Rav Nosson Tzvi Finkel, Z"TL

This week the Rosh Yeshiva of the Mir Yeshiva, Rav Nosson Tzvi Finkel, passed away. He was known to be a brilliant Rosh Yeshiva in the traditional sense and he was particularly known for his compassion and sagacious advice.


One of his many students (is there such a thing as a former student of a Rebbe?) wrote, "He was the only Rosh Yeshiva I ever met who vocally expressed his intense love for his talmidim. I will cherish the moments that I spent with him and will never forget the hundreds of times I heard him say to the students in the yeshiva, "Ich chab dir leeb" - "love all of you." This is a trait he shared with his namesake, the Alter of Slbodka. (The Alter passed away in 1927. Different reports have called The Alter Rav Nosson Tzvi's grandfther or great-grandfather.) This fits with what a colleague of mine emailed the Gemorah staff, I once had the opportunity to ask the Rosh Yeshiva zt”l how to motivate my talmidim to learn better.


He responded without hesitation, “show them warmth and they will learn better.” Rav Nosson Tzvi grew up in Chicago and went to Ida Crown where he was on the student council. Soon after that he began a life of unusually intense learning and devotion to Torah.


The Mir Yeshiva, in Yerushalayim, according to HaAretz newspaper, has between 3000 and 5000 students. There is a welcoming and amorphous nature to the place. Several of the teachers in my school spent some amount of time there, something that I didn't know till a flurry of emails started going around after the Rosh Yeshiva passed away.


In my favorite of the personal stories shared, one colleague wrote, "I spent a summer zman in the Mir and after a Friday schmooze asked Rav Nosson Tzvi (zt''l) about a particular issue that I had very little clarity on for an eitzah. He told me 'Knei lecha chaver' - the word knei can also be translated as a quill (pen) ('your pen is your friend' ). He advised that I write down on paper all that I was thinking and said that I would discover that I had much more insight than I realized."