Rabbi Leonard Kravitz ז״ל

Belief in coincidences is a theological category, so I don’t know if you buy into them or not. But on Sunday evening, I was at a conference in New York that happened to be taking place at my alma mater, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York. In fact, I was sitting in the Beit Knesset, listening to a lecture by the great social activist Ruth Messinger, when I received a text on my phone telling me that Rabbi Leonard Kravitz had died.

The astonishing serendipity of that moment: This was my first time back on the New York campus of HUC-JIR in many years. And there I was, getting this news while I was in the very chapel where I often sat next to Rabbi Kravitz during Tefillah over the four years that I was a student there. The wave of emotions, memories, and warm feelings was just amazing.

I loved Rabbi Kravitz dearly. He was an expert in medieval Jewish philosophy and Maimonides in particular, and I cherish my copy of his scholarly work, The Hidden Doctrine of Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed (1988; only $230 on Amazon!).

I had the great pleasure of having him as my rabbinic thesis advisor all those years ago.  Rereading that previous sentence, I wonder how many people look back on writing a graduate thesis as a “great pleasure.” I truly do, in large part because of my relationship with him. At that time, I used to meet with him on a weekly basis for an hour of studying the Rambam in his office. It wasn’t always germane to my thesis-writing, but it was like having a weekly one-on-one hevruta-study with someone who was a great scholar and a generous teacher.

Rabbi Kravitz’s classroom could be dizzying, because he tended to speak very quickly. There was a good reason for that: he would simultaneously be delivering a philosophy lecture, a Yiddish lesson, and doing standup comedy. So of course he had to speak three times faster than a typical teacher.

Here are a few more of my cherished memories of him:

·      Delivering my final thesis to him in his office. He leapt up from behind his desk, grabbed my 116-page document with zeal, and cried, “This calls for a L’chayim!” And he went straight to his file cabinet and pulled out the bottle of scotch that was stashed away for just such a moment.  (He was very partisan for his favorite distilleries. I remember bringing him a bottle of The Glenrothes in gratitude before graduation. He smiled and told me I was truly a disciple who had learned his lessons.)

·      Once, some joker put a full-size poster of his namesake the rock star Lenny Kravitz on the door to his office, with dreadlocks flying in the air. Rabbi Kravitz got such a kick out of it that it stayed on his door for the whole semester.

·      He was a kind and gentle soul, but definitely mastered the time-honored art of the putdown. If he disapproved, say, of a sermon that was delivered during Tefillah, he could say with perfect inflection, “That was nice.”

·      And he had a wonderful sense of humor and was even a bit of a raconteur. I recall him once emerging from the elevator at HUC-JIR and saying in a loud voice to anyone in the vicinity, “My friends! Please! Study Torah! It’s not too late!” And then he whispered to me, out of the corner of his mouth, “It is too late, but don’t tell them.” (For that matter, he used to translate the Mishnah’s statement וְתַלְמוּד תּוֹרָה כְּנֶגֶד כֻּלָּם as: “It’s across the street.”)

·      As a scholar of Maimonides, his philosophical outlook was decidedly rationalist (and he used to fondly remind us that he fit in quite well during his years at a Jesuit school). So one time, when he earnestly quoted a Hasidic story to me, I fell off my chair. “Rabbi Kravitz, did you just tell me a Hasidic story?!” He just laughed.

Even though he loomed quite large in my life—in my hevruta studies with Rabbi Ben Levy, it’s remarkable how frequently his name comes up—I hadn’t been in touch with him in a long time. Then, in 2022, I was receiving my Doctor of Divinity honorary degree from HUC-JIR, and Rabbi Joel Soffin gave me very important advice: to write to some of the professors who were especially important influences on me. Rabbi Kravitz was one of them, of course. Each of the professors whom I contacted wrote back to me, but I was bowled over when I got a phone call from Lincolnwood, IL. It was his daughter: “He wants to talk to you.” And suddenly I was his student again; he was speaking Yiddish, and quoting the Rambam, and saying, “Of course, I’m not telling you Torah you don’t already know…” We had a series of calls after that, and I feel so lucky to have resumed this relationship with such a unique and precious soul.

He died this week at 96 and is no doubt speaking a mile-a-minute in the olam ha-ba, explaining his elaborate map through the Guide of the Perplexed that he alone could decipher. He was a wonderful rabbi, mentor, and mensch. His memory is a blessing forever.  

