A year after his passing, Rav Moshe Shapira ztz”l’s talmidim are using the emunah tools he instilled to navigate their own loss

He wanted people to realize what the Jewish heart is, what the neshamah is, how authentic emunah was always passed down from parents to their children and how each of us has so many tools of faith inside of us. (Painting Gili Stern. Photos: Mattis Goldberg; Rabbi Aubrey Hirsch)

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t’s almost clichéd, the post-levayah accounts that talk about the diversity of the crowd, the different demographics that joined in mourning the great man as evident by the size and color of the yarmulkes.

Still, it’s always worth mentioning, although in most cases, it’s just a reflection of public respect, indication that the tzaddik in question was revered beyond his own community.

Last year, though, as the darkness of the Tenth of Teves descended, a different kind of levayah was held. Because for Rav Moshe Shapira ztz”l, all those different types who escorted him on his final journey weren’t just paying respects — they were mourning their rebbi, the man who was, to them, a source of life.

From all corners, they came to cry.

And so the image was the revelation of a secret, the secret held by this man who hurried through life gathering talmidim and breathing life into souls wherever he went, but never letting it be about him.

What, then, was the call of this prophet, the message that had nothing to do with externals and everything to do with the neshamah?

Rav Moshe said shiur in lomdus, halachah, Kabbalah, and hashkafah, but there was one topic that he never really touched on: himself.

But during his final months, just over a year ago, he was in New York for treatment and a beloved talmid was sitting with him. “For 40 years,” Rav Moshe remarked, “I am speaking about emunah.”

That was the message. And that’s the secret of the masses, those who came from all over to learn from this man — because emunah is beyond externals; it’s the essence of every single Jew.

Rav Moshe once explained it this way. The Ramban understands that the mitzvah to remember Mattan Torah isn’t “lizkor,” to remember alone, but also “pen tishkach,” not to forget. Remembering can be external, but not to forget means it’s internal, part of our essence.

Rav Moshe was the shepherd of emunah — teaching, speaking, revealing, fanning its eternal flame — and giving water to the thirstiest flock in the world.

 Share the Wealth  

The talmid in whom Rav Moshe confided that day during treatment had been along for a large part of that 40-year journey.

The relationship between Rabbi Ruven Schmelczer and his rebbi dates back to a simpler time, when Rav Moshe was freer than he would be in later years. Rav Moshe was in Chicago for a wedding and the teenage Telshe talmid was drawn to this visitor, a young rosh yeshivah who managed to exude Telshe majesty along with the Novardoker humility, just as he combined Slabodka grandeur with Kelmer discipline. It seemed as if every one of the great yeshivos of the last generation had brushed him with some of their color and vibrancy.

They spoke in learning, the American bochur and the Israeli visitor, and two souls connected. The bochur followed up with a letter he sent to Eretz Yisrael — and Rav Moshe replied:

“My dear one… continue to make acquisitions in Torah. See to it that any area you encounter should become yours through constant review and proper iyun…”

It was Rav Moshe’s personal credo: to master each subject… and each person, each place, each date. There are layers of real significance under every stone.

Reb Ruven, a son of the beloved and revered rosh yeshivah of Telshe-Chicago, Rav Chaim Schmelczer, would go on to learn under Rav Moshe in Yeshiva Mishkan HaTorah and eventually become part of a close circle of talmidim.

About 20 years ago, with the interest in Rav Moshe Shapira’s Torah surging, and nearly all of his shiurim kept to small groups (just one, Thursday night’s parshah shiur at Ohr Sameyach, was open to the public), the longtime talmid asked for permission to publish his rebbi’s Torah.

Rav Moshe — so precise and specific in choice of words and how he shared a concept — believed that the Torah he’d taught wasn’t his, that he didn’t have ownership rights. Besides, as a close talmid told me back then, “Rav Moshe loves Ruvy Schmelczer. Ruvy has a special chein by the rebbi.”

The sefer, titled Afikei Mayim by Rav Moshe himself (in tribute to his father, Rav Yitzchok Meir Shapira) opened new gates: The Torah of Rav Moshe Shapira was accessible to the public. At the beginning, it wasn’t sold in stores, but only to talmidim at the various weekly shiurim. I remember Rav Moshe’s face when he saw the box of those seforim and the eagerness of the customers lining up to buy copies after the shiur — disdain at the fuss involving him, mixed with a certain satisfaction that the Torah, his lifeblood, was cherished.

In time, it became a series, and Rav Moshe made peace with the idea. “Ruvy iz gevoren a shreiber, he’s become a writer,” he quipped when the third sefer came out. Ultimately, he would stop reviewing every word before printing and tell his talmid, “I trust you.”

