya in Torah after a week-long fast. It also meant wrenching up all the false weeds with an iron fist, destroying with outpoured wrath all the imaginary fortresses and establishing a yeshiva in their place!
*
"There is no one who will show us the way; no one who will chastise us to the soul. Who will clarify our claims and who will align our midos? Who will uplift our spirits? We sorely feel the lack of our rabbis and mentors...
"When we are confronted with the tests of life, face to face, and when we are denied the light of truth and of higher intellect, we feel bereft and we freshly reexperience the hand of death...
"We are behooved to burst into tears and mourning..." (R' Chaim Zeitchik: Science and Life, p. 329).
Bialystok Yeshiva 1920
*
R' Chaim came to Jerusalem the Holy City and was introduced to new and different vistas which were altogether foreign to him.
R' Chaim was stunned by the force of the transition. He came from the heady atmosphere of Bialystok and Mezeritch, from the single-minded allegiance to Hashem, alone; from days of intense longing; from the aura of searching-seeking —to the spiritually clean-pressed concepts of post-churban. He was plunged into the chasm of the in-between. Here people hungered for bread even when it was available. The thirst for the word of Hashem became a tangible, malleable clay.
Missing was the atmosphere of R' Dovid Budnik, whose thoughts gushed volcanically forth with an otherworldly sharpness and bounty. This persistent thought gave him no rest for weeks on end. The Alter R' Yozel used to force him to drink shnaps to dull his senses and awareness.
Novardok used to say that what other places defined as `the joy of Torah,' they considered to be Tisha B'Av. The atmosphere was that of the Bialystok era where R' Chaim and his grandiose ideas were expelled from the city.
And there, in a small hut, equipped with a sleeping bag and a bare bench, a Chaim Piotrkover burned with an inner flame and stormed the peaks of mental insight... every mevakesh would enter the tent and hear what the young Piotrkover had to say about clarifying one's character, and about courage and searching in general. R' Chaim would lead his sixty `Cossacks,' as they were called, whose sole concern was to what extent their steeled souls would withstand the test of the day of evil.
R' Chaim had great periods of searching, an important concept in Novardok, during which the earth could not contain him. He would maintain long periods of solitude during which he was sustained by thought, stormy soul searching and bitachon. There were glorious periods of `not rising and not budging,' which he would refer to in moments of mellowing.
And, very unconventional in his circles, he also made occasional trips to the elders of intellectual inquiry of his generation where he gathered up the last bricks for his structure of perfection. He traveled to the Chofetz Chaim in Radin; to R' Moshe Rosenstein, the great oved of Lomzha (who, R' Chaim used to tell, would end off a day of avoda and solitude with a piece of herring and a sip of soda water), and noted figures of the Novardok court: R' Dovid Bleicher, R' Avrohom Zalman's and R' Dovid Miadnik, the giant trio.
This established practice of traveling to the courts of tzadikim was far removed from the essence of Novardok and was, in fact, considered a breach in its walls. They used to say that R' Chaim's thirst for bikush (seeking), which was a pure Novardok institution, was so strong that it found expression in a counter-Novardok manner.
The scholars of Bialystok used to subsist on cucumber peels left from the meals of other scholars. They stayed on in the yeshiva to partake in the seder of R' Avrohom Yaffen, the rosh yeshiva, but the invitation only included the right to stand there. Each one had to come provided with his own kezayis matzo. Hunger was so rampant in Novardok that the Siberian famine he later experienced meant nothing to R' Chaim; he hardly felt it.
In one of his inspired moments, he resolved to go into seclusion for the remainder of his days. He discussed this wish with the Alter Kadisha of Radin, who answered evenly, "The Alter, R' Yozel, also entertained the idea of secluding himself. But stop to think what the world would have been like if he had realized this wish, G-d forbid."
