Rabbi Yehoshua Kalish showed how you, too, can reach extraordinary heights no matter where you started off   

Photos: Family archives

Rabbi Yehoshua Kalish was not a celebrity, but he was larger than life, impacting the lives of thousands in the Tristate area and beyond. His essence was his Gemara and his relentless pursuit of learning — he finished Shas over 40 times — but on the outside, he seemed like a nice mesivta rebbi. Yet to his myriad disciples over half a century, he was a living example of how a “regular” person could grow to such extraordinary heights, no matter the starting point

A peaceful stillness reigns in the beis medrash, in place of the earlier hubbub of the day’s learning. Suddenly, it is broken by a deep, resonant chortle from the front left corner of the room. The few remaining heads hunched over their seforim don’t even bother looking around for the source of the noise. They already know that the laughter was not prompted by someone telling a good joke, but from Rabbi Yehoshua Kalish who was in the midst of learning his daily seven blatt at the mizrach vant.

That’s because Rabbi Kalish didn’t merely enjoy learning Gemara — he reveled in it; it was as if he were sitting at the feet of the Tannaim and Amoraim, drinking in their wisdom, witnessing their greatness, and laughing at their witticisms. It wasn’t just a function of his intense self-discipline that enabled him to learn the entire Shas every year — he’d been through Shas 40 times — but also the fact that nothing made him happier. The logical twists and turns of the Torah, paths he had long trodden and retrodden, were constantly inspiring him to a fresh insight or appreciation — up to his final days when he passed away last month at age 80 after a battle with cancer.

Still, the longtime rav of Bais Medrash of Harborview in Lawrence and maggid shiur at Yeshiva Derech Ayson (a.k.a. Yeshiva of Far Rockaway), was always striving to learn more, wild with the love and excitement of a youngster. He recently published Pnei Halevanah, a sefer with brief insights on every single blatt in Shas, and planned to write teshuvos on a range of halachic topics. After nearly 50 years of teaching in Yeshiva of Far Rockaway, he started a new chapter of his life with the founding of a halachah kollel. To the outside world, he might have looked like an energetic but aging zeide with a slightly slower tennis swing and a wider skiing turn (he was an avid participant of both sports). But where it matters, he was perpetually young, full of idealism and bubbling with dreams and aspirations for the future.

“Rabbi Kalish believed that every person can become great,” says his close talmid and friend Rabbi Zalman Stern. “He would say that you just have to be consistent and create systematic review: chazer and chazer and chazer.”

Reb Aaron Felder, a Bais Medrash of Harborview kehillah member for over 25 years, and a talmid of Rabbi Kalish for more than 35 years, since his early days in mesivta at Yeshiva Far Rockaway, says his relationship with Rabbi Kalish began with Maseches Nedarim, when he was an 11th-grade bochur.

“That year, through Rebbi’s constant encouragement, patience, and guidance, was the first year I was zocheh to complete a masechta in Shas, and that became the springboard to what would be the first of more siyumim I would make, baruch Hashem, over the coming years,” Reb Aaron remembers. “But as soon as I completed Nedarim, Rebbi gave me a big hug and mazel tov and said to me, ‘Aaron, you’ve made it past the first step, but you said ‘hadran alach’ — that you will return to it. So now what you need to do is to set up a schedule to chazer it and really acquire it while learning next zeman’s masechta, and then keep repeating the process.”

Coming from a man who reviewed seven and a half blatt a day, it was hard for Felder’s younger self to come up with a plausible excuse not to. “He taught me what it means to love Torah, to be transformed by limud HaTorah,” says Felder. “He was the living embodiment of the pasuk ‘Mah ahavti Sorasecha kol hayom hee sichasi.’ ”

Rabbi Kalish would tell his 11th-grade talmidim at the beginning of the school year that there was nothing more precious to him than when they would ask him a question in learning, regardless of how “good” or simple the question was. “The fact that you’re asking demonstrates that you think it is important to know the answer,” he would say. “What can be more precious than that?”

At a hesped for Rabbi Kalish’s shloshim this week at the Yeshiva of Far Rockaway, Felder — a member of the Lawrence Village board of trustees and owner of a medical consulting firm — said that even though it’s only been a month since the devastating loss of his rebbi, he’s already counted over a dozen times that his fingers itched to call for a sh’eilah in halachah or hadrachah.

“He took everything about our lives into account before rendering a psak, and was always so reachable that I used to think that I must be the only one asking him sh’eilos,” Felder told the crowd. “But nothing could be further from the truth. His guidance was sought by thousands, well beyond our immediate kehillah — whether it was here in Yeshiva of Far Rockaway, in the beis medrash of Harborview, in the local kollel that he spearheaded, in the kollelim in Eretz Yisrael he often visited, in the Daf Yomi shiurim in Shaaray Tefila, in Waterbury, where his son Rav Daniel is rosh yeshivah and where he considers the bochurim there like his eineklach, and in the hearts and minds of countless more. We all cherished him, we all were in awe of him, and we were all so fortunate and proud to call him our rav and manhig.”