Rabbi Moskowitz Memory #02: Burying My Rebbi Admit Tears and Suppressed Laughter

I wrote this as a Facebook post two years ago the morning after the funeral of my rebbi, Rabbi Morton Moskowitz zt"l. I'm sharing it here on the occasion of his 2nd yahrzeit.

Jun 03, 2024

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The Torah content for this week has been sponsored by Judah and Naomi Dardik in honor of Rabbi Moskowitz's second yahrzeit and in appreciation for all those whose love of Torah and excitement for ideas shines in their teaching.

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In honor of the second yahrzeit of my rebbi, Rabbi Morton Moskowitz zt"l, I will be reposting all the "Rabbi Moskowitz Memory” Facebook posts that I wrote during the week of his passing. I’m not going to edit any of them unless I find a typo. I want to preserve the spontaneous writing I did during that intense period of grieving.

I wrote this on May 31, 2022, the day after his funeral.

Rabbi Moskowitz Memory #02: Burying My Rebbi Admit Tears and Suppressed Laughter

I buried my rebbi yesterday. I expected this final stage of the levaya (funeral) to be the most difficult part of all. I expected to break down sobbing, as I had so many times in the 36 hours prior. Indeed, there were tears at the burial, and there was sobbing. When I shoveled the dirt and rocks onto the casket that held his body, the finality of it all was not lost on me. But as I watched OTHER people huffing and puffing and shoveling the dirt onto his grave, I began to smirk, then smile, and then laugh, and then force myself to suppress my laughter. Let me explain why.

The day was September 23, 2002, the 17th of Tishrei 5763, the first day of Chol ha'Moed Sukkos, at around 9am. I remember this because it was one of the saddest days in the recent history of the Seattle Jewish Community: the day that Ari Grashin (a"h) died of a brain tumor at the age of 16. I had just begun my first year of yeshiva at YBT in Far Rockaway, but I was back in Seattle for Sukkos and I had decided (as I would for many years to come) to daven at Northwest Yeshiva High School and spend my entire morning sitting in on Rabbi Moskowitz's high school classes. News had reached most of the students before school began, and many of his classmates stayed home that day. Ari was universally loved by the entire school, and although his passing was not unexpected, it shook the entire community. The mood in the air was black with heartbreak. To this day, whenever I say Hallel on any occasion, and I reach the phrase "zeh ha'yom asah Hashem, nagilah ve'nismecha bo" ("This is the day that Hashem has made - let us be glad and rejoice on it!") I recall the incongruence of the NYHS student body singing this line amid anguish and crying.

That was the mood that prevailed when students entered Rabbi Moskowitz's classroom for the first class of the day. I want to stress this again: the students in this class were peers of Ari, but not his close friends. They were grief-stricken not so much because of their relationships with Ari, but because this was the first death they had ever encountered in their young lives. What was Rabbi Moskowitz going to do? Was he going to teach as normal? Of course not. I have no recollection of how he initiated this particular discussion or how many other topics were discussed in that class. All I remember is that he somehow got onto the topic of telling us about his workout routine - which physical exercises he preferred to do, and how he did them. Not only did he TELL about his workout. He SHOWED us.

Rabbi Moskowitz was a hefty man. I rarely ever saw him do any physical activity more than walking, sitting down, and standing up. But that day in class, he got up, walked in front of his desk, and physically demonstrated all the exercises he'd do. Many of these involved taking "practical" tasks and making them into aerobic exercises, which he demonstrated through pantomime: chopping wood, lifting furniture, and yes - shoveling dirt. And this wasn't just pantomime. It was HILARIOUS pantomime: masterful physical humor, involving caricatured and exaggerated motions, on par with Charlie Chaplin and the Three Stooges. I have a vivid memory of him demonstrating the shoveling action in this animated hyperbolic manner again and again, while narrating all the physical benefits of the motions.

(I don't have actual pictures of this, but the photos you see here were supplied by Ann Morhaime showing a similar "lesson" taught by Rabbi Moskowitz a few decades earlier; they're the closest thing to what I witnessed that day.)

It quickly dawned on me that Rabbi Moskowitz did this in order to give this particular group of students some laughter because he knew that at that moment, they needed that light to get out of their darkness, and they needed to release that tension more than they needed a Torah class. It was an act of chesed - an unorthodox one, for sure, but one that worked. AFTER that, the students opened up and talked about what they were going through, but only because Rabbi Moskowitz had broken the ice. Had he begun by addressing the issue head-on, in the serious mode of a rabbi explaining death to students, it would have flopped or made things worse. They needed the release of laughing at the funny sight of their overweight rabbi leading an aerobics course.

And THAT was all I could think about while watching people shoveling dirt onto Rabbi Moskowitz's casket yesterday.

