A Model To Aspire Toward

In the Gemorah from Bava Metziah 85b, Rabbi Chiya tells of how he planted flax, then with the flax wove nets, and with the nets caught deer. he gave the deer meat to orphans for food and used the hides for parchment . He wrote the Torah on the parchment and brought it to a town without teachers and he taught the Chamishah Chumshei Torah to five children. And he told each one to teach it to a friend. Then he taught the Shishah Sidrei Mishnah to six kids and instructed each one to teach it to a friend. And he told them all to stay occupied teaching each other the written and oral Torah until he returned. "So I arranged," he said, ""that Torah would not be forgotten in Israel." And the Gemorah comments that this is why Rabi Yehudah HaNasi said, "How great are the deeds of Rabi Chiya."

Rav Aharon Kotler asked why Rabbi Chiya needed to do what he did in the way that he did. Why didn't he buy parchment and hire a scribe? Why didn't he just buy a Torah? Why did he go through a dramatic process from A to Z? Why did he not personally skip even one dotting of an i or crossing of a t ?

Rabbi Kotler's take on this story is that Rabbi Chiya was not only saying that Torah had to be preserved. He was modelling the main ingredient that must accompany every other component of the process. For Torah to be preserved there must be passionate purity.

As Irving Bunim (as put to paper by Charles Wengrov) puts it: "...From the very start his entire program of activity for the Torah was LeSheim Shamayim - for the sake of Heaven. No other purpose or intention was mixed into it...The sage knew how important it was to teach this lesson - not in words, as one more pious rule among many, but by action, which speaks louder than words... Even when he was left with meat from the captured dear, he would not sell it. For people could then say that this was his main purpose, to turn a profit, and the rest was incidental; or at least they could comment sarcastically that the pious dedicated rabbi 'was not losing on the deal.' So he gave the venison away to orphan children in an act of charity."

It makes sense that Rav Aharon Kotler saw it this way. He was pure fire, pure Torah, to the best of my understanding. And Irving Bunim was from a place of purity as well and thus remembered and took in this idea and passed it on. It's not for nothing that his biography is entitled A Fire In His Soul.