Ben Z. an UAlbany and Shabbos House alumnus walked down to the Chuppah to the melody of “Oyfen Pripitchek” an old classic Yiddish song that at one time every Eastern European Jew knew well. The melody is beautiful, it is slow and rich and a little haunting. But really it is a children’s lullaby. It is a song that mothers sang to their young children about how they ought to appreciate learning the Alphabet, to repeat and it remember it for life. It describes the Alphabet teacher near the warmth of the fireplace, and it speaks to how much history, depth and tears are within these letters.

So why sing a lullaby or Mother Goose-type nursery rhyme when a grown man walks to the Chuppah?

Here’s a few answers:

MARRIAGE IS A NEW BEGINNING

You start fresh with a new person, living together, sharing with one another. It is a language all its own, one needs to come open and fresh, eager and willing, as Ethics of Our Fathers says: Like ink on fresh paper. Yes, we each enter marriage with lots of baggage, but we ought to come eager to learn and gain from each other, and grow anew together. So relearning the Alphabet can be quite appropriate.

THE BELGIAN FIDDLER

And then there’s this story from my years studying in the Lubavitch Yeshiva in Brunoy France. The Yeshiva was in an old French chateau, with a central courtyard surrounding by walls and buildings, with very tall wooden doors at the entrance. One day a middle-aged man arrived, I remember him standing in the open doorway of the courtyard. He had a violin case and a knapsack. Turns out he was from Belgium, was in between jobs and was told to come to the Yeshiva to study. He didn’t know much Jewishly but was eager to learn and he joined Zarbib’s Kollel which was a part of the yeshiva set aside for middle-aged men with little prior Jewish knowledge who took time off to learn.

The Belgian Fiddler (as we called him) was very grateful to the Yeshiva for taking him in and want to give back in some way. Here’s what he came up with. Every morning an assigned student went around to all the dorm rooms waking everyone up. Basically, he had a metal stick (used to connect two bunkbed layers together) and banged loudly on each dorm room door. The Fiddler felt this was a rude awakening (literally) and he offered to play a song each morning to wake everyone up in a pleasant manner. The Yeshiva administration agreed and he enthusiastically made his rounds each morning energetically playing up a storm up and down the hallways. Literally up and down, because the hallway of the old chateau was not even, it had small sets of stairs going up and down, and as our rooms were across the courtyard it would be quite amusing to see him (through the hallway windows) fiddle his way up and down those hallways. The only Jewish song he knew at that time was Hava Nagilah, and he played it with gusto!

My friends and I were student-teachers at the Yeshiva, known as “Bochurim Shluchim” and that year due to construction our living arrangements were in two trailers at the end of the courtyard. One day, my friend Zalman A. and I walked into our trailer and lo and behold we see that the fiddler made himself at home in our room and he was studying at the desk. What was he studying? we wondered silently. We tiptoed over and looked closer and saw that he was studying “Samach Vov” the thick book of Chassidic discourses of 5666/1906 which are considered to be some of the most sophisticated, advanced and in-depth Chassidic texts! Wow, we thought, perhaps he wasn’t such a simple fiddler after all? Maybe he was a hidden saint, a great scholar hiding his knowledge under the guise of simplicity and ignorance?

My friend was a bit skeptical. He went over to the fiddler, greeted him, and asked him in French, “What are you studying?” The fiddler looked up and answered simply, “Oh, I am just reviewing the Hebrew alphabet!”

THE REBBE’S SIDDUR

One more enriching Alphabet experience from an adult vantage point. This one is quite personal and I haven’t shared it much before. It’s a little subtle, may not be so easy to explain or appreciate without all the background, but here it is.  On the afternoon before your wedding, every Lubavitch groom had the rare opportunity to pray from the Rebbe’s Siddur. It was loaned to you for a short time, this was an extremely precious and holy object, you handled it with great care and devotion.

On the afternoon of the wedding, its customary for a Chassan (bridegroom) to pray a special Mincha prayer, similar to the one on the afternoon before Yom Kippur. So that’s what us Lubavitcher briodgegrooms usually did when we got the Siddur. Obviously, its an auspicious time, you have in your hands a very holy and precious object, and your heart is full and there is much to think about.

When I got the Rebbe’s Siddur on the afternoon of my wedding in 1996 (two years after his passing in 1994) I was overcome with a sudden urge and inspiration to read or relearn the Hebrew alphabet in the Rebbe’s Siddur. I don’t remember if I ended up davening the Mincha prayer with it or not, but I do have a deep and lasting memory of seeking the Hebrew letters, the basic building blocks of everything, in the Rebbe’s Siddur.

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Robert Fulghum said: “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten”and there’s lots of truth to that. It doesn’t mean we stop learning after that, of course not. We continue learning throughout life. But much of what we learn later in life is building on those building blocks, or deepening that awareness, we constantly come back to the depth within the basic letters.

Many of you know of my fascination and interest with the depth that life hidden within quality children’s books. It follows the same thought as the Oyfen Pripitchek song, “When you children will grow older, your will understand on your own, how much lies within these letters, how many tears…”

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See this page for a beautiful Chassidic symbolism behind the shape of the letter Aleph.