As a Driven Leaf

As a Driven Leaf stands as Rabbi Milton Steinberg’s most famous book, and arguably, the single most significant contribution to the literary canon of American Jewish theology. Based on scattered Talmudic references, Steinberg’s novel is set in second-century Palestine and tells the story of Rabbi Elisha Ben Abuyah. Elisha’s mother died in childbirth, so he was brought up by his Hellenized father, until he too died, leaving Elisha to be raised by his religiously observant uncle. Blessed with a sharp intellect and probing mind, Elisha rises quickly in learning and stature to become a great sage of the Rabbinic Sanhedrin. Soon thereafter, however, Elisha’s faith is shaken to the core as he bears witness to the death of the twin boys of his most beloved disciple, Rabbi Meir, and his wife Beruriah. The hammer to his faith, so to speak, would fall when Elisha beholds the death of a young boy obeying the command of his father to shoo away a mother bird in order to retrieve its eggs, fulfilling not one, but two biblical commandments associated with the reward of long life. At the sight of the pious boy tumbling to his death, Elisha’s trust in God disintegrates: “It is all a lie,” he said with a terrible quiet in his voice. “There is no reward. There is no Judge. There is no Judgment. For there is no God.” Disillusioned with his faith and having uttered heresy aloud, Elisha flees from his community to Antioch in hopes of finding wisdom and truth in Greek culture. Despite throwing himself into Hellenistic philosophy, thought, and society, here too Elisha fails in his search for certainty. Bereft of God, bereft of community, Elisha is left a broken man tragically alienated from everyone and everything he once held dear.

As for so many others, perhaps as for many of you, Steinberg’s novel was a turning point in my own religious journey when I first read it decades ago. In the figure of Elisha Ben Abuyah, Steinberg gave voice to much larger struggles between faith and reason, between Jewish and secular culture, tensions that are not just the stuff of historical fiction, but struggles present in all of our lives. Over the years, I have read the book many times and given away more copies than I can count, and I teach it whenever I get the chance. The insoluble dilemmas embedded in As a Driven Leaf remain as pressing today as they did in the time of the Talmud, as they did when Steinberg first drafted the novel.

But as I pulled the book off my shelf once again this past summer, I was prompted to ponder its significance in a new and altogether self-reflective way. You see, As a Driven Leaf was published in the seventh year of Steinberg’s rabbinate at Park Avenue Synagogue – precisely the same juncture at which I find myself today. After arriving in New York by way of a Midwest pulpit, Milton and Edith Steinberg went on to serve the needs of a dynamic and ever-evolving Upper East Side Jewish community. I spent some time this summer poking around his archives housed in the Center for Jewish History downtown. He was, like me, engaged in teaching, preaching, fundraising, committee meetings, movement politics, Israel advocacy, and more – all the things we rabbis are called on to do. Most of all, he was – as all rabbis are a pastoral figure, present at the lifecycle events of his flock, the “hatchings, matchings, and dispatchings” of the Jews he served. In other words, Steinberg was no ivory tower figure. He was, first and foremost, a communal pastor – a realization that prompted me to reconsider what his most famous book was actually about. “I put a lot of myself into the book,” Steinberg would later reflect, meaning that this was a book that could have been written only by a congregational rabbi, a congregational rabbi at a moment in time and space analogous to my own. For Steinberg, Elisha Ben Abuyah’s struggle to find God and to find a place in the community were not merely matters of esoteric contemplation. They were, I believe, a congregational rabbi’s active thoughts in his seventh year on the two primary and interdependent vocations of every Jew in the pew: the search for God and the search for community.

Seven years in, permit me to offer two postulates about the Jewish condition. First, as Jews, each and every one of us is called on to stand in relation to two things: God and the community. Second, a Jew’s relationship to the former impacts his or her relationship with the latter. Meaning, on a good day, when things are going well, we believe that God is good, that God is just, and that the world that God created is a good one. And when our belief in God is strong, so too, our place in the community is also secure. The closer we feel to God, the closer we feel, or at least have the potential to feel, to the Jewish community. That said, however, the opposite holds true as well. When we encounter loss, when we experience heartache and grief, these are the days we find ourselves alienated not just from God, but from the community as well. How is it possible, we ask, as Elisha Ben Abuyah did, that a just God allows bad things to happen to good people? The divine presence eludes us, or even worse, betrays us, and so we take our leave of the community. I understand the thinking; it is actually rather straightforward in its logic: a causal relationship between our disbelief and our disaffection. In more theological terms, there is a correlation between our proximity to God and proximity to the Jewish people. The person who believes himself to be in exile from God stands in self-imposed exile from the Jewish community.

Just the other week, I received a note from a young member of Park Avenue Synagogue, sharing with me her reluctance to attend High Holiday services. She explained that her father died in 2001 and that she harbored such painful memories of sitting with him in synagogue in the months prior to his passing, crying together as they chanted the words “who shall live and who shall die.” “I haven’t been able,” she wrote, “to come to Temple on [the holidays] because I get too upset hearing those words.” A beautiful Jewish soul standing alienated at the periphery, locking herself out due to the theological assumptions of a synagogue. “There is no Judge and there is no Judgment,” her thinking goes, and thus, “there is no place for me in the Jewish community.”

