Outlook

The many articles on Rav Yaakov Kamenetsky ztz”l in honor of his twenty-fifth yahrtzeit triggered a flood of nostalgia for one of the happiest periods of my life: the nine months I lived with Reb Yaakov. No I didn’t live in Reb Yaakov’s home; indeed Reb Yaakov was no longer alive. But for the nine months that I spent writing Reb Yaakov I thought about little else besides him: How would Reb Yaakov have acted in this situation? Why did he do that? (Today the same project would take me closer to nine years and I would be too distracted to completely immerse myself in my subject.)

Given the frailties of human memory I can’t be sure that every story in the biography took place exactly as written. But as Reb Yaakov’s grandson Rabbi Dovid Kamenetsky told me after reading the manuscript “Every story in the book could be true.” Reb Yaakov was a person of unusual consistency and so it is possible for anyone who knew him well to say “That was not Reb Yaakov’s shprach [way of speaking].”

He had a worked out mehalech in every area of life. Perhaps a former haus bochur captured it best when I asked him what he had seen living in Reb Yaakov’s house. “Nothing absolutely nothing” he replied. Every single hanhagah had been thought through so long ago and so precisely followed since that it seemed completely natural. “Being in his presence was like riding in a luxury car. You did not know you were moving ” is how Dr. Yaakov Greenwald described the experience.

Above all Reb Yaakov was known as the pikeiach hador. Rav Aharon Kotler would consult with him before every major decision to make sure that his own understanding of the situation was accurate. Reb Yaakov’s acuity judgment and vast knowledge of the world and its inhabitants cannot be taught. Perhaps something of it can be absorbed over decades of personal interaction but I remain as naïve today as when I first started researching Reb Yaakov’s life.