Dreaming While Awake: The Quintessential Visionary
The Rosh Yeshiva, Harav Hagaon Reb Noson Nota Schiller זצוק״ל
By: Rabbi Dr. Yitzchak Greenblatt
Rabbi, Senior Lecturer at Ohr Somayach and close talmid
Reb Nota often cited the “Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness”, Alfred North Whitehead’s pithy
phrase for the human urge to ascribe physical permanence to an abstract or spiritual concept.
Mitzvos, Reb Nota would say, are as a rule, physical acts which
encapsulate and represent spiritual ideas. As such, he would continue, with the kind yet piercing stare of a man who had predigested vast swathes
of Torah, literature and philosophy; and was seized with the urgency of communicating his understanding with precision;
mitzvos are by definition acts of creativity.
The misuse of our desire for concreteness is to assign independent existence or inherent sanctity to an object
– avoda zara.
Ironically, Reb Nota himself became, for me, the paragon of permanence. Whenever I needed to speak about anything, he was in his office, surrounded by seforim , scotch and sports memorabilia. He bore the tremendous responsibility for Ohr Somayach’s funding with a grace and equanimity which bespoke a firm belief in the Divine imperative of his cause – yet was still able to be a rebbe, listening patiently, giving advice, and sharing thoughts.
He would always say that someone who can’t see the trees for the forest cannot be a true leader. And to him, individuals really mattered. His vision of outreach was to educate each student to enable him to attain the maximum level of ‘talmid chacham-hood’ possible - to produce not just infantrymen, but generals.
This was not a contradiction to the army’s ultimate aim. It marched in step with it. And the ultimate aim was an audacious dream. He was a dreamer, but as he was wont to say, a visionary is one who dreams while he is awake.
Reb Nota’s dream was to inspire those of us not brought up with a yeshiva education to climb the mountain of Torah study; to strive for the highest height of understanding we could reach. He accomplished this by employing the greatest teachers of Torah available – authentic mountaineers – to show the way, and by communicating his unspoken yet unequivocal expectation that this climbing up the mountain, this shteiging, would happen through hard work and dedication.
Reb Nota said repeatedly that no one can teach a person how to learn Gemara. A teacher can only provide tools for the committed student to teach himself.
Plainly, one does not become a competent alpinist without training and sacrifice. I was one of those blessed to benefit from that environment; that waking dream, which he, along with his partner-in-climb, Rav Mendel Weinbach, zt”l, built into reality. Yes, Ohr Somayach has always been a place to provide inspiration. Inspiration for perspiration.
Reb Nota never oversimplified. In the middle of analyzing something, just one more time, for clarity, he would often quote Rav Shach: “Our greatest enemy is superficiality”.
In spite of his gargantuan vocabulary, I never heard him over-complicate something for the sake of it. If he used a flowery phrase, it was for rhetorical effect. If he used a technical term, it was for precision.
Reb Nota was also fond of quoting Rav Soloveitchik: If I were walking and came across a ravine with a bridge, next to which was a plaque reading, “Built by a poet, who became a hermit and lived here,” I would be loath to drive my family across that bridge. I would not have faith that the poet, talented a poet as he may have been, was capable of taking account of the stresses and strains of the environment, the expansion and contraction of the metal, etc., in his hobby of bridge-building.
To bridge between generations, you need a Ph.D. in halachic engineering. Reb Nota was a master architect. His legacy is an empire, an edifice of Torah, broadcasting its light to the Jewish world. He was not interested in constructing Potemkin villages, whose purpose is to provide an external façade to a situation; to make people believe that the situation is better than it actually is. He wanted solid buildings, founded on the words of Chazal. He wanted every Jewish neshama to have a real education. There was no cherry-picking of sources to fit an agenda. His agenda was not just informed by Torah, it was formed by Torah.
We who remain must build on. We poets must learn to be engineers. His memory demands nothing less.
Reb Nota on Philosophy
This idea of the focus on the individual as a necessary prerequisite for the betterment of the wider community is
paralleled by Reb Nota’s conception of Jewish philosophy. Whereas in the West, he would often say, philosophy tends to begin with the general
rule and then move on to its application to particular cases, in Torah we move from the particular to the general, from the microcosm to the macrocosm.
The presumption is that the particular cases of Torah, as revelation, contain within them philosophical truths to be
mined.
This, then, would be a reason that the Talmud is so focused on comparing and contrasting individual particular cases,
often hypothetical in the extreme. And it is in the exploration of the particular, the resolution of (seeming) contradictions, that one can come
iteratively closer to truth.
This dialectical (in the Hegelian sense) approach to philosophy is key. A human is by definition a walking
contradiction - a celestial rarified neshama, curiously
coupled with an ape-like body - and much of our weltschmerz
is rooted in the resulting cognitive dissonance. We train ourselves to resolve the surface-level contradiction between particular cases
through learning Torah, and resolve the seeming contradiction inherent in our body-soul duality through involving the body in
mitzva.
True simcha,
then, can only come from resolution - ein simcha kehatoras hasfeikos
. Pleasure is not just a side-benefit.
Reb Nota would often cite the introduction to the Eglei Tal
, where learning Torah lishma
is defined as learning for
the pleasure. The morning blessing recited over learning Torah also contains a request that Hashem enable us to taste sweetness:
veha’arev na, “Please make it sweet.”
But the word arev, meaning “sweet”, can also
mean a “guarantor”, as in for a loan. To be a guarantor of Torah for the next generation - we must find the sweetness.
The future of Klal Yisroel was a perennial fixation for Reb Nota. It was never enough just to
think about now. It was imperative to build for future generations – to build buildings and build people. And he did so, with the sheer
force of his personality and erudition. He was as comfortable citing Chazal
, the Chazon ish
and the Meshech Chochma
as he was referencing, lehavdil, Aristotle, Shakespeare or
Conrad. He was also quite at home discussing baseball statistics from the 1950s. Reb Nota was a disarmingly charming man, but nonetheless,
fierce in his convictions, with an incisive mind, able to see right through even the most opaque of situations.
