By the time I had matured enough to pose the right questions, dementia had decayed his towering intellect and muted his deep, rich voice
My grandfather, Rabbi Moshe Bekritsky, was an enigma. The spiritual anchor of our family, a towering scholar and articulate speaker, he was a distinguished pulpit rabbi — but also a closed book. From my perspective as an adult, could I gain a new understanding for the mix of ambition and melancholy that characterized this towering man?
Childhood memories are a curious thing. Patchy and undeveloped, they are our only reference to the people and places of our tender, formative years and we tend to regard them as acknowledged truth. But those memories can be unreliable as a trick mirror, reflecting depth and significance in shallow dimensions, as trivialities. By the time we begin to understand enough about the world to ask the right questions, the generation has shifted, and the ones with the answers are no longer there to reply. And we are left to reconstruct their legacy from the scattered bits of memory we are fortunate enough to discover.
Growing up, my grandfather Rabbi Moshe Bekritsky was an enigma.
Grandpa was the spiritual anchor of our extended family. He could finish any pasuk I started, was the unofficial family posek, and could lein the Torah in its entirety. Plagued by insomnia, he’d always be hunched over a Gemara at the kitchen table when I pattered in for a 2 a.m. drink, and felt most accessible through a shared interest in learning. Grandpa doted on us grandchildren with hot bagels and fresh Danishes on Sunday mornings, gently massaged our hopelessly flat feet, and whispered his pet name, “pussycat,” as he planted moist prickly kisses that echoed of Old Spice. He was over six feet tall, the tallest man I knew, his bearing radiating dignity and authority.
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