Rachel Weber Leshaw: Rav Kahn, My Rebbe Before I Ever Met Him

Rachel Weber Leshaw

I recently studied the sugya about tearing kriah for your rebbe, and there’s a discussion about whether one tears kriah for anyone they learned Torah from, or just someone they learned the majority of their Torah from. But there’s another category that isn’t discussed there, and that’s your rebbe who taught you how to learn, so that anything you learn afterwards will essentially be a continuation of their teaching you.

Rabbi Moshe Kahn was my rebbe before I ever met him. He taught my very first Gemara and Halacha teachers, the ones who opened my eyes to the beauty of Torah shebe’al peh. They were his students at a time when women studying Gemara was a rare occurrence on the edges of Modern Orthodoxy. But from the very beginning, Rabbi Kahn set high standards for his female students and assumed that they were capable of studying the most challenging texts our tradition has to offer.

My earliest Gemara education included a heavy focus on reading and translating, and vocabulary quizzes to make sure we were developing our Aramaic vocabulary along with understanding the sugya. I assumed this was how everyone learned Gemara, but I also thought it was for amateurs. Eventually I assumed I’d graduate from that method.

I was wrong on both counts.

Two years later I entered Rabbi Kahn’s Advanced Gemara shiur in Stern College flying high from two years at Migdal Oz. I was immediately pulled back down to earth by Rabbi Kahn’s decision to teach Masechet Yevamot that semester. I can’t explain the experience of sitting in shiur with Rabbi Kahn, other students may be able to put it into words. But I vividly remember when we all failed to properly explain a Tosfot how he’d readjust his kippa and say “No, not quite” while explaining it all again. Vocabulary quizzes re-entered my life, and this time if you so much as forgot to translate the alef at the beginning of a word or a vav at the end, you were marked off. Rabbi Kahn taught us that every letter mattered, and I learned where my teachers had developed their methodology.

Rabbi Kahn’s methodology was simple. What is the Gemara trying to say? No fancy Brisker chakiras, very few Achronim. But if Tosfot quotes a different Gemara, you’d better show up to shiur having prepared that Gemara too, because otherwise how could you claim you understand what’s going on?

Studying for Rabbi Kahn’s Gemara tests remain some of my best memories from college. Late nights in the Beit Midrash, attempting to fit weeks of material onto a white board we could review over and over or literally taping a Milchamot Hashem to the wall. And then being kicked out of the Beit Midrash and finding a dorm lounge to make our ersatz Beit Midrash until we fell asleep. (I once almost failed a Rabbi Kahn midterm. I had planned to study on a Sunday, but it turns out my chavruta was a ploy and I got engaged instead. I still feel bad that I didn’t study enough, but Rabbi Kahn didn’t hold it against me, and I made up for it on the final.)

I owe Rabbi Kahn my best friendships from Stern as well. The shenanigans we pulled, the “shiur boyfriends” we assigned to deliver snacks, the times we randomly made pancakes for breakfast, they all happened because Rabbi Kahn expected that we spend hours in the Beit Midrash preparing for shiur, and we didn’t want to let him down. We even learned on the fifth floor of the YU library during our Hurricane Sandy exile. I don’t think he ever really noticed the shenanigans, but I know he was proud of us.

When I close my eyes, I see Rabbi Kahn just like in the picture, hunched over a big Gemara, entirely immersed in his world of Torah. We could stand next to his table waiting to ask a question for ten minutes and he’d never notice, until we coughed nervously or quietly said his name. And yet he was always happy to be interrupted, always happy to explain, over and over. As a teacher now, I admire this about him more than I did at the time. His love of Torah was so deep that he was willing to go as slow as necessary if it meant one student understanding something better than she did before.

My current students hear about Rabbi Kahn all the time. I talk about him when I give vocabulary quizzes, and when they ask me how I learned to be a Gemara teacher. Sometimes I tell them about how I’m still somewhat traumatized by Perek Hazahav of Bava Metzia, because I can barely handle the dollar-shekel exchange rate, and the dinar-sela gold-silver computations that perek required were almost beyond my abilities. (I might have done better had I woken up for shiur on time on a more consistent basis.) But Rabbi Kahn believed in us more than we did, and we believed in him. If he thought we could do it, then we could.

Rabbi Kahn never wrote a book, didn’t go on speaking tours, he was uninterested in making a name for himself. All he wanted to do was teach Torah (and become a therapist later in life, another thing we admired.) Because of this, Rabbi Kahn’s name is not on any list of “most influential” anything. But when I think how many generations of students he’s taught directly and indirectly, I’m overwhelmed.

As I move through life I meet more women who I feel connected to because we were both were lucky enough to be students of Rabbi Kahn. It will always be one of the great privileges of my life that I was able to learn from such a brilliant, modest, and kind individual.

When I see my students again and share this news, I will tell them with tears in my eyes, שלי ושלכם, שלו היא. My Torah and your Torah is his Torah.

יהי זכרו ברוך

(Rachel is Gemara Ra”m at Midreshet Lindenbaum.)