W hen someone who helped so many fellow Jews directly and significantly takes leave of the world it’s only fitting to write about him in a venue where many will read about who he was. Many stories will be told about Beinish Mandel z”l whose shloshim will be marked this week in Brooklyn. I have no stories to share only my personal observations of what I feel made him so unusual and such a source of inspiration.

I believe his ability to inspire owes much to the fact that he was one of us which means in turn that it is within reach of each of us to strive to be more like him. Coming from an unremarkable background he was self-made building himself into a gadol.

A gadol? Yes because it is written of Moshe Rabbeinu “Vayigdal Moshe vayeitzei el echav vayar b’sivlosam — Moshe grew great and went out to his brethren and saw their burden.” Rashi explains the last phrase to mean that he focused his eyes and heart on the suffering of his brethren as a way of intensely participating in their distress. While some translate vayigdal in a chronological sense as “he grew up ” another meaning is that “he grew great ” and what followed naturally was that “he went out to his brethren and saw their burden.” Gadlus means encompassing other Jews in your sphere of influence and caring and action; the more such Jews are within that ambit the bigger the gadol.

And so over time Beinish transformed himself into an outstanding ish chesed accompanied every step of the way by his equally giving wife Bashie. He bestowed his caring and expertise as a highly skilled paramedic upon untold numbers of people during decades in Hatzolah doing medical air transports at Camp Simcha and as a source of counsel and referrals and a listening ear to families and individuals in dire straits.

The role of medical first responder can sometimes attract those looking to be “where the action is.” But Beinish was into compassionate healing not “action.” He was the very expression of sensitivity and of composure under pressure. He spoke softly and thoughtfully and gave you his complete attention. When speaking with him you had the sense you really mattered to him — indeed at that moment you were all that mattered — and that was true of longtime friends or a kid he’d met just five minutes earlier.

People in the helping professions who deal with human trauma on an ongoing basis can run the risk of a certain desensitization to suffering. Not Beinish. Over the course of a decade-long up-and-down battle with his own serious illnesses he was often unable to do what he loved most helping those in need. But somehow the Hatzolah radio stayed on in his car even as he grew too weak to lift his equipment anymore; it was as if that radio was as essential in a vehicle of Beinish Mandel’s as the carburetor. Yet when a call came in he’d turn down the volume unable to bear listening to another Jew’s tzaros that he was powerless to alleviate.

Beinish saved lives and helped people in every sort of emergency imaginable and grateful beneficiaries would stop him in the street to thank him or send him an invitation to the simchah they were able to make only because he had been Hashem’s malach harefuah. But Beinish always seemed to have a convenient momentary amnesia unable to remember those who approached him and he never gave a second thought to actually attending any of the events he’d been invited to attend as an honored guest. His thinking was “I’ve seen these people in their most vulnerable moments and often in rather undignified circumstances and I’m going to bring all that back for them?” And that sensitivity to others’ dignity far outweighed the opportunity to bask in the glow of their appreciation.

Over the years Beinish was called upon to serve the personal medical needs of a number of revered Torah leaders such as Rav Avrohom Pam Rav Shmuel Berenbaum and Rav Nosson Tzvi Finkel bringing his trademark professionalism and sensitivity to the mission. He grew particularly close with Rav Nosson Tzvi building on a kesher he had first developed while learning in the Mirrer Yeshivah much earlier. By the time I got to know Beinish his entire essence was bound up with “the Mir.”

I don’t know if the deep affection he had for gedolei Torah preceded his close involvement with some of them or resulted from it but either way it was palpable to anyone who met him. It was also richly evident from the large photographic portraits of the gedolim he knew that graced the walls of his home.

From the outside one would size up that home as undistinguished another home on another block in Flatbush. But inside one discovered an incubator for chesed a warm Jewish home where divrei Torah were treasured where fealty to halachah and reverence for its expositors reigned supreme and children were given the room to find their individual paths in life. Chesed began in that home but certainly didn’t end there.

Beinish is now surely enjoying there the fruits of his toil here. Yehi zichro baruch.

DO YOU KNOW TOO MUCH? Last week I discussed a lesson to be learned from the Gemara’s account (Sanhedrin 39a) of an exchange between Rabban Gamliel and a nameless heretic. A bit earlier the Gemara tells of another such instructive exchange.

In this one a nonbeliever said to Rabban Gamliel “I know what your G-d is doing and where he is sitting.” The latter became visibly faint and sighed prompting the heretic to ask what was wrong. Rabban Gamliel responded “I have a son in a faraway city whom I pine to see and I want you to show him to me ” leading the heretic to exclaim rhetorically “Do I know where he is?!” With that Rabban Gamliel had his man. “That which is on earth you do not know ” he said “and that which is in heaven you do know?”

In this story one hears an echo of the powerful words of Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch in an essay on Shavuos in his Collected Writings in which he addresses the notion of Judaism as theology:

Nothing could be more senseless than to… call the Torah “Theology” or even “Jewish Theology.” For whilst “theology” contains the thoughts of man on G-d and things Divine the Torah contains the thoughts of G-d on man and things human.

There is little said in the Torah that refers directly to G-d and things Divine… The Torah rather tells us what G-d is to us to the Universe…; above all what the universe the earth mankind Israel and every individual Israelite mean to G-d the Ruler of them all. The Torah tells us how we should regulate develop and perfect our intellectual spiritual physical domestic and social relationships on earth; how to sanctify our existence as well as all our endeavors on earth so that the Divine Glory may abide in our midst….

The Torah does not want to tell us how things look in Heaven but how they should look in our hearts and homes.

It’s interesting that the Gemara refers to Rabban Gamliel’s interlocutor as a kofer even though he seemingly acknowledged the Jewish G-d even claiming to know a great deal about His activities and whereabouts. Apparently it is as problematic to presume to know too much about G-d as it is to deny Him entirely. As the Infinite One He is inherently unknowable; were it otherwise He would not be G-d. In the Rambam’s words “if I were to know Him I would be Him.”

Moreover when one claims to know G-d that “knowledge” will be filtered through the biased human mind and heart inevitably resulting in a “G-d” who looks suspiciously human-like. Voltaire was a vicious anti-Semite but he got one thing right when he said “If G-d created man in His image man has more than reciprocated.”

It is of course so tempting to focus on “how things look in Heaven” which doesn’t cost us anything. Thinking about how they should “look in our hearts and homes ” by contrast means having to make real changes in our lives. That cannot happen without study of Torah which Rav Hirsch writes Hashem

expects everyone to come to and draw wisdom from it by day and by night. Thus the Torah does not know of theologians and laymen; it rather knows a holy nation and a kingdom of priests…. Why does the child not study the Torah? “Well he doesn’t intend to become a theologian.” It is here that we have the key to the whole tragedy of our days.

And like so much else in Rav Hirsch’s writings that is so strikingly relevant and up-to-date those words are the key to much of the tragedy of contemporary Jewry too.