| MAGAZINE FEATURE |

THE LIFE AND LEGACY OF DR. NATHAN BIRNBAUM

 By Gedalia Guttentag | SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

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Dr. Nathan Birnbaum embarked on a quest that led him to the “promised lands” of Zionism and secular Yiddish culture. Then he had an encounter that changed everything

 

All credit goes to Gedalia Guttentag and The Mishpacha Magazine

It was soon after arriving in Israel

to learn in yeshivah that I went in search of Rechov Nathan Birnbaum. The street named after my great-great-grandfather, I was told, was somewhere in the upper reaches of Jerusalem’s Zichron Moshe neighborhood. Making my way past Geula, I encountered Zichron Moshe’s legendary shul, once the stage for Rav Sholom Schwadron and beloved of bochurim from Brisk. At the corner of Rechov Soloveitchik, I turned left and went uphill.

Filled with anticipation at seeing a road named after my ancestor, I almost missed the blue and white sign. “Rechov Nathan Birnbaum,” it read, “writer and philosopher.” Looking around at a passageway little more than an arm-span across, my pride gave way to disappointment. It occurred to me that the street was probably named by a bureaucrat who never saw it. This was no “Rechov,” merely an alleyway.

But this backstreet, it later struck me, is actually a fitting metaphor for the man whose name it bears. Because Dr. Nathan Birnbaum is the forgotten giant of modern Jewish history, although he was a leader of three mass movements that shaped the Jewish world.

Born in Vienna, he was one of the founders of the Zionist movement even before Theodor Herzl arrived on the scene. But then Birnbaum committed Zionist heresy by embracing Yiddish and advocating for Jewish autonomy in the Diaspora. His odyssey continued when, as a world-famous Jewish intellectual, he abandoned secularism. Birnbaum became arguably the first baal teshuvah of the modern era, rising to prominence in the nascent Agudas Yisrael organization. But written out of Zionist history, and part of a secular Yiddish culture that has vanished, Nathan Birnbaum is preserved only as a dim memory in the religious world; a fate symbolized by this modest passageway in Zichron Moshe.

Just over 80 years after his odyssey ended, I embark on a journey of my own to learn more about him. As a great-great-grandson of Nathan Birnbaum, I’ve always known the basic facts, but now these coalesce into a story. It’s one worth retelling, because Nathan Birnbaum’s dramatic life was a microcosm of 150 years of Jewish history, and his story of teshuvah is capable of inspiring all of us today.

The Vienna into which Nathan Birnbaum was born in 1864 was the melting pot of Eastern European Jewry. As the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it was a gateway from the impoverished east to the cultured west. Jews such as composer Gustav Mahler, psychologist Sigmund Freud, and author Franz Kafka were making an outsize contribution to this bastion of German culture. But their Eastern European brethren were marked as backward and embarrassing Ostjuden — a label that ambitious newcomers were eager to avoid. The prevailing snobbery is captured by Professor Joshua Fishman in his work The Odyssey of Nathan Birnbaum, with a clever Yiddish put-down. Er is nit azoi a Viener vi a Bukovina, one might say of an Ostjude trying to blend in: “He’s not really Viennese, but from Bukovina.”

Menachem Mendel Birnbaum and his wife, Miriam, made the journey from chassidic Galicia to cultured Vienna in the early 1860s. Many sources (likely quoting each other) describe a home drifting away from observance. But according to my great-uncle Mr. David Birnbaum, archivist of the Nathan and Solomon Birnbaum archives in Toronto, that wasn’t the case. “Menachem Mendel owned a yeast business and one Pesach he had a problem with the sale of the stock. After asking a sh’eilah, he threw away his whole stock at great loss.” Clearly, although no longer chassidim, his parents were religious.

Sadly, Menachem Mendel passed away when Nathan was only 11 years old. Given that early bereavement and the freethinking spirit of the times, it is perhaps unsurprising that a teenage Nathan should abandon his parents’ Jewish attachment.

But despite the fact that he, like many of his contemporaries, had become unobservant, one thing set young Nathan apart. He saw himself as Jewish, not German, as he later wrote: “although at that time there was not a single other Jewish youngster in Vienna who did not consider himself to be German.” This belief, expressed at approximately 16 years old, was to take this teenager on a remarkable sequence of events. The precocious ability to go against the current remained a feature of his life until the end.

Common wisdom has it that Theodor Herzl founded the Zionist movement in the wake of the 1894 Dreyfus trial, and just over half a century later the State of Israel came into being. The truth is far more interesting. In 1882, Nathan Birnbaum headed to the University of Vienna to read law, philosophy, and Near Eastern studies. The following year, this young student founded Kadimah, the first nationalistic Jewish student organization. Then in 1884, at the age of 20, he published a pamphlet called Die Assimilationssucht (“The Assimilation Mania”), arguing that the renaissance of the Jewish people depended on the Land of Israel. Over the next decade he went on to turn this idea into a movement.

As a lifelong and prolific writer, Nathan Birnbaum built his movement up with his pen. From 1885–1894 he edited (and wrote much of) Selbst-Emancipation!, a vastly influential Zionist paper. Jess Olson, associate professor of Jewish History at Yeshiva University and author of the recent book Nathan Birnbaum and Jewish Modernity, describes how he developed a program of Zionism in a series of essays during the 1890s. He used his newspaper to “call for the formation of a Zionist political party to transfer Zionism into a mass movement.” His influence was such that “Nathan Birnbaum’s associates represented a who’s who of early Zionist figures.”

Birnbaum himself gave the movement a name, the Hebrew Ziyonut and the German Zionismus. While others were talking about similar Jewish nationalist ideas, historians agree that he alone was responsible for coining — and popularizing — the new term.

Determined to make his ideas a reality, in 1892 he headed east to Galicia to promote a program of settlement in Palestine, under the name of the Zion Union for the Colonization of Palestine. He succeeded in founding more than a dozen branches of the group. The “ancient national home of the Jews” was the only place that this rebirth could happen, not in Argentina or the United States, as other Jewish leaders proposed. By the time that a shocked Herzl reacted to the Dreyfus trial with his book Der Judenstaat, Zionism as a movement was a going concern.

The father of Mishpacha editor Rabbi Moshe Grylak was close to Nathan Birnbaum towards the end of Birnbaum’s storied life. In fact, as I discover, Rabbi Grylak provides a tangible link to my ancestor with a memory he has as a two-year-old. “I was zocheh to sit on his lap and pull his beard,” Rabbi Grylak tells me. On Nathan Birnbaum’s place in the Zionist pantheon, Rabbi Grylak is clear: “He was the dominant — the deepest — thinker in Zionism.”

