Title: Eternal Fire: The Fire and Passion of the Legendary Mechanech Rav Shmuel Kaufman
By: Shaya Ostrov
Publisher: Feldheim
I loved him. How could anyone not love him? Rabbi Shmuel Kaufman – my seventh grade rebbe at Yeshiva Beth Yehudah in Detroit, Michigan – would drive you to the pizza shop if you forgot your lunch at home. If he trusted you, he would even let you control the steering wheel on the way to the store. If you were struggling in class, he would call you at night to study with you.
I sat next to his desk. On more than one occasion, he placed his hand on mine and said, “Ah, I love you.” I was so enamored of him that I once replied, “I love you too.” I was a 13-year-old boy. I don’t think I had uttered those words to my parents in years (it wasn’t “manly”). But I said them to Rabbi Kaufman.
In Eternal Fire, a new biography of Rabbi Kaufman by Shaya Ostrov (a brother-in-law of Rabbi Kaufman and author of The Menuchah Principle series), an old student is quoted as saying: “For those who knew [Rabbi Kaufman], he is impossible to describe. And for those who did not know him, he is impossible to imagine.” I concur fully. Rabbi Kaufman (1934-2016) had an unusually magnetic personality which, indeed, is impossible to capture in words. But Ostrov tries – with considerable success.
Rabbi Kaufman – whose grandfather, Rabbi Yaakov Yosef Herman, was the subject of another Feldheim biography, All for the Boss – walked with two canes by the time I knew him (due to post-polio syndrome). Yet these canes – along with his long white beard – only added to his persona, and students would race to open doors for him. I often won these contests, and also had the zechus of washing Rabbi Kaufman’s breakfast bowl every morning. I hated eating or even touching oatmeal, which was his meal of choice. But for Rabbi Kaufman, I put my discomfort aside. That’s the kind of devotion he inspired in his students.
Ostrov writes that Rabbi Kaufman had “a limp in his walk and a fire in his heart.” He did, indeed. Rabbi Kaufman loved teaching and loved igniting his students’ souls. He also longed to draw non-observant Jews closer to Hashem. “You gotta start keeping Shabbos,” he told one former student when they met years later. “You know there’s a Ribbono Shel Olam. You know a life without Torah is not a life… You really gotta think it over.” Amazingly, this student not only took Rabbi Kaufman’s words to heart; he returned home and convinced his wife to become frum too.
Ostrov quotes numerous other students – including distinguished roshei yeshiva and roshei kollel – who told him that if not for Rabbi Kaufman’s persistence a half-century ago, they and their children and grandchildren would not be frum today.
Rabbi Kaufman’s incredible charisma allowed him to make even forceful requests. Ostrov relates that Rabbi Kaufman once asked his daughter-in-law to visit an Israeli woman who had arrived in America for a lung transplant. She objected that she didn’t know Hebrew and couldn’t just knock on someone’s door unannounced. Rabbi Kaufman replied, “[T]his is a gevaldik mitzvah and you have to do it. You can’t rely on anyone else to help her. She’s here all alone. You have to go.”
His daughter-in-law yielded, but Rabbi Kaufman wasn’t satisfied. “Dini, for such a mitzvah, you have to go today.” She agreed to go that afternoon, but that still wasn’t enough for Rabbi Kaufman. “For such a mitzvah, you have to go now,” he said. She relented, and the two women quickly became fast friends. “I can’t begin to tell you…how grateful I was to my father-in-law for pushing me,” she told Ostrov.
Rabbi Kaufman’s daughter recalls that her father once urged her to invite some of her non-frum classmates for Shabbos. When she demurred, Rabbi Kaufman said, “[T]here are girls in your class who won’t have Shabbos if they aren’t here. Are you ready to take achrayus for a girl not having Shabbos?”
To his students, Rabbi Kaufman often exuded a childlike impishness, which was probably one reason they were so drawn to him. Ostrov quotes one student who recalls Rabbi Kaufman helping him sneak out of school to buy a slice of pizza. Another remembers him hand-wrestling in the classroom. When one student incessantly misbehaved, Rabbi Kaufman made him write 150 times, “I like my latkes fried in gasoline.” Only Rabbi Kaufman could come up with such a punishment.
Ostrov quotes a student who recalled, “He was different from the other teachers. He never followed the strict rules. He was kind of a rebel in that way, a rebel with a love for serving Hashem, and that’s what endeared him so much to us.”
Ostrov notes that Rabbi Kaufman was a “living legend in his time.” Most legendary perhaps was his talent in telling stories – in his own classroom and in special visits to other classrooms too. He began sharing stories with his students after the Lubavitcher Rebbe urged him to do so during a private meeting in the 1960s. Ostrov relates this fact but unfortunately underplays the character of this meeting, which was far more dramatic than Ostrov reveals. For one, Rabbi Kaufman initially told the Rebbe that he didn’t tell stories because he considered it bitul Torah. The Rebbe was not pleased, to say the least, according to Rabbi Kaufman.
Ostrov also sucks some of the drama out of a story I remember Rabbi Kaufman sharing about Rav Moshe Feinstein, with whom he enjoyed a close relationship. Doctors discovered a brain tumor in Rabbi Kaufman’s wife and said operating would be risky. They predicted she likely would emerge from the surgery paralyzed. Rabbi Kaufman was understandably concerned and shared the doctors’ prognosis with Rav Moshe. Ostrov writes simply that Rav Moshe told Rabbi Kaufman the doctors should go ahead with the surgery. I remember a much more dramatic reply, however. Rabbi Kaufman told us that Rav Moshe said the surgeons should “cut and shut up” (I believe the Yiddish words were “schneid un shveig”).
Eternal Fire also contains a story about Rabbi Kaufman and Rav Aharon Kotler that Ostrov relates with far less verve than the way I recall it. But then again, how does one capture a punchline on paper which Rabbi Kaufman delivered with a booming voice and passionate depth of expression? An exclamation point simply won’t do.
I have other quibbles with the book. For example, Ostrov several times quotes himself in the third person, which is just plain strange.
Overall, though, he does a good job of giving readers an appreciation of and feel for a most unusual rebbe. Very few are blessed with Rabbi Kaufman’s extraordinary talents, but thanks to Eternal Fire, everyone – including those who didn’t know him – can now be inspired by his life to be better than they otherwise would be.
