Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg died yesterday afternoon.

His formal obit in the New York Times appears here.

He was a teacher of mine, a close friend, and a mentor.

Like so many students of history, I first met Arthur on the pages of a book, his Zionist Idea, which up until the last time I saw him (last Tuesday just before Pesach) he always referred to as “the single greatest essay on the history of Zionism ever written.” Before you could even conceive of wrinkling your brow to question the certainty of such a statement, he’d add, “But can you really argue with me on this?”

We met face to face in rabbinical school, when I occasionally sat in on his classes at New York University, where he was the Bronfman Visiting Professor of Humanities. His classes were small, intimate, fiery seminars in critical thinking and listening to one of the smartest, most analytical Jewish thinkers you’d ever met. You could walk away from those sessions inspired, crushed, or awestruck (and sometimes you could feel all three at once) and you craved the opportunity to come back.

Years later, when I was appointed Director of the Bronfman Center Hillel at NYU, I was told by the person who hired me, the great Naomi Levine, that meeting with Arthur for a private tutorial once a week would be a requirement of the job. And so for the better part of nearly seven years, over sandwiches in his office or cups of tea in mine before he taught or hamburgers at the Village Crown (where he’d cover his head and share a few words of Torah before eating), I got to know Arthur.

I got to know his wicked sense of humor, often leveled at people to take them down a notch, to humble them, because that was his relationship with God and the tradition: harsh and humbling.

One scholar’s work was “horseshit.” Another was “barely fit to be a high school teacher in Kansas City.” He is reported to have told Henry Kissinger that if he would have been born in the United States, he’d have been the “chief rabbi of Kansas City.” (I regret never getting to the bottom of his Kansas City thing.)

When he’d call me in my office, he’d often say as I picked up the phone, “This is Yassir Arafat.” And then we’d set a date for a lesson in White House politics, American Jewish life, the reality of Israel, Blacks and Jews, the Vatican, whatever was on his mind, whatever he was writing at the time, for the New York Review of Books, for the New York Times, or dictating to his devoted and intrepid personal secretary Carol. He didn’t write his books at a computer, I learned one day, but dictated them, in full paragraphs, eloquent, scholarly, and polemical, to Carol, who raised her brows, laughed, shook her head, and chided him to be more kind.

He believed in his heart that the true story of American Jews was our prior economic humility and he had no patience for the pretensions of success. Most of us descend from the Lower Middle Class, he’d say, and American Jewish history really begins with Ellis Island and the candy store in the Bronx. The real intellectual elite were the rabbis and scholars, and most of the great ones thought America was a wasteland and were killed in the Shoah.

He never moved off that idea and on one level saw his life as a testimony in honor of what should have been.

Arthur told me so many stories but I want to share this one, told to him by the grandson of a great Polish rebbe who was close to Arthur’s father.

In one of the camps during the War, on a Friday afternoon, a paricular group of Jews were rounded up for extermination. In a last, desperate attempt to salvage their dignity, a small band among them met and decided to rebel. “Let’s go to our death fighting!” they said. And then their rabbi interupted them to remind them that it was Erev Shabbat. “Shabbat is greater than everything happening here. And our obligation to welcome it with singing is greater than our obligation to fight a battle we will not win.”

Crying through the last words of the story Arthur said, “And that rabbi went off to be killed with his community, singing Shabbat songs as the sun was setting on the horizon. I only wish I had that much courage. I, in my weakness, would have wanted to join the rebels. Could I have ever been so great as to dare to lead in that way?”

His stature, his voice, his sense of self was so great that it is literally impossible to imagine him dead. His stories, his scholarship, his razor-tongued wit, have left a living legacy that I have already begun passing on to my students.

Okay, one last story. During one hospital stay, just before the 2004 Presidential election, Arthur was being visited by a young geriatric social worker, who, it turns out, had just become a naturalized American citizen. “I’m a naturalized citizen, too,” he boasted. “But I came from Poland, not Canada!” She looked a bit frightened. “Have you figured out who you’re going to vote for?” he challenged her. She just wanted some simple information from him to make his stay better.

“Young lady, I’m a Roosevelt Democrat and this guy in the White House wants to put Social Security on the market in Wall Street! I say ‘Throw the bum out!’ ”

With his daughters and Carol urging him to remain calm, he argued like a prophet, conveying his message to anyone within earshot. Nurses and doctors passing by looked in to the ICU to see this American Jewish icon holding forth.

To your wonderful wife and daughters and granddaughters, to your secretary and nurse who cared for you, Arthur, I pray you will find a much deserved peace and comfort with your ancestors. But knowing you, I can only add that for those figures you encounter on the other side who need it, give ‘em hell.

May your memory be a blessing.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 18th, 2006 at 11:39 am and is filed under Politics, Big Issues in Jewish Life, Israel, Writers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.