Chayei Sarah 5766

This week’s Dvar Torah is dedicated to the memory of our grandfather, Dov ben Moshe. May our Torah learning be a merit for his soul.

No Ulterior Motives

            After Avraham sends his faithful student Eliezer to find a wife for Yitzchak, Eliezer meets a young woman and believes his search has come to an end. Eliezer then meets the girl’s parents and, trying to convince them of the clear divine providence involved in his finding their daughter, retells the entire story of their meeting and all that happened.

            The Torah, which we know is extremely careful to be as absolutely concise as possible, not wasting even a single letter, repeats Eliezer’s lengthy description, despite the fact that we already read the description when it first happened. Why did the Torah do something so out of character? What lesson is being conveyed here?

            Rav Moshe Mordechai Epstein (1867-1934, chief rabbinical judge and rosh yeshiva in <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Slobodka, Lithuania; later rosh yeshiva of the Chevron Yeshiva, originally in Chevron until it moved to Jerusalem) explains that really Eliezer could have had an ulterior motive in his search for Yitzchak’s wife. Eliezer had an eligible daughter, and he felt there could be no better match for his Rebbi’s son than the student’s daughter. When he suggested the match to Avraham, Avraham decided against it. Now that he began the search, Eliezer could have done a lackadaisical job, trying to finish up as quickly as possible. If he failed to find an adequate candidate, maybe Avraham would even change his mind and let Eliezer’s daughter marry Yitzchak. The Torah repeats the entire sequence of events to tell us that Eliezer did no such thing. Instead, he carried out his mission meticulously and with full dedication, as if he was looking for his own future daughter in law. The Torah wants us to see how Eliezer put aside his own personal wants and focused solely on what would be the greatest objective good for everyone. Despite what the “natural” thing to do may have been, Eliezer acted differently.

            Rav Aharon Kotler (1892-1962, founder of the yeshiva in Lakewood, NJ) had just passed away, and the Ponevizher Rav (Rav Yosef Shlomo Kahaneman, 1886-1969, rav of the city of Ponovezh, Lithuania, and rosh yeshiva of its yeshiva) happened to be in the United States. The Ponovezher Rav eulogized Rav Kotler at his funeral and immediately thereafter arranged for an emergency meeting at the home of Charles Bendheim, one of the Ponovezher Yeshiva’s greatest supporters. But this meeting was not on behalf of his own yeshiva, but rather for Rav Aharon’s yeshiva in Lakewood. The Lakewood Yeshiva was beset by a debt of $100,000 and Rav Kahaneman labored ferociously to erase it. In fact, Rav Kahaneman worked so tirelessly for the Lakewood Yeshiva, that people thought he may have forgotten that his trip to the United States was actually a fundraising trip for his own Yeshiva. Because Rav Kahaneman worked endlessly for what Klal Yisrael needed, even though it may have made his own life more difficult.



            Shabbat Shalom,



            Shuki



The story can be found in Builders, by Hanoch Teller, pg. 333.