“He couldn’t hear, but that was just a detail, it didn’t define him. What made him unique was his kishron, what made him unique was his desire to learn, and what made him unique was his ability to understand other people” (Photos: Jeremy Melnick, Joely Bernstein)

“B

esser, I have a scoop for you.”

The caller was a leading rosh yeshivah — not the sort who shares scoops or calls writers with tips.

Rav Elya Brudny, maggid shiur and rosh yeshivah in Mir-Brooklyn, had been at a wedding where the mesader kiddushin was an out-of-town rosh yeshivah — a tall, distinguished-looking man.

The visiting rosh yeshivah walked up to the chuppah and took his place behind the microphone. When he recited the brachos, it was obvious that he had trouble articulating — his words seemed somewhat garbled.

“But then I saw him by the dancing, leading the chasunah, his talmidim surrounding him,” Rav Elya continued, “and I realized that he was getting through to his talmidim better than many of us do.”

It sounded dreamy — the plot of a kid’s book or maybe an Abie Rotenberg song — a sweet tale of a rosh yeshivah who doesn’t hear, and his devoted talmidim.

But this is the real world, where things aren’t so sweet and neatly packaged.

And so I flew down to Toronto to see. You know how people say “no words”? Like, when they want to convey their astonishment, speechlessness becomes a way of expressing an awe that words would only limit? In a humble trailer just west of Bathurst Street, I found a world where that awe never fades. No words.

Back when Brownsville was the place, when pushcart peddlers along Pitkin Avenue haggled with customers in Yiddish, the Brooklyn neighborhood had a real rebbe.

The Brownsviller-Mezhibuzh Rebbe, Rav Shmuel Avrohom Rabinowitz, was a son of Rav Eliezer Chaim of Yampola, a grandson of the Rebbe of Ropshitz. He was reputed to be a ba’al mofeis, a healer, a writer of kabbalistic amulets. His son, Rav Dovid Eliezer, was born in 1917 — deaf.

Rebbes work with words. A child deprived of words, the building blocks of connection, the invisible ropes with which to draw others close, has no future working with people.

He can be a craftsman, perhaps, or even a successful peddler, but not a rabbi.

Right? No, not really.

Rabbi Dovid Eliezer Rabinowitz would become an effective and respected shul rabbi, leading a community of deaf and hearing-impaired Jews in Brooklyn. He taught them many things, but perhaps the greatest lesson of all was about perseverance.

His grandson, Chaim Tzvi Kakon, was also born with hearing challenges — and with that very same determination.

The Kakon family lived in Denver, and then in Detroit. The Zeide, Rav Dovid Eliezer, moved away from Brooklyn twice, following his grandchildren so that he could be near them and part of their lives.

Many things were confusing to young Chaim Tzvi. Days were spent in public school, where he mastered sign language as part of his total communication education, while nights were filled with dreams of learning Torah.

Tough as it was, he came home to his parents each evening — to love and warmth and encouragement — but what he really wanted was to go to summer camp.

On the first day of camp, hundreds of boys gathered in the Camp Mogen Av shul as head counselors called out names, assigning a bunk to each camper — but there was one camper who couldn’t hear them. Chaim Tzvi Kakon sat on the bench with no clue where he belonged.

In his seforim-lined study, the rosh yeshivah of Nefesh Dovid — the first and only yeshivah in the world where hearing-impaired young men are welcomed into the world of Gemara, Rashi, and Tosafos — looks like he’s sharing a routine childhood memory; but when it comes to that recollection, the first day in camp, there is an unmistakable flash of pain. “It was very bewildering. I had no idea where to go, didn’t know who my counselor was or who was in my bunk.”

On a bench near Chaim Tzvi on that summer day sat 11-year-old Normie Lowenthal. Today Rabbi Lowenthal, a respected social worker at Baltimore’s Talmudical Academy, remembers that summer well.

“It’s important to appreciate what Mogen Av was doing. Camp Mogen Av was accepting boys with disabilities and special needs, mainstreaming them before it was even a term,” Rabbi Lowenthal says.

At camp the previous summer, young Normie had made friends with a boy who was deaf, and the boy taught Normie the basics of sign language as a means of communication. “So when I saw Chaim Tzvi looking bewildered, I immediately recognized that he had a hearing impairment, and I was confident that I could communicate with him. I introduced myself and we became friends.”

