It’s a Friday morning assembly in one of the pioneer yeshivos in Brooklyn. The principal is speaking to his boys -- to him, they really are his -- and he speaks from his heart to theirs. They listen and soak it up. He enters their own world and paints it in the colors of his great rebbe, Reb Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz; he brings them into the thought-world of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch; he shows them how to shape their lives as Jews in America. He plants seeds that still flourish and bear fruit, decades later.

That man is Rabbi Elias Schwartz, the legendary principal of Yeshiva Toras Emes in Borough Park. He is an educator’s educator, one of the most successful yeshiva principals ever to mold the Jewish products of the New World. He inspired students, he trained teachers, he convinced parents that even their children, even in America,could become the fulfillment of their grandparents’ dreams.

In this book, Rabbi Schwartz shares with us the words and ideas that made American-Jewish history. Close your eyes and imagine yourself in the auditorium of Toras Emes. Rabbi Schwartz advances to the shtender(lectern) and you feel the warmth. You know he is speaking directly to you, even though more than a hundred other students may be eavesdropping. He begins. He tells a story, a parable, an insight. He talks about your own difficulties and you wonder how he understands you so well.

Let’s join him as he “delves within” us and shows us how to become what we really want to be.

This is a book for parents and children, for teachers and students. It is the formula that still lives in thousands of families and that infuses four generations by now. Let’s read and delve.