Michael el Chayil

As I have mentioned more times than you'd care to remember, I have been learning Spanish for more than two years now. I am now able to offer my seat on the bus to a young mother to be able to sit with her two little boys. I am also able to ask the cleaning lady to please put the recyclable trash straight into the blue can and to not put it into a trash bag. This process has taken longer than I had imagined, so to not take time from my learning, I also now get Manantiales de Torà , divrei Torah from R' Biderman (Torah Wellsprings, gringo). That has been a challenge and I am usually hard pressed to really get anything from it. But I have hope. I recently started a new chavrusa with a young man who is looking to improve his gemara skills. We are starting with Eilu Metzios and going carefully through the topics and each Rashi. Not just "getting the gist", but translating every word in the gemara and Rashi to really get a firm handle on both the topic and the skills that ...

At the table where I generally sit for the morning prayer service recently there was a cohein and a levi. I joked, "Hey if R' Ploni were here we would have all of Klal Yisrael represented -- cohein, levi, yisrael, and me -- the eirev rav." (They weren't born as part of Klal Yisrael, I wasn't born as part of Klal Yisrael... get it?) 😁 I thought it was funny, but the cohein and levi both looked at me and said, "You are not eirev rav; don't talk like that!" It was parshas Ki Sisa, so "eirev rav" is a bit of a trigger, after all. I started thinking about the eirev rav, though, and -- as often happens -- the simple, superficial understanding of the situation started to unravel. How did they get there? They crossed though the Yam Suf with Klal Yisrael. What did the eirev rav eat? Presumably the mahn along with everyone else. Moreover, even though it certainly was (a relatively small number of ) individuals from the eirev rav who built and worsh...