As a congregational rabbi, as your congregational rabbi, I am in possession of story after story of heartbreak and sorrow. For all of our shared joys, and there have been many, you have also invited me to be privy and present to the saddest moments of your lives. The loss of loved ones well before their time, parents burying children, horrific turns of fortunes, and betrayals of trust; men and women facing chronic and terminal physical and mental disease. I have recited viddui, the death bed prayer, with congregants and their families more times than I dare count, and we cry together at each other’s side. We are no longer strangers; your pain is my pain, the heartbreak is altogether real. “Don’t tell me,” you have said to me on more than one occasion, “that there is order to the universe, that this is somehow part of God’s plan.” More than once, I have heard your silent or not-so-silent existential scream – how in the face of pain and suffering, a congregant has fled the theological perimeter of the Jewish community. How many times have I myself sought to understand the painfully elusive will of God only to find myself with more questions than answers?

I think what Steinberg came to acknowledge seven years in, what I acknowledge today, is that there are limits to theological reflection. Philosophize all you want, seek your source for some definitive, but there is something terribly humbling about serving as pastor to a congregation. An advanced degree in theology is of no use in a hospital room, a funeral chapel, or a shiva house. The child plunging to his death in the fulfillment of a commandment is not meant to be a literal occurrence, but rather a case study on the absence of God’s justice in this world. Elisha’s flight, Jonah-like, away from the community, represents the most natural human response to the most unnatural and painful circumstance. Steinberg was the greatest theological mind of his generation, but as a pastor to his flock, when it came to human suffering, he understood that all his erudition was for naught. Knowing the job as I do, I have to believe that on more than one occasion he was brought to his theological knees at the suffering of the humanity he served. Not he, not I, not anyone, has the answer to why bad things happen to good people. As Arthur Cohen explained in his biographical sketch of Steinberg, As a Driven Leaf was “an explanation of himself to himself, an articulation of why a Jew stays a Jew and why a Jew deserts Judaism.” (Anatomy of Faith, p. 49) Steinberg knew the pain of his congregants firsthand, and from what I can reconstruct, his life was not without heartaches, losses, and sorrows of its own. Steinberg knew all the reasons not to believe in God, all the reasons why one would take leave from community. Nevertheless, the strength of his conviction, his faith in God and the people he served, impelled him to build a community whose driving purpose was to bring back those who would otherwise be lost to our people.

Which is why, I believe, the most critical scene of the entire novel comes at its very end, the scene that I believe must somehow reflect Rabbi Steinberg’s response to the questions embedded in Elisha’s soul – a personality who I now believe was literary proxy not for Steinberg, but for the Jews he served. Disillusioned and broken, Elisha chances upon his beloved student, the same Rabbi Meir who had lost his two young sons years before. The day, exactly like today, was not only Shabbat, but Yom Kippur as well. In riding a horse on this holiest of days, Elisha was in knowing breach of the Sabbath commandment; he had long since abandoned any concern for Jewish law. Nevertheless, Meir walks alongside Elisha, yearning for the company of his teacher to whom he had once been so close. The two men eventually arrive at the roadside marker signaling the communal boundary, the Sabbath limit, beyond which an observant Jew must not travel. “Here is the Sabbath limit.” Elisha tells Meir. “You must not go farther. It is time for you to turn back.” Eagerly seizing upon his former teacher’s words, Meir responds to Elisha, “Master, you, too. Even as it is written, ‘Turn back, turn back, ye wayward children.’”

Only this year did it finally dawn on me that the voice of Rabbi Meir calling on Elisha to return was the voice of Rabbi Steinberg calling his Jews back into the communal fold. “Turn back,” Meir cried, even now, with all your doubts, you can return. Rabbi Meir made no claim to have the answers to Elisha’s questions. If anything, having buried two of his own children, he experienced those questions weighing more heavily on his soul than they did on that of his teacher. But what Rabbi Meir knew was that although he lacked the answers, there was still comfort, solace, and support to be found in community. Both Meir and Elisha knew full well that throughout our lives there would be times of hester panim, when God’s face is hidden from humanity and we experience an existential loneliness at the realization of God’s absence in our lives. However, unlike Elisha, for Rabbi Meir (or, if you will, Rabbi Steinberg), the Jewish response to the vacuum wrought by God’s absence is that it be filled with the overflowing presence of humanity. “Turn back, turn back,” do not leave the boundaries of the community, bring your wounded self in from the outdoors. To paraphrase theologian Martin Buber: it is precisely at the moments when God’s contraction, tzimtzum, from this world is felt most acutely, that we call on the manifold relations of humanity to gush forth. It is at the very moment that we feel most estranged from God, that as Jews we must cling most closely to the humanity around us.

