By Yehuda Sugar
On the day on the Chabad calendar that celebrates the return of the Agudas Chassidei Chabad library books and ultimately the prizing of learning, Yeshiva Temimei Darech of Tsfat will host a Siyum HaShas, spotlighting the accomplishment of its learning director, Rabbi Shmuel Kopel, who undertook to learn the entire Talmud on his own.
When he embarked on the mission 3.5 years ago, a Baal Habos at the time albeit a learned one, little did Kopel know that the effort would help pave the way to land him a job as the popular yeshiva’s learning director.
But it seems it did.
Originally from Crown Heights, a father of more than a minyan of children, bli ayin hara, and with a background in shlichus, the 40-year-old Kopel said that soon after he started the project, “crazy things started happening in my life. One of them was that I went from teaching at YTD (Yeshiva Temimei Darech) for 7 years on a freelance basis to being offered a full-time job as a Gemara teacher and soon thereafter was appointed to direct the overall learning and semicha programs.”
Completing all 63 tractates of the Gemara is an endeavor of epic proportion involving learning 5,422 pages of intricate and intellectually challenging discussions and arguments that provide the basis for Jewish law. It comes in distinction to the more common challenge of finishing just one book of the Talmud or other works of Torah or learning the whole Talmud by splitting it up among many people.
The achievement will be celebrated at the yeshiva this Sunday night, Hey Teves, beginning after 7 p.m. Maariv at its classy new confines (120 Jerusalem St.), the former site of a 5-star boutique hotel, among substantial fanfare. Following the customary siyum, the public completion of the Gemara by Kopel and a special prayer for the soldiers and hostages, a Seudas Mitzvah will take place in an atmosphere of farbrengen and divrei Torah with community members and local rebbeim joining in with a certain-to-be-beaming yeshiva founder and Rosh Yeshiva, Rabbi Shalom Pasternak.
“We’re very much looking forward to this milestone,” said Pasternak, who founded the institution in 2009 originally as the only English-speaking yeshiva for male baalei teshuva in northern Israel. “This accomplishment should inspire all of us to stay driven in our learning, always endeavoring to reach new heights.”
The date of the 5th of Teves selected for the event is anyway a day of joyous celebration for Chabad Chassidim as it is the anniversary of the day in 5747, corresponding to Jan. 6, 1987, that a New York federal court judge ordered the return of stolen books to the esteemed Agudas Chassidei Chabad library.
