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The Nazir by Dr. James David Weiss Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak Kook (18....) was responsible for changing the lives of many people, but perhaps the person most affected by Rabbi Kook's dynamic personality and vast knowledge was his pupil, Rabbi David Cohen. David Cohen, son of a Lithuanian rabbi, was considered by many to be an iluy (a Torah prodigy) and demonstrated vast potential for Torah achievement. By the time he was sixteen, he rose to prodigious heights of Torah scholarship in the great yeshivos of Volozhin and Slobodka. Yet, at the age of eighteen he dropped it all. Defections from the yeshiva were not uncommon at the turn of the century and those who left, especially those with the enormous potential of a David Cohen, dealt a severe blow to the yeshiva world and the Torah community at large. "The yeshivas were hemorrhaging," observes Rabbi Berel Wein. "They were losing their life-giving plasma." David Cohen left for Germany, the bastion of culture and secular education in the western world. He attended the University of Heidelberg and the University of Freiberg, where he happily found himself under the tutelage of a certain Professor Shapiro. Shapiro had once been a rabbi who, like many of his students, abandoned tradition for the calling of a new "enlightened" way of life. He taught mathematics in Freiberg and attracted many former yeshiva students who chose him as an intellectual role model. Their studies were not limited to mathematics. Often before class they would engage in deep Talmudic disputation, "...often without yarmulkes, on Shabbos, smoking cigarettes. They just loved to learn Talmud. It is hard for us to understand that frame of mind. We only associate 'learning' with the religious experience, while they learned purely for intellectual motives," Rabbi Wein observed in one of his taped "Biography" lectures. Cohen received his Ph.D. in mathematics and went on to earn a second Doctorate in philosophy. At the age of twenty-six he joined the faculty at the University of Basel in Switzerland where he held chairs in both mathematics and philosophy. In 1914, Rabbi Kook was invited to speak at the founding convention of Agudas Yisrael in Austria. Almost as soon as he left Israel, World War One broke out. The Turks sealed the borders of the Holy Land, making exit and entry into the country impossible. Rabbi Kook was effectively exiled from his country. It would be five years before he would be allowed to journey home. For the first two of those years, he took up residence in Switzerland, accepting the position of Rabbi in a small hamlet named St. Gallan. In a chance meeting, Rabbi Kook was introduced to the young philosophy professor, David Cohen, and they spoke briefly. Cohen recalled later that he was very attracted by the rabbi's unique combination of scholarship and worldliness. A short while later, still enchanted by their first meeting, the professor called on Rabbi Kook. This time they spoke at length on all matters from philosophy to kabbalah, as David Cohen began to sense that he had found someone he could learn from, a mentor who could synthesize the old and the new. "He made me see that traditional Judaism often clarified modern philosophical trends and that the modern temperament clearly owed its intellectual heritage to classic Judaic ideas," Cohen recollects. After a sleepless night, Cohen heard Rabbi Kook recite the prelude to the Parshas HaAkeidah in the morning prayers. Something in his soul snapped; he h ad found his Rebbe. When he had won Cohen's trust, Rabbi Kook challenged him, "Why are you making a fool of yourself? The university life is sheker, false, and if you stay here and get caught up in this career, you too will be sheker." It didn't take long for the professor to acknowledge the strength of the Rabbi's logic. In a very short period of time David Cohen transformed himself entirely. He became a baal teshuvah (returnee to Jewish tradition) and for the rest of Rabbi Kook's stay in Switzerland he learned from him. They both returned to Israel after the war and David Cohen took an oath of nezirus (to become a nazir) to atone for his previous behavior. As a nazir, he never cut his hair nor drank wine, and he was known as "The Nazir" and was reputed to be a tzaddik gamur (a perfected individual). In Rabbi Kook's eyes, his own temporary exile to Switzerland was engineered to save this one Jew. In fact, Rabbi Kook felt that the outbreak of the First World War occurred only to bring David Cohen back to observance. "Hakol bishvil Yisrael," everything exists for the service of the Jewish people. God will turn the world upside down to give one yeshiva dropout the chance to come home. This article was reprinted from Vintage Wein, the Collected Wit and Wisdom of Rabbi Berel Wein by Dr. James David Weiss, with permission from the publisher, The Shaar Press. |