Rebbetzin Miller reflects on her life and the kingdom of Torah her husband built
Rebbetzin Chaya Gitta Miller sits in her tasteful and cozy living room, the walls of which are lined with seforim and dotted with pictures, during our interview. It’s in this small Northern British town of Gateshead, within terraced houses lining a narrow street, that her husband, Rabbi Mordechai Miller ztz”l, helped found and fashion an institution — Gateshead Seminary — which would produce thousands upon thousands of talmidos who absorbed his message that nothing can compare to the wisdom, depth, and beauty of Torah.
There’s a lot of laughter in Rebbetzin Miller’s home. There always was. Rabbi Mordechai Miller was known for his dry wit alongside his insightful shiurim. Even now, 25 years after his passing, the laughter in the Miller household hasn’t been silenced. Gateshead ladies love to stop by for a good game of Scrabble with this vibrant nonagenarian Rebbetzin.
Two of her daughters are also here, and gales of laughter often intersperse their vivid reminiscing. Their lives have a laser-clear Torah focus, but there’s a lighter side and an overt happiness in the package, too. As Rabbi Dr. Akiva Tatz, a disciple, wrote in his obituary of Rabbi Mordechai Miller, he was “a serious oveid with a light touch and sense of humor… intensity cloaked in sparkling good nature.”
The concepts he taught were the depths of Torah hashkafah and machshavah, but, Rabbi Tatz says, “His unique talent for clarity and simplicity made him a master teacher.” Rabbi Miller could take deep concepts from the Maharal and use the clearest language and the most apt parables to make them accessible to his young students. Some girls may have found the highbrow lessons too difficult to understand, but Rabbi Miller maintained his approach. “I’m not teaching them things they know already,” he’d say. And if they couldn’t understand, that was fine, too. “They don’t have to be able to grasp Torah. Even better, let them feel that Torah is so deep and so vast that they can’t always understand it.”
Rabbi Miller was a master of hashkafah. Among the streams of young people who passed through Gateshead, there were those who harbored questions about their Yiddishkeit, and dozens of both bochurim and sem girls had their doubts assuaged by him. He gave highly popular shiurim for SEED, and once traveled to South Africa as a keynote speaker at a kiruv seminar. In fact, the story goes that his shiurim even changed the life of a technician who was fixing someone’s tape recorder. He put in a tape of Rabbi Miller’s shiur to test whether the machine was fixed — and found himself transfixed and wanting more.
The five printed volumes of Rabbi Mordechai Miller’s Shabbos Shiurim are mainstays for anyone who wants to plumb the depths of mussar, hashkafah, and halachah in the weekly parshah, but they are only a fraction of the richness that exists in the notebooks of thousands upon thousands of Gateshead sem girls. If the girls who absorbed his shiurim carry its truths to their own homes and imbue them in children and students, the credit goes to their master teacher, and to his wife, who Rav Eliyahu Dessler ztz”l handpicked to stand at his side.