JOINING THE MARINE (PARK) CORE!

BS”D

Joining the Marine [Park] Core!

Signs of the Times! Maintaining That Special Perspective

                              (Part 1)

Rabbi Hillel L. Yarmove  

When I was a young parent (Baruch Hashem, I’m a great-grandfather now!), I heard a presentation from a well-known educator of the day about how outside “experts” do not understand Orthodox Jewish children. The example employed by the speaker was a real-life story (or so he claimed) about a non-Jewish psychologist who held up an apple in front of a young “day school” student and asked him to identify it—whereupon, the boy retorted “Borei p’ri ha-eitz.”

Really? Perhaps, after all, this account is apocryphal. But that’s beside the point!

It is certainly clear to me that Chazal expected us to view the world from, let us say, a different vantage point than that maintained by the ambient secular society in which we find ourselves. Those of us who have just participated (on the eighth of Nissan) in the recent siyum on Mesichta Nazir can certainly attest to the very special spiritual motivations that lay behind a person’s wanting to undertake nazirus. But you don’t have to take upon yourself such a kabbalah. What you do need to do is to open your eyes to the underpinnings of glory that are unfolding before our very eyes with the advent of the spring season.

And you know what? You don’t even have to rely on the “magic” of spring to remind you of Hashem’s perpetual, all-abiding hashgachah. To back up this statement, I have attached three sets of pictures to my column this month.

The first set focuses on a truck on Rechov Malchei Yisrael in Yerushalayim. When I first glanced at the vehicle, I as a Daf-Hayominik was struck by the name on the front of the truck: DAF. Never mind that the huge machine was produced by a Dutch manufacturing company of the same name. You can just imagine how awestruck I was!

The second set of photos was taken at night—again, in that area of Yerushalayim known as Geulah. Indeed, one of my relatives had pointed out to me the text that was printed below the Israeli license plate [sic]: “Roll With The ABISHTER!” Now I’m not saying that the texture of the language was necessarily the finest, but the aphorism’s insistence on staying loyal to the Omnipresent certainly resonated within me.

The third set was taken while at a traffic stop in Lakewood, here in the States. I was on my way to learn—and, all of a sudden I saw on the exterior of the trunk hood of a late-model Toyota Sedan the name of the outstanding Talmudic sage, RAVA. Well, actually, the model’s name is RAV4 (RAV, I am told, stands for Recreational Active Vehicle, or words to that effect; the number “4” refers to its being an all-wheel-drive automobile). I must have blinked several times before I realized that the Japanese designers were, in all probability, not thinking about either Rava or Abayye when they fashioned the car!

But I was! Who knows? Perhaps Japanese engineers were moved (unbeknownst to them) to choose this name (RAV4) which, when it was rendered as a name on the outside of this Toyota model, looked somewhat similar to the name of our great RAVA.

But I am not the least surprised. For when you live in a Torah-oriented universe you see signs of the Eibershter everywhere! >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

{Questions or comments? Please send these to me at hillyarm@yeshivanet.com. Have an inspiring, kosher, happy Pesach, dear readers!}