Over Pesach I had an opportunity to converse with Rav Avrohom Chaim Feuer — a prolific author lecturer and former rav in Monsey now living in Jerusalem — who was spending the Yom Tov in my neighborhood. He mentioned a chinuch idea worth implementing: Why not utilize the talents of the many retired people in our community — who have the time patience caring and learning skills to lavish on our elementary and high school talmidim and talmidos — as chavrusas and mentors? Rav Feuer’s words made me smile as I explained that my father a”h whose 14th yahrtzeit arrives this week had done just that many years earlier.
After my mother a”h passed away he was in his 70s yet moved back to the Lower East Side of his youth and would volunteer his time to learn with students at a local yeshivahwho were having difficulty . At times they would get in trouble and my father would go to bat for them with the principal even to the point that my father’s advocacy would put him on the principal’s “bad side.” He once mentioned to me in passing that his current “chavrusa” had asked him for a hundred dollar loan and he’d given it to him. I said “Abba! He’s a kid and a chevrehman too — do you really think you’re going to see that money again?”
My father replied “That’s how I keep him close. He knows he owes me.…”
I think Rav Feuer’s forward-thinking concept deserves to be broadly implemented but my father was just doing what came naturally to him. He would quote the old adage “Those who can do; those who can’t teach ” and then add with a smile “and those who can’t teach teach others how to teach.” But that was just a self-deprecating line. For him chinuch wasn’t a last resort or even a second-best choice; it’s what he wanted to do with his life. He chose that path way back in the 1950s when the Jewish day school movement was in its infancy when teaching was for idealists or ne’er-do-wells. Abba was very much the former.
A teacher is just who he was everywhere he went and at all times. Kids young adults grown-ups; yeshivah bochurim public school kids and fellow teachers; Jews non-Jews whites blacks; Torah science life… it didn’t matter — he was always teaching by word and deed. On line at the bank while a patient in the hospital in the teacher’s lounge at school — it made no difference.
Before entering the public school system he had been a successful rebbi and principal. He arrived in Rochester New York to find a day school that went through fourth grade where the boys wore yarmulkes only in “Hebrew” classes and bentshing consisted of only the first brachah. In a few short years my father turned the school around religiously in myriad ways added another grade each year and brought in heart-and-soul mechanchim like his dear friend Rabbi Phil Kosowsky.
Rabbi Mordechai Wolin a”h was a shochet in Rochester until his kids’ chinuch necessitated a move across the country to Los Angeles. His daughter Mrs. Debby Eidlitz shared with me early memories of her principal: “I remember him as being kind and very insightful into the essence of children. He seemed to realize what made us tick and how to reach out to us. I always felt warmth from him as if he really knew who I was and really cared about me personally. I also remember always feeling a sense of fairness from your father. I was a pretty obedient-type kid so I didn’t end up in the principal’s office too often but I do remember the other children commenting about that. They knew they would be listened to and treated fairly by your father.”
My eldest brother Dovid remembers his father the principal “standing at the school’s front door each morning to greet every kid mostly by name. ‘Good morning Pnina!’ ‘How are you Paul? Have a good day.’ ‘Shalom Sarah’… every kid something special. Don’t you wish your grandchildren had a principal like that?”
FACING MY DOUBLE If Rebbetzin Yehudis Samet ever publishes yet another one of her wonderful books on the mitzvah to judge others favorably (from which my family has gained much at our Shabbos table) replete with her trademark illustrative real-life stories my own personal anecdote is ready for submission. A reader writes that “in a recent edition of Mishpacha magazine Eytan Kobre wrote that he neither has nor knows how to use a Twitter account. I am a very big fan of his written work [in various venues] … but am wondering how forthcoming Mr. Kobre is with his readership. A quick search on Twitter reveals that Mr. Kobre does in fact have a Twitter account. I believe this ought to be clarified.”
This reader’s understandable quandary and its resolution help illustrate the extent to which the obligation to be dan l’kaf zechus bids us to summon our latent mental creativity in service of Hashem and His mitzvos. Would I standing in the reader’s shoes have even fleetingly entertained the possible existence of yet another Eytan Kobre (which of course implicates the further uncomfortable question: “Isn’t one more than enough?”) one who is to boot a fellow wielder of the mighty pen a highly regarded practitioner of punditry (with an inactive Twitter account)? Not likely. But is that the fact of the matter? Indeed. (And to answer the question hanging unasked in the air: No my dear brother’s son and I are not both named for a shared long-ago Zeide Reb Ayson).
People sometimes think of the mitzvah d’Oraisa of B’tzedek tishpot amisecha as some sort of gezeiras hakasuv — a Divine decree requiring us to suspend reality and engage in flights of fancy regarding the things that others say and do. The truth is quite to the contrary: This mitzvah challenges us to reconsider whether we truly know what we think we know and thereby to come face-to-face with our own human limitations.
Different mitzvos call upon the use of diverse aspects of ourselves some requiring application of intellect others physical exertion or emotional commitment. This one asks us to employ a combination of deductive reasoning creative thinking and a healthy imagination to explain and to contextualize the seemingly surprising or inappropriate behavior of others.
In this sense this mitzvah is a wonderful model for judging our Father in Heaven favorably too. When confronted with a world in which justice sometimes seems in short supply with the undeserving appearing to prosper even as the righteous go unrecompensed we remember that we don’t know what came before we arrived in This World nor what will ensue after we depart and that indeed even during our brief sojourn here we with our limited minds and error-prone senses are privy to only the slightest sliver of reality.
The hundreds of true stories in Rebbetzin Samet’s books like the many similar episodes we each know from personal experience in which the missing facts context and background once supplied brought understanding and good will in place of suspicion and animosity teach us how fragmented and skewed our perceptions of reality often are. They enlighten us to the fact that outlandish is not synonymous with untrue.
Why there are even two Eytan Kobres.