The weight of a diagnosis and the enormity of what is about to happen in that operating room have a way of filling every available moment of silence.

 Rabbi Simcha Yitzchak Lauer, however, was not most people.

 While sitting together with his wife, Mrs. Rena Lauer, waiting for his first brain surgery, Reb Simcha was calmly learning daf yomi, in the same fashion as always.  She asked him, moments before the surgery was to begin, whether he was afraid.  Simcha calmly looked up from his gemara, and said that he wasn’t afraid.  And then he kept learning for another few minutes.

 "It was like the Torah just guided him and kept him grounded," she would later say. And anyone who knew him, who had watched him move through the world with the particular quality of presence that he carried, would understand that this was not a performance of courage. It was simply who he was.

 When you meet someone named “Simcha,” you might anticipate someone exuberant, perhaps boisterous, someone whose happiness announces itself when he walks through the door.

Simcha's happiness was a quieter one.  It was more interior, deeper, with an understated satisfaction of a person who knows exactly what he has been given and considers it more than enough.

But even with that quieter tone, it was clear to Simcha that life is for celebrating.  At his own wedding, the musician suggested a slower processional. Simcha overruled him. He wanted Ki Mitzion Tetze Torah, and he wanted it fast. "Isn't this a happy day?" he said.

 When Simcha and his future wife were both studying education, still in the early stages of dating, he let her in on a project he’d been working on.  Simcha believed, and felt it strongly, that there was a great untapped opportunity in the way we bring Torah to the next generation, that so much more could be done to make it come alive, to show young people how immediate and urgent and relevant the Torah's conversation with the world actually is.

 "I remember thinking, okay, big shot, do you have a better idea?" Mrs. Lauer would later recall. "In fact, he did."

 His idea was specific: take the news stories people are already reading and discussing anyway, and show what the Torah has to say about them. Not as a parlor trick, but as a genuine demonstration of the Torah's inexhaustible engagement with human life in every era.

 For years before they married, he had been collecting news stories, saving each one in a separate document, and then, as he accumulated more and more Torah knowledge, adding relevant sources.  Soon enough he had hundreds, eventually thousands, of citations from across the spectrum of sefarim, biographies, shiurim, and responsa, each one filed away in its proper place.

 The first volume of Learning the News appeared in 2019. A new two-volume set, Contemporary Questions, Halachic Answers, organized by parsha for the Shabbos table, appeared this past February, shortly before Reb Simcha left the world.

 The books are accessible enough for a teenager with little background, and layered enough that a talmid chacham finds himself turning pages. That was the design from the beginning. He wanted the Torah to reach as many people as it possibly could.

 He was not, however, particularly interested in the attention that came with it.  When his first publisher suggested book signings and public launch events, Rabbi Lauer declined.  It was too much. The sefer was about the Torah it contained, not about him. When he appeared on a Seforim Chatter podcast to speak about the first volume, he spoke almost exclusively about the book itself. Mrs. Lauer later described it: "He said almost nothing extra or anything about himself. He just wanted to get the message about his Torah out there."

 In fact, the publisher of the new set did not learn that Simcha was ill until a matter of weeks before the books went to print. Simcha had not told him because there was no reason, in his view, to make it about himself.

 These were his babies, the product of years of painstaking, joyful labor, and he felt with his whole being the gift that Hashem had allowed him to give.

 The sefarim were the public face of a private world of extraordinary discipline. Simcha maintained sedarim throughout his day, and virtually always had a sefer open.  When he was driving or eating or washing dishes, a shiur was playing. Changing his learning schedule was something he almost never agreed to do. When he visited a rav or posek, he brought a printed list of questions, some pertaining to points of clarification for his sefarim, others purely personal halachic questions, because he wished to be as precise in his mitzvah observance as was humanly possible.

 And all of that love for Torah regularly burst forth and lit up the lives of everyone around him. 

At the Shabbos table, the children waited each week for what they had dubbed "Parsha Fun," the questions and activities and treats and stories that their father prepared to bring the parsha to life for them. The treats and toys related to the parsha; the children had to guess the connection.

