As a very American high school graduate, raised in a frum
New York family, I arrived at Ner
Yisrael planning to stay one year in full-time yeshiva. My life was all planned
out. I already had a scholarship to a good college in New York City and was the
winner of a New York State Regents Scholarship, which would provide me with
extra money while attending college. I planned to combine my daily college
attendance with some yeshiva education while I achieved my B.A. degree,
probably with a major in psychology, and then I intended to pursue my professional
career: either to attend graduate school and become a psychologist or, more
likely, to attend a top law school and become an attorney.
I had accepted my high school menahel’s
suggestion to spend a year in yeshiva full-time before starting college. He
suggested that I attend Ner Yisrael
for a year, which did not pose any conflict, either for myself or for my
father, with my long-term plans because of the yeshiva’s reputation for not
being opposed to “college.”
Having arranged for my slot in
college and the scholarship to wait for a year, I arrived in Ner Yisrael. After one year in
yeshiva, I decided to stay for another year and extended both scholarships for
another year. After two years, I was told that my New York State’s Regents Scholarship
would not be renewed anymore. I decided to spend another year in yeshiva, and
then another. Now, decades later, I presume that there is still a place for me
in the college I was supposed to attend but never did. Instead, extensive
reading supplied my secular education, whereas learning, teaching, and
spreading Torah to Klal Yisrael became my life’s aspiration and
commitment. Clearly, my vision for what I wanted to do with my life changed
very significantly, albeit highly gradually.
How did this happen? Certainly not
overnight. As a high school senior, I remember questioning the study of Bava
Basra, a mesechta whose halachic
issues discuss whether it is my financial responsibility to provide a neighbor privacy
in his yard and whether using a field for three years enforces claiming
ownership of the property. Obviously, these reasons would not establish a legal
claim in today’s world, so why devote time to arcane, non-practical matters? Shouldn’t
we be studying only practical topics like Shabbos or Brachos?
This was the perspective of a senior from a frum background in a quality
yeshiva high school. Yet, somehow, the yeshiva changed my entire life’s view on
the priorities in my life without my ever feeling that I was threatened. To
understand how the yeshiva accomplished this, we need to understand the
greatness of the Rosh Yeshiva.
Educator Par
Excellence
That the Rosh Yeshiva was one of the greatest talmidei chachamim of
his era is an undisputed fact but provides little understanding of his
brilliance as an educator. That he had absorbed the wellsprings of the Slabodka
approach to mussar and personal development from its original proponent
and builder, Rav Nosson Tzvi Finkel, the Alter of Slabodka, is also true
but does not convey to us anything of meaning. Nor does the fact that his head
stored the collected knowledge of tens of thousands of sefarim explain
the success of the yeshiva he founded. And noting his regal comportment does
not clarify our perception of his pedagogic genius. Instead, I will attempt to
show how I, as one young talmid, was influenced on a daily basis, without
my noticing that it was happening. Others will have different stories, but the
results were usually parallel – parallel, but not identical, because the Rosh Yeshiva developed our latent,
individual abilities to an extent far greater than I have seen done by any
master of the literature of contemporary educational theory.
Furthermore, the cultural
difference between the Rosh Yeshiva
and us American boys should have been overwhelming. The Rosh Yeshiva was the age of our grandfathers (the few of us who
had grandfathers), he spoke only Yiddish (which none of us did), had grown up
in the poverty of Eastern Europe, and had been raised from the cradle in a
culture in which Torah study was the highest and, perhaps, the only goal. We
were all baseball-playing, typically spoiled, middle-class American kids,
interested in eventually developing a comfortable, professional lifestyle. Of
course, the most important part of the daily newspaper was the sports section.
How did the Rosh Yeshiva bridge
this gap to be such a successful educator and role model?
Let me mention some specific observations
and anecdotes about the Rosh Yeshiva’s
method of teaching and the yeshiva he built. The Rosh Yeshiva, who had a serious case of phlebitis, was medically
required to go for walks to the extent that he could. As talmidim, we
would often take the Rosh Yeshiva
for walks. (I note that this was done, officially, during the time that,
according to the usual yeshiva schedule, we should be in the beis medrash
studying with our chavrusos.) If you had not prepared questions to ask
the Rosh Yeshiva, he would ask
you where you were up to in the Gemara, and ask you questions that demonstrated
your level of absorption of the material. These were usually inquiries that did
not have obvious answers. He would ask you what you thought the correct
approach was.
It was not until many years later
that I realized the humor of the scenario. The Rosh Yeshiva knew thousands of sefarim by heart. There
was nowhere in Torah that we would have any information that he did not know.
Yet, rather than bamboozle us with his chiddushim, his novel approaches,
or his massive Torah knowledge, as many roshei yeshiva would do, he
asked us, as if he did not know the answer to the question. Was it possible
that we might think of an answer that he had not seen or thought of? Highly unlikely.
