He was Reb Moshe, comfortable everywhere, belonging nowhere; the towering genius who attracted talmidim in the alleys and corners of a world so much smaller than him, leaving his mark on a generation 

Photos Mattis Goldberg, Rabbi Aubrey Hersh, Flash90, Mishpacha Archives

He was surrounded by concentric circles of talmidim — a diverse array of roshei yeshivah, kollel yungeleit, academics, professionals, businessmen — drawn to his shiurim through the force of his incredible personality and the treasures he shared with them every week. Respected by the most prominent figures of the Torah world, yet always hovering slightly at its periphery, Rav Moshe Shapira drank from the reservoirs of virtually every major yeshivah, distilling their waters into his own unique offering of life-giving wisdom. With his passing this week, all those circles of talmidim have lost the focal point that gave them meaning and clarity

They struggled, the daily newspapers, to find the terms to express the loss. No attributes — neither gaon nor mechanech nor mekarev nor mekubal — came close to doing justice to Rav Moshe Shapira, who left this earthly world as the 10th of Teves draped its darkness over it. He has no famous yeshivah associated with him, no formal position that fully defined his ambit.

He was Reb Moshe, comfortable everywhere, belonging nowhere; the towering genius who attracted talmidim in the alleys and corners of a world so much smaller than him, leaving his mark on a generation of roshei yeshivah, rabbanim, and mechanchim who derived their inspiration from his persona and shiurim.

He was a man of the city bus, a figure you might see ducking into a small shul, then reappearing just as suddenly. You could see him davening in one of the shtieblach of Zichron Moshe or on a Brooklyn street corner or deep in conversation in the back of a shul in freezing Moscow.

Early On

The motion, the breadth, the insatiable quest for chochmah, was something he imbibed early on. His father, Reb Meir Yitzchok, was a relative of the Alter of Kelm and heir to his discipline and self-awareness. Reb Moshe, born in 1935, learned in Ohr Yisrael in his native Petach Tikvah before going to learn in Ponevezh, where he became one of the last talmidim of Rav Dessler, whom he referred to as mori v’rabi.

As a child, he often recalled, he felt drawn to the shtieblach of Tel Aviv, where the older generation of Polish war survivors held on to the rich, intense Yiddishkeit they’d known back in Europe. Reb Moshe cherished their vertlach, their ideas, their chiyus.

The Chazon Ish advised him to learn in Chevron, and during those years he heard shiurim from the Brisker Rav as well. Still a teenager, he’d absorbed and internalized so many vibrant paths, threads he’d later weave into a tapestry for six decades of talmidim.

He married Rabbanit Tzipporah, a daughter of Rav Aron Bialistotsky. She would distinguish herself in the classroom as a university lecturer with a PhD — but even more so, with her devotion to him, allowing, enabling, and encouraging him to keep learning, keep giving, keep teaching Torah.

Worn Shoes

His years in kollel were marked by exceptional growth in learning — and by exceptional poverty. There was no money for bus fare, and in later years, he described how his shoes were worn from all the walking back and forth to kollel. Torn shoes notwithstanding, veteran Mirrer talmidim remember their rebbi, Rav Nachum Partzovitz, rising to his feet every time the young talmid chacham with the bright eyes entered the beis medrash to speak with Reb Nachum, who would hurry to the back, eager to speak with Reb Moshe in learning.

He drank from many rebbeim, learning under Rav Michel Feinstein, later meeting Rav Yitzchok Hutner and learned from him as well. He once recalled his late-night sessions with Rav Hutner: tThey would learn kisvei Arizal for several hours, after which Reb Moshe would walk back from Rav Hutner’s Mattersdorf apartment to Bayit V’gan, his feet carrying him in sheer excitement at the new worlds opening before him.

In time, Reb Moshe joined with Rav Hutner, Rav Dov Schwartzman, and other brilliant talmidei chachamim in the formation of Beis Hatalmud. From there, Reb Moshe joined the staff at Ohr Somayach. His stream of influence meandered through different yeshivos at different times until names became meaningless — it was about the man and his Torah.

Rav Moshe and his rebbetzin moved to America for several years in the early 1980s when their daughter, Shulamis, took ill. He joined the hanhalah of the Yeshivas Bais Binyomin in Stamford, making a mark on American bochurim. The young girl eventually passed away and her parents returned home.

After the tragedy, the man who was a master of Shas with Rishonim, familiar with Midrash, kabbalah, and kisvei kadmonim, developed a special connection with Mishnayos — delivering in-depth shiurim in Zera’im and Taharos until the end of his life. Avreichim in his kollel noticed that the shiurim he delivered, incisive as they were, often revolved around the Mishnah, bringing the Gemara back to its source. (Later in life, he would head a yeshivah called Shev Shmaatsa, which was named in tribute to her, using her initials.)

One Big Sefer Torah

People would hear Reb Moshe speak, just once, and find themselves transfixed by the precision, clarity, the glimpse at the vastness of Torah. They would line up to speak with him — and suddenly, they too were talmidim.

