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February 16, 1983

Hesped for Rabbi Avraham Aharon Shatzkes (1983)

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The Excellent Saint and the Rosh Yeshivah: An Appreciation of Rabbi Abraham Aharon Shatzkes and Rabbi Yerucham Gorelick (1983)

The Sages teach us in the Midrash (Tanhuma, Pinchas 10; and in somewhat different form in the Talmud, Ber. 58a and Sanh. 38a): כשם שאין פרצופיהן שווין זה לזה כך אין דעתן שוה. Just as people's faces differ from each other, so the deiot of each person are different from those of every other person. Deiot here means not only opinions, but also personalities. Similarly, when the Rambam writes about Hilkhot Deiot, he refers to a study of character and personality. The world created by the Holy One is remarkably rich, not only in its natural diversity but also in its human variety. If this is true of ordinary human beings, then a fortiori, how much more so is it true for scholars whose deiot (in both meanings, that of intellectual outlook and of character attributes) are formed by the holy Torah. Just as shiv'im panim le-torah, there is no homogeneous, single approach to Torah but rather 70 different ways of interpreting it, so shiv'im panim le'lomdei torah, there is an enormous variety of types of scholar’s and we must not expect amongst them one idealized monolithic personality. Of course, individual traits are clearly marked in Halakhah as desirable or undesirable: thus, respect for human dignity (kevod ha-beriot) is desirable, and vengeance and vindicativeness are undesirable. But there is no one character type or personality structure that is inherently superior or more prevalent than any other. In the realm of Torah, one finds a plethora of personalities, a pluralism of types, and this makes the world of Talmidei hakhamim far more interesting and vital than if the Torah personalities were uniform, homogeneous, and monochromatic. The two great Roshei Yeshiva whom we mourn and memorialize were in many ways directly opposed to each other in personality, cast of mind, and the form of their interpersonal relationships. Yet these two characterological antonyms were unified not only in the friendship they felt for each other and the derekh eretz with which they treated ea…
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Hesped for Rabbi Melech Schachter (2007)

Rabbi Lamm, alongside Rabbi Hershel Schachter and Rabbi Zevulun Charlop, delivers a eulogy for Rabbi Melech Schachter.
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