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June 20, 1991

פרס מיימון (1991)

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One of the high points of a semi-Sabbatical I recently spent in Israel was a visit for Shabbat to Yeshivah Kerem B'Yavneh. I had, of course, paid brief visits during past trips to the Holy Land, but this was the first opportunity to do so together with my family and for a whole Shabbat. That we were greeted with an outpouring of friendship, goes without saying. Even in a country renowned for its hospitality, Kerem B'Yavneh is distinguished for the warmth and genuineness of its welcome. The esteemed Rosh Yeshivah, whom I am honored to consider a friend and whose admirer I am, the well-known and beloved Mashgiach, the members of the faculty and administration, and the students – all were extremely gracious. But it was not only the sum of these individual encounters that left a lasting impression. All together join in forming a model Torah community, in which learning and vigor, piety and youthfulness find their fullest expressions. I do not exaggerate when I say that my family -- including young children who had never been to Kerem B'Yavneh before experienced a sense of home-coming. Kerem B’Yavneh is, indeed, the kind of ”home” on which many of us pin our hopes for Israel's future. Here, in an atmosphere in which spiritual and psychological growth is natural, one finds that rare combination: an uncompromising dedication to Torah combined-with an awareness of contemporary life and a commitment to Israel and Jewry.Most unforgettable was the Friday evening at the home of Rabbi Goldvicht. After enjoying the charming hospitality of the host and hostess, both the culinary excellence and the delightful and instructive conversation, a number of American students — almost all of whom I knew from the States -- came to visit. I was struck by the openness with which they engaged the Rosh Yeshivah and myself in the conversation. It was a frankness perfectly allied with respect and reverence -- in a way, a form of Talmudic discourse on general Jewish subjects I Opinions were freel…
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What Have We Forgotten? (1987)

I am grateful my mother still recognizes me. She may not do so for long, but right now her face lights up when she sees me. My children have less luck; she seems to feel she ought to know them, so she pretends she does. We all see through the act. Her great-grandchildren are another story. She is repeatedly astonished that they even exist. Like most of the others on her floor, she lives in her remote past, both sustained and terrorized by long buried pleasures and fears, loves and hates. She often calls for her mother, and mourns her “recently” deceased parents with genuine grief. Soon these memories, too; will be forgotten, as her malevolent disease destroys more and more of her brain cells. And then all the past will be a blank. The family is helpless to do anything about it. My father and my siblings give her all our love and care, but that is simply not enough. That is the way Alzheimer’s disease goes. The patient has no recollected past, and no conception of or interest in the future. Only the present counts. It is, as someone said, a radically existential situation. My sadness at Mom’s condition and sense of futility, despite the family’s best efforts, are deepened by a suspicion that her sickness is somehow a a metaphor for our culture, for a good part of modernity itself. To live for now, without knowing the value of the past and the promise of the future — that is the skewed experience of an Alzheimer’s society. Mom’s personal travail is our culture’s collective malaise: a physical ailment in one case, a sickness of the soul in the other. All analogies are flawed, and this one is, too. Mom’s condition is different in certain significant ways from the pathology of modernity. For instance, she is obsessed with Friday. She wakes up thinking it is Friday, so she must get out of her wheelchair, rush home to clean the house, prepare the festive Sabbath meals, and light the Sabbath candles. She is convinced that every day is “erev Shabbos,” the eve of the Sabbath…
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קלף סמיכה

ישיבת רבנו יצחק אלחנן בעזהי"ת ה"ה הרב הגדול בתורה ויראה, מצוין במעלות ומדות טובות כש"ת הרב נחום בר" מאיר שמואל לאם שיחי' למד הרבה שנים בישיבת רבנו יצחק אלחנן ז"ל, יגע ועמל בתורתנו הקדושה ומצא כדי מדתו לעלות מעלה בקודש להיות מהתלמידים שהגיעו להוראה ונבחן מאתנו החתומים מטה במקצוע של איסור והיתר ביורה דעה חלק א', ומצאנו אותו יודע ובקי באלו הלכות, וסמכנו אותו בסמיכת חכמים להורות לבני ישראל "יורה יורה באיסור והיתר" ויהי' ד' עמו להגדיל תורה ולהאדירה. הכותב וחותם למען כבוד התורה ולומדי' כ"ט סיון תשי"א לפ"ק, פה ניו-יארק. נאום: נאום: נאום:
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