The Rebbe Who Read Like My Grandfather: Remembering the Dzhirka Rebbe, Rabbi Aharon Brizel

A Visit I Never Forgot

This week I received the sad news that the Rebbe of Dzhirka, Rabbi Aharon Brizel, had passed away in New York at the age of seventy-three. This is not a eulogy. It is a handful of reflections I wanted to bring to the members of our Bet Midrash — about a man I knew for only a few days, many years ago, when I was a young rabbi in San Diego and he came to stay with us. We never met again after he left. But in those few days he showed me things, and told me things about his own road, that I have carried ever since, and that I believe speak to who we are.

He came from a world very different from ours. He was a Jerusalem-born Ḥasid, a Kabbalist in the tradition of the Baal HaSulam, who for the greater part of his life led a small Ḥasidic court in Boro Park, and most of the people in our Shiviti Bet Midrash would never have heard his name. Yet ours is a Bet Midrash that takes pride in crossing boundaries, in the great variety of people we are connected to, learn from, and share with. Much of how we live and learn and carry ourselves grows out of that openness. My days with the Rebbe were one such crossing.

The Road That Made Him

He was born in Jerusalem in 1953 and raised within the Ḥasidic community of Karlin. His father, Rabbi Pinḥas Brizel, was a devoted Karlin Ḥasid of the Brizel family, one of the old and distinguished families of Jerusalem. Karlin is, as it happens, the very world from which my own wife, Rabbanit Dr. Devorah Halevy, descends — a nearness I could not have known at the time, for I had not yet met her, nor imagined how closely our paths had already passed.

He came of age in the Karlin community of Jerusalem, schooled in its yeshivot and formed by its sages, and as a young man he entered the yeshiva of Satmar, where he was numbered among its finest students. There he grew close to Rabbi Moshe Aryeh Freund, later Gaavad — the head of the rabbinical court — of the Eda HaḤaredit, the independent Ḥaredi community of Jerusalem, who granted him his ordination; and he became devoted to the Satmar Rebbe, Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum, the author of the Divre Yoel, whose presence he sought out whenever he could.

In time, his search for the secrets of Kabbalah drew him into the circle of Rabbi Barukh Shalom Ashlag, eldest son of the Baal HaSulam, Rabbi Yehuda Leib Ashlag, the master who would shape the whole of his life. From him Rabbi Brizel received his path in the service of God — the study of Kabbalah in the Ashlag tradition, joined to a discipline of loving-kindness and of love for every Jew — and he became one of the foremost disciples of that circle.

When Rabbi Ashlag passed away in 1991, disciples gathered around Rabbi Brizel. He did not, at first, take up the conventional mantle of a Rebbe; he taught as a Kabbalist of the Ashlag school, and in time the circle that formed around him grew into a Ḥasidic following of its own. He gave his community and its Bet Midrash the name Ateret Michael of Dzhirka — the Crown of Michael — in memory of his grandfather, Rabbi Michael Rothman, who had served as a rabbi in the town of Dzhirka and was remembered above all for his hospitality. The name was almost a vow: the grandson would make the welcoming of guests the whole labor of his house.

And so he did. His study halls — first on Lapidot Street, in the Bet Yisrael neighborhood of Jerusalem, and, about ten years later, in Boro Park, which he led for some twenty-five years while returning often to Jerusalem, above all in the summers — became houses of kindness. The published tributes liken him in this to the now-famous Rabbi Yeshaya of Kerestir: even with attendants and Ḥasidim all about him, he would go himself into the kitchen, cook with his own hands, and set the table for his guests and for those in need. Accounts from well before his passing tell of him feeding scores of young men at his Shabbat table.

He is survived by children and grandchildren, sons-in-law, students, rabbis and judges who carry on his way, and by communities in Boro Park, Jerusalem, Beitar Illit, Bnei Brak, and London. All of this is in the published accounts; what follows is not.

A Ḥasidic Rebbe in a World Not His Own

He had come to San Diego to rest and to see to his health, and he stayed with us for several days. It was an unusual sight: a Ḥasidic Rebbe, in the full dress of his court, in a small Sephardic community at the western edge of America, far from anything familiar to him. We received him as our community receives any visiting talmid ḥakham, a scholar of the Torah, with every honor we could give.

