For the last few years, in the days before and after January 1st, I received myriad text messages, emails, and even phone calls with the supplicants asking, “Is this true?”
Basically, their requests are based on some picture of my zaide, saying basically that he had asked his talmidim what their New Year’s resolution was. The talmidim would then challenge him, “Rebbi! It’s the secular New Year. Why should we be making resolutions?” To which Rav Yaakov allegedly replied, “Everyone in the whole world is making resolutions to make themselves better and we shouldn’t?”
I will not respond to the aforementioned questions. Did this really happen? Is this true? I certainly can assure you that my zaide did not walk into the shiur room and ask everyone to take out a pencil and paper and write down their New Year’s resolution. I assume that a bochur asked him if he is allowed to make a resolution on New Year’s and he quipped an answer somewhat akin to what the proliferators put out there.
It’s not the first time that I have been peppered with Contra-Gadol stories. Somehow, learning day and night and mastering kol haTorah kulah is not as intriguing to some as the posek hador or his son eating breakfast in a pizza shop on the Lower East Side.
But what intrigues me is the fascination with stories that not only show the human side of gedolei hador, but even the side that, if plucked out of the context of lives immersed in greatness, remains seemingly very mundane.
Many of us are rebbe and gadol watchers. And that is commendable. Before my zaide, Rav Yaakov Kamenetzky, took the position of a rov in Toronto, he was asked by the mostly Chassidic leaning members of the committee of his prospective kehillah (the same members who had left a gartel on his seat) if he had a “rebbe.” My zaide replied, “Of course, I had a rebbe. I watched how my rebbe ate. I watched how my rebbe davened. I watched how my rebbe put on tefillin and how he lit the menorah. The only problem is that my rebbe was a misnaged.”
Indeed, many of us are rebbe watchers, but in order to understand what we see, we must know what to look for. The texts and the out-of-context marvellers seem to embrace the small, yanked stories that seem a bit contra to what the essence of the gadol may be, learning day and night with hasmodah atzuma, indeed, “vaiter der Rambam.”
But to do that, one must be a true talmid, a true student. Otherwise, words of a leader can become misunderstood or, worse, misconstrued by those who are in the business of stealing snippets and casting sound bites to shock. Sometimes they are a snippet of a story, a small incident blown into what is narrated as the essence of the man, or a misconstrued word, morphed into a psak.
There were many quotes in the name of Rav Moshe, and I repeated some to my zaide, who responded to me in the early 1980s, “today, you can’t believe anything that they quote from Rav Moshe unless you heard it directly (m’pi kodsho) from his holy mouth.”
Indeed, it is almost impossible to quote a psak or learn a lesson from the words of a great man by taking tiny snapshots of hearsay or snippets of a scene, and then formulating not only opinions but declarations about them.
There is sadly so much absurdity that includes corroboration from alleged quotes or substantiation from alleged incidents that are attributed to great Torah scholars, my grandfather among them.
Some of them are ludicrous. Half-words and even a smaller decimal’s worth of truths are used to prove a point. One of my favorites is the story of a high school kid, a know-it-all, who comes to class wearing a tiny yarmulka, no bigger than the cover of a small jar of olives. When his rebbe, a refined talmid chochom, mentioned to the boy that the yarmulka he was wearing was clearly too small, the boy sprang into action. He ran to his desk and approached his rebbe clutching a blue sefer, which he had prepared well in advance to facilitate the Machiavellian ambush. He thrust it at his rebbe and countered, “You may think it’s too small, but who are you to argue with Rav Moshe!” The rebbe was even more shocked, as the boy smugly thrust a copy of the Igros Moshe toward the rebbe and added, “And Rav Moshe holds that the minimum shiur of a yarmulka is a half-dollar!”