That act of kindness welcomed Chaim Tzvi to the camp experience. The painful start gave way to a spectacular few weeks: While the boys around him were celebrating home runs, Chaim Tzvi was breaking his own barriers. A walk with a friend. A meal at which he’d been attuned enough to pass the milk to a bunkmate. The happy exhaustion at the end of a hike, flopping on the grass feeling connected by a current of shared satisfaction with others.

The gifts he’d discovered in camp came in handy in school and reinforced his willpower to keep trying. His evening Torah learning sessions allowed his dreams to expand, visions wide as the grassy lawns in camp. Finally, at the age of 16, he articulated that secret hope.

His father, Rabbi Yosef Kakon, is a talmid of Rav Moshe Schneider and Rav Aharon Kotler, and an accomplished talmid chacham in his own right. The teenager’s dream was to go to a real yeshivah and learn Torah like his father. His parents, for their part, were ready to let him try — but where would a bochur who couldn’t hear feel welcome?

A friend named Yossi Bienenstock was learning in Toronto’s Ner Israel at the time, and he suggested that Chaim Tzvi join him.

But Chaim Tzvi was weak in learning, having had little experience with serious yeshivah-style study. Still, the son and grandson of talmidei chachamim wanted nothing more than to taste the sweetness of Torah. He arrived for his bechinah with little more than the fire in his eyes.

The Rosh Yeshivah saw nothing else, not the inexperience or the challenges — just the fire.

“At the shivah for my rosh yeshivah, Rav Naftoli Friedler, I learned what really happened that day,” says Rabbi Kakon. “I came and begged to be accepted, but I wasn’t on the level. After I left the office, some of the hanhalah members expressed the opinion that ‘he really is a nice boy, but…’ The Rosh Yeshivah, however, banged on the table and said, ‘I’m not asking you. I’m telling you that we’re taking this bochur!’ ”

(Years later, Rav Chaim Tzvi and Rebbetzin Libbi Kakon would be blessed with a son who would bear the name Naftoli, for the rosh yeshivah who’d welcomed his father to the halls of Torah.)

In Ner Israel, Chaim Tzvi Kakon discovered two things that would make a big difference to his future. “I learned that a yeshivah is a magical place, it’s not just about the learning and growth, but about being part of something, the friendships and connection.”

And he learned that Toronto is a wonderful community. “I’d never been there before, but I felt at home,” he says.

In Ner Israel, the new bochur was placed in ninth grade, with boys several years his junior. “I didn’t care,” he says emphatically. “It was fine. I wanted to learn. I didn’t see the ages of the boys around me, didn’t let it affect my excitement in learning.”

Rebbetzin Libbi Kakon, who has been listening to his account, interjects, “That’s so typical. Nothing bothers my husband.”

“Not true,” he shoots back.

In Ner Israel, with the help of devoted friends, Chaim Tzvi became a yeshivah bochur. The deafness was no longer the story, because there was a Tosafos and a Rashba and a Ketzos to worry about.

Those glorious years in Toronto came to an end when it became evident that Chaim Tzvi needed to move on. Toronto friends Dov and Nancy Friedberg sent him to join their own sons, who were learning in Baltimore’s Ner Israel.

And once again, he felt overwhelmed. “It was a much bigger yeshivah than Toronto, with so many new faces, so much going on.”

He was sitting on a bench on that first night when a familiar face appeared in his line of vision.

Just as he had a decade earlier, in Camp Mogen Av, Normie Lowenthal welcomed his friend to the dizzying new world.

Rav Shraga Neuberger, the new talmid’s maggid shiur, remembers that first zeman. “He couldn’t hear, but that was just a detail, it didn’t define him. What made him unique was his kishron, what made him unique was his desire to learn, and what made him unique was his ability to understand other people.”

The boy who couldn’t hear, relying on sign language and lip-reading, somehow heard the needs of everyone else, becoming a star. “He was popular, not because he was different, but because he had this special chein, the smile and warmth,” recalls one Ner Israel talmid. So popular, in fact, that the other bochurim voluntarily learned sign language so that they could be in his circle as well.

