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MY TEACHER

My beloved teacher, who taught me Talmud when I was before my bar mitzvah age, Rabbi Dovid Silver, passed away last week. He lived a long and productive life and for his latter years was a well known and respected friend in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Bayit’V’Gan. I loved Rabbi Silver because he loved me. One often gives credit to the great teachers that one is privileged to have in high school or college but I was fortunate to have many great teachers in the eleven years that I spent in yeshiva.

They taught me about Jews and Judaism (the two are not synonymous) about Torah and Talmud and about life and its vicissitudes. I am eternally indebted to them for their guidance and efforts on my behalf. But one oftentimes neglects the appreciation that one owes to those who taught him when he was yet a child. Rabbi Silver taught me hatchalat gemara – the beginnings of the study of Talmud, the simple (nothing about Talmud is really simple) ABC’c of how to start to navigate through the sea of the Talmud. But he did it with so much care, love and concern for my welfare that until today, well over a half century later, I cannot open a volume of the Talmud to study and teach it without feeling his warm presence and concern for me hovering over the book.

Other rabbis in the yeshiva took the limelight and were well known in the Jewish world. He was a great scholar but a self-effacing personality. All of the hundreds of students that he taught how to embark upon Talmudic studies owe him a great debt of appreciation and gratitude. Unfortunately, not all of us realize to do so when the person is still alive.

It is said that the great Rabbi Chaim Soloveitchik of Brisk, one of the most creative teachers of Torah and Talmud over the past few centuries, would rise to honor the teacher that taught him aleph bet. He stated that though he had many great teachers later in his life, his aleph bet teacher taught him pure truth – an aleph has always remained an aleph and a bet has always remained a bet, while he came to realize that much that he was taught later in intricate interpretations of the Talmud was not always true and hence was subject to revision and modification.

I came to realize after many years of study that Rabbi Dovid Silver taught me truth. The rules and ideas of the Talmud that he explained so nobly and simply, the complicated issues that he so deftly and effortlessly guided me through, all of this has retained its simple truth with me until today. Only later in life did I realize the exactitude of his teachings and the depth of his explanations that appeared to me as a child to be so simple and direct. He was a master teacher and many of the fine Torah scholars of our generation were fortunate enough to pass through his class and experience his teachings.

Rabbi Silver was a warm human being. He had an infectious smile that was always there. The difference between a teacher that smiles and one who scowls and frowns is enormous, especially to students in their young and formative years. And Rabbi Silver remained a friend, a trusted confidant and advisor, to his students when they matured and left the yeshiva to pursue their life careers.

I knew that he was always there for me in all of my various positions in the Jewish life. He was an outstanding baal koreh – a public reader of the Torah. It was not only his powerful voice and his exactitude in reading the words and notes of the Torah that made him so. It was the sweetness of Torah that flowed from him as he read from the Torah scroll. I remember that I almost looked forward to the fast days that we commemorated in the yeshiva, for on those days Rabbi Silver would be the reader of the Torah.

When King Solomon stated that “honey and myrrh are on your tongue,” he certainly could have had Rabbi Silver’s Torah reading in mind. With his passing, as far as I can reckon, all of my generation of teachers in the yeshiva are gone. I am therefore lonely in a way that I have not known before. King Solomon also said “A generation must leave and a new generation comes.” But the influence and memory of the generation that goes is unending. Rabbi Dovid Silver, of blessed memory, proves that point beyond dispute.

Berel Wein