In Memory of Rebbetzin Dubba Liff

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’ve long been fascinated by the question of what the best predictors of life satisfaction are, in particular, because recent research findings seem to inevitably buttress the Torah’s prescriptions.

So, the following headline caught my eye: “New Study: Helping Others Slows Cognitive Decline by Up to 20%.” Researchers at the University of Texas and the University of Massachusetts followed 30,000 US adults over 20 years and found that those who volunteered or offered informal help to neighbors, relatives, or friends experienced 15% to 20% less cognitive decline associated with aging.

In short, helping others is good for us. As a wise woman quoted in Rav Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler’s Kuntres Hachesed remarked, “Everything I kept for myself was lost; everything I gave to others remained.” When one gives to others, that act of giving creates a relationship that endures. And the quality of our relationships is the best predictor of life satisfaction, according to the famous Harvard longitudinal study.

IF ANYONE SERVED as a living prooftext for the proposition that a life of giving to others helps one remain vigorous and full of zest, it was Morah Dubby Liff, as she was known in Baltimore, who passed away two weeks ago, just three days after her 95th birthday, completely lucid until the end. When flowers arrived on the Erev Shabbos before her birthday, she quipped, “For the grand finale.” In a photo of her surrounded by the flowers, she is smiling serenely.

Her ayin tovah, love of people, and giving nature drew young and old to her — from her four-year-old charges in the pre-elementary school of Talmudic Academy in Baltimore, where she taught for 63 years, only retiring at the age of 93, to her fellow residents in an assisted living facility in Lakewood, where she spent her last 15 months. At the shivah house, a woman told Rebbetzin Liff’s sons that the only reason she ever thought about returning to America for a visit was to see their mother, whose very presence buoyed her so much.

At 91, she flew to Israel unaccompanied for a grandchild’s chasunah, and was able to share a mitzvah tantz with three of her sons.

MORAH DUBBY was born into one of the few turn-of-the-century families in America that retained its Yiddishkeit just as it was in Europe. Her father was a Drebin, a family memorialized in Hinde Krohn’s memoir of her Philadelphia childhood, The Way It Was. (Hinde Tress, the wife of Agudah leader Mike Tress, was another cousin.)

Her mother was from the famous Lithuanian Tarshish family. Her maternal grandfather, Yechiel Shraga Feivush, was forced into five years of service in the czar’s army and managed to retain his level of observance. But when rumors started to spread of the impending Russo-Japanese war, he decided it was time to depart for America, before he was dragooned again into military service.

He traveled to Dvinsk to receive a brachah from the Rogatchover Gaon. But when he arrived at his home, he found the Rogatchover furiously pacing back and forth in thought. The Rogatchover told him to go first to Rav Meir Simcha and then return.

The latter greeted him regally, and when he heard that he was from the geza Tarshish, he gave his blessing to his plan to emigrate and assured him that his descendants would all remain shomrei Torah u’mitzvos in America. He concluded with the verse, “u’Bnei Yisrael yotzim b’yad ramah” (Shemos 14:8). Reb Yechiel then returned to the Rogatchover, who barely lifted his eyes before pronouncing the exact same words: “u’Bnei Yisrael yotzim b’yad ramah.”

For her entire life, Dubba retained the standards of her childhood home. From the age of bas mitzvah, she never missed even a minor fast day, and in her last 25 years, she added fasting on Behab. Only on her final Yom Kippur did she consume shiurim, as Rav Michel Twerski paskened she should.

Once, she woke from a short midafternoon nap and had a cup of coffee with milk, before she remembered she had eaten fleishigs for lunch. From then on, she never again ate a fleishig lunch. But whatever her private chumras, she never discussed them, and certainly made no effort to impose them on her children or anyone else.

She attended many shiurim in Baltimore, always sitting in the front row and taking notes. When someone asked why so few others were taking notes, she replied, “They have better memories than I do.”

Bubbe Dubby, as she was often called, was happily married three times, each time to a talmid of Ner Yisroel. Her first husband and the father of her five children, Rabbi Abba Yaakov Liff, was a beloved ra”m in Ner Yisroel from the age of 24.

The story is told that Rav Aharon Kotler, on a visit to Baltimore, tried to lure him to come to learn in Lakewood. But the Rosh Yeshivah, Rav Yaakov Yitzchok Ruderman, told his old friend from Slabodka, “Take anyone you want, but the masmid of America remains here.”

Rabbi Shmuel Bloom was in Rabbi Liff’s shiur in 1959, when the couple’s third son, Yechiel, was born. Rabbi Liff invited the shiur to learn with him throughout the night prior to Yechiel’s bris. Rabbi Bloom was unfamiliar with the custom of vachnacht, but still vividly remembers the fire of the learning that night, not to mention the special treats that Dubba Liff prepared just a few days after giving birth.

After the passing of Rabbi Abba Yaakov Liff, Dubby married Yitzchak (Ernie) Gutman, a prewar immigrant from Germany who learned through Shas twice with his neighbor Rav Dovid Kronglas, the famed Ner Yisroel mashgiach. He brought Daf Yomi to Baltimore in the vasikin minyan in the Agudah shul, and she brought special homemade cookies and orange juices for the shiur on Rosh Chodesh. Mr. Gutman davened vasikin every morning, and so did Dubby from the time they married, a practice she continued for 25 years, even after Mr. Gutman passed away.

