How long did Mueller keep us in the dark?
T
hat I would make a shivah call to Rav Ariav Ozer, rosh yeshivah of ITRI, when he was sitting for his mother Rivka a”h last week was never a question. We live on the same block, and I have been going to his shiurim for over a decade.
But I must confess I had an ulterior motive besides the mitzvah of nichum aveilim. I wanted to discover, if possible, the secret to producing a child like Rav Ozer, who was already a phenomenon in the world of Torah learning in his mid-twenties, and is today one of the most prominent younger roshei yeshivah in the world.
I wasn’t interested in his genius. That’s a gift from Shamayim. My subject rather was the pashtus (e.g., no frock), approachability and warmth to everyone he meets, and his hasmadah.
When I arrived, Rav Ozer’s parents’ apartment (above his own) was nearly empty. Perfect for my mission. Rav Ozer began speaking about two seemingly contradictory qualities of his parents. Until declining health forced them to move to Har Nof four years ago, they lived in an apartment built in 1933, in which nothing had changed since — not the tiles, not the sinks, not the glass in the windows. The beds were the same metal frames the Jewish Agency gave to new immigrants, with thin mattresses filled with straw. Only the original Amcor 6 refrigerator finally had to be replaced sometime after Rav Ozer’s chasunah.
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