My Teacher, Rabbi Rabinovitch

In the memory of my teacher, the late Rabbi Eliezer Rabinovitch.

There are moments when divine providence touches you on the shoulder and makes you see a certain truth with blazing clarity. Let me share with you such a moment that happened to me this morning.

I was about to write one of my essays for Covenant and Conversation. I knew I was going to write about the Arei Miklat, the cities of refuge, but I wasn't sure which aspect to focus on. Suddenly, overwhelmingly, I felt an instinct to write about one very unusual law.

The cities were set aside for the protection of those found guilty of manslaughter who needed to find safety from the goel ha’dam, the blood avenger. The Torah says about the refuge that he shall flee to one of these cities, va’chai, and live. And from this, the Talmud draws an extraordinary lesson.

“Tanai, it was taught, talmid shegala, a disciple, a student, who is exiled to one of the cities of refuge, megalin rabbo imo, his teacher is exiled with him, shene’emar ‘va’chai,’ since the Torah says ‘he shall live.’ Avid lei mide detevei lei chiyuta, act so that he can actually live there. In other words, as Rambam explains, asei lo k’dei she’yichye, provide him what he needs to live. Va’chaye b'alei chokhmah u'mevaksheha belo Talmud k'mita chashuvim. And for those who seek wisdom, to be without learning, without a teacher, is like death. 

In other words, study is life itself. Study without a teacher is impossible. Therefore, you have to provide somebody who's sent to a city of refuge with his teacher, because teachers give us more than knowledge. They give us life.

Note that this is not an aggadic passage, a moralizing text not meant to be taken seriously. It's actually a halachic ruling codified as such. It was the law.

Nor is it a stray text, out of keeping with the rest of Jewish law, because to the contrary, consider these laws relating to the commandment to honour your father and mother. 

It comes from the Rambam, Hilchot Talmud Torah, chapter 5. Just as one is commanded to honour his father and fear him, so he's obliged to honour his teacher and fear him, yet more than his father. For his father brought him to life in this world, but his teacher, who taught him wisdom, brings him to life in the world to come.

If he finds a lost article of his father and a lost article of his teacher, first he has to restore the lost article of his teacher, and then his father. If his father and teacher are both burdened with the load, first he has to relieve his teacher of the load, and then his father. If his father and teacher are incarcerated in a prison, first he has to free his teacher, and then free his father.

Now, note the power of those laws. A teacher is more than the parent. A parent gives you physical life. A teacher gives you spiritual life. Physical life is mortal, transient, but spiritual life is eternal. Therefore, we owe our teacher life in its deepest sense.

And this was the moment that I felt touched by providence, because I had just, literally just finished writing those words when the phone went. It was my brother, Alan, in Jerusalem telling me that my teacher, Rabbi Nachum Eliezer Rabinovitch, zecher tzadik livracha, had just died. Only rarely in this alma de’itkassia, this world of concealment, do we sense heaven reaching down a hand and guiding us.

But this was absolutely unmistakable for me, and I suspect for everyone who had the privilege of studying with him. He was the greatest teacher of our generation. He was a master posse [halachic adjudicator] as anyone who's read his responsa will know.

He knew the entire rabbinical literature, Bavli, Yerushalmi, Midrash Aggadah, Midrash Halacha, commentaries, philosophy, codes, responsa. He knew the literature that nobody else knew. Obscure, obscure teshuvot and obscure commentaries.

His creativity, halachic and aggadic, knew no bounds. He was a master of almost every secular discipline, especially the sciences. He had been a professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto, and he had written a book about probability and statistical inference.

Of course, his supreme passion was the Rambam, in all his guises, especially the Mishneh Torah, to which he devoted 50 years of his life to writing a multi-volume commentary, an outstanding commentary, the Yad Peshuta. By the time I came to study with the Rav, I had already studied at Cambridge and Oxford. I'd studied with some of the greatest minds of the age, with Roger Scruton, with Bernard Williams, with Philippa Foot.

But Rabbi Rabinovitch was more demanding than any of them. Only when I became his student did I discover the true meaning of intellectual rigour, shetihiyu ameilim ba’Torah, the actual act of labouring in Torah. To survive his scrutiny, you had to do three things:

Number one, you had to read everything ever written on the subject. Number two, you had to analyse it with complete clarity and lucidity. Number three, you had to think independently and critically.