Another of the heroes that would appear along the journey was Dr. Leonard Siger, a professor at Gallaudet University for deaf students in nearby Washington DC. Dr. Siger had learned in yeshivah as a youth, but then drifted away from Orthodox life. The brilliant professor knew sign language, and since retirement, he’d been interpreting Rav Yissocher Frand’s Thursday night shiur for the hearing impaired in the community. Someone suggested that Chaim Tzvi ask if Dr. Siger would come to yeshivah to help him learn Torah.

Chaim Tzvi summoned up the courage to approach this brilliant, irascible, ponytailed academic after the shiur. “Of course I’ll come,” Dr. Siger said, having noticed the talmid from Detroit. “I was waiting for you to ask.”

The professor didn’t drive, so he would walk two hours each day to give over the shiur. It was he who opened the gates of real comprehension in learning to the determined bochur, exposing the full flavor and depth of the shiur. In time, Chaim Tzvi and the professor became chavrusas for the early morning daf yomi shiur as well.

Dr. Siger eventually shed the ponytail and became a full-fledged baal teshuvah. When he passed away two years ago, it was Rav Chaim Tzvi Kakon and his talmidim who came to Baltimore from Toronto to perform the levayah and kevurah, a final gesture of friendship from an ever-grateful chavrusa.

Eventually, it was time for the tall, handsome yeshivah bochur to find a shidduch.

Libbi Spitzer, from Flatbush, did not hear well but, like him, was unconstrained by expectations and perceptions. Able to speak, she was a successful teacher at a school for special needs children at the time the shidduch was suggested.

“My husband,” she says with a smile, “makes goals for himself and then ticks them off, one by one. He decided we were getting married, and I was one more box to check off.” (The Rosh Yeshivah is beaming as she says this, nodding as if he still can’t get over his good fortune.)

Rebbetzin Kakon continues the story. “I was a Hungarian girl, I knew what I wanted. He told me he planned to become a lawyer, and he would buy me a house and a car.”

The chasunah in the winter of 1989 was joyous — a popular chassan, a popular kallah, beloved families. And in the festive dancing, there was a sense that two worlds were merging, two young people burning with purpose coming together to create something new.

They also knew, this young couple, exactly what it was they wanted to do.

Over the first few years of their marriage, Libbi continued teaching while Chaim Tzvi learned in kollel, eventually earning semichah. In the summers, they allowed their dreams to flourish. Chaim Tzvi’s rebbeim at Ner Israel allowed him space on the yeshivah’s campus to host a summer program called Gesher L’chaim, a sort of yeshivah camp for deaf boys. Reb Chaim Tzvi earned a master’s in social work and took a position as a therapist at a psychiatric inpatient unit, also sitting on the State of Maryland’s mental health board.

And the Zeide, who’d already moved to Denver then Detroit to mentor his grandson, moved yet again: This time he and his rebbetzin moved to Baltimore, to the house across the street from the young Kakon family.

Seven years of those summer programs created an informal chaburah, a wide group of hearing-challenged talmidim who felt close to this dynamic couple. In 2001, it was time to found a real yeshivah.

Neither of them were locals, but the Canadian city of Toronto had a certain appeal.

“Rabbi Naftali Neuberger thought it was a good idea, and he always saw further than most people,” says Rabbi Kakon. “I had close friends here from yeshivah and my wife had family here, but it was my grandfather who really pushed us. The yeshivah was a realization of his own dream — and he felt Toronto was the right place for it.”

Ner Israel Rosh Yeshivah Rav Yaakov Moshe Kulefsky also encouraged the reluctant rebbetzin, assuring her it was the right path, and Rav Menachem Goldberger of Tiferes Yisroel told them of the great things accomplished by those who find the strength to follow their destiny.

With these brachos and words of chizuk, the young couple took their young children and their dreams and moved to Toronto.

There, the Rosh Yeshivah found a passionate partner, Dr. Hartley Bressler, a prominent physician who has been deaf since birth. Like Rabbi Kakon, he’s been proving people wrong since childhood. Dr. Bressler had previously invited Reb Chaim Tzvi to Toronto in order to join a shabbaton for deaf participants. At the time, he introduced the Kakons to Mr. Joe Berman, a local philanthropist who provided the seed money for the yeshivah’s establishment. Rabbi Kakon and Dr. Bressler, two people who never heard the pessimism, linked arms and established Yeshivas Nefesh Dovid.

