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Be Normal
In tribute to my friend Rav Dovid Kamenetsky ztz”l
PHOTO: ELI COBIN
I’M
old enough to have lost most of those who had the largest formative influence on my life, including both parents. But not so old that the loss of a close friend younger than me does not hit particularly hard.
Rabbi Dovid Kamenetsky was such a friend. We already knew each other when ArtScroll asked me to write a biography of his grandfather, Rav Yaakov Kamenetsky, over thirty years ago. But that project brought us much closer together. I had been given a large pile of interviews conducted by Rav Nosson Kamenetsky ztz”l, which contained a fair amount of Yiddish. I asked Reb Dovid, who lived just down the street, to help with the Yiddish.
But that translation was the least of his contributions to the biography. He read each chapter and put his imprimatur on the book. He would tell me, “I can’t say that every story in the book happened exactly as reported by a particular interviewee, but I can say that every word is something my grandfather could have said.”
On that point, I trusted his judgment completely, for there was much of his grandfather about him. I once asked a bochur who had lived for a time in Rav Yaakov’s house what he saw there. He replied, “I saw nothing, absolutely nothing.” Everything was done so naturally and so consistently that one noticed nothing out of the ordinary, nothing for the storybooks.
The impact of Rav Yaakov ztz”l was cumulative. Only over a period of time did one realize how worked out everything was. As Rabbi Dr. Yaakov Greenwald put it to me in my first interview for the biography, being with Rav Yaakov was like traveling in a luxury sedan — you did not even know you were moving.
So it was with Reb Dovid. He was invariably one of the first ten at every minyan, and his schedule of chavrusas was fixed and rigorously adhered to. Rav Avraham Steinfeld, the mara d’asra of Chanichei Yeshivos, where Reb Dovid davened, and who knew him for over fifty years, beginning in Torah Vodaath and later in Brisk, said in his hesped that the kol of Reb Dovid learning upstairs with a chavrusa was like background music to the 11 p.m. minyan.
For a number of years, I davened Shacharis in a downstairs room, even though I personally find it a bit claustrophobic, just because Reb Dovid davened in that minyan, and hearing his tefillos behind me was calming.
For more than 30 years, he was the baal Shacharis for the main minyan on the Yamim Noraim. The davening was what I imagine to be the quintessential litvishe davening: precise, sweet, with the feeling coming davka in the restraint and absence of any cantorial frills (even though he enjoyed listening to recordings of Yossele Rosenblatt).
Reb Dovid’s watchword was “be normal,” which could also have been said by his grandfather and ybdlcht”a his father, Rav Shmuel Kamenetsky, the Philadelphia Rosh Yeshivah. What was done in his father’s home was mesorah for him. Even when he was physically weak, he continued to accompany every guest out the door, and to stand throughout Krias HaTorah. And when he could no longer walk to Chanichei Yeshivos, of which he was one of the founders and directors, he still would not take the Shabbos elevator up and down five floors to the minyan in his building.
I often wondered what it was that drew so many to him. He was not especially gregarious. And yet after the Shacharis davening on Shabbos, there was always a circle around his backrow seat in shul of those waiting to speak to him.
We had a regular kevius on Shabbos morning after davening to review the week’s events, both personal and communal. But I never went to sit down next to him until davening was over for 15 minutes or so, and the crowd of those eager to speak to him had thinned.
He had a genuine interest in people. Even over the last couple of years, when he was suffering from a brain tumor, which he knew, al pi derech hateva, allowed for no happy ending, he always began every conversation by asking me about my health, even though he knew I had come over to inquire about his.
Much of his attraction surely lay in his pashtus and anivus. In all the years we were close, I never saw the slightest hint that he considered himself above anyone else by virtue of his distinguished Torah lineage. He taught baalei teshuvah Gemara for nearly a quarter century, but no less important, he and his rebbetzin invited them to their Shabbos and Yom Tov table and maintained the connection long after his talmidim had moved on to other yeshivos or into the workforce.
And he was always eager to help others who required his expertise. Even as a bochur, he began collecting seforim and photos of gedolim, and his face would shine as he handled old seforim. From his youthful interest in kisvei yad and Jewish bibliography, he developed into perhaps the world’s greatest expert in kisvei yad, and his services were sought by the world’s most prestigious auction houses and private collectors of Judaica.
Yet whenever anyone was trying to track down some obscure reference or needed historical photos for an article — among them Mishpacha’s Dovi Safier and Yehudah Geberer — he was happy to help out. “I’m too busy,” was simply not in his lexicon.
Jewish history, particularly but not limited to Lithuanian Jewry, was a lifelong interest. He worked for years on manuscripts of the Vilna Gaon and his talmidim, which he eventually published: two volumes on Biurei HaGra on Brachos and Shabbos; Kol Kisvei HaGra in two parts, as well as works of Rav Pinchos Mi’Plotsk (a talmid of the Gra) on Tehillim and Koheles, and many more. Recently, someone presented him with two volumes of all the articles he published in Yeshurun.
His magnum opus was a projected three-volume biography of Rav Chaim Ozer Grodzenski, of which the second volume was published two months ago. Rav Chaim Ozer was an obvious choice for anyone with Reb Dovid’s interest in Lithuanian Jewry, and the biography focuses on Rav Chaim Ozer’s role as the institutional leader of world Torah Jewry for close to half a century.
But there was also a familial side to the choice of subjects. On a visit to Vilna before coming to America, Rav Yaakov Kamenetsky was asked by Rav Chaim Ozer to become his assistant. Rav Yaakov turned down the offer. He later explained that as the assistant to Rav Chaim Ozer, he would have been expected to succeed him. And in Rav Yaakov’s opinion, there was simply no one who could fill Rav Chaim Ozer’s shoes, and any attempt to do so would have been futile.
I suspect that knowing the reverence in which his grandfather held Rav Chaim Ozer was one of the reasons that Reb Dovid wanted to write a comprehensive biography of him. In that pursuit, he was an indefatigable researcher. On one topic alone — the establishment of Vaad Hayeshivos — he read and categorized over 100,000 letters and other documents. A few years back, in a column devoted to the best books of the preceding year, one of the experts at Tablet magazine named the first volume of his biography of Rav Chaim Ozer, surely an unprecedented accolade for a chareidi researcher with no formal academic training.
His passing has left a large void in the lives of many, chief among them his wife, who devoted herself to his care over the last three years, and his children and grandchildren. But also in the lives of an astounding number of friends. The Leil Shabbos minyanim arranged in his living room during his last weeks at home were always packed, and the list of those who came to make bikur cholim visits, even when he could no longer respond, was a long one.
At the levayah, I could not help but wonder how one person was close to so many diverse Jews, especially given how tightly scheduled his time was. The tears of Rav Steinfeld and Rav Ariav Ozer, the ITRI Rosh Yeshivah, whose weekly shiurim Reb Dovid never missed, had nothing stylized about them. They came straight from the heart.
Many times over the last two years, I wanted to tell Reb Dovid how much he meant to me. But I never did. First, because I feared it would sound like a goodbye and the abandonment of hope. But even more, because I knew that doing so would make an undemonstrative Litvak uncomfortable.
Now, I can finally do so.
Yehi zichro baruch.
(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1080)
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