(trigger warning: suicide decades ago)
Just found out that Rabbi Yosef Adler z”l of Teaneck has passed on to his world.
The mark of a good rabbi, imho, is not merely their erudition (that is a sine qua non) but their capacity to successfully lead a Jewish community. To shepherd, not just educate.
The mark of a great rabbi, is their willingness to care for those Jews who are not of their community. To offer guidance and counsel and support when it is needed, beyond what is expected of them by their own congregation.
R Adler was a great rabbi. Not because I agreed with all of his policies or his politics or his decisions, but because he consistently rose to the challenge of providing pastoral care for Jewish people who came to him, from all walks of life.
When I was a small child, long before my family returned in teshuba to an observant lifestyle, my grandmother was coerced into committing suicide by her husband. As suicide is prohibited by Jewish law, many rabbis, while sympathetic to my mother’s distress, shied away from such a radioactive situation with a ten foot pole. R Adler, a congregational rabbi from four towns over, hosted the eulogies and handled the funeral with grace, compassion, and knowledge (I do not know his legal justification but I suspect in retrospect that it was a combination of my grandmother’s having been coerced and the requirement of כבוד הבריות respecting human dignity of my mother).
I will always remember that.
His memory is a blessing, and I pray that his family and congregants are comforted by the heavens.