Her third husband, Rabbi Yosef Schecter, was a pulpit rabbi and a renowned public speaker, representing Ner Yisroel to the larger Jewish community. He started a project, Siyum HaTorah, to finish, as a community, all of Tanach, Gemara, and Mishnayos, every year, and would solicit Jews in shul to commit to learning portions.

One morning he returned home for breakfast, and Dubby asked him how many people he had enlisted that morning. He told her three, and she replied, “You better go back and get four more.”

He called Dubby’s son-in-law Rabbi Yosef Ryback, and told him good-naturedly, “I can’t keep up with her.”

WITHOUT ANY FORMAL TRAINING, Morah Dubby had a good eye for identifying possible learning difficulties in her charges that needed to be addressed sooner rather than later. (Interestingly, her daughter-in-law, Rebbetzin Symie Liff, opened the first P'tach early intervention program in Israel over forty years ago.)

But her influence on those with whom she worked went far beyond noticing potential learning difficulties. Her son Rabbi Yehoshua Liff once found himself in a shul in Kiryat Sefer looking for a siddur. A man came over to him with a siddur, and after davening, Rabbi Liff went to thank him. They started talking, and the stranger told Rabbi Liff, “Everything I am today, I owe to your mother.”

He explained that Morah Dubby would always bake a cupcake for the birthdays of the children under her care and place a candle on top, telling the birthday boy, “Wish for anything you want, and don’t tell anyone.” Then she would whisper, “But I’m sure you want to be a talmid chacham.”

“Something about the way she said it,” the man told Rabbi Liff, “made it clear to me that there could be nothing better in life.” That Jew is a recognized talmid chacham today, who has written several seforim.

She did not only sell Torah learning to young children. A talmid in Ner Yisroel married a girl from an affluent family in another city. Nothing in her upbringing had prepared her for the life of a kollel wife. Rebbetzin Liff realized that, and drew the newlywed woman close to her, and educated her in the joy to be found in being the wife of a talmid chacham.

Certainly, those joys did not include material comfort. One of the Liff boys was learning in Mirrer Yeshivah in Jerusalem when an older brother was getting married. His father explained to him that there was no money for a plane ticket home, but that he would be like Binyamin, who named one of his sons in remembrance of the fact that he and Yosef had not been at one another’s chuppahs.

But the lack of personal resources did not keep Morah Dubby from giving to others. She parlayed her countless warm friendships in the community into making showers for kallahs. For one daughter of an alter Mirrer, she made two bridal showers. And when she learned that the kallah still did not have silver Shabbos candlesticks, she organized a third shower among her wealthier friends in order to provide the kallah with an elegant set of Shabbos candlesticks.

That lifelong habit of looking out for others in need lasted until the very end. When she learned that one of her fellow residents in her assisted living facility could no longer pay the fees, she called her son Rabbi Yechiel Liff and asked him to enlist all his offspring in Lakewood to raise the necessary money. And they did. Those same offspring often walked for up to two hours to visit on Shabbos just for the pleasure of her company.

The director of the facility told the family that Bubbe Dubby was like an additional staff member, always keeping them informed when a particular resident needed something.

Her passing came very quickly. When her son Yehoshua and daughter-in-law Diane called on Sunday from Israel to wish her happy birthday, she was perfectly alert, and joined her son in singing “Siman tov u’mazel tov,” before pronouncing her familiar blessing to all her married couples, “You should have good, long years together.”

Less than two days later, the hospital called her nearest son, Yechiel, and told him she was failing. But his car was completely snowbound in Brooklyn. Her children worried that their mother, who had given so much to them and to so many others, would pass from the world alone. But a religious pulmonary therapist in the hospital was summoned to her bedside and recited Shema and Vidui with her.

She saw only good in Hashem’s world, through her “rose-tinted glasses,” (in the description of one mechuteneste), never complained or spoke lashon hara about anyone. And she merited to pass from the world quickly and easily, with only joy in the large family she had produced and the thousands she had benefited along the way.

Good News for My Friends

I consider regular readers of this column to be friends (though admittedly I do the lion’s share of the “talking”). And it is incumbent upon friends to inform one another of things that they will enjoy or benefit from. Thus, I feel highly remiss in not having previously announced the appearance of the second volume of Rav Ahron Lopiansky’s Golden Apples series on Shemos.

Rav Lopiansky needs no introduction to Mishpacha readers. He is one of the deepest of contemporary Torah thinkers, while at the same time offering insights of direct applicability to our lives.

One of his essays on Yisro is relevant to the appreciation of Rebbetzin Dubba Liff a”h above. A puzzling Midrash (Shemos Rabbah 28:1) describes Moshe Rabbeinu’s receipt of the Torah both as an act of “taking captives” and as a “gift.”

Rav Lopiansky begins by noting that the Rambam lists the laws of selling and those of gift-giving in two separate sections of his great Code, even though it would have been possible to view a gift as merely a sale for which the purchase price is zero. The difference, he explains, is that when one sells something, his connection to that object is severed. But when he gives it to another, the gift binds the giver and recipient, and is attached to both giver and receiver simultaneously.

The greatest gift is that of the Torah at Har Sinai, and the strongest bond that between HaKadosh Baruch Hu and the Jewish People. But to fully appreciate that gift, we must also take it captive through our intense efforts at understanding.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1100. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)