In the same day, he could give a shiur to a group of fresh baalei teshuvah, then a private shiur to leading roshei yeshivah, some of the most accomplished talmidei chachamim of the generation.

What was he teaching them?

Others have mourned Reb Moshe as the father of machshavah, but close talmidim suggest a different term: Reb Moshe was teaching emunah. Some listeners were distracted by the dazzling structure of the shiur, the mesmerizing presentation, but those who heard him — who really heard — perceived that he was a purveyor of faith, of connection with HaKadosh Baruch Hu.

His call was to look deeper, beneath the surface, to plumb the pasuk or Mishnah or idea and find a new reality. And, by extension, to look beneath the surface of this world, to see past the noise and commotion and diversions, and see Him!

“For 40 years,” he recently told a talmid, “I’ve been teaching one thing: emunah.”

The phrase he used, again and again, zeh megaleh mah sheme’eiver. Look deeper. The whole world, he would say, is composed of ma’amaros, Hashem’s utterances. The ma’amaros are composed of words, which are composed of letters. And thus, he would conclude, the whole world is one big sefer Torah.

He abhorred superficiality. He once commented that anyone who studies pictures of pre–World War II Jewish children will notice an astuteness and intelligence in their eyes. “Yet,” he continued, “our children today don’t seem to have that same chochmah in their eyes, as if there’s an ‘orlah’ covering our generation: What is it?

“Ich mein, I believe,” he continued, “that it’s television. They’ve seen too much superficiality  and inaction.”

Life is the sefer Torah; the pretenses and contrived scenarios are its opposite.

Rav Ari Waxman, mashgiach at Yeshivat Sha’alvim, took a talmid headed back to an American university to Reb Moshe for a farewell brachah. Reb Moshe gave the young man three pieces of advice — to refrain from watching television, to keep a netilas yadayim basin near his bed, and to be stringent about zeman Krias Shema.

A talmid was returning to learn in kollel in America, and he and his wife were worried about leaving Eretz Yisrael. “Keep a netilas yadim cup and basin near his bed,” Reb Moshe advised the wife, “and if he’s remiss, then we will pull him back here, to Eretz Yisrael, together.”

One Vort

Back when Afikei Mayim, a sefer of Reb Moshe’s Torah on the Yamim Tovim written with Reb Moshe’s haskamah, was published by a devoted talmid, I was charged with selling the sefer at the various weekly shiurim.

I reasoned that I would ask the attendees at one shiur where the next one would be held, and so on. I was disappointed.

Those in one chaburah had no idea about the existence of the other. He raced from one to another — there were close to 40 shiurim each week and I covered less than a quarter of them.

I tried my best, using resourcefulness and chutzpah, to stitch together this string of chaburos and shiurim. I noticed two things: Reb Moshe usually began exactly where he’d left off the week before, and the shuls he chose were generally off the beaten path, interesting little out-of-the-way places. At one shiur, I remember, Reb Tzvi Cheshin picked up the new sefer and looked through it. “The Rebbi,” he said, referring to Reb Moshe, “often says that every man has one vort: It’s what he says with his life, throughout his life, again and again. This sefer captures Reb Moshe’s vort.”

And what was Reb Moshe’s vort? I asked a close talmid.

He answers with one word, the word Reb Moshe used in every shiur, whatever the topic or sefer in front of him.

Chayim.

“Cha-yim!” Reb Moshe would exclaim, wonder and delight in his voice. It was all about connecting with life, with the Source of life, of experiencing life, of squeezing the maximum amount of chiyus out of a mitzvah, out of a moment.

Four Amos
The secrecy about the various shiurim reflected Reb Moshe’s great need for privacy.

He quoted the teaching of Chazal that since the Churban Beis Hamikdash, HaKadosh Baruch Hu is found only in the four amos of halachah. “Four amos,” Reb Moshe remarked to a talmid, “is the space occupied by a single person, mekomo shel adam. Hashem and His Torah and the person, alone. Otherwise, if it’s eight amos, zeh kevar miflagah, it’s already a political party.”

He had arguably the greatest following of a rebbi in modern times, but didn’t want a worldwide union of “Talmidei Rav Moshe Shapira” — he preferred the murkiness and mystery, the Briskers unaware of those from Sha’alvim oblivious to the Russian scientists who never could have imagined that a clandestine group of gedolim came to his succah each year, on the yahrtzeit of the Vilna Gaon, and spent the whole night immersed in Toras HaGra.

In addition, says Reb Shlomo Gottesman, editor of Yeshurun, his words were calibrated with such precision and depth that he had to make sure each talmid heard what was right for him. He drew many circles of talmidim, but each circle was tightly controlled.

Therefore, when uninvited guests would show up to the regular chaburos, even if they were respected talmidei chachamim, Reb Moshe would patiently and politely take them aside and apologize: The shiur was tailored to its regular listeners; only those who he’d invited to participate could remain.

