“If he decided to switch to English, he must have had a good reason”
The next day, some bochurim organized an official letter asking the Rosh Yeshivah to resume giving the shiur in Yiddish. When the letter reached a young Shlomo Soroka’s shtender for his signature, he was aghast.
“Rebbi didn’t forget how to speak Yiddish,” he reprimanded the bochurim. “If he decided to switch to English, he must have had a good reason.”
Rabbi Soroka then explained to the convention crowd that in fact, there was a bochur who had been struggling to keep up with the shiur precisely because it was delivered in Yiddish. When Rav Brudny found out, he called over the bochur and told him that he would switch the shiur to English
“Yiddish by me is a hiddur mitzvah,” he explained, “but it’s not l’ikuva. If a talmid will only be able to grasp the shiur if it’s in English, then that will be the language in which it will be delivered.”
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