Personality
Rabbi Ziv was known for his humility, lovingkindness, thoughtfulness, and focus on order.
At Rabbi Ziv’s funeral, his friend and colleague Rabbi Eliezer Gordon, the Rabbi and Rosh Yeshiva of Telz, said that aside from Rabbi Ziv’s greatness in Torah, he had never heard a single word from him that was not related to Torah and to fear of Heaven.
Rabbi Ziv was not only great in Musar but also in his knowledge of Torah and Talmud. Rabbi Gordon, who was known as a fiery and tempestuous genius, would repeat his Talmudic thoughts to Rabbi Ziv and seek his opinion on them, for he valued Rabbi Ziv’s scholarship highly. Rabbi Gordon said that his friend had been fluent in three orders of the Talmud, to such a level where he knew every comment of Rashi and Tosafot word for word. He was also fluent in all four divisions of the Shulchan Aruch and could locate any given Halacha within it with pinpoint precision.
Read more about this topic: Simcha Zissel Ziv
Famous quotes containing the word personality:
“But most of us are apt to settle within ourselves that the man who blocks our way is odious, and not to mind causing him a little of the disgust which his personality excites in ourselves.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Talent alone can not make a writer. There must be a man behind the book; a personality which by birth and quality is pledged to the doctrines there set forth, and which exists to see and state things so, and not otherwise; holding things because they are things.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The habit some writers indulge in of perpetual quotation is one it behoves lovers of good literature to protest against, for it is an insidious habit which in the end must cloud the stream of thought, or at least check spontaneity. If it be true that le style c’est l’homme, what is likely to happen if l’homme is for ever eking out his own personality with that of some other individual?”
—Dame Ethel Smyth (1858–1944)