His name was Rabbi Simcha Zissel Levovitz, of blessed memory. He had studied in the famed Lithuanian yeshivot, witnessed their destruction, and escaped the Holocaust. He reached the shores of America just a few years before I was privileged to experience his tutelage.
"Words, words, words!", he shouted at me. He was a young man, raised as an observant Jew, but now in rebellion against his traditional upbringing. His parents had asked me to meet with him for several sessions to see if I could at least temper his rebellious spirit, and perhaps even convince him to return to the path they desired him to follow.
You have surely noticed the great changes in the way charitable causes do their fundraising these days. There was a time when fundraisers, who often were themselves dignified and prestigious rabbinical figures, knocked on the doors of potential philanthropists in the hope that they would not be turned away.
What is life all about? One answer to that question is that life is all about beginnings and endings.
We were walking down the long airport corridor on the way to the boarding gate. Somehow, it seems that whenever my wife and I have a flight to catch, anywhere, our gate is always at the furthest end of the long hall. We had plenty of time until the airplane departed, but somehow I experience an urgent need to rush whenever I am in an airport, and so we were in a hurry.