I remember writing an essay for him, in which I quoted one of the most famous of all 19th-century Talmudic scholars. He read what I'd written, and then he said to me, but you didn't criticise it. It was extraordinary.

He thought in this case, this particular scholar, Gedol Ha’dor, had given the wrong interpretation and that I should have seen this and said so. For him, intellectual honesty and independence of mind were inseparable from the quest for truth, which is what Talmud Torah is and should be, and what it was for him. 

Some of the most important lessons I learned from him were almost accidental.

I remember on one occasion, his car was being serviced, so I had the privilege of driving him home. It happened to be a hot day, and at a busy junction in Hampstead, my car stalled. Unfazed, Rabbi Rabinovitch turned to me and said, “Well, I think we should spend the time learning some Torah.” He then proceeded to give me a mini shiur on the Rambam’s Hilchot Shmitta v’Yovel. Meanwhile, around us, all the cars were honking their horns, a huge queue had built up, everyone was going quietly mad. The Rav remained completely calm, came to the end of his exposition, turned to me and said, “Now, turn the key. I turned the key, the car started, and we were on our way. 

On one occasion, I told him about my problem, getting to sleep. I'd become an insomniac.

He said to me, enthusiastically, “Could you teach me how to do that?” He quoted the Rambam who ruled that one acquires most of one's wisdom at night, based on the Talmudic statement that the night was only created for study. 

He and the late Rabbi Aaron Lichtenstein zt”l were the Gedolei Ha’dor. They were the leaders and role models of their and our generation. They were very different. One scientific, the other artistic, one direct, the other oblique, one bold, the other cautious. But they were giants intellectually, morally and spiritually. And I mean every one of those three words.

Happy the generation that is blessed with leaders like these. It's hard to convey what having a teacher like Rabbi Rabinowitch actually meant. He knew, for example, that I had to learn fast because I was coming to the Rabbinate late after a career in academic philosophy.

What he did was very bold. He explained to me that the fastest and best way of learning anything was to teach it. So the day I entered Jews College as a student, I also entered it as a lecturer. How many people would have had that idea and taken that risk? 

He also understood how lonely it could be if you live by principles of intellectual integrity and independence. Early on, when I was really quite young, he said to me, “Don't be surprised if only six people in the world understand what you are trying to do.” When I asked him, “Should I accept the position of Chief Rabbi in Britain?” He said in his laconic way, “Why not? After all, maybe you can teach some Torah.”

So I did. He himself, in his early 30s, had been offered the job of Chief Rabbi of Johannesburg, but turned it down on the grounds that he refused to live in an apartheid state. He told me how he had been visited in Toronto by the late Rabbi Louis Rabinowitz, who had held the Johannesburg position until then.

Rabbi Rabinowitz, Louis, looked at the Rav’s house, his very modest house in Toronto, where he was the rabbi of Glanton Park Synagogue. And he remembered his own palatial abode in Johannesburg. And he looked at this very modest house and looked at Rabbi Rabinovitch and said, “You turned down that for this?!”

But of course, the Rav would never compromise the integrity of his positions and he never cared for material things. In the end, he found great happiness, in the 37 years he served as Head of Yeshivat Birkat Moshe in Maale Adumim.

The yeshiva had been founded six years earlier by Rabbi Chaim Sabato and Rabbi Yitzchak Shilat. But it is said that when Rabbi Sabato heard the Rav give a shiur, he immediately asked him to become the Rosh Yeshiva. It's hard to describe the pride with which he spoke to me about his students, all of whom served in Tzahal, in the Israel Defense Forces.

Likewise, it's hard to describe the awe in which his students held him. Not everyone in the Jewish world knew his greatness, but everyone who studied with him did. There is a fine statement in Pirkei Avot:

“Rabbi Elazar Ben Shmoah said, ‘Let the honour of your student be as dear to you as your own. Let the honour of your colleague be like reverence for your teacher and let the reverence for your teacher be like your reverence for heaven’.”

Rabbi Rabinovitch was fastidious in observing the first two of those principles, and we, his students, aspired to the third because we knew that having a great teacher is as close as we get to heaven.

In this city of refuge that is this world, he was our Rav, he was our life. Now we weep for our teacher who has been called to the Yeshiva Shel Ma’ala, to the academy of heaven. May we find the strength, so to, learn and act and teach that he lives on in us.

To his family we say, May Hashem send you comfort among all the other mourners of Zion. And we say to ourselves and to our generation, may his memory live on as a blessing. Amen.