He slipped effortlessly between roles, able to give an Erev Rosh Hashanah shiur to hundreds, then disappear to go wish a gut yahr to the almanah of a talmid. Once, a talmid put his car at Reb Moshe’s disposal. For seven hours, they drove around to visit “nitzrachim” — people who’d turned to him with all sorts of needs. Some ran mosdos facing difficulties, some had unwell children, some had personal issues or financial trouble — for each, he had time, empathy, heart, resources, and the limitless supply of emunah with which his words were laced.

Intensely private, he spent time in deep contemplation each day. This prolific speaker believed that if a person says over a vort too soon after hearing it, “zeh mitafes,” it becomes as nothing.

He fiercely protected his boundaries. Once, an eager young man noticed Reb Moshe sitting alone on the bus: the resourceful bochur grabbed the vacant seat and began to speak to Reb Moshe, who’d been sitting in peaceful tranquility.

“Sitting next to a Yid on the bus isn’t a mechayev to speak with him,” Reb Moshe informed his seatmate.

Reb Moshe drew reverence and respect from the most prominent gedolim. But in some ways he always remained outside the establishment; he felt he’d contribute more to the world as an individual rebbi to individual seekers.

The Bayit V’gan neighborhood was perfect for him, outside the hub of charedi life. He enjoyed the immigrants and academics and Amshinover chassidim. On Yom Kippur, he davened most of the tefillos at local Sephardic minyanim, wishing to recite the Thirteen Attributes of Mercy, which he felt necessary. Only for Neilah did he rejoin a classic yeshivah minyan. He told a talmid how he’d been in Flatbush one year on Yom Kippur, and entered a Sephardic shul as they were reciting the piyut of “Lecha Keli Tshukasi”; he was instantly captivated, and never let it go after that.

At War

Reb Moshe, says a close talmid, was a heiliger Yid, and he gravitated to holiness. He was a man who spent his life at war with Olam Hazeh, always defying its plea.

He was a mikveh-goer and a forceful davener and a habitual faster — the suffering of talmidim often resulted in him being mekabel taanis on their behalf — and he slept very little. He would start his day at the k’vasikin minyan at the Kosel and hurry off to learn and teach. His American talmidim knew that his “phone hours” only started after midnight. At his son’s sheva brachos, Reb Moshe quoted the words of Dovid Hamelech in Tehillim: “That I shall not come into the tent of my house, and I shall not go up on the bed that was spread for me... not give sleep to my eyes... until I find a place for Hashem....”

“If you wish to create a makom l’Hashem,” Reb Moshe told his son, “then that is the eitzah: You have to throw away the bed, m’darf avekvarfen di bet!”

When a close talmid asked him for help deciding between two job offers, he advised, “You know I always do the more difficult thing because that’s what Hashem wants.” If something seemed difficult, it meant that HaKadosh Baruch Hu wanted him to overcome it.

Over the last quarter century, Reb Moshe’s impact exploded as he became, in the words of Reb Shlomo Gottesman, “the intellectual patron of kiruv.”

In Reb Moshe’s worldview, every neshamah is a letter in a sefer Torah waiting to be perfected, and all questions are good questions. The yeshivah led by his close talmidim for baalei teshuvah, Pischei Olam, drew some of the most dynamic and brilliant Israeli returnees, and Reb Moshe loved to spend time there.

Empowered by the spiritual self-identity his shiurim gave them, his talmidim emerged as super-effective mekarvim across Europe, South Africa, Australia, and North America. Reb Moshe himself would travel to share in their work: He enjoyed interacting with the eager, bright, fresh students. Reb Moshe would spend Pesach in Moscow, at Yeshiva Toras Chaim. He would sit down to the Seder and speak the entire night, the glory and wonder of Yetzias Mitzrayim on his lips until the sun came up.

In recent years, many seforim, books, and classes disseminating his Torah became popular. “Ich red,” he joked to a talmid, “uhn alleh machen parnassah — I speak and everyone else makes a living.”

It was a joke with a certain truth, though not in the literal sense. He spoke and others came alive, his words able to recharge souls of the sophisticated and simple alike. Chayim!

Pay Heed

To The Soul Despite the overwhelming popularity and appeal, he remained a mystery, this princely Yid who knew kol haTorah kulah, rebbi of the rebbeim, patron and friend to the downtrodden and demoralized. He danced through this world, but never really stopped to sit down.

A talmid was accompanying Reb Moshe on a visit to England. They were at the airport for the return flight, standing amid typical Heathrow bedlam, blaring loudspeakers and rushing porters and frantic passengers and overwhelmed agents. As they waited to board, the commotion increased. And Reb Moshe was humming to himself.

The talmid listened. His rebbi was softly singing an ancient piyut, “Odeh LaKel Leivav Choker.” It’s a poetic call to the soul to remember from whence it came, and what for. Simu lev el haneshamah. Pay heed to the soul. The song tells of the neshamah’s radiance and dazzle, its journey from beneath the Kisei Hakavod to a harsh world. It’s a reminder that each night, the soul rises to give an accounting of its deeds and the joy of a soul that arises “resplendent, in a tallis and tefillin, splendid as an ornamented bride....”

