Smoking at Har Sinai?

It has been a difficult forty days. Forty days ago I made up my mind to give up smoking for at least forty days. Why forty days? Last year, when I told my Rebbe, Rav Brandvine, that I wanted to give up smoking, he suggested that I try doing it for forty days. He based this figure on the advice of his holy ancestor, Rebbe Elimelich of Lyzhensk, who wrote in the “tsaytil hakatan” that if a person wants to take upon himself a way of good behavior, either doing something good or refraining from something bad, he should strive to do it for forty days. Truly, it is quite a daunting task to do or not do something for forty days. After Reb Shlomo Calebach, of blessed memory, gave a “learning” (kind of a combination concert-Torah class get high on God and Judaism get together with friends), my mother said to the saintly Rabbi that she wanted to take it upon herself to spend less of her husbands hard earned dollars. Reb Shlomo said to my mom, “you know, Brenda, Reb Nachman says that when you make a vow, make it for an hour.” If you take it upon yourself not to do something, start by not doing it for just and hour, no strings attached. Don’t say, “I vow never to beat my dog again as long as I live.” Because chances are you will be breaking that vow, if you are a problem dog-beater. But if you say, “it’s just an hour,” then you can handle it, and keep your word. And we all know how important it is for a person to keep his word, even to himself. Then when he sees that he can do it for an hour, he can go on and continue to do it for another hour, for a whole day, for a whole month. And it that way it is a lot more effective.


You can say many things about God, and many things about God that you cannot prove. But if there is one thing you can truly say about God, it is that He always keeps his promise. And we are told all the time that God is All-Powerful. That He can do anything. But remember, my friends, remember that there is one thing the God cannot do. He cannot break his promise.


So it seems that doing something for forty is reminiscent of Moshe Rabyenu’s forty days on Mount Sinai. I am sitting in the Keshet Restaurant here in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, run by ex-kibbutzniks Ori and Gina. Working in the kitchen we have the tie-dyed Tsaddik Yehuda Witt. When Gina mentioned that modifying behavior for forty days is derived from Moshe’s forty days on Sinai, I mentioned that specifically quitting smoking for forty days is learned from Moshe’s forty days, because everyone knows that he didn’t have a single cigarette the entire time he was up there. Then Yehuda piped in and said, “what do you mean! The Torah says har Sinai ashan culo – Har Sinai was all smoke!” So mazal tov, it was one huge forty day spliff of spiritual reception.


And now, a heart attack later, Rav Brandvine, may he live long, has also quit smoking. And I believe that he quit before the heart attack. He once told my how he decided to quit. He said, “It was in the middle of the night, and I couldn’t find a match at home. So I went down to the boiler room in the basement of the building to try to light the cigarette off of the pilot light of the boiler. When I got there, it turned out that the pilot light was hard to get to, and I had lie down flat under the boiler with my arm outstretched in order to light the cigarette. After I crawled out from under the boiler and went upstairs, I looked at myself in the mirror, and I was covered with black soot from head to toe. All this for a cigarette, so I thought to myself, is it worth it?.”

Will Betzalel have a smoke tomorrow, on day forty-one? Tune in next time, for another exiting adventure of – the Shadow.