Why Are Thousands Still Clamoring for Rabbi Avigdor Miller’s Wisdom?

Photos: Menachem Edelman Studios

Two men, from two different worlds within the Jewish melting pot that is Brooklyn. For them, Torah Avigdor bridged all divides, and now they were at a crossroads: The booklets were being distributed all over the US and even Israel, but you can’t set kids up to staple a thousand booklets a week. What could be done to keep up with the demand? To understand the phenomenon, you have to understand the person: Who was Rabbi Avigdor Miller?

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It began with one person on a bike, with no intention, no plan, almost by happenstance.

He was joined soon enough by someone else, a man with a Rabbi Miller book gemach, from a completely different crowd — with a bit more know-how, but not much more of a plan. Between them and some pivotal others, Toras Avigdor exploded into the Torah paper we know today, distributed in shuls, institutions, and kosher stores worldwide, the Torah of Rabbi Avigdor Miller savored by thousands of people each week, thought by penetrating thought.

It’s these two, the bike man and the book man, that I meet today.

The first is Rabbi Amichai Markowitz. He was learning in Eretz Yisrael post-yeshivah in the late ’80s.

“I remember when I was leaving Eretz Yisrael, I davened my last Minchah in Itzkowitz in Bnei Brak,” he says. “My tefillah, on the brink of departure, was this: Hashem, I need a rebbi in the States, please send me a rebbi.

“About two years later, I met Rabbi Miller. I listened, I heard, but at first, I didn’t take everything he was saying on board. I thought some of it was in conflict with what I knew. But as I got to know him, I began to realize the gadlus of who he was, of his mind, and I was mevatel my daas to him. He became, in every sense, my rebbi. He lived close by, and we’d walk on Ocean Parkway and talk. That was it, Hashem answered my tefillah.”

Rabbi Miller’s flagship shiur was said to be the one he gave on Thursday nights. Amichai didn’t go to that one; he had a longstanding chavrusashaft then. He went Shabbos afternoon instead, when Rabbi Miller gave an Ein Yaakov shiur. But he would purchase the tapes of the Thursday night lectures from the Rebbetzin each week and listen to them on his Walkman a few times over the week.

Rabbi Miller would always conclude his shiurim with hashkafah Q&As. “I loved that, the randomness, the informality, that he was okay with any and every type of question coming his way,” Reb Amichai says.