Reb Moshe, the talmid understood, was rising above it all, the bustle and activity and sheer earthliness of it — connecting himself with the world beyond.

Reb Moshe hummed to himself down the walkway and onto the plane.

At the levayah, one saw the overwhelming grief of thousands of talmidim: externally, there was little to connect them.

Except him.

He leaves over three illustrious sons, but no titles to inherit. There was no demographic or party or mossad associated with him, nothing external, because he was from the world of neshamos, reaching neshamos.

Now they are orphaned in the worst way, their world shrunken, the voice that could recharge them and allow them to flourish for another week, stilled.

It was as he himself remarked after meeting Rav Shlomo Freifeld: Some rebbes give out shirayim of food, Reb Moshe said, but Reb Shlomo distributes shirayim of life. Particles of chayim.

Reb Moshe — his face, his demeanor, his voice, his ideas — had a magnetic appeal, a man of life pulling forth sparks of life. Simu lev el haneshamah — a radiant soul gathering souls from the sides of the road.

In a world that appears devoid of life, of meaning, he showed them that meaning is all around us. In a world that appears dark, he showed brilliant rays of light. In a world where people are numb, he taught how to live.

And now he’s gone, back to the world he never really left.

Where will we find it, that chayim?

Yehi zichro baruch.

The Deeper You Dig // Yonoson Rosenblum

The first time I asked Rav Moshe Shapira ztz”l a question in my public position as editor of Yated Ne’eman, he told me, “There are questions that embarrass the one who is asked.” I understood him to mean that my intuition about a certain matter was correct and I should not have felt the need to ask. But that response left me acutely sensitive to the possibility that my ignorance might ever constitute a diminution of his greatness. Consequently, I would never call myself a talmid of Rav Moshe lest I embarrass him.

For each one of the 20 or so times I quoted him in print, there were another four times when I was trying to express an idea heard from him but was too afraid to attach his name in case I had misunderstood.

To be a true talmid, one would have had to immerse oneself in the vast wellsprings from which he extracted the “ohr ganuz — hidden light of Torah” for our generation. And one would need to have understood enough of what he gave over to extrapolate and shine new light. Rav Moshe opened up new sources and new approaches, but he expected those who drank from his waters of Torah to go further. And with Rav Moshe, there was no substitute for thinking yourself.

There were hundreds of talmidim who met both criteria, including some of the leading roshei yeshivah of our day — Rav Dovid Cohen and Rav Shmuel Yaakov Borenstein are just two of many examples. For decades, Rav Moshe gave an astounding 30 or more chaburos or shiurim a week — some public but most for select groups. The chaburah in Seder Taharos, for instance, was made up of only talmidei chachamim muflagim. And there were those in kabbalah where all the members of the Vaad were of rosh yeshivah stature and themselves experts in sisrei Torah.

Besides those deserving of the title talmid of Rav Moshe, there were thousands more, like myself, who attended his shiurim, reviewed the written versions that circulated, and listened to tapes, for whom any access we had to the upper realms of Torah was through Rav Moshe or his disciples. Without daring to call ourselves talmidim, we would not have hesitated to point to Rav Moshe as the most important influence on our relationship to Torah.

RAV MOSHE HAD A SPECIAL PLACE in his heart for baalei teshuvah — that was an expression of his passion for spreading Torah. When I first came to Ohr Somayach nearly 38 years ago, Rav Moshe had just succeeded another Torah giant, Rav Dov Schwartzman ztz”l, as the rosh kollel for an extraordinary group of baalei teshuvah.

It is appropriate that his largest public shiur was given in Ohr Somayach for more than two decades, as these baalei teshuvah — many coming from sophisticated academic backgrounds — helped to create the audience for the multilayered, deep Torah he was offering. Many of his leading expositors — e.g., Rabbi Akiva Tatz, Rabbi Mordechai Becher, Rabbi Jeremy Kagan, Rabbi Beryl Gershenfeld — come from those ranks.

Rav Moshe was the address to which brilliant questioners of all stripes were directed. Benny Levy, one of the leaders of the 1968 French student revolt and later the leading disciple of Jean-Paul Sartre, was one whom Rav Moshe helped bring to Torah. Rav Moshe’s hesped after Levy’s early passing laid bare the depth of that relationship. Gideon Saar, former minister and a potential future prime minister, was another with whom Rav Moshe learned privately. A rosh kollel told me after Rav Moshe’s passing that he found him most accessible in his conversations with groups of fresh and potential baalei teshuvah, who still addressed him with the familiar “you.”

He served as nasi, gave shiurim, and helped raise funds for numerous kollelim of baalei teshuvah and for Pischei Olam, a yeshivah for Israeli baalei teshuvah from academic backgrounds, headed by his talmid Rabbi Eliezer Faivelson.