The name is based on a pasuk in Tehillim 116, “Ki hitzalta nafshi mimaves — You saved my soul from death, even my feet from stumbling to walk before Hashem in the light of life.”

“This is what a person with hearing loss feels,” the Rosh Yeshivah explains. “When he’s alone, he’s isolated, cut off from what’s going on around him. When a person doesn’t feel part of something larger, he doesn’t feel alive. But through the yeshivah and the network, a young man comes alive, experiencing the light of life, as Dovid Hamelech expressed it.”

Rather than try to describe what makes the yeshivah special, the Rosh Yeshivah invites me to join him on a surprise visit: It’s afternoon, general studies time.

I already know not to expect a massive building — after all, these are the people of substance, not style, the ones who’ve transcended externals rather than getting trapped, and the trailer is just that: humble on the outside, bursting with energy and life on the inside.

“And look who our neighbor is,” the Rosh Yeshivah says as he proudly indicates the building next door.

Yeshiva Gedola Zichron Shmayahu, the community’s flagship yeshivah, saw the opportunity early on. “We could never have opened our yeshivah if not for them,” Reb Chaim Tzvi says.

Rabbi Chaim Mendel Brodsky, the rosh yeshivah of Zichron Shmayahu, welcomed Nefesh Dovid to his grounds, opening up the dining room, gym, and beis medrash to its talmidim. “We eat with them, daven with them, and in general, their bochurim make sure to make our talmidim feel welcome,” says Rabbi Kakon. “They made it possible.”

It doesn’t surprise me that the yeshivah in the trailer feels just like a real yeshivah: jackets strewn over chairs, the smell of black binding tapes on Gemaras, the giddy laugh of the bochur who’d been swinging from a coat rack as the Rosh Yeshivah suddenly comes in.

The Rosh Yeshivah introduces me to the secular studies teacher, an affable Ontarian who teaches math in sign language. “I’ve done this for years, but these are my first group of yeshivah boys.”

I ask the teacher what sets them apart, and he doesn’t hesitate. “Their optimism. They want to do it all and believe that they can.”

The bochurim themselves are a charming group; a young man from the hot, crowded streets of Bnei Brak whose father still learns in Ponevezh and a Chabad chassid from Europe sit near me. Although there are different forms of sign language in different countries, the Rosh Yeshivah and most talmidim are fluent in all of them, and able to easily communicate with each other, kind of a reverse Tower of Bavel — here, they don’t all speak the same language, but they understand one another perfectly.

Some of the boys can’t hear at all, many have cochlear implants and speak flawlessly, and still others can hear and speak. Either way, they’re all tuned in. The Rosh Yeshivah insists that I speak to the talmidim — while I do, a poised young man sits near me and moves his hands in concert with my words.

I tell the boys how Rav Shlomo Freifeld would say that just as we believe that the match between man and woman is Divine, the shidduch between rebbi and talmid is equally Divine, that it takes real siyata d’Shmaya for it to work. The boys smile and nod. Don’t they know it.

Afterward, they gather around the table and field my questions. I ask an Israeli bochur what it is they do differently in Nefesh Dovid, why he feels like — in his words — his life started the day he arrived. He looks at the others, as if for encouragement.

Finally, he tells me that as a child, he spent many hours out of school, trapped in a world of his own. So he passed the time by playing soccer, and became quite good at it. He makes an imaginary kick right there, in the beis medrash.

Rabbi Kakon found out about the soccer thing. He called different balabatim in Toronto and learned that there was a frum adult soccer league. Not everyone was thrilled about admitting a 15 year old boy, but, as the rebbetzin says, when the Rosh Yeshivah wants something…

“That was the difference,” says the Israeli bochur. “No one else ever thought to do that for me. I play soccer and feel so good, it spills over into everything else.”

Each of the boys, in turn, shares just how bleak things were “before.” They have different backgrounds, but the expression on their faces as they remember is nearly identical, each of them appearing overwhelmed, the pain of the past and thankfulness for the present merging. Many were in public school, while some were in special education programs. They all find different ways of saying that they never really felt part of the world around them until they arrived in Toronto.

