Mishpacha
That I would make a shivah call to Rav Ariav Ozer, rosh yeshivah of ITRI, when he was sitting for his mother Rivka a"h last week, was never a question. We live on the same block, and I have been going to his shiurim for over a decade.
But I must confess I had an ulterior motive besides the mitzvah of nichum aveilim. I wanted to discover, if possible, the secret to producing a child like Rav Ozer, who was already a phenomenon in the world of Torah learning in his mid-twenties, and is today one of the most prominent younger roshei yeshivah in the world.
I wasn't interested in his genius. That's a gift from Shamayim. My subject rather was the pashtus (e.g., no frock), approachability and warmth to everyone he meets, and his hasmadah.
When I arrived, Rav Ozer's parents' apartment (above his own) was nearly empty. Perfect for my mission. Rav Ozer began speaking about two seemingly contradictory qualities of his parents. Until declining health forced them to move to Har Nof four years ago, they lived in an apartment built in 1933, in which nothing had changed since — not the tiles, not the sinks, not the glass in the windows. The beds were the same metal frames the Jewish Agency gave to new immigrants, with thin mattresses filled with straw. Only the original Amcor 6 refrigerator finally had to be replaced sometime after Rav Ozer's chasunah.
From the day they got married, the Ozers shared their apartment with Mrs. Ozer's widowed mother and, until his passing, her younger brother, who had suffered as a young child from a lack of medical attention during the family's peregrinations through freezing climes, from Lithuania to Eretz Yisrael via Syria. Thus Rav Ozer, an only child, grew up surrounded by adults and party to their deliberations.
As simply as they lived, Rav Ozer said, it never occurred to him that they were lacking anything, even when he noticed that his classmates lived in a different style. And indeed, the Ozer family was not poor. Rav Ozer's father was one of Israel's leading electrical engineers and headed a successful firm. The parents simply felt no need for anything more than their unostentatious apartment.
Nor was it frugality that explained the way they lived.
"My mother had something verging on a bulmus [uncontrollable desire] to give, both monetarily and physically," Rav Ozer said.
She had a present for every woman working at the checkout counters in the numerous stores where the family shopped, before every chag and upon any personal simchah. The minimum bar mitzvah present was a full set of Mishnah Berurah.
In addition to giving gifts, both Rav Ozer's parents devoted much time to helping the many Holocaust survivors of that era. (Rav Ozer mentioned that in those days in Tel Aviv, it was rare to see an older person without a number on his arm.) An older woman — one of the few survivors from Mrs. Ozer's hometown of Iliya, Lithuania, where her grandfather had been the rav — called Mrs. Ozer after her husband's passing. She was all alone in the world.
From that day on, the Ozers would visit her for hours every week, and, as a teenager, Rav Ozer would occasionally accompany her to doctors' appointments and the like.
One day the woman called up Rav Ozer's father and told him that she wanted him to take her to her lawyer to make a will. He agreed, until she told him she wanted to leave all her money to the Ozers. And he did not relent, despite frequent entreaties in the following months. Finally, the woman proposed that she leave all the money to Ariav. Again, Mr. Ozer refused.
Ariav asked his father why he was so adamant. After all, the visits, over a period of years, had been lishmah. But his father would not countenance the question.
"Don't you understand what a chillul Hashem it would be for us to benefit in any way from her? Her neighbors in Givatayim would say, 'See, the only reason those frum Jews came to visit a nonreligious woman all the years was just so she would leave them her money.' "
The most to which Rav Ozer's father would agree was that the woman designate part of her estate for his brother's kollel in Petach Tikvah. And even then, he insisted that rest of the estate go to the IDF, as her husband had been a career officer and would have wanted it.
In the course of speaking about his mother, Rav Ozer mentioned that she was absolutely incapable of uttering a false word, not even where it might be permitted "mipnei darchei shalom." As a boy it used to frustrate him that she would not sign a permission slip for a school trip if the form was reused from a previous year and not fully accurate.
Nor was that her only hakpadah in speech: "I never heard my mother say a bad word about anyone," Rav Ozer attested.
He also mentioned that his parents had left him ill-prepared for the ways of the world in another way, besides the inability to utter a false word or speak badly about another person: Growing up, despite his unique closeness to his parents, he had never known that it was any more possible for a husband and wife to argue than it would be for the walls of the home to suddenly start shouting at one another.
So did I find what I was looking for on the shivah visit? Not exactly. I was looking for one or two shortcuts to raising wonderful children that I could share with my own children and readers. And all I learned instead is that the likeliest path to raising extraordinary children is to be extraordinary oneself.
No shortcuts.
