This merciless and unrelenting pandemic has claimed the lives of so many: some unknown to us, some known, and some dear and beloved by us. Approximately one year ago, a special and irreplaceable individual was tragically taken by this pandemic, my dear rebbe, Rabbi Chaim Blumberg, zt”l. He was my 11th grade rebbe at TA, but he wasn’t just a teacher of Gemara or halacha or parsha. He was the true definition of what a mechanech is and should be; he taught and led us by example through showing us his love for Torah and through displaying daily for us the lifestyle of a true ben Torah. I couldn’t have asked for anyone better to lead me in learning and through my seventeenth year on this earth than Rabbi Blumberg. He taught at TA for approximately forty years so, of course, he had many talmidim. And I’m certain they all have their own stories of what he meant to them and how he impacted them. With the recent passing of his first yahrtzeit, allow me to share with you what Rabbi Blumberg meant to me and how he impacted my life.
When I arrived in
TA’s high school as an 11th grader, I didn’t know what to expect. I
had recently transferred from the Hebrew Academy of Greater Washington with
hopes of finding a school where I could grow in my limud haTorah and immerse myself in an environment that had a heavy
focus on learning. The class where I would spend the next year of my limudei kodesh studies had only about eight
students. I walked into my new classroom that first day of school and was
struck by the visage of a rebbe, slightly stern in appearance, with a majestic
gray beard sitting behind the teacher’s desk, his briefcase resting atop it.
His head was buried in a small, old copy of a Mishnah Berura gripped in one hand and his glasses grasped with his
other. When I walked into the room, he looked up at me from his sefer. The stern look gave way to a warm
smile. He nodded his head and said, “Hello.” I introduced myself with my Hebrew
name; “I’m Avrohom Shmuel Elbaum.” He gave a nod of the head; “I’m Rabbi
Blumberg.”
He seemed to me,
in that moment, like a simple, quiet man, not a passionate or animated rebbe type
or a fun camp counselor type – just a modest, somewhat serious mechanech. But, often in life we don’t
realize in the moment how relationships and events will develop and ultimately
affect us. I think it was when my first week at TA came to a close that I
realized I wasn’t dealing with a rebbe who would just deliver a lomdishe shiur for an hour or two every
morning. This rebbe, in whose class I found myself, was something special, a
true talmid chacham and someone who
would suffuse within us something intangible – an intangible which I still
carry with me to this day – the feeling and love for Torah learning and the
Torah lifestyle.
It seems to me
that the best way to absorb those values is to see them firsthand from someone
who’s not only genuine and authentic in his own ahavas Torah but is invested in his talmid’s spiritual growth. That was Rabbi Blumberg – a gentle man
whose limud haTorah and transmission
of Torah to his students was his lifeblood. Phrases like “a love for limud haTorah” or “he cared for his talmidim” sound like platitudes; it’s
something that is said about a lot of mechanchim
and rebbeim in yeshivas. But I assure you that with Rabbi Blumberg it was the
truth. That year of my life was formative for me as it is, I imagine, for many
sixteen-year-olds, and Rabbi Blumberg was a big reason for it. TA’s 11th
grade was special then because we had a lineup of Rabbi Blumberg for Gemara in
the morning and Rabbi Dovid Katz in the afternoon for Nach and Jewish history. What a one-two punch for a kid like me
coming from a modern Orthodox day school!
Early on, I
spotted that my new rebbe’s knowledge of practical halachos and Mishnah Berura was extraordinary and like
nothing I had ever been exposed to. And since I hadn’t seen anything like that
before, I wanted to take full advantage of the opportunity to be around someone
like him on a daily basis. So I used to come up with a shaila (question) on halacha every morning to ask him. When I came
into the classroom each morning, I’d sit down at my desk (which, after about three days of being in his class, I made sure
to put right next to his desk). He would look up from his Mishnah Berura, and before it was time to start shiur, like clock-work, I would say,
“Rebbe, I have a shaila.”
Most rebbeim may
abide this I-have-a-shaila shtick for
a day or two, maybe three, but Rabbi Blumberg, for reasons beyond me at the
time, seemed to enjoy it. When it came to talking Torah with his talmidim,
he had the kind of patience to not get irritated or annoyed. This was true even
when he was on the cusp of launching into his prepared shiur on the Gemara and I’d sit down and summarily ask him my daily
shaila. Sometimes he would have a
quick answer like “muttar (permitted)”
or “assur (forbidden),” and sometimes
he would engage the class and spend time discussing what the different poskim say. I don’t think he ever said,
“Not today,” or “I’m not in the mood for this.” That wasn’t him. Instead, when
I would jump in with my whole “Rebbe, I have a shaila,” nine times out of ten, he would flash that warm and
gracious smile, klop the desk and say,
“Avrohom Shmuel has a shaila.” (Later
in my yeshiva career, under a different rebbe, I tried this pre-shiur shaila-asking routine with the hope of continuing to increase my
proficiency in halacha l’maaseh, but
it went down like a lead balloon after about two days with the rebbi so I
quickly abandoned it.)
