Remembering Rav Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler zt”l on His Yahrtzeit, 24 Teves
When Rav Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler zt”l arrived at Yeshivas Ponevezh in 1947, he was something the bachurim had never encountered. His aristocratic bearing. His meticulously elegant form of dress. And then his shiurei Mussar. They challenged the very foundations of how they understood avodas Hashem. His weekly mussar talks were not the traditional shmuess they knew from European yeshivos. They were intellectual journeys. They wove together Maharals and Ramchals, There was the occasional Tanya thrown in with the classic teachings of Kelm. Who was this remarkable individual?
Within weeks, the Mashgiach’s shiurim became the talk of the yeshiva. Students formed chazarah groups to review and discuss his ideas. They copied and circulated his teachings. They preserved the words that would eventually become Michtav MeEliyahu—one of the most influential mussar works of the twentieth century. And, of course, Strive for Truth – which captivated young American and British readers.
Today marks seventy-two years since his sudden passing on 24 Teves 5714 (1953), and his teachings continue to shape how Bnei Torah understand free will, divine providence, and the inner life of the Jew. But back to our question – who was he?
From Homel to Kelm: A Pedigree of Mussar Royalty
Rav Dessler was born on 4 Sivan 5652 (1892) in Homel, into a family that embodied the mussar movement from its very inception. His mother, Chana Freidel, was a granddaughter of Rav Yisrael Salanter himself—the founder of the entire mussar movement. His father, Rav Reuven Dov Dessler, was a close talmid of Rav Simcha Zissel Ziv, the legendary Alter of Kelm. The family lived comfortably; Rav Reuven Dov was a successful lumber merchant, but the household lived and breathed mussar.
Young Eliyahu Eliezer grew up hearing firsthand accounts of the gedolei hamussar, absorbing their derech not from seforim alone but from the living example of parents and grandparents who had walked with giants.
At fourteen, he entered the Talmud Torah of Kelm, the inner sanctum of the mussar world. There, under Rav Tzvi Hirsch Broida—the Alter of Kelm’s son-in-law—he absorbed the Kelm approach: rigorous intellectual honesty combined with painstaking work on middos, all within an atmosphere of almost otherworldly refinement.
The Kelm experience marked him permanently. Throughout his life, Rav Dessler considered himself a product of Kelm, and his descriptions of that institution convey an almost palpable longing for a world of spiritual aristocracy that the Holocaust would soon destroy.
The connections only further deepened. In 1920, he married Bluma, daughter of Rav Nachum Zev Ziv and granddaughter of the Alter of Kelm himself. His brothers-in-law would become central figures in the Kelm approach. His uncle, the great Rav Chaim Ozer Grodzinski of Vilna, granted him semicha—an honor Rav Chaim Ozer bestowed on few talmidim. The young rabbi was poised to take his place among the leaders of Lithuanian Jewry.
Exile and Rebirth in England
But Hashem had different plans. Rav Dessler declined an offer to serve as dayan in Vilna, instead joining his brother in business. Then, in 1928, his stepmother fell ill, and he accompanied his father to England for medical treatment. What was meant to be a temporary visit became a permanent relocation. His wife and daughter remained in Lithuania for three years before joining him, and Rav Dessler found himself building Torah in the spiritual wilderness that was interwar England.
He served as rav in London’s East End and later in Dalston, where he opened a small yeshiva. Among his students was Suleiman Sassoon, son of the famous philanthropist David Suleiman Sassoon. But the masses remained distant from Torah, and Rav Dessler felt the isolation keenly.
In the early 1940s, he found a more congenial setting: the nascent Gateshead Kollel in northeastern England. There, he served as spiritual leader, pouring his energies into building a Mossad and delivering the shiurim that would crystallize his unique approach.
The Gateshead years were formative. Free from the constraints of communal rabbanus, Rav Dessler could focus on developing and teaching his ideas. He worked tirelessly on the kollel’s development, both spiritually and financially. And he began to articulate a vision of mussar that drew on sources far beyond the traditional Kelm curriculum.
