My Personal Rebbe - Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks ZT'L

the two great initial inspirations for me were the lubavitcheraba and rabbi soloveiji both of blessed memory but my own personal teacher was a giant and still is rabbi nakamurabinovich who is then head of jews college i became his successor and is today head of the yeshiva in malaya now he was and is an intellectual giant a huge command of the entire rabbinic literature author of a vast and extraordinary commentary on the whole of maimonides mishna tara and at the same time proficient in virtually all the sciences who was a professor of mathematics and probability theory at the university of toronto there was almost nothing he didn't know and he was my personal teacher for 12 years for those 12 years we studied together at virtually every day now he was and is a man of enormous moral courage and intellectual clarity and from him i learned what is the life of torah so he would constantly challenge me to learn more and learn more i once complained to him that i had enormous difficulty getting to sleep at night i'm an insomniac and he said to me oh really teach me how to be an insomniac that's great i'd love that lo nitna laila ella laguersa he quoted the gomorrah that god only created nights so that we could have time to study he envied my inability to sleep there was one occasion when his car went into the garage to be serviced and he asked me to give him a lift home and it was a hot summer's day and we were in one of the most busy junctions in london at a traffic lights and when the traffic lights changed from red to green my car stalled and this was a very busy junction and i was causing an enormous tail back and my teacher turned to me with absolute equanimity and said well since we're here we have to learn torah together and he then proceeded to give me a most beautiful shear on maimonides hilhoch mitavio vellorzev of the sabbatical year and in the meanwhile cars were piling up piling up and they're hooting their horns and he very calmly reached the end of his exposition and he said and now try the key again i turned the key the car started off we went it was a man who used every single thing that happened in his life as an occasion to learn and live and that is the kind of person you should take as your personal teacher in judaism [Music]