The Time of Preparation
We find ourselves once again in the days of preparation for receiving our holy Torah. Each year, we are duty-bound to reflect seriously on the requisite groundwork for Kabbalas HaTorah, and on the preparation demanded of us so that we may accept it properly.
The ma’amad of Matan Torah included within it a ma’amad of techiyas hameisim, as Chazal explain (Shabbos 88b): “Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi said: Every single utterance that emerged from the mouth of Hakadosh Baruch Hu caused the neshamos of Klal Yisrael to depart, as it is written (Shir HaShirim 5:6), ‘My soul departed when He spoke.’ Yet if their souls departed at the first utterance, how were they able to receive the second? He caused a tal (dew) to descend — the very tal with which He will one day revive the dead — and with it He restored them to life.”
Tal Torah
That tal which restored Klal Yisrael to life was from the Torah itself, as our Sages teach (Kesuvos 111a): “Whoever possesses within him the tal of Torah — the tal of Torah will revive him at techiyas hameisim.” In other words, embedded within the Torah is a tal of revival, capable of restoring the dead to life. This idea finds further expression in Kiddushin (39b): “There is no mitzvah written in the Torah—and whose reward is explicitly stated alongside it—upon which techiyas hameisim is not contingent.”
Thus, the Torah itself contains the essence of life, potent enough to revive the dead. At the moment of Kabbalas HaTorah, when the neshamos of Klal Yisrael took flight due to the overwhelming intensity of the Divine utterance, the Borei Yisborach restored them through the tal of revival that emanates from the power of the Torah itself. It is therefore essential that we reflect deeply on the nature of this tal chaim: what precisely it is, whether we can identify it, and how we can activate it within our own lives.
Chai Margish — The Living Person Feels
The expression of life within a person is manifested through his capacity to feel. The deeper a person feels, the more fully alive he is. As Rav Yisrael Salanter writes (Ohr Yisrael, Michtav 10): “Kol chai margish”—every living being feels. To truly live something, it is not enough to understand it intellectually or to grant it mere theoretical assent. One must find within it a point of personal hispa’alus—a genuine sense of being moved and stirred. Only through this does true vitality emerge. When a person experiences a feeling of hispa’alus, joy, or a similar emotion, he is truly alive in that moment, and in that very instant he yearns for this sensation to remain with him forever.
The same principle applies to Torah study. For the Torah to breathe life into us, we must discover our own personal point of hergesh and hispa’alus — our individual sense of being moved and personally affected — in the Torah. This requires us to delve deeply, to contemplate with genuine inwardness, and to bring our personal lives into authentic contact with it. Mere performance of actions and fulfillment of instructions does not generate life, for they remain devoid of hergesh. But when a person labors to be moved, and strives to perceive how the Torah touches his own life, he begins to truly live within the Torah. It is then that the Torah breathes eternal life into him.
We are, admittedly, unaccustomed to this approach. We tend to delegitimize the significance of our personal thoughts and relegate our private feelings to the margins, granting them little weight. We mistakenly believe that what truly matters is concrete fulfillment and tangible outcomes, while our inner experiences carry no particular consequence. This, however, is not the case. For the Torah to breathe life into us, we must infuse our learning with our own feelings and personal hispa’alus, and we must allow room for our personal and unique approach. It is specifically when we bring chiddush, when we impart our own distinctive coloring and perspective to the Torah, that we begin to feel that the Torah is giving us life.
Torah Transmission and Personal Expression
This same principle applies to the transmission of Torah from rebbe to talmid. Such transmission is not meant to be a mechanical replication of the shimu’ah, in the exact language and emotional tone used by the rebbe, in a manner disconnected from the life of the talmid. Rather, the talmid must develop his own independence and infuse the received Torah with his personal hergesh. It is
precisely those individual and unique negi’os—biases of self-interest—that enable him to truly live and feel the Torah. This is evident in practice: when a person brings his own distinctive quality to the Torah, he is alive and flourishing. But when he merely quotes mechanically and remains disconnected from his personal reality, he has not yet begun to live within the Torah.
When a person wishes to “live” Baba Kama, he shouldn’t study it in a dry, detached manner — as a mere collection of dinim and pilpulim. Rather, he should draw from it a living hergesh, a fresh and meaningful message in the realm of bein adam l’chaveiro. Similarly, one who wishes to truly live his tefillah must attain a renewed hergesh regarding his relationship with the Borei Yisborach. He needs his own personal understanding of the tefillah — one that gives expression to his own personal state — not one detached from the reality of his life.
We may now understand with greater clarity that the techiyas hameisim experienced at Matan Torah was absolutely necessary and teaches us that we must be ‘chai margish’ in the Torah — truly living and feeling within it. To achieve this, we must continuously infuse the Torah with our own feelings and personal negi’os, which shift and develop over time in accordance with our avodah and the realities of our lives. Only in this way can the Torah become for us a genuine source of chaim netzachiyim—eternal life.