Do these Torah concepts, even the greatest, have any permanence? Doesn't senility erase them from the mind?
ANSWER:
It does not. You are right, it erased them from the conscious mind, but in the subconscious they remain; I'll give you an example. A senile person who seems to understand nothing, sometimes surprises people by making a remark about his experiences. Where did he get that? He seemed to be out of his mind entirely. The answer is as was mentioned before, it's there. You can never erase from the subconscious, and that becomes part of the baggage of your soul.
Even though consciously he's not able now to summon – it's like a viewer. You have a machine that helps you view pictures. The viewer gets out of order and the pictures that are supposed to focus automatically don't come anymore; the conveyor broke down. So you look through the viewing scope and you don't see the picture anymore. But the pictures are there waiting only the apparatus broke down.
In senility the apparatus of recalling consciously all the facts that you once learned has broken down, but subconsciously they're all stacked away, it never could be erased. It's taken along with the neshomo; it's part of the baggage of the soul in the World to Come.
That's why the Gemara says, in the aron habris in the mishkon and in the mikdash they had the luchos that Moshe Rabbeinu brought down, but also the shivrei haluchos, the broken ones and the second tablets, the entire ones. Now the broken ones you have to know, that when Moshe Rabbeinu broke them, the inscriptions were destroyed – the writing was destroyed. So the question is what's the purpose? The answer is, they once had the writing on them.
And therefore the Gemara says we learn from this, והזהרו בזקן ששכח תלמודו מחמת אונסו דאמרינן לוחות ושברי לוחות מונחות בארון be careful with an old sage that forgot his learning, because even the broken luchos are also put in the aron; now that means something. An old sage, he's senile now let's say, you have to watch him that he should not run out in his underwear into the street, that's how senile he is. He even forgot that a street is not a place for underwear.
But in his subconscious everything that he learned is there, you cannot erase it. The bad things that he learned also he cannot erase, everything is there. When he comes to the Next World, and then his focusing apparatus is repaired, then he's going to see these pictures, only in a more glorious perspective.
Nothing goes lost that you learned in this world and that's why it's so important to learn only the right things.
Good Shabbos To All
This is transcribed from questions that were posed to Harav Miller by the audience at the Thursday night lectures. To listen to the audio of this Q & A please dial: 201-676-3210
Important Numbers