Despite the strength of my faith in God, I readily concede the problem of pain. I don’t know why bad things happen to good people, nor did Steinberg, nor does anyone. But as a congregational rabbi, I am not without arrows in my quiver; I have a response. It is the response I have dedicated my life to, the response of human presence, the response of community. In one of her final interviews, the twentieth-century intellectual Hannah Arendt recalled the day when, as a precocious teenager of fourteen, she wanted to rebel, and so she stood up in the middle of her Hebrew School class and declared: “I don’t believe in God!” To which the Rabbi teaching responded: “Well, who asked you?” (Hannah Arendt, The Last Interview: And Other Conversations, pp. 128-129) Ours is a tradition that not only allows religious questioning but understands the role of community as the vehicle for that questioning. It is not theology that matters as much as it is human presence. Technically speaking, according to Jewish law, when you show up at someone’s shiva house, you are not supposed to speak until spoken to. You aren’t there for your intellect, to explain someone’s suffering to them; you are there to let another person know that they are not as alone as they would otherwise believe themselves to be.

I am reminded of one of Elie Wiesel’s recollections from Auschwitz-Birkenau. One night, three learned prisoners, experts in Jewish law, convened a rabbinical court to put God on trial. Night after night witnesses were called up, some for the prosecution and others for the defense. Finally, after several nights of deliberation, the head of the tribunal announced the verdict for God: “Guilty as charged.” Following a silence, lasting, in Wiesel’s words, “a minute or an infinity,” the head of the court shook himself, smiled sadly, and said “And now, let us pray ma’ariv [the evening service].” (The Trial of God, p. vii) The story reveals the paradoxical nature of Jewish faith – a sort of “in spite of it all” spiritual posture. We do not know the will of God, we may even object to it, and for that matter, nobody necessarily even asked us for our opinion. Yet, in spite of everything, we still turn to each other. In communion with each other we still pray to a God who is absent and perhaps even guilty as charged. Even at those moments, precisely at the moments when our faith wavers, there is always the voice of Rabbi Meir calling on us: “turn back, turn back” to your people.

I cannot speak for all synagogues, only this one. And seven years older and hopefully wiser than when I came, I can tell you that our message today is one and the same as it was in the time of Rabbi Steinberg. “Turn back,” we plead to you standing on the boundary of community. There is no theological litmus test for entry; we are not here to judge you. A synagogue is not just a place for believers; if it were, it wouldn’t be so hard to get a seat. We will take you back. The promise of community is that it is a place that validates and honors your inquiries, provides you the space and tools to ask your questions aloud, and puts you in relation with other people of integrity facing the same or similar struggles. If you are angry with God, then this is a place to express that rage. If you are drowning in self-pity, then community will give you the strength to leverage your hurt towards empathy for the hurt of others. If God’s presence eludes you, then it is in the presence of other human beings created, like you, in the image of God that will provide uplift. If you are without hope, then it is here, in the synagogue, that you will come to see that our world, though deeply flawed and filled with pain, is not without its blessings. If nothing else, this synagogue is a place that calls on us to express gratitude for the most basic gifts of our lives, gifts that we know would otherwise be eclipsed by the overwhelming pain in this world. Let this synagogue serve as refuge to you in this storm-tossed world. The gates of return are never closed; turn back, turn back to the Jewish community that wants you so.

In the heart of the campus of Tel Aviv University sits Beit Hatefutsot: The Museum of the Jewish People, and on display in one corner of the museum is a sculpture called “The Minyan,” a scene of Jews, old and young gathering for prayer. The idea behind it came from Abba Kovner, the famed Lithuanian partisan turned Israeli poet. Though Kovner survived the Vilna Ghetto uprising, many of his family and comrades perished in the Shoah. Understandably, when Kovner arrived in Israel, he was alienated from God, secular to the bone, wanting nothing to do with organized religion. One day, while he was walking through the Old City of Jerusalem, a man pulled on his sleeve and invited him to join a minyan at the Western Wall – to be the tenth. For the first time, Kovner explained, he felt he counted, that he belonged, that he was needed in the Jewish community. The oddity of the minyan sculpture, Kovner explains, is that it has only nine and not ten participants as prescribed by Jewish law. The absence of the tenth is meant to remind you, the viewer, that you are needed to complete the minyan, that the community cannot go on without your help. (Lawrence Epstein, A Treasury of Jewish Anecdotes, p. 128)

Friends, our world provides us with so many reasons to turn away. For far too many here, the year gone by has been filled with pain and sorrow. We know that so too, the year ahead will undoubtedly provide reasons enough to challenge our faith. I pray to God that neither you nor your family should know any suffering or loss. Please God it should be a good year for each and every one of you. But should it be the case that sorrow arrives at your doorstep, don’t turn away, turn back; turn back to the community. Your humanity matters. Without you this community is not complete, without you we cannot be whole. With all your doubts, with all your objections and should it be the case, with all your disbelief, the integrity of our search is bolstered by your presence. Broken as your soul may be, it is in the presence of other such souls that we find the strength, together, to greet a new day. You and I, all of us together, creating a community capable of bringing the wandering Jew in from exile and maybe, just maybe, bringing a distant God, closer to earth, closer to each and every one of us.