But where Birnbaum had succeeded in galvanizing an intellectual movement, it was Herzl who proved to have the organizational ability to create a successful political movement. It was Herzl, not Birnbaum, who convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897. At the Congress Birnbaum was asked to speak about “Zionism as a Cultural Movement.” His eminence within the movement was recognized by his election as the secretary-general of the new Zionist Organization. But it was clear that a new sun had risen over the movement that Birnbaum had created.

A popular image of Theodore Herzl is of a bareheaded, black-bearded figure in formal attire gazing out over the water in a visionary pose. From a distance, Nathan Birnbaum could have been mistaken for Herzl, as is obvious from photographs of a young Birnbaum. But there any similarities ended. Their personalities were too different — and too large — to coexist for long at the head of the same movement.

Herzl’s diaries reveal an unmistakable condescension towards Birnbaum who, as an unsuccessful lawyer and lifelong activist, was practically penniless. He attacks Birnbaum’s “shameless begging letters” for daring to ask for a stipend from the Zionist Organization, complaining that he “dares to draw comparisons between him and me.” Clearly, although by this point Herzl was in control of the movement, he was wary of the challenge that Birnbaum still represented.

Besides the personal difficulties, there were real ideological differences as well. Whereas for Herzl, Zionism was about achieving political independence as a solution to the “Jewish question,” Birnbaum’s thinking had evolved. Zionism was to be a movement first and foremost of cultural regeneration of the Jewish people.

Within a year of the Zionist Congress, after Herzl opposed his re-election to the post of secretary-general, Nathan Birnbaum had left the Zionist Organization. He closed the door on the movement that he had founded, just as it was taking off for meteoric success.

History, it is said, is written by the victors. In the struggle for the domination of the Zionist movement, Herzl had succeeded. And in the best tradition of such struggles, Nathan Birnbaum was erased from the history books. A very recent biography of Herzl fails to make mention of his existence at all. An older biography dismisses Birnbaum in a footnote as “erratic.”

But the truth is that Nathan Birnbaum was anything but erratic. The evolution of his thinking was dragging him inexorably eastward, toward the benighted galus Jews whom the Zionists scorned. It was time for the second act of Birnbaum’s drama.

Photographs taken throughout Nathan Birnbaum’s life are clear evidence of his evolution. The nattily dressed young university student with Kadimah friends gives way to a brooding, middle-aged intellectual, and finally to a majestic, quasi-rabbinic figure. The camera doesn’t lie: This is a formidable face, that of a leader. But equally, the camera doesn’t tell the whole truth. I’m left wondering what type of person Nathan Birnbaum was in private. Here and there, I find fragments of information.

Mirjam Birnbaum was a daughter of Nathan Birnbaum’s son Uriel. She passed away a few years ago, having spent her whole life in Holland, and she remembered her grandfather from his final years. I myself never met her, but my grandmother, Mrs. Eva Guttentag ,recalls her saying that despite his severity, “When he smiled, it was like the sun coming out.” To another cousin, my great-uncle Mr. David Birnbaum, she described a “warm and loving Opa.”

Professor Olson paints a similar picture of Birnbaum’s personal side. “In some of the correspondence I examined between Nathan Birnbaum and his children, he comes across as a very warm father, even unusually so for the period.”

As for his severe look, he tells me that “although he could be irascible at times, he certainly had a sense of humor. It went all the way back to his youth. One of his earliest contributions to the origins of Jewish nationalism was in a student-produced, partly humorous journal, Megillah, that he and early Kadimah members published.”

One picture in particular speaks loud and clear about Nathan Birnbaum’s celebrity. It’s a photo taken in Buczacz, Galicia in 1907, and it shows a middle-aged Birnbaum surrounded by a crowd of hundreds of men and women. While some are in modern dress, many are visibly religious. Nathan Birnbaum was by then a candidate for an Eastern Galicia seat in the Austrian parliament, and these were amcha, the Jewish masses coming out in his support. But how had this Viennese intellectual become involved in the rough-and-tumble of Eastern European electoral politics? This is the heart of Birnbaum’s second stage, his advocacy of Diaspora Nationalism.

Underlying Birnbaum’s rupture with the Zionist movement, in addition to his fallout with Herzl, was his discovery that the eight million Jews of Eastern Europe didn’t need the Zionists’ promised land to be transformed into a nation. They were already a living entity by virtue of their language, Yiddish, and the unique culture it had given birth to. What they needed was cultural autonomy right where they were.

From 1902 onward, Birnbaum developed a theory of Jewish nationalism he called Pan-Judaism. Whereas Western Jews derided Yiddish as a “jargon” — a backward ghetto dialect — he taught himself Yiddish and promoted it as the authentic expression of Jewish culture. This belief proved far-reaching. His son, my great-grandfather Professor Solomon Birnbaum, held the first chair in Yiddish at the University of Hamburg. This was just one aspect of the particularly close relationship between the famous father and his eldest son. It was a bond that grew deeper as they later undertook a parallel journey to discover their Judaism.

Although a new convert to Yiddishism, Nathan Birnbaum again took a leadership role. In 1908 he convened the first Yiddish Conference in Czernovitz (present-day Ukraine), attended by the leading Yiddish writers of the day. In what was a very active year, he also crossed the Atlantic to preach the importance of Yiddish in the United States. Again, Birnbaum’s stature can be grasped from the fact that he met President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House, a visit arranged by New York Congressman Henry Goldfogle.

Where once as a Zionist he had preached nationalism in the Land of Israel, now he sought autonomy for the Jewish people as a nation in the Diaspora. Everywhere in the Austro-Hungarian Empire restive minorities were demanding self-determination, and Birnbaum saw a chance for the Jewish People. So in 1907 he stood as a candidate for the Reichsrat, the Austrian parliament.

It was on the campaign trail for this election that the picture was taken — a campaign that should have met with success. But he was denied a seat due to electoral fraud on behalf of the Polish candidate, Stefan Moyser. According to David Birnbaum, “My father told us that during the first ballot the Polish faction didn’t tear up enough ballot papers, but in the final ballot they did.”

Birnbaum’s focus on Yiddish and Diaspora autonomy would prove to be on the wrong side of history. As the American experience proved, a secular Yiddish culture could not be any bulwark against the forces of assimilation. And Jewish autonomy fell prey to the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

But Nathan Birnbaum was far from a spent force. As Europe descended into the upheaval of the First World War, he was about to mount his own internal revolution.

The baal teshuvah movement is today a fact of Jewish life. Kiruv centers dot the globe. Outreach organizations are active on university campuses and within communities, and their alumni fill yeshivos in Israel and beyond. With the movement itself well into middle age, it is hard to imagine a world in which Jews don’t rediscover their Judaism.

