Try Your Hand

Reading Rabbi Dovid Bashevkin’s introduction to The Fundamentals of Jewish Faith, one of the ten books by Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan ztz”l that has been newly republished by NCSY, I came across these lines: “When Rabbi Micah Greenland, international director of NCSY, was a teenager, he reached out to Rabbi Nosson Scherman with a question. He received a handwritten reply, which he still keeps today.”

Reading those words, it occurred to me that much of the power of that anecdote lies in one word: “handwritten.” Had it been instead, “He received an email in reply…” it still would have been impressive, but I wonder whether its recipient would have held on to it for all these years.

There’s something moving about the mental image that a long-ago handwritten reply conjures up, of a busy man with lots of responsibilities, taking the time to sit down and write a note to a youngster. The mere act of writing it, rather than just signing something typed up by a secretary, is a powerful statement of regard for the worth of that young person. And then, of course, there’s the time, the effort, and the forethought involved.

Reb Nosson’s reply and what it represents is in turn related to something else in Rabbi Bashevkin’s introduction, an important facet of Rabbi Kaplan that was touched upon in my recent article on him in these pages: that although he was a true intellectual, someone steeped in Torah in both the revealed and esoteric realms, and very much at home in scientific and other disciplines as well, he spent a lot of time speaking with teenagers and geared much of his writing to them.