Had you been spying on my backyard on a Sunday afternoon a few weeks ago, you would have seen an unusual sight: me, wearing a hardhat, safety goggles and work gloves, wielding a chainsaw, preparing to chop down a tree that had become a nuisance.
Felling a tree is an art of sorts. One first makes a wedge-cut on the side facing where the tree is to land, and then cuts through the trunk from the other side. In this case, I calibrated the wedge-cut to ensure that the tree would miss the Rabbi Sherer Hoop Memorial.
The what? Glad you asked. Therein lies a story.
21 Iyar was the 27th yahrtzeit of the legendary Agudah leader. As every year, office staff gathered in the main boardroom at the national office, learned Mishnayos and made a l’chayim l’zeicher nishmaso. This year, after most of the staff had left the room, I reminisced to those still there about something that had happened during my early days at the Agudah.
Thirty-one years ago, I was a mechanech who had no interest in leaving the classroom when Rabbi Sherer invited me to come on board. I balked but, in the end, after consulting with my rebbi, Rav Yaakov Weinberg, zt”l, and receiving a push from Above (long story), I gave in.
It was quite an adjustment moving from a small, close-knit community in Providence, Rhode Island, to the Big City, a place I had always shunned as a potential residence.
But I and my family eventually settled in, and I tried to do my job as best I could.
One of the early assignments with which I was tasked was really a great honor. Rabbi Sherer had been asked by the editor of a then-popular general Jewish newspaper to write something about some topic—I don’t remember what it was—but was busy with a slew of more important things. So he told me what he wanted to say and asked me to ghost-write a draft for him. I did. He marked the draft up. And I edited it (probably several times, until it met his famously perfectionist standards).
End of story? Almost.
A few weeks later, Rabbi Sherer summoned me to his office. Uh-oh, I thought. Did I mess something up like the time I wrote a letter to two officials and forgot to change the salutation in one of them? (Disaster was averted, as the boss insisted on seeing the letters before they were mailed. He pointed to the error and looked at me, which was all it took to ensure the dumb mistake was quickly corrected, and never repeated.)
Baruch Hashem, the summons this time was not born of any wrongdoing. When I entered his office, he handed me a check from the newspaper for $150. “What is this for?” I asked. “It’s for the article you wrote for me. They sent me a remuneration. As you see, I’ve signed the check over to you.”
“Uh, Rabbi Sherer,” I protested. “It was your article, not mine.”
“No, you wrote it and I just made a few suggested changes.”
“I can’t take this,” I said. “I draw a salary here and whatever I did was part of my job!”
He wouldn’t hear of it, and pushed the check into my hand. “Go buy something for your children with it.”
That was classic Rabbi Sherer. He saw all of us who worked under him as part of a family. He was a strict father, but a father all the same. And his familial feelings had a way of expressing themselves.
And so, I followed his directive precisely, and bought a basketball stand and hoop. I made sure that the kids knew it was a gift from Rabbi Sherer.
After his petirah and our children’s marriages, I left the hoop in place. And today, decades later, there it remains, a memorial of sorts (perhaps, having rusted over the decades, not very impressive to a passer-by, but most meaningful to me) to a giant of a man, someone who changed my life but, more importantly, those of countless Yidden—and the course of Yiddishkeit—in America.
And yes, the tree landed precisely according to plan.
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