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| Encounters |

Cognitive Shift  

Abba’s quest for emes drove him to turn his back, suddenly and totally, on a life of exceptional success and achievement

R

abbi Abba Goldman never spoke about his past. He never talked about his childhood in Newark, New Jersey, or his years as a college student, a researcher, and then a professor. He never mentioned his father’s secular achievements and medical discoveries. Really, he never did.

As his son in-law, I think I fell into a unique space where I felt neither the filial deference of the sons nor the propriety of the talmidim, and toward the end of his life, when it was clear the days for asking questions were dwindling, I began to ask.

I already had some basic information, but it was incomplete. I had known, for instance, that my father in-law had studied philosophy, but not that he was fluent in French, German, and Greek and had learned from original texts.

I knew that my father-in-law’s father, Dr. Lester Goldman, had discovered the relationship of nonmatching blood types between mother and baby, and the treatment for it (used to this day in about 15% of all childbirths) — but not that he had declined both the Nobel Prize and the cover of Time magazine, preferring to work quietly making people better. I knew he had met Einstein, but not that it was for the purpose of creating job visas to get Jews out of Europe during the Holocaust.

We all knew that he had been a psychology professor, but none of us knew what his field of specialization was. He never mentioned Freud or Adler (or Aristotle or Descartes). His children did not even know he had been a psychologist until they were adults. I never heard him mention Mozart or Beethoven, or that he had been a skilled enough classical pianist to play in an orchestra. I never even heard him play. He hadn’t touched a piano in 48 years at the time of his petirah at the age of 82.

My mother-in-law kept some of his old things. Around the time of the shloshim, I asked her if I could look at his dissertations. Apparently, there was one he had written in French. The two she showed me were his master’s dissertation and PhD thesis, comprising together nearly 2,000 pages. They were completely impenetrable to me. I only have a master’s degree in psychology.

Rabbi Abba ben Mordechai Leib Goldman, our abba and zeidy, was born in Newark, New Jersey, in the summer of 1942 to Sadie and Lester Goldman, followed three years later by his sister Marilyn. Sadie was a dedicated teacher who stayed at the local public school for her students, long after the rest of the middle class had abandoned the neighborhood.

Lester was a hematologist, a scientist, and a teacher. He taught in many of New Jersey’s medical schools; treated poor patients in Newark for whatever they could afford to pay, making house calls with his little leather instrument bag; and directed the Mount Sinai laboratory department. After his funeral, as the family was cleaning out his things, they discovered drawers full of receipts for amounts under $5. He was responsible for such extraordinary medical breakthroughs as conducting the first bone marrow transplant; discovering the relationships of RH factors in blood; and establishing the first heart surgery center in New Jersey, and the first center for hemophilia in the world.

Abba was a child prodigy, and, expecting to follow in his father’s footsteps, he earned an invitation to an exclusive scientific research program at Harvard University after he finished 11th grade. He was the first early admission in Harvard’s history. But seeking something deeper after his freshman year, he switched his focus to psychology, philosophy, and mathematics. After graduating with a triple major, Abba wandered through such disparate occupations as shoe and vacuum sales (he never sold a single vacuum).

He knew he wanted more. He began learning Torah and lighting Shabbos candles. A year later, he was tracked down and recruited by a professor in the nation’s top psychology department at Clark University, who had read Abba’s undergraduate thesis on the synthesis of the philosophical discipline of epistemology (how we know) and developmental psychology (how we learn), to enlist his aid in researching this unique field.

Abba earned his PhD in psychology at Clark, in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he also met my mother-in-law and his first rebbi, Rabbi Yosef Gold. Upon receiving his doctorate, Abba accepted a professorship at Beloit College in Wisconsin. The chair of the department had agreed to allow my father-in-law to create his own curriculum (some of which he based on the Chovos Halevavos) rather than forcing him to follow the orthodoxy then in vogue in his discipline, much of which he recognized as foolishness and kefirah.

In Beloit, Abba learned Torah from Rav Avigdor Miller’s tapes and from whatever translated seforim he could get his hands on. With the smile of fond memory, he would recall that his favorite masechta was Keilim, with its intricate rules and systems, which he learned from the Philip Blackman Mishnayos. He took his small but growing Torah knowledge and started a Jewish house on campus where he provided kosher food and taught the Torah he was learning to his students.

The nearest kosher butcher to Beloit, where my in-laws bought their meat and chicken, was in the nearby town of Rockford, Illinois. The butcher shop was owned and run by an erliche European couple, Reb Yaakov and Shifra Niman. When Abba’s questions became too many for Reb Yaakov, he told him to wait for his son, a rabbi in New York, who would be coming for Yom Tov.

