When Our Questions Melted

My first introduction to Rav Falk was on a Friday morning, my first week in Gateshead Seminary. He told us he’d be teaching us hilchos Shabbos, and said we’d be starting with an overview. But first, he said, he needed to teach us two halachos that he’d seen, over the years, many girls were unaware of. And because we were doing the melachos in order, and these points were a toldah of a melachah that we’d only learn the following year, he wanted us to learn them immediately.

He then taught the halachos, and to my dismay, I realized I had unwittingly been mechalel Shabbos d’rabbanan for years. Around the room, I saw similar looks of incredulity and distress.

That Friday, as girls called home, I heard them telling their mothers the halachos we had learned. And I got a taste of the urgency, the primacy of halachah. A Torah Jew needs to know how Hashem wants us to live. If they don’t, they will err and stumble, unknowingly loosening their connection to our life source. So halachah must be learned, and absorbed, and immediately put into action. This is what Rav Falk transmitted to us.

We felt it in the way he taught. He would explain the same concept again and again, in a half dozen different ways, if even one girl was struggling to understand. He never settled for us “basically” knowing what to do. We had to know it absolutely. Because this wasn’t about learning; it was about living. And you have to know how to live!