As a community, we venerate great Torah scholars. Our children start collecting gadol cards at a young age, and publications aimed at the community are often loaded with pictures of leading gedolim and chassidishe rebbes.
But as the old saying goes imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. There are aspects of the lives of the gedolim that we are all capable of emulating. And we should.
For over 20 years I have had the privilege of writing biographies of great Torah leaders. One common thread uniting the stories of all the disparate figures whose lives I have researched and written about is the way they used every encounter with a non-frum Jew or even a gentile as a means of creating a positive image of Torah and Torah Jews.
A little story involving Rav Yaakov Kamenetsky captures this attitude. Reb Yaakov once found himself in a doctor’s waiting room together with a six-year-old boy. He began playing ball with the boy. Someone accompanying Reb Yaakov expressed surprise that the rosh yeshivah would engage in such frivolous activities. But Reb Yaakov explained “I don’t know if he’ll ever have a chance to see another old Jew with a white beard and I want the association to be a positive one.”
During the 1930s Rav Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler’s primary livelihood in London came from tutoring Orthodox boys who attended public schools. One of those he tutored was Aryeh Carmell later the principal editor of Michtav MeEliyahu. It was in middle of a worldwide depression and beggars proliferated. Rav Dessler instructed his student to drop a small coin in the cup of every beggar along his walk to Rav Dessler’s home.
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