I was surprised to see in my Facebook memories that it has been more than four years since my teacher Rabbi Neil Gillman z”l died, and four years since I wrote about his influence on me as a teacher for the Rabbis Without Borders blog. I guess my sense of the passage of time has been distorted, not only by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic but also by the subsequent passing of several other influential teachers and mentors during these years. Reading my post from December 2017, I’m struck by how I could have written these same words last week:
“There is no way to know whether they [my students] will remember anything I taught them or whether they will still care about Esau in 25 years. I can only hope they will retain the feeling with which each lesson was offered to them, by a teacher who had the privilege and joy to find her way into Torah from a great rabbi whose memory remains a blessing.”