On Friday morning we awoke to painful news: that Rav Adin Steinsaltz, zt”l, had passed away. The flood of tributes came immediately, and many more eulogies are sure to follow. I offer these recollections with humility, knowing how inadequate they are; Rav Steinsaltz was too multifaceted, too extraordinary a personality, to be captured in any one article.
I have long considered myself one of Rav Steinsaltz’s “students from afar,” although I sadly never had the opportunity to develop a personal relationship with him. Nevertheless, I was blessed to have the opportunity, about 10 years ago, to be Rav Steinsaltz’s personal driver for a day—a small taste of what Rabbi Arthur Kurzweil, Rav Steinsaltz’s closest American student and personal driver, experienced over decades (Rabbi Kurzweil’s book, On the Road With Rabbi Steinsaltz: 25 Years of Pre-Dawn Car Trips, Mind-Blowing Encounters, and Inspiring Conversations with a Man of Wisdom, is a must-read for Rav Steinsaltz chasidim).
My wife’s uncle, Ilan Kaufthal, was a close friend and supporter of Rav Steinsaltz for many years. When Ilan’s mother passed away, Rav Steinsaltz wished to pay a shiva call, and needed a driver to drive him from New York City to the shiva house, and from there to the airport. Amazingly, even in the midst of their mourning, the Kaufthals remembered my fascination with Rav Steinsaltz, and arranged for me to be the driver.
I had so many questions, about life, Torah and Judaism, that I wished to ask Rav Steinsaltz, and I was not disappointed. I quickly learned to expect the unexpected. After settling into the car, he asked me to tell him about myself. When I explained that I was the assistant rabbi at the Young Israel of Staten Island, he said: “I have family in Staten Island. But let me ask you—what connection does a sane man like you have with Staten Island?” But he was just getting started. He said: “Assistant rabbi? Some assistant rabbis are just meant to arrange chairs. Are you one of those?”
Rav Steinsaltz was brilliantly, deviously funny; he was the antithesis of self-important rabbis who take themselves far too seriously. Speaking about the rabbinate, he said, “The Chief Rabbi of Rome is the only Chief Rabbi I like, since he’s a part-time Chief Rabbi.” And he had no qualms about speaking bluntly, or even sharply; he didn’t mince words. In our discussion regarding interfaith conversations and the Jewish people’s relationship with the Christian world, he said: “The Jewish machers forced me to meet with nine catholic cardinals and give them a shiur. The cardinals didn’t want to meet with Reform or Conservative Rabbis—only Orthodox!” After the shiur, Cardinal Frances George of Chicago later told Rabbi Yehiel Poupko that “Rabbi Steinsaltz spoke to us for an hour and offended us from beginning to end! But he was right about everything he said…” As Rav Steinsaltz said to me that day about Jewish-Christian dialogue, “We dance together, but we don’t dance the tango. Just the cha-cha!”
One of my rabbeim at Yeshiva University was Rabbi Ozer Glickman, zt”l, whom we affectionately referred to as the “ROGue” (Rabbi Ozer Glickman). Rav Glickman was a Jewish Renaissance man—a Torah scholar, philosopher of the law, banker, musician and more, a man who could not be placed inside a box or “classified” as a particular type of Jew. Rav Steinsaltz was the same way, a man of extraordinary curiosity and wisdom who was too complex, too authentic, to be categorized. He was a rebel in spirit, the “rogue” among the rabbis, who perceived the world differently than mainstream Torah scholars.
Shmoozing together in the Kaufthal kitchen, Rav Steinsaltz’s conversations moved back and forth seamlessly, from the Talmud to mystery novels, from the world’s deepest lake (Lake Baikal, in Russia) to the Tanya. Rav Steinsaltz was fascinated by almost everything, including science, sports and people (my favorite line: “I am also interested in people—sometimes I even like them!”).
There are many biographies published in the Orthodox world that portray great rabbis as, in Rav Steinsaltz’s words, “plastic saints”—as perfect people who never made mistakes. Rav Steinsaltz, however, understood that perfection is for angels, that it is our striving that makes us uniquely human. He wrote that “every man is a contradiction… a combination of the holy and the trivial. One has to integrate it all into some workable unity by building one’s life as though it were an annex in the court of the Holy Temple, the inner chambers of which one can never be sure of entering.” If anyone has ever succeeded in living these words, it is Rav Steinsaltz himself.
At the Kaufthal shiva house, Rav Steinsaltz related that when Rav Kook’s mother died, Rav Kook cried. Someone asked him: “Why are you crying? She was over 90, she lived to see you succeed in your exalted position.” Rav Kook responded: “I’m not crying for her. I’m crying for me. For nobody is going to call me ‘Avrumele’ anymore.”
We too are not crying for Rav Steinsaltz, who lived a life full of extraordinary accomplishments. We cry, instead, for ourselves, for we can no longer stand in the presence of the most unique gadol of our generation. May his memory be a blessing, for all of Klal Yisrael.
Rabbi Elie Mischel is the leader of Synagogue of the Suburban Torah Center.
