Yeshiva Boy: Yicchus not Yuck-us

"The Torah can get you so high... I mean so, so high. Like you have no idea," said the man with a look of sheer ecstasy (no pun intended) on his face.

Everyone from Yeshiva started laughing. One thought went through my mind: Tzfat sure is quite a place. Where else could you hear a religious man with a long beard talk about highs the Grateful Dead would have envied? Even that conversation, though, couldn't begin to prepare me for my Shabbat stay in the holy city. 

When we arrived in Tzfat and looked out from the city's Jerusalem Street, one couldn't help but feel in a different world. White puffy clouds surrounded the entire city, which appeared to be floating in the sky. It was as if we were in heaven, only I envision heaven as having better pizza.

My friends and I walked through the artist's colony, heard a speech about Kabbalah and art, and a few brave souls broke off from the group to go to the famed Ari Mikva. The rest of us went to the hotel to prepare for Shabbat and then headed off to the Beirav Synagogue which featured the tunes of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach. We sang and danced for two hours that night, but lost many friends along the way who crashed exhaustedly into the few chairs in the building as men many times their age sang and danced without end. Needless to say, the dinner that followed was devoured by 70 hungry teenagers. 

But the night was still young and we were only in Tzfat for one night. We needed to capitalize. What's a Friday night without a Tisch, that timeless get together that features lots of food and even more singing? Lame, my friends and I figured, so we decided to wander the streets of Tzfat hoping that our wildest tisch hopping dreams would come true. As we meandered through the streets, Tzfat seemed eerily quite. For a city known for its fair share of dancing Na Na Nachmanites, the sight of nearly empty streets was disheartening.

As we continued walking, we asked everyone and anyone we encountered where the nearest tisch was.  Most looked at us apathetically, saying they didn't think there were any such events that night. Determined, we marched on. Our obstinacy seemed to pay off when we met a chassid  who said - in perfect English - that he knew where a tisch might be and would walk us there. When I asked him how he spoke English so well, he answered nonchalantly, "I used to shack up with an American girl." And the night got weirder and weirder. 

As it turns out, Mr. English Speaker didn't know where a tisch was after all. After much travail, we got wind of a tisch on the outskirts of the city. When we arrived at the neighborhood in which this shindig was supposed to take place, we hedged our bets and followed a group of about a dozen chassids down a broken path and into a synagogue. Tisch--we had arrived.

Have you ever walked into a room and felt like you didn't quite fit in for some reason? Welcome to our lives.  At the head of the long table was the Rebbe wearing a streimel and next to him another rabbi (who I later found out was a Rosh Yeshiva in B'nei Brak) with a black hat and long beard. The length of the table was occupied by men donning black hats. My friends and I walked in wearing leather jackets, brightly colored sweatshirts and various colored kippahs, none of them black. But we had come too far to be deterred, so we entered sheepishly, figuring that if nothing else we could exit quickly. 

The tisch-goers were quite friendly. The Rebbe made blessings over food and then passed out an impressive array of goodies, from nuts to chickpeas to hot kugel [noodle casserole]. Soon after, the rabbi sitting next to the Rebbe began a D'var Torah in Hebrew. I listened attentively, trying to understand as much as I could.

As he spoke I heard him quote a lesson he had learned from Rav Chaim Kreiswirth, the late Chief Rabbi of Belgium and, as I found out shortly after my family became religious, a relative of mine. Having never met Rabbi Kreiswirth, I was intrigued by what this Rabbi knew of him. Not knowing whether it was "acceptable" to approach the Rebbe and the Rosh Yeshiva at the head of the table, I decided to take a chance. As I walked the length of the room, I felt the dozens of piercing glances from people in the room.  Who is this kid, they must have thought, and why in the world could he be approaching the Rebbe. 

"Excuse me Rabbi," I said in Hebrew. "My name is Nathaniel. Shabbat Shalom."

The Rabbi nodded his head stoically. Hardly the warm welcome I was looking for, but maybe he felt just as clueless as I did. "Did you know Rabbi Kreiswirth," I asked. This time I managed a "yes" out of the Rabbi, so I figured I was making progress. "He's my cousin."

Suddenly I was in. The Rabbi's face lit up--a total three sixty. He quickly sat up in his seat, extended his hand and said Shabbat Shalom. He then spoke excitedly to me for many minutes about Rabbi Kreiswirth, going on about what a giant of Torah he was, what a merit I have that I am related to him, and on and on. I was in shock, but it couldn't have compared to that of the other people watching this occur. What in the world could the Rabbi and the kid in the leather bomber jacket be talking about.

A few minutes after I returned to my seat, the Rabbi got up to leave with the help of two attendants. As he reached the door he stopped dead in his tracks. He peered down the long table, looked at me, said something I couldn't discern and walked out. As I looked around, I saw many utterly bewildered faces. Not wanting to be in the dark, I turned to the man next to me and asked what just happened. "The Rabbi just gave you a blessing," he said. 

Stunned, I kept thinking back to that famous old adage: its all about who ya' know.