Imagine this:
A person is stricken with Parkinsons Disease. In his case, his speech is affected and his movements are exaggerated in the extreme. He cannot help it. Yet, none of this affects his schedule. Just the opposite. For some 20 years, from the moment he is stricken until the day he dies, at age 69, he works harder than before, achieves more than his peers, becomes one of the major builders of Jewish education in history and does it all with a love of others that is palpable.
Imagine? We need not imagine. Rabbi Nosson Zvi Finkel was a prince of a human being. He died suddenly in Jerusalem this week, shocking thousands of students and countless admirers.
They were shocked because, paradoxically enough, it was his fierce struggle never to give up, never to lay down the burden that conveyed the illusion of immortality. If he could overcome, day after day, year after year, then how could he ever cease to be?
This man came on the scene with a very small budget at his doorstep. We do not know the exact number, but it was a small fraction of the $26 million budget he leaves behind. How and why did his budget grow astronomically? Because he did not let Parkinsons Disease dampen his dreams of a world-class school of Torah study (apolitical Torah study, we might add) in Jerusalem.
When this American-born teenager moved to Jerusalem, how unlikely it seemed that he would end up having a decisive impact on the Holy City. When he later became the head of the Mir Yeshiva in Jerusalem, succeeding his cousin, the yeshiva occupied a single building, its top floor with an ungainly, unfinished parapet. Rabbi Finkel dreamed of an additional student, an additional outreach. Always, one by one. The human touch, always the same. Never empire building; never, institution building. Always, people building, one by one.
Slowly, that required another building. Then, slowly but surely, another, and another, until the Mir Yeshiva rebuilt and transfigured the entire Bet Yisrael neighborhood one of Jerusalems most poverty-stricken and became the largest yeshiva in Israel.
When people in great pain go to bed, they generally worry about themselves. When Rabbi Finkel went to bed, he worried about the next fundraising tour to America, the next class he had to give yes, his difficulties with speech and movement notwithstanding, he never stopped teaching. And he worried about the countless human problems laid at his doorstep.
When a child is born and named after a great person, it is a bit awkward. How could this little baby carry that great persons name? It is unlikely that the newborn will measure up to the deceased. Rabbi Nosson Zvi Finkel was named after his great-grandfather, perhaps the greatest Jewish educator in the last two centuries, a producer of many geniuses and academies.
Rabbi Nosson Zvi Finkel was one of those rare newborns who lived up to the hopes of his family in Chicago when it named him. His outsized inspiration to lovers of Torah, to builders of Jerusalem, to shapers of young men and, hardly least, to the debilitated and disabled everywhere, gives eternal promise of a better world.
Copyright © 2011 by the Intermountain Jewish News
