Rav Eliyohu Eliezer Dessler

Early years

Rav Eliyohu Eliezer Dessler zt"l, known all his life as Elya Lazer or Eliyahu Leizer, was born in Gomel in 5652 (1892). His father, Rav Reuven Dov Dessler, was a talmid of Rav Simcha Zissel Ziv, the Alter (Elder) of Kelm, one of the main leaders of the Mussar movement. Elya Lazer lost his mother when he was young, and his father remarried. Rav Reuven Dov became a successful timber merchant in Homel, but he lost nearly his entire fortune after the Russian Revolution, which led his son to relocate to England.

As a boy he learned with private tutors. In 1906, at the age of fourteen, he entered the yeshiva of Kelm as one of its youngest students. The yeshiva was then led by Rav Zvi Hirsch Braude, the son of its founder. Rav Dessler later spoke warmly of the learning and the work on self-perfection he had known there. Kelm was unusual in giving its students a secular education alongside their Torah learning, so that they could earn a living without having to take rabbinic posts.

He was a diligent student at Kelm. He received semicha (rabbinic ordination) from his uncle, Rav Chaim Ozer Grodzinski, who became the spiritual leader of Orthodox Lithuanian Jewry until his passing in 1939 and rarely gave semicha.

Torah and leadership

In 1920 he married Bluma, a granddaughter of the Alter of Kelm. He went into business with his father and turned down a position as a dayan (rabbinical judge) in Vilna. After his stepmother passed away in 1928, he had to accompany his father to London for medical treatment, and he decided to stay in the United Kingdom. His wife and children remained behind for the time being.

In London he served in the rabbinate, first in the East End and later in Dalston, in the north-east of the city. His family joined him in 1931. In Dalston he began to teach young people, and for a time he was the private tutor of the children of the wealthy Sassoon family. A talmid from those years, Rav Aryeh Carmell, became one of the main spreaders of his ideas after his passing.

His son left London in the early 1930s to learn in the yeshiva of Kelm. During the war they escaped to the Far East and eventually settled in the United States. A few months before the outbreak of the Second World War, Rav Dessler's wife went to Lithuania with her daughter to visit relatives. The war separated them, and the women spent most of it in Australia.

In the early 1940s he took over the leadership of the newly formed Gateshead kollel, a framework for married men to learn Torah that was then still a novelty in Western Europe. Over the following years he led the kollel, raised its funds and also taught small groups of young people.

In the late 1940s the leaders of Yeshivas Ponevezh in Bnei Brak convinced him to become its mashgiach ruchani (spiritual supervisor and speaker on mussar). He moved to Eretz Yisroel and once again gathered a small circle of talmidim. One of them, Rav Chaim Friedlander, later filled his place as mashgiach of Ponevezh.

Teachings and seforim

Most of Rav Dessler's Torah reached the public through the talmidim he raised in England and in Eretz Yisroel. After his passing they edited his letters and mussar writings into the six-volume Michtav MeEliyahu, a name that means a letter from Eliyahu. It alludes to the letter that Eliyahu HaNavi sent to the king of Yehudah, which arrived after Eliyahu had ascended to heaven in a fiery chariot. The work was later translated into English as Strive for Truth.

One of his most influential ideas runs through all his writings, and especially through an essay in the first volume called Kuntres HaChesed (Pamphlet on Lovingkindness). It is a Jewish philosophy of love. Real love, he taught, is not give and take but is built entirely on giving. He also spoke strongly against being absorbed in materialism and technology, which he saw as distancing a person from spirituality.

Another idea explained in Michtav MeEliyahu is the Nekudas HaBechirah (point of free will). Each person has one point in his avodah where the real struggle with the yetzer hara takes place. The levels beneath it have already been won and are easy, and the levels above it are not yet within reach. Each time a person chooses good, his point of free will rises a little higher, and the same choice becomes easier in the future. Man's task in life is to keep raising that point and so keep growing in his service of Hashem.

It is hard to say which of his teachers shaped him most, but he was clearly a product of the yeshiva world of the early twentieth century, which was deeply influenced by the Mussar movement. He was also at home in Kabbalah, in Chassidic seforim and in Jewish philosophy. In explaining the fundamentals of Jewish thought he followed the approach of the Maharal of Prague, and another great influence on him was the Tanya.

Later years and passing

Rav Dessler passed away suddenly on 24 Teves 5714 (30 December 1953). In the months before, he had been unwell with a circulatory illness.