Their son was Reb Shmuel Niman a”h, a maggid shiur in Yeshivas Chofetz Chaim in Queens, New York. Rabbi Niman and my father-in-law met that Pesach and developed an instant and powerful mutual respect. After speaking with Rabbi Niman, Abba proposed coming to New York at the end of the spring semester for the last six weeks of the yeshivah zeman. Rabbi Niman agreed, and my in-laws, with my wife-to-be, nearly one year old, stayed together in a small bedroom in the Niman house while Abba went to yeshivah for the first time.

His next year teaching in Beloit would be his last. He took his sabbatical the following year to go to New York and learn in the yeshivah. After a few months there, Abba and Mommy made their decision.

In 1976, Dr. Andrew Goldman retired from teaching, relinquished his tenure, and walked away from a brilliant career trajectory headed toward international prominence. The Goldmans moved with their growing family to New York with no money, no support, and no practical means of sustaining themselves. Abba came to yeshivah, and he never left. He learned for the rest of his life, day and night, stopping only when his help or advice was sought by the downtrodden and brokenhearted.

Abba described the heart of his odyssey as a search for emes. When he was six years old, he tried to convince his parents to switch him from public school to yeshivah. (They refused.) Given that he was so young, and immersed in an exclusively secular environment, I asked him where that impulse came from. He said he wanted to find the emes. (Maybe not the word he would have used at the time, but his best description in retrospect.)

When he dropped his science major as an undergrad at Harvard and switched to philosophy and psychology, he explained it as a search for emes. Likewise when he started learning with Rabbi Gold in Worcester. And when he abandoned everything he knew and had devoted his life to, in order to move to New York to join the Chofetz Chaim yeshivah, going from holding a high-prestige position to being a 34-year-old in yeshivah who could barely read Hebrew, he said it was because he saw the emes of the rosh yeshivah’s Torah and mussar.

For 48 years, Abba was lo yamish mitoch ha’ohel. All of the genius, and the focus, and the mental energy that had earned him such incredible academic achievement, he turned to Tosafos and Rav Akiva Eiger; to learning the mesorah of Slabodka mussar from his rebbi, Reb Henoch Leibowitz; and to avodas Hashem.

In some ways, the most exceptional thing about Abba was his intentionality — his absolute focus on what he was doing each and every moment of his life. His avodah to the klal, his hasmadah in learning, his zerizus and zehirus in mitzvos — all of these incredible maalos were wrapped in the most extraordinary middah of presence.

When he davened, it was like he was in another world. I sat next to him in shul many times, and in his home in the later years, when he was too weak to go to shul. Every time he davened was like the first — or maybe the last. He gave all of his focus and concentration to every word. This is not hyperbole. In 17 years in the family, I never saw him daven or bentsh outside of a siddur or bentsher, or raise his eyes from the printed words as he was speaking to Hashem.

When he said brachos, when he changed the conversation at a hint of lashon hara, when he learned Torah, when someone came to him with tzaros —he treated each of these as if it were the only thing happening in the world, and he devoted every ounce of his energy to it. In the evenings, he would sit on the couch with a Bircas Shmuel on his lap for hours at a time, unmoving, utterly focused, indefatigable, until the phone rang with the next emergency.

His children recall the same dedication as a father. Though he would never miss a seder or a tefillah, or even come late, when he was with his children, they had his entire focus. He knew everything, they recall with warm pride, and he helped each child at every age with every subject, always exhibiting the same patience and pleasure. He helped them with arithmetic in elementary school, and then, as they got older, with calculus and history and physics and literature. He learned alef-beis with them, and he helped the boys in yeshivah (many of whom are roshei yeshivah today) with their chaburos.

He could read the same bedtime story with the children, and then with the grandchildren, a thousand times, with no diminution in enthusiasm. His joy at his children’s achievements was overwhelming. When he learned Torah with a grandchild, tears would roll down his cheeks. When the children would share divrei Torah, his body trembled with happiness. He would often ask the boys to explain the rosh yeshivah’s shmuess, though he had heard it himself and understood it better than anyone. His respect for his wife and children and grandchildren was immense, as was his pride in their character and their achievements.

Maybe it is because he came under the wings of the Shechinah at the age of 30 from an elite intellectual background that he did things with such incredible purpose. Every mitzvah was a priceless opportunity, and also a conscious choice. This was really how he lived. He never took a vacation or a day off. He had no hobbies. Bein hazmanim he spent in the small house in Kew Gardens preparing the next zeman’s masechta and talking to people who came to him for help.