As I progressed
through the years in yeshiva, two things became apparent to me looking back on
Rabbi Blumberg’s shiur: One, the
number of mechanchim with the
proficiency in halacha l’maaseh that Rabbi Blumberg had were
scarce at best, and, two, most rebbeim I came across wanted to focus on
whatever lomdishe shiur they had prepared for the day and did
not want to be bothered with an off-topic shaila
on halacha l’maaseh – or on anything
else for that matter. Not Rabbi Blumberg. Talking Torah with his talmidim is what truly excited him. It
didn’t matter whether the topic was a ktzos
on maseches Gittin, a kashya (question) on how the Mishnah Berura paskened a halacha, or a vort on the parsha. Rebbe was there for it, and boy did he love it. Answering
these shailos only took a few minutes
every day, but his answers and his enthusiasm in answering them has always
stayed with me. I draw, daily, on some of the psakim he gave me from our pre-shiur
halacha chats.
Rabbi Blumberg wasn’t
interested in hearing himself talk or bloviate on some sevara that he had developed on our gemara. He was a TA, Baltimore
boy himself, one of us, and his happiness came from getting us to develop our
learning on our own. If we came up with a kashya
on the gemara or on any of the chiddushim
we discussed on the gemara, he didn’t just humor us with a retort of “good kashya,” then serve us a quick answer
and move on. He would stew on it, give it consideration, contemplate all sides
of it in his head. Sometimes he would klop
his closed fist on the table, knuckles first, and say “That’s takeh (indeed) a good kashya. Does everyone hear Moshe’s kashya?” Then he might repeat it himself
to the class and work out a teretz (explanation)
with all of us. Do you know how good it felt for us 11th graders to
hear our kashya or teretz repeated to the class by our rebbe?
And if we were able to provide a teretz
to a kashya that he hadn’t thought of
before, he would listen to it intently. If it was a teretz that made sense to him, would he be thrilled. He’d repeat it
for the class over and over and say, “Yosef! Very good! Does everyone hear it?
Very good.” If a talmid’s kashya or teretz was off the mark, he never dismissed it out of hand. He
always at least considered it and thought about it before giving you his
answer. The positive reinforcement he gave us and the respect with which he
treated us and our learning were extraordinary. Certain rebbeim and mechanchim garner respect from their talmidim because of the chochma (wisdom) they exhibit, but more
often than not it’s because of the sincere care and concern they show for their
talmidim.
That year we
learned the second perek (chapter) of
Maseches Shabbos b’iyun (in depth), and when Chanukah
approached, our class contributed to a kuntras
(small book), in Hebrew,
put together by some of the talmidim
and rebbeim in the TA high school. What we had to do was choose any topic from
the Gemara we had learnt that year, come up with a shtickl Torah on it, and write it out in Hebrew. After days of
trying to choose a good inyan (topic),
I said, “Rebbe, I can’t decide what I’m going to write on.” He said, “How about
you write up something on the inyan
of shemen sreifa and use that gevaldig sevara from the Kehillas Yaakov that we talked about in
class?” So, I wrote up the shtickl
Torah for the kuntras on the somewhat
obscure topic of shemen sreifah and
even included a kashya and teretz of Rabbi Blumberg’s which he had
come up with himself. That was the first time I ever wrote any shitckl Torah in Hebrew. I didn’t even
think my abilities in learning were at the point that I could write a few pages
in Hebrew, much less on such an obscure inyan like shemen sreifa. Rabbi
Blumberg encouraged me, though. (Of course, he edited my submission for me.) I
still have that kuntras on my sefarim shelf and think about Rabbi
Blumberg whenever I see it.
The Kehillas Yaakov which he referred to is
a sefer written by the Steipler Gaon
on the Gemara. Rabbi Blumberg used to enjoy citing from it when he could. I say
“when he could” because at the time, any sefer
of Kehillas Yaakov could only be
purchased from the Steipler’s daughter in Bnei Brak. Rabbi Blumberg didn’t have
a copy of the set himself. In fact, I believe he had only taught us that chiddush of the Kehillas Yaakov on shemen
sreifa because it was quoted in a different sefer that he had.
