Rebecca (Feldman) Becker Stern: Tribute to Rav Kahn


Rebecca (Feldman) Becker Stern 1997-2000, GPATS 2001-2003


Please allow me to join the other tributes, I don’t have any new facet or element of Rabbi Kahn to share, just my own personal experience of him, from having been his student for about 6 years, including his intermediate and advanced Gemara shiurim, two years in GPATs (2001-2003), and halacha shiurim at Stern College.

 Once when Rabbi Kahn called on me to read the Gemara in class, I started to read and he said to me, I’m sorry to interrupt you, but you are reminding me of something that happened in the Rav’s shiur, where he said to a student, "Just because you can read in a sing-songy voice doesn’t mean you understand what’s going on." And we all had a good laugh. And of course, he was right, tapping into something very deep: that as someone with imposter syndrome, I was trying to conceal the fact that I didn’t really know what was going on.

 My friends joked that when I tried to explain something in shiur, rambling on and on, he would look at me like he was mentally trying to turn a radio dial, tuning out the static towards something approximating a lucid thought. He was always trying to eliminate the noise, the distraction, whatever the crutch was that I was leaning on instead of trying to actually be alone with the sugya. Rabbi Kahn insisted that I abandon the defenses that I was building, talking aimlessly around the issue, and instead focus with rigor, isolate rather than flee the struggle, so that I could truly contend with it and ultimately become stronger rather than just further entrench my own weaknesses.

 He gave an assignment over one Pesach break, to decipher something like a page-long Tosafos in a far-away masechta and what seemed like a completely different sugya than what we were learning, without the assistance of anything but a dictionary or the sources on the page. It felt like we were dropped into this vast, dark forest with just a little flashlight and were told we needed to find our own way home. It was one of the most demanding exercises, and I remember breaking my head over it, taking the Tosafos with me to coffee shops and everywhere I went, just thinking about it over and over again. To have gotten some degree of approval from Rabbi Kahn on this assignment remains one of the most pure, thrilling, and enduring senses of satisfaction I have ever experienced. Because as much as I tried, with him it was impossible to be an imposter, there was nothing to hide behind, so that success felt earned beyond any question or doubt.

I was always in awe of Rabbi Kahn when he sat alone in the Stern caf, unlike most people, he didn’t busy himself with a book or his phone. He just ate in quiet tranquility. He had no pretense, no need to fill the space. This always seemed much more than a derech halimmud, of the ability to tune out the noise and to focus on the stillness of reality, but a derech of mindful and purposeful living.

May the knowledge of his immeasurable legacy bring you deep and lasting comfort.

(Rebecca is VP Legal, Alpha Tau Medical Ltd. in Jerusalem)


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