When Gemara is taught in yeshivah, I learn, the words are shown on the screen so the boys all see the daf. “And even while there’s debate whether it’s better or not to teach in sign language,” the Rosh Yeshivah explains, “for Gemara it’s certainly better, because it becomes visual, you see the concepts — the machlokes is set up on the screen, Abaye here, and Rava there. The talmidim follow along and really get it.”

The Rosh Yeshivah created his own signs to represent more yeshivish terms — kushya, terutz, hava amina — and he’ll use them in shiur, along with saying the word as well. In every shiur in the world, the echo of Har Sinai is heard; at Rabbi Chaim Tzvi Kakon’s shiur in Toronto, the thunder and lightning and healing is there too, the faces of talmidim who wanted so badly, for so long, radiant as they too listen to shiur.

Sometimes, the Rosh Yeshivah attends local shiurim and his own friend and personal interpreter, Dr. Mitchell Sutton, comes along to translate what the maggid shiur is saying. “And inevitably, other people thank me afterward, telling me that the presence of the interpreter, the gestures and signs, made it easier for them to follow along too. It’s easier to absorb information when you see it.”

“In chinuch, the most important thing is to be attuned, a rebbi has to hear a talmid, what he’s saying, what he’s not saying,” reflects Rav Shragi Neuberger, the Rosh Yeshivah’s rebbi. “Rav Chaim Tzvi is blessed with a koach hashmia, he picks up nuances — it’s a mix of really caring about talmidim and being very sharp. He’s a natural mechanech.”

Talmidim agree that it’s the rebbetzin who gives the yeshivah its heart. Along with creating the home that’s as much a part of the yeshivah as the dormitory, she will often reassure worried mothers that their sons will flourish in the yeshivah — and, at the request of the yeshivah’s board of directors, she handles all the fund-raising. “My husband is simply too busy with his boys,” she says. “He wakes them up in the morning and is with them all day, Shabbos too. That’s his mission, and this is mine.”

The Kakon family has embraced their role as well. “The bochurim come over Friday night after the seudah,” she says. Two of the Kakon daughters, who do not hear, married talmidim of their father’s yeshivah.

The rebbetzin serves as a surrogate mother to many of the foreign bochurim, and is a respected teacher in the local Bais Yaakov. She is also unafraid to be honest: It’s her willingness to share her own struggles that makes her call to be strong so much more effective.

The Kakons have several children — two with hearing loss, others who hear perfectly (they all communicate in the healthy dynamic of any normative home). And then, just around the time Nefesh Dovid was created, they were blessed with a little baby girl, Devoiri.

The rebbetzin’s face visibly lights up when she mentions the name. But, as she often concedes in her popular lectures, it wasn’t always easy.

Devoiri was born with Down syndrome and later diagnosed with autism as well. Those first few months were very difficult — there were older children; there was a yeshivah… and now Devoiri.

In a written tribute to the family’s rav, veteran Toronto rav and posek Rav Menachem Adler, the rebbetzin, a gifted writer, recalled those hard days:

I remember when we were poor and downtrodden. What to do? Where to go? The Rav turned his kind eyes to us and helped us rebuild. He believed in us. He believed in our children and he believed in our future, when we could not see past the day.

When our severely disabled daughter was born adding more weight to my heart, the elderly Rav shuffled his way down the street to our Shabbos table week after week, 52 consecutive weeks, on the way home from Friday night prayers. He gazed at the candles that were so hard for me to light, gazed at our table that almost did not get set, gazed at our family that almost did not grow to be strong and capable.

Then he turned around and left, slowly heading on to his own home and his own table where his rebbetzin waited, unbending and loyal. His children did not know until I told them. He is the unknown, the status of the true faithful.

Is this what G-d does? Visit us week after week, moment after moment? Does He wait and watch and we do not turn to see Him?

In the early months of Devoiri’s life, the rebbetzin — undaunted for so long, rising above her own challenges to teach, marry, mother, and build a yeshivah — felt like she would give up.

“My husband reminded me, he encouraged me, he inspired me. He lifted me. And he waited for me.”

