Page 37 - HaMizrachi Sukkot 5783 USA

In the introduction to the new book of Rav Eitam’s Rav Eitam’s writings
writings, you write that “although Rav Eitam would demonstrate his complete
protest the comparison with his father and with comfort in both the world of
his saintly great-grandfather, Rabbi Yosef Eliyahu the beit midrash and that
Henkin zt”l, one cannot fail to note the similarity of of academia. Many people
incisive mind, integrity, and self-effacing nature.” find those two worlds to
As a mother, when did you begin to see that Eitam be contradictory. How was
was going to become an outstanding Torah scholar? Eitam able to harmonize
them in his scholarship?
Looking back, I realize that there are things you see in your
children that you only understand decades later when they There is a section from chap-
are adults. In our family, the spoken language is halachah. ter 16 that I chose to put on
Years later, I realized that the way he would read halachic the inside jacket of the book,
works as an adult was very similar to what he did as a two in which he writes that his
year old. I remember being at a Chanukah party in the gan personal opinions on the topic
– I wanted him to dance with the other two-year-olds, but being discussed are irrelevant to the presentation.
he stayed on my lap. I thought the party was passing over
him, but by the next day he had processed and analyzed the He had no patience for dishonesty, and he did not bend facts
event, and spoke to me about it, exactly as he would later to fit his own agenda or opinions. He was famous for this,
do as an adult. and this is why people of all religious stripes respected him.
This integrity was not only a feature of his personality, but
When he was in yeshivah high school he would come home also a feature of his scholarship. The book includes a number
and go to the computer to write for online forums at Kipa, of riveting articles about historical revisionism, showing
where young people would discuss various religious topics. how writers systematically rewrote history to change the
Occasionally, he would walk out his room and ask “where views of great Torah authorities to conform to their own
does the Rambam say x, y and z?” with the assumption that outlook.
his mother should know these things. Somewhere along the
way the tables turned, and I was the one asking him the He pursued truth, which is why he was accepted in both
questions, rather than the other way around. worlds. People understood that he was reliable, that he
demanded of himself absolute honesty and integrity. My
Eitam read everything my husband, Rabbi Yehuda Henkin, husband was this way too. It wasn’t that they were worried
wrote, and everything his great-grandfather wrote; and my someone might catch them writing something false; integ-
husband read everything that Eitam wrote. However, to rity was simply a part of who they were.
some extent we only discovered the staggering reach of his
intellect after he was no longer here. After shiva, my chil- But it goes even further than that. During shiva, someone
dren were able to unlock his computer thanks to a teenage sent us a poignant post in Yiddish. We had no idea Eitam
prank. He and a friend had scaled the water tower in our understood Yiddish, let alone had written in it. Apparently,
neighborhood, and hung a sheet from it with the gematria he participated in a Yiddish forum called ivelt. The Yiddish
of their names. Thanks to that mischief, our daughter and speakers in the forum, reacting with horror to the murder,
our son thought that would be the obvious password to called him one of their chavura.
his computer, and they were right. What we found was an After the murder, there was a fierce debate on the internet
astonishing vault of Torah creativity. that saddened us. People were arguing about who was the
There were files of Torah writing in various stages of com-
pletion, including chiddushim (innovative insights) on the
four parts of the Shulchan Aruch. Until then we never knew
the full breadth of his learning.
No one understood how he managed to accomplish so much
each day. He spent time every day with his children, and
at 4pm most days members of his yishuv would watch Rav
Eitam and Naama walk together to pick up the children
from gan. He taught, learned in a kollel, was a fellow at Forum
Kohelet, wrote and published, completed academic degrees,
and answered emails from dozens of scholars, My husband
set the bar high in our home, assuming that is the way
people were supposed to be, and Eitam rose to the challenge.
I think we realized early on that Eitam was gifted, but it was
only towards the end that my husband was able to say “he’s
going to be a gadol, a first rank posek”.
Rabbi Eitam Henkin hy"d Naama hy"d and Itamar Henkin

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