When our first son was born, at dawn on the cusp of Spring after a difficult labor, we felt strongly that we were seeing open miracles. That is one aspect of our relationship with Hashem, when he opens to us, and our avodah is to teach our eyes to see, our ears to hear, and our hearts to receive that revelation. However, to have a true and intimate relationship, that cannot be the only aspect; we would be left passive, lacking agency. Thus, we must expect that there is an aspect where Hashem gives us the space to make the opening, to reveal ourselves to him. We have been granted such an opportunity with the birth of our second son, at nightfall as the yontif season gave way to Winter, which led us to choose his name: Yochanan Meir.
Often, this aspect of hester panim, the hidden face of Hashem, is associated with suffering, with exile, with darkness and bitterness. Our avodah, then, would simply be to cry out to Hashem with faith that he will see our distress, hear our cries, and remember the covenant. That has certainly been a part of Yochanan's life so far, born to pain and danger in the grip of a fearsome disease, and inspiring an incredible outpouring of tefillos from loved ones around the world. One word for this mode of tefillah is tachanunim, from the same shoresh as Yochanan.
But that is not all that hester panim represents, nor all the role that we hope to see it play in Yochanan's life. Another instance of the same dichotomy is Torah shebichsav, the written Torah, and Torah sheb'al peh, the oral Torah. The former is pure revelation, and all we can do is receive it to the limit of our capacity; the latter is also doubtlessly min hashomayim, but it is revealed through the mechanism of human action, the give and take of rav and talmid, of chavrusos. Several figures in Jewish history could plausibly claim to represent Torah sheb'al peh: perhaps Ezra haSofer, leader of the Great Assembly, or Rabbi Yehudah haNasi, who fixed the six Orders of the Mishnah. But the one that spoke to our hearts was Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai. In the mishnah in Avos, he is the last described explicitly as receiving the Torah from his rebbeim, Hillel and Shammai, and he is the only rabbi who is recorded in Avos explicitly in dialogue with his students. He shepherded us through the deepest hester panim, the destruction of the Beis haMikdosh and Yerushalayim, mass slaughter and enslavement, and the imposition of the Roman exile in which we still languish. Through him and his students, Torah sheb'al peh was preserved and restored. Like this namesake, may Yochanan Meir be saved from his tzaros, and may his salvation establish an unceasing wellspring of Torah for all future generations.
There is another level, brought out by a dichotomy within Torah sheb'al peh itself. The gemara, Sanhedrin 24a, brings a number of teachings describing the superiority of the torah of eretz Yisroel over the torah of Bavel. The sages of E"Y are pleasant in discussion, while the sages in Bavel wound each other in the milchemta shel torah; the sages of E"Y are sweet as olive oil, the sages of Bavel bitter as olives; Bavel is a place of flattery and haughtiness, of confusion, of darkness. My rosh yeshiva at Darche Noam, Rav Yitzchak Hirshfeld, taught that this distinction symbolically describes two ends of a process, rather than a geographic fact. The nature of Torah sheb'al peh is that, through laboring in it, we transform it for ourselves from one to the other. In the framework I outlined above, the torah of Bavel would be our opening ourselves to Hashem, and the torah of E"Y would be the relationship that follows when Hashem receives and accepts us. This insight is most clear to me in the teaching of the olives. How do bitter olives become sweet? Through grinding and crushing, or through brining in bitter waters. It is not simply that we escape the bitter and have sweetness in its place at the end; through further tribulation, the bitterness itself becomes the sweetness. The olives were never bad, we just had not yet brought out their goodness. This lesson appears again in this week's sidra, when klal Yisroel encounter the bitter waters at Marah and Moshe is instructed to cast in an 'etz. Chazal teach that this was a bitter tree, and extrapolate that this is the way of Hashem, to make sweet the bitter through bitterness. The section concludes with a giving of undefined chok and mishpat, with an exhortation to listen -- Torah sheb'al peh. To drive that message home, the text flows directly into the camp at Eilim, representing the Torah sheb'al peh of E"Y, with seventy sweet trees for the seventy elders of the sanhedrin and twelve sweet springs for the torah of each tribe. To represent this aspect of Torah sheb'al peh, symbolized by the torah of E"Y vis-a-vis Bavel, none can rival Rabbi Yochanan, who taught most of the great Amoraim of E"Y for three generations in his long tenure leading the yeshiva he founded in Teveria. So strongly did he shape the torah world of E"Y that he is credited as the primary author of the Talmud Yerushalmi, though it was not redacted until well after his death. Like this namesake, may Yochanan Meir find favor with Hashem and be welcomed into the deepest and most intimate communion, transforming all his tzaros to sweetness and light.
The symbol of the olive tree is especially poignant given that Yochanan Meir's bris was held 'erev Tu BiShvat. Tu BiShvat is described in the mishnah as the Rosh Hashanah for trees, particularly fruit trees where the count of years has legal ramifications. As both human beings and the Torah are compared to fruit trees, this is understood to have great mystical significance. The fruits of the tree, which have their Yom HaDin on Shavuos, represent chiddushim in Torah, novel ideas and insights that come through human effort. It is also connected to the bris milah in particular, because fruit trees lose their status as 'orlah on their third Tu BiShvat, producing neta' reva'i, sanctified fruit, in place of fruit that must be discarded. So, too, a boy at his bris loses his 'orlah, the foreskin, and has in its place an os bris kodesh, a sign of the covenant.
Yochanan Meir was born on the eighth day of the eighth month, and the number eight is connected to light. Rav Hirsch describes it, one more than the seven of creation, as a spiraling return to begin creation anew at a higher level, and creation begins with light. The Maharal similarly sees the essence of eight in being one more than the seven of creation, but draws from that a complete transcendence of the natural order, a symbol of miracles and the or haganuz, the hidden light, that is reserved for the righteous in the world to come, which is hinted at in Chanukah. Chanukah itself was important in Yochanan Meir's life, marking his coming to full term and being deemed healthy and stable enough to leave the intensive care unit: our own glimpse of light in the darkness. The great tanna, Rabbi Nehorai, is better known as Rabbi Meir, because he gave light through his teaching. We wish for Yochanan Meir to share that illuminating quality all his life.
The combination of the or, light, of Meir with the chein, favor, of Yochanan is intended continuously to invoke all the blessings alluded to in the verse, "Yaeir Hashem panav eilekha vichuneka", Bamidbar 6:25, the second verse of birkas Kohanim. Birkas Kohanim is taught to contain within it every blessing, and the second verse focuses on the spiritual. The or of the Shekhina and of Torah, the chein that it should be freely and lovingly granted. This verse, in our eyes, distills into five words the essence of our hope that our opening to Hashem should be received and transform hester panim into intimate revelation. That is why we named our son Yochanan Meir.
