“You know, you really write good speeches. Perhaps one day you could be a rabbi”

When a friend asked me why I was driving to Boro Park in the heat of the summer to be menachem avel someone I hadn’t spoken to in decades, I replied, “Wait for the article.”
I was not trying to be evasive, nor was it a secret. Rather, I preferred to express my thoughts through the written word, which allows for the time necessary to formulate them properly.
I found parking on 16th Avenue and began walking to his home, waxing nostalgic. I recalled the times we spent together walking the streets of Boro Park more than half a century ago.
The year was 1973, and the Jewish world was in the midst of teshuvah, tefillah, and tzedakah as Israel fought for its survival in the Yom Kippur War. Beryl and I would walk the streets of Boro Park, collecting dimes and nickels to send to Israel.
Yet a few years later, we each married and drifted apart, losing touch with each other. If not for a chance email, I would never have known that Beryl had passed away.
I still remembered the house; it hadn’t changed much. I had spent many a Shabbos there.
On Shabbos morning, we would walk to 15th Avenue to hear Rav Yisroel Schorr ztz”l, the renowned rav of Beth El for over five decades, deliver the drashah to a standing-room-only crowd. Beth El, back then, was one of the largest shuls in Boro Park.
Beryl and I would then leisurely walk back to his house while debating the problems of the world. Mixed in with our philosophical discussions were passionate arguments about the Yankees and the Mets.
We went together to the last game played at the original Yankee Stadium on September 30, 1973, just days before the war broke out. It was Tzom Gedaliah, but we were “moser nefesh” to go. When the game ended, we went onto the field, bringing home, along with thousands of others, clumps of dirt from the outfield.
A few years earlier, as we approached our bar mitzvahs, Beryl had asked me a favor. Neither of our fathers was American-born. Indeed, the majority of my classmates’ parents were not born in America. However, his father, like most, was a Holocaust survivor, while my father was a Yerushalmi who had gone to yeshivah.
His father, unfortunately, had no yeshivah background, and Beryl asked me (and therefore my father) to help him write his bar mitzvah pshetl. Of course, with my father’s help, I obliged. I spent hours translating and elaborating on the notes, transforming it into a fully written drashah.
When the finished product was presented to Beryl, he delivered it flawlessly at his bar mitzvah, to the delight of his parents and many guests.
But all that does not explain why I I traveled in the heat to Boro Park, to the home of a man I had not spoken to in 40 years to be menachem avel his children, whom I did not even know.
Why, then, did I go?
When Beryl finished his pshetl, he came over to me, and with all of the seriousness a 13-year-old boy can muster, he said, “Thank you. You know, you really write good speeches. Perhaps one day you could be a rabbi.”
That thought remained with me much longer than my actual friendship with Beryl. Indeed, deep inside, it ignited within me a spark — a potential I have privately and quietly held on to for decades.
This heartfelt compliment from Beryl was a major validating moment, and it entered straight into my heart.
That’s why I had to go to Boro Park for the shivah.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1073)