Seven years later, Rav Moshe Shapira's teachings still light the way

Photos: Mattis Goldberg, Rabbi Aubrey Hersch, Family archives

Rav Moshe Shapira never let the world around him color his clarity. His warm heart and all-encompassing knowledge in both the revealed and hidden Torah, brought him to unique heights, taking his talmidim along and opening vistas for them, too. In Looking into the Sun, by longtime talmid Rabbi Menachem Nissel, Rav Moshe — who passed away seven years ago on 10 Teves — comes alive again for students old and even new

Iwas a young yeshivah bochur from England when I approached Rav Moshe Shapira for the first time. It was 1981 and he had just joined the faculty of Yeshivas Mishkan HaTorah on 41 Rechov Sorotzkin.

The yeshivah had previously broken off from Yeshivas ITRI (playfully called “Splitri”), and bringing in Rav Moshe was considered a master stroke to put the yeshivah on the map. Rav Moshe was still in his forties, yet his reputation as a man who had mastered kol haTorah kulah preceded him. His face radiated the hadras panim of a previous generation, of one mining the depths of the penimiyus of Torah, and harmonizing it with the outside world.

So I was delighted to finally meet this extraordinary person. I asked him a question on the Gemara we were learning. He asked me my name and then answered with magnanimous patience and clarity. I left feeling like a million dollars.

The next day I went back to him with a different question. This time he looked at me with his piercing eyes and said, “Did you look up the Rashba?” I said no. “Rav Akiva Eiger sends you to a Gemara in Yevamos — did you look it up?” I said no. Then he paused and said, “So why are you wasting my time with your unprepared questions?”

The conversation was over. I was traumatized. I ran to my friend, Rav Yerachmiel Fried (currently a rosh kollel in Dallas), and asked him what had just happened. “The first time you went to him you were a stranger,” he explained. “Now you have become a talmid.”

And so, for the next 37 years, over 20 of them as his “Friday driver,” I was careful to only ask questions that were thoroughly prepared. Rav Moshe demanded excellence from his talmidim. He expected us to go deeper. And when we had reached our capacity of depth, we were expected to reanalyze everything and question every assumption and then go deeper still.

Rav Moshe rarely spoke about himself, and we had to gather snippets of information from here and there to get a bigger picture. He was born on 25 Iyar, 1935, and grew up in Tel Aviv. His father was Rav Meir Yitzchok Shapira of Skudvill, Lithuania, a great nephew of the Alter of Kelm and a talmid of the Telz yeshivah.

One story that Rav Moshe shared at his father’s shivah made a huge impression on me, helping me to understand where Rav Moshe got his superhuman personal discipline.

At some point in Rav Meir Yitzchok’s youth, he decided he wanted to make sure he would never lie in bed for no reason. He trained himself that if he would ever wake up during the night, he would immediately stand up next to his bed. Then, in an upright position, he would decide whether he needed further sleep or whether he should start his day.

Over the decades, he trained himself to get up at precisely 2 a.m., rush to shul and learn until Shacharis. The last days of his life he was in a coma. The nurses told Rav Moshe that every night at around 2 a.m., he would start struggling with his blankets, as if trying to get up — while in a coma.

At his mother’s shivah, Rav Moshe shared her mesirus nefesh for his Torah. At the young age of 11, she sent him to the fledgling Ohr Yisrael Yeshiva of Petach Tikvah to learn from the great geonim Rav Yaakov Neiman and Rav Yosef Rozovsky. Soon after his bar mitzvah, he moved to Ponevezh, where bochurim many years his senior would ask him for help on the sugya they were learning.

Ponevezh led to Chevron, which led to Beis Yehuda (Rav Michel Feinstein’s yeshivah in Tel Aviv) and after his marriage, Kamenitz and the Mir. In 1960, Rav Moshe married Rebbetzin Tzipporah, who stood by his side throughout nearly 60 years of marriage. Her father was Rav Aaron Bialistotsky, head of the famed Ohel Torah kollel in Jerusalem, whose talmidim included Rav Yosef Shalom Elyashiv and Rav Shmuel Halevi Wosner.

Rav Moshe’s brother-in-law, Rav Yitzchok Bialistotsky, once shared with me that his father tested his prospective son-in-law on all of Shas b’iyun. Afterward, Rav Moshe’s father told his future mechutan, “What you don’t know about my son is that he knows Maharal the same way he knows Shas.”

Rav Moshe’s life can be simplified into 40 years of learning and 40 years of teaching. What they have in common is that he kept on reinventing himself and never seemed to stay in one place for more than a few years. Before Mishkan HaTorah, he was a maggid shiur in Beis Hatalmud and in Tifrach, and in 1976, he arrived on American shores and taught in Stamford, Connecticut — his first exposure to American talmidim.

For Rav Moshe, every moment of life was precious — he certainly wasn’t the type to engage in nostalgia. That’s why I was surprised one Friday as I drove him home from the mikveh when he shared a decades-old memory.

“Do you remember when Yehoshua was Andy? And Gershon was Johnny? And Yerachmiel was Robbie? And Elazar was Eliot? And you (Menachem) were Manny?” He paused and then delivered his punch line in Israeli-accented English. “Those were the good old days.”

These were Mishkan HaTorah chevreh, and Rav Moshe, who was less known then, chose to give us his undivided warmth, guidance, and attention. He had an office with plain whitewashed walls that wasn’t much bigger than a closet, and all we had to do was knock on the door, and we could talk about whatever was on our minds. He was tough with us and loving with us. He was there for us as we navigated shidduchim, and he was still there for us a generation later as we married off our own children.

I started shidduchim way before I was ready. The reasons were dramatic and complex, but to simplify, my father wanted me to take off a year from yeshivah to study at a business school in London. Rav Elyashiv told me to listen to my father but with one small caveat — I should go married! It was July, and university began in two months; how could I possibly be married by then? Rav Elyashiv assured me that this was Yerushalayim Ir Hakodesh. Things worked differently here. Everything would work out fine. Two weeks later, I was engaged.

During that period, Rav Moshe held my hand. I was in awe of his penetrating insights on my personality when giving me dating advice. I was reassured that I was in good hands. When I felt ready to propose, I asked him if I was ready. “Menachem, ani choshev she’zeh tov,” were the words I will never forget. Rav Moshe’s confidence gave me the peace of mind that I was making the right decision. Forty years later, I still have that peace of mind.