The Ponevezh Revolution
In 1947, Rav Yosef Shlomo Kahaneman—the Ponevezher Rav—invited Rav Dessler to serve as Mashgiach Ruchani at his newly reconstituted yeshiva in Bnei Brak. It was a surprising choice. In his youth in Telshe, Rav Kahaneman had actually been among the leaders of the famous “mussar rebellion” of 1905, opposing the introduction of formal mussar study.
But the churban had changed everything. Rav Kahaneman now understood that rebuilding Lithuanian Torah meant preserving the mussar tradition as well, and he sought a mashgiach of the highest caliber—someone who embodied the old world while speaking to the new.
Rav Dessler accepted, but on his own terms. He would serve as “mashgiach-lecturer” only, delivering shiurim without the traditional responsibilities of monitoring attendance or providing individual guidance to students. Rav Kahaneman agreed readily.
What followed exceeded all expectations.
Rav Dessler’s mussar shmuessim were unlike anything the bachurim had heard. They were not the emotional exhortations typical of the Yeshiva shmuess, but rigorous intellectual explorations with an almost philosophical flavor. He drew freely on Maharals, Ramchals, and—remarkably for a Lithuanian rav—on chassidic sources, particularly Chabad. He quoted Rav Nachman of Breslov alongside the masters of Kelm. His talmidim found themselves challenged to think, to question, to probe the foundations of their avodah.
The weekly Mussar shmuess became an event.
Students discussed it for days afterward, formed chaburos to study his teachings, and painstakingly transcribed and mimeographed his words. From these handwritten notes emerged, after his passing, the five volumes of Michtav MeEliyahu, edited by his devoted talmidim Rav Aryeh Carmell.
Kavod HaBriyos in Practice: Vignettes of Ethical Refinement
Yet Rav Dessler’s mussar was not confined to the lecture hall. Those who observed him in the quotidian details of daily life witnessed the translation of theory into practice—a living embodiment of the Kelm tradition’s insistence that authentic spiritual refinement must permeate every interaction.
During the early years of his tenure at Ponevezh, before Rebbetzin Bluma Dessler had joined him from England where she remained overseeing the couple’s affairs, Rav Dessler took his meals at an orphanage near the yeshiva complex. This institution had been established by Rav Kahaneman himself—who, having escaped Lithuania shortly before the Nazi onslaught consumed that ancient Jewish community, had dedicated his remaining decades to resurrection, building not only the yeshiva but numerous chesed institutions to shelter the shattered remnants of European Jewry. The orphanage housed children who had emerged from the inferno of the Shoah bereft of parents, communities, and homelands.
Mrs. Munk, who administered the dining facility, recognized in Rav Dessler a personage of exceptional spiritual stature. She therefore took it upon herself to provide him with modest supplementary portions—a small treat here, an additional serving there—distinctions not afforded to the other diners. For Rav Dessler, steeped in the mussar tradition’s exacting standards regarding interpersonal conduct, this preferential treatment occasioned considerable discomfort. The very notion that he should receive privileges unavailable to orphaned children violated his deeply held convictions about human dignity and the impropriety of self-aggrandizement. He repeatedly entreated Mrs. Munk to desist from these well-intentioned gestures, though she persisted in her reverence.
The matter reached its decisive moment one afternoon when Rav Dessler observed a young boy hastening from the dining hall with evident agitation. Inquiring as to the cause of his distress, the Mashgiach discovered that the child had taken a cherry—a cherry that had been expressly set aside for Rav Dessler’s exclusive consumption. The incident crystallized everything that had troubled him about the arrangement. A child, likely bearing the invisible wounds of inconceivable loss, had been driven to such an act by the very system of privilege that Rav Dessler found so objectionable. He proceeded directly to Mrs. Munk and delivered what amounted to an ultimatum, framed with characteristic gentleness but unmistakable resolve: “I shall either partake of the identical fare served to every other person in this establishment, or I cannot in good conscience continue to take my meals here.”
