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Jewish Heresy

Looking into the Sun: Personal Reflections on my Rebbi, Harav Hagaon Rav Moshe Shapira zt”l

by Rabbi Menachem Nissel | January 18, 2017

I was an excited yeshiva bochur as I approached Rav Moshe Shapira for the first time. The year was 1981 and he had just joined the faculty of Yeshivas Mishkan Hatorah on Rechov Sorotzkin, Yerushalayim.

His reputation as a Torah scholar in a different league had preceded him. In Ponivitz as a bar mitzvah bochur he was already known to be the address for reciting the “yeshivishe reid”
on any sugya in “Nashim and Nezikin.” At age sixteen he had finished Rav Chayim Vital’s “Shaar Hakedusha” b’chavrusa with his rebbi Rav Dessler. His brother-in-law, Rav Yitzchok Bialistotsky told me how after his father had tested his prospective son-in-law on all of Shas b’iyun, Rav Moshe’s father told his future mechutan, “What you don’t know about my son is that he knows kisvei Maharal in the same way that he knows Shas.”

Rav Moshe zt_l