Abba’s quest for emes drove him to turn his back, suddenly and totally, on a life of exceptional success and achievement, without a backward glance — and yet, when what he had left behind determined how many people viewed him, he didn’t bat an eye. The Torah that he found was, to him, so much more powerful, so much deeper and more valuable and transcendent than his secular knowledge. He never talked about psychology or philosophy.

When people came to him with the most difficult emotional challenges, he referenced only divrei Chazal. He certainly defined himself much more by his semichah than by his PhD, which I never heard him mention. Yet in the 1970s and ’80s, there were many talmidei chachamim in the frum world in New York, but not a lot of psychologists, and so his advice and his guidance were sought out constantly. And this came to define his legacy.

It is ironic that in his academic career, Abba had not been a clinical psychologist. He had been a professor, an intellectual, and a researcher. He left his secular life and somehow, he again became Dr. Goldman. He got his yoreh yoreh yadin yadin, was a rosh chaburah in yeshivah, and his hasmadah and depth were formidable. But his eitzah and his chochmah in kochos hanefesh were what brought people to him. He abandoned psychology for Torah only to find that HaKadosh Baruch Hu needed a psychologist. He embraced the retzon Hashem in this, as in all things in his life.

While Abba never returned to academia and most of his work with people was more in the paradigm of eitzah and chizuk, in 1994, 20 years after he came to the yeshivah, he got a license to practice psychology (he had been a professor and not a clinician in his academic career). Over time, some people did make weekly appointments with him, and his license enabled him to bill insurance for those sessions. Yet he never charged clients in the conventional way therapists do. He never asked for money, and gave his time to anyone who came to him. The few people he saw regularly who did pay him did so because they themselves wanted to remunerate him.

Yet even this more formal counseling never interfered with his learning time — he never took off seder for it. He was in yeshivah from 7 a.m. until 7:30 at night for all the years.

What Abba gave the yeshivah community was not psychology, but neither was he a typical rebbi. He was a truly unique hybrid. He spent most of his hours in yeshivah, teaching and learning; but he also made time for the people who sought his advice, and he gave many vaadim.

A talmid recounted to me about a mussar group at which the boys had asked him about mussar b’hispa’alus —the internalization of mussar, the connection of mind to heart.

He said, “I will show you.” He closed his eyes and concentrated, and then, as tears began to roll down his cheeks, he said, “I imagine. I imagine myself holding my children’s hands and walking with them to Har Sinai at Matan Torah.”

In this story, there is so much to learn, the talmid explained. What is hispa’alus? What does it mean to truly internalize a mussar concept such as emunah? How do you do it? (Not by singing to yourself when you read Mesilas Yesharim, as many people think.) How do we grow in our emotional avodas Hashem? It is not an answer anyone else would have given.

HE dedicated a tremendous amount of his energies to helping people with their shalom bayis and the emotional development of their children. In advising people how to interact with their children, he would often say with a smile, “The halachos of bein adam l’chaveiro also apply to children. And even to your own children.”

He did not see himself as a psychologist, though the inattentive saw him that way. He saw the neshamos of the people who spoke to him, not their psyches. He saw the power of middos and mitzvos and tefillah and yegia in a person’s growth, not therapeutic tools and psychoanalysis. He drew infinitely greater insight into human psychology and kochos hanefesh from divrei Chazal and the mussar shmuessen of his rosh yeshivah. Multitudes of people we had never heard of reached out to the family after the petirah to say they owed their lives to our father. It staggered all of us.

Of his many exceptional qualities, perhaps greatest of all was his anivus. He never self-promoted. He did not write articles or speak at conferences. He sat in the beis medrash and toiled over the holy Torah, stopping only when someone came to him for help, and then returning immediately to his learning.

He would close his Gemara and turn it sideways so you knew you had his full attention. And he would say, “What can I help you with?” Only those who experienced this moment can appreciate the full intensity of Abba’s total focus and deep compassion for a person who needed help. And then, when you were finished, he would wish you hatzlachah, turn his Gemara back around, and resume his learning without a flicker in his intensity, without pausing for a breath.

Those with the zechus to experience his singular gadlus, his kedushah, and his unmatched genius in understanding the human soul and the emotional and spiritual development of children, know what a unique and irreplaceable giant we lost last year.

May he be a meilitz for us, and in continuing to follow his teachings and the example of his life, may we be a zechus for him.

 

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1065)

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