Drasha for Sheva Brachos (#1)

Are you in the market for a drasha for a Sheva Brochos? This Dvar Torah is presented as a public service to the unprepared, to the ditherers and the feckless, prepackaged for your Sheva Brachos convenience. Or Sheva Brachot. It is free of charge, and guaranteed original with this author. It is, in my humble opinion, of reasonably good quality, and in field trials has been shown to be effective. No animals were harmed in these tests. It is not tied to any one parsha, and can be used at any time. (For other Divrei Torah for Sheva Brachos and for other life-cycle events, you may click on the relevant label in the column on the right.  As of July '11, we've posted eight divrei torah for Sheva Brachos.)

Traffic on this site is pretty light, so you probably could plagiarize my divrei Torah with confidence. There's always the small risk that someone in the audience spends time on the net and will recognize the theme. But that risk is unavoidable for any dvar Torah you say, so good luck.

This dvar Torah seems long, but it can be broken into several divrei Torah, or boiled down by skipping some tangential discussions.

The first part of this drasha is based on Rabbi Lau’s autobiography, “Ahl Tishlach Yodcho Ehl Hana’ar.” He is a great man and widely respected, so you can mention his name in most places. If you are speaking to an ultra-black or fringed audience, just say "I saw this maiseh in the name of an odom godol," as my Rosh Yeshiva used to say when he was quoting the Satmerer Rov.

R’ Lau was proposed as a shidduch to the daughter of the Rav HaRashi of Tel Aviv, R’ Yitzchak Frankel, who had known the young Rabbi Lau's father. Rav Frankel called him over to talk. He said, in Breishis 2:24, when the Torah is talking about the first zivug, between Adam and Chava, it is strange that the first thing that is said is a negative, that the person will leave his parents. It says “Ahl kein ya’azov ish es oviv v’es imo v’dovak b’ishto v’hoyu l’bosor echod," "and so a man will leave his father and his mother and cleave to his wife". The Torah could have first said that purpose of the right zivug is to create shleimus, love and dveikus to each other, to do something positive. Why begin with a shlilus, a negative? That after the parents put a life of hard work and worry and hope into a child, the child would abandon his parents? That is not a pleasant thing to hear.

Rav Lau was caught off guard by the question. He thought hard, and admitted that in all the sheva brochos that he had attended, nobody addressed that question, and he had nothing to say.

R Frankel said that in all the years he was m’sader kiddushin, at every wedding he looked at the young couple and wondered, how can these two very different people make a kesher shel kayama, they are so young and inexperienced, they have such different ideas. But then he looked at the parents of the young couple standing at the side, and he remembered that twenty five years before, he was mesader kiddushin at the parents' weddings, and they looked exactly like the new couple, and somehow they had managed to create a home that produced this new generation. The young couple will have observed their parents’ behavior, and they will have learned, without words, the skills that go into building a bayis shel kayomo. And he realized that this is what the passuk is teaching. ‘Ya’azov’ means ‘leave,’ but is also can be read as a form of the word ‘Izavon,’ which means ‘heritage.’ (Note: in Mishpatim, Shmos 23:5, in the parshah of prikah, it says the word ‘azove.’ There, Rashi explains that the word means ‘help.’)

When a young couple gets married, they bring with them the heritage that they acquired as they grew up watching their own parents, and they bring with them the spiritual bequest that their parents have passed on to them. This is what builds a bayis shel kayama, when the azivah, the leaving to build their own home, is accompanied with a spiritual izavon.

R Frankel continued that he had heard about R Lau from many people, and he listed them, and he knew R Lau’s father and heard Torah from him, but he wondered, what izavon, what heritage of family life will this orphan bring to his marriage? He grew up in dormitories, in other peoples’ houses, by his rabbeim, what understanding and foundation is he going to bring to his marriage? At this point, Rav Lau started wondering if this was Rav Frankel’s way of telling him that he had decided to decline the proposed match.

But R Frankel continued, and said that when he saw that R Lau had a brother who had come with him through the war, and who had gone to work in Eretz Yisroel and was a shomer torah umitzvos, he was confident that R Lau had learned from his brother what was entailed in bringing a spiritual izavon to his own marriage. And, of course, Rav Lau and Rav Frankel’s daughter did get married and have lived happily ever after.

Now, let us look at the same question from a very different perspective.

Yosef HaTzadik named his first child Menashe, ki nashani Elokim es kol amoli v’es kol beis ovi, for God has allowed me to forget all my father's house. This choice of name for a child is puzzling. Obviously, Yosef did not forget his home; his father’s image was his conscience. And I don’t believe it means that he was grateful that Hashem helped him to overcome the paralyzing grief and homesickness so that they wouldn’t interfere with his ability to live a normal life, because that‘s not a reason to give that name to a son-- "Thank God I have gotten over my grief and longing to be reunited with my father". Anyway, more interesting than whatever the pshat in the pasuk is, is the teretz I saw in the Shai Latorah Vol. I. He brings a strange and thought- provoking teretz from R’ SZ Broide from Chevron, as follows.

