Dr. Shana Strauch Schick- Tribute to Rav Kahn
The Jewish people lost a gadol. Many of us lost our rebbi . It is hard to write these words, that our rebbi, Rav Moshe Kahn z’’l passed away. His passing is heartbreaking. A terrible loss for his family, his many students, and the Jewish people. I have so much to say, so much to share, though I can’t do justice to Rav Moshe Kahn and all that he gave.
If you have ever encountered an American-born woman who studies or teaches Gemara, whether in the US or Israel, chances are she was taught by Rav Kahn or one of his students. Through decades of teaching in what were the only places in the US where Orthodox women could learn Gemara at an advanced level—Stern College and its Graduate Program in Advanced Talmud Study, along with the Drisha Institute—he was central to the advancement of women’s Talmud Torah. The trajectory of women’s Torah learning in America emanated from a kol demama daka, the soft voice of Rav Moshe Kahn z”l, who taught us and encouraged us and made it all possible.
Rav Joseph B. Soloveitchik famously delivered the opening Talmud lecture at Stern College’s Beit Midrash in 1977. Six years later, one of his students, Rav Moshe Kahn, began teaching the Gemara shiur at Stern and continued to do so until just a few months ago when his illness forced him to stop. For many people of equivalent backgrounds (a student of the Rav, a YU musmach who continued learning in its Kollel for a number of years) this would have been a steppingstone to another position or a side job, but for him, teaching halakhah and Gemara to women at an advanced level was his life’s work of nearly forty years. His long-term commitment to teaching at Stern College, and particularly giving a daily high-level shiur to women learning in the beit midrash, was particularly notable, for it provided the kind of continuity that exists in a yeshiva—linking together generations of students who shared the experience of learning Gemara under his guidance. Students from his earlier decades of teaching were able to send their own students to his shiur, effectively creating a mini yeshiva that operated within Stern College, and providing the conditions from which Stern was able to launch its own postgraduate learning program.
Rav Kahn was a talmid chacham as well as an excellent teacher. He taught his students how to learn, many of us—myself included—had never been taught to learn Gemara before attending his shiur. And by learn, I mean how to learn be’iyun on a high level; how to read, understand and analyze a Gemara, Rishonim and Acharonim. Rav Kahn was not concerned with status or recognition. He just wanted to teach Torah to people who wanted to learn, and he treated all of his students with equal respect. It did not matter if his student was male or female, a lamdan or someone who never before looked at a daf Gemara. If an individual had a desire to learn Torah, R’ Kahn wanted to teach them, and he exhibited true happiness in doing so. It still puts a smile on my face when I think about the look of pure pleasure he would get when a student would answer one of his probing questions correctly, and he would respond “she’s right.” There are few things in life that gave one the satisfaction of being the recipient of his high compliment and spark of joy.
He never brought the level of learning down or lowered his expectations. Instead, he systematically provided his students with the building blocks so that each one could fashion a steady foundation on which to attain higher levels of achievement. Rav Kahn taught the intricacies of a sugya but he never let you forget the basics or take things for granted. “You have to know how to read the Gemara” he used to quote his own rebbi, the Rav, to us. In his shiur you couldn’t “sort of” translate a word, or “vaguely” explain a concept, or “kind of” describe a Gemara quoted by Tosafos without looking it up. You couldn’t just skim through any source; he expected his students to look up every word and every Gemara cited, beginning with its Mishnah. And he would question his students about it, expect them to understand it in its own context and why the Tosafists were citing it. It was these sorts of demands that led to the very ironic moniker of “Killer Kahn” among Stern College students (which he always got a chuckle from hearing about); ironic because he was one of the kindest, softest-spoken and gentlest people one could encounter. Yet despite his kind nature, his shiur always had an atmosphere of seriousness and reverence for Torah.
