During the long hot days of sitting shiva for our father, one of my brothers found an oversized three-ring binder while poking through my father’s things in the basement. Written out in meticulous block print was a series of divrei torah on the weekly parshiyos that were neatly separated by yellow dividers into their traditional order, starting with Bereishis and ending with Zos HaBracha. At the end of shiva, I stealthily brought the binder home, convinced that my father’s words would allow him to speak to me from the grave for many years to come.
During that first long year of aveilus, when days felt like weeks and weeks felt like years, when the mere thought of him brought me to tears, I tried, each week, to look at the dvar Torah he had written for that week’s parsha. None of these divrei Torah were dated, so I had no sense of their chronology other than assuming that the ones on the brittle yellowed paper were the oldest. Many of them were sourced but many were not, which made me wonder if they were his own compilations or if he just hadn’t sourced them, although given his scrupulous attention to detail, this seemed unlikely.
As the weeks went on, it became disappointingly apparent to me that my father and I were not inspired by the same things. I desperately wanted to connect to the ideas that he thought worthy of preservation, and while I was able to appreciate them intellectually, my heart remained perversely neutral. Yet another layer of disappointment stemmed from the absence of any divrei Torah for many of the parshyos. Particularly vexing was the blank space where Parshas Pinchas should have been. That was the parsha we read the week my father died; Pinchas was also his name.
As the first yahrzeit grew closer, I went back to the white binder, hoping I had missed something, hoping that something would have magically appeared in that yawning chasm between Balak and Matos, hoping that my father had left me a breadcrumb. But there were no breadcrumbs; the cupboard remained bare. And so, I turned to the stack of seforim I had taken from his basement collection and found a small book of lectures on Sefer Bamidbar which had been given by my father’s rebbe, Rav Yosef Ber Soloveitchik. A shiur about the semicha that Moshe Rabbeinu bestowed on Yehoshua at the end of Parshas Pinchas inspired the only dvar Torah I would ever write in honor of my father’s yahrzeit.
For the next eight years, life happened. I stopped consulting the binder as if it were an oracle and pursued my own interests, the binder sharing space with my old college and optometry school textbooks, books I no longer used but was unable to part with. My nieces and nephews started to get married shortly after the first yahrzeit, and then the babies came, almost as if my father’s death had triggered this generational shift.
Seven weeks before my father’s tenth yahrzeit, my youngest daughter got married. She was the tenth grandchild to get married in the ten years since his passing, and the numerical synchronicity seemed auspicious in some undefinable way, a nod from the heavens perhaps, or at the very least, no coincidence. After the wedding, I was uncharacteristically weepy – the emotional high had triggered a burst of sentimentality which was further bolstered by the looming milestone yahrzeit, which one of my siblings wryly dubbed “The Big Ten.” Once again, I started to think about the white binder, but also about how to meaningfully link Parshas Pinchas to the yahrzeit. I spent hours googling divrei Torah and poring through my sefarim to find something that resonated, but nothing seemed right.
The Sunday before the yahrzeit was Shiva Asar B’Tammuz and my husband and I drove to Queens to visit the kever. Oddly enough, because it’s very antithetical to my nature, I have never felt my father’s presence in the cemetery. What I do feel is the weight of history, my grandparents whom I barely remember buried next to their siblings and cousins that I never knew, who are buried next to other Hirschs and Hirschorns whose stories are lost forever, lost because no one is left to tell their tales. My father’s grave stands alone, or mostly alone; he was much younger than his siblings and cousins and all those unknown relatives, so he died much later. At that point there was no more space in the front part of the family plot, so his grave is further back, a bridge between the generations. On my way out I put stones on the graves which were stoneless and bare, and with each stone I said a little prayer for each neglected soul.
On the drive home, I had an epiphany. I would go to shul on Shabbos in time for layning and something meaningful would appear to me, something more substantial than Zalman Pinchas dying the week of Parshas Pinchas, a confluence that seemed meaningful at first, but on further scrutiny, fell apart. As much as I loved and cherished my father, he was no zealot. He had strong convictions, which he wasn’t shy to share, but he was not a spear-wielding kanai; any other insights would have to be found elsewhere in the parsha.
The day of the yahrzeit came and went, with too many feelings to put into words. On Shabbos I made it to shul just in time to hear the second pasuk of the parsha being read, a pasuk I knew well because I had perused it so many times. I read each word of the parsha along with the ba’al koreh, letting the narrative itself wash over me, and in the simplicity of the peshat itself, I found what I was looking for, both in the episode involving the Bnos Tzelafchad and also in Hashem’s command to Moshe to go up on Har Ahvarim, each one worthy of its own discussion, which I will save for another time.
The real surprise, though – one that both shocked and delighted me – came not in what we layned, but in what we didn’t layn. As I flipped to the haftara, which was from Yirmiyahu, I passed the haftara that we only say when Parshas Pinchas comes out before Shiva Asar B’Tammuz, which is a story about Eliyahu HaNavi from Melachim Aleph. Its relevance to Parshas Pinchas stems from either the belief that Eliyahu Hanavi is actually Pinchas, or that they were both zealots for Hashem’s honor. The perek starts out with Eliyahu fleeing from Achav and Izevel, and ultimately finding shelter in a cave at Mount Chorev. Hashem calls to him and asks him why he is there, Eliyahu tells him why, and then Hashem tells him to stand on the mountain. The text that follows contains one of the most beautiful sentences in Tanach which encompasses a concept that has afforded me many hours of deep contemplation from the first time I encountered it:
“G-d is passing, and a great powerful wind is smashing mountains and breaking rocks before G-d – but not in the wind is G-d; and after the wind, an earthquake – but not in the earthquake is G-d; and after the earthquake, a fire – but not in the fire is G-d; and after the fire, a still, thin sound” (Melachim I 19:11-12).
This idea of the “still, small voice” which sounds infinitely more lyrical as “kol demama daka,” can roughly be explained as finding Hashem not just in big overt miracles, but also in the minutiae, which can only happen if you are listening, if you are tuned to the right frequency. This also implies that due to our different temperaments and personalities, different people will be attuned to and inspired by different “voices” that Hashem makes available to us. I have known this phrase my whole life – we say it in davening on the Yamim Nora’im – but I didn’t know its provenance until I started learning Nach Yomi about five and a half years ago.
One of the things that I do when I learn Nach Yomi every morning is take notes on the ideas and thoughts that are meaningful to me, and after rereading the perek about the “still, small voice” on Shabbos, I went back to my notes on Melachim to read through what I had written. It struck me then that my father’s binder was exactly this – a compilation of things that had moved him, the same way my Nach Yomi Google doc is a compilation of things that move me. It seems so obvious now, but that white binder was not for me – it was a window into my father’s inner life, a written compilation of the still, small voices that spoke to him, but were only for him.
At my daughter’s wedding, someone asked me if I felt my father’s spirit under the chuppah. I smiled, but sidestepped her question. The wedding was wind and earthquake and fire, wrapped in ivory lace; all I could think about at that moment were the moments still to come. The past stayed firmly in the past. After the excitement subsided, when the wind died down and the fire became a flicker, when being alone in the house was a different kind of alone than it had ever been before, only then was I able to sense my father’s presence.
It is here, in these small, quiet spaces, in these small, quiet moments, that I feel both his absence and his presence most acutely. His presence has shape and form, an entity that I can almost – but not quite – touch, an entity that eludes the eye but not the soul. It is a still, small voice that only I can hear.