The rebbetzin mentions another one of those Divine messengers who offered encouragement at the right time. “My great-uncle, Rav Avrohom Chaim Spitzer, the old Vienner dayan and later the rav of Ohr Hachaim in Boro Park, was a big part of our lives. I grew up revering him. We knew he was a tremendous talmid chacham, but he was so approachable, so easy to connect with. After Devoiri was born, he sent me a message: I was to get more household help, he paskened. He didn’t just rule, he also sent the funds to cover the help. He became a big part of the yeshivah too, and many of my husband’s talmidim would go to him for brachos.”

Family, faith, patience — and a sense of humor.

One day during Devoiri’s first few months, Reb Chaim Tzvi welcomed a visitor to his home: Dr. Leonard Siger, his old chavrusa from Baltimore. The Rosh Yeshivah was holding the newborn infant when he opened the door, and he informed the guest that the baby was born with Down syndrome.

“Okay,” the professor didn’t miss a beat as he looked at his old friend, “but you know that everyone has some sort of challenge in life, don’t you?”

“It’s true at home and it’s true in yeshivah,” the rebbetzin remarks. “My husband teaches the boys to laugh, to accept themselves for who they are, to go live — there’s too much beauty and meaning to get stuck on the things that don’t work. People from other yeshivos see our boys in the street, or at weddings, and they wonder why they seem so much more alive than boys who can hear perfectly!”

In her inimitable style, the rebbetzin writes:

The boy, Shmili, who comes in sad. His eyes. I cannot look at his eyes.

I see him Friday night. I say to him, something happened to you. You look different. One week you have been here. You look different.

He smiles slightly. The first hint of a smile.

He quips, I must have grown taller. Oh my. Don’t we have a sense of humor?

He did grow taller.

Eitan.

His eyes. Dark. They brighten noticeably week by week. Dark like a night sky, not the dark of tar on the ground.

Kindness. Acceptance. Letting dreams free.

Yisroel Avraham.

I am not going to Toronto to a “DEAFO YESHIVAH!” he yells. I am not DEAF — I am fine! Everyone can go fly a kite. His parents drag him to Toronto.

I am not going home! I want to stay here at Nefesh Dovid. Forever.

My husband drags him to the airport after reassuring him he will be back in two weeks to continue watering his dreams. He is coming back not to a deaf yeshivah, but a yeshivah for those with hearing loss.

They all come back.

“You know, so many of the lessons we preach, what we expect from our children, are relevant to all parents, not just in the special needs community,” the rebbetzin says. We are back at her home, where the dining room table is elegantly set. (“Remember, I’m an old Williamsburg girl.” She laughs and insists I accept a slice of cake.)

I tell the rebbetzin that one of the boys in the yeshivah, upon learning that I worked for a magazine, urged me not to write about the yeshivah. “Then everyone will come, not just boys who can’t hear, and we don’t have room for all of them.”

The Rosh Yeshivah and rebbetzin laugh. The Rosh Yeshivah jokingly puts a finger to his lips, as if charging me to keep his secret.

“The Rosh Yeshivah empowers them — he always tells the boys that they’re not nebach cases, that rachmanus has its time and place.”

There was a bochur who had trouble speaking clearly, but years of hard work and therapy paid off, and he developed the ability to articulate himself. Not long after he received the gift, he spoke with chutzpah to his rebbi.

“On one hand, it was a great simchah to hear him speak so fluently,” the Rosh Yeshivah recalls, “but at the same time, I realized I would be doing him a disservice if I wouldn’t point out that he’d behaved improperly. ‘I’m so happy you speak so clearly,’ I told him, ‘but there are also expectations about what you can say and what you can’t say.’ ”

“Who doesn’t need someone to believe in them?” the rebbetzin asks. “So many boys come here dying inside and waiting for someone to tell them it’s okay; they can fly as high as they want to. That’s what we do.

“Parents don’t mean to limit their children, they just worry too much about reputation, so they try to conform without giving the child enough space to be himself. And then there are others, parents so scared of disappointment that they discourage their children from trying. It’s easier not to try than to fail, they think, but it’s not true.”

She shakes her head. “It’s better to try and fail though, you know why?”

“Because,” Rebbetzin Kakon, wife of the rosh yeshivah of Nefesh Dovid, speaks softly, “because then you tasted the joy of trying, and once you’ve worked hard, you’ll do it again.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 704)