I was head of the Shaarei Torah yeshiva at the time, so we started producing tapes and distributing them.
And the rest is history.
King Solomon said it long ago: “Cast your bread upon the waters” because you don’t know when you’ll hit something. Our job is to do. We don’t know how it affects people. I had no intention that thousands of people would listen to me, but I tried to do something and the Lord helped that it happened. Everybody should try to do that.
In your book you recount many interesting encounters you had with rabbinic greats of yesteryear. For example, you write that Rav Yaakov Kamenetsky once taught you proper etiquette toward tollbooth collectors.
I drove him once into the city and we came to the George Washington Bridge. It was a very long line, it was a very hot day, and by the time we got to the tollbooth I was completely exasperated. I gave the toll collector a 20 dollar bill, he gave me change, and I just zoomed off. Rav Yaakov bent over to me and said, “You forgot to say thank you to the toll collector.” That’s the kind of person he was.
You also relate several stories about Rav Yosef Shlomo Kahaneman, rosh yeshiva of Ponovitch, which surprisingly have a “Zionist” tinge to them. Can you share?
On Yom Ha’Atzmaut he would fly the Israeli flag over his yeshiva. He told me that when certain fellows in town complained, he said to them, “On Lithuanian Independence Day in Ponovitch, I flew the Lithuanian flag. Here [in Israel] it’s not worse.”
The Ponovitch Yeshiva continues this Yom Ha’Atzmaut practice to this very day, correct?
Yes. Rav Kahaneman was his own man…. I remember a speech he gave in the Chicago yeshiva in 1947. At the time there were seven members of the Irgun, or the Stern Gang, whom the British wanted to hang. Rav Kahaneman said, “If I had people who were as dedicated to building a Torah state as these people are dedicated to driving England out of the Land of Israel, we would have a Torah state.”
This lack of vision or dedication to grander goals is still a problem today, is it not? Many Orthodox Jews in Israel focus on their individual communities and yeshivas but very few, it seems, are concerned with building a national Torah society.
That’s always the problem. The trees or the forest, what are you looking at? We concentrate on the trees.
In a Jewish Action article several years ago you criticized yeshivas for teaching too much Gemara and too little Tanach. Can you elaborate?
I didn’t say there’s toomuch Gemara. I said the curriculum is skewed so that there is nothing so to speak but Gemara, and not everybody can deal with Gemara. Also, how can you be a Jew if you don’t know Tanach, if you don’t know Navi, if you don’t know Hebrew? We’re illiterate in our own language.
In that article you wrote that the “study of Tanach is almost an oxymoron statement regarding our schools.”
It’s true. It doesn’t exist. If it does exist, it’s very peripheral, usually very boring, and not challenging. But if you know Tanach, if you know Trei Assar, for instance, you know what’s going on today. All of today’s problems are reflected in Trei Assar – everything: assimilation, ignorance, machlokes, education, domestic problems, family. The nevi’im speak about it all.
Some people also bemoan the absence of dikduk in Jewish education.
You cannot know Rashi if you don’t know dikduk. It’s a lost art, a lost subject.