The greatest shiurim leave an imprint far beyond the content of that particular shiur: They change our relationship to Hashem and His Torah. For more than a decade I attended along with hundreds of others Rabbi Moshe Shapira’s Thursday night shiur and for a number of years I was part of a small chaburah at Ohr Somayach learning Perek Cheilek in Sanhedrin with Rav Moshe.
There were times when I felt I missed the thread of the Thursday night shiur or failed to grasp it at all. (Though I often relay divrei Torah that I heard from Rav Moshe in these pages I almost never cite him by name for fear that I am offering only a very superficial or even wrong version of what he said.) But even when I was too exhausted to concentrate on Thursday night or during the mid-afternoon chaburah I felt it was worth going just to see Rav Moshe.
I always left the chaburah with the feeling that the whole Torah fits together seamlessly. From friends in another chaburah on the Rambam’s Hilchos Talmud Torah I would see that Rav Moshe was dealing with the same themes in every shiur over a period of weeks. In other words no matter what text he started with he would bring it back to a particular set of problems with which he was wrestling while remaining completely faithful to the text in front of him.
I might be troubled by the age-old issues of theodicy — e.g. the suffering of the righteous and the prosperity of the wicked — but watching Rav Moshe it was clear to me that he does not share my questions. And the knowledge that he has worked everything out was assurance enough for me.
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