One of the wondrous tefilos we have during Yamim Nora’im is that of Hineni he’ani mima’as, fearfully recited by the chazzan before Musaf. In the middle of this prayer there is one word that the chazzan shouts out: “Shad-ai!”
What is the meaning of this Divine Name?
Rashi’s explanation on the verse “Ani E-l Shad-ai” is well known:
I am the One whose Divinity has enough (sheyeish dai) for every creature.
We don’t need anything besides Hashem and His Torah. That is enough for us. Along these lines it is said about the Torah:
I was then His nursling, I was then His delight every day, playing before Him at all times.
[Here we see that also delighting and playing are to be found in Torah.] This is actually our generation’s main problem. We live in a world where people feel that “it’s impossible to just learn Torah. You need to expand your horizons a little,” and so on and so forth.
It is known that the thing that wrecked our whole spiritual world was the Haskalah movement. Not so long ago, about seventy years ago, R. Chaim of Brisk wrote in a letter that he remembers that in past times, the whole Jewish people was always one people, holy to Hashem. Although every shtetl had its meshumad (apostate), its shikor (drunkard) and even its malshin (informant to the non-Jewish authorities), the community in general was still wholly with Hashem.
Came along the Haskalah and turned everything upside down. The early Maskilim argued that indeed we need Torah and more Torah, but that alone is not enough. We need something else in life: to be enlightened and knowledgeable about what is happening in the world at large – Haskalah.
The thing that destroyed the world for us was not the few regrettable minutes that yeshivah boys spent peeking at books from the outside world. It was the insult this entailed. The offense it constituted to the reality of Hashem as the One and Only. It was as if saying that His Divinity doesn’t have enough, chas v’shalom.
If it is not enough for someone to just have Hashem’s Torah, to be in Hakadosh Baruch Hu’s embrace, then he brings an awesome destruction upon the world!
As it is with the world at large, so it is with a person’s own private world. Every Jew needs to live his life with Hashem and to feel that His Divinity has enough for him. A person doesn’t need anything else.
In the Yamim Nora’im, this is the way for a person to rescue himself: Ani l’Dodi v’Dodi li. I live exclusively within Hashem’s Torah. In a world of friendship, relationship and fondness with Hakadosh Baruch Hu.