Part of the Plan

Rabbi Ruven Schmelczer was one of the few who glimpsed Rav Moshe from inside. Yet a full year after his rebbi’s passing, he still wears an expression of wonder.

“It’s an amazing thing. On one hand, Rav Moshe’s whole life’s work was to transmit just how illusory this world is, that the only reality is the world of the neshamah. You’d think we’d have the tools to deal with his petirah.”

But at the same time, Rav Moshe himself taught his talmidim about very human pain.

In 1985, Rav Moshe and Rebbetzin Tzipora tblct”a lost their beloved teenage daughter, Shulamis, to illness. Before the fresh kever was closed up, Rav Moshe leaned in and whispered, “Shloft zees mein kind — sleep well, my child.”

Then he straightened up and instructed a group of talmidim standing there to make sure to join in the wedding of a fellow talmid that evening — to rise above what they’d just seen and give it their all.

During the shivah, he quoted Chazal’s teaching that there are three partners in a person: the father, the mother, and the Ribbono shel Olam. “But how can one partner make a decision without consulting the other two?” he wondered.

Rav Moshe quoted a Rashba clarifying that in the case of a zechus — if one partner knows it to be beneficial for all of them — he may go ahead and make a decision over the protests of the others. “Clearly, there is a Partner here who knows what is good for us and He decides.”

Rav Moshe took that intense pain and tried to build with it. In his daughter’s memory he undertook the learning of seder Taharos, in which he would become an expert, and eventually opened a kollel named for her.

“He taught us the proper synthesis between emunah and pain,” Rabbi Schmelczer reflects. “Close to 20 years after her passing, someone asked him to join a Shabbaton for parents who’d lost children, lo aleinu. Rav Moshe said it was still too difficult for him to discuss his pain in public, he couldn’t do it.”

Rabbi Moshe Antebi of Lakewood, whom Rav Moshe considered a trusted writer, worked for many years to commit Rav Moshe’s Torah to paper. Rav Moshe asked him to call the eventual sefer Shuvi V’nechezeh, a reference to the pasuk in Shir Hashirim, “Shuvi, shuvi hashulamis” — a tribute to his daughter.

Rav Moshe had also developed the art of listening. People would pour out their personal troubles before him and feel better just from watching his expression, hearing his soft sigh of compassion. Once, a talmid undergoing tremendous anguish unburdened himself to his rebbi. “It hurts so much,” he said.

“Yes,” Rav Moshe softly replied, “Hakadosh Baruch Hu wants it to hurt right now.”

“He made the pain into a gift,” Reb Ruven explains. “He made you feel like the pain was some sort of special bond with the Ribbono shel Olam, and that the fact that it was so intense was part of the blessing. He offered layers of emunah with each word of compassion.”

And so his talmidim feel the pain. They miss him, longing to hear one more “L’havin! I beg you, understand….” And that pain, too, is part of the plan, another way His glory is revealed.

We All Have It Rabbi Schmelczer a maggid shiur in Brooklyn’s Mirrer Yeshivah, spent many years learning all sorts of topics under Rav Moshe — Gemara, Mishnayos, halachah, and aggadah.

“But,” he says, “it’s really all one. Everything is emunah, at the core.”

He recalls how his rebbi once reacted to a teshuvah from Rav Akiva Eiger. “He was enchanted by it. He said, ‘Ruvi, every word here is mussar and emunah.’ I assumed he was referring to Rav Akiva Eiger’s words of greeting at the beginning and end of the teshuvah, but Rav Moshe said, ‘No, I mean the divrei Torah themselves are mussar and emunah!’”

Rav Moshe had grown up in a shtibel of Polish war survivors — sharp, warm-hearted chassidim who imbued him with a lifelong love for the Torah of Kotzk, Peshischa, Lublin, and Ger. “He would often tell us that in Kotzk, before tekias shofar, they would immerse themselves in the Urim v’Tumim’s klalei migu [intricate halachos involving the claims of litigants, from the famed sefer of Rav Yehonasan Eibeschutz]  to prepare their hearts. They were on fire!”

Rav Moshe led several kollelim over the years. Once, a generous donor came to visit, and as they stood in the back of the noisy beis medrash, he turned to Rav Moshe. “Wouldn’t it be okay if there was one yungerman less?” asked the philanthropist, who believed there were other ways to benefit the Jewish people with his funds.

Rav Moshe met his gaze and spoke firmly. “There is no way to bypass Har Sinai,” he said. “Torah always was and still is the only way to find Him.”

To Rabbi Schmelczer, the description of Rav Moshe as a “baal machshavah” falls short. “He wasn’t selling philosophical arguments and proofs — just the opposite.”

