Over the course of the last ten days, we lost two great leaders in Klal Yisroel. No, their pictures did not appear alongside the ubiquitous displays of gedolei Yisroel or celebrated chinuch personalities on social media statuses. If they did, they were most certainly posted without permission. Those posts don’t define greatness; they define celebrity.
These two leaders were not celebrities, just great people who were indeed larger than life. Their accomplishments, both personal and communal, impacted the lives of thousands of men and women and Torah-true families across the tri-state area and hundreds of miles beyond.
I’m not here to be maspid either Rav Yehoshua Kalish or Rav Meir Gutfreund. I’m really not worthy of that, and I have not written hespeidim for quite a while, learning from criticism that whatever you say will never be enough.
In this article, I’d like to focus on one aspect of the myriad maalos of Rav Kalish. (I hope to elaborate on Rav Gutfreund next week.) Although the myriad articles and hespeidim focused on the various attributes of his greatness, the aspect I’d like to focus on is embodied in one word: Normal.
I did not know Rabbi Kalish extremely well. We talked on a number of occasions. Sometimes it was about talmidim, who came from our elementary school to become his talmidim at yeshiva of Far Rockaway. Other times it was about something that was going on in the community, and we often shared views that may have been dissenting from popular opinion. Most of the times our paths crossed, I did not attempt to speak to him. I would often see him at weddings. In fact, I felt uncomfortable even extending my hand to offer him shalom. That was not because I was in a squabble with him; it was simply because I did not want to interrupt him. He was always hunched over a small Gemara, in the middle of finishing his daily quota of seven blatt a day. His hasmadah was legendary. But it was only part of his greatness. Although I am not a statistician or a recorder of such feats, which I am sure have been accomplished by numerous others, the only others I know who finished Shas 40 times were the great men of the last generation.
No, Rabbi Josh Kalish was not Rav Chaim Kanievsky. Rav Kalish finished Shas only 40 times. Rav Chaim never came late to Maariv because he was listening to a Mets game. But like Rav Chaim, since that day and that regret, he never came late to Maariv again. But so much of what Rav Kalish had, was something that I think is missing in some of his contemporaries who, like him, may also have finished Shas forty times and written a sefer with questions and comments on every single daf in Shas (if there are any).
My wife’s zaide, Rav Leizer Levin, a talmid of Kelm and Radin who served as the rov of Vashki in Europe and then for a half-century as the rov of Detroit, was a talmid of the Chofetz Chaim for seven years and lived in his home for one and a half years. When his grandson, Rav Pinchos Lipschutz, once asked him what the Chofetz Chaim looked like, he responded, “If you did not know it was the Chofetz Chaim, you would not see anything. Ah,” he continued after a brief pause. “But if you knew it was the Chofetz Chaim, then there was so much to see!”
Writing in the Yated, read by bnei Torah whose lives were (and even are) spent dissecting every word of a Tosafos, I want to reiterate again: I don’t mean to compare Rabbi Kalish with the subject of any of the aforementioned adages, but they are so appropriate that even though they were said about men of greatness whom we cannot fathom, forgive me, but I believe the axiom itself applies to great people like Rabbi Kalish.
When someone wowed at his accomplishment at his yearly Siyum Hashas, Rabbi Kalish made light of it. “Don’t be impressed. I’m just a minor leaguer! Rav Chaim (Kanievsky) finishes kol haTorah kulah every year. I can only handle Bavli, and then some.”
Rabbi Kalish was so normal in life outside the Gemara (those few moments) that it was hard to imagine that he was anything but a nice, regular mesivta rebbi. He played ball with the chevrah in Camp Heller and knew how to play an accordion and ski, both on water and on snow. There were probably many more mundane aspects to his life that I do not know, and as many as there are, there are myriad more aspects to his Torah life of chesed and knowledge that I certainly do not know.
In fact, a few days after his petirah, I mentioned to a choshuveh maggid shiur in Monsey that I was going to be menachem avel by Rabbi Kalish. I heard a gasp on the other side of the line. “Rabbi Kalish was niftar?!”
I asked him how he knew the rov, and he confided that he did not know him well, but “through my parents, when I was twelve or thirteen, he had paired me up with a chavrusa who needed to learn with a younger bochur. When the summer ended, he told me that he’d like to treat me to something special. He took me water skiing!”
Usually, the term “normal American boy” contradicts Torah greatness, at least in the sheer volume of knowledge and the acquisition of voluminous amounts of Torah during a lifetime. I do not believe that there are many individuals who can jet ski and have finished Shas, and know it cold, forty times (and various masechtos, including Beitzah, 100 times). They simply don’t exist.
My zaide, among other gedolim, were known to have given the following brocha to many who sought his blessing for their children: “Zohl er oisvaksen ah nohrmalle bochur. He should grow up to be a normal bochur.”
Seeing Rabbi Kalish, and learning about his greatness in Torah, I understand what he meant.
