Kids know. They have an unerring, intuitive sense of who is real and who isn’t
The words of two individuals on opposite ends of the Jewish spectrum recently confirmed for me the power of positive early experiences.
One of those individuals is a talmid chacham of stature in Eretz Yisrael, the other a self-described unaffiliated American Jew. But as youngsters, each of their lives was affected by a particular special rebbi, and neither of them ever forgot it.
Some weeks ago, an email came my way, thanking me for a piece I’d written last year, a remembrance of my elementary school principal, Rabbi Mordechai Dov Altein, and his rebbetzin. The yeshivah I attended while growing up in the Bronx was one, I wrote, whose student body “was comprised largely of nonobservant kids, since nearly all my frum contemporaries went to yeshivos out of the neighborhood for what their parents considered a superior education. But my parents felt it was important to support the only local elementary yeshivah and the tzaddik of a Jew who ran it.”
My correspondent wrote that he “was one of those ‘nonobservant kids’ who attended Lubavitcher Yeshiva of the Bronx for eight years.” He’d come across my column and was writing to thank me for my “remembrance of this truly great man.”
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