Earlier this week I travelled to London to extend a kovod acharon to my uncle, Rev Bernd Koschland z”l, and spend all too brief time with my cousins as they observed shiva. As I sat with them, I learned that my uncle was a teacher to countless students, far more than I could have imagined. He taught texts of Torah in the classroom and the refined conduct, cheerfulness and kindness of our teachings in every interaction. All the more remarkable is what I knew very well, that he came to London on the Kindertransport as a German speaking orphan who was all alone at the age of nine, with my mother to follow sometime later. Much later in life he would document and speak about the Kindertransport experience; little about the enormous personal challenges and much about his gratitude and respect for the determined and ambitious programs that the British community and its leadership undertook.
It was during the shiva that the inscription that my mother and uncle had shared with me several times resurfaced. My grandfather patiently penned to his nine-year-old in a pocket size Chumash which would perhaps become the only physical remnant that my uncle had of his childhood, but one that remained close at heart at all times: “on the day that you take leave of your father’s home…talmud Torah k’neged kulam.”
I realized this morning that my uncle learned through painful aloneness at the youngest of ages one of the truths of our people, found in the depths of the first Ramban on Parshas Breishis. Ramban (1:1) articulates the questions that we all want to ask on the medrash known as the “first Rashi in Chumash” wherein Rav Yitzchak explains that if not for our need to defend our rightful claim to the Land of Israel as granted by the creator, the Torah could just as well started from the first mitzva given during the redemption from Mitzrayim.
Bothered by the suggestion that foundational philosophical tenets need not be found in the Torah’s written record, Ramban rephrases Rav Yitzchok’s observation: having read the descriptions of creation, we really know little more than what appears in the fourth commandment, so why not let that the story of Shabbos be the written record of creation? That rephrased question, and the seeming suggestion that the story of the Avos is also negotiable and actually remains unaddressed, leads the Ramban to rephrase the answer as well.
It seems to me that in his answer the Ramban paints the entirety of Sefer Bereishis as setting in place the pattern of exile and diaspora that would become a definitive description of so much of our history: Adam and Chava exiled from Gan Eden, Kayin exiled into a nomadic lifestyle, Noach and family exiled on to the teivah, the haflogo generation displaced and dispersed. We can add to that Avraham, according to Ramban, suffered religious persecution and was driven from Ur Kasdim only to be driven out further by famine, Yaakov is on the run out fear of his life, and Yosef suffers similarly. Rav Yitzchak, accordingly, portrays exile and wandering as the divine response of choice so to speak, a pattern that is strongly planted in human and Jewish experience from our very beginning.
Why should that be? Of the many consequences, punishments and yisurin that speak to the fragility and precariousness of life, G-d forbid, illness and epidemics, war and crime, poverty and famine, for example, why is exile chosen as the “staff of G-d” that would be imprinted in our national DNA? Why is the lesson of pining to be home so more impactful than pining to be healthy, safe and secure, and independent?
I think my grandfather’s inscription says it all. On the day that you leave your father’s home, know that there is only one North Star, only one set of teachings, only one code of behavior, and only one set of tenets. All else can be captured as “the day that you left home”.
We will learn much through our prayers for health, peace and peacefulness, contentment and comfort. Yet those prayers will not remind us that as we thrive and creatively build productive lives and meaningful legacies wherever we land, we need to be uncomfortable philosophical foreigners, maintain counter-cultural beliefs and mitzvos, and robust resistance to so much of our host culture; all to protect the dreams of that which define us.[1]
[1] Further elaboration of this Ramban may be the meshcech chochma vayikra 26:44.