The rebbe was silent as the boy opened the sefer to the first teshuvah, which indeed did talk about the size of a yarmulka. The boy pointed to two words, set in the middle of a sentence in which Rav Moshe quotes the early 19th-century work by Rav Shmuel Kolin of Sudilkov, known as the Machatzis Hashekel. The comments of Rav Kolin had no bearing on the boy’s argument, but to him, it made no difference. The translation of the name of the work means “a half of a coin,” a reference that Rav Kolin used to note that his work was a collaboration of his and his students’ ideas. But the boy only saw what he wanted and interpreted the words in the light of the olive jar cap on his head. And he blurted again, “Rebbi! Look for yourself! Right there in Igros Moshe! He pointed, “Here! Machatzis hashekel! A half a dollar!”
Rav Moshe had indeed used those words, albeit in an entirely different context. He was quoting a very famous sefer, the Machatzis Hashekel, in regards to a peripheral matter. In no way was he using those words to denote the shiur of a yarmulka!
Many also like to extract an incident or a hanhagah or a historical fact from its context and time period. Many people live in the past, recording the world of yesteryear as a precedent for today. They live in a time warp, where shomer Shabbos was an anomaly, and thousands of pink slips were handed out to potential Shabbos observers every Friday afternoon.
Marrying a kollel fellow was unheard of, and cholov Yisroel was thought to be milk imported from what was then Palestine. Which reminds me of how sometimes a word out of context can be a good thing.
The story is told of the Pittsburgher Rebbe, Rav Avrohom Abba Leifer, who had moved to Pittsburgh after the passing of his father in the 1960s. At the time, there was a Chabad community, and they produced cholov Yisroel on a farm near Pittsburgh. The rebbe set out on a mission to ensure cholov Yisroel for the children in the Hillel Day School, in addition to the children in the Chabad school, but the expense would be a challenge. The concept of cholov Yisroel would be foreign to the few wealthy individuals who were known as the benevolent members of the community. The rebbe decided to try the president of the community’s Hillel Academy, the Jewish day school, to allow the school to purchase the more expensive milk. The man was a generous individual, but the rebbe was skeptical. The budget was tight, and the man was not strictly observant himself. Why would he want to support an endeavor like cholov Yisroel?
The rebbe decided to be straight. He approached the man and asked, “I would really like to bring cholov Yisroel to Pittsburgh. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the children would drink cholov Yisroel?” He was expecting an incredulous reaction, and he began to explain.
But he was stopped in his tracks.
“I know what that is! Milk of Israel! Rabbi, I am not a religious man, but I want you to know one thing: Anything that has to do with Israel, I am 100 percent behind! Anything you need and it’s yours!”
The children got their cholov Yisroel.
But some live in the past, and the search for spirituality often meets derision and remarks about how we have become way more religious than our fathers were, and way more religious than the gedolim of yesteryear. I am not arguing in totality on that point, but I will paraphrase Rav Mordechai Gifter, who publicly rhetorically asked, “Does the fact that I went to public school in Portsmouth, Virginia, mean that all of us have to pull our kids out of yeshiva and send them on Greyhound buses over the Mason-Dixon Line?”
Growing up as a Kamenetzky, I often laughed at the misconstruction of the aphorisms, adages, and stories that were falsely attributed to my zaide. Certain minor incidents that may have been indeed accurate sprout many spores and even more organisms that have the ability to spoil the truth quite infectiously.
There was a convent down the block from my zaide’s home in Monsey. In one of the gedolim biography books, it tells the story of how, each day, on his daily walk, my zaide would nod, or even say, “Good morning,” to an old nun who would sit outside her convent. The stories morphed into a real bizarre tale that was as false as it was ludicrous. “Is it true that the nuns rented a bus to go to your grandfather’s levayah?”
I went on those walks a number of times and did notice even a nod. And it could be that once or twice or even a bit more, Rav Yaakov said a hello, and it may be true that the nod from the holy rabbi prompted a sister to ask about the rabbi after his passing. But it would be quite strange, as my zaide had a stroke and was not taking those walks for a very long time before his petirah.
But true or not, people love the Contra-Gadol tales, whether they have the gadol eating in a luncheonette shop, morphing into him working behind the pizza counter, or waving “hi” to nuns or making New Year’s resolutions. Perhaps it’s something we can easily do. But those are not the ingredients necessary to make one into a gadol b’Yisroel. It’s “veiter der Rambam un noch ah blatt.” Nothing else. I’m just saying.
