Rav Nota Greenblatt, one of Rav Moshe Feinstein’s greatest talmidim, moved
to Memphis, Tennessee, as a single, young man to see what he could do for
Yiddishkeit. He remained in the city for almost 70 years and became renowned as
one of America’s top halachic authorities, the posek sought after
by most other poskim, people such as Rav Moshe Heinemann and Rav Yosef
Rottenberg, for his halachic opinion.
At the same time, he traveled to scores of places to be mesadeir gittin
(the rav overseeing the procedure of a get), check mikva’os,
eruvin, and kashrus, and whatever other halachic issues were needed.
I had met Rav Nota when I was still a bachur learning in Ner Yisrael, but I was first able to
spend quality time with him after I assumed my first rabbonus position
in the suburbs of Buffalo, New York. At the time, Rav Nota’s many activities
included overseeing domestic wine production for the OU Kashrus Division. This brought him to Buffalo, since western New
York state, whose effective capital is Buffalo, is a rich, grape-growing area
with hundreds of wineries and several kosher wine production facilities.
Since I was the only full-time rav of an Orthodox congregation in
the area, I became the address for many community needs, including the local Vaad Hakashrus, geirus, the mikveh,
and gittin, in which I had working knowledge but was not ready to be
the rav overseeing the procedure of being mesader gittin. I had
asked Rav Nota, known far and wide as the traveling mesader gittin par
excellence, to be mesader a get while he was in our area. He
acquiesced, as he always did.
At this point, Rav Nota told me that I should not wait until he was in
the area, anyway, for gittin. Once I had two gittin to take care
of, I should let him know, and he would put Buffalo on his schedule.
Rav Nota also told me what to charge people for his services. The price
should be “not one penny more than they would have to pay” for non-valid gittin
produced by non-Orthodox clergy. I realized that this meant that Rav Nota would
often not receive more than his travel costs, with no compensation left either for
his time or his vast professional expertise – and he functioned as both the rav
overseeing the gittin as well as the sofer, the scribe who wrote
the gittin. None of this mattered to Rav Nota. What mattered to him only
was that someone who needed a get should get a proper, kosher get.
Rav Nota was an absolute pleasure to work with and knew how to defuse
the frequent tensions that can arise in these often unpleasant situations. He
was always calm and relaxed, professional and friendly
– and when necessary, humorous. He knew his objective
and had no ego of any kind, nor any other motivation other than to make sure
that the halacha was observed
correctly and to create a positive atmosphere. At times, things were stressful,
but you would never have guessed this from Rav Nota’s demeanor.
He knew all the halachic
background so well that he never needed to consult with written sefarim during
our deliberations, which was a very good thing, because we were in a place
where few and probably none of the sefarim one would need to consult
were available, and this was decades before these works could be accessed
online.
Communal Responsibility
I often asked Rav Nota both halachic
questions and guidance about decisions that I needed to make. He always gave
very definitive answers. When I asked him educational questions about my
children, I was surprised at his approach. “As a rav, your decision must
be based on what is best for the Yiddishkeit
in the city. Identify which school will afford you the most
influence, and that is where you send your children. This is the way that you
will be able to accomplish the most.” I was highly surprised, because this
approach seems to run counter to the words of Mishlei, “Chanoch
lana’ar al pi darko – train your child according to his path.” This means that one should identify
what this specific child needs to grow in his or her relationship with Hashem
and provide the training in that direction. This implies that educational
decisions should be made according to the individual child and not on what is
best for the family, school, or community. It does not imply at all that an
individual should take into account the needs of the community when making decisions
about his child’s education. Since I never asked Rav Nota why he felt the words
of Mishlei do not apply in this situation, I do not want to suggest here
how he might have answered it.
I once asked him whether our local Vaad Hakashrus (which, at the time of the question, consisted of
just me) should give a hechsher to a certain type of meat. He responded,
“Of course you should. What is wrong with it?” I told him that, since the time
that I had studied the topic when I was in kollel, I had refrained from
relying on the kula used. He replied, “It is mutar. You should be
matir neder on not using it, give the hechsher, and eat it. Never
give a hechsher to something that you yourself would not eat.”
Here I had several educational lessons: 1) You should not have a double
standard when organizing community kashrus. If it is not good enough for
you, don’t accept it for others. And 2) If it is mutar, do it. Don’t consider
yourself superior to others. This is not the way to serve Hashem.
Speak Up
I once mentioned to Rav Nota that I had received permission to visit a
“kosher” winery with a less than stellar reputation for its kashrus
standards. Upon a future visit, Rav Nota asked me whether I had visited the
winery and what I had seen. Indeed, the kashrus standards were very
wanting, and I told Rav Nota what shortcomings I had observed. He then asked
me, “Did you tell the rav hamachshir (supervising rabbi) what you saw?” I admit that this had not
even occurred to me. “You have a responsibility to tell the rav what you
saw. Whether he does anything to improve the situation is not your problem, but
you must bring these matters to his attention and cannot simply ignore them.”
This placed me in a quandary. How could I, a young, neophyte rabbi,
criticize a rav more than a generation my senior about the deficiencies
in his supervision standards? To Rav Nota, this was not a question. Halacha requires that I bring this to
the rav’s attention. Any other questions, observations, or calculations
are simply not factors.
