Once the school year is over, I’m able to pray more frequently at the “Shteeble”, a small, warm synagogue on New Scotland Ave in the heart of the local Albany Jewish community. Very often, in addition to the local regulars there are travelers and visitors passing through who stop to pray there as well. It’s become known to religiously observant 87 travelers as a Minyan oasis. I like meeting new people, so I struck up a conversation with a young man, a visitor, probably in his mid-twenties. Turns out he’s from Montreal, learning in Lakewood NJ. Lakewood is home to America’s largest (Litvish-style) Yeshiva for advanced Talmudic studies, and people are known to study Torah there for years after their marriage as well.
I asked him what he’s been studying and he replied that he’s now learning “Hamafkid”. That’s the title of the third chapter of tractate Bava Metziah which deals with bailee-bailor relationships, borrowed and entrusted items. Learning it in Lakewood means that he’s learning it on a very advanced level, delving into commentaries and super-commentaries. I told him that I know “Hamafkid” as well because I taught it here to kids in the day-school. He snickered slightly. Teaching to kids and studying it on a Lakewood level are almost as if two different pieces of Talmud! I think he realized it wasn’t so polite, so he said that teaching to others is a great way to remember the material.
I saw him heading out to a car that looked like it was a rental. So I told him that a rental car is a good case example for Hamafkid. I saw his eyes flicker a little, he gave it some thought, reviewing Talmudic terms in his mind and then correctly said, “You mean it would be like the case of a Socher (literally, “the renter”)?” Wow. Imagine this guy learning this chapter of Talmud in such depth and with so many commentaries but is so detached from the reality of everyday life that he never thought of a “Socher” in terms of a car rental! The lack of relevance…
There’s an old rabbinic anecdote of a scholarly Rabbi who learned the laws concerning a chicken’s Kashruth very well, but didn’t really know how the technical terms in the Code of Jewish Law would translate into actual chicken parts. So when examining a chicken that had a Halachic question he would muse aloud: “Oyb a Kurkevan is a Pupik – if a Kurkevan is a belly button… then the law would be as follows!”
Raizy reminded me of a similar story that happened to me in my rabbinic studies. I was in France at the time, and we were being tested by Rabbi Hillel Pevsner, an old scholar and Chassid who was a respected practicing Rov (he also presided over large educational institutions). Our first test was on the Laws of Salting (the koshering process to remove blood before we can cook or bake chicken).
Rav Pevsner’s first question to us was: “Are you allowed to salt meat or chicken in a bathtub?” Now, I never thought of it that way. After all, I had never actually salted a chicken, we learned about it academically, almost in the abstract. So I had to think hard and fast. I knew there were Halachic requirements for the vessels used in salting: they had to have an angle or slant for the blood to run off, and they had to have proper drainage so it wouldn’t pool. Now to apply that to a bathtub: It does have a slight slant, maybe not a steep enough one, but it does have proper drainage. I figured it could be used if somehow you could create a better slant, a steeper incline. The Rabbi laughed. He said we were right, it would be best to place wooden slats under the meat if using a bathtub.
We came back to Yeshiva, and the younger students crowded around. They asked us if there were any tough questions at the test. I told them about this bathtub question. One 14-year old studen pipes up, “Of course you can salt in a bathtub. That’s where my mother does it. She puts slats down and the meat on top…” I was blown away.
Why share all these stories? The main takeaway is that we always ought to seek the relevance and application whenever possible in our Torah studies. Bring it down, make it real.