Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz PhD 2019 from
Weizmann Institute on
Vimeo.
How Rabbi Steinsaltz’s whiskey shenanigans changed Judaism for me
The late scholar will be remembered for his Talmud translation and
commentary, but also for his call to avoid idealizing anyone, including
him
It was one of my most memorable interviews. Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz,
the world renowned Talmudist who died on Friday, sat opposite me,
puffing away on his pipe, regaling me with the tale of a drinking
escapade with two friends
“Between us, we finished about three bottles of whisky,” he said, telling me what an “experience” it was.
One of the friends was Conor Cruise O’Brien, the late Irish politician and writer who once
famously tried
to use the might of the United Nations to keep his glass charged,
writing a resolution that insisted the UN headquarters guarantee “the
free flow of wholesome beer at a temperature appropriate to the present
thaw in international relations.”
But Steinsaltz intimated that he drank O’Brien and his other friend
under the table. “In fact, I have a better head for drinking than they
have,” he told me.
If it seems galling to share this recollection soon after his death,
that’s precisely why it should be shared. Steinsaltz was a great
scholar. With his mammoth Talmud translation and commentary, he made the
seminal work of rabbinic wisdom accessible to all. In other books he
provided
valuable insight into a range of other topics, from Passover to prayer.
And it was all done with a view to empower Jewish people to feel
connected to our tradition. “What I am doing,” he told me, “is changing
the melody of one simple sentence, which is: ‘I am a Jew.’
“The sentence has two possible melodies. One is the tune of: ‘I have
an inherited disease.’ The meaning is: ‘I’m not guilty, I didn’t do
anything. I acquired it. I try as much as I can to hide it. And if I
have a way of getting rid of it, though I probably cannot, I will try.
“The other is to sing ‘I am a Jew’ in the same way you’d sing: ‘I am a
royal prince – it’s not my doing, I inherited it.’ The point lies in
what your attitude is towards this inheritance.”
Nu, Nathan? You interview this great thinker, twice, for
conversations that lasted hundreds of pipe-puffs, and decide upon his
passing to share a drinking story?
Absolutely. Because his unusual choice of conversation topic during
our interview was no mere amusement. It was a profound lesson we can
hold onto, long after his passing.
Steinsaltz was not just being charming. He was laughing in the face
of a culture where some religious leaders take on superior airs,
dressing in royal garb and claiming VIP connections to the Almighty.
In his scholarship, Steinsaltz was manning the barricades against the
trend of hagiography – depicting our great Jews as one-dimensional
saints.
One of many lessons he taught us was that when we record the lives of
our heroes, we need to remember them as three-dimensional beings. That
doesn’t mean dishing dirt; it means remembering them as relatable and
deeply human characters.
He controversially insisted that even Biblical characters should not be idealized. He sharply dismissed the view that any person “is a saint so you shouldn’t say something.”
As a scholar of such enormous standing, it was easy to put Steinsaltz
on a pedestal. But both times I met him, he steered the conversation to
ensure this could not happen.
At our second meeting, in 2011, he insisted on interviewing this
interviewer before talking about himself, and went on to be frank about
his own personality,
saying
the task he had just finished, the first ever translation of the Talmud
into Modern Hebrew, “was in many ways to keep myself in rein.”
He was tempted to write “astonishing” and “novel” works, but that
would have put him at the center. “Working on this kind of thing you are
far more thinking about the readers, whoever they are, than you are
thinking about what I can do to glorify myself,” he said.
At our first interview, in 2005, the 26-year-old journalist in front
of him was awestruck. I wrote in my article at the time that, given the
authority he had as a reference resource on the page, meeting him “feels
as unreal as, say, going for tea with the Oxford English Dictionary.”
He wanted none of that. If we were spending time together, I was to
take him as he was, complete with a drinking story, and an admission
amid his long, winding sentences that he was “very un-user friendly.” We
talked about his interests at the time, as an amateur detective
novelist, sculptor and zoologist.
He criticized the adulation of rabbis, saying that “whether you
worship Michael Jackson or Rabbi So-and-So it is sometimes the same need
to be dependent.”
I was reporting on religious affairs and these cookie-cutter accounts
of great sages were all around me at the time, so it was refreshing to
meet one who gave such a rounded view of himself, and urged doing so
with other figures we encounter as we delve into Jewish study.
I went to hear about Steinsaltz the Talmudist, but in his worldview,
if you only bother to listen when a person is answering the questions
you think are important, you miss some of the best and most interesting
bits.
“People are intrinsically complex, complicated, so to make a
hagiography is to take a real person and to overcast him with plastic
cladding,” he said in a video interview.
There is next-to-no importance in the fact that Steinsaltz went
drinking with Conor Cruise O’Brien and they finished three bottles of
whisky. What’s important is that he was the type of person who would
tell such a story, and speak of much else that made him relatable, when
being quizzed on his magnum opus by an admiring young journalist.
Just as his Talmud translation and commentary is part of his lasting
legacy to the Jewish People, so is
his clarion call against hagiography.
And the way he made sure there was no pedestal in sight when I
interviewed him, makes me think about this now.
It makes me think that, as the great and the good are giving him
well-deserved plaudits for his earnest achievements, he would like to
also be remembered as he taught us to remember others. I’m convinced
that he would crack a smile if he could see that, as Israel’s Prime
Minister and President are eulogizing him, it’s also being noted that he
could hold his drink better than Conor Cruise O’Brien could.
Our image of people can quickly fade to the sum part of their
Wikipedia entries, or the hallowed pages of rabbinically-sanctioned
biographies. I hope our memories of Steinsaltz capture something of the
three-dimensional man.
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/how-rabbi-steinsaltzs-whiskey-shenanigans-changed-judaism-for-me/?utm_source=The+Daily+Edition&utm_campaign=daily-edition-2020-08-09&utm_medium=email