But the first baal teshuvah was not a product of the Six Day War and an encounter at the Kosel. The first baal teshuvah of the modern era was Nathan Birnbaum. His teshuvah was so sincere and shocking that his contemporaries named him “der Baal Teshuvah.”

But Nathan Birnbaum’s teshuvah was a process, not an overnight decision. In retrospect, the precursor of that dramatic teshuvah was a scene recalled by Solomon Birnbaum from his own childhood. He remembers his father looking down to the street from their third-floor apartment. There in the road was a poor family whose cart had overturned, scattering their belongings. The reaction was curious. “Nathan Birnbaum began to chide G-d. How could He, if He existed, allow such a thing to happen?” Clearly, a lot lay beneath the surface of this atheist’s mind.

But the realization of G-d’s existence finally came from an encounter with the massive forces of nature. “The first sensation of the Master of the Universe was awoken in me as I was traveling across the ocean,” Nathan Birnbaum later wrote. He was referring to the journey to America that he undertook in 1908, still a secular intellectual. The Chazon Ish writes at the beginning of his classic work Emunah u’Bitachon that belief grows from an encounter with the vastness of heaven and earth. And the Chazon Ish used to reference Nathan Birnbaum’s own transformation as a result of the awe-inspiring physical world.

According to Rabbi Moshe Grylak, the sea would continue to exert this hold on him even many years later. Having left Berlin, his home since 1911, with the rise of the Nazis in 1933, Birnbaum lived in the seaside town of Scheveningen, Holland. As Rabbi Grylak’s father walked with him along the beach, tears came to Birnbaum’s eyes and he began to speak about his teshuvah. In fact, Nathan Birnbaum’s tzavaah asked his descendants to read the book of Yonah, another story of teshuvah connected to the sea, on his yahrtzeit.

But the initial spiritual awakening on this boat journey lay dormant for a few years. In a speech in St. Petersburg in 1912, his feelings suddenly crystallized. At a secular conference, having finished speaking about another topic, he suddenly rose again and spoke about the spiritual mission of the Jewish People — a startling scene that was witnessed by Yitzchak Ben-Zvi, who later became the second president of Israel.

Determined as ever to live by his convictions, by the middle of the First World War, Nathan Birnbaum had become a full-fledged baal teshuvah. A major influence at his early-teshuvah stage was Rabbi Tuvia Horowitz, a nephew of the Vizhnitzer Rebbe. Another person he turned to was a young Rav Moshe Chaim Lau, father of former Israeli Chief Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau. Letters that he sent to Nathan Birnbaum are headed “rabbinical candidate,” meaning that he was still early in his rabbinical career when they met in Vienna, where the Lau family spent the First World War.

To appreciate the shock effect of Nathan Birnbaum’s very public change, one has to grasp just how prominent he was. In an age when intellectuals could be celebrities, he was a household name in the Jewish world. This was a man whose image featured on greeting cards. Since the days of the French Revolution, the traffic had been one way only: from east to west, as Jews abandoned Torah life in droves in the name of “enlightenment.” Yet here, for the first time, was an intellectual at the pinnacle of European Jewish life, who had done the unthinkable. He had declared that the true light lay to the east, in the long-scorned world of Torah.

Perhaps the best contemporary comparison to Birnbaum is Rabbi Uri Zohar. An Israeli cultural icon of the 1970s, he was the epitome of the new secular Israeli. His teshuvah sent shockwaves through Israeli society, as Birnbaum’s had in his time, and opened the door for others to make the same journey.

Russian Zionist leader Menachem Ussishkin was one person who had encountered Birnbaum at the different stages of his metamorphosis. In 1891 he came through Vienna and made his pilgrimage to the famous Zionist leader Dr. Nathan Birnbaum. After they had finished talking, Ussishkin asked Birnbaum whether he was able to direct him to a kosher restaurant. Birnbaum walked his guest there, but refused to join him inside. “I won’t eat in such a place,” he said.

Many years later Ussishkin came through Vienna again and met Birnbaum, now fully religious, and reminded him of their last encounter. “You, Ussishkin, have stayed the same,” Birnbaum told him. “But I have changed; I represent the dynamic type of Jew.”

Dynamism was a feature of Nathan Birnbaum’s character throughout his life, including his last, religious stage. Although a newly minted baal teshuvah, he wasn’t prepared to take a back seat in his adopted world. In 1917 he published a pamphlet called Divrei HaOylim, in which he criticized what he saw as the failures of religious Jewry in their observance. He founded groups called Oylim (Ascenders) under the umbrella of Agudas Yisrael, which he hoped would go on to create a movement that would transform the Jewish people.

His new vision was typically sweeping. Oylim were to focus on three elements: Daas, Rachamim, and Tiferes. Broadly, these stood for service of Hashem, rachmanus and care for others, as well as an outward dignity appropriate for G-d’s servants. The Oylim were to be involved in agriculture — which Birnbaum saw as less corrupting than bourgeois occupations — and live in communities to be founded both in the Land of Israel and abroad. The Oyleh would combine the best of chassidus, mussar, and an elevated derech eretz.

Once again, Birnbaum succeeded in working his magic. According to Rabbi Grylak, “The cream of Poland’s young religious intellectuals, such as Rabbis Yehuda Leib Orlean and Alexander Zusia Friedman Hy”d, counted themselves as Birnbaum’s followers.” A circular published in 1928 promoting the Oylim lists luminaries such as Rav Avraham Elya Kaplan, the young gaon of Slabodka who was the head of the Berlin Beis Medrash L’Rabbonim, as well as leading rabbis from Germany. Reprinted in the mussar journal HaNe’eman published in Telshe, it testifies to the waves that Nathan Birnbaum’s program was making.

A sense of his fiery commitment to his new path, and what made Birnbaum such a great publicist, comes from a famous essay he wrote in Zurich in 1919. Titled “In a Jewish Galus,” he denounces the fact that leadership of the Jewish people has gone to those distant from the Torah. “On the day that the idea appeared in the minds of the Jews,” he writes, “that the light shines in foreign quarters and that in our camp there is darkness, and that therefore we must bring in light to the darkness — on that day, our exile started among our fellow Jews.” Yet again, Nathan Birnbaum succeeded in pinpointing the central issue of the time — the “Galus among Jews” — in a way that rings true still today.

Not long after, “der Baal Teshuvah” began playing a leadership role within Agudas Yisrael, newly reconstituted after the First World War. In 1919 he was appointed the organization’s first secretary-general.