Rebellion, radicalism and a stormy soul were the building blocks with which Novardok built long lasting perfection: in the Siberian plains, in the forests of solitude, in the harsh times of hunger, pitch black nights of border running. There was no room for lassitude or second thoughts. Such thoughts were completely banished from the Novardok lexicon. He would tear his soul to pieces in standing up to the demands he made of himself.
Always, always, even when he had to shatter the window of some peasant or grind a hard crust of bread with a rock in order to make it edible and thereby save himself from starvation, even when he risked his very life in order to travel and hear the enlightening teachings of R' Yisroel Yaakov of Baranowitz, and even in the end of his days, when his lungs were consumed bit by bit through fire.
*
HaRav Shmuel Yaakov Bornstein
"I felt duty bound to justify my having survived the terrible conflagration... Each of us must feel that his was granted life in order that he dedicate it for the glory of Hashem Yisborach, to praise and laud Him...
"This sentiment stings the body and gnaws away at the brain... How shall we justify our existence to the A-mighty? What area shall we rectify? In what way can we glorify and publicize His kingship?
"This feeling gives no peace to my eyes or rest to my eyelids. Hashem alone knows how great is my desire, trembling and longing..." (R' Chaim Zeitchik: "Essay on the Epitome of Creatures").
*
Upon his coming to Jerusalem, a group of excellent youths from Chevron converged around him. These were the lions of the herd. The first discourse he delivered to them is still etched upon their hearts, black fire upon white fire.
He spoke with extreme emotion about the generation that was no longer, of the burden of emotions which he bore with him from the Russian forests, as a message to the coming generation. He spoke of R' Shimon Bar Yochai emerging from the cave and feeling the need, in this transition between two worlds, "to rectify something." His soul almost swooned as he spoke.
This was a crossroads in his life. From the heights of divine aspiration, he found himself in a generation where the dominion of Torah was self-understood, but mediocrity and pettiness reduced everything to a diminutive size.
He still reverberated with the deep cognizance of a mission, to brake the velocity of the fall by evoking memories and telling the chapters of the valor and greatness of the preceding generation and by also calling up the figures of the rulers of the realm of the spirit, which he did in his work, Hame'oros Hagedolim.
R' Chaim would repeatedly dwell upon the idea of continuity before his group of select `Chevroners.' This was a new concept, a different approach which preached the necessity of bridging the generations, the past with the present, by depicting the stature of past great figures, their works and deeds, and to thus put flesh upon the dusty past and invigorate with emotional impact.
As one of those select students, R' Shmuel Yaakov Bornstein, present rosh mesivta of Chevron-Geula, put it, "I first met the Rosh Yeshiva thirty years ago, but I feel as if I knew him for seventy!"
Very few of those about him learned to control the present; this was the emotional approach of a different generation. But they, at least, learned to appreciate and recognize this feature. They learned to implant in the pragmatic approach of the Jerusalemite neighborhood of Ezras Torah some shoots from the forests of Bialystok reclusion.
He demanded thorough thought from a generation unused to thinking. He required hisbodedus in the nonexistent Jerusalem forests. Demanded— by way of his fire and brimstone vehemence and piercing reproof. Seclusion was such a `simple' thing! An extension of Mordechai's `not rising and not budging.'
The language of practicality of this group was a far cry from their leader's concept of seclusion and standing firm, but his mission achieved its purpose: the concepts made inroads and the yearning was developed. A new ladder of aspiration was erected.
He used to rail hotly and bitterly against the atmosphere of pampering in which bnei yeshiva indulged. This was a debasement of holiness, he maintained. He also felt the pain of the lost system of accepting pain and suffering, even seeking it, which had once been embraced by Torah scholars. A ben Torah who does not have the tools to grapple with good and bad, both of which are destructive forces—can learn diligently and observe mitzvos punctiliously, and yet miss out on the entire point; he will still be completely removed from the essence of things.
He did not even bother to declare war against this world and its futilities. He simply dismissed these with utter disdain. Prestige, power and money were despised and not worthy of his attention.
End of Part 1
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