NO ONE IN OUR GENERATION reached more Jews with Torah of comparable depth. He revealed Torah not only in its halachic aspects or as a guide to every aspect of our behavior, but also as chochmah, as the portal to the infinite Divine mind — a chochmah that can only be received via a teacher. Every public shiur — the Thursday night shiur, Leil Tishah B’Av, Hoshana Rabbah, or those in Yeshiva Sh’or Yoshuv in Lawrence — was standing room only, no matter how large the beis medrash.

There is a flourishing cottage industry of seforim based on his shiurim, and superb write-ups of his shiurim by Rabbi Moshe Antebbe and Rabbi Doniel Baron circulate in the thousands weekly. Thousands more download the shiurim from Kol Halashon. One can listen to a single shiur multiple times in succession and still experience the thrill of discovering new depths on each listening.

He was a product of the great yeshivos — Ponevezh, Chevron, Mir, and Brisk. As a bochur, he lived for several years in the home of Rav Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler, after the passing of the latter’s wife. And he credited Rav Dessler with having twice told him something that changed his life. One was to study the Maharal. Rav Dessler understood the poetic nature of his soul, and discerned that his love of metaphor and multiple layers of understanding would find its salve in the Maharal. (Not by accident has one of his closest talmidim, Rabbi Yehoshua Hartman, published the multivolume Gur Aryeh Chumash and numerous other annotated volumes on the works of the Maharal. Rav Moshe and he traveled at least once a year to the kever of the Maharal.)

But though he was a sheim davar in the world of the yeshivos from his youth — many said of him that he was the greatest baal kishron they ever met — his Torah was available to all. Kippot serugot were liberally sprinkled throughout his public shiurim and around his table and living room on Purim.

IT IS DOUBTFUL that there is another figure in our time who served as mentor and guide to so many hundreds of talmidim. They needed him not because of their timidity but because he constantly pushed them in new directions and far from their comfort zones. In the midst of a Tu B’Shevat shiur on the fruit tree as a metaphor for the creative power of man to bring forth fruits that exist together with him, he suddenly interjected: “We are not here to rearrange the furniture: We are here to become partners with Hashem in returning Creation to its primordial perfection.”

That is how he lived. In his last years, he led a Seder in Russia every year. Asked why, he responded, “In Jerusalem, they don’t need me. Here, I’m told they need me.” He constantly prodded his talmidim to go out and do and teach, often in far-flung locales or unfamiliar circumstances. They agreed, but only on condition that he would still be there to guide them.

One young activist who has created two organizations — one to teach Torah in secular and dati-leumi Israeli schools and another bringing together frum and non-frum Israelis to argue with one another based on Torah sources — told me recently, “How can I possibly function without being able to constantly ask Rav Moshe what are the proper boundaries? He guided me every step of the way, and was always there for our questions.”

The levayah was on Asarah B’Teves, which is described as the darkest of the fasts in the darkest time of the year. In one shiur on the day, Rav Moshe asked why the siege of Jerusalem is independently a cause of mourning. He answered, “Torah goes out from Tzion. When Tzion is besieged, the light of Torah can no longer be expressed in the same way.”

Tzion and Yosef, he pointed out, have the same gematria (156). Yosef is the flame that goes forth from the fire of Yaakov; the power of the Torah of Yaakov to spread and conquer Eisav, until the world is filled with knowledge of Hashem.

Rav Moshe Shapira was the Yosef of our generation. Oy lanu on the flame that has been extinguished and the darkness in which we are left.

End of an Era // Rabbi Doniel Baron

I first heard our rebbi, Rav Moshe Shapira ztz”l, over 25 years ago when I was a bochur learning in yeshivah in Eretz Yisrael. From the first minute, I felt like I was receiving Torah straight from Har Sinai. He would breathe new life into simple-looking things we’d  never noticed, and transform that which on the surface appeared mundane into something incredible and inspiring.

In many cases, the gateway to new understanding came on the heels of a simple question. Why is Lavan named after the color white? Our rebbi would reveal to his talmidim incredible depth that lay hidden within something we thought we knew or never bothered to think about. Hundreds of people came to his shiur every Thursday night; his words opened the hearts and expanded the minds of all those who heard him.

He had uncanny insight into human nature — so many people from different walks of life felt comfortable sharing their pain with him, and his heart was big enough for every one of them. While I was privileged to seek his counsel on many occasions, he seemed to read the future as well, and one instance stands out in my mind.

It happened when my wife and I were visiting Yerushalayim just a few months after our wedding. We wanted to pursue our dream of living and learning in Eretz Yisrael, yet we found ourselves in the middle of a particularly difficult wave of terrorism. I asked Reb Moshe how we should factor the security situation into the decision.

On the spot, he told me that we shouldn’t take it into account at all. I wanted to make sure I properly understood his directive and worked up the courage to ask him to confirm that I could rely on that particular piece of advice. He looked me straight in the eye and said, “And what makes you so sure nothing will happen in America…?”