Not everyone within the Agudah world was on the same wavelength as the newcomer. “After Nathan Birnbaum spoke about saving the Jewish People,” says Rabbi Grylak, “a Hungarian rav rose to disagree saying “Vachamushim olu — only a fifth of the Jewish people left Egypt.” Appalled by the implied disregard for Am Yisrael’s fate, Nathan Birnbaum rose to speak again. He exclaimed: “Did you ever eat on Yom Kippur?” The rebuke was clear: Nathan Birnbaum had himself proven that the Jewish People are never too far to come back.

The Birnbaum archives show that at this stage he was in contact with luminaries as varied as the Gerrer Rebbe, the Reisher Rov, Rav Aharon Lewin, Rav Joseph Tzvi Carlebach of Altona, and leader of the Chovevei Tzion movement Rav Shmuel Mohilever. His correspondence shows him deploying his well-honed skills as an activist to build the young Agudah, the major communal project of the Orthodox world at the time.

Today’s Agudath Israel of America dates its birth to 1922. In a very real sense, Nathan Birnbaum had a hand in the creation of this legendary organization as well. A famous photo from that year shows him seated next to the gaon Rav Meir Don Plotski, known as the Kli Chemdah, and other illustrious rabbanim. They are en route to America on behalf of Agudas Yisrael — a mission that led to the creation of the Agudah in the new world. Life, for Birnbaum, was coming full circle because it had been in 1908 as a secular ideologue that he had last visited the United States.

With Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Nathan Birnbaum left Berlin and moved to Holland, which had been a neutral country in the First World War. Also, as a Nordic country Holland seemed to be safe from Hitler. He spent his final years in the seaside town of Scheveningen, a suburb of the Hague. From there, he published yet another of his innumerable newspapers, Der Ruf (The Call), and spoke out about the coming threat to European Jewry.

By the time he passed away in 1937 he was revered across the Jewish world. Historian Dr. Maximilian Landau wrote, in almost lyrical terms, that Birnbaum retained until the end of his life a “childlike nature, an almost unimaginable degree of freshness.” He describes “an amazing natural dignity,” and Nathan Birnbaum’s “instinctively aristocratic bearing.” Rabbi Alexander Altmann, who emigrated from Germany via England to the United States, describes Birnbaum as a “prophetic personality” who possessed “the ethos of the pathfinder who surveys the scene as a whole.”

But self-made as he was, Nathan Birnbaum was never quite at home in any movement — only with his burning passion for the Gottesvolk, the people of Hashem. This was uppermost in his mind with his final words, “Use my death to spread my ideas.”

Nathan Birnbaum’s burial place in Wassenaar, the Hague, turned out to be significant for myself personally. Only a few years ago I discovered that buried next to him are his friends and admirers, Leo and Erna Kruskal. They are none other than my wife’s great-grandparents.

From my first encounter with the alleyway in Zichron Moshe, one question has persisted in my mind. What did Nathan Birnbaum leave behind? Does the man who abandoned Zionism just when it was taking off, who advocated for a soon-to-vanish Eastern European Jewry, and who is barely remembered in the religious world he embraced, have any legacy at all?

For Professor Olson, the answer is yes. “Even if his legacy is not easily measured in terms of concrete accomplishments made relative to those who followed him, he was a pioneer for these positions. Perhaps if he hadn’t blazed a trail, things would be very different. When Nathan Birnbaum helped create Jewish nationalism in the 1880s, he wrote so extensively that he himself was largely responsible for an untold number of people taking it seriously. The same held true for his foray into Yiddish and his teshuvah. He was an inspiration to many important figures in each intellectual world he inhabited.”

But there’s no doubt that his main legacy was as “der Baal Teshuvah,” so utterly sincere was his return to Torah. In the preface to a slim volume of Birnbaum’s writings that he translated, Rav Moshe Sheinfeld puts it best. He explains that the title “gaon” describes perfection in a certain area. “Dr. Nathan Birnbaum z”l,” he goes on to write, “was a gaon of teshuvah.”

Even if there were no direct links between the teshuvah movement of the 1960s and Nathan Birnbaum, he was the first to show that it could be done. According to Rabbi Grylak, “He was the first to make the dramatic change, to say that we have to go back to Har Sinai.” He faced the entire majestic edifice of Western secularism in its prime, and declared it to be a house of cards. And as a major intellectual force in the secular Jewish world, the shock waves spread far.

Today’s students aren’t lured from the beis medrash, as they once were, by intellectual giants and towering revolutionaries. The contemporary secular world lures in a different way: It promises fun. But teshuvah is teshuvah. Nathan Birnbaum is still relevant because he showed that the call of Sinai is more potent than the siren song coming from foreign shores.

Dr. Nathan Birnbaum’s life story was epic by any measure. To those whose Judaism meant nothing to them, he was erratic, founding movements and abandoning them. But viewed from a Torah perspective, things look different. Beginning as a teenager, his life was one relentless quest, a journey to discover the fissile core of the Jewish people.

For that alone, Nathan Birnbaum deserves to come in from the dusty side streets of Jewish memory.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 726)

 | PROFILES |

TIME TO SHINE THE LIGHT

 By Refoel Pride all credit goes to him and the Mishpacha Magazine| MARCH 28, 2018

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For years, Rav Shlomo Bussu, grandson of the Baba Sali, was an anonymous kollel avreich… until pressured to forge the next link in his chain of tradition and meet a thirsting public

 

“We have to focus our bechirah only on the things that are in the realm of free choice, which is the choice between tov and ra. But when you come to a choice between two ways to good — don’t choose. Leave it to HaKadosh Baruch Hu. The more you leave in His Hands, the more He does. Because the best thing is to say, ‘I don’t want anything — He knows the best.’ In my own experience, nothing went better when I went the way I wanted. Hashem always knows better” (Photos: Moshe Shapoff)

 

Y

ou have to climb the stairs at the side of the Hamelech Hachassid print shop in order to get to Beit Medrash Tiferet L’Yisrael, but for those who know Rav Shlomo Bussu, the location is really no surprise — his shul is tucked away, just as he’s been all these years.

Situated at 25 Rechov Givat Shaul, in the middle of yet another aging Jerusalem industrial area giving way to gleaming residential towers on either side, the two-year-old shul occupies a humble address that is sure to become prime real estate.

On this sunny spring day, Rav Shlomo Bussu is giving chizuk to a group of American bochurim from a Sephardi yeshivah before they head back to the States for Pesach. He is wearing multiple pairs of tzitzis and tefillin — he keeps his tefillin on all day long, every weekday. He speaks to them in their language — fluent English softened by a light French accent — about how victories over the yetzer hara, even the ones that seem so small down here, take on majestic proportions Above.

