Q:
What was the main greatness of the Alter of Slabodka?
A:
Now I must tell you that I’m not big enough to measure him. Besides, I never saw him. He had passed away before I came. But I could tell you some of the things that characterized him.
First of all, he was a man who lived with machshava. The pnimiyus of Torah was to him the main goal of life. Which means he taught his talmidim the importance of learning and the importance of fulfilling, but in addition he taught them how great is the necessity of understanding what Hakadosh Baruch Hu wants of us. מה ה’ אלוקיך שואל מעמך – What does He want of us in these things.
I’ll give you a mashal. It’s possible for a person to learn Chumash and in the Chumash we read that בצלם אלקים עשה את האדם – Hashem made man in the image of Hashem. Fine. Then we go further. But he didn’t go further. He spent forty years on that subject, talking about the image of Hashem.
I once talked to an old Slabodka talmid. He said, “For forty years he was speaking about the same subject.” He was so tired of hearing it already. So another talmid said, “You’re tired of hearing it? It means you never heard it once then. If you’re tired of hearing it, it means you never heard it.”
That’s how it was in Slabodka. Over and over again, tzelem Elokim, tzelem Elokim, in hundreds of different variations. Understand what the Torah wants us to understand, the greatness of mankind! And he spent his life studying the greatness of mankind, al pi haTorah.
Also, another branch of his endeavor was to understand the person’s inner motivations. People deceive themselves. They don’t examine. נחפשה דרכינו – Let’s search out our ways, ונחקרה – and discover how we’re deceiving ourselves. Many people are doing wrong things and living lives of error, but they refuse to recognize how wrong they are. And it’s important for a person to gain the knack of pishpush and chipus in his deeds, to understand, to analyze himself. And that was one of his great achievements, to analyze the motives of himself and of course of others too.
He was a great mechanech also. He was a great pedagogue. And when he saw people with certain abilities, even that they were no good, he made them great. He took boys with good heads and he gave them money to spend, they should buy good clothing, expensive clothing.
Now other boys, frum boys didn’t get that money. They were jealous. “Why are these boys getting all the money? They don’t come to davenen in the morning. They daven in their room at home and we come to daven every morning and they get the money!” But those boys whom he gave the money had good heads and they became the rosh yeshivas. True story. One, two, three – I can tell you at least three rosh yeshivas who became great because the Alter was the one who lavished his attention on them. He was a mechanech. He knew how to take people who had abilities and produce greatness out of them.
And so among his exploits are all the yeshivas that were founded as a result of his talmidim and of course the great teachings that he left over for us to study.
(July 1994)
