The Side Door

The Last Man in the Building

Every year Reb Tzadok Greenwald leaves his home in Eretz Yisrael and flies to Germany, where he serves as chazan for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in the great synagogue of Frankfurt. It is a grand building with a long memory, and on Yom Kippur it fills — two thousand people, a good many of whom will not walk back through those doors until next Elul.

A few years ago, on Motzaei Yom Kippur, he was finished. Not finished davening — finished. A full day on his feet, a full day without food or water, a full day carrying two thousand people through Ne’ilah on his own voice. All he wanted was the walk back to his hotel, something to eat, and a bed.

By the time he was ready to leave, everyone was gone. The crowd that had been standing there thirty minutes earlier had scattered to break their fasts. The security guards had gone home. Most of the lights were off. The front gates were locked. He let himself out through the side door.

And there, outside the locked gate, stood an elderly man in a white yarmulke.

The Man at the Gate

Something was wrong. The man was pulling at the gate, trying to get in. He looked lost.

Reb Tzadok walked over and asked if he could help him.

The man turned, frustrated and confused. “What’s going on? Where is everyone? Why are the gates of the shul closed? Isn’t tonight Kol Nidrei?”

“Kol Nidrei was last night,” Reb Tzadok told him gently. “It was yesterday. Today is over. Davening is finished.”

The man broke down where he stood. “How did this happen to me? How did I make this mistake? How did I miss Kol Nidrei?”

Reb Tzadok tried to calm him. There would be another Kol Nidrei next year, he said. It was the kind of thing you say to a man crying on a sidewalk.

The man would not hear of it.

A Promise from Twenty Years Ago

“You don’t understand,” he said.

And then he explained. Ever since he was a boy, his father had taken him to shul one night a year — Yom Kippur night, for Kol Nidrei. That was it. That was the whole of it. And twenty years ago, before his father passed away, his father made him promise that he would never miss Kol Nidrei. His father knew exactly what he was doing. He knew that this one night was the only thread still tying his son to everything that came before him.

For twenty years the man had kept the promise.

Tonight was the first time he had broken it.

Kol Nidrei for One

Reb Tzadok felt something move in him. He looked the man in the eyes.

“You know what? You’re in luck tonight. Don’t worry. I’m the chazan of this shul. Come inside with me and we’ll daven Kol Nidrei.”

The man stared at him. “Really? You would really do that for me?”

“Gladly.”

He took him by the hand, walked him around to the side of the building, and brought him in through the side door.

The night before, that room had held two thousand people. Now it held two.

Reb Tzadok walked the man to the amud, draped a tallis over his shoulders, and found the place for him in the siddur. Then he went up to the bimah, put on his own tallis and his chazan’s hat, and began Kol Nidrei — a full day late, in an empty shul, for one man.

And something happened to him. The moment he opened his mouth on Al daas HaMakom, the exhaustion lifted. He was given, he says, a supernatural second wind. He had never in his life concentrated that deeply or sung with that much heart.

“I felt chills through my whole body,” he told Rabbi Yoel Gold, who tells this story. “I found myself thinking about the six million who died in the Holocaust. I felt that the neshamos were with us. And this whole Jew, everything he had left, was that he wanted to be close to his Father in Heaven.”

When it was over the man threw his arms around him. “You don’t know what you did for me,” he said. “You saved my life.”

They stood in that empty building and cried.

The Letter With No Floor

Rabbi Gold draws the lesson from the shape of a letter.

The Gemara teaches that Hashem created this world with the letter hei. Look at how the hei is built and you learn something about the world you are living in.

The hei has no floor. The bottom is wide open. That, the Gemara says, is because this world is like a portico with one side missing — anyone who wants to walk out can walk out. Nothing holds you in. It is not a question of whether a person will slip; the question is when. All of us fall at some point. All of us make mistakes we would rather not have made. Some of us hit the floor and discover there isn’t one.

But look again at the letter. The left leg of the hei doesn’t reach the roof. There is a small gap up near the top — a narrow opening that is not the way you left. That, the Gemara says, is the way back in. And the piece of the letter hanging there between the roof and the ground is a hand extended down to a man on the floor, asking him to take hold and climb.

There is a side door. It is always open.

Why not simply walk back in through the wide opening you walked out of? Because it doesn’t work that way, the Gemara answers. Leaving takes nothing. Coming back takes help. A man who decides to make himself impure is given an open doorway and no resistance at all; a man who decides to make himself pure is given a hand.

The Crown at the Top

There is one more detail in that letter, and Rabbi Gold doesn’t mention it, but it belongs here.

The hei is written in a Sefer Torah with a small crown on its roof. Why? The Gemara answers in Hashem’s own words: “If he comes back, I tie a crown for him.”

Not I forgive him. Not I let him in the door. I make him a king.

Two thousand people davened Kol Nidrei in Frankfurt that year on the right night, in the right clothes, at the right hour. One man came a day late, in the dark, to a locked gate. And I would not be surprised if the crown that night was tied for him.

Ask Your Father

Which brings us to Haazinu, which we read yesterday, on Shabbos Shuvah.

Haazinu is Moshe Rabbeinu’s last song, and it is not a gentle one. It is the song of a nation that will forget, and stray, and fall, and be brought back anyway. Right near the beginning of it, Moshe tells us how a person finds his way when he has lost the thread. “She’al avicha v’yagedcha — Ask your father and he will tell you” (Devarim 32:7).

An elderly man in Frankfurt asked his father, and his father told him. Once a year. Yom Kippur night. Don’t miss it.

That was all the father had to give him, and it turned out to be enough. It kept a Jew standing at a locked gate at eleven o’clock at night on Motzaei Yom Kippur, weeping because he had missed a tefillah he barely understood, in a language he barely knew, in a building he entered once a year. Moshe says it a few lines later: “Ki cheilek Hashem amo, Yaakov chevel nachalaso — For Hashem’s portion is His people, Yaakov the rope of His inheritance” (Devarim 32:9). A rope. Not a decoration — a rope. You can be very far out and still be holding it.

Yom Kippur is coming, and most of us will get there on time. But every one of us is late for something. There is a promise somewhere we stopped keeping, a night we used to show up for and don’t anymore, a version of ourselves we walked out on through the wide opening at the bottom of the hei.

The front gates may be locked. Keep pulling on them anyway.

Somebody is going to come out the side door.

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