I kept on smirking, then concealing it, then feeling laughter bubbling up again, then suppressing it. Don't get me wrong - I wasn't suppressing the laughter out of guilt. I've been a student of Rabbi Moskowitz for long enough that I didn't feel any guilt about laughing at a funeral. Rather, I suppressed my laughter out of sensitivity for others, who would not be able to understand why I was laughing at such a somber time. I eventually leaned over to a fellow student of Rabbi Moskowitz to share what was going on in my head. Once I got those thoughts out to someone else who could appreciate them, that somehow helped me to get things under control.

As we buried Rabbi Moskowitz's body, I couldn't help but think of the words that Rabbi Moskowitz said at the funeral of his beloved son, Shmully (a"h). (For those who don't know, Shmully was a beloved friend of many and an actual genius in Torah and chochmah who died suddenly and tragically of legionnaires disease in 2012.) The theme of Rabbi Moskowitz's eulogy of his own son, which he repeated as a refrain throughout his speech, was about the body in the coffin: "That's not my Shmully," he said over and over, contrasting that with a description of who Shmully really was. "This isn't his funeral," he said again and again, as he described what Shmully would have thought about all the depressing fuss. Here are Rabbi Moskowitz's exact words:

"The fact that we're crying? This can't be his funeral. That's not Shmully. Shmully wanted balloons at his funeral. And one more thing, if that [body] was my Shmully, you think I'd put him in the ground to rot? I can't do that. No parent could do that. That's not my Shmully. If you wanna go to Shmully's funeral, go home, don't bother coming to the cemetery ... On the way home, pick up the best bottle of whatever you like, some whisky, wine, or beer ... Go home, put on shorts and a t-shirt, and crack a joke, tell an idea. Don't learn mishnah, don't learn Gemara. Make sure it's an IDEA. I mean, it could come from the Gemara, but say an IDEA! Work out a way to help somebody. When Shmully heard somebody he knows in the community [needed help], it's not that he just ran off. He one time told me that there was a problem. He told me the complications, all the questions - it was like a tosafos, and he had to work out that everybody should be happy. He says, 'I can't RUN there. I gotta first work it out.' Work out a way to help a person - THEN you have Shmully. Then Shmully is there. That's when Shmully is there. And if you come to the shivah, and you want to bring your beer, that'd be great. Bring balloons. Then you're with my Shmully. When anybody met him, he understood how to talk with them - you walk away changed, [then] you have my Shmully in you. That's where Shmully is. And for the rest of your life, whenever you want to think of Shmully, just get into shorts and a t-shirt, and think of an idea. Think about helping somebody. That was my Shmully. That [points to the casket] - that's not."

This is exactly how I felt at the burial. That body belonged to Rabbi Moskowitz, but it wasn't him. Rabbi Moskowitz was the one making me laugh as I remembered how he brought laughter to the grieving kids who would probably leave the class and have to endure educational suffering while other teachers tried to push forward with their lesson plans.

And that triggered ANOTHER hilarious thought. You know how in Star Wars when a Jedi master dies, he comes back to his disciple in the form of a glowing blue spirit to provide continued wisdom and counsel? I started laughing at how funny Rabbi Moskowitz would be as a "Jedi ghost" - especially at that moment, at his own funeral. I could picture him standing next to me, with his hands behind his back, leaning over to me and whispering observations and psychoanalytic explanations of the behavior of the people at the cemetery. I'd lean in and ask him questions or share my own thoughts, and we'd BOTH have to suppress our laughter. And then, just when I'd think the conversation was over, he'd push the boundaries by cracking a joke.

Yes, what Rabbi Moskowitz said at Shmully's funeral was true now at his own: that's not my rebbi in the casket. That's not my rebbi who is being buried. Chazal say, "tzadikim, even in death, are called 'alive.'" My rebbi may have left this physical existence, but he is alive in the minds, the hearts, and the memories of all the people whose lives he touched. I don't know how graveside funerals usually go, but so many of us - including many students of his, who were no longer observant but whose lives had been changed by Rabbi Moskowitz - stayed around talking and sharing and laughing for nearly an hour. "When anybody that met him, he understood how to talk with them - you walk away changed." That was true of Shmully and that was true of Rabbi Moskowitz, as evidenced by all the people who came to his funeral in person and the 300-400 people who participated in his levaya over Zoom. We were all changed by knowing him, and his ideas and personality and influence will continue to change us even after his passing.

If Rabbi Moskowitz knew that there were more smiles and laughter on the day of his funeral than there were tears, he would be happy. That's the kind of funeral he would have wanted, and that's the kind he got.

If you have any thoughts on this or any of your own memories of Rabbi Moskowitz you’d like to share, I would love to hear them! I’ll make sure they reach Mrs. Moskowitz as well.

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