Rabbi Schmelczer’s own 2015 book, The Heart of Emunah (Israel Book Shop), was a product of his rebbi’s call. “My rebbi heard the thunder and saw the fire of Har Sinai and his life’s work was to keep it alive, to transmit its power and energy. He would repeatedly quote the words of the Ramban, ‘Hayu eineinu v’libenu sham kol hayamim — Our eyes and hearts will be there all the days.’ That’s what he was trying so hard to convey, and he encouraged me to write a book specifically in English, in order to reinforce this. He wanted people to realize what the Jewish heart is, what the neshamah is, how authentic emunah was always passed down from parents to their children and how each of us has so many tools of faith inside of us.

“It wasn’t that Rav Moshe didn’t believe in looking at creation, at finding the clues all around him — of course he did. He was constantly studying the world around him,” Rabbi Schmelczer continues. “The whole world, every detail and nuance, is filled with clues and we’re expected to reveal them to find the substance. But imagine if someone compliments a child, saying that he looks exactly like his father. It makes the child feel good, not because now he knows that he and his father have the same DNA, but because he feels more of a connection to his father. For Rav Moshe, emunah meant that connection.”

He Saw Deeper

Rav Moshe once asked a talmid who was driving him to pull over at the scenic lookout just off the Palisades Parkway. They walked to the guardrail and Rav Moshe indicated the large binoculars placed there. “It’s shallow to think that you have to look through these glasses just because someone placed them here,” Rav Moshe said and led his driver to a small, private path, off to the side. For five soundless minutes, Rav Moshe stood there transfixed, studying the magnificent view; the man who saw all of Creation as a sefer Torah stood there and simply looked.

One year on the 17th of Tammuz, Rav Moshe asked a talmid to drive him up to Gamla, in the Golan Heights. As they drove up the winding mountain roads, Rav Moshe was fixated on the breathtaking view. “Now that we are looking and finding the Creator within this scenery,” Rav Moshe commented, “it becomes alive, a means of connecting with Him.”

When they reached the ancient fort-city of Gamla, one of the last Jewish strongholds against the Romans, Rav Moshe sat there for hours in silent contemplation, as if seeing the war that took place on those hills at the time of the Churban Beis Hamikdash.

“He had an ability to remove the superficiality,” says Rabbi Schmelczer. “He could look at a tree or mountain, or a person for that matter, and it would become so alive! He saw deeper.”

Rav Moshe was once told about a leading secular scientist, an avowed atheist, who changed his opinion late in life. He’d reached the scientific conclusion that G-d exists, and wrote a book celebrating his newfound belief.

Rav Moshe was unimpressed. “Uch uhn vei, a pity on the god that can only be discovered in a laboratory.”

Whether his talmidim were working with American college kids or Russian scientists, Rav Moshe — one of the great spiritual patrons of the teshuvah movement — had a very clear approach to transmit to his disciples. “The main thing is to teach that Torah comes from Heaven,” he would say, “that all of Creation derives from the very same source as the Torah. If they can’t reconcile what their eyes see with its truth, bring them deeper into the Torah so that they can see that the Creator is the One who gave the Torah. The light within it will affect them.”

Yet he would always warn that even if one could bring a million people to teshuvah, it’s forbidden to change, alter, or repackage any of the Torah’s ideas or concepts in order to make them “user-friendly.”

“The word my rebbi used most often,” Rabbi Schmelczer reflects, “is ‘metzius.’ His life’s work was to open our eyes to a different reality than what our eyes behold, to see existence as a flow of Divine energy, to see the Torah and the One Who gave it as the only truth.”

Always Connected

This master of profundity cherished simplicity above all.

In a derashah to the Gateshead talmidos, Rav Moshe spoke straight to the point:

“In the name of Avraham, Yitzchak, and Yaakov. In the name of the Shevatim — Reuven, Shimon, Levi, Yehudah, Yissaschar, Zevulun, Dan, Naftali, Gad, Asher, Yosef, and Binyamin. In the name of the six hundred thousand yotzei Mitzrayim, the zekeinim, neviim, and Anshei Knesses Hagedolah. In the name of the Tannaim, Amoraim, the Rishonim, and Acharonim, I want to tell all of you… Thank you! Thank you for choosing to live lives of Torah and to transmit it to future generations. Thank you…”

Reb Ruven becomes visibly emotional. “He never lost his flavor in genuine Jewish nuances. He once quoted a devar Torah and said, with obvious delight, ‘Do you know where I saw this? This vort, I saw in the Tzenah Urenah [a sefer written centuries ago in Yiddish, a compendium of ideas on the weekly parshah meant for women]!’ ”

And in the spirit of those saintly Jewish women who would spend Friday nights with this sefer, Rav Moshe would use some of that holy connectivity in his own encounters. Someone close to him was in difficult circumstances and Rav Moshe got personally involved, trying to help through various methods. In the end, the situation improved. Reb Ruven asked Rav Moshe how he’d ultimately been successful. “Men hut oisgeveint,” Rav Moshe answered. “We davened our way out of the problem.”