Three months later, those words would haunt me, as I was standing on a pier in Hoboken, New Jersey, on a clear and sunny September day, waiting for a ferry to take me to the World Trade Center across the Hudson. I saw a giant fireball as an airplane hit the iconic landmark that I later realized I had seen for the last time. As the truth slowly emerged from all the confusion, it became clear that we were under attack. And all I could hear my rebbi’s voice: “And what makes you so sure nothing will happen in America…?”

It’s difficult, if not impossible, to find words to describe the impact our larger-than-life rebbi had on our generation. Perhaps the greatest hesped lies within in his own words — words he said at the hesped for one of the great leaders of our time, and I’ve taken the liberty of using them to describe Reb Moshe himself. The Gemara (Nedarim 22b) says that had we not sinned, our Torah would have consisted of only the five Chumashim and the book of Yehoshua. Does that mean that we would have forgone everything in the 24 other books?

That would be impossible. Indeed, we would have had that Torah — but instead of receiving it, we would have arrived at it in a different way.

Chazal teach that Avraham fulfilled all of Torah, and the Midrash (Bereishis Rabbah 95:3) cites the opinion that Avraham learned “mei’atzmo” — from himself. How exactly did Avraham learn everything from himself? And why can’t we learn Torah from ourselves as well? Our rebbi answered that in order to learn Torah mei’atzmo, one has to be atzmo — one’s real self. Had we not sinned, we would have been able to derive the remaining books of Torah by ourselves — and from ourselves. But because we were unworthy — and not ourselves — Hashem had to instead reveal that Torah to us.

Unfortunately, we are not ourselves, but the product of what others say and think. It is extremely difficult to find a person who is truly atzmo — one who doesn’t care what others think and doesn’t seek anyone else’s approval. But there are very few people who are truly themselves — people who are completely independent of others’ opinion. The more a person distances himself from his true self, the more he forgets Torah. Conversely, the more he reverts to being himself, the more he can learn all of Torah mei’atzmo.

Reb Moshe was “atzmo” — he was all-encompassingly his own truth. He was not the outcome or product of what other people would say or do. This was the secret of his success in making huge numbers of people into bnei Torah.

The Gemara (Bava Metzia 84a) says that when the great sage Rav Yochanan first met Reish Lakish, the latter was a highway robber. Rav Yochanan saw something special in Reish Lakish and confronted him and said, “Cheilach l’Oraisa! — Your strength is for Torah!” Those two words made Reish Lakish into the person he became. They changed everything and transformed a brigand into one of the greatest sages the Jewish People ever knew. Because he was so real, Rav Moshe could bring out the atzmo in those who sought his guidance.

His passing marks the end of an era. We lost so much more than our rebbi. We lost the last chance we had to connect to our true selves.

Rabbi Doniel Baron has been a talmid of Rav Moshe Shapira ztz”l for the past 25 years and taught at Pitchei Olam, one of Rav Shapira’s yeshivos. He lives in Jerusalem with his wife and children.

All There In Front of Him // Rabbi Zave Rudman

There’s an urban legend about the Israeli daily Maariv including a quote about Rav Moshe Shapira’s hold over a generation of chozrim b’teshuvah. The legend is true. I know; I tracked it down. “I see my friends walking around with a Walkman and headphones. I think they’re listening to Pink Floyd… but they’re actually listening to Moshe Shapira.”

Reb Moshe was the spiritual guide of Ika Yisraeli, the prominent Israeli artist who became frum and helped launch Ohr Somayach. He remained involved in all aspects of the teshuvah movement — but his talmidim came from every circle.

I first sought out Reb Moshe at a wedding. He heard my question, then asked me to backtrack and explain what I knew about the sugya. Then he took it forward. I realized I was speaking to a master mechanech, and I began attending his shiurim. My wife will attest that those shiurim impacted the entire family. When I returned from his Friday afternoon shiur, we all went into Shabbos uplifted.

The famous Thursday night shiur was given lecture-style. But other shiurim had a give-and-take. And if you gave, you had to be ready to take. He’d quote the Chazal that there is no blade of grass without a malach that hits it and says “grow” — emphasizing the word “makeh.” You need to be pushed to grow. If someone at the shiur misquoted Chazal by one word, he let you know.

He was conversant in science, philosophy, history, languages. I once asked him whether Shakespeare would be considered “chochmah b’goyim.”

“Yes, but you consider Shakespeare chochmah?” he answered. You could do better, was the unspoken message.

It was an awe-inspiring experience to be next to a person who carried within himself literally kol haTorah kulah. I could ask him anything — Tanach, Shas and poskim, machshavah — and almost instantaneously have an answer. More than that, he had it all literally there in front of him.

As great and as brilliant as he was, I can still picture him at my daughter’s wedding: He was wrapped around my son-in-law, giving him a hug. There was emotion, there was care, there was feeling….

Who’s going to guide us now?

