Tamar Beer Horowitz Tribute to Rav Kahn

Tamar Beer Horowitz

Today we mourn the passing of Rabbi Moshe Kahn, a gadol and a tzadik. Many can and have spoken about Rabbi Kahn’s derech halimud, and his impact on am yisrael and on Torah learning. If your feed hasn’t yet been graced with these posts, I will link them below. But what I want to contribute to this conversation is something more personal, the influence that Rabbi Kahn had on me. I want to try to somehow express, knowing full well I cannot do the topic justice, the loss I feel now that Rabbi Kahn is no longer with me. Rabbi Kahn changed my life. I say without any exaggeration, that I would not be the person I am today without him.

As many have stated, he really believed in his students. It didn’t matter who you were or what your background was. He had high expectations. His class was not easy for me. I really struggled, and in the beginning I even failed some of the tests. But I think his goal in making his class so challenging was to instill a sense of humility and reverence in his students. Torah is difficult. Torah is deep. Torah is tremendous. Through his teaching I appreciated that learning was difficult and would continue to be for the rest of my life. And there was something extremely beautiful about that. Rabbi Kahn’s love for Torah was infectious and I felt it rubbing off on me every day. The way someone worded it at the levaya was perfect: “Every word was precious to him”. Every prefix, suffix, and noun was equally as important to him as anything else the Torah contained. One day, when he wanted to express his derech halimud, he told two stories: The first was that there was once a person who knew so much Torah, but he never wanted to be a teacher. People would ask him “please come teach! Why won’t you teach?” His response was “Everyone’s looking for a chiddush. And I just want to teach the Toras Emet! What if the pshat is just simple? Will I need to make up a chiddush to impress my students?” The second story was that once there was a Rebbe giving a shiur- he finished the amud and turned the page, and what followed on the next page seemed to make absolutely no sense! So the Rebbe thought of a creative pshat, to make sense of the flow from one amud to the next. One of the students said “Rebbe, I believe your pages were stuck together!” but the Rebbe responded “I like my pshat better”. To me, these stories were such perfect illustrations of what it was like to be in Rabbi Kahn’s shiur. Someone at the levaya also mentioned Rabbi Kahn’s teasing and sense of humor, and that offered me great nechama since through these heavy and serious times I almost forgot about the lighthearted sense of humor Rabbi Kahn would take to approach everything. My first year of his class I was too intimidated to appreciate Rabbi Kahn’s jokes, but eventually I became very familiar with them. I remember that I was answering a question, and I think it was because I threw in some irrelevant information that he said “why’d you say that, to annoy me?” I said “Yes Rav Kahn, I said that just to annoy you.” He responded something like, “Okay, what else will you annoy me with then?” and I said, “I have an entire semester’s worth of material”. Then we laughed because it was all in good spirits. Another time, he joked that we from now on should refer to Yeshiva University as “Yeshivat Chelm” because the wifi wasn’t working for our Zoom class. When you got something wrong in his class, he told it to you straight. And when you got something right he would smile and say “she’s right!”. And that was the best feeling in the world. For me I remember this moment where I gave my pshat of a gemara, and he said “that’s not the pshat I had planned for the class, but it’s good and I’m pretty sure there’s a rishon that says it”. We never ended up finding the Rishon, but I still felt proud that he really considered the interpretation of the Gemara to be interesting and plausible. Rabbi Kahn was never afraid to be wrong or to reconsider something. In fact, he loved it when his students corrected him. I remember one day a student who was newer was arguing back and forth with him, and I was thinking “why is this student bothering? Doesn’t she know Rabbi Kahn knows the answer to this?” But then the next day he came to class and said “I looked into it and… my way of reading it was wrong. Thank you for correcting me” I could not believe it! How could he be wrong? But to him it was not impossible. Rabbi Kahn truly exemplified his catchphrase “never learn with emunah”. For him Torah was all about hard work and had nothing to do with the skills you were born with. I remember when we did a lengthy Ramban and tried to present it to him, he said “I did this Ramban 12 times before I understood it. Go do it again!” He simultaneously told us we got the Ramban completely wrong, while validating our struggle to understand it by letting us know about the hard work he himself puts into the material. And just like that, I became mesmerized by Torah. I fell in love with learning in Rabbi Kahn’s shiur. In his shiur, Torah wasn’t about him or me or anyone else for that matter- it was centered entirely around HaShem’s word. I wish I asked him more questions. I wish I communicated with him better. While he was sick, he took on so much teaching, he turned to it until he couldn’t anymore. Right before the chagim, I brought up a specific skill I was struggling with, and without hesitation he offered to meet with me every week to work on it. I was thrilled, but neither of us knew it would be one of his last days teaching. I never really accepted his health deteriorating. I just couldn’t believe it was true. He was still filled with so much light and life and passion and love of Torah- how could he be sick? How could this be the same person we were davening for a refuah shelema for? It would be nice if I could be positive and say I feel honored to be a part of his last class. But to be honest, I don’t feel honored right now, I just feel sad. How could I finish this year without Rabbi Kahn? How can I return to Stern knowing he won’t be there? What is Stern without Rabbi Kahn? Who will I turn to for wisdom and guidance when I’m teaching? Who will cold call on me in shiur, or tell me I am wrong? Where is my Rebbe? It is so hard for me to accept this reality, I still do not feel fully sure it is real.

“משה אמת ותורתו אמת"

"ממשה למשה, לא קם עוד כמשה"

"והאיש משה עניו מאוד מכל האדם אשר על פני האדמה"

All of these lines read exactly as though they were written about my Rebbe, Rabbi Moshe Kahn. And while I wish I could have had him a lot longer, I am infinitely thankful to have been blessed with my own personal Moshe Rabbenu, to teach me and guide me, and impact my life forever.

Today, we mourn the tragic loss of a tzadik, a gadol, Rabbi Moshe Kahn. But through these stories, through us- his students, friends, and family- his Torah will never be lost.