Maalos Magazine

[Judd Eisenhauer]

Aroundfive months ago, I sat facing my brother Matisiyahu in his living room. I asked him whether he harbored any anger at anyone for the delay in diagnosing his cancer (one that included aggressive in its name) at the outset and the slowness with which the results of his first scan came back. He did not flinch before answering: "I believe in G-d. If that's how it worked out, that's how it was supposed to work out."

Matisiyahu was a yarei Shamayim (G-d-fearing person) through and through. He used to joke that he was perhaps the first baal teshuvah in history to become religious from a fear of Gehinnom (Hell).

To that yiras Shamayim (Fear of Heaven), he would add overwhelming ahavas Hashem (Love of G-d). In an email to Rabbi Yisrael Shaw, the editor of his forthcoming sefer, six days before his passing, he wrote that "acknowledging G-d's good should be a special focus for me in particular. The name Matisiyahu has the connotation of 'G-d gives' or 'gifts of G-d.' "

He achieved that rare madreigah (spiritual level), described by Rav Wolbe in Alei Shor, of coming closer to Hashem, even as Hashem was taking his life. His oldest son, Avraham Yeshaya, heard him repeating Shema over and over, in a barely audible voice, in his final moments.

MATISIYAHU, or Matthew, as he was then known, was the youngest of five Rosenblum boys. At four years old, in the midst of a family discussion about college applications, he piped up, "Amherst, that's the one you have to apply early decisions." None of his older brothers were allowed to read comic books, lest we be distracted from our academic endeavors. But that concern did not apply to Matthew. My parents just worried that he should be normal.

Matthew followed three older brothers to Yale, where, as in high school, he quickly outshone them all. As a freshman at Yale, someone asked him before a final exam how many of the optional readings he had done. "All of them," he said. Yes, in part, that reflected a desire for good grades: He never received anything but an A at Yale. But more importantly, it reflected his love of learning and knowledge.

By the time he arrived in Israel for a year off after college, he already had three religious married brothers living there. There was no sneaking up on him, and he was fully defended. He had not taken well to his next-oldest brother Max and sister-in-law Brandy kashering the Rosenblum home, which he considered an outside invasion.

But twice in his first week in Jerusalem's Nachlaot neighborhood, his apartment was robbed, and he had little choice but to come live with my young family. At our Shabbos table, he met many students at Machon Shlomo, a local baal teshuvah yeshivah, then in its early years. Many would eventually become his closest lifetime friends.

When a student in the upper shiur at Machon Shlomo departed, leaving only three, Yitzchok Feldman, who had become friendly with Matisiyahu at Yale, prevailed upon Rabbi Beryl Gershenfeld to offer Matthew a spot. That offer, made in person on a Sunday morning, came at a propitious moment. It followed a screaming argument between Matthew and me on the preceding Thursday night about the direction of his life, after which we spent several hours walking around Har Nof in the early hours of the morning.

THE WORLD OF TORAH and yeshivos quickly proved Matisiyahu's natural habitat, and, I'm confident, the only one in which he could have ever been fulfilled. In his final months, he told my youngest son, Elimelech, "My greatest joy in life is learning Torah. Every time I learn of a new aspect of Torah, I want to know it all."

His first Gemara rebbi, Rabbi Shaul Miller ztz"l, one of Rav Abba Berman's closest talmidim, had a rule that he never taught a sugya (topic in Gemara) unless he had reviewed it 40 times. He quickly upped that number to 100 when Matisiyahu entered his shiur.

But his attraction to the world of Torah had little to do with such practical considerations. He was as genuine a truth-seeker as I have ever met. He was never content with the level of understanding that his natural brilliance allowed him to access quickly. He always had to grasp the full picture, the deeper understanding. And when the pieces fit and the picture was complete, he reached a state best described as child-like wonder, fairly jumping up and down in excitement.

As a seeker of truth, he was mevatel (negated) himself in front of all those whom he felt could bring him to a deeper understanding. Rabbi Yitzchok Feldman, the rav for a quarter century at Congregation Emek Beracha in Palo Alto, wrote in his hesped (eulogy), "Matisiyahu had already been the fastest intellect in most rooms he inhabited by the time we met [at Yale]. That was his calling card, and it gained him entry to many great Chachamim.... His rebbeim allowed him to trail them doggedly because they saw how much he wanted to learn, and how much he could do with it."

