Excerpting: “Hacham Baruch” by Rabbi Nachman Seltzer. ArtScroll Shaar Press. 2025. 544 pages. ISBN-10: 142264324.
(Courtesy of Artscroll) Before he became a rabbi, Raymond Beyda worked with a man named R’ Chaim, a Yekke (a Jew of German ancestry). R’ Chaim’s father was from the Upper West Side, but he’d been raised in Brooklyn where he attended Yeshiva Torah Vodaath and was a talmid of R’ Pam, and later R’ Belsky. This Yekke served as the CFO for the same company where Raymond was employed. He was an extremely punctual individual and would walk through the door at exactly nine o’clock, not 8:59 and not a minute past nine. He would stop for lunch at noon and be back at his desk working at 12:31. If you tried to talk with him during working hours, you would find out very quickly that it wasn’t going to happen. Not during work hours.
As the years passed, Raymond noticed something very interesting. For every additional year that the man worked for the company, he began leaving work fifteen minutes earlier. Five turned into 4:45, which turned into 4:30… until he was leaving at 4:00 each afternoon.
“How do you arrange to leave earlier every year?” Raymond asked him.
“I made a deal with Joe.” (Joe Sutton was the firm’s owner.)
“What kind of deal?”
“At the end of every year, Joe offers me a raise. I tell him to keep the raise, but to let me leave fifteen minutes earlier.”
The man continued doing this until he was leaving at two in the afternoon.
One day, Joe Sutton turned to his employee and said, “I have to ask you something. You’ve been turning down my raise offers for years in order to leave earlier and earlier. Where are you going every day?”
“I go to learn with my rabbi.”
Joe was a businessman, but he was also a good Jew. As long as the job got done, he was more than happy for his worker to go off and learn. It turned out that his CFO was learning one-on-one with R’ Yisroel Belsky in his office at Torah Vodaath.
“One day,” Raymond said, “the two of us had to go somewhere together. When the man got into my car, I was listening to a cassette of Hacham Baruch giving a shiur, as I always did. At the start of the drive, the man was learning something from a sefer. A few minutes later, he picked up his head and asked, “Who are you listening to?”
“You have your rabbi, I have mine.”
“Who is he?”
“His name is Hacham Baruch.”
“I have to meet him!”
“Why do you have to meet my rabbi?”
He looked at me. “Don’t you hear it?”
“Hear what?”
“The way he speaks. This is a great man. I have to meet him!”
I was very surprised. The tape I was listening to was one of the shiurim that had been recorded by Alan Mizrachi. It was a class on a very basic level, far below my fellow employee’s level of learning. In the class in question, the Rabbi would read from the Shulhan Aruch and then use what he’d read as a springboard to discuss a wide range of topics with his talmidim. There was no in-depth learning; it was not that kind of class. Nevertheless, my fellow employee was very impressed.
The CFO started attending Hacham Baruch’s class. He went every single week. Why did he do this? After all, he was the havruta of R’ Yisroel Belsky, the Rosh Yeshiva of Torah Vodaath and one of the poskei hador! But R’ Chaim was able to feel the greatness emanating from Hacham Baruch (even over a recording), and he wanted to experience that greatness up close and personal. He also wanted to connect with the Rabbi’s incredible font of knowledge.
Such was the attraction of Hacham Baruch to every Jew, from simple to great. Sometimes, all it took was the sound of his voice to draw people close to him.
Reprinted from Hacham Baruch by Rabbi Nachman Seltzer with permission from the copyright holder, ArtScroll Mesorah Publications.
