A World and Its Rabbi, Lost and Remembered

“Remember that every person stands before you in a state of loss.”

I am reminded of this prescient counsel as we approach the most fraught High Holiday season in our generation, standing beneath the pall of our national loss that casts a shadow extending to Simchat Torah and, I fear, beyond.

This wisdom was offered to me before I led Rosh Hashanah services for the first time as an ordained rabbi by my teacher and mentor, Dr. Steven Saltzman z”l, whose 10^th yahrzeit is observed this evening.  When Rabbi Saltzman first proffered this advice, I had little idea what he meant; at the time I had yet to experience grave loss in my life.  But a decade ago I lost Rabbi Saltzman, my own father, and a cadre of other close family and friends in the span of a year.  Saltzman’s untimely death was shortly before the Days of Awe, and when I entered synagogue a few weeks later I stood, for the first time, both before and among every other person in a state of loss.  I do so again this year.

The unnatural death and devastation we witnessed on and following October 7^th have eclipsed the more common losses that would have captured our attention in a normal year.  At a time of unprecedented tragedy it can feel uncomfortable to dwell on losses that occur in the course of the human condition.  At the same time, it is proper to pay respect to losses that are less shocking but not less significant.  The loss of Steven Saltzman is of consequence to we who knew him and profited from his capacious mind and spirit; the loss of the world he exemplified is of importance to the contemporary Jewish community.  Both deserve to be marked among the losses we mourn today.

The world of which I write, and in which I was privileged to grow up, was the world of the Great North American Synagogue, and no one filled it like Steven Saltzman, who ministered towards the end of its zenith at the turn of the millennium.  In that era, the edifices of Jewish worship were intentionally imposing, Saltzman said, to make the statement that we, the Jews, had arrived, and had taken our place alongside the other great faiths of the New World.  The cavernous sanctuaries of those synagogues seated thousands and the architecture itself demanded in their rabbis a powerful preacher fully engaged in Sermonic Judaism (Saltzman’s words again).

His sermons were masterpieces of meticulous Judaic and secular scholarship that took him, by his own estimation, 25 hours each to research, craft, edit, and rehearse.  He believed the primary function of the congregational rabbi was as a theologian and Talmudist (he held twin doctorates in these fields) and to present a weekly scholarly and popular discourse on these topics worthy of publication. While he was dying, Saltzman still came to shul each week to preach; he said that when he stood on the bimah and sermonized he felt the most alive.  The cathedral synagogue, he taught, was meant to evoke the transcendence of the Almighty, and the task of the rabbi was to spiritually and intellectually elevate the congregation to those heights.  No one did it like him.

He modeled his oratory on the preaching style of the American south.  I met Saltzman when he became rabbi of Adath Israel Congregation of Toronto in 1989 and when, at the age of 17, I first heard his booming voice bellowing from the pulpit, I remarked to myself, “Dorthy, we are not in Kansas anymore.”  On Shabbat morning, in the presence of his imposing physical stature and mind (he was a student of mathematics, subatomic physics, Lacanian psychoanalysis and German Idealism), one was transported to a world of ideas, escaping the banalities of everyday life to enter an intellectual Oz.  Like that fabled land, Saltzman’s world was also filled with the strange and wonderful: his passion for Karate and Arabic, scribal arts, Hollywood screenplays, and Sherlock Holmes.

In his final years, Saltzman knew that the rabbinical world in which he lived was coming to an end.  The American rabbinate, he averred, had ceased to be a profession of ecclesiastical leadership and had become instead a branch of social work.  A proud student of the Jewish Theological Seminary during its heyday under Saul Lieberman and Louis Finkelstein, he already felt that he and his generation of students did not possess the comprehensive command of rabbinical sources of their teachers.  He entered rabbinical school, he told me, having mastered “…only half of Shas”; years later, when he was teaching the laws of Gittin (Jewish divorce) at JTS, he lamented that he had to help students who did not have sufficient knowledge of Hebrew to fill out their rabbinical school applications.

A trained classical musician (he played cello and counted a book on Jewish ethnomusicology among his numerous publications), Saltzman bemoaned the collapse of the choral synagogue and shrinking role of the choir in the liturgy.  An unapologetic adherent of traditional Conservative Judaism, he saw the movement he venerated slowly disappearing, and he fought the liberalizing trends that compelled him to eventually lead his shul out of the United Synagogue of America.  He said that he had been attracted to Conservative Judaism originally because he had found there halachic Orthopraxis (several of his own legal positions were stricter than those of Modern Orthodoxy) coupled with a non-fundamentalist openness to academic critical scholarship.  When he felt these dual commitments had been lost among his colleagues in the Rabbinical Assembly he sought them elsewhere or, he said, in solitude.

In eulogizing we must avoid hagiography.  The world of the 20^th century grand American synagogue was not an ideal land beyond the rainbow, and Saltzman was not some sainted wizard.  But I can attest that both the milieu and the man were magical in manner that now feels far away.  I imagine that many who read this encomium will find foreign and antiquated both Saltzman and the Judaism he exemplified, and this too is a loss.

Saltzman was obsessed with the Book of Job, and he read, wrote, and lectured about countless aspects of the work from medieval commentators to modern Bible scholarship to the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man.  As with the book’s namesake, Saltzman sought to understand and reconcile the ways of God.  Like Job, he was a man of faith, struggling not with God’s existence (he was an absolute believer), but rather with the nature of His revelation and how to relate to Him.  Saltzman’s untimely death in 2014, and the murder of his only son weeks later, are sadly evocative of the biblical story and a painful coda to his study of theodicy.

The Book of Job is about a man who loses the world that he loved and the people most precious to him.  We Jews who have just endured the death of thousands of our brothers and sisters mourn not only their lost lives, but also the loss of the world they inhabited and exemplified.  As Jews, we look with optimism towards the future, and as Job’s world was rebuilt, so too we will rebuild Israeli society and contemporary Jewish life.  We trust that our children will live in a vibrant new Jewish world.

Jews look forward, and we also look back, to our lost worlds and the great leaders of our past.  We mourn what we have lost and celebrate all that we have acquired.  Recounting today the enormity of the loss of Rabbi Steven Saltzman I remind myself and all who knew him how much we gained from having been part of that lost world.