Like Walking Into a Buzzsaw
I had just graduated college and committed to go learn at Ohr Somayach in Yerushalayim. I walked in with a bit of an ego. I had been captain of the baseball team. I had been on the Dean’s list.
Then I walked into the yeshivah in Elul, the most intense time of the year, and it was like walking into a buzzsaw. I was overwhelmed in every way, intellectually and physically. I couldn’t keep up with the pace or the long hours. I struggled with the Aramaic, and I couldn’t relate to the Gemara. What did one ox goring another have to do with me? It was a shock to my system.
After a few months, sometime after Yom Tov, I said to a friend, “This isn’t working. This isn’t for me. I don’t know what I’m doing here.” In my own mind I had more or less decided I would get up and leave.
Then Hashem sent me a gift — a high fever.
Three Days in Bed
It was one of the most debilitating illnesses I’ve ever had. The fever lasted three days, with an infection in one of my fingers on top of it. I was stuck in bed, in and out of consciousness.
And sitting there, “by chance,” was a book I had taken out not long before: Rejoice, O Youth, by Rav Avigdor Miller. I didn’t really know much about Rav Miller at that point.
So I would surface out of the fever, read a little, get tired and fall back asleep. Wake up, read, fall back asleep. Three days like that.
The Original Thinker
What really struck me was how Rav Miller described Avraham Avinu, who came to believe in Hashem on his own. Rejoice, O Youth is laid out as a conversation between a young man and his teacher, and the teacher says that Avraham “used his native instincts and reason to discover the entire truth, without benefit of tradition.”
The young man answers, “Then, according to your words, Avraham was not only a righteous man but also a great thinker.” The teacher agrees.
Avraham was the original thinker.
A Palace Full of Wonders
A Midrash illustrates this point with a mashal. It compares Avraham to a traveler who comes upon a magnificent palace. He stops and asks, “Could it be that this palace has no owner?” Then the owner looks out and says, “I am the owner of this palace.”
A palace doesn’t build itself, Rav Miller explains. Creation must have a Creator. Avraham used his great mind to study every part of Creation. Through bechinah, probing and analyzing the world for its niflaos haBorei, he arrived at that conclusion. Then, after many long years, the Owner looked out and identified Himself: “I am the Owner of the world.” That was when Avraham received prophecy.
Rav Miller himself followed this method. Rejoice, O Youth is full of examples of niflaos haBorei, one of the subjects he became famous for, and arguably the most famous of them all is the apple. It comes “wrapped in a waxed and waterproof wrapper which is painted by a Master Artist.” As long as it’s unripe, it stays green, hidden among the leaves. When it’s ready, it turns bright red, as if the apple were saying, “Eat me!” Even the stem is remarkable. All summer it holds on tight through wind and rain. But once the fruit is ripe, it “releases its grip and falls down to you.” And when you finish eating, “one finds a coupon which entitles him to receive another package” — the seeds. And that’s just one fruit. Rav Miller has page after page of examples like it.
The great obstacle, Rav Miller says, is habit. We see these things every day, so we stop seeing them. The person who achieves greatness is the one who can look at the world as if he were seeing it for the first time. A loaf of bread on the table should amaze us as much as the most spectacular miracle. That, he says, was Avraham’s way.
Years later I worked for Rabbi Ezriel Tauber, writing his seforim. Rabbi Tauber was not a man who was easily astonished. One day he came back from hearing Rav Miller speak, and he was astonished. What caught my attention was the reason. By then Rav Miller had been speaking about the wonders of Hashem’s world for decades, and Rabbi Tauber told me, “He’s still as excited about that apple as he was thirty years ago!”
One World Before, Another After
Until I read Rejoice, O Youth, yeshivah felt like squeezing myself into a box. Fitting in was an important part of the process, but it felt as if there was no room for me, for who I was. Rav Miller opened up a world of possibilities. There was room for a thinker. In my own small way, I could follow Avraham Avinu. More than that, I should.
At the end of those three days in bed, I knew what I was doing in yeshivah. I didn’t know much, and I certainly didn’t think it was going to be easy. But it was one world before those three days and a different world after them.
Looking back, those days of high fever were the greatest gift Hashem could have given me. They gave me the time and the opportunity, and they forced me to think, with that book sitting right there.
A Sefer in English
The history of Rejoice, O Youth is a story in itself, and it’s part of the reason the book ended up by my bed. In the early sixties, Rav Miller was already the mashgiach of Yeshivas Chaim Berlin when he decided to write a sefer. You’d expect a talmid chacham of his stature to write it in lashon kodesh. Instead, he wrote it in English, and he filled it with the questions he was hearing from students, about science, the Holocaust and the culture at large. When Rejoice, O Youth came out, it caused a stir in the yeshivos. A sefer of hashkafah, in English? Who had ever heard of such a thing?
But he didn’t care what others thought. To him, an English-language sefer could make a far bigger impact on the generation. He truly did it l’sheim Shamayim. I think that may be one of the reasons he was not only so popular in his own day, but even more so today. And his impact is still growing.
Written for Me
I feel that Rav Miller wrote Rejoice, O Youth exclusively for me. Of course, many people feel that Rav Miller’s teachings brought them back, and Rejoice, O Youth in particular. Rav Miller’s biography tells the story of a young man completely distant from Torah, who once came to a family’s home on some errand, saw the book and read it. Today he heads a large family of yerei Shamayim, shleimim in Torah and mitzvos.
From the perspective of decades, I can see that Hashem was already laying down the path ahead of me. It was a path that would give me the tremendous zechus to write and publish several Rav Miller books. There are also the two volumes of Awaken Your Emunah, which are built on Rav Miller’s derech in niflaos haBorei, looking at the world and seeing the wonder in it. That too goes back to those days lying in bed with Rejoice, O Youth.
That’s what Rav Miller spent his life teaching. It’s also how he tells us Avraham Avinu became Avraham Avinu: a boy who looked at the world, found its Owner, and kept looking, because every wonder brought him closer.
Hashem told Avraham “Lech lecha” — go! Lying in that bed in Yerushalayim, I heard those words too — go away from yourself, from the self you’ve always been, from the self you’re comfortable with, into a much wider world, a true world, a world of meaning and growth.
Related reading: Rav Avigdor Miller; The Things We Step On; Awaken Your Emunah
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