Rebbetzen Tziporah

 Dear friends,

My mother’s yahrtzeit, the 9th of Iyar, (never mind that we in the family thought it was on the 10^th. The correction came when I saw that the date on the tombstone was different from the one on the computer. She would have understood this – she never trusted computers). It falls on the day of Rav Chalkowski’s shloshim. The two never met, yet the kind of life each of them lived – steady, principled, and unembellished – feels in some ways parallel. My mother, like Rav Chalkowski’s mother, saw Eretz Yisrael as the natural place for a Jew. Although I was an only child, she never tried to dissuade me from living in Israel; on the contrary, in her later years she made aliyah herself. For her, aliyah was never a change of address or citizenship, but something literal – an upward movement in how one lives: in dress, in observance, and in a quiet pride in what we are. Rav Chalkowski would often speak of his own mother in a similar register. After the sudden death of her husband, Rav Chalkowski’s mother recalled being told that Israel is the place for our people, and she took her young family into the unknown, settling in Kibbutz Lavi – a distance from England as real and as total as Maalot Dafna is from Brooklyn.

Against that backdrop, I want to share this about Rav Moshe Chalkowski, whose life, in a different setting and language, reflected a similar seriousness about how a Jew stands in the world.

Some of you know who Rav Moshe Chalkowski was. You may know him as one of the early pioneers in what Neve eventually became – the largest and most successful of the many open doors to women who were seeking to rediscover or discover who they are as Jews. He was with Neve since the 70s, even before me (and yes, most people had abandoned the caves, since the majority of dinosaurs were gone). Rabbi Refson, the one who began the entire process, was looking for someone to be part of his emergent vision and had asked Rabbi Chalkowski to come aboard. It seemed like an unlikely headhunt – why would a man successfully learning drop everything and do the equivalent of making Aliyah to another planet? When he consulted with his Rebbe, Rav Shlomo Wolbe zatzal, he was told that this is the next step in his journey, and as was very characteristic, he committed himself heart and soul to building.

In order for you to better understand the man whose idealism was never far from his humility, his vast storage of common sense, and ability to do things uncompromisingly without tossing humor out the window, I am giving you a bit of a peek into his Rebbe’s approach. Rav Chalkowski taught and lived Alei Shor. Here is a snack – to have the meal, you have to do the work. There were a few non-negotiable principles:

EVERY PERSON IS UNIQUE

He often emphasized that a person is an entire world unto himself. Growth begins not with imitation, but with discovering one’s own inner structure. Rabbi Chalkowski never saw “another girl” – he saw another world with a past, present, and aspiration for a future.

MUSSAR IS ABOUT BUILDING, NOT BREAKING

His principles avoided the (easy-to-use) tactics of guilt. He would strengthen what is healthy, develop awareness, and aim to cultivate middos gradually.

AVOID EXTREMISM

He loved to talk about being a BTN – a Baalas Teshuvah who is normal.

INNER SELF-AWARENESS (HAKARAT HANEFESH)

His vaadim helped the participants learn to ask real questions. What motivates me? What patterns define my life?

ORDER AND STRUCTURE (SEDER)

Rav Wolbe believed spiritual growth requires rhythm and order. He famously wrote that the greater a person becomes, the more ordered his life tends to be. Structure creates freedom from impulsiveness.

SMALL, PRACTICAL CHANGE

He distrusted dramatic spiritual resolutions. Instead:  Small practices, repeatable habits, and slow internalization are what lead to real change. He suggested using concrete exercises and mini-steps to choreograph the “dance” (a phrase he would never use) towards integrating emotion and developing sensitivity, relationships, and letting the person you are and want to be touch your daily conduct.

He avoided idealized spirituality detached from ordinary life.

EDUCATION MEANS SEEING THE INDIVIDUAL

When this became who he genuinely was, nothing could be further from him than forcing all students into identical molds. Rav Wolbe would maintain: A mechanech must ask:  Who is this? What is his natural path? What blocks his growth?

Rabbi Chalkowski took all of this to the real world. He loved demoting any bit of pompous “chashivus”—he had the joy of a child sticking a pin into a balloon.

I knew the Chalkowskis before I knew Neve. In one of the first years of my marriage, my husband had to be abroad for Rosh Hashanah. I don’t remember anymore how we even knew of each other’s existence, let alone that I could use an invitation for a Yom Tov meal, but at the time it felt natural. I came the second night of Rosh Hashanah. The usual (or more correctly unusual) fruits were on the table so that the brachah Shehecheyanu (thanking Hashem for giving us life and reaching this point) is said, celebrating the new year… and the new fruit. There is a lot of potential solemnity and, as the Rav picked up the fruit (I think it was a guava), he said exactly what I was thinking but would never say: “Nobody would eat this if it wasn’t Rosh Hashanah,” which, given its taste and texture, is… true. The invisible ice was broken, and the warmth touched everyone in the room, including me.

Seeing everyone meant recognizing what needed to be done and how. He slept in his office during the Gulf War to see that the girls didn’t feel isolated from anyone who could be there for them if an emergency arose.

What stays with people is less a formal legacy and more the experience of being around him. He had a way of making big ideas feel human and serious moments feel just a little lighter without losing their depth. Those who knew him—as family, students, or in passing—tend to remember not only what he said, but the rare feeling of being properly seen, often with a touch of humor at just the right moment. In the end, his influence lives less in slogans and more in the quieter, more grounded way,

Love 

Tziporah

 

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