My friendship with Rabbi Eli, on the face of it, was illogical, he was almost ten years older than me and we knew in the Talmud Torah "Morasha". Rabbi Eli was already a veteran teacher and I would start. But from the moment we met, we had crazy friendships. We have not stopped talking about every subject in the world. We talked and talked and talked and kept talking, even as each of us moved to live in different places in the country.
Sometimes we didn't get to talk for a few months, but when we talked again, we kept talking from the same place we stopped. We would talk about everything in the world, about technical, practical things, about things in the depths of a person's soul, about struggles, about very, very deep passages in Rabbi Kook's writings, about what we learned in her company.
My life friend to this day is Rabbi Eli HaYad. I lost the friend of my life. My wife and Dina were also very connected and the chemistry that was created was amazing. Many times I try to understand what Rabbi Eli found in me, but it was something amazing.
It was fun to talk to him, he had a rich world and a rich soul. I do not want to talk about what Rabbi Eli would say about a particular issue, I want to talk about the principle of mental, spiritual, mental toil in every situation he would encounter in his children's education, in Beit Raban's infant education when he taught at Morasha and later on issues that arose when he taught. In "Captivity of Hebron" and in the dilemmas and insights into what is happening in the country.
It's a character of a smart student who lives life in a real way. Always always. Even when Rabbi Eli was in the depths of the problems and situations, the beatings and entanglements, something inner, deep inside me, from the depths of his soul helped him get out of it and he would build another floor after that, some more insights.
In the difficult years they lived in Jerusalem, the last few years there were a nightmare for them, but out of it, out of the crisis, he reached the wonderful time in "Captivity of Hebron." On this change Rabbi Eli told me that he felt that the Blessed One had not given an 'upward' kick.
He is so lacking to me and our family, if who can I speak and who will also understand the words in my soul?
Rabbi Eli was always uplifted. He did it with the laughter he knew how to do, with the cynicism at times, but uplifted.
Tanzavah
Rabbi Zion Toyle
