Thoughts from Dena Rock (Stern 1997-2000, GPATS 2000-2002)


Dena (Freudlich) Rock


I wrote this to share with my Midreshet Lindenbaum students after hearing of Rabbi Kahn’s passing. I have now been teaching Gemara for over 20 years, first at Ma’ayanot Yeshiva High School in Teaneck, and then after making Aliya in 2010, at Midreshet Lindenbaum in Yerushalayim. Gemara is absolutely central to my Judaism and my life. As you will see below, I owe that to Rabbi Kahn.

Though most people have never heard the name Rabbi Moshe Kahn, he has been one of the most influential figures in women’s learning in America. Virtually every single woman who learned Gemara in a serious way in America in the last decades of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st learned from Rabbi Kahn. There are now many high-level Gemara shiurim available for women taught by a variety of different teachers (many of whom were originally taught by Rabbi Kahn!), but 20, 30, and 40 years ago, that was simply not the case. Rabbi Moshe Kahn was it; he was virtually the only one teaching women Gemara in a rigorous way. And what’s remarkable is that he was not a rabble-rouser or revolutionary by nature. Quite the opposite – he was humble, quiet, understated, and gentle. He simply genuinely and deeply loved learning and teaching Torah. And he just as genuinely and deeply cared about and believed in his students.

I want to share my own personal journey so you can all appreciate what an enormous debt of gratitude I owe Rabbi Kahn, and by extension how much all of you who are my students have gained from him as well without ever having even met him. I went to a high school that did not teach girls Gemara, so my first exposure to serious Gemara learning was on the Drisha Summer High School Program the summer after 12th grade. My Gemara teacher that summer was Rabbanit Sally Mayer – who herself had spent years learning with Rabbi Kahn - and I fell in love with Gemara that summer in her shiur. So when I got to Stern College after my year in Israel, I jumped straight into Advanced Gemara with Rabbi Kahn -- and proceeded to drown. I had no idea what was going on; I pretended to take notes only so that he wouldn’t realize how utterly lost I was. When it came time to register for second semester classes, I did NOT sign up for Gemara. However, I had to call Rabbi Kahn during the break between semesters to get his address to mail him my final assignment (WhatsApp didn’t exist yet…). When he found out I wasn’t planning on taking Gemara the following semester, he was so upset, and had so much confidence in my potential, that he stayed on the phone with me and wouldn’t end the conversation until he had convinced me to change my schedule and register for another semester of Gemara after all. So in many ways, I owe my Gemara career and the importance of Gemara in my life to his early confidence in me and his belief in my potential. I went on to take him for Advanced Gemara all 6 of my semesters as an undergraduate in Stern, and then for an additional 2 years as a student in GPATS. He literally and absolutely laid the foundations of my Gemara skills, my approach to learning, my focus on the text, and the centrality Gemara plays in my life. I am forever indebted to him.

 (Dena is a Gemara Ramim at Midreshet Lindenbaum.) 

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tamar Beer Horowitz Tribute to Rav Kahn

Image
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 re...
Read more

Ilana Gadish: Tribute to Rav Kahn

Image
Ilana Gadish Today, I have written and re-written reflections on the beloved Rabbi Moshe Kahn, ztz”l, the foremost influential Talmud teacher of countless women, myself included. Much of what I want to say has already been said by many– how Rav Kahn held us to the highest standards, how he quietly, but powerfully educated not just one, but several, generations of female Torah scholars. How he took the job to teach the women’s Gemara shiur at Stern when very few people were willing to do so– how he did this not, as we say, bedieved (ex post facto) but entirely lechatchila (from the outset, ideally), believing in the importance of advanced women’s Torah study wholeheartedly. How he was utterly humble in this immeasurably impactful endeavor, not in a disingenuous way, but in a way that still leaves me baffled as to how to actually achieve true humility in one’s life as he did. Someone once said to me (it was probably some YU guy) – “You know, if Rabbi Kahn hadn’t gone to teach the women o...
Read more

Ilana Bauman: Tribute to Rav Kahn

Ilana Bauman I had the zchut of learning with Rav Kahn for only a short time. I started learning in GPATS this year, and he taught us this semester with every ounce of strength he had until he was unable to continue. And that was the most painful decision for him. Because Torah energized him. Because teaching energized him. And it also was physically exhausting for him because he put his all into it. But I see that that is what it means to לעסוק בדברי תורה, to engage in the words of Torah. It’s an experience that allows one to transcend their bodily limitations and allow their heart and soul, their emotion and spirit, to take over and overcome for as long as the body can sustain. You could see it on his face — his physical exhaustion, but his eyes wide and curious to see what we had learned and his smile so large to express his joy in his Talmidot’s learning. It was an immense blessing to watch someone push through in order to pursue the passion that was so true to their heart. I lea...
Read more