Self-Confidence
Rav Nota once told me that he had never lacked self-confidence. This
means that, once he understood what his Torah responsibilities were and what
the halacha was, he never
doubted what he needed to do. But at the same time, he worked very hard at
building up other people’s self-confidence.
More than once, Rav Nota questioned why I brought him to Buffalo
to take care of the gittin. He felt that I was knowledgeable enough in
the field to arrange them myself. I answered him, truthfully, that as long as
there were more experienced rabbonim willing to do so, I did not want to
assume this type of responsibility. And so he continued to come. Every time I
had two gittin to be taken care of, I called Rav Nota. He would call me
back a few days later: “This is Nota Greenblatt. I arrive on flight 753 from
Greensboro on Wednesday, June 19 at 4:45 p.m. I hope to catch an 8:30 a.m.
flight the next morning.” I now understand my parameters: Wednesday evening we
would schedule the two or three gittin that were waiting. I would book
them two hours apart to make sure that we had ample time, and make sure that we
had enough witnesses there and whatever else we might need.
Rav Nota would stay at our house when he was in town, and whatever my
wife chose to serve was fine with him: never any requests, no desire to stay at
hotels when it was not necessary.
One time, we dealt with a potential true agunah situation. Debbie,
who was not from a religious background, had been married in Israel before she
and her husband moved to America. She had a son from this marriage, but the marriage
had not lasted long. Now Debbie was in the process of becoming frum, and
the kiruv rabbi involved realized that not having a get from her
marriage would be a serious impediment to remarriage and, probably, to her
deciding whether she wanted to embrace a frum lifestyle. Jack, the boy’s
father, was paying no child support, had not visited his son for several years,
and was now living a thousand miles away in an area with no Jewish community of
any type. Debbie had contact information for Jack (formerly Yaakov, or Koby),
and I called him to see if I could interest him in participating in a get.
Surprisingly and to his credit, Jack was not opposed to the get procedure.
At this point, I tried to figure out how I was going to arrange a get
when Jack lived many hundreds of miles from any organized Jewish community.
Jack told me not to worry; he was planning a visit to Buffalo to see his
son in the not-too-distant future. I asked Jack to let me know in advance when
he would be arriving, since I needed time to make the arrangements for the get
when he would be in town. I hoped that Rav Nota would be able to come to
Buffalo on the days that Jack was visiting. I called Rav Nota and advised him
of the situation.
Three weeks later, late on a February Thursday night, Debbie calls me:
Jack was at her door. He had arrived to inform her that he was planning a visitation
with his son and that he was willing to take care of the get while he
was in town. Debbie put Jack, who sounded very cooperative, on the phone. I
asked him how long he would be in town, to which he answered, “I leave early Sunday
morning. I have to drive a thousand miles to get back to work.”
In a panic, I called Rav Nota, realizing that there was no way he could
arrive in Buffalo to perform this get. Rav Nota’s calm response was,
“Rabbi Kaganoff, I have been telling you that you should take care of the gittin
in Buffalo yourself. Now Hashem is telling you directly.”
The get did take place smoothly, and is one of only two gittin
that I ever was mesader. Even after this get, Rav Nota still
agreed to come to Buffalo to do the gittin. But he gave me the
self-confidence that I could do it, if needed.
Humble and Decisive
Rav Nota was incredibly humble when it came to his own honor. He dressed
like anyone else. For decades he was clean shaven, and then grew only a small
goatee. He wore regular grey suits, topped off by a straw hat in the summer. He
would stand up to honor people decades his junior who were a fraction of the talmid
chacham he was. Yet he was always halachically
decisive, thinking through the issue quickly but carefully and providing an
immediate response.
I once asked him a very thorny question about a practical mamzeirus
issue, perhaps the most serious an issue that one can face in today’s world. He
thought about it for a moment and then responded, “The next generation’s Rav
Moshe will have to deal with this.” This was his way of saying that he could
not think of any heter for the particular situation. I then suggested to
him an approach that had occurred to me. I could see that he did not think that
the argument had any merit, but he would not say so. He simply did not answer,
thereby registering his disapproval. As the Gemara says, “Silence is
twice as valuable as response.”
When I would call him on the telephone, I would deferentially speak to
him in third person, as to be expected when speaking to one of the top poskim
of the generation. Yet when I would ask him, “How is the rav?” he
would unfailingly respond, “There are two rabbonim on this phone call.”
Being spoken to in third person, as if he was special, was something he simply could
not tolerate.
When calling his home, if neither he nor his rebbitzen was home,
you would receive the message, “This is the Greenblatt residence. Please leave
your phone number so that we can call you back.” Initially, I could not bring
myself to leave a message. How can I ask one of the poskei hador to call
me back? But that is exactly what Rav Nota wanted.
I have told many people that I
am so grateful to have gotten to know Rav Nota. He was truly one of a kind. And
it will require the creation of another heaven and earth to produce another Rav
Nota Greenblatt.
Rabbi Kaganoff was the founding Rav of
Congregation Darchei Tzedek from 1986 to 1997, when the family made aliya. He
also served as a dayan on the Baltimore Beis Din. He is the author of 11 books
and hundreds of articles on rabbinic scholarship, in both English and Hebrew,
and has taught in many yeshivas, seminaries, colleges, and adult education
programs in Israel and the U.S. The Kaganoffs live in the
Neve Yaakov neighborhood of Jerusalem.
