In this week’s sedrah we read about one of Hashem’s commands to the Am Yisroel as they were preparing to enter into Eretz Canaan. ̇∆‡ יםƒר¿בֹע ם∆ּ ַ̇‡ יƒּכ ןַﬠָנ¿ּכ הָˆ¿רַ‡ ן≈ּ„¿רַּיַה – When you cross over the Yarden to the land of Canaan, ם∆ ̇יƒר¿ ̃ƒה¿ו ם∆כָל הָינ∆י¿הּƒ ̇ טָל¿ ̃ƒמ י≈רָﬠ יםƒרָﬠ ם∆כָל – you should designate for yourself, arei miklat, sanctuary cities הָ‚ָ‚ׁ¿ ּ̆ƒב ׁ ̆∆פ∆נ הּ≈כַמ ַח≈ˆֹר הָּמָׁ ̆ סָנ¿ו - and a killer who unintentionally takes a life shall flee there (Masei 35:10-11).
It’s talking about a man who accidentally killed a fellow Jew and now finds himself in danger of being killed by his victim’s family. The goel hadam—the ‘blood redeemer’—has the right to avenge the blood of his dead relative and so the Torah provides a safe haven to where the accidental killer can escape. In the arei miklat he is protected from the goel hadam, ַח≈ˆֹרָה ּ̇מוָי ‡ֹל¿ו – and that way he will not die (ibid. 12).
But we’ll see now that not only was this city a place where the killer finds refuge from the vengeful anger of the goel hadam, but the Torah tells us that while he’s there in that city the beis din is also required to go out of its way to provide him with all the means of normal living. ל≈‡ָה יםƒרָﬠ∆ה ןƒמ ַ̇חַ‡ ל∆‡ סָנ¿ו – He should flee to one of these cities, יָחָו – and there he will live (Devarim 4:42). And the Gemara (Makkos 10a) says that the word vachai means, “You must make a life for him there in that city.” Even though it's a form of a prison for him there, but vachai – make for him a life; the beis din has to provide the rotzeiach with all the necessities for ordinary existence.
Life and Death
We don’t tell him to live on bread and water; he’s supplied with nourishing food and vitamins and medicines, everything he needs. The city must have all the various necessities of a city. That, the Gemara says, is what vachai means – give him life; provide him with whatever he’ll need to live a normal life.
Now, in the crazy world we live in today, you might think it means they have to supply him with color TV. After all, what’s life without television? You know there was a big riot last year in one of the prisons upstate. The inmates broke windows and smashed tables. Why were they so upset? Because they only had ordinary TV, black and white TV. “It’s not a life,” they said. “We need color TV.” And so a special commission came, a state board of inquiry, and this committee of wise men sat down together b’koved rosh and thought deeply into what life means, about what living life to its fullest includes, and they concluded that the felons are right! How can you deprive human beings of color TV?!
But that’s not the Torah view of life; television is the opposite of life. They didn’t make a movie theatre in the city of refuge, no. Movies, if you’re Hungarian, you say ‘muvess’. “I’m going to the muvess.” That’s what it is, a place of death. I pass by the movies and I see boys with yarmulkas standing in line; they’re paying money in order to murder their souls. So no color television, no movies, in the ir miklat. Because “and you should provide for him life,” means not that you give him what the lowest element of society thinks life is about – vachai means you have to give him the means of living a successful life.
Imprisoning the Rosh Yeshiva
And that’s why the Gemara tells us a queer thing, something we wouldn’t have realized on our own. The Sages (ibid.) say that included in this mitzvah of ‘vachai’ is that we make his teacher, his rebbe, go into exile with him.
Now, the rebbe is innocent—it was the talmid who killed somebody b’shogeg, not him—but when the student is sentenced to go into exile, the rebbe is forced by the beis din to go with his student.
So the rebbe says, “What did I do?! I’m innocent! I have to be imprisoned in an ir miklat?!”
And so we tell him, “We can’t help it. The Torah says vachai, that your talmid has to live.”
“Let him live,” the rebbe says, “I have nothing against him living. But why should I be sentenced along with him? I’ll write to him, I’ll visit him, but let him live without me!”
“No,” say the Chachomim, “that’s not called living life; without a rebbe it’s not life.”