In any event, that
wasn’t the only time he quoted the Steipler Gaon. Every Friday, Rabbi Blumberg
used to say various vortlech on the parsha. He would always bring a sefer of divrei Torah with him each Friday morning; it would often be sefarim like Tallelei Oros, Mishulchan
Gavoha, or the latest sefer that had
come out with cute vortlech on the parsha. He’d get a kick out of telling
us the different vortlech of the parsha that struck his fancy. And he’d
get an even bigger kick out of hearing our own thoughts on those vortlach. Sometimes on Fridays he would
give us divrei Torah from a sefer that the Steipler wrote on Chumash
called Birchas Peretz, which, like Kehillas
Yaakov, was unavailable in bookstores. He used to tell us that you can only
get this sefer in Bnei Brak from the
Steipler’s daughter but that he had somehow gotten hold of it a while back. You
could tell it was very dear to him. Looking back, I can’t think of a better way
to spend erev Shabbos then those
delightful Friday mornings listening to my rebbe gleefully deliver his favorite
divrei Torah on the weekly parsha.
It turns out that,
around Chanukah time, my family and I flew to Eretz Yisrael to visit my sister,
Rachel, who had been studying in seminary that year. I told Rabbi Blumberg that
I was going to Eretz Yisrael and that I wanted to visit gedolim while I was there. One of the ones he suggested was R’
Chaim Kanievsky, the son of the Steipler Gaon. He smiled and half-jokingly
said, “If you do see R’ Chaim, maybe you can get a copy of the Kehillas Yaakov for me.” We both
giggled, but as I thought about it, I said to myself “Why not?” I told him
right before I left, that I was going to try and track down a set of Kehillas Yaakov for him from Bnei Brak.
He shot back that warm smile at me. The day before I left, Rebbe gave me a
letter he had written to R’ Chaim and said, “If you really are going to see R’
Chaim, here is a letter with a kashya
that I’ve been struggling with.” I asked him about it, and he said it was just a shaila
on an inyan that he had been working
on. “Hopefully, R’ Chaim will send me a response,” he said to me.
Well, a week or so
later, my father and I drove to Bnei Brak, and we met R’ Chaim outdoors on a
warm, sunny afternoon. R’ Chaim was sitting in a car, and I delivered the
letter from my rebbe to him. After briefly speaking with R’ Chaim, I asked one
of his gabbais how I could obtain a
set of Kehillas Yaakov for my rebbe,
and they pointed me to the dira of
the Steipler’s daughter. They told me I had to purchase it directly from her.
So, off I went to the dira down the
street. An older rebbetzin, answered the door, and I told her I was looking to
purchase a set of Kehillas Yaakov for
my rebbe. I also timidly asked for my own copy of Birchas Peretz. She disappeared for a few minutes and came back
carrying a huge set of black sefarim
with the words “Kehillas Yaakov”
embossed on the side in gold. I gave her the money and thanked her, imagining
how excited Rabbi Blumberg would be to finally have a copy of his own.
On my first day
back at school, I shlepped the heavy
set of black sefarim direct from Bnei
Brak into Rabbi Blumberg’s classroom. You would’ve thought I was handing him a
check for three point five million dollars. “Avrohom Shmuel, you got it! Thank
you! Thank you!” he exclaimed, beaming at the set of Kehillas Yaakov sitting on his desk. His pure happiness and
excitement just to receive a new set of sefarim
which he didn’t already own was infectious.
A few months later
Rabbi Blumberg brought into class a letter from Eretz Yisrael. R’ Chaim had responded
to Rabbi Blumberg’s shaila and mailed
him a teretz. I found out later from
Rabbi Dovid Katz, another talmid of
Rabbi Blumberg’s, that Rabbi Blumberg is actually mentioned in Igros Moshe regarding a shaila that he asked R’ Moshe Feinstein
many years ago. Rabbi Blumberg never told me about that. To him, it wasn’t a
matter of personal pride to communicate with a gadol, he was just excited to talk Torah with one and have his shailos answered. Maybe that’s why he
never minded taking the time to answer mine. But, that’s one of those rare
intangibles he possessed.
