You have experienced this.
You go to the dentist, and she pulls a tooth, and your tongue instinctively goes to the place in the mouth where that tooth used to be.
It’s called the presence of an absence.
That is how many of us have been feeling for exactly a year. Last week, we observed the first yahrzeit (anniversary of a death) of David Ellenson — past president of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, past provost of that institution, a professor at that institution for a generation – a teacher, a theologian, a historian of Jewish ideas, a world-class thinker. Someone said that “David was always the smartest person in the room, and he never let you remember that.”
If you could look up the word “mensch” in a dictionary, you would see David’s photograph. You could meet him and never know he possessed one of the greatest Jewish minds of this generation. Simple, unpretentious, a man who made everyone feel that he was a member of their family. A man who passionately loved his own family, especially his wife, Rabbi Jacqueline Koch Ellenson, and their children, several of whom have followed David and Jackie into the rabbinate. David and I were friendly for more than 50 years; our kids are friends; our grandchildren are friends. Three generations of friendship in one family. It does not get any better than that.
Please check out the podcast that we recorded in his memory. It features:
- Professor Arnold Eisen — former president of Jewish Theological Seminary.
- Rabbi Michael Marmur — associate professor of Jewish theology at HUC-JIR, Jerusalem, who had served as the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Provost at HUC-JIR, having previously been dean of the Jerusalem campus.
- Elisheva Urbas — editorial director, Hadar — an editor, writer, translator, coach and teacher.
We took a deep dive into David’s life — beginning with his formative years in the Orthodox community in Newport News, Virginia. We discussed how David’s Southern Orthodox Jewish boyhood shaped him — making him sensitive to what it means to be a cultural stranger, and imbuing within him an infectious love for clal Yisrael — the entirety of the Jewish people.
David loved the Jewish people — all Jews — and the Jewish people loved him back. When he died, the tributes to him came from every corner of the Jewish world — Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, Renewal and every flavor of Orthodoxy. Perhaps the only scholar to have earned honorary degrees from HUC-JIR, JTS and Yeshiva University.
That would make sense for a man who spent a good part of his scholarly career studying the roots of German Orthodoxy. I could never walk on Hildesheimer Street in the German Colony in Jerusalem without thinking of David and his work on Ezriel Hildesheimer, a German rabbi who was one of the founders of modern Orthodoxy. (And, on the subject of Jerusalem and Zion, David was a passionate liberal Zionist. He liked to remind people, discreetly, that the eighth day of his life — his brit milah ceremony — was on Nov. 29, 1947 — the day the United Nations voted on partition of the land of Israel.)
All of which brings me to one of David’s greatest lessons — which he shared with me, and with so many others.
I was recently in New Orleans, and I remembered David’s teaching about Rabbi Bernard Illowy, who had emigrated from Europe in 1853 and settled in that city.
Rabbi Illowy had a question: Could local mohalim (ritual circumcisers) perform ritual circumcisions on sons born of a Jewish father and a Christian mother, who would not be Jewish according to traditional Jewish law?
Illowy thought that they should not do so. But that was not enough. He consulted with German rabbis, including Hildesheimer, and they agreed with him.
One rabbi, however, dissented. Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer was a German Orthodox rabbi whose views were somewhat more enlightened. He considered the case of those infants, and he used a particularly powerful term to describe them — zera kodesh (holy offspring). He said that it was a mitzvah to bring those children into the covenant.
Rabbi Kalischer drew on the teachings of a 16th-century Sephardic sage, Rabbi David ben Zimri, who taught that descendants of the Marranos, or anusim — Jews who had been forcibly converted to Christianity but maintained attachments to Judaism — should be welcomed back into Judaism.
What did David conclude from this? He taught that Jewish law could speak in many voices and that in this particular case, as in others, Jews could reach across the intra-Jewish aisle (Ashkenazic and Sephardic) to seek solutions to vexing problems.
But I will always remember what David taught about Kalischer’s response in 1862. It ended with these words: “Perhaps great religious leaders will spring from among them.”
David resonated with Rabbi Kalischer’s optimism, hope and humility. In particular, David resonated with that first word: “Perhaps.” Who knows what will become of those children? Perhaps they will become future leaders of our people.
David would not allow the Kalischer response to live in the clouds of obscure academic research. For David, this was real, and it pointed to the way that contemporary Jews might respond to the challenges of intermarriage. In an article that he co-wrote with Kerry Olitzky, we find these words:
Our community has to demonstrate—through experience—why living a Jewish life will add meaning to their lives and the lives of their children. We must be prepared to do this, and we must do so in a spirit that Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer articulated in the 19th century when he labeled children born of gentile mothers and Jewish fathers as holy offspring. He argued that the community should do everything in its power to facilitate the entry of such children into the Jewish community.
That was David Ellenson’s life project — reaching back into the past to see how its models could speak to contemporary challenges.
I miss him. Many of us miss him. His life was, and continues to be, a blessing.
