Rav Amital is perhaps one of the most interesting leaders of the Dati Leumi community in the last generation. He was a Hungarian-born ilui (Torah genius); Holocaust survivor; founder of the Hesder program where young men both serve in the army and learn Torah over a five year period; a founder of Gush Etzion and its Yeshiva; a member of Rabin’s government in the 1990s; and perhaps most importantly, a teacher.
Rabbi Moshe Taragin, a Rebbe at Yeshivat Gush Etzion, is well known in his own right, and his recent book, To Be Holy but Human: Reflections Upon my Rebbe, HaRav Yehuda Amital was exceptional, and perfectly titled and subtitled. In reverse order: this is not a biography, even though it contains a lot of biographical detail. It is a set of reflections, a pastiche of Rabbi Taragin’s experience of and with Rav Amital. Sometimes he shares Rav Amital’s stories and their lessons; sometimes Rav Amital’s divrei Torah; and often they are the lessons that Rabbi Taragin drew from his many years of learning from and service to his Rebbe.
The title is also incredibly apt. The experience of reading these reflections is truly of a holy, yet deeply human person. This is no hagiography, which I suspect Rav Amital would have been troubled by. The person that emerges through the book is a living Torah, someone who is humble and thoughtful of each moment and each person. To live Torah, for him, is not a theoretical exercise, and life does not have to fit into preconceived categories. Living Torah requires that one lives in the world, not apart from it, and allows that lived experience to inform his Torah understanding and life choices.
Rabbi Taragin interestingly situated a part of Rav Amital’s approach as emerging from the Hungarian Orthodox community’s more grounded, balabatish approach to Torah, rather than the Lithuanian Yeshiva world’s intellectual elitism. I was not aware of this distinction, and found it quite interesting and powerful.
One area that impacted me greatly were the descriptions of Rav Amital’s simple and straightforward approach to tefillah as a conversation with Hashem. It’s not that I’ve never heard a description like this before, but somehow hearing it from Rav Amital touched me more deeply, and has made a significant impact on my tefillah recently.
Perhaps this vort from Rav Amital does a good job of explaining his groundedness. In Chana’s tefillah for a child, she asks for “zerah anashim,” the seed of men, which is a strange phrase – what else would she give birth to? The Midrash explains that she was asking for a child who was ordinary – not a prodigy or a spiritual giant. Just a normal, balanced child. This, Rav Taragin said, was Rav Amital’s message to his son at his bar mitzvah. Just be normal, and that’s more than ok.
The book could have used a touch of editing, with some stories or ideas either going on too long or feeling repetitious. But since they were interesting and insightful, I took the chazarah (review) as useful educational practice.
Rav Amital, and certainly Rabbi Taragin’s reflections on him, are not only powerful and important, but necessary in an increasingly fractious world. Rav Amital had a quality of Aharon HaKohen– ohev shalom v’rodef shalom, to love peace and pursue peace, and we would all benefit from his model of leadership.
Just Because I Liked It:
- Dr. Moshe Krakowski, a colleague, neighbor, and friend, shared his important early-stage research on why people leave the Orthodox community, with Dovid Bashevkin on the 18forty podcast. There are some keen insights, especially one about how the Chassidish community makes the chol (mundane) part of living in a Torah community.
- I found this interview on Sam Harris’s podcast about the risks of AI fascinating. The interviewee worked for ChatGPT, until he quit because he didn’t think they were serious enough about the potential risks of a superintelligence. It was surprisingly comprehensible!