As he entered, he stopped in shock. There, in his Givat Shaul shul, sat Rav Shlomo Zalman Auerbach
Writers are famous for agonizing over their leads. Good writers also agonize over their conclusions. A strong conclusion has a certain resonance. Like the last notes of a symphony stretching and filling the empty space before the applause, the perfect conclusion swells and reverberates in the reader’s mind.
Last week we published Rav Michel Stern’s memories of his uncle, Rav Shlomo Zalman Auerbach ztz”l. We worked hard to place his stories inside an orderly structure, with a proper opening and strong conclusion. But sitting at a family simchah on Thursday, I stumbled on that one elusive story that could have been the perfect conclusion. It was too late for last week’s magazine, but the beauty of this business is that there’s always another edition on its way to print. So here’s a belated finale, courtesy of my uncle Jared (Yaakov) Gordon, who heard the story firsthand from a witness.
A man we’ll call Reb Aryeh lived in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Givat Shaul. He had a sweet son we’ll call Doniel. Doniel had learning delays, and it was clear that he would never be quite like the other boys in shul. But it was equally clear that he had an intense fascination for leining. Whenever the sefer Torah was rolled open, he’d creep to the front of the shul and stand glued in place, watching the baal korei enunciate every word.
“Your son has a special connection to leining,” one of the mispallelim told Reb Aryeh. “It would mean the world to him to lein the haftarah for his bar mitzvah. Make sure to start early, so he’ll know it well.”
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