My father, Albert Elazar, was a man of thought and action, but not particularly a man of writing. He wrote down his ideas only in general ways when he felt it was necessary as part of a campaign for one thing or another or to supply textual material for the schools he directed. As a result, he left no body of educational theory. At the same time, he was an educational innovator of the first rank and in his innovations one can discern some clear and consistent theoretical lines. This essay represents an effort to abstract a theory of education from his life’s work, one which this writer believes has great relevance for all forms of elementary and secondary education, no matter what the venue or the sponsorship.
My father, not having been trained in an American or European school of education but in Jerusalem, while influenced by American ideas of child-centered and progressive education, was not imprisoned by them. While he never stated his philosophy of education as such, from his works and the few writings he left, it can be identified.
First of all, my father believed that learning was an effort and acquiring the habit of learning was equally an effort. While there were ways to make learning and acquiring the habit more palatable, by using materials that were more enjoyable, proper formal and informal settings, subject matter that appealed to the students or at least was taught in an appealing way, there were no shortcuts. He often emphasized to me that one of the first needs of the diaspora Jewish school was to teach Jewish students in the diaspora that they had to make sacrifices in order to remain Jewish, but that those sacrifices should be in the direction of remaining Jewish while being very much involved in the world, not in withdrawing from it. Not only was that the temper of modernity, but as a Sephardi he had a heritage that taught him that this was possible even within the framework of Jewish tradition as it had been among his people for a millennium. That is one of the reasons why he opposed the day school. He thought that trying to make things easier might seem attractive in the short run but would not help in the long run since it would not form the right habits. Education, to him, was in many respect about forming the right habits.
My father strongly believed in what today is called “moral education.” He felt that the major subjects in the Jewish school could be taught in that way with a little bit of effort. While in Detroit, he and my mother prepared a series of textbooks for teaching Tanach (Bible), and Habayit Hayehudi for teaching Hebrew, which incorporated those principles. In other words, they emphasized three kinds of materials at once: teaching Hebrew language, teaching history (in the case of Tanach) and Jewish customs and ceremonies (in the case of Habayit Hayehudi), and teaching the moral values embodied in both. Thus, when he taught about Abraham, he saw that not only as a chance to convey something of the early history of the Jewish people and the geography of the Land of Israel, but equally as a chance to convey how Abraham set a pattern for us in hakhnasat orhim, the reception of guests (his example). He believed that by combining subjects it was more interesting for the student as well, at the very least there would be something of interest to every student and that the students would be both morally enriched, better habituated in some ways if only in the learning of the Hebrew language or some Jewish customs, and substantively enriched. That was always his aim.
Nor was my father wedded to any particular teaching methodology. His teaching methods were very straightforward. For the upper grades and adults he used essentially a form of well-clarified, highly systematic lecturing. He believed in students doing problem-solving and learning through independent investigation, and he saw the virtues in learning certain subjects dialectically, but he strongly believed that the method used should fit both the teacher and the subject rather than either the teacher or the students being locked into one or another particular method.
My father very much opposed the lachrymose approach to Jewish history or the treatment of Jewish materials in ways that implied that the Jews were weak, physically deficient, or little. At the same time he never went to the other extreme either. He was never taken in by the Jews’ exaggerated opinion of themselves after the Six-Day War in which they saw Israel (and Israel saw itself) as a world power. He thought that we should understand that we are a small people, vulnerable to those pressures which affect small peoples, but that did not mean that we could not be a strong people, wisely using our strength. That is one of the major messages he wanted to convey through Jewish education. Thus he believed that every Jew should learn how to shoot and to be prepared for the eventuality of having to defend himself. He thought we should give due recognition to Jewish heroes and heroism of a national, patriotic, or physical kind, far preferring that his students read in Hebrew about Jews who made contributions to their people or their countries of residence than about little shtetl types. He saw this as having a dual benefit: it would be more interesting to children and would also teach the desired moral lesson.
