Mourning Rav Baruch Mordechai Ezrachi 

Photos: Mattis Goldberg, Mishpacha archives

There was the lomdus and hasmadah, but there was also something else. Rav Baruch Mordechai Ezrachi ztz”l knew how to have simchah from a sevarah and delight in a diyuk, yet he didn’t want to keep all that joy to himself. He taught three generations how to have a geshmak in learning, eventually building his own yeshivah, “a yeshivah for people, not malachim,” because it is in them that the Torah can work its wonders

“Shulamis, zeh Baruch medaber,” he called out. “Shulamis, it’s Baruch speaking.”

And again, this time while banging insistently, “It’s Baruch!”

And then, once more, a cry of “Shulaaamis” — his voice rising in desperation, then a wail of hopelessness, and he sat down.

The hesped was over.

A hesped on his wife of 70 years.

What was he doing? Why was he addressing her directly, talking like a person trying to enter a room when the door is locked?

Later, a close talmid explained it:

Others in that situation — mourning a spouse — try to explain the loss, to convey the pain using stories or memories.

But Rav Baruch Mordechai Ezrachi was not others. He was well aware of the fact that thousands of talmidim were there, watching and listening. He knew that they had observed the partnership between the Rebbetzin and himself and perhaps had dreamed of having such marriages themselves. He had a few minutes to express the profundity of what he was feeling, of what a Torahdig marriage can become.

And so, Rav Baruch Mordche, the most gifted baal masbir — explainer — of all, a man capable of taking the most subtle, delicate ideas and allowing listeners to touch them, did precisely that.

He addressed the Rebbetzin as a man addresses his wife, “Shulamis, it is I, your husband, Baruch!” And although she didn’t answer, in that one-sided conversation, he transmitted to them not the information of what marriage means, but the emotion that marriage creates.

It was Rav Baruch Mordche’s way of being masbir it.

Now they’re together, but who is gifted enough to express the loss for the rest?

Because he stood alone — not only unique in this gift of articulating concepts in a way that gave them dimensions and color, but unique in his ahavas Torah, in his relationship with the ideas he was trying to express.

And so these dual characteristics — extraordinary communication skills and extraordinary love for the subject — merged, giving the generation a man who not just allowed people to understand Torah, but also to love Torah.

A double loss.