Total greatness doesn’t tolerate a discrepancy between public persona and private reality

IT

was a crisp Chanukah evening, and the large crowd of 20-to- 30-somethings gathered on the Tel Aviv rooftop were celebrating in style: mixologist cocktails in hand, fresh Moroccan sfenj between teeth, and live music wafting overhead.

As hosts of the kiruv event, my wife and I circulated among the guests, greeting old friends and newcomers drawn to the organization’s premier winter social.

Half an hour into the evening, it was clearly a success. Under the influence of the Chanukah cheer, people were having a good time, and their faces showed it.

All, it seemed, except Revital.

Born in Ramat Gan to a traditional family of Sephardic heritage, Revital (not her real name) was both more knowledgeable and more committed than the average participant at our shiurim and programs.

But that Chanukah night she stood out for another reason; despite the buzz, she looked downhearted, distressed even.

“You don’t know that Rav Steinman passed away two days ago?” she explained rhetorically.  “I can’t stop thinking about it.”

Two days before, and just a few miles away, I had joined hundreds of thousands of people for the levayah of Rav Aharon Leib Steinman. In shuls and communities up and down the country, mourning had replaced the festivities.

But why would a Tel Avivian woman working for the IDF be so affected by the passing of a rosh yeshivah?

As out-of-left-field explanations go, the reference to the gadol from next-door Bnei Brak took some beating. Revital, it turned out, had quite a story.

“It all began when I applied for high school,” she recalled. “My mother wanted me to go to a religious school but I wasn’t accepted into the local high school.

“My mother looked into different options, but none worked out. Desperate to avoid sending me to a secular school, she looked further afield and heard about a religious high school in Tel Aviv.”

Making her way across the city, Revital’s mother marched into the principal’s office and asked for a place for her daughter.

Things didn’t go as planned, though. The principal of the long-established and Ashkenazi high school didn’t see why he should admit a girl from an unknown Sephardi family from the next town in the middle of the school year.

There was nothing personal; it just wasn’t a match.

Desperate to secure her daughter’s future, Revital’s mother didn’t give up.

“You have to let my daughter in — she has no religious school to go to!” she pleaded.  “If you don’t give her a chance, she’ll have to go to a secular place.”

The conversation went back and forth, with neither backing down. But then the principal — looking for a way to wash his hands of the saga — threw out a comment.

“If Rav Aharon Leib Steinman tells me that I have to let her in,” he declared, in a tone that indicated how remote a possibility it was, “then your daughter has a place.”

It was a slim chance, but a chance nonetheless.

A short time later found the determined mother knocking on the modest door at Bnei Brak’s Rechov Chazon Ish 5.

As Rebbetzin Tamar welcomed her guest to the Steinmans’ spartan home, it was a meeting of worlds. The beleaguered mother from Ramat Gan was soon pouring out her tale of woe.

“I’ll tell the Rav,” promised Rav Steinman’s Belgian-born wife. The visit ended and Revital’s worried mother went back home praying for a good outcome.

She didn’t have long to wait.

“The next day,” Revital continued, “my mother received a call from the principal.”

“Rav Steinman spoke to me, and your daughter is accepted,” the principal said.

“That’s why I’m so sad,” Revital finished her story against the background of the Chanukah festivities.

“I got permission from my job in the army to attend the levayah, because although it all happened 20 years ago, where would I be today without the Rav?”

Every Chanukah for the last five years, come Rav Steinman’s yahrtzeit, that story comes back to me.

That’s partly because it’s in keeping with what we know of Rav Aharon Leib’s abhorrence for the elitism in whose name some frum schools turn away children who don’t fit the institution’s image.

But it’s also because this particular anecdote has something unique to say about gadlus — the concept of Torah greatness itself.

That Rav Aharon Leib had enormous Torah knowledge is a given. To anyone who saw his pitiful living conditions, it was clear that he was a throwback to tzaddikim of yore, sustained more by the holy words in front of him than by the morsel he consumed each day.

To look into his eyes — as I once did while he waited to speak in the Mir Yeshivah — was to gaze at a man living in a different dimension.

Add to that his razor-sharp understanding of people and motivations, and it was clear why the most fraught public and private questions — everything from the future of the Torah world to medical dilemmas — came to his rickety table.

But all of those attributes are only half the story. History is replete with great men who stand out for their words or deeds; but just as often, these titans were moral pygmies in their home lives and dealings with people beneath them.

Torah greatness, in contrast, is fundamentally different — it doesn’t tolerate a discrepancy between public persona and private reality.

Gadlus lies in the ability to think big and small at the same time; in the understanding that there is no such thing as an insignificant action, and there is no such thing as an unimportant Jew.

For all his diminutive height, Rav Aharon Leib was a giant of a leader —   personally responsible for a vast expansion of Torah study in Israel and beyond. That greatness was complete, embracing both macro and micro, lofty goals and the everyday struggles of far-off people.

As the lighting of the menorah marks another yahrtzeit, Revital and countless others like her will remember the critical lesson that Rav Steinman taught.

That gadlus means the greatness of small things, of fighting for the future of one lost teen, if that’s what needs to be done.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 940)