In Honour of Rabbi Steinsaltz

Beloved friends, Rabbanim mechubadim, we are here to honour this evening one of the great figures of our generation, Kvod HaRav, Moreh Doreinu, Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, and wish him mazal tov on his 80th birthday. Friends, what Rav Steinsaltz has done is quite extraordinary. 

I once had the privilege of knowing a scholar who had written hundreds of books. He had written so many books that when somebody used to phone him up and his wife would answer and say, “I'm sorry my husband can't come to the phone because he's writing a book,” the person at the other end would say, “Don't worry, I'll wait.”

But even he, who is famous throughout the academic world for his prolific authorship, could not remotely rival the man we honour tonight, Rav Adin, the only person in Jewish history who has written explanations, interpretations, translations, and commentaries to the entire Jewish canon. Tanach, Mishna, Mishna Torah of the Rambam, Tanya, and above all, the Bavli and the Yerushalmi, the great two works of rabbinic wisdom, and done so in a way that has opened the doors of Jewish learning to the entire world.

It is an astonishing achievement, and we and our children and grandchildren are the beneficiaries. Sometimes it's really hard to translate and communicate in a different language, and the Babylonian Talmud is written in very difficult Aramaic. I'm always mindful of the fact because of the story that struck home to me so much.

I'm a philosopher in my spare time, and the story is told of the British philosopher who went to the University of Beijing to give a lecture, and they provided him with a translator because he didn't know Mandarin. And he was giving a long lecture, and a very complicated one, and he would stop every couple of sentences for the interpreter to translate. And the translator waved him on and said, “Don't worry, I'll tell you when you have to stop.”

This went on for 15 minutes, and then finally the translator said, “Stop,” and said four words in Chinese to the audience, and waved the man on. 30 minutes, the same thing happened. 45 minutes, the same thing.

And at the end of the hour's lecture, he said three minutes to the audience. The audience very decorously stood up and left the room. The philosopher went over to the interpreter and said, “I have just given one of the most complicated philosophical lectures. How could you condense it into so few words?” “Easy,” said the translator. After 15 minutes, I said, “So far he hasn't said anything new.” After half an hour, I said, “He still hasn't said anything new.” After 45 minutes, I said, “I don't think he's going to say anything new.” And after an hour, I said, “I was right, he didn't.”

Now, what Rav Adin has done is taken our ancient texts and make them new again for future generations, and it is an incredible achievement.

Adin is the author of many other books, of course, on Jewish spirituality, “The Thirteen Petalled Rose” and many, many others. And he is one of the most creative thinkers I know. He was trained as a scientist, but he has the soul of a poet.

He was brought up by very secular parents. Adin told me that his parents insisted that he learn Gemara because they wanted their son to be an apikores, but not an am haAretz. They wanted my son, the heretic, not my son, the ignoramus.

And of course, we are very creative heretics in the Jewish tradition. My favourite was the philosophy professor in Columbia who famously said, “I don't understand why God is so angry with me just because I don't believe in Him.” 

But Adin, with this incredible creative genius that he has, has taken the most complex texts and turned them into the most simple messages, and thereby has done wonders for opening the doors of Jewish knowledge to everyone.

I have to say, creative things happen here in Israel. I mean, I don't know any other country that could do a chicken imitation and win the Eurovision Song Contest. I mean, this is really creative thinking.

In Israel, they created a programme - I'm sure you all have it on your smartphones - which I think is the most spiritual invention of our times. It's called Waze. Do you know this thing, Waze, Google Maps? This has done more for Shalom Bayit than any invention in history.

Do you know how many marriages fell apart because he said to her, ‘Why didn't you look up the directions?’ And she said to him, ‘Why didn't you stop and ask somebody?’ All of that disappeared thanks to Waze. 

But the truth is, the truth is, Adin has that kind of complete genius ability to say things that are completely unexpected and completely true. He once spoke in our home in London, and we were talking about the politics of the Middle East. And somebody asked him, “Rav Steinsaltz, are you an optimist or a pessimist?” 

Only Rav Steinsaltz could give the following answer. This is what he answered:

He said, “I am not an optimist like Leibniz, who thought this is the best of all possible worlds.”

He said, “I am not a pessimist like the Gnostics, who held that this is the worst of all possible worlds.” He said,”What I believe is this is the worst of all possible worlds, in which there is still hope.”

Now you have to be a Rav Adin Steinsaltz to think like that, and it was a statement of genius.

He once asked me what I thought was the book that all Soviet Jews should read to rediscover their Jewish identity. I gave up. I said, “Tell me.”

