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.

Rabbi David Ellenson זצ״ל

Rabbi David Ellenson has died. I hate typing that sentence. Moreover, since it’s Chanukah, Jewish tradition says that part of the simcha of the season means that we shouldn’t give eulogies. So don’t consider this a eulogy, in the sense of a lament for a lost mentor. Consider instead a tribute: He meant an enormous amount to me, as a rabbi, mentor, and friend, so I’d like to share with my community of students and friends a little bit about his brilliance.

Rabbi David Ellenson teaching at the Shalom Hartman Institute, Jerusalem, Summer 2023 (photo: NG)

There are brilliant scholars in the world, and there are incredibly kind and compassionate people as well. But it is astonishingly rare to have both of those dispositions bound up in the same soul. Yet that was Rabbi Ellenson, as anyone who knew him will affirm.

David—and I mean no disrespect by calling him by his first name; he insisted on it, and he had a way of making you feel like such a cherished friend that it would seem impolite not to call him “David”—was an extraordinary leader. For much of his academic career, he was Professor of Jewish Religious Thought at the Los Angeles campus of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. Since I was ensconced at HUC-JIR’s New York campus, I didn’t have the pleasure of studying with him in rabbinical school; I only got to know him after graduating.

I did things backwards: I had the great fortune over the years to become his friend, and subsequently I became his student. When HUC appointed him President, David invited me to be a founding member of something he called the “President’s Rabbinic Council.” He needed a kitchen cabinet of advisors, he said—with his ubiquitous smiling eyes—because he had no idea how to be a college president! That sort of modesty was characteristically David, and just one aspect that made him so beloved.

But no one was fooled by that self-deprecation. He was one of the most serious thinkers about liberal Judaism of this generation or any other. His scholarship on the development of modern Orthodoxy, modern Jewish philosophy, the meaning of liberal Judaism, the evolution of Jewish liturgy, the ethics of halakha, and so much more was impeccable. And just as important was his way of using knowledge and scholarship to articulate an ethical imperative for contemporary Jews of all stripes.

Here's a story. For many years my family lived in Highland Park, New Jersey, which has a unique mix of Jews from across the religious spectrum living alongside one another. Our next door neighbors were friends who became family (they remain so); they are observant Jews who are very active and committed to modern Orthodox institutions. I remember on occasion my neighbor would come over and ask, “Did you see Rabbi Ellenson’s editorial in the NY Jewish Week?” No, living in New Jersey and entirely overextended, I was not a regular reader of the Jewish Week. “I’ll clip it for you, it’s brilliant,” she said. And then: “How lucky we”—we, as in the entire Jewish community—“are, to have a voice like his.”

She was absolutely right. His intellect, his interests, and his menschlikhkeit overflowed the boundaries in which Jewish communities have fenced ourselves. Sure, much of his career was devoted to leading the academic flagship of Reform Judaism. But his intellectual seriousness and his generous disposition gave him credibility throughout the Jewish world. That sort of leader is, tragically, an endangered species in Jewish life today, and we need more of them desperately.

Others will trace his academic and writing career more completely than me. If you’d like a taste of his scholarship, I’d recommend the anthology Jewish Meaning in a World of Choice: Studies in Tradition and Modernity (2014), a collection of essays in the JPS “Scholar of Distinction” series.

Instead, let me make myself vulnerable by telling you what he meant to me.

When I was going through the hardest time in my life—when I was at a turning point in my career, abandoned by some people and institutions who said they “cared” about me—there were a few foundation stones in my life who totally embraced me: my family, some friends and colleagues… and David Ellenson.

At the time, David was the Director of the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis University. He was, by that point, a dear friend. When I didn’t know where to go or where I might land, he said to me, “Neal, I want you to come to Brandeis and study with me.”

Let me parse that: it was one thing to be there for me as a friend, confidante, and counselor. But at a time when my self-esteem was shot, and I was feeling quite lost both personally and professionally, David said to me: “I want you.”

So I enrolled at Brandeis, and eventually received my second Master’s degree. The biggest privilege was to write a Master’s thesis with David, which included studying with him one-on-one, and eventually defending the thesis before him (and another brilliant Brandeis scholar and mensch, Yehudah Mirsky). He believed in me, and I can only hope to honor his memory by doing likewise and paying it forward.

He taught our A Tree with Roots community on two occasions. Two years ago, when his most recent book was published, he came to me and asked if he and his co-author Rabbi Michael Marmur could do a program on our platform. They were, of course, wonderful: insightful, enlightening, and funny.

The second occasion was just five weeks ago. As part of the 30th anniversary of the Kavod Tzedakah Fund, we asked David to give the closing Torah teaching. It was scholarly discussion of the ethics of war in the writings of Maimonides and Rabbi Shlomo Goren. But the passion and complicated human emotions of Israel’s war with Hamas also came shining through; it was quintessential David Ellenson:

Rabbi Ellenson’s teaching begins at 39:45 in this video from A Tree with Roots

There is one mistake I’m proud that I didn’t make in this relationship: I told him often in the past few years just how much his love and support meant to me.

There’s a passage I’m thinking of tonight from Tony Hendra’s extraordinary book Father Joe (2004). Hendra[1], an English comedian perhaps best known for his role as band manager Ian Faith in the movie This is Spinal Tap, had a private and remarkable spiritual sanctuary. His mentor was a monk who lived for decades at Quarr Abbey on the Isle of Wight, and Hendra throughout his life would visit Father Joe there, for centering and counsel. He always presumed that Father Joe was “his” priest, and that their relationship was special and unique. At the end of the book, he goes back to Quarr for the Father Joe’s funeral—and he is astonished to discover that there were hundreds, if not thousands, of people all over the world who also loved him went to Father Joe for solace and guidance:

Common sense suggests it would be hard for one person to maintain in one lifetime more than a few such friendships. It would be taxing physically—the toll it would take on time, energy, patience, concentration—and brutally hard on the emotions, let alone the spirit. Yet as the tributes came in and I dug farther, it became clear that Father Joe had undertaken not just a few, or even a few dozen, but hundreds of such life-altering voyages.

I’m under no such illusions: I know that David Ellenson loved and was beloved by countless students all over the world. I also know that part of his brilliance, part of his awesomeness, was that he loved each one of us uniquely and in our own way.

In Judaism, that sort of spiritual mentorship is called being a Rebbe. And among his accolades and accomplishments, surely that title is the most precious of all.

זכר צדיק לברכה / The memory of the righteous is a blessing.

[1] I’m quite aware that after Father Joe was published, sexual assault allegations were made against Hendra by his daughter. It was an early “Me Too” moment, and Hendra died in 2021 scarred by the scandal. I will not whitewash him, for sure. But I can’t unread his book, nor can I deny that it is truly powerful.

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.