For over 50 years Rabbi Brovender has taught thousands of students from all around the world. This week we introduce you to Aaron Liebman. Aaron has taught or served as an administrator in a number of Jewish high school settings across the United States since 2006, He currently teaches at the Yeshiva of Cleveland (a Chofetz Chaim institution) and his wife teaches math and science at the Hebrew Academy of Cleveland. They live in Cleveland with their three children.
How did you meet Rabbi Brovender?
At two key points, I met Rabbi Brovender: first, as a former public-school student. Green and trying to understand Yeshiva University, I spent my second year of college at Yeshivat Hamivtar in the effort to learn how to learn. That formative year, with essential help from Rabbi Ebner, I gained a lot and went back to YU, better able to take what it had to offer.
I had encountered a different caliber of Rabbi on the Hamivtar faculty. It was a wonderful place. Then, post- college, I returned for a longer stay.
I still remember the Sunday I had been invited to enjoy an excellent brunch in New York City where Rabbi Brovender encouraged the gathered to join the kollel at Yeshivat Hamivtar. The pitch: in addition to the advantages of the salubrious climate around Yerushalayim, funding was available to support such a choice.
Why would we stay in New York? I was convinced to switch continents, at least temporarily, for Asia.
What do you find most important or striking about the “Brovender Method” -his unique way of teaching?
Rabbi Brovender’s reputation as a maverick has always been linked in my mind to his being a democratic personality. I heard, even while a student (22 to 30 years ago), that there was a lot of voting that went on behind the scenes at Yeshivat Hamivtar (for example, about what masekhet to study) and that, after hands were raised, Rabbi Brovender lost.
His capacity to leave space for other people is routinely acknowledged.
By what method has he done this? “I don’t know.”
Rabbi Brovender has done a lot with that phrase over the last nearly sixty years and, long ago, so did Socrates.
The phrase turns up in many of the thousands of recordings on YU Torah, WebYeshiva, and elsewhere, as Rabbi Brovender begins opening a space for learning and for speaking about Torah: a pasuk, a word, a difficulty.
Into that space, substance is introduced, and a kind of unexpected complexity is revealed. By being substantive, Rabbi Brovender has held his own and remained interesting to young and old, decade after decade; under the unreasonable pressure of the demand that a Rosh Yeshiva be always profound – ועלהו לא־יבול is a daunting standard – Rabbi Brovender has won, has earned, the crown of leaves.
His students, and the broad community he has spoken to, have enjoyed the many digressions (linguistic, literary, or political) along the way. If Rabbi Brovender still sometimes grumbles about useless vocabulary he mastered while working for a PhD, he has also made use of that training in many knowing asides: the distinction between\ע\ and \א\ was preserved among Sephardim but lost among Ashkenazim – but not so fast!
There’s a gemara about people in Beit She’an, in Beit Haifa, and in Tivonin who could not lead davening because they also confused those sounds (Megillah 24b).
He once cautioned me that the gemara about טוטפות stemming from an African root (Sanhedrin 4b) – was homiletic. And, should anyone raise a question about proto-Canaanite, Rabbi Brovender could remind them of the distinction between the written and, the more elusive, primordial, spoken Hebrew tradition.
Rabbi Brovender has maintained a highly individualistic style: he has achieved much good with straight, bracing talk, and much with the use of intentional paraphrases that listeners might resist, or by way of contextualization: “in the idiom of the Medieval Jewish philosophers…” or so-and-so, “a chassidishe rebbe, but – that’s okay…”.
Unhelpful distinctions among people were not a part of the bet midrash where Rabbi Brovender learned or in a classroom when he taught. He tried to broaden the range of voices, including Medieval, Charedi, and Hassidic, in a way that students could appreciate.
I think the hope was that it could lead us to insights: the Mishnah Berurah was useful in learning, and could be meikal (see, neilat ha-sandal). There was the text in front of us, and texts behind that text. Interpretation, at times, he offered, had less to do with how a scholar would read a single text but in interactions among texts, and disagreement resulted sometimes from scholars simply looking at alternative lists of mekorot.
