Sunday. The sun was shining and the crowds began streaming in from all places across the metropolitan area. The electricity in the room was palpable.

Packed to capacity, there was not a seat to spare. For weeks beforehand, people had been talking about it. It was the buzz at Shabbos tables, and parents and even grandparents all waited in anticipation for the day to come. Something historic was about to unfold. The participants themselves, the stars of the event, had been coming home every night with a special glow, reminding their loved ones to mark the date. They were to be celebrated as the upholders of Torah, those lomdei Torah upon whom, the meforshim tell us, the very world stands.

I entered the large event hall, adorned with care: banners draped behind the mechubadim, a deliberate beauty that announced before a single word was spoken that this was no ordinary gathering.

When the program began, the room fell silent.

And then, one of the choshuve “honorees,” one of the participants who holds up the world with his Torah, began to speak.

“Vayikra, un er hut gerufin. El Moshe, tzu Moshe.”

No. This was not the Adirei HaTorah event. This was the seudas Chumash for Pre-1A at The Cheder in Brooklyn. And if, for the first few sentences, my dear readers were absolutely certain that I was describing that magnificent maamad in Philadelphia, then I have made my point before I’ve even made it. Because the only difference between those two events, the only one that actually matters, is that one of them had better parking.

Now, before anyone accuses me of minimizing what happened at the Xfinity Mobile Arena, let me say clearly: I am not. Adirei HaTorah was breathtaking. Twenty thousand Yidden in one arena, ten thousand in another. Yungeleit, baalei batim, fathers and sons gathered to declare, in an arena that has hosted rock concerts and hockey playoffs, that the yungerman sitting and learning is the most important person in the room. Any room. The mission of the evening, as the roshei yeshiva articulated with a clarity that cut right through the noise of modern life, was nothing less than restoring the glory of the lomeid Torah.

The roshei yeshiva spoke. Rav Yitzchok Soloveitchik spoke. And the massive audience spoke in ways louder than ever heard before on these shores. There is nothing comparable in the enormity of the event. But maybe, in some ways, in the Heavenly scales, there is a spiritual match.

Chazal teach us a deceptively simple observation: Im ein gedayim, ein teyashim — If there are no kids, there are no goats. If there are no kids, there will be no adults. Without that Chumash seudah, there is no Adirei HaTorah.

A generation of lomdei Torah does not materialize from thin air at a sports arena. It is assembled, one posuk at a time, in classrooms across the country. It may begin in Pre 1-A classrooms that smell like melted crayons, with a whiff of spilled grape juice, with pre-school rabbeim whose names will never appear in lights and will never enter rooms accompanied by musicians playing “Yomim,” but it is the patience and perseverance of those melamdei tinokos that quietly seed the fertile ground that grows the men who are one day celebrated in giant arenas.

Those twenty thousand men in Philadelphia were once five years old. Every single one of them had a moment, a first posuk, a first Rashi, a first Tosafos. Then a Maharsha and all the seforim, Rishonim and Acharonim that were so proudly articulated at Sunday night’s event.

The great celebration of thirty thousand is nothing less than the sum of thousands of tiny siyumim and haschalos of tens of thousands of kinderlach. A child finishing his first parsha. A boy chanting Bereishis bara Elokim with slightly more confidence because his rebbi infused in him the ahavas haTorah that will one day manifest itself in hours of yegiah on a bench in the Mir or Ponovezh, or a seat in BMG.

We know that the world stands on the Torah of tinokes shel bais rabbon. Maybe the Adirei HaTorah stand on them too.

I am reminded of something I heard in 1985 at a kollel dinner in Pittsburgh. If the source surprises you, it surprised me considerably more. The speaker was Dick Caliguiri, then the mayor of Pittsburgh, a man whose familiarity with Gemara was, shall we say, nonexistent, but whose instinct for truth was remarkably poignant. It was not long after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power and established perestroika, and Torah was slowly, cautiously, coming back to life in the Soviet Union. The mayor had recently visited the Soviet Union, and for reasons I never understood, he said that he had visited a kollel there. It quietly and courageously had taken root in the chaos of the times, behind what remained of the crumbling Iron Curtain. He told our entire audience in that Pittsburgh ballroom about those fewer than ten men, sitting in a cramped room, learning Talmud in a city that had spent decades trying to make the very thought of it illegal.

He looked out at us and said something I have never forgotten: “I know that the only reason there is a kollel in Moscow is because there is a kollel here in Pittsburgh.”

The man was an Italian-American mayor with no yichus to speak of and no knowledge of Torah other than two day schools and a kollel in his town. And yet he had articulated, without knowing it, something our greatest mussar giants have always taught us. Torah is never isolated or unconnected. Everything is linked. Every link holds the next one up. And chains are only as strong as their weakest or, in this case, smallest link, the five-year-old reciting Vayikra and Bereishis into a microphone that is slightly too tall for him.

That child in Brooklyn is not a warm-up act for Philadelphia. He is also Philadelphia. He is an Adir HaTorah, and if we train him right, he will grow to be celebrated, not in the basement of a cheder in Brooklyn, but in large stadiums that will host all of Klal Yisroel.

So I say: Bring on the rugelach and coffee. Bring on the folding chairs and the slightly off-key singing and the banner that says mazel tov in gold letters that have been quietly peeling off since the time they made the banner years ago. Bring on the small boys with their beautiful paper crowns, some that are sitting on the noses or held up by the ears of the boys with smaller heads. Then remember to applaud loud enough so that it will echo all the way to Philadelphia.

Adirei HaTorah happens once a year. A Siyum Hashas happens once in seven. They are glorious and they are necessary and they lift the entire klal in ways that are real and lasting.

But a child saying his first posuk of Chumash? That happens every single week even in front of a grandmother who is already crying before he opens his mouth. But that grandmother will be the mother of the daughter who is crying with pride at the accomplishments of her husband who said his first chaburah in BMG.

Those twenty thousand Adirei in Philadelphia are the teyashim or the tzon. Strong, proud, magnificent goats, each one a world. But the kids? The gedayim?

Without the seudas Chumash and the crooked yarmulka and the microphone that is slightly too tall, you have no event to plan, no arena to fill, no maamad to speak of.

Celebrate them. Cherish them. Nurture them. They are and will be the next generation of Adirei HaTorah.

Just Saying.