The centerpiece of his shiur was often a makhlokes between the Ba’al haMe’or vs the Rif and Ramban’s Milkhamos Hashem. As he explained to me, he would often select the sugya he would focus on based on those which contained such a makhlokes. He expertly balanced teaching the basic art of reading the text with higher level analysis. He was able to raise his students up without ever watering down the material or skipping ahead to a bottom line he wanted us to get from it. It was a completely bottom-up shiur, as he liked to say, building on the basics of the text up toward a more sophisticated level of understanding. Faced with the unfortunate and daunting task of teaching his GPATS shiur when he no longer could these last few months, I listened to some of his classes that are available online, and was reminded of how superbly he conducted his classes; creating a collaborative learning experience, asking questions to probe how well his students understood the texts, and always expecting excellence from them.
Rav Kahn also stood out from many of the teachers modern Orthodox women encounter in his ability to empathize with the challenges that may arise when encountering texts that are difficult to reconcile with a contemporary perspective on gender. He never offered easy solutions, nor did he ever question the sincerity and motives of the student. He always answered honestly and readily conceded when no satisfactory answer was forthcoming. I remember when learning one particularly challenging sugya, he just looked at me with a truly troubled look and said- “yes, I don’t understand.” As was always true for him, this was not a condescending attempt at displaying sensitivity to women; rather, merely what he understood to be true. It was this striving for truth and profound empathy that led him to join a rabbinical court to try to help agunot, or to write an article arguing for the permissibility of married couples to make their own decisions on when and how many children to have. He was so apolitical and sincere that he was shocked when a few orthodox journals would not publish the article. For him, it was about Torah learning, truth, and treating others with dignity and compassion. He was so tamim, that he did not consider broader controversies, nor did he have any agenda beyond doing what he saw to be “right and good in the eyes of Hashem”. Because of his compassion and respect for others it was only natural that he decided to become a licensed therapist, extending the help and guidance that he had always offered to his students to others as well.
What always struck me most about Rav Kahn, right up until the last visit I had with him this past week, was his modesty, humility and lack of ego. And he displayed these in all facets of his life. He never tried to wow his shiur with a virtuosic sevara that his students wouldn’t fully grasp, he only sought to teach us so that we could learn and understand the texts for ourselves. He also modeled humility in his parenting, which I have witnessed and have been awed by, and of course his lack of ego was apparent in how he conducted himself—a true baal middos in every sense. Since his diagnosis became public, countless students have thanked him and told him the extent of his contributions; of how he opened the world of serious Gemara learning to so many people—many of whom wouldn’t have had the opportunity otherwise—and how many of his students have continued a life of learning and teaching others. His response was genuine surprise. Not one to ever consider his accomplishments, he did not realize the huge impact he had on the Jewish people and the course of women’s Torah study. He was a paradigm of humility in ways that are impossible to simply describe, because they were such an integral part of his essence.
Rav Kahn is so missed already. His desire to teach was undiminished as he faced the end of his life, and he continued teaching until he was physically unable to. My heart is breaking from this terrible, terrible loss. He still had so many students to teach, so many questions to answer, so much wisdom to share. I know that as much as he was pained by the thought that his life’s work was unfinished, Rav Kahn took comfort in the accomplishments of his many students and the Torah that they are sharing, through which his legacy as a teacher of Torah lives on.
Rav Kahn, we all have so much to be grateful to you for; for patiently and painstakingly teaching us how to learn, for giving us the tools to continue to do so, and most importantly for showing us what it means to be a truly good and humble human being. For as long as I have known Rav Kahn I have felt that when it is written in the Torah והאיש משה עניו מאד מכל האדם אשר על פני האדמה, “the man Moshe was humble, more so than any other person on the face of the earth,” it was with Rav Moshe Kahn z”l in mind as well. יהי זכרו ברוך
(Dr. Schick is lecturer in Talmud and Rabbinics in The Multidisciplinary Department of Jewish Studies at Bar Ilan Universiety and teach gemara and Halakhah at Drisha Institute.)
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