Torah And America
I strive every week to leave you, my readers, with an insightful idea, an important lesson, or perhaps a redeeming perspective based on the thoughts filtering through my psyche during any given week. This week, in honor of Shavuos, I thankfully received a message that I plan on laying out here in the coming sentences and paragraphs. However, the vessel through which it is being conveyed is somewhat in jest.
The truth is, that itself is apropos and significant.
The Gemara says that before the Amoraim would deliver a shiur, they would first open the minds of their students with a joke. I suppose it makes sense then that on the week of the giving of the Torah—G-d’s shiur to the Jewish people—the article marking the giving of the Torah should likewise be introduced with a joke, opening our minds to receive the Torah of the holiday.
What are the mechanics of a joke? What makes something funny is the unpredictability of the answer to the question. The classic joke is: Why did the chicken cross the road? The supposition is that there must be some profound or unexpected insight hidden within such a simple question. The last response anyone expects is: “To get to the other side.” If it weren’t already cliché, it would still be funny.
The last thing anyone expects is for an aristocrat dressed in tails and a top hat to suddenly end up sprawled across the floor. So when he slips on a banana peel and falls in the middle of his dignified walk, it evokes laughter.
The notion that Torah would ever make it to America was once considered almost laughable in Eastern Europe. In truth, it was less comedy than gallows humor—ah bittere gelechter.
I remember hearing in yeshiva that when Reb Chaim of Volozhin, zt’l, realized that the final stop for Torah before Moshiach would be America, he wept in disbelief while quoting the verse: “And it is not across the ocean…”
But where does that notion come from?
Why was America seen as fundamentally different from every other place Torah had traveled?
And what does that mean for us?
In a maamar discussing mattan Torah, Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, the Alter Rebbe, zt’l, cites a midrash describing the divide between the “Bnei Romee” and the “Bnei Surya”—a spiritual separation between heaven and earth. Until mattan Torah, the two realms could coexist, but they could not truly permeate one another.
Then came the moment of “Vayeired Hashem al Har Sinai”—And G-d descended upon the mountain.
With that descent, the decree separating the upper and lower worlds was abolished.
The Alter Rebbe explains that this divide was not merely metaphysical. It manifested physically as well: the light of mattan Torah had not yet penetrated the lower hemisphere of the world, specifically America.
This leads to two possible conclusions. Either America and submission to the word of G-d are fundamentally incompatible, and therefore the light of Torah could not naturally reach its shores; or America represents the final frontier—the ultimate tachton—and it is specifically our task to draw the light of Torah into that space as the culmination of creation itself.
Unlike Reb Chaim of Volozhin, zt’l, when Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson, zy’a, the Frierdiker Lubavitcher Rebbe, arrived on the shores of America in 1940 amidst a crescendo of naysayers, he thundered those immortal words: “America iz nisht anderesh.”
America is not different.
Those words laid down the mandate for the ensuing decades of Chabad activity throughout America and eventually across the world.
This morning, while learning Leshem with my chavrusa, I noticed something that startled me.
The acronym AM’R VK’B—referring to Ohr, Mayim, Rakiya, and one hundred berachos—bears an uncanny resemblance to the word “America.”
Ohr is the most ethereal expression of creation. Mayim represents the next stage of descent. Rakiya forms the boundary beneath the upper waters. And berachah is the mechanism that draws Divinity fully into human reality.
Chazal say that one who eats without a berachah is as though he stole from Heaven. Through a berachah, the physical becomes integrated into holiness.
Likewise, in the opening chapter of Tehillim, Dovid HaMelech, a’h, writes: “Ki im b’Soras Hashem cheftzo, u’v’Soraso yehegeh yomam valaylah.” At first, Torah is described as Toras Hashem—the Torah of G-d. But eventually it becomes Toraso—his Torah, internalized within the person learning it.
All of creation was designed to progressively draw Divinity downward into the lowest possible realm, fulfilling what the Midrash Tanchuma famously describes as Hashem’s desire for a dirah b’tachtonim—a dwelling place in the lowest worlds.
Yet contrary to what many sages in Eastern Europe thought possible, Torah did not merely survive in America. It flourished here beyond anyone’s expectations.
Entire worlds of Torah were rebuilt on these shores.
What was once considered the “lower hemisphere” became saturated with yeshivos, batei medrash, chassidus, halacha, and Jewish life.
Which raises an interesting possibility.
Perhaps every generation has its own “tachton”—the frontier that appears too coarse, too foreign, or too spiritually dangerous for Torah to meaningfully penetrate.
In previous generations, that frontier was America itself.
Today, perhaps the new frontier is artificial intelligence.
The greater the hysteria surrounding a new development, the more it may indicate how desperately that space requires the light of Torah.
America was once viewed as unreachable terrain for holiness. Yet Torah flourished here beyond anyone’s imagination.
Perhaps AI is no different.
All I can say is that I remain astonished by the depth of G-d’s imagination, and I hope we possess the courage to continue bringing Torah into the places necessary to fulfill His primordial desire.
Yochanan Gordon can be reached at [email protected]. Read more of Yochanan’s articles at 5TJT.com.
