By Aharon Spetner
Illustrated by Miri Weinreb
Zaidy Holtzbacher opened the front door. “Welcome, Ari,” he said with a large smile. “Come on in. Bubby is making a batch of cookies - they’ll be ready in a minute. In the meantime, why don’t you sit with me in my study? I really want to hear about your family trip.”
Ari sat down on the couch in Zaidy’s study and told him all about the family trip to Fort Knox. “There was so much gold there,” he said.
“I could imagine,” said Zaidy. “Did they let you take any home as a souvenir?" Zaidy winked.
Ari laughed. “No, Zaidy, of course not. But they told us that just one pound of gold costs $50,000 - and a pound of gold is so small it can fit in your hand! And Totty did the cheshbon of the size of the kapores on the aron in the Beis Hamikdash - it would take 150 million dollars worth of gold to make the kapores! That means the aron weighed more than a car! Can you imagine how strong the Leviim who carried it had to be?”
“Well Ari,” said Zaidy. “Chazal tell us that the aron carried those who carried it. So they didn’t have to worry about how heavy it was.”
“Zaidy,” said Ari suddenly, noticing an open drawer in the desk. “What are those big scary knives?”
“Oh, those are my shechitah knives,” said Zaidy.
“Wait, you’re a shoichet?” Ari asked.
“Well, I was. Many years ago, before the fall of the Soviet Union, there were still a few Yidden living in the shtetl of Horki. I was still in kollel, and the Horki Rebbe asked me to learn to be a shoichet for the Yidden living there so they could have kosher meat. I spent years learning hilchos shechita - it’s a big responsibility being a shoichet. The smallest mistake can chas veshalom cause a Yid to eat meat that isn’t kosher.”
“That’s incredible,” said Ari. “So how long were you a shoichet for?”
“Not long at all,” laughed Zaidy. “Three weeks after I arrived, the Soviet Union fell and the Yidden of Horki moved to Boro Park to live close to the Rebbe. I had only shechted one cow, but I wasn’t needed as a shoichet anymore so I came back and when your father opened his business I started working for him, since there weren’t many openings for shechitah jobs here in Boro Park.”
“Oy, that’s terrible,” lamented Ari
“Why would it be terrible that Yidden got to escape the Soviet Union?” asked Zaidy.
“No, I mean the fact that you spent all those years learning to be a shoichet and it was all for nothing.”
“For nothing?” asked Zaidy, shocked, as Bubby came into the room with a plate of hot steaming chocolate chip caramel fudge cookies with sprinkles and marshmallow bits. “Learning Torah is never for nothing.”
“Yeah but the reason you learned those halachos so many times was so you could become a shoichet. You could have been learning other things instead of just focusing on that.”
“Ari,” said Zaidy. “In this week's Parsha it says “ViShinantam.” Do you know what that means? It means it’s not enough just to learn Torah. We need to repeat everything that we learn over and over and over again. No matter how many times we learn something, each time we learn something new and the Torah becomes more and more a part of us. Imagine spending time planting a field of wheat and never harvesting that wheat.”
“That would be silly,” said Ari.
“Exactly. And learning without chazering it is just as silly. Each time we learn Torah we must remember to go back and learn it over and over again many, many times. So, I was zoche to learn hilchos shechitah for years and for those heiligge halachos to become a part of who I am.”
“Oh,” said Ari, realizing something. “When we make a siyum we say ‘hadran alach’. ‘Hadar’ in Aramaic means to return. So, we’re saying now that we finished learning something, we are going to return to it, to go back and learn it again?”
“Correct!” Zaidy said, with a big smile. “That’s why if someone wants to tell you a dvar Torah which you heard before, never say ‘oh I heard it already’. Listen to him tell it to you again. Each time you hear it, you are making the divrei Torah part of who you are as a Yid.”
Reprinted from the Parshas Va’eschanan 5785 email of Toras Avigdor Junior based on the Torah teachings of Rav Avigdor Miller, zt”l.