My father strongly believed that Jewish education should be principally in the hands of Jewish educators. He very much opposed both rabbi-dominated or politician-dominated Jewish education and thought that the non-educated or voluntary lay leadership should govern but should not control, that they should be guided by professional Jewish educators even while they chose the educators to guide them. For example, my father was a strong community man and a Federation man, but he thought Jewish education should be housed in an independent agency within the Federation family, not be under the direct control of the Federation any more than it should be under the direct control of the synagogue, that Jewish educators in the end had to be responsible for Jewish education, though they had to be responsible to someone.
My father also believed that Jewish education should be a profession, that its members, as professionals, should be able to make a good living from their profession, but they should be trained professionals and should have the responsibilities and obligations of professionals as well as the standing. All his life he battled for a more professional Jewish education field with proper training, proper status, and proper conditions.
While he never enunciated it in so many words, my father believed that educational administrators had to be educational leaders, that they could not, dare not, cut themselves off from the classroom. One of the things that I learned from him was that the task of an educator is to educate and for that, even if an educator had entered the ranks of educational administration, he or she still had to educate, both those who worked with him directly and the students who were in the classrooms. My father never lost touch with the students or the classroom, personally teaching regularly at all levels.
My father believed that teachers should consider where students are coming from in their teaching. He also believed that the students had an obligation to learn materials that had to be learned. I believe that, in the end, my father may have been more accepting of his environment in some ways than he should have been, but for the most part he succeeded in conveying much of what he wanted to convey to students who as students were no better or no worse than those of any other school system.
The United Hebrew Schools
My father both worked out and expressed his educational philosophy in many arenas - Jerusalem; Salonika in Greece; Alexandria in Egypt; St. Paul, Minnesota; Chicago, Illinois; and Denver, Colorado– but he found his finest canvas in Detroit at the United Hebrew Schools where he was first Associate Superintendent and then Superintendent over a period of twenty-three years. His philosophy came to fruition there as he built the United Hebrew Schools into a great instrument of Jewish education.
The UHS was founded in 1919 by uniting Talmud Torah schools in Detroit that dated back before World War I. When the Jewish Welfare Federation was organized that same year, the UHS was one of its six constituent agencies. Thus it was in on the ground floor and had a governing role in the Federation which it continued. Indeed, Detroit was the only Jewish community, perhaps with the exception of Minneapolis, where Federation leadership could make their way upward through Jewish education rather than through the Jewish Community Center or one of the social services. My father saw the great opportunity that such a situation could provide for doing what he wanted to do.
The United Hebrew Schools in 1948 had eight elementary school branches, from the Parkside branch on Pingree near Twelfth Street, what was then the old Jewish neighborhood from which Jews were rapidly exiting, to the Rose Sittig Cohen building near Dexter and Davidson, then the heart of the major Jewish neighborhood. North of Livernois, in the area between Six Mile Road (McNichols) and the Outer Drive half a mile beyond Seven Mile Road, a new Jewish neighborhood was rapidly developing. The principals of those branches were the typical Jewish educators in North America at the time. All were born in Europe. Many had come to the United States as refugees before, during, or after World War II.
The teachers whom my father inherited were a varied lot. The professionals were typically students of the maskilim who had come thirty or forty years earlier to the United States and formed the backbone of the national-cultural approach to Jewish education. This meant that they were Zionists, that they were committed to Jewish peoplehood and to Jewish civilization, and, with few exceptions, were believers in Jewish tradition including Jewish religious tradition, without being ideologically Orthodox. In that sense they were holdovers from an earlier age before modernity had begun to push Jews into religiously ideological movements. They taught traditional Jewish religious practices and behavior as a matter of course and generally maintained those practices themselves, at least in public.
