From generation to generation

WHAT does a great-grandparent know of his great-grandchild born the day after he dies? What does a child, told that his looks or mannerisms resemble the grandparent he never knew, really know?

Beyond a generation or two in either direction, continuity is an abstraction. Whether the descendant I shall never know will carry something of me, I shall never know; whether the ancestor I never knew lives in me, I cannot know.

Or so I thought.

“Netziv” is an acronym for the long-time head of the first and most famous yeshiva of the modern period, Naphtali Tzvi Yehuda Berlin. He was dean of the Volozhin yeshiva, 1854-1892. My Uncle the Netziv is memoir by his nephew Baruch Epstein, who studied in the Volozhin yeshiva, and once found himself stuck in Minsk on his way home for Passover.

Nearly penniless, Epstein found an inn and was given its least appetizing room.

He was carrying his own bread, butter, and milk — which had soured. He had no blanket and feared that if he asked for one, the innkeeper would ask him for payment, which he didn’t have. When he ventured out into the hall to see whether he could find a blanket, he found a tumult.

Young Epstein learned that the eminent Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (1820-1892) had unexpectedly entered the inn, since his customary spot in Minsk was already occupied. The innkeeper did not have a single empty room. Rabbi Soloveitchik called for silence.

“Maybe there is someone here I know who wouldn’t mind sharing his room with me?” he inquired of the innkeeper.

But there was no one he knew.

So the rabbi asked the student from Volozhin, whom he did not know — but he did know his uncle the Netziv — whether he could share his room.

At which point this story unfolds: what the rabbi said to the student, how the scholars and lay people of Minsk crowded into the rabbi’s and the student’s room, what the rabbi said — how he understood the people, how he formulated his remarks, how he was both friendly and stiff, intimate and aloof, colorful and dignified, accessible and intellectual, down-to-earth and in the clouds, illustrative and systematic. Always — always — in total control. Unfazed by any question, person, or issue.

AS I read the student’s record of Rabbi Soloveitchik’s encounter with the masses in Minsk, I became unsettled. Bells rang. My equilibrium was disturbed. I had heard these words of Rabbi Soloveitchik before. I do not mean, heard of them, but heard them.

Which, of course, was impossible. Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik died in 1897. I could not possibly have heard his words.

But they were ringing in my head.

It was uncanny.

Suddenly, I got it.

From 1969 to 1972 in Boston, I heard lectures by Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (1903-1993) — the namesake and the great-grandson of the rabbi in the memoir. The second Rabbi Soloveitchik was himself born after his great-grandfather had died. Listening to the great-grandson, I heard the substance, the tone, the attitude, the cadence, the formulation, the method of analysis, the approach to life, the relation to listeners of the great-grandfather, recorded in the memoir. Everything in the great-grandson’s words matched those of his great-grandfather.

Which must mean: Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik of the 19th century passed something to his son, Rabbi Chaim Soloveitchik, who passed something to his son, Rabbi Moses Soloveitchik, who passed something to his son, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik — something indelible, concrete, and comprehensive — down to the quirks in the way a mind formulates phrases all the way to the comprehensive way a human being meets life.

Uncanny.

The Soloveitchik family embodied four generations of continuity, not in the abstract — a continuity so strong that it belied the evanescence of time; so elemental that it jarred my mind even as it was filtered through the translation of a book, itself written decades after Baruch Epstein encountered the 19th-century Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik.

Clearly, the Soloveitchiks had a power of family tradition that pervaded not only their minds but their entire being. A power of tradition realized in the electrifying encounter of Talmud teacher and Talmud disciple, as each of these four Soloveitchiks was.

Whence this continuity?

From the Torah.

The eternity of the Torah.

•     •     •

“I was born too late,” a yeshiva student in his twenties recently told me about his desire to study Torah with the late Rabbi Yitzhak Hunter, who died in 1981. And someone who was a yeshiva student in 1981 told me he regretted never having been able to study under the Brisker Rav, Rabbi Yitzhak Zev Soloveitchik, who died in 1959. No doubt, students in 1959 regretted never having been able to study under the legendary Chofetz Chaim, who died in 1933.
But there is a compensation, besides the obvious one — to study with the living Torah scholars in one’s own age. That compensation is to seek out the students or the children of the sage of the previous generation. In one instance, I was able to do so four generations back.

When I moved to Israel in 1972, I learned that an elderly man living in Tel Aviv was the great-grandson of the founder of the Musar movement, Rabbi Israel Salanter (1810-1883). Rabbi Israel’s son was Yitzhak, whose son was Binyamin, whose son was Chaim Yitzhak Lipkin, whom I visited. It was like standing in the mirror of history.

Rabbi Lipkin was a gentle, kind man, extremely considerate, reflecting the ideals that his famous great-grandfather embodied and disseminated. But it was not just Rabbi Israel’s person — four levels diluted, so to speak — that I could see in Rabbi Lipkin. He actually possessed the last letter that his great-grandfather wrote, a few days before he died on Shevat 25, 5643 — in 1883.

I had seen a copy of this letter, printed in Tenu’at ha-Musar, which was published before the days of high-tech copy machines. Rabbi Israel’s handwriting as reproduced in that book appeared sketchy, as if he suffered from a stroke or had arthritis, and could hardly write.

Looking at the original, I saw something very different: large, flowing, round letters. Everything about Rabbi Israel’s handwriting bespoke peace and serenity.

The Alter of Novorodock met Rabbi Israel a couple of years before he passed away and was overwhelmed by his inner peace. This shone through in the handwriting of his last letter — a brief congratulatory note to his granddaughter, who had just become engaged to Rabbi Chaim Ozer Grodzenski, later the leading rabbi in Lithuania before WW II.

In his congratulatory note, Rabbi Israel advised his granddaughter to be certain that her intended was a person of character.

Rabbi Israel cited part of Deuteronomy 22:16, which reads,“And the father of the girl should say to the elders [the judges]: ‘I have given my daughter to a man, this [man], as a wife, and he hated her.’” Rabbi Israel extracted only these words:I have given my daughter to a man. He wrote his granddaughter that a husband must be a man, that is, a decent human being, a mensch.

This is a reversal of context. Deuteronomy speaks of a marriage that has collapsed in recrimination. Rabbi Israel speaks of an engagement, a moment of happiness. The Torah cites “this man” — an accusing husband — with contempt. Rabbi Israel takes “man”to connote the epitome of decency — the basic criterion for a Jewish husband.

Because of his brilliance and piety, Rabbi Israel — and his children and disciples down to the fourth generation — clarified everything from the Torah’s command to be a  mensch to the quest for inner peace.

I was born too late.

Actually, not.

The great teachers of Torah reach us from across the generations.

Through their writings.

Their disciples.

Even, their direct descendants.

Who — in rare cases, such as the Soloveitchiks — preserve not only their teachings, but their actual voice.

None of us is born too late.