The Day the Lion Bit the Rosh Yeshiva: When the Righteous Became Uncircumcised

I’m going to tell you a lesson about a man I’ll call Noach, builder of many yeshivot and batei midrash, a Rosh Yeshiva whose benches stretched like planks, whose shelves of sefarim rose like ribs of a teivah. For one hundred and twenty years he “built arcs,” and by that I mean houses of learning—rooms lined with voices, tables worn smooth by hands, doors open wide enough for beasts and men and doubts to enter together. Those 120 years were not just a timeline; they were a mirror of a soul’s journey in this world. People say the truly righteous—tzadikim—reach 120. But there is a secret here that hurts to speak: being “righteous” is not enough if, at the end of that span, the brit has been cut in the heart, if the covenant has quietly loosened while the lips still say all the right words, if the image of HaShem no longer shines from the face.

He entered the teivah because a great flood came—not only of water, but of confusions that drown clarity, of arguments dressed like piety, of noise that makes prayer forget itself. Inside that shelter, discipline ruled the hours: each creature in its turn, each need in its measure. Yet there was a night the lion was fed late, and it struck his hand. I don’t call it punishment; I call it a mirror. A sign that when we serve only the letter and neglect the living pulse of chesed, the world itself pushes back. Even the king of beasts becomes a rebuke written in fang: you are tending the rules, but you are not reflecting the image. He remained there a full year—long enough for the torrent outside to quiet and the storm inside to become audible. A year to learn that a structure can keep you dry while your heart dries out inside it, if you forget why you built it.

The teivah was a kind of sukkah too—thin shade, measured light, enough roof to face the sky without pretending to own it. And when he stepped out from that shade, the hidden cracks showed. He planted, he poured, he believed he had the halachic scaffolding to hold it all. It was guised as a good thing, permitted on paper, even praised by those who like fences more than fields. But wine has voices. There is the cup that sanctifies, and there is the cup that steals the mind while promising to give it back tomorrow. He drank the second, the one I call “Satan’s wine,” the one that flatters as it hollows. And as the intoxication peeled back the polite layers, what was concealed in modest language became visible in pain: the covenant had been severed in spirit long before anyone named it. Sexual inappropriateness doesn’t begin at the act; it begins at the quiet decision to love the rulebook more than the person, the certification more than the sanctity, the appearance more than the awe. When the cover slipped, even kin became the blade—what we call castration in the old story becomes, in our generation, the lived reality of a heart cut off from brit, a lev that no longer feels, a face that no longer reflects HaShem.

This is how a year inside turns into a lifetime lesson outside. You can build a hundred batei midrash and still miss the beit within. You can hold the title Rosh Yeshiva and forget that the roar in your hallway is a hungry lion named Compassion, waiting to be fed on time. You can say “I did all that was written” and discover at the end that the letters you served never turned into light. The flood recedes, the ground dries, the vineyard sprouts, the cup gleams, the rationale is airtight, the signatures are many—and still the brit is thin as a thread. And when the thread finally snaps, the world calls it scandal, but heaven calls it revelation: the severing didn’t happen today; today only showed it.

So I speak softly to you, to myself, to anyone who builds: do not mistake building for binding, nor policy for covenant, nor permission for purity. The year in the teivah is for unlearning the arrogance that hides under compliance. The sukkah is for stepping out of the illusion that roofs make us safe if hearts are stone. The vineyard is for remembering that grapes are secrets—clusters that can hold either blessing or a quiet undoing, depending on who lifts the cup and why. And the lion at your door is for teaching you, one more time, to feed the living before you feed the ledger, to return to the brit before you defend your brand.