The first of the seminal influences on him was Rabbi Beryl Gershenfeld at Machon Shlomo, and for years thereafter. At the shivah, I related to Rabbi Gershenfeld that one of my brother's talmidim (students) had written that he would have exploded from the pressure as a newcomer to Machon Yaakov, where my brother taught and mentored talmidim for 15 years, but for a yesod (fundamental principle) in Divine judgment that my brother shared with him. I asked Rabbi Gershenfeld if he knew the source of that yesod. He told me that it is found in the Hakdamos U'shearim of the Leshem, the great Lithuanian kabbalist, which he and Matisiyahu had learned together. Rabbi Gershenfeld then enumerated many other sifrei Kabbalah they had learned.

From Machon Shlomo, Matisiyahu went to Mercaz HaTorah for two years, and then learned in Rav Tzvi Kushelevsky's Heichal HaTorah for more than a decade. "Every blade of grass has a malach (angel) that strikes it and tells it to grow," Matisiyahu once said. "For me, Rav Tzvi Kushelevsky has the status of that malach."

Rav Tzvi loved Matisiyahu, and often discussed the shiur with him both before and after it was given. He usually (not always) enjoyed the way Matisiyahu's critical and aggressive intelligence pushed him to ever further clarity. Once they were arguing after a shiur klali, and Rav Kushelevsky had to leave for the airport. Forty-five minutes later, the phone rang in the yeshivah. It was Rav Kushelevsky asking for Matisiyahu: He had another proof to his position from a Meiri.

Another of the great influences on Matisiyahu was Rav Aaron Lopiansky. In his second year at Machon Shlomo, Matisiyahu hired Rav Lopiansky to learn with him at the Mirrer Yeshivah. That relationship remained lifelong. Rav Lopiansky's dialectical mindset and unique ability to see all the multifaceted aspects of any issue perfectly suited Matisiyahu's perpetual quest for a larger synthesis. He once told me, "I know at the end of every 45-minute shiur of Rabbi Lopiansky, I will have a yesod that I can apply in my own life and avodas Hashem (Divine Service)."

Matisiyahu undertook the herculean task of listening to hundreds, if not thousands, of cassettes of Rav Lopiansky's shiurim. (He once joked that a childhood endeavor of organizing 3,000 comic books, each in a laminated cover, had been good preparation.) He categorized and summarized them, and created a website. That website will be one of his enduring monuments. Rav Lopiansky told me during the shivah that Matisiyahu brought him to a level of harbatzas Torah (spreading Torah) that he could never have achieved without him.

THE LAST FIFTEEN YEARS of his life he served as mentor/shoel u'meishiv at Machon Yaakov, in addition to substituting for Rabbi Gershenfeld's Chumash shiur on the latter's frequent trips abroad. Rabbi Avraham Yitzchok Jacobs, the founder of Machon Yaakov and a good friend of my brother's from their days together in Machon Shlomo, made him Machon Yaakov's first hire in 2005, though initially he expected his influence to be limited to two or three very bright students a year.

Providing Matisiyahu with the opportunity to share his Torah with others, Rabbi Jacobs has told me many times, will be his claim to Olam Haba (the World to Come). A plaque will soon mark the corner of the beis medrash (study hall) where Matisiyahu held court and from which the energy of afternoon and night seder emanated.

Matisiyahu was not an obvious choice for the role of mentor in a baal teshuvah yeshivah. He was an introvert by nature, though he had a remarkable capacity for deep and lasting friendships, going back to his high school years. The number of people who called last week to say, "I loved Matisiyahu," was extraordinary. "Every conversation with him was transformational," remembered one friend. "He took you either upward or inward."

At the same time, he brought some rather unique traits to the task of mentoring, most obviously his sense of humor. Virtually every email received in the period up to his passing and afterward contains some form of the words "brilliant" and "hilarious" in close proximity. "Quirky" also made frequent appearances. The wife of one of his closest friends wrote last week that she always knew when her husband was speaking to Matisiyahu on the phone from his belly laughs.

Most of his humor carried within in it real insights delivered in an easy-to-take package. With his humor he broke down the barriers between him and his students and made rabbis seem less austere and forbidding.

Then there was the breadth of his yedios haTorah. One former talmid, who has been learning full-time for the past 13 years, recalled Matisiyahu learning with him Nefesh HaChaim when he could barely read Hebrew. Last week, he offered a chavrusa to anyone who wants to learn Nefesh HaChaim, l'illui nishmas my brother. Another mentioned to me at the shivah house learning the introduction to Alei Shor with him.

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