I had no personal relationship with Rav Aharon Leib Steinman ztz”l except through friends who were close to him. Yet like hundreds of thousands of others around the world I found myself crying upon hearing of his passing. Why? Because I knew he cared about me and every other Jew from elite Torah scholars to young teenagers struggling in their Yiddishkeit.
The stories of his pashtus his asceticism and kedushah his incredible hasmadah and his wry humor are legion. But what stands out most for me is his sense of achrayus for every member of the tzibbur and for Klal Yisrael as a whole. We have all seen the famous video of a well-known askan trying to convince Rav Steinman of the necessity to exclude certain types of talmidim from our educational institutions and Rav Steinman’s angry response: “Gaavah gaavah it’s all gaavah.” He relates how neither he nor the son of the Brisker Rav learned in the “frum” cheder in Brisk.
In his nineties he undertook multiple trips abroad to any place where he felt he could inspire and uplift Yidden and increase their commitment to Hashem and His Torah. Each day’s schedule was packed from dawn until late at night. A friend of mine who accompanied Rav Steinman on one of his overseas trips was embarrassed one morning when Rav Steinman asked him (50 years his junior) why he had not been at the haneitz minyan despite the fact that they had retired only a few hours earlier.
I first heard of Rav Steinman in 1989 from my rebbi Rav Aharon Feldman. Rav Shach had just founded Degel HaTorah. With the new party an English-language Yated Ne’eman came into existence. Rav Feldman was the founding editor and I assisted him. Rav Feldman felt it important that I — then a baal teshuvah of only ten years who had been to Bnei Brak once in my life — should understand that we were involved in something a lot more important than mere politics even religious politics.