He said, Hans Christian Andersen's story, “The Ugly Duckling.” Do you remember that story? The ugly duckling who thinks he's ugly and one day wakes up and realises ‘I'm a swan.’ Somehow, thanks to Adin, all those Jews who were ambivalent about their Jewish identity realised they were not ugly ducklings. They were Am Nivchar. They were Jews. And that is Adin's sheer genius. 

Already in his 20s, he was giving shiurim to the President of the State of Israel, and for more than 50 years he has dedicated himself to helping us understand the text of our tradition.

And truly tonight, we honour one of the giants of our time. Ladies and gentlemen, we salute you, Rav Adin Steinsaltz. 

I also want to pay tribute, first of all, to his wonderful wife, Sarah, who has been with him and supported him in all of this.

Because he was busy thanking everyone else, let me thank his son, Meni, who has led the institution for the last 10 years. I want to pay special thanks to the publishers of Rav Adin's work, who just happen to be my publishers as well, to Koren and the indefatigable and amazing Matthew Miller. And, of course, to all of you who have supported and made his work possible.

I also - just a moment of sad reflection - let us remember the late and beloved Thomas Nisell of blessed memory, who for 25 years really made Adin's work possible. 

Now, what is the significance of Rav Adin's work? He wrote a brilliant little book about 30 years ago. I don't know if you've seen it. It's probably the least known of his books. He wrote it with the historian Amos Funkenstein, and it is called “The Sociology of Ignorance.” It was a play on a book by Karl Mannheim, “The Sociology of Knowledge.”

And in it he set out a most brilliant idea. He said that knowledge is power, and therefore people who have power try by and large to keep it away from other people, otherwise their power will be diminished. So most societies have valued the people with knowledge, but they haven't spread it widely.

He said only two societies were actually committed to spreading knowledge as widely as possible, ancient Greece and ancient Israel. Ancient Greece built its academies. Israel built its Batei Midrash and its yeshivot. Eventually, Greece let the academies fail, and it then ceased to be a civilisation. Jews never let their schools or their houses of study or their yeshivot fail. 

What was it about Judaism that made it the civilisation of all civilisations that focused on making knowledge accessible? The short answer is that the great advances in human civilisation happen when there is a revolution in information technology.

The world's first revolution in information technology was the invention of writing, cuneiform in Mesopotamia, hieroglyphics in Egypt. There were seven civilisations that independently invented writing. Indus Valley script, Chinese ideograms, the Mayans, the Aztecs, and the Minoans, who had a script that's nowadays called Linear B. Writing was the birth of civilisation because it meant that we could accumulate knowledge and hand it on to the future beyond the capacity of a single human memory.

The third revolution in information technology was printing, which led to the Reformation and the whole new birth of freedom in the modern world.

Judaism was born in the second revolution - and in many ways the most important - which was the invention of the alphabet. The very first alphabet discovered by the British archaeologist Flinders Petrie in the Sinai Desert in 1903 is known as Proto-Semitic, and the alphabet has only been invented once.

Every alphabet today is a direct or indirect descendant of the original Canaanite, Phoenician, Hebrew script. That's why it's called an alphabet, from Aleph and Bet. 

Now this was revolutionary because the writing systems before then had had huge numbers of symbols. There are 40,000 different symbols in Chinese. Even the simplest hieroglyphics, Demotic hieroglyphics, had 450 symbols. You couldn't teach these to everyone, so you had a small class but new and a large mass of people who were illiterate.

With the birth of the alphabet, reducing all of knowledge to 22 symbols, 22 letters, made for the first time possible a society of universal literacy. And that's what the prophet Isaiah meant when he said, “All of your children shall be learned of God.” Jews produced the world's first system of universal compulsory education in the first century, as the Gemara in Baba Batra tells us, in the days of Yehoshua ben Gamla. In the first century. 

Do you know how long it took England to have a system of universal compulsory education? 1870. I try not to tell this to Brits, you know, it's like a little immodest, but there it is.

So we had this wonderful vision of a world in which everyone would be literate, as Adin himself always pointed out. If you look at the eighth chapter of Sefer Shoftim, Gidon is about to fight a battle with the Midianites. He comes to a town called Sukkot. He says, ‘My men are hungry. Give us the army some food.’ They say ‘First, play Manchester Unite… first defeat the Midianites, and then come back and then we'll give you some food.’

He goes with his army. They defeat the Midianites. They come back and he's not best pleased. And he takes a boy in the street and says, ‘Write down the names of the elders of the town.’ And the young boy writes down 77 names. 3,000 years ago, it could be assumed that a random child in the street could read and write.