His legendary map through the Guide of the Perplexed - I have pages of this, in his handwriting.

A Torah of Kindness

For Rabbi Larry Raphael, and His Torah of Kindness

I’m writing too many eulogies for teachers of mine these days. But when I heard that Larry Raphael had died on Sunday, I wanted to put some thoughts into writing, for he was truly special.

Larry was a dean at HUC-JIR when I arrived at the New York campus in the early ‘90s. He published a few anthologies of Jewish mystery writing (his great passion), and it was fun to talk books with him. He taught professional development classes to rabbinical students, but those are not the lessons that I most cherish from him. There are two that I want to share here.

The first is that Larry was the constant champion of the school’s soup kitchen, which I ran for a few years, each week feeding about 200 people who came in off the city streets and into our school. Yet the soup kitchen was not universally embraced by the administration or the students at the time; it was big disruption to the operations of the building on Monday afternoons. But Larry worked tirelessly behind the scenes to make sure that it was funded and that it thrived. He regularly came to join in the cooking and serving. And he was personally supportive of me, helping me navigate the grant money, for instance.

The soup kitchen really was his baby for many years. It endures today, thanks in part to the strong foundation he laid when he was an administrator at the College.

The second thing for which I’m grateful to Larry is more intensely personal.

Did you ever have the feeling of not being sure if you belonged? The sensation that wherever you were, everyone except you seemed to know exactly where they were supposed to be going and what they were supposed to be doing? I can remember feeling that way at distinct moments when I was a kid in elementary school, sort of perpetually when I was in high school, and many other times since then. I used to think I was the only one who ever felt that way, but I’ve come to learn that I’m not alone.

Well, I sure felt like that the day I interviewed at HUC in New York – “what in the world am I doing here?” I was a senior at Colgate getting a degree in philosophy and religion, not the most pragmatic of majors. I made the decision to go to rabbinical school. There was no Plan B. So I applied and showed up one winter morning at One West 4th Street for my interview.

I walked into the building and sat in the common area with another prospective student. She didn’t seem nervous at all; she seemed right at home. We made small talk. Then another prospective student came into the room. And the two of them—well, their eyes just lit up. “J, is that you?” “D, is that you? I haven’t seen you since…!” And they fell into each other’s arms, two reunited old friends from Jewish summer camp who were now all set to become colleagues together.

As for me, I just sat there with a growing sense of imposter syndrome. I didn’t go to Reform summer camps, I didn’t like NFTY, and I sure wasn’t feeling like this impending interview was a big family reunion. Why would they accept me and not these two, who were obviously “naturals”? In my mind, I started figuring my options in fast food or in the gas-pumping industry.

And then Larry, the Dean of Students, came out and sat beside me. He made the perfect kind of small talk: he asked me about the musicians I liked (I exhaled, “Coltrane!”) and the books I was reading (I had Borowitz’s Renewing the Covenant with me). He put me at ease. More important, he made me feel like I was qualified and deserved to be there, at just the moment that my self-confidence was dissipating. Larry had a gentleness, inherent kindness, and good humor that were so precious to me that day and many times afterwards. I’ll never forget it.

In recent years, those old bad feelings have occasionally returned with renewed fervor. And I’ve wished I had a Larry Raphael nearby for some self-esteem booster shots. Once in a while, an email would arrive from him out of the blue, usually after I’d published an essay or Dvar Torah someplace and he’d want to let me know that he’d read it and liked it. Those notes meant a lot.

Look, I fear that in our world these days, celebrating a person’s kindness may seem banal. I want to be clear: there is nothing banal about being a kind person. It is irreplaceable. I’ve met brilliant academics, dazzling rabbis, and forceful advocates for social justice who were not personally kind people; who lack warmth, or compassion, or a sense that they care about you as an individual. And frankly—it mitigates their success in other realms. Their lack of personal kindness is a character flaw, and while we’re all imperfect creations, somehow their work is less admirable, less whole, because of this missing piece.

Not so with Larry. He consummately lived the Mishnah’s urgent prodding:  וֶהֱוֵי מְקַבֵּל אֶת כָּל הָאָדָם בְּסֵבֶר פָּנִים יָפוֹת / “receive every person with a cheerful countenance”.  There’s a Torah of kindness that emanates from certain kind souls, and he was one of them. May his memory be a blessing.