Their every word and deed revealed an ancient civilization and traditions filtered through the centuries. Their bodies were turned into fountains of blood by the delirium of Islamist murderers who shouted “Allahu Akbar”. But to see them alive, shadows swaying, was to realize that those four learned men transmitted the plastic image of scenes from the Old Testament.
They each wanted to aspire to be a “talmid khakham”, students of rabbis who preceded them, in the tradition of those pious scholars who founded a democratic theocracy and rebelled against the most formidable autocratic monarchy of the time, Egypt.
The four Israeli rabbis killed with a machete in the synagogue in Har Nof, Jerusalem, lived with an acute sense of the Jewish tragedy. The destruction of the Temple, the mass pogroms of Chmielnicki and the Holocaust were physically present in their lives.
They spoke of “mesirut nefesh”, Hebrew for self-sacrifice. “The Lord chooses his children, we have to respect his wishes.” This infinite compassion was the greatness of Rabbis Moshe Twersky, Aryeh Kupinsky, Kalman Levine and Avraham Shmuel Goldberg. They had a pale and elusive beauty, intensified by a spiritual contempt for fear. They wore long white beards and blue eyes bursting with curiosity.
Twersky was heir to two of the families who have contributed volumes to the glory of Orthodox Judaism. A life of study and prayer. His maternal grandfather, the great Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Jewish philosopher and rabbinic head of Yeshiva University, known simply as “the Rav”, pressed Pope Paul VI to reinstate the condemnation of the charge of deicide during the writing of the Vatican encyclical on Judaism Nostra Aetate, which had disappeared from the draft under the pressure of the Arab eastern churches. The other grandfather, Rabbi Isadore Twersky, famous for his works on Maimonides, founded the Center of Jewish studies at Harvard.