(condensed from Ein Ayah, Berachot 6:43)

Gemara: When Rav died, his disciples escorted him to burial. When they came back, they said: “Let us go and eat bread by the Dank River.” When they were about to eat, they wondered whether each one should make his own beracha because they were sitting but not reclining, or whether the fact that they discussed eating together is equivalent to reclining and one could exempt the others from making the berachot. They did not know the answer. Rav Ada bar Ahava got up and moved the rip in the garment (from the mourning for Rav) to the back and made another rip, saying: “Rav has died, and we don’t even know the laws of berachot on food.” Finally, a sage came, contrasted a mishna and a baraita, and concluded that discussing eating together is equivalent to reclining.

Ein Ayah: The loss to the world upon the death of a tzaddik is two-fold, like his importance to the world during his life. One element is the lofty segula (roughly, the special spiritual conduciveness). Namely, when a holy person is in the world, it certainly brings on shleimut to those who are both near to and far from the tzaddik. The second element is from the more direct benefit that people extracted from his Torah knowledge and his righteousness.

The first element is broader and deeper and is thus the focus of one’s thoughts during the ripping of the clothes. However, when the halachic issue arose and they did not have a solution, Rav’s disciples felt more strongly their personal loss of a teacher to whom to turn, and Rav Ada decided to do something in recognition of this feeling. They turned the clothes around to indicate that this second element now eclipsed, in their cognizant thought, the first, general element.