Yet Rabbi Blumberg
was also as normal as can be. I had a rebbe in TA who told me about his father,
who used to be frum in Europe but
lost his frumkeit when he came to
America. This rebbe told me that he didn’t stand for his father when his father
entered the room and didn’t show him the kavod
that a parent typically deserves because he considered his father a true apikores for not retaining his frumkeit. This got me thinking about
relatives of my own family who came to this country and weren’t as observant as
they were in Europe. Unfortunately, we all have relatives who didn’t keep the same
level of frumkeit they did before
they came to America. Was this how I should view these family members? I truly
wasn’t sure and wanted to know the right way to relate to them. So the next
morning when I came into Rabbi Blumberg’s classroom, instead of asking him a
halachic shaila, I said to him, “I
have a shaila. If we have a relative,
whether a cousin or a parent or a grandparent, who lost their frumkeit when they came to America,
should we still show them kavod?” He
looked at me solemnly and said, “Yes.”
“But, what about
the fact that they relinquished their frumkeit?”
I asked. “I mean, it’s not like they were raised not knowing anything. These
people voluntarily chose to shed their observance. Why aren’t they apikorsim?”
He replied in a
sober and soft tone, “Avrohom Shmuel, I know a lot of people like that. We all
have relatives like that. You don’t know what it was like for them when they
came to this country and what nisyonos
(challenges) they faced. Don’t judge them. You can’t put yourself in their
shoes.”
I asked him, “So
you think I should still respect these people in thought and in practice? I
mean, do you?”
Without
hesitating, he said “Yes.” And that was that.
The next year, I
graduated TA. I spent time in yeshiva in Eretz Yisrael and America, went to law
school, and got married. Many years passed, yet I always carried with me my
rebbe’s warm enthusiasm for Torah. I happened to run into him a few years ago
at a TA banquet at Martin’s West when TA was celebrating its 100th
anniversary. After all, he was a TA boy like the rest of us. Of course he was
there, but I was thrilled to see him after all these years. It was as we were
making our way for the exit at the end of the banquet that I noticed him,
quietly standing right behind me. I turned around and there was that warm
smile. I couldn’t believe it was him. I was so excited to talk to him again
after so many years and to introduce my wife to him.
He told me he
wasn’t at TA anymore and had recently moved to Lakewood to be with his children
and grandchildren. I was sorry that Baltimore’s loss was Lakewood’s gain but
was happy that he was enjoying the nachas
from his children. I told him what an impact he had on me and asked him,
“Remember how I used to ask you shailos
every morning.” He smiled warmly and shook his head yes. I told him how much I
loved his class. I don’t know if he really remembered all the details of that
year as I did or my whole shaila
shtick. Maybe not. He almost seemed like he was wondering why I was so excited
to see him. I wanted him to know how much that year meant to me and how much he
meant to me as a rebbe.
I can’t tell you
how sad I was when, in September of last year, I saw the text on my phone from
Rabbi Katz that Rabbi Blumberg was taken from us during this horrifying Covid
pandemic. Like many of his talmidim,
I felt like I was hit by a two by four. I called Rabbi Katz, and we shared our
disbelief and sadness with each other at his passing. I spoke to other former
classmates of mine and exchanged fond memories of our dear rebbe. I’m so sad
he’s gone now but I’m so glad Hashem gave me the opportunity to see him one
more time so I could tell him what he meant to me and how he impacted my life.
In Rashi’s famous
words about Yaakov leaving Beersheva, when a tzadik exits he leaves behind a roshem,
an impression; because as long as a tzadik
is present in a city, he is its glory, splendor, and beauty. That’s the loss I
felt when I watched the levaya on
Zoom of my rebbe, Harav Chaim Yeshayah ben Moshe, zt”l. If not for Rabbi Blumberg, I wouldn’t have gone to Bnei Brak.
I wouldn’t have met with Rav Chaim Kanievsky, I wouldn’t have bought Birchos Peretz (and certainly wouldn’t
have learned through it), I wouldn’t have written a several page shtickl Torah in Hebrew on shemen sreifa, if I hadn’t had a
rebbe who showed me his own genuine enthusiasm for those things. And I wouldn’t
have the ahavas Torah I have now if
it weren’t for Rabbi Blumberg. He lived day in and day out with a sheer passion
for Torah learning and for transmitting that passion and enthusiasm to his talmidim.
I remember him as
a man of passion, excitement, and warmth. As I look back at that night at
Martin’s West, Rabbi Blumberg was being who he always was: modest, a man of few
words when outside of the daled amos (sphere)
of Torah; somewhat reserved in his interactions when Torah was not involved
because it was Torah that he lived for. I’ve never met anyone truly like that. He
was his most passionate in the classroom with his talmidim surrounding him and a sefer
in front of him. At least that’s how I remember him. And why I miss him now and
always will.