As time passed, of course, my father brought in his own hirees. Can I honestly say that they were an improvement? No. A few were. Many were not. The talent just was not there. One person, however, made a world of difference, Isidore Goldstein, who became the UHS administrator. My father found him in New York, a young World War II veteran, eager to advance in life and to get out of New York to do so, a man with a secularist background, not from the circles that usually produced people in Jewish education, but he was devoted to the tasks he assumed, loyal to my Dad, and an efficient administrator. In a very short time, he became my father’s alter ego, someone on whom my father could rely to undertake the growing administrative responsibilities of a major school system so that my father could be free to be the system’s educational leader.
That was a major part of my father’s educational philosophy. Many of his colleagues were neither educators nor administrators. The more successful ones had become administrators by all but giving up their educational role in the process. My father strongly believed that a principal or a superintendent had to provide educational leadership first and foremost and, if at all possible, should have someone he could depend on for the necessary administrative chores and improvements which needed to be carried out efficiently. His partnership with Goldstein was a great partnership and one that much influenced my thought in matters of institution-building.
Another major element in my father’s educational philosophy was that good educational administrators had to have a hands-on understanding of what was happening in the classrooms of their schools. Unlike in the first case, he never spelled this out to me as a philosophy in so many words, but it was clear by his actions. For example, he arranged to have his Thursday afternoons free so that he could do substitute teaching wherever there was a need throughout the school system. He would check every Thursday morning to see which teachers were going to be absent and he would choose a class to teach that afternoon. Normally, he would do that brilliantly. Many of his students, whom I knew as peers or younger children, would tell me what a fine teacher he was and how much better he was than their regular teachers.
What this did was to give him a full sense of the schools and the classrooms in his system. He knew what the students were like. He knew what the teachers were doing. After such a stint, as appropriate, he would call in the principal and tell him things that the principal himself did not know or he would use object lessons from his teaching in the principals’ meetings. With that level of classroom contact he, far more than anybody else, knew what was happening in his system.
I learned one other point from this, namely, that no school system should be so large that the superintendent cannot get into all or at least most of the classrooms at least once in the course of a year. Again, both of these unenunciated but acted upon principles have guided me every since. One has to be “hands on” in relation to the activities of the system one is heading and no system should be so large that its head cannot be. My being a federalist is, in part, predicated on those principles. I am confident that that is one of the major reasons why my father was able to develop a good educational system. Indeed, the between four and five thousand students that represented the United Hebrew Schools at its largest was probably the maximum size for such an approach to the work. After a century of pressure on the part of professional educationists for school consolidation and ever larger school systems on the false premises that large size and hierarchical control are better and “more efficient,” educators and educational researchers in recent years have been coming back to the idea of the problems of size and that there are limits to scale, and are coming to conclusions very similar to those that my father reached through his own experience.
I must say that while the full sense of these principles as principles did not come to me until somewhat later, I already sensed their vitality. As a teenager (I must have been fifteen or sixteen at most) walking with my father near the Rose Sittig Cohen branch where his offices were located, we had a discussion about governments and political systems and I first enunciated the principles of federalism that have continued to guide me, namely that having both states and a federal government gave needed advantages of both smaller scale and larger scale government and also the advantages of partnership. How that kind of system works has intrigued me from then on and by the time I started college, while unformed, this interest in federalism was already well established in my thought processes thanks to my experiences with my father’s leadership at the United Hebrew Schools.
Among my father’s first innovations was a pre-school program, nursery school and kindergarten, which rapidly became a very good one and remained an important one for years. This was long before Head Start began to worry about three and four year olds. Rather it was an adaptation from traditional Jewish education which started early. My father did make the mistake of the educators of his generation in thinking that children could not learn formal academic subjects like reading and writing and classic Jewish texts from a very young age. He was much influenced by the progressive education movement, everything from its notion of graded readers to more open classrooms. In later years, when I came to see what has the result of that approach to education, I found myself in disagreement with him on a number of those fronts. But my father always believed that children had to start learning early.
My father also began to build up a central Hebrew high school in which elementary graduates from the branches came together at the Rose Sittig Cohen building for supplementary high school studies. There had been something before he came but he systematized and regularized it, and improved it. I attended that Hebrew high school from the moment we moved to Detroit and it became one of the major socializing influences of my teenage years.
