When I saw Sivan Rahav Meir's article about the humble home of the late Rabbi Uri Zohar in Jerusalem, I felt I was seeing a midrash.
The man who brought many closer to the Torah passed away near the Feast of the Giving of the Torah, and perhaps that is why the Midrash I mentioned is a well-known legend, which some commentators also place at the time of the giving of the Torah.
According to legend, when Moses ascended to heaven, he saw the Blessed One sitting and decorating the letters of the Torah.
When Moses asked Gd why he was working so hard on every letter, Gd told him that in a few generations a great man would arise in Israel by the name of Rabbi Akiva, and he would "demand on every thorn and thorn a barbed wire of laws."
Moshe asks to meet Rabbi Akiva, and Gd flies him forward in time and seats him in the last row in Akiva's beit midrash, where he marvels at the future of his people, that generations after his death still demands laws from the Torah he gave him.
The movement in time was done by Uri Zohar himself.
He moved throughout the Israeli-Jewish timeline: from the Tel Aviv-Israel temporary life, which was one of the figures who shaped them in the 1960s, as a dominant member of the Kassit and Lul groups to the Jerusalem-Jewish eternal life, in the world of Torah, Which also bought a place of honor.
It is possible that this ability to move in time on his own also earned Rabbi Uri Zohar the ability to see the future of his people without getting up from the chair, but we will get to that ...
As an artist, it seems to me that the most striking characteristic of Uri Zohar was his energy.
Within the artistic groups that had gathered around him he was the engine.
Wild, defiant and full of life, he managed to be at once the man who creates the creative vortex among the great talents of the "Lol" gang and the focused director who commemorates it.
Then sometime it happened: the Talmudic bandit Rish Lakish is told, who met Rabbi Yochanan in the Jordan River and said to him, "Your heroism is the Torah!"
This statement changed Rish Lakish's life and made him one of the great sages of Israel.
Uri Zohar is in my eyes a modern quiche.
I do not know who, or if he had Rabbi Yochanan of his own, but I know that Zohar's tireless energy, his big eyes, searched and found the only infinity that could satisfy endless curiosity.
Even a broad pendulum motion, like the one Zohar's curiosity and energy allowed him to perform in his life, ended up meeting the center.
The center is the future of every pendulum, and this future sat next to Grandpa Uri in the form of one of his grandchildren and the late Arik Einstein.
This grandson, an ultra-Orthodox guy, comes from a combat unit, about which Grandpa Uri said "this boy is righteous", is the result of his grandfather's pendulum movement - a little Rish Lakish and a little Rabbi Yochanan, and this special connection is an important key to the future of the people of Israel. To see in his life.
"I would like to be a bit of a celeb like you first, and then repent ...", the grandson said in that rare article.
Grandpa laughed, and I thought we had a future.
Were we wrong?
Fixed!
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