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Stuart Schoffman: Ethics of My Father
On Purim I went to visit my parents in their Jerusalem apartment. My father was weak and his hearing was poor. I sat at his bedside and began reading him the Megillah, the Book of Esther. He did not respond until I reached the verse in chapter 2 where the character of Mordecai is introduced as ish yehudi, a Jewish man. Suddenly my father interjected: "The Kotzker Rebbe asked, Why does it say ish yehudi? Why not just yehudi?" "Why, Abba?" "Eyder tsu zayn a yid," he replied in Yiddish, his mother tongue, "darf men zayn a mentsh." Before being a Jew, you have to be a man, a human being. He died at home six weeks later, on the 29th of Nisan. He was 92.
It was the last bit of Torah he ever taught me, and a profoundly pertinent one in our troubled times. Of course he had conveyed this lesson to me over many years, by example. Louis Schoffman -- Elazar in Hebrew -- was a mentsh above all. A gentleman: a gentle man, kind and wise and dignified, who valued the dignity of others no less than his own. He was richly conversant with the entire Talmud, but the tractate he cherished most was Pirkei Avot, "Ethics of the Fathers," which in Chapter 4, Mishnah 1, captures my father in a timeless adage: "Who is respected? He who respects other people."
He was a man of prodigious learning, blessed with an extraordinary memory. He could recite Russian poems by Lermontov and quote Dante in Italian and Vergil in Latin. Well into my fifties, I could count on him to help me with my homework. I would phone and ask, Abba, what�s that great line from Ibn Gabirol? Where does Rashi say such-and-so? And he would always know.
Yet he was also modest in the extreme. Several years ago I began pressing him to tell me more of his life story. More than once he responded with an anecdote about Hayyim Nahman Bialik, the greatest modern Hebrew poet. When Bialik published his first poem, "El Hatzippor" ("To the Bird"), in the 1890s, the editor of the literary journal asked him to provide a bio, by way of introduction to the readers. Bialik answered: "I have no biography."
By which Bialik meant, and my father too: What�s to tell? My story is so common, so typical. But this is the very point. My father was a representative man, a member of the last generation of maskilim, Jewish intellectuals of a special time and place: European-born, multi-lingual Hebraists; rationalists devoted to Jewish tradition; liberal humanists with a passion for knowledge and independent thought. In the synagogue on Shabbat, in Brooklyn and Jerusalem, he would sit with such men and quietly argue fine points of philology and religion. Few are left, and we won�t see their like again.
Born in a Latvian village called Ape, he grew up in Valka, today a quiet, leafy town on the Estonian border. His strongest memory was of skating on the frozen river and being chased off the ice by his gentile friends� older brothers, who had come home from university infected with anti-Semitism. He arrived in New York as a boy of 11. His father, Schneur Zalman, a ritual slaughterer, came from a hasidic family and wanted his eldest son to be a rabbi. But after two years at Yeshiva University, my father switched to Brooklyn College, where he majored in the polar opposite of rabbinics: classics, Greek and Latin. He received his PhD in Jewish history in 1941, writing his dissertation on the relations between the Church and the Jews in medieval Spain. After serving with the American army in North Africa and Italy in World War II, he became a professor of Hebrew at Brooklyn College. In 1979, he and my mother retired and made aliyah.
I asked him once when he first became a Zionist. "I was 7," he replied. "Not 6, Abba, not 8?" "It was 1919," he said firmly. "It was after World War I, and everyone around me was getting a country of their own. The Latvians, the Estonians, the Finns. I wanted one too." And I remember a walk we took in Jerusalem years ago, not long before I went off to work in Hollywood. Near the Montefiore Windmill we paused and took in the view of the Old City walls. "Do you know why the Crusaders failed?" my father asked. "Why, Abba?" "Because after two hundred years Europe lost interest in them," he said, pointedly. "If that ever happens with American Jews, Zionism will fail too."
Three years ago, my father suffered the first of his strokes. One day we were sitting together on the terrace at the rehab hospital when he began to recite something in English that was unfamiliar to me. At Yeshiva University, he said, his English teacher had required everyone to pick a favorite passage to memorize, and he had picked this one. I jotted down a few words and went home and Googled them, and here is what my father recited verbatim, after 70 years, from Areopagitica, John Milton�s 17th-century tract against censorship:
"For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them."
My father was a bibliophile of the first order. The shelves of his library teemed with volumes that reflected his boundless intellectual curiosity. Those familiar with the modern classics of Jewish historiography know him for his elegant translation from Hebrew into English of Yitzhak Baer�s magisterial "History of the Jews in Christian Spain." Apart from that, though he was a gifted stylist, he didn�t write books of his own. He was a man who believed in Torah lishma, learning for its own sake.
The Kotzker, along with other great teachers of hasidism, was an exemplar of our oral tradition and also left the writing to others. For decades my father imparted his love of learning to untold numbers of students, many of whom went on to be teachers and scholars themselves, writers of books and articles that are also, as Milton put it, the progeny of my father�s soul. On his gravestone are these words, adapted from the very first passage of his beloved "Ethics of the Fathers." He�emid talmidim harbeh: He raised many disciples. May his memory be a blessing.
The Talmudic tractate my father cherished most was Pirkei Avot, which in Chapter 4, Mishnah 1, captures him in a timeless adage: �Who is respected? He who respects other people.�
June 14, 2004
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