Va'etchanan: Love G-d

Dedicated to my father R’Yitzchak Asher ben Yechezkel Shraga zl

The Sheloshim or first thirty days of mourning for my father will be completed on Wednesday.  Since his passing, I’ve had a great deal of time to reflect on his life which spanned nearly a century.

You learn a great deal from your parents and try to emulate their positive attributes in your own life.  My father was a polymath, who was blessed with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Torah in addition to politics, the arts and classical music.  He taught me many lessons, one of which I would like to share with you in his honour.

As Jews, we have a rich treasury of texts which start with the Torah and span the four thousand years of our existence.  For many years, when I attended Synagogue on a Shabbat afternoon during the summer months, I was puzzled as to the texts the congregants recited after the end of the Amida.  Of course, I discovered that they were learning Pirkei Avot, the Ethics of the Fathers.  As a child, these random mishnayot didn’t make much sense until a few years ago, when I decided to investigate their meaning.

I felt as though I had stumbled upon an Aladdin’s Cave of verbal treasures.  Each Mishna I read spoke to me, both intellectually and emotionally.  I eagerly anticipated their return to my lexicon on an annual basis brightening up nearly every Shabbat afternoon for the six months that bridge Pesach and Rosh Hashanah.

Additionally, Pirkei Avot has proven to be very useful as a mine from which to draw out precious gems of wisdom for many an occasion, both happy and sad.

I adopted Chapter 1, Mishna 14 as my life’s motto:

He (referring to Hillel) used to say:
“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? 
And if I am only for myself, what am I?  And if not now, when?”

I could spend a great deal of time explaining why this means so much to me, but today, it is another Mishna that recently occupied my mind because it really encapsulated the man that my father was and appropriately enough, it also relates to this week’s Parasha of Va’etchanan.

My father’s name was Yitzchak Asher, which can be roughly translated as ‘he who laughs is wealthy’.  By nature, he was a very modest man, an architect, blessed with G-d given artistic talent, whose teacher was one of the greatest teachers of the last century, Rabbi Dov Ber Soloveitchik, otherwise known as ‘The Rav’.

His motto from Pirkei Avot can be found in Chapter 4, Mishna 1:

Ben Zoma said:
“Who is wise?  One who learns from everyone, as it is said
From all my teachers I gained wisdom.”
“Who is strong?  One who masters his evil impulse, as it is said
He who is slow to anger is better than the mighty”...
Who is rich?  One who rejoices in what he has.”

In the Hebrew, this last saying is אֵיזֶהוּ עָשִׁיר, הַשָּׂמֵחַ בְּחֶלְקוֹ

As you may have gleaned, my father’s name ‘Asher’ is synonymous with ‘Ashir’ and it is so appropriate, because my dearest father was really very happy with the portion allotted to him.  He asked for very little out of life and gained a great deal pleasure from even the smallest gifts.  Whether it was learning a new piece of Torah, having a slice of lemon meringue pie (his favourite) or seeing his family (especially his granddaughters).

Chazal, our Sages, understand this Mishna to mean that a wealthy man or woman is a person who derives happiness from the portion that G-d has allotted to them, regardless of whether it is good or bad, large or small.  My father was such a person.

His appreciation of everything he had, came from Gd and the way he expressed this, was through a single emotion.  Love.

At this juncture, I am reminded of a humorous conversation I had with some friends a few years ago.

We were invited over to their house for a Shabbat lunch and I noticed that he was wearing a set of cufflinks with a legend bearing the words: ‘Love G-d’ which he had recently purchased.  His wife smiled and said he didn’t understand the intended connotation of the phrase.

I was a little taken aback by the usage of these words together and questioned him about them.  He said that they needed to be read as a verb, not a noun!  He explained that they should be read as ‘(to) Love G-d’ as opposed to ‘Love G-d’.

My father was a man who really loved G-d.  In fact, he simply loved.  On our last Shabbat together, two days before he passed away, Stephnie and I spent the morning by his bedside and I prayed with him.  When it came to the Shema, we said it together and with the strength that he had left, he kissed the Tzitzit on my Tallit as we recited the third paragraph together.  Later, with the use of his hands, he indicated not only that he loved us both but that he wanted us to continue loving each other and on the next afternoon, the last words, he whispered to me were ‘I love you’.  They were also the final words he was able to say to me a few weeks’ previously before his illness robbed him of his voice.

In this week’s Parasha, we read the first paragraph of the Shema, where we are commanded to love G-d with ‘all your heart, with all your soul and with all your might.  These words which I command you today shall be on your heart.’

Until I spent those precious hours with my father, I didn’t fully appreciate what this meant. For this is exactly what he did.  He loved G-d with every fibre of his body and by extension, he loved us in the same way.

The Gemara in Yoma 86a tells us something incredible:

Abaye cited a baraita (a mishna which was not incorporated within its six orders): “You shall love the Lord your G-d” (Devarim 6.4) means that because of you the Name of Heaven will become beloved.”
[This means] that when a person studies Scripture and Mishnah and serves scholars of the Torah and speaks softly with other people and his dealings in the market place are proper and business is conducted honestly – what do people say about him?  [They say:] Happy is so-and-so who studied Torah; happy is his father who taught him Torah; happy is his teacher who taught him Torah…

(translation taken from ‘The Shema: Spirituality and Law in Judaism, Rabbi Norman Lamm zl, The Jewish Publication Society, 1998)

Such was my father.  His love of G-d and of people (except the Belgians, but that’s another story) were one.  They, the Torah and by extension, us, his family brought him sheer, unadulterated happiness.  How did he express this?  Through telling us how much he loved us.  Through reciting the Shema together.  This is how he left this world.

Who is wealthy?  A person who is happy with whatever he has.  Whatever G-d has provided him with.  Be it his family, home or job.  It often takes a crisis to make us stop and appreciate how ‘wealthy’ we all happen to be.  Just think back to what became important during those Covid lockdown months a couple of years ago…the simple things that money can’t buy such as a hug from a parent or child.  That was the lesson I learned from my father. 

In his blessed memory, I will treasure this for the rest of my life.

Shavuah Tov.