I had braced myself for the awkwardness of language, expecting Yiddish and the slow work of translation. But when he turned to me, the young rabbi of the place, he answered in Hebrew — clear, native, unhurried, the Hebrew of a man born in Jerusalem. From that first exchange he kept me close. All the days he was with us he wanted a companion in Hebrew, and he made me one, treating me, a far younger rabbi, as an equal and keeping me close throughout his stay. For a Rebbe of his stature to receive a younger rabbi in this way was a mark of rare humility, and I have never forgotten it. In those days at his side, I caught a glimpse of him.

Two Voices at the Torah

One morning we called him up to the Torah. He went to the tevah and made the blessing in the Ḥasidic pronunciation of his own, its vowels and cadence just as you would expect of a Rebbe of his kind. And then he began to read, and the pronunciation changed. From the first words his reading turned flawlessly Yemenite — the vowels, the consonants, the te’amim, the whole music of it, without a seam. He sounded exactly like my paternal grandfather, Rabbi Ḥaim Halevy. I stood there and listened to a Ḥasidic Rebbe from Boro Park chant the Torah in the very voice I had grown up hearing.

When he came down, I could not help asking him, “How does a Ḥasidic Rebbe come to read like a Yemenite?” He laughed. That laugh, I would learn over the days that followed, was the man himself — light and warm, with no heaviness in it; nothing sat too heavily on him. And then he told me the story.

Before the Secrets, the Sources

As a young man in the Ḥasidic streets of Jerusalem, he had wanted Kabbalah above all else, and he had come to Rabbi Ashlag to receive it. Rabbi Ashlag met him with a question. How was his Hebrew grammar? His Mikra (Tanakh), his Mishnah, his Talmud, his Rambam, his Shulḥan Arukh, the whole body of the classical sources? The young man answered that he was a yeshiva student. That, said Rabbi Ashlag, was not yet enough. Before a man may enter the hidden wisdom, he must first possess the revealed Torah entire.

And so Rabbi Ashlag sent him to study under Rabbi Yosef Kapaḥ (Qafiḥ).

The choice was extraordinary. Rabbi Yosef Kapaḥ was the great Maimonidean scholar of the age, who produced his monumental edition of the Rambam’s Mishneh Torah on the basis of Yemenite manuscripts, together with his own extensive commentary, and who gave the Hebrew reader fresh translations, from the original Judeo-Arabic, of the Guide of the Perplexed and of the Rambam’s Commentary on the Mishnah — the latter drawing on the Rambam’s own autograph. He was the grandson and disciple of Rabbi Yiḥya Kapaḥ, who had founded the Dor De’ah movement, a call to return to the rationalist tradition of the Rambam and of Rabbi Saadia Gaon, and a forceful opponent of the Zohar and of Kabbalah. Rabbi Yosef Kapaḥ was heir to that Maimonidean Judaism, and he gave his life to the study of the Rambam. To his house, of all houses, Rabbi Ashlag sent a young Ḥasid who wanted nothing in the world but the secrets of the Zohar.

And he went. He left behind all that he had known and took his place in the Yemenite study hall of Rabbi Yosef Kapaḥ, where he learned deeply.

I have come to see this as the very heart of what Rabbi Ashlag was teaching him. If a person truly wants to learn, he must be willing to learn anywhere — to go, when that is where the wisdom lives, into a world entirely unlike his own, and to give himself to it fully: to the grammar, the text, the law. A Kabbalist sent his disciple into the house of the great Maimonidean, and the disciple went. For a community such as ours, that is a whole philosophy of learning: seek what is true wherever it is found, even far beyond the world you were raised in.

We spoke of far more than this in those days — of the Zohar and the question of its authorship, of what Rabbi Kapaḥ himself truly held concerning it. Those are matters for another time. But I will say this: in all the tributes written since his passing, I have not found one that so much as mentions Rabbi Yosef Kapaḥ. They speak of Rabbi Ashlag; of the Yemenite years, of the seasons spent beneath the great Maimonidean, they say nothing. How much of that chapter his own Ḥasidim ever knew, I cannot say. With me, it was among the things of which he spoke most.