Within two years my father had also established the Mid-rasha, a college of Jewish studies designed to enable young people to continue their Jewish education and, in particular, to train Hebrew teachers for the schools. I think that he got more Hebrew teachers from the first group of students than from any other, but it did send a steady stream of younger teachers into the schools. The Midrasha was a typical college of Jewish studies except that my father did not play ball with the Igud that united such Hebrew teachers colleges elsewhere in the United States, which emphasized Hebrew texts and literature and did not train teachers in educational methods. He want less attention paid to the substantive study of the normative subjects of the modern Hebrew movement and more to educational issues and teaching methods. Thus it was a long time before the Midrasha was accredited, although the standard of education within it was high from the first. When I graduated from the Hebrew high school, I entered the Midrasha and attended as long as I remained in Detroit.
My father also began to adapt the United Hebrew Schools to the new realities of the suburban frontier. In this he was a real innovator. The communal Talmud Torah schools in the United States were all tied with the immigrant generation who settled in the country’s big cities on its urban frontier. Most of the Talmud Torahs were unable or were prevented from making the adjustment to the shift away from the neighborhoods of first or second settlement and thus as the Jews moved out of those neighborhoods as they prospered, the Talmud Torahs collapsed, to be replaced by congregational schools, particularly in the Conservative synagogues. Often the leaders of the latter were powerful enough in the community to prevent common community support for the Talmud Torahs that would have enabled the Talmud Torahs to move. Detroit was one of the few exceptions and that, mostly because of my father. My father recognized that the Jews were moving rapidly into new neighborhoods and insisted that UHS branches be established in a new neighborhood as soon as Jews began to move there. In this respect the UHS stood in marked contrast to the Jewish Community Center which was always building fifteen years too late. My father had the UHS acquire land for building far enough in advance so that it could be obtained relatively inexpensively, established a temporary branch somewhere and then arranged to build if that was what was called for, as soon as possible. Thus in most new neighborhoods, the UHS was the first Jewish communal institution to arrive.
In this connection, my father pioneered a new relationship between the community Hebrew schools and the synagogues, Orthodox as well as Conservative, proposing to them that the UHS establish branches in their congregations that would not only provide Jewish education five days a week, but would also supply them with personnel to undertake those programs of particular concern to them as congregations, mainly junior congregations, bar and bat mitzva training, and youth work. This would give the congregations a chance to build the loyalty of their young people while at the same time assuring them that formal Jewish education would be in the hands of an educational system not subject to the mercies or whims of a congregational rabbi and its baalei batim.
To sweeten the offer, my father worked out with the Federation that, where such an arrangement was established, the UHS would sign a ten-year lease on the school building and pay the money to the congregation in advance, thereby helping them with their building fund so they could build their new structure in the first place. This system worked throughout my father’s tenure and kept expanding.
It was only a decade after he had retired that it began to unravel, partly as a result of poor leadership in the UHS and partly as a result of the changing geodemographics of Jewish life. By the 1940s Detroit already was known as a highly mobile Jewish community, neighborhoods rarely lasting as long as even one generation. The pace of change established in the 1930s continued through the 1970s, but in the 1980s movement outward became so rapid and so scattered that Jewish institutions were truly hard put to keep up. Distances became too great for transportation of students and parent interest in the schools flagged.
By the 1950s, my father introduced different kinds of cooperative programming with the Reform Movement and the Yiddish schools in Detroit. There were two Reform temples in the Detroit area at the time. Beth El, the oldest synagogue in Michigan, was close to classical Reform. Temple Israel, a traditionally-oriented congregation founded in 1941, reflected the beginnings of the return to tradition among Reform Jews. With the latter, my father established a special two-day-a-week program to expand their Sunday school education, but still was unable to bring them up to the Jewish educational level of the rest of the community. He provided a special teacher training program for Reform schools within the framework of the Midrasha and a special high school program for graduates of Reform schools that also had fewer hours a week and learned more in English. The regular high school was, of course, ivrit b’ivrit.