 He bought every Jewish children's book he encountered and read them to the children, repeatedly, with patience and evident pleasure. He made a siyum, as it were, on the the "Know Navi" series and the 613 Mitzvos Illustrated with his daughters, always with prizes and activities marking the occasion. When he completed a masechta, the family would gather for a celebration, special food, dancing, sometimes his guitar, and sometimes a PowerPoint he had prepared so the children could understand what he had been learning and why it was worth celebrating.

 In first grade, his daughter's teacher asked the Lauers how a six year old girl had come to know so much general Torah. She seemed to have absorbed an unusual breadth of knowledge.

 His humility was not a quality he cultivated. It was, as best as anyone could tell, simply the natural condition of a person who was not particularly interested in himself.[2]  For example, when he became a chosson, the stream of congratulations that followed him everywhere made him visibly uncomfortable.

 Years later, after the diagnosis, when he was in the hospital awaiting surgery and his neurologist arrived and was stunned to discover his name was not on any Tehillim lists, it took the doctor's astonishment to persuade him. Thousands of people davened for him over four years, many without receiving updates, many without knowing the details, and it moved him deeply that people cared without being asked to. But he had not wanted the attention.

 His sensitivity to others operated with the same quietness. When they made aliyah and Mrs. Lauer wanted to hang the children's Purim projects on the front door, Simcha stopped her gently. Their neighbors were struggling with infertility at the time, and he was afraid the signs would cause them some amount of pain, however slight.

 When he learned of a couple in shul davening for a yeshua, and heard that there was a particular significance to having the kohanim daven for them during birchas kohanim, he printed small cards with their names and distributed them to the kohanim before davening. The couple only found out he had done this after Simcha passed, and are currently expecting their first child, after ten years of waiting.

 While he could still drive, he signed up with Lemaan Achai, a local chesed organization in Ramat Beit Shemesh, to deliver food packages to families before Shabbos. He would stop along the way and add snacks from the store to the packages before delivering them.

 When the tumor was found, Reb Simcha internalized the severity of what he was facing and arrived at something like a spiritual program.  He examined where he could grow, and moved full speed ahead, setting a course to become more of what he already was. 

 He would daven vasikin and often set aside time for private prayer, in areas where no one would disturb him.  He was open with his wife about his constant request for more time with his family, and he decided that, in the meantime, he would have to simply make the time.

 By nature, Simcha was a man who was happiest at home with his sefarim, what he called his friends. Trips and outings were not particularly his inclination. After the diagnosis, he began joining more family trips, taking the children out on Fridays so that his wife could prepare for Shabbos in peace, and eventually even initiating trips around the county.

 At bedtime, the children came to know that they could call for their father when their mother had run out of steam. He would come in and sit with them and tell them stories until they fell asleep.

 Simcha didn’t forget about his parents and decided he wanted to strengthen himself in that area as well.  He set up daily Facetime chavrusas with his parents.  At the end of each call, he would stall and wait for his parents to hang up, as he felt it was improper for a son to end the conversation.

 Mrs. Lauer shared that Simcha started to plan more frequent dates, often weekly, when he could manage it. He heard about Rav Dovid Trenk zt"l leaving his wife notes and decided to bring that custom into his own home.

 Mrs. Lauer reflects, "I often said that Simcha took his cancer as a clear message from Hashem to work on himself.  But the truth was that it was a message for the rest of us around him, because he had so little to improve."

 He continued daf yomi until a few months before he was hospitalized. His seder in Chumash continued until just weeks before. He brought his laptop on every trip, every flight to another country for treatment, every hotel room on the night before a surgery. When he could no longer manage the final stages of editing, his brother-in-law Rabbi Moshe Pessin and Rav Zevy Trenk stepped in and completed them for him.

 When the new volumes arrived, the Rav of his shul came to make a lechaim. Men from the community brought instruments. They gathered around him and sang. The song they chose, or perhaps the song he chose, was Ki Mitzion Tetze Torah. His favorite. The one he had insisted upon at his wedding, over the musician's objection.

 Mrs. Lauer reflected on that moment, "It was clear to him that he had accomplished the mission he set out to when he wrote this sefer. The Torah had come forth, and people appreciated it."

He was 38 years old, with a wife, four young children, and sefarim covering almost every wall. When they told him things were getting worse, right until the last minute, he would say, “I’m still here.”

And he still is. יהא זכרו ברוך