Elliot Cosgrove, PhD March 19, 2010
It is my distinct honor and privilege to offer a sermon in memory of Rabbi Milton Steinberg on the occasion of his 60th Yahrzeit. On behalf of the entire congregation, I want to welcome Rabbi Steinberg’s sons, Dr. David Steinberg and Dr. Jonathan Steinberg, and their family and friends who have gathered from near and far. We look forward to hearing your words immediately following Kiddush. From your presence at my installation, to the friendship you have shown me every step of the way as we have conceived and planned this weekend, please know how grateful I am for your counsel, support, and encouragement as I take my own steps in the extended shadow of your father’s pulpit.
The honor of speaking today, great as it is, also comes with its share of anxieties. To what aspect of Rabbi Steinberg’s rabbinate shall we direct our attention? His congregational achievements, his theology, his fiction, or perhaps his book that will be posthumously released tomorrow? For a brief time, I thought I should just deliver one of his published sermons, so that the gathered family could experience his words spoken by my humble proxy. It is an impossible task to encapsulate the totality of Rabbi Steinberg’s rabbinate; the combination of Steinberg’s interpersonal skills, felicitous pen, and leadership qualities left a profile encompassing a trusted pastoral presence, a community builder, as well as a leader in Jewish institutional, literary, and ecumenical life.
Given the options, I will begin where he did just over sixty years ago, with a sermon on Passover, by way of notes preserved by Bernard Mandelbaum. The sermon is about suffering and it bears the title “Rabbi Levi’s Prayer.” In his sermon, Steinberg cites another sermon, given by Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev, the saintly figure of 18th-century Hasidism. Rabbi Levi Yitzhak introduces the subject of human pain and suffering by way of the famous passage in the Passover Haggadah on the four sons:
“The Haggadah speaks of four sons,” Rabbi Levi explains, “One wise, one wicked, one simple, and one who does not know how to ask. Lord of the world, I, Levi Yitzhak, am the one who does not know how to ask. Lord of the universe, even if I did know, I would not dare to. How could I venture to ask You why everything happens as it does, why we suffer, why we are driven from one exile to another, why our foes are allowed to torment us?” Rabbi Levi continued in his cry to God, “But the Haggadah explains to the father of this fourth child: The father must take the initiative. Lord of the world, are You not my Father? Am I not Your son? I do not even know what questions to ask. I do not beg You to reveal to me the secret of your ways – I couldn’t comprehend it! But please show me one thing. Show me the meaning of what is happening to me at this moment. Show me what it demands of me. Show me what You, Lord of the universe, are telling me through it. I do not ask why I suffer. I ask only to know that I suffer for your sake.
It is a terse and enigmatic homily, a message preached by Rabbi Levi Yitzhak in Berdichev some two-and-a-half centuries ago in the midst of torment, and a message preached by Rabbi Steinberg on the Upper East Side in the late 1940’s. The earnest fourth child, in possession of a question he dare not ask, “I do not ask why I suffer. I ask to know only that I suffer for your sake.” It is both a remarkable concession and an insistent demand. He knows the inevitability of pain, he knows the life of quiet desperation that most men lead; he accepts pain as an unwelcome but necessary part of the human experience. But what Levi Yitzhak wanted to know, what Milton Steinberg wanted to know, what every human being who has experienced or witnessed pain wants to know is “For what purpose is this suffering?” In secular terms: “Is there something good to come of it?”
Steinberg’s intellectual legacy cannot be summed up neatly. In his far too brief life, his oeuvre touched on the full range of Jewish study and concern. But in those final few years, when this sermon was written, at the peak of his intellectual prowess, as he crafted and drafted the novel that will be released tomorrow, he stood face to face with what his student, and product of this congregation, Arthur Cohen, called, “the Tremendum.” The overwhelming theological questions raised by standing in relationship with a God under whose watch the Holocaust took place. Steinberg could not stand on the sidelines. Given his national profile, he was asked to speak again and again, to mobilize American Jewry, to provide relief to refugees, to raise funds on their behalf, to build up the fledgling state of Israel, and most difficult of all, to make sense of the Shoah to a Jewry in search of meaning. His addresses, published and unpublished, on behalf of agencies such as the JDC, the National Jewish Welfare Board, the National Refugee service, bear titles such as “That These Dead Shall Not Have Died in Vain: Four Messages from the Dead – Addressed to Us, The Living,” “Breathe Upon these Slain and They Shall Live.”