There were three Yiddish schools in town, each with its own ideological orientation and quite independent of, even antagonistic toward, the others. There was the Folkschule of the Labor Zionists, the Sholom Aleichem Institute of the non-Zionist, socialist secularists, and the Workman’s Circle (Arbeitering) of the radical socialist anti-Zionists. My father tried to bring each of the three into the Hebrew Schools system on a special basis, something like what he had done for the Reform. They were very suspicious, especially since he could not even speak Yiddish, but he slowly won them over and programs were devised for each.
The only holdout was Congregation Shaarei Zedek, where Rabbi Morris Adler had his own afternoon Hebrew school. My father had a cordial personal relationship with Adler, but believed that he was typical of the Conservative rabbis who went around the country preaching the value of Jewish education, but in practice put their own congregations first and stood in the way of any quality Jewish education. Indeed, all my encounters with Shaarei Zedek showed a program that was willing to accept lower teaching standards, less qualified teachers, more emphasis on synagogue skills and less on substantive learning. For example, when the Jewish Theological Seminary founded the Leaders Training Fellowship to encourage educated Jewish leaders for the future, and LTF came to Detroit, the LTFers from Adas Shalom who attended the United Hebrew Schools, fulfilled the requirement of at least six hours of Hebrew study a week. Those from Shaarei Zedek included junior congregation in the six hours because their students barely had four hours in the classroom. JTS accepted them because, after all, Adler was a very prominent Conservative rabbi and it was a major Conservative congregation. The LTFers in the Midwest knew the difference and my father certainly did.
Detroit, as a labor town, had a very strong work ethic and a tradition that called for its teenagers to go out and work at a job, at least for their pocket money, from the age of fourteen onward. Just about everybody did so. At the UHS we faced a dilemma in that powerful drive toward work. How we expect to have teenagers attend Hebrew high school? My father hit on the solution - to hire them for certain kinds of jobs at the Hebrew schools. For example, the elementary school children were picked up every day at their public elementary schools by bus to be brought to the Hebrew schools. They usually arrived about a half hour before classes began. My father set up a recreation program to provide them with a chance to have a snack, play a little sports, at least ping pong in the winter, and refresh themselves before going into the class and he hired high school students to be the recreation directors. When I organized the UHS library and got the idea that we should have bookmobiles so that every branch would have some library service, we hired high schoolers to be the bookmobile branch librarians. Thus we provided something like sufficient employment opportunity for our high school students and enabled them to keep in step with their cultural environment and at the same time keep up with their Jewish education.
In a few years my father had the UHS ticking away like clockwork, unlike in virtually all of the other major communities in the United States where the Talmud Torahs, if they survived at all, were contained by the growing Conservative synagogues. They were confined to the old neighborhoods and prevented from expanding to the new ones and were thus doomed to a slow and painful death. The UHS was the leader in serving new Jewish populations and the congregations established for them, while retaining the Talmud Torah-like character of the educational system.
Old schools were abandoned as neighborhoods changed and new schools were built. In the end my father organized the building of a campus in Southfield with a separate library building. It is still in service as the BJE headquarters with the Hebrew High School and Midrasha, the library and adult studies, although the system it served hardly remains at all.
New teachers were recruited, teachers’ salaries and benefits improved, better teacher training instituted, and school enrollments expanded. Arrangements were made to bring good trained teachers from Israel for short periods. My father pioneered in bringing real teachers from Israel – not just catch as catch can Israelis who knew Hebrew and needed jobs – on a systematic basis and would go every year to interview potential candidates, beginning in 1950.