This orientation toward honoring others manifested with particular warmth in his interactions with his talmidim. When students came to pay their respects during Chol HaMoed—the intermediate days of the festivals, when Torah scholars traditionally receive visitors—he would greet them with an exclamation that inverted the expected hierarchy: “What an honor it is to behold you!” This was no mere pleasantry or social formula; it reflected a profound theological conviction, rooted in the mussar teachings he had absorbed from his father-in-law and refined through decades of introspection, that every human being constitutes an image of the Divine and therefore warrants genuine reverence. On these occasions, Rav Dessler would retrieve from an aged cupboard a set of silver goblets and pour wine that he had crafted with his own hands. “This wine I have prepared myself,” he would explain, “and I reserve it exclusively for my most distinguished guests.” The students, young men engaged in the rigorous study of Talmud and halacha, thus found themselves elevated to the status of honored dignitaries in the eyes of their mentor.
This same disposition extended beyond the confines of the teacher-student relationship. On one occasion, Rav Shlomo Wolbe—the German-born mussar master who would himself become one of the preeminent ethical voices of the post-war generation—came to visit Rav Dessler. Rav Wolbe had studied in the great pre-war yeshivos of Mir and Frankfurt, had spent the war years in Sweden after escaping Europe, and had subsequently emerged as a leading figure in Israeli Torah education, eventually serving as Mashgiach at the Be’er Yaakov Yeshiva south of Tel Aviv. The two men shared a commitment to the perpetuation and adaptation of the Lithuanian mussar tradition in the radically altered landscape of post-Holocaust Jewish life.
As the visit drew to its close and Rav Wolbe prepared to depart, Rav Dessler found himself troubled by a lapse in hospitality: he had offered his guest nothing by way of refreshment. The material circumstances of his life in Bnei Brak were modest in the extreme, and a search of his kitchen yielded only a single chocolate bonbon. Yet even this small token could not be presented without attention to the delicate calculus of honor. Rav Dessler recognized that accompanying Rav Wolbe to his conveyance—a gesture of respect mandated by halacha when seeing off a distinguished visitor—might cause his guest embarrassment, as though the younger man required such ceremonial attention. He therefore announced that he himself had an errand to attend to in the same direction. Together they walked to the bus stop, where Rav Dessler remained until the bus arrived and carried Rav Wolbe away, thereby fulfilling the mitzvah of escorting a guest while preserving the other’s dignity through the fiction of coincidental purpose.
The final years of Rav Dessler’s life, following the passing of Rebbetzin Dessler, presented particular challenges to his deeply ingrained reluctance to impose upon others. A young man named Shalom Ullman was engaged to assist with the daily necessities that the elderly and widowed Mashgiach could no longer manage alone. Yet Rav Dessler’s aversion to receiving service was so thoroughgoing that he would not permit Ullman to prepare him even a cup of coffee. Offers to polish his shoes or to assist in the preparation of wine for Shabbos were similarly declined. The Rav insisted on performing these tasks himself, despite the difficulty they now entailed. Indeed, so completely did Rav Dessler invert the expected relationship between employer and employee that a wry observation circulated through the corridors of the Ponevezh Yeshiva: Rav Dessler served his helper far more than Ullman served his master. This paradox encapsulated the Mashgiach’s lifelong teaching that authentic greatness expresses itself not in the accumulation of honor but in its bestowal; not in being served but in serving; not in standing above others but in elevating them.
The Nekudas HaBechirah: A Revolutionary Framework
Among Rav Dessler’s most influential contributions is his teaching on the “nekudas habechirah”—the point of free choice. In his famous “Kuntres HaBechirah,” he argued that genuine bechirah exists only at the precise point where a person’s yetzer hatov and yetzer hara are evenly matched. Below that point, good behavior comes easily and earns little credit; above it, the challenge is too great for the person’s current level. Only at the exact frontier of one’s spiritual growth does true bechirah—and true reward—exist.
