Q:
What does it mean mesivta d’rokiyah?
A:
Mesivta d’rokiyah, yeshiva shel maaleh is portrayed in the Gemara like a real yeshiva. Now in a sense it’s true, in a sense it’s a mashal.
What’s the purpose of a yeshiva? To gain chochmas haTorah. That’s the purpose. In a yeshiva, you don’t manufacture shoes, you don’t make boxes. It’s for the purpose of learning chochmah.
Now in the World To Come, there’s one happiness that was explained here – seeing the ziv haShechinah, and that’s chochmah, realizing the truth of the world. It’s a tremendous wisdom. It comes through our eyes, such a happiness to see the emes of the briyah. We see Hashem and therefore that’s a mesivta d’rokiyah in a higher sense.
So as you sit there, צדיקים יושבים – they sit in that mesivta and they look at the Shechina, and they gain wisdom from it, tremendous wisdom every second, they learn the secrets of the briyah, I don’t have time to explain how that works, the secrets of history, the secrets of nature, they learn all the pnimiyus of everything by looking at Hashem, that’s a tremendous happiness.
However there is another thing. There is such a thing as learning Gemara in yeshiva shel maaleh. There’s Gemara in yeshiva shel maaleh, yes. Those people who acquired a taste, a geshmak, a pleasure in learning, in the World To Come they’re going to get the real taste. מתוקים מדבש ונופת צופים. It’s sweeter than the most delicious kind of cake. The most delicious thing in the world you can imagine is learning Torah, although we don’t feel it in this world. But those people who tried and they got a certain mesikus, a certain pleasure in this world, in the yeshiva shel maaleh, they’ll be in a separate group. They’ll be learning Torah and enjoying it together with the ziv haShechinah together.
So therefore, Olam Habah is me’ein Olam HaZeh. If a person spends his life trying to understand the secrets of the Gemara, of the sugyahs of the Gemara, in the World To Come they’ll do it again, only this time it’ll be with a tremendous happiness, a sweetness. הנחמדים מזהב ומפז רב ומתוקים מדבש ונופת צופים. Nothing as sweet as that. But even without that, the study of the greatness of Hashem, the chochmas Hashem, that encompasses everything and therefore the tzaddikim in that yeshiva shel maaleh, mesivta d’rokiyah will certainly have a tremendous happiness that will never come to an end.
(April 1996)
