Remembering Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, intellectual wonder and Jewish landmark

MIDDLE ISRAEL: One would assume Steinsaltz spent his days and nights ensconced in his study like Lithuania’s Vilna Gaon, America’s Moshe Feinstein or Israel’s Elazar Shach, but he was different

By AMOTZ ASA-EL
‘THE TALMUD,’ once said Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz, ‘is difficult to enter because it’s as if someone wrote math in the form of poetry; that is why I aim at a broad readership.’ (photo credit: THE STEINSALTZ CENTER)
‘THE TALMUD,’ once said Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz, ‘is difficult to enter because it’s as if someone wrote math in the form of poetry; that is why I aim at a broad readership.’
(photo credit: THE STEINSALTZ CENTER)
Strolling once in the zoo with a journalist, Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz observed: “When I look in the lion’s eyes I see sadness, when I look in the tiger’s eyes I see murder.”
Driven by such intellectual observation no less than by religious faith, Steinsaltz, who passed away last week at 83, left a literary legacy that future luminaries will be at a loss to contest.
His translation of and commentaries on the Babylonian Talmud is so monumental that it happens only once in a millennium, the previous such accomplishment being Rashi’s.
Comparing both men’s work is impossible. Rashi (1040-1105) did not have printed books, dictionaries, a concordance or the legal codices of Maimonides and Rabbi Yosef Karo. While more than excusable, the fact remains Rashi left out seven Talmudic tractates, whereas Steinsaltz covered all 37, as well as two of the Jerusalem Talmud.
Rashi’s biblical commentary is also incomplete, unlike Steinsaltz’s. Moreover, Steinsaltz also interpreted Maimonides’s voluminous Mishneh Torah and the foundational hassidic text, the Tanya. This is beside an introduction to the Talmud, and some 30 other books, on subjects ranging from commentaries on the Passover Haggadah and the Jewish prayer book to a discussion of the sociology of ignorance.
With such an output, one would assume Steinsaltz spent his days and nights ensconced in his study like Lithuania’s Vilna Gaon, America’s Moshe Feinstein or Israel’s Elazar Shach, all great rabbis who seldom appeared in public.
Steinsaltz was entirely different.
OUTGOING, conversational, eloquent and a Hebrew University graduate in physics, chemistry and math, Steinsaltz enjoyed meeting people, from academics, industrialists, journalists and soldiers, to the Dalai Lama and Pope Francis.
Steinsaltz addressed highbrow audiences at Yale University and the Aspen Institute speaking rich English, and delivered lectures on Army Radio in a contemporary Hebrew aimed, like his writings, at the broad public.
The Talmud’s language – Aramaic – is the lesser problem facing its reader, he explained in a TV interview. “The Talmud,” he said, “is difficult to enter because it’s as if someone wrote math in the form of poetry; that is why I aim at a broad readership, not necessarily Judaic scholars, but people of all types.”

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That is why the Steinsaltz Commentary is voweled, punctuated, paragraphed and checkered with historic backgrounds, scientific explanations and graphic illustrations. For instance, a Roman drawing of men casting a die in the context of gamblers’ inadmissibility as witnesses; or a sketch of a black kite, mentioned in a tale about that bird of prey – “common in Babylonia and the Land of Israel, its length 55 cm and its color blackish brown” (Bava Metzia 24b) – having snatched meat from a market stall and dropped it in someone’s property, raising a question about permission to eat that unidentified meat.
Expectedly, Steinsaltz drew ultra-Orthodox fire. Studying Steinsaltz’s commentated Talmud – ruled ultra-Orthodox sage Shach – “removes every spark of sanctity and faith.” Worse, some of his books “include heresies and dishonor the Torah.”
Some of what Steinsaltz originally wrote was indeed indigestible for ultra-Orthodox rabbis, for instance, that King Solomon’s marriage of foreign women was part of a pragmatic diplomacy that “possibly made of him the first proponent of the slogan ‘make love, not war.’”
A man of peace, Steinsaltz mended walls with the ultra-Orthodox rabbis, but the big difference between him and them could not be hidden, and indeed explained not only their suspicions, but also his success: he was raised secular.
BORN IN British Jerusalem to socialist activists – his father traveled to fight in the Spanish Civil War – Steinsaltz became religious in his teens while studying Judaism with a rabbi at his father’s initiative, in line with his motto “better a heretic than an ignoramus.”
Steinsaltz’s Judaism was therefore not the result of training, habit or convention, but fully a matter of judgment, and a reflection of his colorful background; a combination of worldliness and dialecticism that ultra-Orthodoxy could neither produce nor stomach.
Like the rigid sage Shamai, who angrily dismissed a man who wanted to be taught the Torah while standing on one foot, Steinsaltz’s adversaries shunned the other, thus driving a wedge between the learned and the unlearned, and planting walls between modernity and faith.
Steinsaltz, like Shamai’s adversary Hillel, who told the man standing on his one foot “don’t do to others what is hateful for you, the rest is just commentary – go study it,” communicated with the other. It was, in fact, the guiding principle of his life’s work.
Having emerged from the secular world, he knew it intimately and never turned his back at it. Having known science, philosophy, history and art, he once explained on Israeli TV why he thought its cultural programs were inferior to French TV’s, and he happily broadcast a lecture series together with secular philosopher Amos Funkenstein.
Yes, Steinsaltz was an intellectual wonder and a Jewish landmark, but his creation was above all Israeli.
The people who encouraged him to translate the Talmud were Knesset speaker Kadish Luz and prime minister Levi Eshkol. Eshkol personally raised the seed funding, and the project’s first board meeting was held in his office, in the same boardroom where the government of Israel holds its weekly meetings.
Eshkol did not believe in God, but Steinsaltz believed in Eshkol – much the way he believed in the simple person, in the power of knowledge and in the promise of the Jewish state.
Philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, Steinsaltz once observed, thought we live in the best of all worlds, while Voltaire thought we live in the worst of all worlds. Steinsaltz disagreed with both. “I think we live in the worst of all the worlds – that still have hope,” he said, “that is what I say about the State of Israel; I call it Jewish optimism.”
www.MiddleIsrael.net
The writer’s best-selling Mitz’ad Ha’ivelet Hayehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sfarim, 2019) is a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s leadership from antiquity to modernity.


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