So the rebbe has to move; he has to leave his home and find a place to live in the ir miklat in order to fulfill the command of the Torah. If he has a yeshiva, he has to forsake his yeshiva—he can take his yeshivah with him but whatever he does, it's his responsibility to go with his talmid into the ir miklat. And it's based on the admonition יָחָו – he must live. And there’s no life without a rebbe.
Sending a Torah Library
Now we could have thought that all this was in the olden days. In the ancient times when it was still forbidden to write anything except Torah Nevi'im u’Kesuvim—you couldn't write the Gemara—and so the only source of Torah knowledge was a live rebbe. Maybe some Chumash you could learn on your own but that’s all—and even your Chumash didn’t have any Rashi. And so, without your rebbe you were cut off from the fountain of Torah.
But after printing was invented—suppose we had the system of arei miklat today and one of our disciples was unfortunate enough to be sentenced to galus, so we would think that it’s up to the beis din to provide him with a Shas; a big Shas with all the mefarshim, and all the rishonim and achronim too. And that’s how we’d fulfill this mitzvah of giving him spiritual life; we’d give him a Torah library and that's all he needs—so it would seem. The rebbe could continue with his great work maintaining his yeshiva wherever he was and he could make a big order from the Jewish bookstore and send a Torah library for the talmid.
And yet no such leeway is given. Even today, with all of our printed books and with all of our Torah lectures on the telephone, still, when we have arei miklat again, this din won’t change. Because vachai means not only that he should have food and clothing and medicine and even seforim and Torah tapes, but most of all he should have his rebbe too. And the rebbe would have to come personally because that's what the Torah means when it says vachai. ‘To live’ means you should live together with your rebbe.
Torah is Not Algebra
Now we should try to understand why that is so. You know when you learn mathematics, so the one who is teaching you mathematics is not giving you a part of his neshama. He's taking a dry formula that he has somewhere in his pocket and he's handing it to you and so it makes no difference if he gives you the formula with a smile or with a sigh or with any kind of pious thoughts. You understand what kind of thoughts the teachers have in the schools usually, and so it's lucky that the thoughts don't go in with the mathematics. Thankfully the thoughts remain in his head and the disciples get only mathematics.
But that’s not the case here; Torah isn't lehavdil like mathematical laws, like geometry propositions. It's a big error to think that Torah is a set of abstractions. No, Torah is something different altogether—it’s a way of life; its teachings are intended to become part of your personality.
The problem is that people generally think in stereotypes; they think that just like an algebra teacher teaches algebra, so a Torah teacher teaches Torah. They’re the same thing only one went to the university and one went to the kollel. And because the rebbe has certain information that you don’t, therefore you have to have to be in contact with him in order to access that information.
The truth is that you can’t blame people too much for thinking that way because today most of our Torah has been learned from pages that have no character, no personality, no emotions. Even the rebbes themselves are sometimes test-tube babies—they are the result of laboratories. They are the product of printed pages, and so their ideas are all paper ideas. It’s a sad thing that since the heter to write the Torah down was given, this gem of having a rebbe has been neglected to a certain extent. Because actually a rebbe gives so much more than Torah information.
Image of the Rebbe
The Gemara (Kiddushin 70b) tells us that once an old sage came to visit Naharda’a. Now this sage was a disciple of the great Torah giant Shmuel and so Rabbi Nachman took the opportunity to ask him something about a certain halacha that was confounding him. Rabbi Nachman asked him, “Did you ever hear anything about this from Shmuel?” So the old sage said, “Yes, I remember when Shmuel was once about to take leave of us and he had one foot on the ferry boat and one foot on shore; when he was just about to board the ferry across the river he told us this halacha that you’re asking about.”
That's how people knew their rebbe. Whenever they repeated anything of the Torah, the face of their rebbe came up before their eyes. The way he stood, the way he spoke, every nuance, it was part of the Torah.
The Breath of Your Nostrils
And that’s because Torah means not the halacha alone; it means much more. When the rebbe speaks, the talmid understands that he is accepting from his rebbe a part of his soul. The Torah was given over with expressions of countenance and with the participation of emotions in such a manner that it couldn't be lifeless. Ki heim chayeinu! It was the lifeblood that passed from the rav to the talmid; it became part of his soul.
And that's what life is—that’s what a rebbe really is. It's not merely a refinement. It's not a luxury. A rebbe is mamash the breath of your nostrils. It’s your life in the World to Come. That's what we're learning here and that’s what the Torah meant when it said, vachai. To live in this world means you should live together with your rebbe.