That existed nowhere else for centuries and millennia to come. 

Now why is this significant? Very simple. 

There have been two attempts in history to create a truly egalitarian society.

Number one, a society where everyone has equal power. Number two, a society in which everyone has equal wealth. They were both tried and they always failed.

The reason is the power is always hierarchical and wealth is always unequal. Judaism came across with the world's greatest alternative. The third route. How do you create an egalitarian society? By giving every single individual equal access to knowledge. 

And that works in a way that the other two don't work. Why so? Take power. Take wealth, for instance. Supposing you have a thousand dollars. You decide I'm going to share it with nine other people. How much do you have left? One-tenth of what you began with. Supposing you have total power and you are foolish enough to share it with others. Big mistake. We always knew the shul president who used to say on every motion, all those in favour say, ‘Aye.’ All those against say, ‘I resign.’ That's how to exercise power. But if you decide to share it with nine other people, how much power do you have left? One-tenth of the power you began with. 

But supposing you have a certain amount of knowledge and you share that with nine other people, how much do you have left? Not less. In fact, you will even have more because the best way to learn anything is to teach it.

So it turns out that wealth and power are zero-sum games and they always lead to conflict. But knowledge is a non-zero-sum game and that is why the Jewish approach to an egalitarian society worked where every other attempt failed. 

And that is the fascinating fact. The Egyptians built pyramids. The Mesopotamians built ziggurats. The Greeks built the Parthenon. The Romans built the Colosseum. Jews built schools. 

And that is why they are dead civilisations and why we can still stand and sing “Am Yisrael Chai!”

At some stage in the modern world, in the 19th century, that unbroken chain broke. And for some reason, that centrality of Jewish learning in Jewish life was lost for a while. And we can see its effects.

You all know the story of the Pew Report into American Jewry in 2013, that said outside Orthodoxy, 71% of Jews are marrying out. But the really significant figures in the Pew study were these: 

94% of American Jews say they are proud to be Jews.

48% of American Jews can't read an Aleph-Bet. 

And when that happens, Jewish identity has nothing by way of content. And when we lose the Jewish mind, we lose the Jewish future.

And that is a tragedy because we were the people who, throughout our history, made our citadels our schools, made our heroes our teachers, and made our passion study, and the life of the mind. 

And that is what Rav Adin, in the most spectacular act of intellectual courage, set out to change. And to that, he has dedicated his whole life. He has brought learning back into Jewish life and done so in the egalitarian way by opening the doors of study to everyone. And that is what makes him one of the real heroes of our time. 

Friends, there is a story in the Talmud which says this.

Rabbi Yanai, one of the Talmudic sages, once saw a stranger look very distinguished, ambassadorial, professorial. He thought, I will invite this man back to my home. He brought him to his house.

They had a meal. And he said to his guest, ‘Tell me something that you have been learning from Mishna.’ The man said, ‘I cannot tell you because I did not learn Mishna.’

‘Okay,’ he said, ‘Tell me something from Midrash.’

He said, ‘Midrash I never learned.’

‘Okay, tell me something from Torah.’

He said, ‘I cannot tell you because I did not learn Torah.’

He said, ‘Okay, if you cannot do anything else, bench.’

He said, ‘I cannot bench.’

Rabbi Yanai said to him, ‘In that case, repeat after me the following words - a dog ate at Rabbi Yanai's table.’ 

The guest got up and said, ‘You thief!’

Rabbi Yanai said, ‘Me, a thief? What have I taken from you?’

He said, ‘You've taken from me my heritage.’ It is written “Torah tziva lanu Moshe morasha kehillat Ya’akov.” It is not written Torah tziva lanu Moshe morasha Rabbi Yanai. I am a Jew. I have a share in the Torah. Give me back my share in the Torah by instead of laughing at my ignorance, by teaching me some of what is my heritage.’

And that is what Rabbi Adin has done in our time.

He has given us back our texts. He's made them accessible to every one of us. He has restored Torah as morasha kehillat Ya’akov, the heritage of every Jew.

Let us salute his achievements. Let us continue to support the work of his foundation. Let us get that foundation to embrace - as it plans to do - the new revolution in information technology, so that every Jew in the world can access the work of Rav Adin - on his smartphone, on his iPad, and really take Torah back into the heart of Jewish life.

Adin Steinsaltz has given the Book back to the people, so that we - our children and our grandchildren - can once again become what we always should be, the People of the Book. Let us salute this man and wish him blessing and success into the future.

Thank you.