Rabbi Zave Rudman, a talmid of Yeshivas Chofetz Chaim, is a rebbi in Ohr David and teacher in many seminaries.

Triply Bereft // Rabbi Noson Weisz

Three tragedies befell us in the month of Teves: We were forced to translate the Torah into Greek on the 8th, we lost Ezra Hasofer on the 9h, and Nevuchadnetzar placed Jerusalem under siege on the 10th. The three tragedies perfectly describe the loss we have suffered through Rav Moshe Shapira’s departure. And while I am wholly unworthy of being maspid my rebbi, it was impossible for me to ignore the request to briefly address the meaning of this threefold loss to me and to Klal Yisrael.

FOR THOSE OF US who had the zechus to listen to Reb Moshe over the years, one of the things we learned was how truly untranslatable Lashon Hakodesh is. He was able to show the incredible congruity between the structure of the Hebrew words used to express a Torah idea and the content of the thought being described, and he did this quite often. The combination of certain key letters, the numerical value of the words, were so clearly indicative that Hashem created the world in Lashon Hakodesh, that I often felt sorry that the kofrim among Israeli Hebrew speakers had no access to his shiurim; they would surely have become believers just by appreciating the language they so took for granted.

Reb Moshe repeatedly demonstrated how thinking in modern Hebrew was a serious barrier to appreciating Torah ideas. For example, anyone who grew up using the modern Hebrew word tzilum for “photograph” could not possibly appreciate the implications of being a tzelem Elokim. The subconscious association with photographs would inevitably distort the term’s true significance.

How could anyone unfamiliar with Reb Moshe possibly appreciate the great tragedy of translating the Torah into Greek?

IN HIS HESPED, Rav Berel Povarsky described Reb Moshe as one of the maatikei hashmuah, clearly a reference to Ezra Hasofer, who was niftar on the same date as Rav Moshe. Ezra HaSofer and his beis din authored the siddur that we daven from today in order to ensure that the Jews who had lost their clarity of vision in galus would not speak nonsense inspired by the surrounding nations when standing before the King in prayer. The Gemara says that Ezra was fit to give us the Torah, but Moshe Rabbeinu had preceded him. The Torah Ezra taught was Moshe Rabbeinu’s Torah, which we could no longer properly understand. Our exposure to the foreign cultures we encountered during our galus distorted our thinking and stripped our ability to comprehend Torah concepts.

It was in this sense that Reb Moshe was the maatik hashmuah of our generation. The post-Holocaust generation was raised in a culture radically different from the culture of the two-thousand-year galus that preceded the Holocaust. We needed a gigantic figure to be able to teach us the same ideas again, rephrased in terms of the new cultural language of our formative years.

For many years, Reb Moshe gave an incredible 40 shiurim a week, teaching hundreds of us who were exposed to modern secular ideas how to think straight about Torah concepts, and undoing the cultural confusion inflicted upon us by modern concepts of “rights,” “equality,” humanism, and democracy.

Every idea he expressed came straight from the seforim that Klal Yisrael had always used to teach us how to think about the Creator and His world. Yet without the entr?e he gave us, those seforim were largely inaccessible to many of us. He gave us access to the Maharal, the Gaon, and countless others that were closed books to those who were not zocheh to hear him. (I do not mean to imply, chas v’shalom, that no one else knows how to read these seforim properly.) No one else took it upon himself as a life mission to teach machshavah to such vast numbers of seekers, especially those who had been intensely exposed to the secular culture and lifestyle.

REB MOSHE repeatedly explained that some cities are cultural centers, not just locations on the map. New York or Paris are cities that influence world culture. Yerushalayim represented the center of a specific culture, one superior to that of the non-Jews, and they viewed it as impenetrable for that reason. Nevuchadnetzar’s attempt to besiege Yerushalayim attested that he no longer considered the culture of Torah — with its physical locus of Yerushalayim — to be beyond his reach. It was just another city, just another culture.

Rav Moshe showed us how exalted the Torah’s wisdom truly was — far beyond the reach of even the most superior human being. He was a living example of the wisdom of Torah transcending any wisdom available to mankind. It would have been impossible to besiege any city from where the words of his Torah emanated.

You cannot besiege Heaven, after all, with the tools and weapons available on the earth.

Rabbi Noson Weisz, a talmid of the Mir Yeshivah and a rebbi in Beis Yisrael and Aish haTorah, lives in Jerusalem with his family.

He Gave Us The Gift Of Language // Miriam Kosman

It all started about 12 years ago, with a small group of sheltered young men from Rav Moshe Shapira’s kollel, young avreichim from Bnei Brak and Yerushalayim who didn’t know a thing about kiruv and had never spoken to “rechokim.” But they were his talmidim, and they had learned the power of Torah and the power of words. Their drive to establish Nefesh Yehudi — an organization that offers a stipend to Israeli university students if they devote 4.5 hours each week to Torah study — was a natural outgrowth of his chinuch.