After his shmuess, the bochurim form a line to receive individual brachos from Rav Bussu. He gives them each a warm smile, a firm handshake, and a clap on the shoulder, along with personalized counsel. His good cheer and easy camaraderie with these young men call to mind a winning coach exhorting his team. But the bochurim’s awed demeanor shows that their rosh yeshivah prepared them well for this visit: for Rav Bussu is a mekubal, towering talmid chacham, a posek, sofer, shochet, and mohel. He is also a grandson of the Baba Sali, Rav Yisrael Abuchatzeira zy”a, the beloved mekubal and leader of Moroccan Jewry who was niftar in 1984 — himself the grandson of the revered Abir Yaakov, Rav Yaakov Abuchatzeira, scion of a distinguished line of Torah scholars and kabbalists stretching back to the time of Rav Chaim Vital and the Arizal.

Into the Open

This public role is relatively new for Rav Bussu, one he stepped into only several years ago. For the quarter century before that, he stationed himself in the Ohalei Avraham shul on Eretz Chefetz Street in Jerusalem’s Shmuel Hanavi neighborhood, learning as an anonymous kollel avreich. He adopted the rigorous schedule practiced in the Abuchatzeira family, engrossing himself in Torah for 18 hours every day, sleeping just two hours a night, and fasting from morning to evening — all out of the public eye.

“Those were my best years,” he says with a hint of a wistful smile of the years in his “hideout,” where avreichim in the neighborhood knew a brilliant tzaddik was in their midst, but not many others had an inkling. “It’s best to be under cover, to be nistar. Something that is hidden cannot be compared to that which is known by people.”

He resisted taking on a public role, but his relatives pressured him to forge the next link in the chain of tradition, binding together the generations of the Abuchatzeira family. “They told me, ‘If people don’t come to you, they will go to all kinds of charlatans.’ ”

In the end, he consented, because he was persuaded that his yichus could be a powerful asset. “If a person comes to me with an open heart, and he’s excited about meeting me because I’m a grandson of the Baba Sali… without [the yichus] it would be much, much harder to influence that person. You can’t pass up the opportunity to be mekarev him and be mechazek him.”

The decision really came down to how best to make a kiddush Hashem. And for that, there couldn’t have been a better role model than his saintly grandfather, the Baba Sali.

“Simple derech eretz can make a kiddush Hashem,” he says. “Sometimes even just by being there you can make a difference — we have such an achrayus not to make a chillul Hashem.

“Even in our appearance,” he emphasizes. “We see how the secular and the modern people are fastidious in their appearance. I don’t know what kind of heter some yungeleit have not to be makpid this way. You should be clean and proper. It’s a Chazal mefurash that when a talmid chacham is not makpid on cleanliness, others will say, ‘Oy, this is the way lomdei Torah are?’

“I remember how the Babi Sali used to be very clean…. Even in Morocco, which is very hot, he was makpid to be clean and to keep his clothes clean. He said, ‘A person who is naki b’gufo is naki b’nishmaso.’ This is a very important inyan.”

 

Parting the Clouds

The Baba Sali was a constant presence in Rav Bussu’s house when he was growing up — even when he was not physically there. Rav Shlomo Bussu’s father, Rav David Bussu, was from a Buenos Aires family, orphaned at a very young age. He made the hard decision to leave his family in Argentina to learn Torah in Eretz Yisrael, eventually landing in Yeshivas Mir and then Porat Yosef. His mesirus nefesh attracted the attention of the Baba Sali, who announced to young David that he had been selected to marry the Baba Sali’s bat bechorah, Avigayil.

“I think it was this mesirus nefesh that gave him the zechus to marry the daughter of the Baba Sali,” Rav Bussu says of his father. “Behind everything special there is always mesirus nefesh.”

There is a story Rav Bussu often shares about the lesson he learned from the Baba Sali regarding mesirus nefesh. Rav Bussu was once at a seudas bris with his older brother, Rav Shimon, who is also a highly esteemed talmid chacham and mekubal. There was also a very well-known rosh yeshivah in attendance.

Rav Shimon rose to speak first, and in the course of his devar Torah he mentioned that someone once saw his grandfather, the Baba Sali, learning Gemara. His eyes flew down the page as if he were speed-reading. The onlooker asked the Baba Sali how he could learn Gemara so fast; doesn’t learning Torah require ameilus, great effort and concentration? Shouldn’t he review more slowly?

The Baba Sali answered, “My grandfather, the Abir Yaakov, was zocheh to be given the Zohar as a gift. I was zocheh to be given Shas as a gift.”

While Rav Shimon recounted this, Rav Shlomo noticed that the rosh yeshivah, who had been smiling throughout the bris, suddenly went straight-faced.

When Rav Shlomo’s turn came to speak, he made note of this. “I noticed that the Rosh Yeshivah stopped smiling when my brother mentioned this, and I would like to strengthen the Rosh Yeshivah’s question — how can Gemara be a gift if a Jew is supposed to work hard to acquire it? — with two more stories.

“One night, when we were living in France and the Baba Sali was staying with us, he asked my older brother Rav Moshe to run downstairs and check to see if the sky was clear enough for him to say Kiddush Levanah. Young Moshe dutifully ran down several flights, only to see that the moon was completely obscured by clouds. He carried this news back to our grandfather.

“This happened three nights in a row, until the last night came when one could say Kiddush Levanah. The Baba Sali again sent Moshe out to check — but it was again too cloudy. When Moshe reported this, the Baba Sali rose from his place, took his cane in hand, and made his way down all the stairs with Moshe’s help. When they got outside, the Baba Sali raised his cane toward the sky. The clouds parted in front of the moon, and he recited Kiddush Levanah.

“But I have a question on this,” Rav Bussu said. “There was another instance when, in order to say Kiddush Levanah in time, the Baba Sali rode by train for 600 kilometers to reach a place where there were no clouds. But why didn’t he just wave his cane?”

Rav Bussu proceeded to the second story. “I heard this from Rav Amram Abergil, my grandfather’s gabbai in Morocco. Once the Baba Sali told Rav Amram he wanted to go toivel in the mikveh, which was a natural spring inside a cave. Rav Amram accompanied the Baba Sali to the cave, but when they reached the pool, Rav Amram saw that the water was swarming with biting, stinging creatures. The Baba Sali nevertheless prepared to immerse, and when he put his foot in the water, all the creatures parted. When he emerged, the creatures swarmed back again to fill the water.

“The Baba Sali told Rav Amram to toivel also, but Rav Amram was afraid: Sure, the creatures made way for the Baba Sali, but they would eat Rav Amram alive! The Baba Sali advised him not to worry. He would put his own foot in the water, and the creatures would all keep away — and that’s what happened.