This framework transformed how generations of bnei Torah understood their struggles. It explained why the same temptation might be a major nisayon for one person and trivial for another. It provided a model for spiritual growth: through repeated victories at the nekudas habechirah, a person elevates his point of struggle, rendering yesterday’s challenges automatic and facing new, higher tests. The concept has been compared by academic scholars to philosophical frameworks ranging from Kant to Sartre, yet it emerged organically from Rav Dessler’s synthesis of mussar tradition and penetrating insight.
Wrestling with the Churban
The destruction of European Jewry weighed heavily on Rav Dessler, and his writings from the postwar period reveal a man grappling profoundly with catastrophe. In letters to fellow survivors—including Rav Yechiel Yaakov Weinberg, the Seridei Eish, and Rav Chizkiyahu Yosef Mishkovsky of Krinick—he poured out his heart with a rare emotional intensity.
In one letter from Tammuz 5706 (1946), he acknowledges the pain of those who ask how all this suffering could have meaning, who wonder what lessons could possibly emerge from such horror. “The truth is clear to one who truly seeks it,” he writes, “and only one who wishes to err, errs.” He speaks of ikvesa d’meshicha—the footsteps of Moshiach—and the chevlei Moshiach that the generation was enduring. The letter reveals portions that were omitted from earlier publications, suggesting that even his closest students felt some of his words were too raw for public consumption.
His response to the churban was not merely theological but practical. In “Vayehi Achar HaChurban” (“And It Came to Pass After the Destruction”), he called on survivors to recognize their sacred mission: rebuilding the world of Torah that had been destroyed.
Those who remained alive, he taught, bore responsibility to recreate what had been lost—not merely to mourn but to build.
More controversially, his “Michtav B’Dvar Emunas Chachamim” (“Letter Regarding Faith in the Sages”) addressed those who questioned the guidance of gedolei Yisrael in the years before the war. Rav Dessler firmly rejected any criticism of the gedolim, arguing that we, the “small ones,” are neither capable of nor permitted to judge their decisions. This essay became an important text in the entrenchment of the ideology of daas Torah, though many continue to debate its implications. This author spoke at length with Rav Dovid Feinstein zt”l about the issue and all of its corollary issues and debates.
A Legacy That Endures
Rav Dessler passed away suddenly from a heart attack on 24 Teves 5714 (December 30, 1953), at the age of sixty-one. This author believes it was a widow-maker heart attack. He was buried in the Shomrei Shabbos cemetery in Zichron Meir, Bnei Brak, leaving behind a yeshiva transformed, talmidim bereft, and notebooks full of teachings waiting to be compiled.
His talmidim became the next generation’s leaders. Rav Chaim Friedlander served as mashgiach in Ponevezh. Rav Aryeh Carmell became a major Torah educator in England and translated Michtav MeEliyahu into English. Rav Mattisyahu Salomon brought the Kelm-Rav Dessler approach to America as Mashgiach of Beis Medrash Govoha in Lakewood.
Rav Moshe Shapira developed Rav Dessler’s philosophical approach in his own shiurim for decades in Yerushalayim. Through them and countless others, Rav Dessler’s influence permeates the yeshiva world.
His son, Rav Nachum Zev Dessler, carried the family legacy to America, founding the Hebrew Academy of Cleveland. His writings continue to be studied, analyzed, and debated. Academic scholars compare his concepts to Western philosophy; yeshiva bachurim grapple with his demanding vision of avodas Hashem. And those in high school and beyond have become enamored with his thought.
Perhaps most remarkably, Rav Dessler achieved what few mussar masters have accomplished: he made mussar intellectually compelling to generations raised in the modern world.
On this yahrtzeit, seventy-two years after his sudden passing, we remember a man who bridged many worlds: Kelm, chassidus, prewar Europe, postwar Eretz Yisrael, traditional mussar, modern intellectual inquiry and yes – even Reader’s Digest. His Michtav MeEliyahu remains not merely a sefer to study but a letter addressed to each of us—a summons to find our own nekudas habechirah and, through relentless effort, to elevate it ever higher.
The author can be reached at yairhoffman2@gmail.com
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