Not Everything You Have to See

Wanting to make the most of his days with us, he asked me one afternoon what our city was known for, and what a person ought to see while he was here. I told him that San Diego is famous above all for its coast, and that if he wanted to see it at its best he should go to La Jolla — the Cove, the Shores, up to Mount Soledad, out to the bluffs of La Jolla Farms. The idea delighted him. He wanted to see the ocean, the Pacific, the water.

As I was speaking, another rabbi in the room spoke up. It was not right, he said, to send the Rebbe to such places; the beaches were full of immodesty. He said it in Yiddish: s’past nisht — it is not seemly. The Rebbe turned to me and asked what was troubling the rabbi, and when I told him, he only smiled. “Not everything you have to see,” he said.

And with that he set off along the shore with his gabbai, his attendant, and came back that afternoon in time for Minḥaand Arvit, the afternoon and evening prayers, lifted and glowing, moved to his very core by the beauty of the Pacific and of the world HaKadosh Barukh Hu had made.

The Ḥasid in Hell

Somewhere in the course of his stay we were invited together to a farbrengen at a local Chabad, a Ḥasidic gathering of song and Torah and warm company, and he spent much of his time there.

At the farbrengen they asked him to speak. He rose, and in a heavy Israeli accent laid over Yiddish-inflected English, he told a story he warned was hardly decorous, and that he plainly relished. It deserves to be told as he told it, laughing.

“Do you know the difference between a Ḥasid and a mitnaged — one of those who set themselves against the Ḥasidic way?” he asked. “I would sooner go to Gehinnam, to hell, in the company of a Ḥasid than to Gan Eden, to paradise, in the company of a mitnaged.” The room stiffened; even the Ḥasidim were startled, for such a thing is not said. “Let me explain,” he went on.

A man dies, he said, and comes up before Heaven for his portion in the World to Come. Up steps the mitnaged, and at once he begins to make his case: look how much Talmud I mastered, look how careful I was in the law, look at every stringency I took upon myself — surely I have more coming to me than this. He had learned, it is true; but he had spent his whole life keeping accounts, sure that Heaven was holding out on him. So they give him Gan Eden — and it does him no good at all. A man convinced he has been cheated can be handed Paradise itself and still feel that he is sitting in Gehinnam.

Then comes the Ḥasid, and he makes no case at all. He kept no ledger and counted no merits; he comes with open hands. And so, with nothing to plead in his own favor, he is sent down to Gehinnam. And what does the Ḥasid do there? He looks around and says: if this is where HaKadosh Barukh Hu has set me down, then this is surely where I belong — and if this is where I belong, I had best be content. He ties on his gartel, the sash a Ḥasid wears for prayer, and he begins to dance. And a Gehinnam with a Ḥasid dancing in it is already Gan Eden.

The room rang with laughter. But there was more in the story than the laugh. Beneath it lay something quieter: that a man must know where he belongs, and trust that HaKadosh Barukh Hu knows even when he himself cannot see it; that in making peace with the portion he was given, he turns his own Gehinnam into Gan Eden. Accept the place you have been given, and you can dance anywhere.

The Visit I Never Made

For years afterward, whenever I found myself in New York, in Boro Park, the same thought would come to me: I should go and find his Bet Midrash, step inside, and tell him what those days had meant to me. I never did. We never took up the acquaintance again, and now I no longer can, and I feel that keenly.

Had we met again in later years, I suppose there would have been matters on which I could not have walked beside him. But that was never what our days together were about. In those few days I was entirely myself with him, a younger rabbi from far outside his world, and he was entirely open to me, warm and at ease. A man of so many worlds had room in his heart for mine.

Ben Zoma taught (Pirke Avot 4:1): Who is wise? One who learns from every man. Three things from those few days have stayed with me: that there is wisdom to be sought wherever it lives, even in a world far from your own; that not everything must a man see; and that one who is at peace with his portion can turn any hell into Heaven.

May the Rebbe’s soul be bound in the bond of life. May his family and his Ḥasidim be comforted, and may the memory of the righteous be a blessing.