My father and the United Hebrew Schools were the first recipients of the Shazar Prize given by the Department of Education and Culture of the Jewish Agency for extraordinary contributions to Jewish education in the diaspora. The prize was named after Zalman Shazar, the third President of the State of Israel and, by his own interest, an education president. When the prize was introduced, it was natural that the first to receive it should be Albert Elazar and the United Hebrew Schools, the outstanding Jewish educational achievement in the United States at that time and one of the outstanding achievements in the Jewish world. My father was proud to receive the prize, especially since it had been “pushed” by some of his American colleagues.
As I write this, the monumental system is no more. My father hardly outlived it but he had not had any role in it for twenty years. Having retired in 1971, he had ceased to be consulted on its direction perhaps two years after that. At that time my father was only mildly disturbed. He had really left when he left. It was now other peoples’ problem. He had done what he could. In that as in so many other things, he was a wise man.
A Summing Up
My father was a great and good man. In his lifetime, he spanned an unparalleled period of change in the world. When he was born in Jerusalem well before World War I, most people traveled by foot or on the backs of animals. Only to a few places could they go by horse and carriage and even fewer by railroad. He could become locally celebrated by making an 80-mile round trip by train in one day, from darkness to darkness. He was still a young man, if his story is correct, hardly more than a boy when he learned to fly, and had not yet reached retirement when the first men landed on the moon. Telephones were either rare or nonexistent in his childhood, yet during his last illness we communicated with the medical authorities to send documents by fax. When he was born, he and his family lived under the rule of a medieval empire which had ruled in Jerusalem for 400 years and had been established 300 years before that. When he was in mid-career, the State of Israel was reborn.
Not only did my father adjust to all of these changes which would have been unimaginable to his parents or in his own childhood, but he fit into them easily. He was a forward looking person who was neither fazed nor upset by the changing world in which he lived, as such. True, like any decent human being, he was appalled at the depths to which humans could sink, displayed in the twentieth century, but he no more associated such forms of human degradation as Nazism and Communism with the whole world than he would have associated the evils of earlier ages that had been limited by technology.
My father had close contact with Fascism while he was a youth, in its moderate form in the still partly traditional Greece of the 1920s, in its original modern form in Italy in the ‘20s and the ‘30s, and even briefly in Germany in its virulent Nazi form and Russia in its equally virulent Communist form. He hated Nazism and Fascism, for obvious reasons, but I think that he had more contempt for the Communists, whom he thought were working with lesser human material.
He also saw the British both at their liberal best and colonial worst. He admired the first and disliked the latter, but did not dismiss the benefits of colonialism out of hand. While he liked the British and their system, he always had a certain guardedness toward both.
My father was a real democrat, I think perhaps the best democrat I have ever known. That probably was why he was a natural born American. He thought of all people as being fundamentally equal, yet he also recognized what Thomas Jefferson and John Adams discussed as a natural aristocracy among men, who, in a free society, would or should rise to the top by virtue of merit and talent. He was a true liberal, seeing the world as a wonderfully diverse place, to be understood liberally and enjoyed liberally, yet he never succumbed to the false liberalism of underdoggism, equating support for whoever was defined as an underdog as liberal or progressive, or to the false belief that all values are relative, merely matters of taste or opinion. In all these respects he was true to authentic biblical Judaism, the Jewish worldview that believed that we were all obligated to take care of widows and orphans, yet we were equally obligated to administer the law with equal fairness to rich and poor alike.
My father was one of those natural born aristocrats. Given half a chance he would have risen to the top anywhere, but he needed a wide enough stage. That is another reason why America so appealed to him. I think that the thing that bothered him most about Israel and the Jews who built it or those who contested for it was their narrowness. I think that this is a tendency in Jewish life that he found frequently and had a hard time accepting, even though he not only learned how to live with it but with the legitimate interests that it represented. While he could accept its legitimacy, it just wasn’t him. Nor was that a matter of liking this party more than that or this community-of-origin group over the next. He disliked the narrowness of the Labor Zionists only slightly less than he did the narrowness of the haredim and he could no more play the politics of the Vaad HaEdah HaSepharadit B’Yerushalayim than he could of the Jewish Agency. Personally he was always attracted to the cosmopolitans even when he agreed with the locals.