As an observer of reality, Rabbi Brovender has shared generously with us from his experiences often employing his famous humor with a talent for setting up for us the incongruity (please note I am paraphrasing all Rabbi Brovender quotes in this piece): “…I entered the apartment, and there was Rav Soloveitchik standing on the windowsill…” “…It’s 1967, and everyone in Israel is depressed. … And the military received a shipment of these berets — you can see them in the pictures. Soldiers could now ready themselves for war, you know, by positioning their hats, rakishly…”
I remember that tense day when Yassir Arafat arrived in the West Bank with the armed men and the celebratory shooting that could be heard outside of Efrat and I was then in a shiur with Rabbi Brovender. I interrupted to suggest that maybe we should sell T-shirts in nearby Arab villages to raise money for the Yeshiva. Rabbi Brovender then offered a much funnier comment (which I’ve forgotten!) – but, he cautioned me, “You see, Aaron, I can handle the jokes here.”
And even in the wake of the most frightening events we witnessed and lived through such as when he was pulled from his car during an Arab riot, that humor helped. Recalling the incident, Rabbi Brovender commented at one point: “…I thought to myself at that moment: so, this is what being beaten by a mob feels like…”
We could find a way to laugh at the inhuman and the merely human. Rabbi Brovender shared our exasperation at absurd realities, or we came to share his and gained some of his perspective. Rabbi Brovender might have been neo-Hassidic before we had the term. During his, thank God, long career— from seeing the Hippies to meeting the Neo-conservatives in shul— he has always been in the vanguard of cool.
Never one to retreat into his own institution, his own building, and wait in anticipation for some glorious future day on which all those who do not agree with him fail, Rabbi Brovender’s religious commitment has led him to a lifelong legacy of communication.
When it comes to Torah learning, what were you most drawn to after learning with Rabbi Brovender?
An openness to different genres of Torah that continues in my own learning and teaching today. For example, Mussar. The Sefer Cheshbon HaNefesh (Moral Accounting) has an unusual history that intersects with the ninth chapter of Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography. I teach both.
Rabbi M.M. Levin of Satanov (1749-1826, “the father of the Galician Haskalah” and friend of Rav Yisrael Salanter) used the bookkeeping method for attaining “ethical perfection” outlined in the Autobiography, including Franklin’s list of thirteen virtues, as the framework of his own book. It remains a minor classic of Mussar literature. Anyone who takes the time to compare Franklin and one of Rabbi Levin’s chapters, for example, on frugality, קימוץ , will see differences in both the tone and the substance.
For Rabbi Levin, Sefer Kohelet’s perspective on heaping up wealth as an act of nihility and the fury and accusation of Mishlei 24, combine in a chapter railing against conspicuous consumption and the corruption of communal leadership that it brings. Franklin’s virtues are not simply translated but transmuted by Rabbi Levin.
What lesson or specific Torah that you learned from Rabbi Brovender, do you keep coming back to or carry with you wherever you go?
My chelek in Torah, what I am able to share with my family, is deeply indebted to Rabbi Brovender. Key figures in chumash, Avraham Avinu, as understood by the Rambam, arrived to me first through Rabbi Brovender. My understanding of Bilaam and the sinister ambiguity of his poetry are inseparable from how Rabbi Brovender discussed him. From Rabbi Brovender, I first learned the Ramban’s Introduction to Chumash. From Rabbi Brovender, I first met the Rambam.
Rabbi Brovender and I spoke on occasion about his relationship with Rabbi Soloveitchik. In listening to Rabbi Brovender, I understood there had been moments of communicative unsuccess in that relationship. There was sadness that the Rav did not support his decision to make aliyah. To hear Rabbi Brovender speak about his relationship, as a talmid, with Rabbi Soloveitchik was to perceive that relationship with its sincere admiration but shorn of the excessive
romanticization that can accompany hero-worship: frustration, and some pain, were part of the reality. I took away from these conversations a deepened appreciation for the human aspect of the relationship between a talmid and his rebbe.
The truth is, I remember too much to recall here. There was Rabbi Brovender visiting Yaakov Silverstein in the hospital after the back surgery and smuggling in ice cream bars. Another time, when a student in the Yeshiva became sick or had some other serious personal difficulty, Rabbi Brovender made quiet but often effective efforts to help.
I have sincerely missed Rabbi Brovender. It’s been a long time, and I am sorry we don’t live nearer to each other. I would like to introduce him to my children. I hope we have that opportunity added to what we have already been zocheh (had the privilege and the advantage) to enjoy.
I cannot restrain myself from concluding with a heartfelt limerick:
The wise guy of Kiryat Mattersdorf is him
not frightened by anthropomorphism.
Students say thanks for the provender –
the feed, and for teaching us all how to read –
The gifts of the Rav Chaim Brovender.
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