Rabbi Moskowitz Memory #04: The Hike

Here's another Facebook post I wrote during Rabbi Moskowitz's shivah. This is the story behind my favorite photo of me with my rebbi.

Jun 04, 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 June 2, 2022, during his shivah.

Rabbi Moskowitz Memory #04: The Hike

I'd like to switch it up a bit and tell the story behind my favorite photo of Rabbi Moskowitz and me. (I provided a shortened version of this story in the "Thank You" book that Marshall put together, but I recently discovered my own records of the event which helped me to piece together a more accurate and complete version.)

Although he might not look the part, Rabbi Moskowitz was a very outdoorsy kind of guy for most of his life. So many of the older photos I've seen show him hiking and camping with his friends and talmidim. By the time I met him, he was in his late 60s, and those days were long gone ... OR SO WE THOUGHT!

It was Chol ha'Moed Sukkos 2010. I believe it was a Sunday. I had come back from davening at shul and was thinking about what I wanted to do with the rest of my day. All of a sudden, my phone rings, and it's Rabbi Moskowitz:

"Hey Matt!"

"Hey Rabbi Moskowitz!"

"Do you wanna go on a hike?"

"Sure!" I replied, expecting him to ask me which day and time would be best.

"Great!" he said. "I'll see you in 10 minutes. I have Ben and I'm on my way to pick up Ken."

Alrighty, then! I guess we're going on a hike RIGHT NOW!

He picked me up and the four of us drove out to Deception Pass, which was a good 1.5 to 2 hours away. Rabbi Moskowitz said that he found an easy hike that would take us to a beautiful lookout point. We arrived, got out of the car, and began our trek on what began as a pleasant, level trail.

We soon found out that the trail was not easy. At least, not for Rabbi Moskowitz. There was a rather steep and winding incline that proved difficult for him to ascend. He managed, but once it became clear that the rest of the trail was likely to get even more difficult, Rabbi Moskowitz decided that he'd stay put while we went ahead and finished the hike.

"Go on without me," he said. "I'll sit here and enjoy the view. If you come back and I'm not here, that means that either I'm dead somewhere, or I decided to go back to the car."

We didn't want to go on without him, and said that we could accompany him back, but he insisted. We hoped he wouldn't try to make it back on his own. I told him that the main reason I didn't want him to die on my account was because of the guilt. The loss of chochmah was a close second.

(Btw, if you think it's inappropriate of me to make jokes about Rabbi Moskowitz's death in a post during his shivah, then you clearly were never exposed to Rabbi Moskowitz's morbid sense of humor! I know he’d be okay with it, as long as it was a good joke.)

Before we continued on, we took this photo. At least, I'm inferring that we must have taken this photo at that time ... for reasons that will become clearer later on. ::: OMINOUS MUSIC ::: Ben, Ken, and I continued the hike. We got to the scenic lookout, admired the view, poked around in the forest, then headed back. When we returned to the same spot where we left him, he wasn't there, so we continued on the trail.

Rabbi Moskowitz always taught us that a chacham makes decisions based on probability. We were, like, 90% sure that he went back to the car, but 10% concerned that something untoward happened, and were actively on the lookout for signs. We saw a couple of other hikers headed our way. Ben asked, "Did you, by any chance, see a Jewish man with white hair in his 70s?" "Yes," they said, "we just passed him a little while ago." We breathed a sigh of relief ... until we started hearing the faint sound of Rabbi Moskowitz's voice saying, "HELP!! ... HELP!!" which made us pick up the pace.

When we finally saw him, he was standing on that steep part of the trail which gave us trouble earlier, clinging for dear life to a branch in an effort to prevent himself from tumbling down the incline. But he just looked at us with a smile and said, "Oh, perfect timing!" We provided support so he could let go of the branch, we had a good laugh, and then we hiked down the rest of the trail back to the car. He dropped us off at our homes, and that was the first and last time we went on a hike with our rebbi.

Come to think of it, it's highly likely that that was his last hike. I don't think he appreciated his near spill and I can't imagine he went hiking on his own after that. The following day I posted a Facebook status which cryptically said: "and we did NOT kill Rabbi Moskowitz. Yay!"

My primary motive in writing this story today was because I wanted to savor the memories and the retelling. But after I wrote it up, I wondered whether there might be any insights or lessons to be learned from this episode. I arrived at three.

(1) I have absolutely zero recollection of what the four of us talked about on that outing. I don't remember what we discussed in the car ride there. I don't remember what we talked about on the portion of the hike when he was with us. I don't remember what we discussed on the car ride home. Don't get me wrong: I know we had great discussions! It would be impossible to spend any amount of time with Rabbi Moskowitz and not have great discussions, let alone an entire morning and afternoon. But I don't recall a single idea from that trip. And you know what? It doesn't matter. Shlomo ha'Melech teaches: "One who walks with the wise will become wise" (Mishlei 13:20). And Rabbi Moskowitz has always taught: "It doesn't matter whether you remember the ideas you learn. As long as you see the idea clearly, it will affect your soul, even if you forget it afterwards." Based on these two teachings, I am confident that we all gained in wisdom while walking with our rebbi, even if I can't tell you exactly what that wisdom was.

(2) Part of what made that outing so memorable was its spontaneity. If you think I have a regimented modus operandi now, you should have seen me 12 years ago! My personality was not given to going on spontaneous adventures, even during Chol ha'Moed vacation, when I had no other plans. The experience of being swept away on a spontaneous adventure was beneficial for me in and of itself, but was even more beneficial because it was initiated by my rebbi. That positive association reinforced the reality that spontaneous decisions can be rewarding, which is something I really needed to learn at that time. And in a way, "spontaneous adventure" is an apt description of what it was like to learn with him, especially outside of the classroom.

(3) One of the many things I love about my yeshiva community is the strong sense of mesorah. It is a real privilege to be a part of a yeshiva in which there are so many interlinking chains of teachers and students, many of which span three generations. I'm speaking not only about the actual mesorah of Torah, but also the mesorah of the people involved. It has been such a delight over this past week to share memories of Rabbi Moskowitz's personality, jokes, and sayings with people from different generations. Growing up in yeshiva, we heard that Rabbi Moskowitz used to go on hikes with his students. As I said earlier, by the time I met him, those days were over. So when he called me out of the blue on that day and we went on that one last hike, along with two of my best friends, it didn't feel like just an isolated event; rather, it felt like a connection to a bygone era of the Rabbi Moskowitz mesorah - an experience we were able to partake of which was shared by our own rabbis from decades ago.

I'm sure Rabbi Moskowitz would roll his eyes at that last paragraph. That's okay. I'm more sentimental than he is. But I'm also sure that if I brought up the first two insights, we'd end up getting into a discussion about learning, about psychology, and about who knows what else. It would certainly be a spontaneous adventure.

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.

The Rabbi Schneeweiss Substack

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