A Torah giant, up close and personal

By Toby Klein Greenwald

JERUSALEM — Myriads of articles and books will be written on the life and legacy of Rav Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz, who passed away on Friday, the 17th of Av, and was buried on Har Hazeitim – the Mount of Olives. The diversity of people who accompanied him to his final rest spoke to the miracles he accomplished in his lifetime.

Once in a generation – if we’re lucky – are we to witness to the creation of such a vast body of Torah work by one person; he has revolutionized Jewish scholarship for hundreds of thousands – perhaps millions — of people, and for future generations. Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, who was a keynote speaker at a dinner in honor of the Rav in 2018, said, “He was trained as a scientist but has the soul of a poet.”

Almost everyone who knew the Rav had a personal story about him. Here are a few, including our own.

In 1965 the Rav married his wife Sara, opened a small hesder yeshiva (in which students divided their time between study and army service), and he founded the Israel Institute of Talmudic Publications in Jerusalem in cooperation with the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office, and the Ministry of Education and Culture. With that he began his life’s work on the Steinsaltz Talmud. He was only 28 at the time. This is not as surprising as one might expect, because at 24 he had been appointed the youngest school principal in Israel, at a school in the Negev.

Though the small yeshiva could not sustain itself beyond the first year, it was a microcosm of things to come. My husband, Yaakov, was one of the six students in this new and unusual yeshiva. He recalls, “The highlight was the seudat shlishith (the third Sabbath meal) that we had at the home of the Rav every week. The singing, his inspirational stories, the atmosphere…this was what made the yeshiva special.” Since then the Rav went on to found a plethora of educational institutions, and that special atmosphere permeates them all.

The work of a lifetime
The Rav expected to complete his Talmud project within 13 years. It took 45. The project, culminating in 40 additional volumes, was completed in the month of Kislev of the Hebrew year 5771 (December, 2010). In 1991 he changed his last name to Even-Israel under the guidance of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, to whom he became very close. He was awarded the Israel prize in 1988 and many other prestigious prizes.

By 1976, the Rav had also created the Shefa Institute, consisting of an elite group of students who would study, write pedagogical materials, and teach in educational programs for adults, creating a new dialogue with Jewish texts. My husband was one of the eclectic group of researchers and writers, and the Rav hired me to produce Shefa’s adult educational activities.

I remember vividly meeting with him a number of times in his private office in the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. It is written in Talmud Succa 21:2 “Even the prosaic conversations [sihat hulin] of wise men are equal to the entire Torah.” And indeed, even the Rav’s comments on prosaic matters were filled with rich philosophical insights and colorful anecdotes, and it was a privilege to just sit quietly and listen while he expounded on educational issues and Israeli society, as way of introduction to the next project.

The benefit of this close contact gave us a rare opportunity to know the Rav when he was much younger, and even then, a visionary and dreamer.

The Rav established a network of educational institutions for the Jewish community in the former USSR, including the first yeshiva formally acknowledged by the authorities (in 1989, prior to the fall of the Soviet Union), a Jewish university and a training school for preschool and elementary school teachers.

Rav Even-Israel also established other schools that are inspired by his worldview, such as an army yeshiva (Yeshivat Hesder) in Tekoa, Israel, and the Makor Chaim elementary, middle and high schools in and near Jerusalem. Two of our grandsons have studied in his elementary school.

Sadly, the Makor Chaim high school yeshiva in Kfar Etzion became well known when two of the three teenaged boys who were kidnapped and murdered by terrorists, in 2014, were from that yeshiva. One of them, Naftali Fraenkel, was my student. The yeshiva morphed their tragedy into days of unity, during which they send students to secular schools in Israel to interact and create dialogue.

During the seven years I taught English in Makor Chaim, I discovered it was a high school yeshiva with out-of-the-box thinking and an atmosphere of curiosity, creativity and joy. One of the highlights for the students was when Rav Steinsaltz would come to speak to them. His special approach to faith and to learning permeated our teachers’ room as well. I still teach in the yeshiva in January of every year, when boys from New York and New Jersey, students at MTA, come for a month of study in Makor Chaim, a rare opportunity to drink in the special atmosphere.

Yehudit Shabta, editor and translator in the Steinsaltz Center, worked for the Rav since 1989. She tells the following story, by way of illustrating his worldview. “When our daughter was one-year-old we brought her to the Rav for a bracha. He said to the child, ‘I bless you that your parents will not get in the way of your growth.’”

Anat Zalmanson-Kuznetsov, filmmaker and daughter of Sylva Zalmanson, one of the 12 Soviet Jews who tried to escape the USSR in 1970 by hijacking a plane, in the bold “Operation Wedding,” and who ended up as prisoners of Zion for years, wrote in a public Facebook post on the day of the Rav’s funeral, about her own experience with Rav Steinsaltz. She was sixteen and rebellious. Everyone had advised her mother to be tough on her. Sylva took her to the Rav and he had one piece of advice: “Only love.”

Joelle Aflalu was born in Fez, Morocco. She had a child and a husband who died in Morocco, and then she left with her surviving child and today lives in Luxemburg. She became a founding member of the Matanel Foundation that is among the supporters of the Rav’s work. How did they get involved? Joelle says, “The Rav’s book The Thirteen Petalled Rose spoke to my soul. A friend wanted to give me a gift, so the gift she gave me was a meeting with Rav Adin. In was in 2004. We spoke for five hours. When Rav Steinsaltz talks to me, he makes me laugh.”

We have in our home many books by Rav Steinsaltz that have informed our teaching — on Talmud, Chassidut, Tanach, Jewish mysticism, and more. One of my favorites is a little book that I consult when authoring a new biblical musical – Biblical Images, Men & Women of the Book, which always enchants with refreshing and deep insights on biblical figures central to our national shared consciousness.

My last professional experience with the Rav was when I was the lead translator of the book In the Land of Prayer, Personal Tefillot from Israel in Troubled Times, edited by Dr. Daniel Gutenmacher, also a teacher in Yeshivat Makor Chaim. It was published it 2006, following the uprooting of Gush Katif. Rav Steinsaltz has a generous blurb on the back cover of our book, but even more meaningful, he has his own prayer inside. This is his final paragraph:

Compassionate One, who is true to the covenant, the time has arrived for You to send a message of salvation and redemption to Your world, to comfort all of Your children, and to bestow upon them an era of peace and blessing, light and joy. – Rav Adin Steinsaltz

May it be so, in our day.

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The author is an award-winning playwright and director of biblical musicals for Raise Your Spirits Theatre and a recent recipient of an American Jewish Press Association award for Excellence in Jewish Journalism.