Matot-Masei

Here is a message, summed up succinctly by Sivan Rehav Meir, about one of Rabbi Katchen's rebbes, Rav Yehuda Amital, on his recent 8th yahrtzeit.

אין פטנטים - there are no gimmicks!

May his memory be a blessing.

Rabbi Katchen

In a generation in which people want to make things easier, shorter, lighter and more accessible, he demanded thoroughness, depth and effort. 

Today we mark eight years since the passing of Rabbi Yeudah Amital – a Holocaust survivor, a former minister in the Israeli government, founder and head of the Yeshivat Hesder “Har Etzion”. Here is a short text by him, in which he explains why it is precisely in our day and age that we must take our Torah much more seriously: 

_“I have nothing against medicine such as Advil, but whoever thinks that he can cure the maladies of this generation only through songs of R’ Shlomo Carlebach, only through the intensification of emotions, is wrong. This is a pill. Enthusiasm is always momentary, and every time we need some new excitement. This kind of enthusiasm is not a possession that we can take home. 

Learning Torah is a possession that stays with the person even when he himself leaves it. The Torah has not lost of its charm. It keeps being relevant, and Advil is not enough. We must return to the hard way of learning, to the toil, the knowing, the effort. 

The brain, man’s intellectual power, is the most important organ one has. Can we suffice with worshiping HaShem only through our hands, through our bodily organs? 

We would take a Shofar in our hand and blow it with our mouth, we would don Tefillin, eat Matzahs – and only the brain would stay alone? 

Those who are not involved in learning Torah are lacking something basic. Can we keep the brain solely for our career, for getting an academic degree, but leave the worship of G-d for the other organs?”

This is how he educated thousands of young students for decades, and in our day and age in which the tendency is to demand less – he called upon us to demand more.