My father had a breadth in his interests that was characteristic of classic liberalism, but he did not suspend judgment because he believed in plural. He believed in a pluralism with standards and was not afraid to describe certain things as good and others as bad even as he was prepared to accept and tolerate a wide range of diversity, whether he believed that it was good or not. He never believed that he had all the truth, but rather always tried to see the other fellow’s point of view before making a judgment.
My father was always a planner who organized his future to the best of his ability. This remained true of him to the end. For example, before he went into the hospital in March 1993 he arranged with my brother to handle all future financial problems, even arranging to transfer the funds that might be necessary in the case of his death so that there would be no expenses that he could not cover from his own resources. After he died, we found all his papers in order.
My father’s relationship to his Jewishness was not easily defined. He was a national-cultural Jew who believed in traditional Jewish religion but not in its Orthodox variant, especially as he knew it in his childhood in the Old City and as it became again in his last years. He believed in the Jewish people and the Jewish community, their culture and traditional way of life, but not in the penchant for either moralistic or legalistic heresies which he saw Jewish leftism and Jewish Orthodoxy as representing. He believed in the ability of the individual to choose within the Jewish way those things which were most suitable for him, yet he believed that unless one knew enough about that way, one could not make an intelligent choice and therefore could not be expected to make good choices or even adequate ones. To my father the world was to be experienced and enjoyed and Jewish tradition was to be an ally in experiencing and enjoying it, not a barrier.
My father’s religion was serious and traditional but not necessarily halakhic. He could be called a religious man but not a halakhic man, in the sense that Soloveichik describes the latter. His religion was a deep appreciation of Divine power and majesty in the world as expressed through its mysteries and aesthetic expressions.
While he never talked about it directly except through glancing remarks, he saw the beauties of the world as God’s handiwork, whether the beauties of nature which he much appreciated, the mountains, the forests, the waters. His ideal scenery was a deep mountain lake of glacial origin surrounded by snowcapped peaks; that to him was the most harmonious possible scene. If that could be joined to great music, i.e., a symphony orchestra or a string quartet playing Beethoven or Mozart compositions or Bach cantatas, then he approached religious ecstasy. When he encountered such phenomena or even the compositions without the scenery, he would often comment how they were true religious music. He especially appreciated Bach’s religious soul.
Jewish customs were to be maintained because of the larger message that they contained and the traditions that they preserved. He would frequently single out to me certain special prayers as being particularly moving in his eyes. Hallel was one. Ilu Finu in Shacharit was another. In it, he saw a prayer that brought together and expressed something very close to his exact thoughts on the subject of God’s natural world and the human duty to praise and thank God for that world. While he was a regular synagogue goer and I prayed with him hundreds or thousands of times during his life, he rarely commented on other prayers except perhaps in sociological or psychological terms but not in religious ones.
During the American Civil War, the very dyspeptic Confederate General Daniel Harvey Hill, while commanding the forlorn Confederate coastal defenders in North Carolina, rejected an application of one of his soldiers to transfer from the infantry to the band, writing across it in his hand, “Rejected. Shooters, not tooters are needed in this army.” I have always believed that the world is divided into shooters and tooters. My father was a shooter. Others were much better as tooters. He never had an eye for publicity and received much less than his fair share of credit, but he got things done.
Like his father before him, he associated with the greats of his related fields in his time, but like his father they did not easily give public exposure to his involvement. Thus outside of his circle of family, friends, colleagues, and students who knew him and knew his work, he was more often unsung than not, although greatly admired by the serious people who knew him. The unserious people, on the other hand, the tooters rather than the shooters, had a certain natural aversion to him because of his success and ignored him until they could not. Even in his passing this remained true, but his record stands for itself: the many individuals who were blessed by having been in contact with him, the institutions that he built, even if time and circumstances and other limits brought them down after he left. Most of all, his family recognized his greatness and his goodness. May his memory be a blessing for us all.