When writing a tribute to a niftar, one reaches for those with the closest relationships: family, the talmidim or intimate friends, longtime neighbors who will share cherished memories. When it comes to Benny, there is a confidence that I can speak to anyone and they will have precisely the same reaction.
Because this isn’t about what he did, or where he came from, or even what he was.
This is about what he did to other people: the way he made you feel, the respect he conveyed with just his eyes, the warmth he exuded with his handshake, the appreciation he expressed with his smile.
It wasn’t Dale Carnegie or a LinkedIn seminar on creating connections. That wasn’t the secret of Benny Fishoff’s appeal. It was something much purer, much more holy: the humility and sweet sincerity of one raised on and saturated with the Torah of Gur, the cognizance of the Master of the Universe, of man’s frailty, of the gift of life itself, of the spiritual oxygen that is faith.
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