I did not know Rabbi Dovid Landesman well enough to write a full appreciation. But I read enough of his writing at Cross-Currents and in a collection There Are No Basketball Courts in Heaven to know that with his sudden passing Erev Shabbos parashas Shoftim deprived the world of a distinctive and important voice.
What I did not know, however, was what a remarkable mechanech he was over many decades in both Israel and the United States.
Reb Dovid was thoroughly rooted in the world of the yeshivos. He was sent from his native McKeesport (a suburb of Pittsburgh) to Torah Vodaath as a teenager. After marriage, he and his wife Nechama, the daughter of Rabbi Yitzchok Chinn, the rav of McKeesport, made aliyah. Reb Dovid learned for a number of years in Bais HaTalmud under Rabbi Berl Schwartzman.
He always was full of stories of his interactions with the Torah giants of his formative years in the United States: his rebbe Rabbi Gedaliah Schorr, Rabbi Yaakov Kamenetsky, Rav Moshe Feinstein, Rabbi Yitzchok Hutner, and the Satmar Rebbe.
But the yeshiva world of his youth was not that of Eretz Yisroel, where he lived most of his adult life. His was the world Reb Yaakov Kamenetsky, whose watchword was, "Men darf zein normal – Just be normal." Though Reb Dovid learned for many years in kollel and was a talmid chacham, he came from a world in which earning a parnassah was an accepted and normal part of life.
The Israeli chareidi world is very different. A rav whom I respect greatly told me recently, "Yonoson, the problem with you is that you see things in shades. But that doesn't go in Eretz Yisrael: Everything here is black and white." That was not Reb Dovid's world.
Although he was outside the Israeli chareidi mainstream, he was in no way estranged. He was extremely medakdek in all halachic matters, and would not tolerate anyone speaking dismissively of a gadol b'Torah's "chumros." He knew who he was, who the gedolim to whom he had been close were, and that knowledge gave him the confidence to remain independent without any bitterness.
That independence is likely what made him so effective with a wide variety of teenagers outside the chareidi mainstream: Sephardim in Rechasim, where he lived for over two decades, Russian-speaking teenagers in Rabbi Yitzchak Dovid Grossman's Migdal Ohr institutions; modern Orthodox high school kids as principal of YULA in Los Angeles; and in recent years with raw American kids in Israel for post-high school yeshiva studies.
A self-described "troublemaker" was cutting class early in his first year at YULA high school when he ran into Reb Dovid in the hallway. Reb Dovid greeted him and started chatting. An hour later, Reb Dovid looked at his watch and commented, "We are both going to get into trouble if we don't head back to where we belong."
In that hour, Reb Dovid won over that teenager by showing him that "he was genuinely interested in me, my opinions, and the things I cared about."
"He was willing to talk about anything, any time. No issues were off limits," that student remembered. He liked nothing better than stirring up the students in heated debate. Those classroom arguments, wrote one student, "made my brain hurt, but I loved it."
Aaron Katz, who was in the first class at YULA high school to have Rabbi Landesman as principal for four years, attests, "I know for a fact that every single member of our class had a personal relationship with [him]." Katz spent every single Shalosh Seudos his senior year at the Landesman's, and he learned with Rabbi Landesman for four summers after graduating. When he and his wife later moved close to the Landesmans in Ramat Beit Shemesh, the Reb Dovid's first questions were: "Can I take you shopping at the local supermarket?" and "When do we start learning?"
The breadth of his Torah knowledge gave him a wealth of tools with which to connect. He taught Jewish history, and besides his two volumes of essays produced a series of seforim on TaNaCh, several books to help those just entering the world of Gemara learning, co-authored a biography of Rabbi Yosef Breuer, and translated Rabbi Eliyahu KiTov's monumental Book of our Heritage and the Netziv's commentary on Shir Hashirim.
He was comfortable with every Jew, from whatever camp, without being confined to any. Such Jews are a disappearing breed, and he will be deeply missed by his large family, hundreds of students around the globe, and thousands who knew him from his many essays.