“But there was another incident. I heard from my cousin, Baba Elazar, that he also once accompanied our grandfather, the Baba Sali, to toivel in a mikveh in Morocco. Baba Elazar heard him descend into the water, but then heard gasps of agony. Baba Elazar hurried to see what had happened, and saw the Baba Sali covered in blood, having been stung and bitten by the same types of creatures. So here’s the same question: Why didn’t the Baba Sali simply clear the creatures out, as he did on the other occasion?

“It all comes down to mesirus nefesh. Because the Baba Sali was willing to travel 600 kilometers to say Kiddush Levanah, he was zocheh to part the clouds with his cane. Because the Baba Sali was willing to be ravaged by stinging, biting creatures in order to toivel, he was zocheh to be able to clear them away and immerse undisturbed. It was the same thing with the Gemara. Because my grandfather was moser nefesh with a great many years of intense ameilus in learning Gemara, he was zocheh to be given it as a gift.”

 

Always Feel Their Pain 

Rav Bussu says that in addition to his father’s mesirus nefesh, there was another trait that met with the Baba Sali’s approval. “My father’s anivus is unbelievable — only one who knows him understands,” he says. “If you want to see, just come to my parents’ house in Har Nof in the middle of the night. You will see him there in the window, absorbed in a sefer.”

After Rav David Bussu and Rabbanit Avigayil were married, the couple moved back to Buenos Aires. Rav Shlomo Bussu was born there on Hoshana Rabbah 5722 (1961). In the meantime, the Baba Sali was in Paris, and his son-in-law and daughter soon felt called to join him there. Rav Shlomo grew up mainly in Paris, and French became his mother tongue. Although the Baba Sali moved on to Eretz Yisrael in 1964, he returned to Paris three times during Rav Shlomo’s youth, staying for three months on each visit.

“My whole life would be completely different if I hadn’t known the Baba Sali at this formative stage of my life,” Rav Bussu muses. “A malach, mamash. I would come back home from school, knowing that the Baba Sali was at home. Light was coming from the house, the whole house was light. It wasn’t normal. He wasn’t a man, he was a malach. When he passed away, that’s when we really realized. It was a sunny day, but everything was dark.

“Just to be in his presence was like being recharged,” Rav Bussu says. “People used to come to the house just to see him. ‘We want to look at him.’ Even litvishe people would come over, just to look at him.”

There is a story about his grandfather that Rav Bussu tells frequently, one he witnessed as a child with his own eyes. He cites it to stress the importance of never becoming desensitized to other people’s pain. A desperate father had come before the Moroccan sage, pleading that he pray for the man’s dangerously ill son. After the man left, as young Shlomo looked on, the Baba Sali broke out in tears and called out to the heavens, “Ribbono shel Olam, take my hand away. Take my hand so this child should have a refuah sheleimah.”

“Doctors, you know, can lose all their sensitivity,” Rav Bussu points out. “When they’re in the middle of an operation, they can’t think about what they are doing to this patient. But the Baba Sali, who heard thousands and thousands of stories of people’s pain and suffering… he had the same regesh, the same sensitivity, with each and every one of them.”

Rav Shlomo grew up in Paris, attending yeshivah ketanah at Mercaz HaTorah, headed by Rav Yaakov Toledano (son of Rav Rafael Baruch Toledano, leader of the Jews of Meknes, Morocco, for most of the 20th century). He went on to learn at Yeshivas Chochmei Tzarfat, headed by Rav Chaim Chaikin, a talmid of the Chofetz Chaim.

In 1978 he followed his brother, Rav Shimon, to Gateshead, where he learned under Rav Leib Gurwicz, Rav Leib Lopian, and Rav Moshe Schwab. That is where he picked up English and Yiddish — as well as the Ashkenazic pronunciations he sprinkles throughout his speech. (He also learned Arabic from his illustrious grandfather during the extended periods the Baba Sali stayed with his family in France.)

After learning in Gateshead, Rav Bussu became engaged to the daughter of his uncle, Rav Baruch Abuchatzeira (Baba Baruch) of Netivot, son of the Baba Sali. It was clearly an auspicious match; the shadchan was the couple’s grandfather, the Baba Sali himself. In 1982 Rav Bussu and his wife, Rabbanit Rut, settled in Eretz Yisrael, and he went to learn in Yeshivas Mir; his chavrusa was Rav Dovid Moore, today a noted dayan and posek in Brisk.

Then Rav Bussu began his nearly 25-year sojourn in the Shmuel Hanavi neighborhood of Jerusalem, essentially leaving his family for the week across town in Har Nof and living in a machsan so he could focus all his energies and waking moments on Torah.

He blended into the crowd in Shmuel Hanavi, a complex of long tenement buildings built along the 1949 armistice line to accommodate the large influx of Jewish refugees from North Africa. Even today, many homes in the area feature portraits of the Baba Sali, mounted on concrete walls built three feet thick, to withstand the pre-1967 Jordanian artillery shells.

But the days of blending in are over now for Rav Bussu: He has been pressed into service to head several kollelim, and his itinerary has taken him around the world, where he is in demand for audiences with the public, all while still keeping to his rigorous daily schedule of learning and fasting.

He has been back to his native Argentina, as well as Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Gibraltar, Hong Kong, Morocco, and the UK. His stops in the US have included New York, Los Angeles, and San Diego.

“I didn’t leave Israel for almost 25 years,” he reflects. “I thought I’d be staying until Mashiach comes. I understood that if a person is really shteiging and trying to get closer to Hashem, he can’t disconnect himself. I thought if I went to chutz l’Aretz, it would be like trying to cook something, but taking the pot off the fire, putting it back on, then taking it off again…”

Rabbi Moshe Shapoff, a Stolin-Karlin chassid who has known Rav Bussu for a decade and has served as his gabbai for the last six years, identifies a thread running through the Abuchatzeira family history that has perhaps found expression in this current generation as well.

“The Baba Sali was always running away from kavod, a model of anivus, and now the whole world knows who the Baba Sali was,” he says. “It’s a whole avodah to run from kavod that you don’t find in many other places today.” And now, it seems, honor has taken off in pursuit of the Baba Sali’s grandson.

“It was a real earthquake for me, the difference between all the years of being alone and now having to be very awake and alert and careful to do exactly what Hashem wants in every situation,” Rav Bussu says. “So, baruch Hashem, after staying in one place for so long, He is bringing me to other places. Everywhere we go, every step, we feel the Hashgachah. We feel Him leading where we have to go.”

 

Don’t Choose

Rav Bussu has a well-developed strategy culled from the depths of Torah that can help a person determine which direction to take when Hashem puts him at a crossroads. Mainly it involves being judicious about when to apply one’s freedom of choice.

“A person needs not to have his own ratzon in these things,” Rav Bussu explains. “We have, on one side, the Chazal that a person is guided in the direction he wants to go, for both the negative and the positive.