His goal was to build confidence in us to think independently and seek answers to
Torah questions from within ourselves.
Over the years, I have been able
to write many articles and full-length works on Torah topics. Many have asked
me, where did I learn to think so independently? Initially, my answer was
incredulous. Is there any other way to learn Torah? This is the way I was
taught how to analyze Torah sources. And then I realized that in Ner Yisrael we received an education
that included how to use our own best resources, that blessed brain that G-d
gave us – and lots of sweat – to plumb the original Torah material until we
were satisfied with the approach at which we arrived. And that approach would
remain with us as the truth of Torah until such time as we realized that we may
not have understood the sources perfectly. At that moment, our need for
absolute intellectual honesty would teach us to review and potentially revise
our understanding.
The Machzor and
other Stories
Since this is a Yom Kippur and Sukkos
issue, I will include a few anecdotes about this season of holidays. I note
that these stories indicate very different aspects of the Rosh Yeshiva’s greatness: his
skills at molding people to serve Hashem and how to be a mentsch, not by force of personality but by example.
There is a famous incident, which
I personally witnessed, about the Rebbetzin’s
machzor. One Rosh Hashanah Mussaf, we saw that the Rosh Yeshivah had davened his quiet Shemoneh
Esrei near the doorway of the beis medrash, instead of at his usual
place in the center of the front of the beis medrash. Why had he davened
there?
The Rebbetzin was homebound in those days. (Her health had been
failing; she predeceased the Rosh
Yeshiva by several years.) When the Rosh Yeshiva was about to begin the Mussaf Shemoneh Esrei,
he realized that, when he had left home (after making Kiddush before the shofar
blowing), he had mistakenly taken the Rebbetzin’s
machzor with him. Realizing that the Rebbetzin would want to use her familiar machzor, the Rosh Yeshiva immediately walked home
(not an easy walk for him at his age) to make sure that the Rebbetzin had her machzor, and
then returned to yeshiva to join the davening of the quiet Shemoneh Esrei
in progress. This became his uppermost concern prior to the Mussaf Shemoneh
Esrei of Rosh Hashanah, a prayer that he told us annually was of
utmost importance. This lesson in respect for one’s wife you never forget.
Another time, the wife of one of
the prominent chavrei hakollel had given birth to twins prior to Yom Tov. They had one other child,
about three years old, at the time. Because of the timing, no extended family
was available to help out at the house. This yungerman understood that
his responsibility for Yom Tov was
to help his wife at home and not to attend davening in shul. Apparently, at the time that krias
haTorah would occur, things at home were quiet, and he came to the beis medrash,
three-year-old in tow, because, after all, he could daven at home, but
he could not hear krias haTorah at home. Immediately, the Rosh Yeshiva called him over and sent
him home. “Your mitzvah for this Yom
Tov is to take care of your wife and children, not to hear krias
haTorah or come to the beis medrash.” A lesson in family
responsibility that you never forget.
On the longer winter Friday
nights, I would often visit the Rosh
Yeshiva and his Rebbetzin
at their house on the yeshiva campus. The conversations were always about what
life was like in Eastern Europe, in the town of Slabodka, and similar matters.
The Rebbetzin participated in
the conversations very freely, and the Rosh
Yeshiva was very forthcoming with information, stories, insights, and
observations. It was completely natural and informal. I had no sense in the
slightest that I was wasting his time or preoccupying him with trivial matters
when he would rather be studying Torah. He was too great for that. This is a
lesson that I have often thought about, although I admit to falling far short
of his abilities in this area also.
One insight of mine is that the Rosh Yeshiva would answer any
question that I asked him about any matter – with one major exception. When I
asked him about the greatness of the Alter of Slabodka and his abilities
to create so many gedolei Yisrael from his disciples – the Rosh Yeshiva would not answer. All he
would do was allude to the incredible greatness of who the Alter was.
Anything more than that was sacred territory on which the Rosh Yeshiva would not tread.
Perhaps I should follow his lead
and refrain from discussing the greatness of the Rosh Yeshiva. But I feel this would deprive future generations
of an appreciation of who he was and, perhaps by some extension, a sense of the
greatness of his rebbe, the Alter.
Rabbi Kaganoff
was the founding Rav of Congregation Darchei Tzedek from 1986 to
1997, when the family made aliya. He served as a dayan on the Baltimore Beis
Din and is the author of 11 books and hundreds of articles on rabbinic
scholarship, in both English and Hebrew. He has taught in many yeshivas,
seminaries, colleges, and adult education programs in Israel and the U.S. The
Kaganoffs live in the Neve Yaakov neighborhood of Jerusalem.