Last Links

As clear as Rav Moshe’s vision was, there was still a paradox: On one hand, he’d seen the fading glory of pre-World War II Judaism. “Our generation…” he would say sadly, waving his hand as if to indicate how barely recognizable we would be to those who came before us.

In a derashah, he once analyzed a pasuk in Tehillim: “In order that the last generation might know, sons who will be born should tell their sons” (Tehillim 78).

If it’s the “last generation,” Rav Moshe asked, “then who are the sons, and their sons?”

He explained that the generation before the war was the “last generation,” containing the last examples of “adam” we had. Today, we’re just sons and grandsons of that generation, emulating the last known species of human.

And yet, even as he bemoaned the generation, he celebrated its effort, pouring his energies into those “grandchildren.” Struggling teenagers knew that the man who managed to dance between labels and mosdos and formal meetings — belonging to no one — was completely theirs.

An accomplished talmid chacham once joked that he was jealous of Russian baalei teshuvah. “I tremble every time I ask Rav Moshe a question. If he detects superficiality, he’ll react with distaste, grimacing as if he’s tasted something unpleasant. He doesn’t tolerate foolishness. But from them, whatever they ask he seems to enjoy…”

Rav Moshe did have a soft spot for those determined souls who’d managed to find warmth in the freezing Russian wasteland. He once told Reb Ruven, “Zei reiben zich mit Eisav — they’ve been doing battle with Eisav.” In their struggle, he saw the perpetual Jewish clash between holiness and impurity and he loved them for it.

Each Pesach, he and the rebbetzin left their children and grandchildren to spend Yom Tov in Moscow, leading the Sedorim and the entire Yom Tov for talmidim at Yeshiva Toras Chaim.

When asked how he could leave masses of talmidim behind at such a crucial time of year, he shrugged. “I’m told that in Russia, they need me, in Eretz Yisrael, they’ll manage.”

What Do You Think?

To some, it was a curiosity that this exceptional maggid shiur — he had the sources, the delivery, the eloquence, and the clarity — never really had a yeshivah of his own. To his talmidim, though, it couldn’t be any other way.

“He had this original way of using terms and applying them,” Reb Ruven reflects. “He once said that the world is composed of two reshuyos — there is reshus harabbim, public space, and reshus hayachid, private space. The yeshivos, he said, are the public space where a ben Torah starts to develop, but the halachah is that reshus harabbim only goes as high as ten tefachim. To become great in Torah, a person has to continue to grow in that private space, which continues up until Shamayim.”

Yeshivos, to Rav Moshe, were the oxygen, the first breaths of a ben Torah, but after that, it was up to the individual to truly soar.

And he was the perfect example — his own man, making music to a song only he heard.

Rav Moshe was a habitual faster. Once, Reb Ruven recalls, he cancelled a shiur because he was feeling weak. “Perhaps it isn’t worth fasting if it causes bitul Torah?” one of the talmidim wondered. Rav Moshe considered the question, and then answered.

“Who says the shiur, this Torah you’re missing?” he asked. “I do. And if I don’t fast, then I am not me.”

He got frustrated when people didn’t think for themselves, and was joyous when they did. One bar mitzvah bochur, the son of a talmid, analyzed in his derashah whether Sefiras Ha’omer is one mitzvah or many mitzvos. The boy did a fine job running through the various shittos.

Rav Moshe smiled. “And you? What do you think about this?” he asked gently, bestowing a bar mitzvah gift to a young man taking his first steps on the road to greatness.

Parting Pain Rabbi Schmelczer searches through his seforim, looking for something.

“Here, this is what I hold on to, what I’ve been living with over the past year,” he says.

He shows me a copy of a letter Rav Moshe wrote to the mother of a beloved talmid, Rav Yisroel Chaim Prager, when this young talmid chacham and tzaddik passed away suddenly:

If the pain and agony of childbirth brought you such glorious fruit as Reb Yisroel Chaim, the intense, unbearable pain of today will bring us speedily to a rebirth which we are not even able to imagine or comprehend… If we were given permission, we would merit seeing him seated between the tzadikim in Gan Eden, radiant and shining…

Reb Ruven looks up at me and back to the letter. He says nothing as he points to the last line.

From one who cries in secret over this splendor which has been lost, Moshe Shapira.

(Originally featured inMishpacha, Issue 692)