Perhaps Rabbi Steinberg’s most heart-searing address was delivered at the Waldorf Astoria to the Women’s Division of the United Jewish Appeal in 1944. In it, he speaks of Seraye, “a village situated in the Lithuanian County of Suwalki, just to the east of the old German frontier.” A village, in Steinberg’s words “whence my family stems, where my father was born.” Listen to his words: “I say that I have been thinking about Seraye a great deal of late [because] I cannot think about all of Europe’s Jews, the six million dead, the one and a half million of walking skeletons. Such numbers are too large for me to embrace, the anguish they represent are too vast for my comprehension. And so I think of Seraye instead.” Steinberg recounts imagined people and scenes of this village that is no longer, the countless Serayes destroyed by the Nazis. He is filled with anguish and anger, “Sometimes,” he writes, “when I think of Seraye, I want to hurl hard words at God, that terrible saying of Abraham; ‘Shall the Judge of the whole earth not do Justice?!’”
If the first part of Steinberg’s life was devoted to negotiating the dialectic between faith and reason, secularism and piety, universalism and particularism, then I believe the last few years of Steinberg’s life were devoted to the question of suffering – national, personal, and otherwise. From his public addresses and his sermons to his study of 19th-century European philosophers (especially Kierkegaard), Steinberg’s questions turned again and again to the question of human suffering, the Divine and the human response to our agonies. It would be during these years that Steinberg would come to say “I still revere a great mind, but I revere a great heart more. In part because, like everyone else in our generation, I have discovered of what monstrosities the merciless intellect is capable.”
There is a deeply human and sometimes plaintive quality to his writing in the final years of his life: The following is from his 1947 Yom Kippur sermon, “A Pity for the Living”: “The hard tragic fact is that of the universality of suffering, the truth that to live is to suffer… All life is a great fellowship of anguish in which each of us participates in some fashion or other.” Steinberg concludes “that because all things suffer, things merit our pity.” One human being to another, or a God to a suffering humanity, our agony must not be for naught, it must, as Rabbi Levi Yitzhak said, lead to a deepening of the human spirit.
Sixty-plus years later it is difficult to connect all the dots. I cannot say with absolute surety if Rabbi Steinberg was drawn to the question of suffering solely because of the Shoah. That was probably part of it, but probably so was his heart condition and his deteriorating health due to his frenetic schedule. Or it could simply have reflected maturity of thought, that after shuttling between faith and reason, secular philosophy and devotional learning for decades, he decided to slice it another way – directing his energies inwards, directly towards the human condition. Certainly, as a rabbi, one has many opportunities, plenty of late nights in hospital rooms at the side of congregants standing face-to-face with the question of “For what purpose is this suffering?” Steinberg’s theological legacy is important not only because of his philosophical rigor, but because his writing was wrought by way of a deep engagement with a suffering humanity.
Steinberg did not live long enough to write a systematic exposition of his own religious thinking, and, as we know, he died before he completed his novel. But if granted length of years, he, like Rabbi Levi Yitzhak would know what every human being comes to know: that while it is not for us to escape suffering, and it is not for us to understand it completely, it is in our capacity to determine how we bear it and how purposefully we lead our lives. “If his suffering turns him in on himself,” wrote Steinberg, “makes him cruel, selfish, bitter, then will he think ill not only of himself, but of the whole human species and God. If on the other hand his pain renders him merciful, if he carries it off with dignity, then he has given himself a demonstration of man’s nobility.”
There are questions about which we cannot ask and to which we will never have answers, but each of us can, every day of our lives, respond with gentleness, compassion, pity, and concern. Even in the face of suffering, we can come to appreciate God’s world. In fact, I would venture to say that Steinberg’s able pen and supple heart would have found a way to express that it is the very vulnerability of our lives that can draw us into this greater appreciation. He hints at that very thought in what is understood to be his finest sermon, “To Hold with Open Arms.” It is a meditation upon leaving the hospital after a massive heart attack. He steps out of the hospital, awed by the eminently ordinary – the sunlight, breeze, and humanity ignored by a healthy humanity. In the very recognition of life’s fragility, we can embrace our world and our God with open arms.
Rabbi Steinberg knew the brittle shell of our common humanity. The rabbis employ the image of vessels in a potter’s shop, tapped by the hammer of our Divine maker to check for quality – and yes, sometimes tapped so hard that we shatter. For Steinberg, this condition did not yield to gloom and cynicism. Prisoners we are, but for Steinberg we are prisoners of hope. To paraphrase his final address, above our suffering, beyond our doubts, and aside from the questions we dare not ask, lies something else – hope. Hope for humanity, hope for each of us, and hope for a world in need of redemption. May this message, some sixty years later, bring with it comfort and uplift in our day as it did in the time of Rabbi Steinberg, and may the memory of Rabbi Milton Steinberg, Harav Micha’el ben Shmuel Ha-levi, be for a blessing and enduring legacy for generations to come.