30 Friday, October 4, 1985 THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS ., NON-PROFIT JEWISH ORGANIZATION NEEDS SEVERAL PRIVATE CARS— •.‘‘‘ iie „. i'' INSIGHT — WILL ACCEPT DONATIONS REGARDLESS OF AGE The Continued from preceding page PLEASE CALL 399-0880 m5 :6:0 NI l'il*c: THE CLASSIFIEDS CLASSIFIEDS Oi Call 3 07. 4. 1 16 h : O BE A WINNER, PLAY bk+ 236 Y L DORO \ ■ Baby Emporium • creative gifts • custom made clothing • hand knit sweaters and dresses • original dolls from Arienes coach house • unique children's apparel 32800 Franklin Road • Franklin • 626-0602 L PORSCHE LEASE A LEGEND FULLY EQUIPPED 1985 PORSCHE 944 . Gate • • • • • • • 5-Speed Air Conditioning Cruise Stereo Sunroof Power Windows Body Side Moldings • Stabilizer FROM $38700 * PER MONTH IN STOCK FOR IMMEDIATE DELIVERY 'With Approved Credit, 48 Month Closed End Lease, 18,000 Miles Per Year, Total Down Payment $2000 Plus 1st Months Payment and Refundable Security Deposit. Payment Does Not Include Tax or License and Title Fees. Total of Payments $18,576. While Supplies Last. Offer Expires September 30, 1985. PORSCHE • 37901 GRAND RIVER at 10 MILE FARMINGTON HILLS 471-0044 4, to his success as the group's or- ganizer. "Baruch ha-Shem, baruch ha-Shem," he said, bless- ing God but seeming to praise himself more. The rav cut him off. "Tanya," he began, reading aloud from the text. It was enough to get us all to immediately focus upon the text open before us. "Abba Binyamin said: 'There are two things I have fretted about all my life — that I pray before I die and that I lie with my body lying north to south.' "What does this mean, the Gemara asks — that his death be put off by his prayers or that he have an opportunity to pray just before his death?" A few of the men tried to cue the text and began to offer an answer, but the rav continued with his reading. "It means that he hoped for the opportunity to pray just before the moment of his passing. "And what does it mean to lie with his body lying north to south?" "Gentlemen. This is not an easy piece of Gemara. We must struggle to give meaning to a sacred text — that perhaps more than anything else reflected the devotion of the men of the bes medresh. To discover meaning even where there appears to be little; to dismiss nothing of the sacred tradition. The rav continued: "We have learned a law that people are not too careful about these days — to place their beds along a north-south line. But we must discovdr why this is so. First, though, let us go back to the be- ginning of the text. "'All my life I have fretted.' Why must he fret?" Well, we can understand why he fretted. After all, which of us can know what it will be like just before we die? It must surely cause us all a deep anxiety. Lying in a bed facing north and south — that's something else. "A man is a complex creation, made up of a body and a soul, forces that oppose each other — like fire and water. If a person leads them both according to the ways of the Torah, then the soul can be carried and controlled by the body. "Prayer bears the soul. It is not, gentlemen, simply the reci- tation of words. It bears the soul — that is what the beginning of our text is trying to tell us." His inflection implored our under- standing; his loud voice de- manded it. "As the bed bears the body, Abba Binyamin wanted his soul and his body to be under the sway of the Torah, for he understood that the two were intertwined, inseparable." For a few moments the Tal- mud had been opened up, and I could see into a text that a mo- ment earlier had been opaque to me. Through metaphor, the rabbi had taken all of us into a passage that would otherwise have excluded me. That literary approach was something I could relate to and cothprehend. It could bridge my two worlds. We now looped into and out of legal arguments, trying to straighten out the law and dis- cover its demands. Some asked questions; others offered chal- lenges or alternative interpreta- tions. It dawned on me that by now we were reenacting in our lernen precisely what the text itself was doing: jumping from topic to topic, story to story, de- bate to debate. That was what it meant to enter into the Talmud, to speak its words as if they were one's own. We were giving life to the Oral Tradition that had been embedded in the pages in front of us. Reb Shimileh was bringing in tea and cookies now. The rav got his tea first, a glass filled with the darkest liquid of all, a Our hearts might be warmed by words of Torah, but our bodies also needed a hot tea. bag still in it. Then each of the otehrs got one. I didn't know it then, but I would later learn that there was a precise order in the way the drinks were dis- tributed. The scholars and seniors were first; young new- corners like me came last. At first the tea party seemed to me extraneous to the lernen. In the interstices of an argu- ment someone would whisper a request for the cookie plate or sugar bowl. Between the flights of narrative and legalistic argument the sounds of spoons stirring sugar into gIffsses seemed incidental. - But when I saw, week after week, how important the ritual of its distribution and drinking was to the men, I began to won- der if I was missing some of its significance. Never would the group allow the tea to be mis- sed. Never would they even permit it to come too late. But although I came to look forward to the t'ta as much as all the others, it wasn't until I reviewed my tape recordings of this first visit that I finally saw the con- nection. It was in the relation- ship between body and the spirit. One might refresh the spirit with Talmud, but pre- cisely because — as the rav told us on my first night — the body and soul were forces opposing each other, one could not refresh one without sustaining the other. Our hearts might be warmed by words of Torah, but our bodies also needed a hot tea. And besides, men who traveled together through the special world of the page shared a fel- lowship that the tea helped ce- ment. • After that first evening, I be- came a regular at Heichal Baruch. As the weeks and months passed, I found myself looking forward all week to my Tuesday-evening class. The rav Continued on Page 64