Everyday Scholar 

Rabbi Yehoshua Kalish was not a celebrity, but he was larger than life, impacting the lives of thousands in the Tristate area and beyond. His essence was his Gemara and his relentless pursuit of learning — he finished Shas over 40 times — but on the outside, he seemed like a nice mesivta rebbi. Yet to his myriad disciples over half a century, he was a living example of how a “regular” person could grow to such extraordinary heights, no matter the starting point

A peaceful stillness reigns in the beis medrash, in place of the earlier hubbub of the day’s learning. Suddenly, it is broken by a deep, resonant chortle from the front left corner of the room. The few remaining heads hunched over their seforim don’t even bother looking around for the source of the noise. They already know that the laughter was not prompted by someone telling a good joke, but from Rabbi Yehoshua Kalish who was in the midst of learning his daily seven blatt at the mizrach vant.

That’s because Rabbi Kalish didn’t merely enjoy learning Gemara — he reveled in it; it was as if he were sitting at the feet of the Tannaim and Amoraim, drinking in their wisdom, witnessing their greatness, and laughing at their witticisms. It wasn’t just a function of his intense self-discipline that enabled him to learn the entire Shas every year — he’d been through Shas 40 times — but also the fact that nothing made him happier. The logical twists and turns of the Torah, paths he had long trodden and retrodden, were constantly inspiring him to a fresh insight or appreciation — up to his final days when he passed away last month at age 80 after a battle with cancer.

Still, the longtime rav of Bais Medrash of Harborview in Lawrence and maggid shiur at Yeshiva Derech Ayson (a.k.a. Yeshiva of Far Rockaway), was always striving to learn more, wild with the love and excitement of a youngster. He recently published Pnei Halevanah, a sefer with brief insights on every single blatt in Shas, and planned to write teshuvos on a range of halachic topics. After nearly 50 years of teaching in Yeshiva of Far Rockaway, he started a new chapter of his life with the founding of a halachah kollel. To the outside world, he might have looked like an energetic but aging zeide with a slightly slower tennis swing and a wider skiing turn (he was an avid participant of both sports). But where it matters, he was perpetually young, full of idealism and bubbling with dreams and aspirations for the future.

“Rabbi Kalish believed that every person can become great,” says his close talmid and friend Rabbi Zalman Stern. “He would say that you just have to be consistent and create systematic review: chazer and chazer and chazer.”