When I was a child, my father took my hand and said “Come, we're going to see a real Talmid Chacham.”
I don't know what I expected, but it probably wasn't the short, animated redhead rabbi who taught the class we attended. The truth is that I don't remember anything that he taught that seventh day of Pesach at the Katamon Shtieblach, but the face of Torah as I met it through Rabbi Steinzalz I carry with me until today: Torah that is fire, full of energy and animated. Sometimes an intimate and warming flame and other times a fast and intensely hot fire. A fire that attracts the sharpest of minds and rises up along with them to illuminate the night sky.
A few years later, when I arrived at my grandfather's house for our weekly visit, he announced that today we would be going on the bus to Mea Shearim, to collect abandoned volumes of the Talmud. When we arrived we found that the streets of the neighborhood were flooded with brown books with gold letters on their covers, which people for some reason had removed from their homes. These looked like other holy books, but were larger and seemed much more interesting to me. They contained relevant illustrations and explanations of Greek terminology in their margins, and I spent the trip home drinking the rabbinic biographies and other details that fired up my imagination. I later discovered that my grandfather had heard about the ultra-Orthodox boycott of Rabbi Steinzaltz which followed the publication of one of his other books, so he had asked me to save those books from destruction. For years he continued to distribute those volumes to his friends.
Years later, it was I who was taking my students to meet the wonder known as Harav Adin Even-Yisrael (the Rock of Israel) Steinzaltz. Different lessons took on different themes, whether a sharp discourse in Halachah or an associative conversation jumping between Persian culture and dolphins. What we were meeting was a live, extant and active Talmud page. No matter the subject, whether “holy” or “secular,” ′′Torah′′ or ′′Mada”: all of these were part of the corpus of Torah for this great rabbi, whose passion was acquiring knowledge and wonder in encountering God’s world.
I always asked him to tell us about his father, the atheist communist, who told him: “As far as I'm concerned, you're allowed to think whatever you want, but I forbid you to be an ignoramus.
And as a result of this decree from his father, Rabbi Steinsaltz and his work became an inheritance for the entire Nation of Israel. Because of his works, we all have the ability to realize the passion for knowledge and wonder that sprouts from every page of the Talmud, to feel the warmth of its words and benefit from its lessons as we enjoy stories of our sages, and great debates of Jewish law.
The one thing we don't have anymore is an excuse. We no longer have any excuse not to know.
May his soul be bound up in the bonds of the living.
The writer is the director of the Mandel Program for Leadership in Jewish Culture, and co-founder of the Klausner Minyan