But here, Rav Bussu cautions, a person can fall into another trap. When a person is given a choice not between a good thing and a bad thing, but rather between two good things — say, a choice between two yeshivos — he may start to form his own plans and desires around the question.

“We have to focus our bechirah only on the things that are in the realm of free choice, which is the choice between tov and ra,” Rav Bussu says. “But when you come to a choice between two ways to good — don’t choose. Leave it to HaKadosh Baruch Hu. The more you leave in His Hands, the more He does. Because the best thing is to say, ‘I don’t want anything — He knows the best.’ In my own experience, nothing went better when I went the way I wanted. Hashem always knows better.”

But what is a person to do when Hashem does not make His preference in the matter abundantly clear? What if it seems the decision is left to the individual alone?

“That’s also a challenge,” Rav Bussu acknowledges, “but there’s a trick you can use, and it’s something that will never fail if you go with it.”

Rav Bussu refers to Chazal’s teaching that during Avraham Avinu’s ten trials, he asked no questions of Hashem, until the malach instructed him to stay his hand and not slay his son Yitzchak: “Yesterday, You told me ‘Yitzchak will be accounted for you as offspring.’ Then You came back and told me, ‘Take, please, your son, as an offering to Me.’ Now You’re telling me, ‘Withhold your hand from the youth.’ ”

“So what happened?” asks Rav Bussu. “Did Avraham Avinu lose control, when we said previously that he asked no questions?”

Rav Bussu resolves the apparent contradiction: Avraham Avinu reasoned that Hashem had presented him with two options: Under the first scenario, Yitzchak would survive to be his heir and carry on his mission to bring Hashem’s message to the world. In the second scenario, Yitzchak would be brought as a sacrifice.

Avraham was able to recognize how Hashem’s will was expressed in the first option, but when he analyzed it objectively, he had to concede he favored that option himself; if he followed that first option, he could not discount the possibility that he was acting to benefit his own interests, and he could not claim to be exclusively following the will of Hashem.

The second option also reflected the will of Hashem, but Avraham had to admit that he himself did not prefer this scenario. Avraham ultimately decided that, to ensure he was fulfilling Hashem’s will only, and not taking his own interests to heart in the slightest, he should obey the command kach na es bincha. He was resolute in this decision, and was in the midst of carrying it out when the malach stopped him.

“As long as he was determined to slaughter Yitzchak, he had no questions,” Rav Bussu says. “But when the malach told him, ‘Al tishlach yadcha el hanaar,’ he thought maybe it was a trick. Then he had questions! ”

Just as Avraham Avinu went against his own ratzon at the Akeidah, so should a person avoid taking the easier way out. “When you are in safeik as to what’s best for you, don’t choose the option that you are prejudiced to take. Choose the one that is less comfortable for you. That way, you will certainly not be making a mistake.”

 

Stories to Live By

The extended Abuchatzeira family remained tight-knit, guarding the derech of the Baba Sali and their other holy ancestors. Rav Bussu guards the mesorah he absorbed directly from his grandfather, and there is no place he taps into it more than during his reception hours for people in crisis, many of whom are suffering because of chinuch issues with their own children.

A traditional couple was once referred to him because they were having issues with their children and their own shalom bayis. He asked them, “And what’s with Shabbos?” They responded that they keep Shabbos. “And what does your Shabbos table look like?” They answered that they didn’t really have a Shabbos table. Everyone in the family just ate on their own.

The Shabbos table, says Rav Bussu, is an antidote to many ills. “I almost never start Kiddush until I see every child is at the table,” Rav Bussu says. “Everyone should be there, from big to small. But I don’t force them. I try to make it geshmak to be at the table. We keep going for three or four hours — I have to fight to start the bentshing. You don’t have to prepare a lomdishe devar Torah — just keep it geshmak, a light devar Torah, and make it interesting, with lots of singing, and speak with each of your children in front of the others. It is the only protection. It makes you their best friend.”

The number one priority in confronting the particular challenges of this generation, he says, is to stress the positives with your children. Negativity should be employed only in extreme situations, to set borders on behavior.

“Be as positive as you can be — the negatives, dwell on them as little as possible,” Rav Bussu says. “I almost never said to my children, ‘Sit and learn,’ almost never. But if I happen to catch one of them learning from a sefer, I say, ‘Wow! What are you learning? Tell me about it!’ They feel excited and encouraged.”

Rav Bussu carries this principle even into the realm of dealing with a child whose actions aren’t measuring up. He remembers how one of his sons fell asleep in shul on Shabbos morning. “Anyone else would have woken him up, but I let him sleep. Only at Mussaf did he open his eyes, yawn, and stretch. And then he davened Mussaf. Afterward I said to him, ‘Wow! How did you do that? You were so tired! I can’t believe it!’ I came home and told my wife, ‘You won’t believe what our son did, how he davened Mussaf when he was so tired.’ Most people would scold and say, ‘You slept through shul and hardly davened Mussaf!’ But what does the child get from that? Nothing.

“You have to give encouragement. Tell him he’s a gibor when he wakes up in the morning even though he’s tired. When he gets this kind of encouragement, he wants to show he can do it.”

Rav Bussu lists another priority that he says might seem very small but may well the most important inyan of all: to tell a story about tzaddikim at the Shabbos table. “Do you know why? Because the main inyan of tefillah is ambition,” Rav Bussu asserts. “If you think about it, everyone has an ambition. In life, too many things arise that spoil a child’s pursuit of his ambitions. But with a story, he has no negiyus. He always identifies with the tzaddik, and internally he develops ambitions to be like him.”

Sippurei tzaddikim were a regular fixture at the Bussu family table when he was growing up. His father’s stories captivated the entire family. Rav Bussu emphasizes that there is a correct shiur for stories of tzaddikim: exactly one per week, at the Shabbos table. He said he heard in the name of the Chazon Ish that one story is worth more than a thousand mussar shmuessen. But the one-per-week ratio is not only a minimum; it is also a maximum.

“I was once at a chinuch conference with the Tolna Rebbe — he spoke about it explicitly, the need to tell sippurei tzaddikim,” Rav Bussu says. “One rav who was present said he wanted to tell his kids a story every night. The Tolna Rebbe said no — they’ll just fall asleep. Once a week is enough. Once a week and they’ll pay attention.”

Rav Bussu emphasizes that this is not a simple story time for children; very great care must be invested in this task: “There was a time it was harder for me to find the right story than it was to prepare a shiur. It’s pikuach nefesh.”

Reconnecting Rav Bussu reflects on his new public role — of being an address for people all over the world who seek his counsel and blessings — and the preparation Hashem provided him for it, seeing the Hashgachah pratis every step of the way. Besides his illustrious lineage, Rav Bussu’s own life experience has equipped him with powerful tools and a unique insight for dealing with the hopes and concerns of Jews all over the world.