Reb Moshe was thrilled with his talmidim’s initiative and remained intimately involved with every aspect of the organization, shepherding it from a small 30-student endeavor to what it is today — a mammoth undertaking that enrolls 5,000 secular Israeli university students in its programs yearly, offering them a chance for serious Torah study.

He was a man who drove himself incessantly, and yet he had endless time for the mekarvim of Nefesh Yehudi, whose ranks swelled to include hundreds of men and women. While many of the mekarvim were groomed in his kollelim and had constant contact with him, he also made a rare concession and met with a few of the mekarvos a number of times as well. Question and answer sessions with him were often scheduled for after his last shiur, at 11:30 p.m. At those sessions, he never hurried us. He believed in us. He would tell us, “Go and teach this. You can do it. Tevarchu v’tazlichu.”

While he made himself endlessly available to the staff, when it came to the young baalei teshuvah, the word that best described his attitude was tenderness. After his weekly shiur at Ziv HaTorah, the yeshivah for graduates of Nefesh Yehudi, lines of young men would form waiting to seek his guidance on every aspect of their lives; he danced for hours at their weddings, his face infused with joy. He loved them with a fierce love and they returned his love. Rabbi Eli Ilani, the rosh yeshivah at Ziv and director of Nefesh Yehudi, described to me how at the levayah, he stood among his talmidim, who a short while ago had never once spoken to a rabbi, and now at his petirah were crying like children who had lost a father.

But more than all this, I feel that Reb Moshe gave us the gift of language — he was the ultimate meturgeman. He translated sisrei Torah into a language that could be understood even by people who saw Judaism as a collection of warm and fuzzy customs at best and a bunch of partisan and misogynist myths at worst. He unfurled a world of grandeur and beauty, where every aspect of creation fit snugly, like pieces in a puzzle. In private sessions, he told us mekarvim that this, and only this — the power and beauty of Torah — is what we should give to our students.

He was an artisan with words, each word gently tugging another nuance onto the stage. His Torah was revelatory, a series of insights, each one leading inevitably into the next, in an endlessly looping line of light. In fact, I think it was the exhilaration of revelation that created that relentless drive among those who heard his Torah to go out and offer it to the world, and especially to those beloved members of our nation to whom the very idea of revelation would be a revelation.

At the levayah, many were frustrated that it was hard to hear the maspidim. The loudspeakers were not synchronized, and the same word could be heard coming from a few different directions, with a few seconds’ delay. Rabbi Dov Rosenbloom, a close talmid —himself a translator of Reb Moshe’s Torah to the students — pointed out how apt the symbolism was. Reb Moshe — who used language with such exactitude, who extracted clarity from a morass of blurriness — is no longer with us. At his levayah we could no longer hear, no longer make sense of what we were hearing.

Often, one sensed that for him, there was an element of pain in his transmission, as if the impossibility of ever translating the ultimately untranslatable weighed on him. His was the pain of having to channel hugeness through the medium of narrow words. Our pain is the loss of words.

“Hu lo poh, ein kevar dibur.” With his loss, there are no longer any words.

Miriam Kosman is a lecturer for Nefesh Yehudi and the author of Circle, Arrow, Spiral, Exploring Gender in Judaism, in which much of the material is based on her understanding of the Torah of Rav Moshe Shapira ztz”l.

He Never Budged // Rabbi Shimon Levin

We normally use the term adam gadol in reference to a man’s Torah learning, but Rav Moshe Shapira was an adam gadol everywhere: in the yeshivah, at home, on a plane, or when talking to a gvir.

I became close to Rav Shapira on his many visits to Russia when I was the rosh kollel in Saratov. Every time he came, he would speak about the tremendous potential of the Jews in Russia and that they were the kodesh hakodoshim. He would come every year before Pesach, and each time he visited, one could see how much he cared, and how he treated each visit with the same importance.

I would translate his shiurim into Russian for the avreichim, and sometimes I would accompany him to Moscow on fundraising missions for his yeshivah.

I saw him speak to many Jews who had never heard a shiur in Torah. I would watch him speaking with gvirim who were far from Yiddishkeit. Sometimes they would disagree, or even argue with him. They never budged him one millimeter. He never resorted to flattery, nor did he waver under pressure.

He had boundless wisdom when it came to talking to people. He would sometimes have to say things that the gvir wasn’t ready to hear. He never changed one word of what he had to say, and he had this greatness that he was always able to deliver his message without the other person ever feeling insulted.

He was so sharp in every way. I accompanied him on a trip to Vilna once. He had a phenomenal memory. He knew the geography; he knew the history and he knew every house of historical importance and who lived there.

Chazal say that someone who teaches you Torah is like a father — and I felt like a son, too. I was used to being with him in small groups, and he always made me feel as if I were his only talmid. When I was at the levayah, even though there was such a large crowd, I could sense that every one of his talmidim felt the same way I did — that we were all his unique and special talmidim.

Rabbi Shimon Levin is deputy chief rabbi of Moscow.

(Originally Featured in Mishpacha Issue 643)