Bava Metzia 85a: R’ Zeira was mispallel to forget toras chutz la’aretz before going to Eretz Yisroel. Obviously, he did not want to revert to am’oratzus. He wanted to push aside the primacy of what he had learned, the entrenched attitude which his learning in Bovel had engendered, so that he wouldn’t have a hard time adjusting to the new approach and svaros of Eretz Yisroel.

Shabbos 88b: R’ Yehoshua ben Levi: “le’chayov ke’arugas habosem:” kol dibbur v’dibbur she’yotzo mipi Hakodosh Boruch Hu nismalei kol ho’olom kulo besomim. V’kivon she’midibur rishon nismalei, dibur sheini l’heichon holach? Hotzi Hakodosh Boruch Hu ho’ru’ach mei’otzrosov, v’hoyoh maavir rishon rishon.” With every pronouncement of a Command from Har Sinai, the world filled with fragrance. And if the world was full of fragrance, where did the next Command go? God brought out a great wind and blew away each fragrance so that the next Command could fill the world once again.

What’s pshat? What’s so shver about the residual fragrance from the previous dibur? Why was it necessary to dissipate the residual fragrance from each of the Aseres Hadibros before beginning the next dibur?

We see from the Gemora that so long as the world was full of the fragrance of the first dibbur, Hashem did not want to say another dibur, and found it necessary to dissipate the remaining fragrance. If the first smell was still there, Klal Yisroel wouldn’t be able to absorb the rei’ach habesomim of the next dibur. In the broadest conceptual terms, one might say that the lesson of this Chazal is that a preoccupation with the past interferes with the march toward the future.

Yosef Hatzadik, who grew to greatness in the House of Yakov, if he didn’t have the tremendous power, the indomitable inner strength, to put aside his past in his father’s house, could never have been able to lead the house of Pharaoh, which was opposed in every way to his father’s house. It was with Hashem’s help that he was able to forget, in a sense, his past, that he was able to become the de facto ruler of Mitzrayim. A Yeshiva Bochur cannot be the head of Mitzrayim; the character of Mitzrayim was totally opposed to that of the household of Yaakov.

In Yeshivishe jargon, we would say that a person has to be able to shtell tzu one hundred percent in order to accomplish great things, and if Yosef was still holding in the matzev of being a talmid of Yakov and a talmid of the limudim of Shem v’Eiver, he couldn’t have shtelled tzu to become the ruler of Mitzrayim. A person has to be where he is, and not where he was. Once you decide you are going to do something important, then, even if you have to put aside being a yeshiva bochur and don the garb of secular, foreign potentate, you have to find a way to do so. It was this skill that Yosef was grateful for: for the ability to function as a Mitzri king-- to out-Mitzri the Mitzrim-- while remaining, inside, a student of the Yeshiva of Shem and Eiver and a member of Yakov's household.

With Rav Broyde’s observation, perhaps we can see a different answer to the question we began with. Perhaps this is why the first thing we learn about marriage is that “ahl kein yaa’zov ish es oviv v’es imo v’dovak b’ishto.” When a person leaves home to make his own family, he certainly needs to keep in mind everything that he learned at home. But he has to remember that his new home is not simply an extension of the home he grew up in. His wife is a different person with a different past, and his children will be the sum of new factors and experiences. He has to focus on his new situation and realize that the approaches of the past may not apply now. No matter how illustrious and beautiful his familial home was, one must not insist on blind loyalty to the past, but rather must focus on his and his wife’s new situation, and see what is best and most effective for them now. The reason we don’t marry our siblings is because we need to create something new, and not unthinkingly recreate the past.

Now we can see the deep meaning the Torah embedded in the word ‘ya’azov.’ In the simplest words, to encapsulate all that has been discussed above: the phrase first used in the Torah to describe marriage is “Ahl kein ya’azov ish es aviv v’es imo v’davak b’ishto.” It is surprising that this seemingly negative term is what the Torah considers the most essential description of marriage. The answer is that the word ‘azav’ has two meanings, and both are vital parts of a successful marriage. One is ‘izavon,’ a heritage. One must bring into his marriage a heritage of spiritual growth and the knowledge of how to make the home into a beis hamikdash m’aht. The other meaning is ‘azav,’ to forsake. A marriage is the combination of two different people from different homes, of different genders and emotional and intellectual natures. One must abandon the attempt to slavishly recreate the home he or she grew up in to the last iota. The new couple must learn to compromise and to create a new and unique home that combines elements of both families. Bring your heritage; it is priceless and essential. But be prepared to adjust and modify what you have learned as you build your new and unique bayis ne’eman b’yisrael.