“I was born in Argentina, I moved to France, I learned in England,” he reflects. “I’ve met in my life all kinds of mentalities — chassidish, Sephardi, Ashkenazi. And also, HaKadosh Baruch Hu gave me the languages.”

Above all, the message he hopes to get across is that however formidable the challenges facing our generation appear to be, they are dwarfed before the power of Torah and connection to Hashem.

“Being connected to the Torah is being connected to Ein Sof,” Rav Bussu says. “When we say, Koh amar Hashem, im lo brisi yomam valailah, chukos Shamayim va’aretz lo samti [if My covenant were not day and night, if I had not set the laws of Heaven and earth — Yirmiyahu 33:25], it doesn’t mean the Torah only defines a black-or-white set of rules, the world either exists or it doesn’t. It means that all the grays in between depend on Torah, as well. All brachah comes from the Torah — parnassah, health, shalom — it all depends on the Torah Hakedoshah.

“The more people are connected to the Torah, the more success they will have in everything. When a person is learning, he’s influencing the whole world. It makes learning completely different. It’s not only about filling your neshamah, to enable you to overcome the nisyonos in your own life — you’re connecting to the essence of the brachah for everything.”

And as our own conversation winds to its close, Rav Bussu turns back to the sefer on the desk before him, and reconnects. —

 

The First Second Opinion

Rav Bussu shares a story about his grandfather the Baba Sali giving an eitzah that proved prophetic, regarding Rav Yisrael Dovid Novener and his rebbetzin. (Rav Bussu heard this story from Rebbetzin Novener.) Rav Novener was a rosh yeshivah in Mattersdorf, as well as a noted composer of niggunim. After the war, the Noveners moved to France, where after a time Rav Novener took ill. A diagnosis revealed he had a condition in his spine that required immediate intervention. They managed to consult with the world’s number one specialist in this realm — a French Jewish doctor.

This specialist advised Rav Novener that he must undergo an operation that was extremely risky, but offered the only ray of hope for recovery. Without it, he said, Rav Novener could not expect to live long. Rebbetzin Novener flew right away to Eretz Yisrael, straight to the Baba Sali who had already moved there from Morocco and with whom the family was connected since his sojourn in France, to get a brachah for a successful operation.

But upon hearing the details from Rebbetzin Novener, the Baba Sali’s response was adamant: “The operation isn’t necessary,” even as the operation had already been scheduled.

Rav Novener also had a connection to the Satmar Rebbe, who advised, “Get a second opinion.”

The Noveners were a bit thrown by this — who could give them a second opinion, after they had already consulted the number-one specialist in the world? In the end, they went to this specialist’s professor from medical school. This professor reviewed all the tests and diagnostics and said the operation was necessary.

So they went back to the specialist, but when he heard they had sought a second opinion — from his professor, yet — he was offended and refused to perform the operation.

The Noveners were distraught — who would now perform such a dangerous operation? In the end, they were recommended a non-Jewish surgeon, who reviewed all the files and determined that surgery was necessary. He told them he’d take them on a Sunday, but they requested instead that it be pushed off to Tuesday. Since the operation was being delayed two days, this doctor wanted to do all the tests again. The results came back, and he said emphatically, “Yes, you need the surgery.”

But as he reviewed the results again, this time a bit more closely, he exclaimed suddenly, “No! It’s an infection! The infection looks like this other condition, but it can be cured with antibiotics!”

Straightaway they put Rav Novener on antibiotics, and he was cured.

 

Don’t Throw Them Out

“I was once talking with an American yungerman about technology,” Rav Bussu says. “This yungerman told me, ‘Kids today, you know, they know what they want.’ But why? Who said so? Who decided?  A family has to sit together and find some kind of solution. It has to be done with understanding — the parents can’t just say, ‘Give me your phone!’ but rather, ‘These are the issues, this is the danger.’ Don’t look at it as taking away your child’s pleasure — you’re protecting him for his whole life! Everyone has kedushah, and compromising that affects his whole life. Your kids can understand this.”

But from the side of the mosdos chinuch, on the other hand, Rav Bussu charts a very fine line to which mechanchim must hew; because although the challenge from technology is formidable, a bochur must not be cast out.

“Roshei yeshivah today, when they throw out bochurim because they hold it’s pikuach nefesh, they have to try to understand that we have no idea what kind of nisyonos these bochurim have to confront. There is a big disconnect between many mechanchim and their talmidim. It’s a disaster.

“My son Moshe Yaakov — the mashgiach in his yeshivah threw out a bochur. Moshe Yaakov asked to speak to the rosh yeshivah. He said to the rosh yeshivah, ‘The Gemara says when we pasken whether a beheimah has a mum or not, we must consult many different experts to be sure we pasken right. But with this bochur, you decided by yourself that it was pikuach nefesh?’ And the rosh yeshivah brought the bochur back!” Rav Bussu relates this story with evident relish.

Rav Bussu points to another challenge confronting today’s yeshivah bochurim that contributes to their challenges: Their yeshivos won’t let them get married early.

“That makes things much, much harder,” he says, shaking his head. “That has caused a lot — a lot — of korbanos. When a person knows he’s about to get married, he has a safe harbor. If you’re not letting him start shidduchim till 23, he’s already struggling. A rosh yeshivah tells me not to worry about such a bochur, saying, ‘What’s the problem? He’s a tzaddik! Look, he’s learning!’ Your tzaddik comes to me to tell me all his struggles. We cannot fathom the nisyonos they are struggling with. Sometimes they get addicted to very bad things. I don’t know what heter a rosh yeshivah has not to let someone get married when he wants to.”

He interposes the well-known story about Rav Steinman ztz”l and a mashgiach who sought the Rosh Yeshivah’s advice on how to deal with a certain bochur. All the positive measures had been exhausted, and now the yeshivah’s only option was expulsion.

“We warned him,” the mashgiach said, “but it continued, he’s finished now, and he cannot stay in yeshivah.”

Rav Steinman was pained to hear this. “Are you sure you tried everything?”

“We tried everything, and I’m telling the Rosh Yeshivah, it was mamash erech apayim,” the mashgiach insisted.

Rav Steinman gave a deep krechtz. “What’s his name?” he asked. “And what’s his mother’s name?”

“I don’t know,” the mashgiach said with a shrug.

“What?!” Rav Steinman demanded, now clearly agitated. “You didn’t daven for him?! What are you, a policeman?!”

“Rav Steinman threw the mashgiach out,” Rav Bussu says, “and he told that rosh yeshivah he had to find another mashgiach.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 704)