Bob Jampol

It has been argued that an accurate measure of an individual's worth can only be undertaken once that person departs this life. Otherwise, the ephemeral brilliance of his light might blind us to the actual substance within. Sometimes certain cultural or political figures, having spent the better part of a lifetime basking in the spotlight, pass almost immediately upon their deaths into obscurity. Not that the lives of these luminaries account for nothing, but their legacies, like broken-hearted widows, will not long outlive them.

Dick Israel, it is true, never sought to bask in any spotlight. He would have chuckled at the notion of having left a legacy, save that represented by his four children and five grandchildren. Yet his influence was felt throughout the American Jewish community, an influence that sprung from his active participation in a variety of organizations, his eloquent articles and books, and his numerous friends and acquaintances. His utter lack of pretension, paradoxically, helped him to cement a legacy that will surely endure.

It endures within my life though Dick would be surprised to hear me say so. Dick made it possible for boomers like me, prone to rejecting the establishment, to believe that we could carve a out a Jewish life that both honored the tradition and avoided the conventionality of mainstream American Judaism. Not for us the Judaism of plush, carpeted synagogues with sparkling chandeliers. Not for us the hierarchical Judaism of

shuls in which all power resides with the rabbi. Without being trendy or avant-garde in the slightest, Dick's life suggested that a healthy skepticism need not preclude genuine engagement with Jewish ritual. His example encouraged me and my family to deepen our commitment to a Jewish life.

Dick's life work centered on the world of Judaism; Judaism was Dick's world. Yet the way he lived could serve as a model for non-Jews as well. His was a thoughtful, well-considered life in which he tried to exercise control over as many aspects of his existence as was practicable. Dick was "hands-on" before "hands-on" was fashionable. This quality also increased Dick's appeal for boomers, as it paralleled the "Whole Earth Catalog" precept that people should learn to fend for themselves.

This hands-on approach carried over into Dick's Judaism. An ordained rabbi, he encouraged the laity to educate themselves and to take charge of organizing and leading their own communities of worshippers. He worked both within and outside the mainstream, which viewed much of what he did with suspicion. The Synagogue Council of Greater Boston, for example, refused to admit the Newton Centre Minyan, which Dick had co-founded, to its ranks. Why? Because the group had no clerical leadership, didn't believe in it, and preferred that its own members deliver the drashot and lead the prayers. The whole thing smelled of subversion, the status quo apparently concluded. Hence, to this day the group, which counts eleven ordained rabbis among its members, has yet to gain organizational acceptance from the communal powers-that-be.

One sensed that Dick secretly delighted in this rejection and would have been disappointed had the Minyan joined the status quo. Bob Dylan once wrote, "To live outside the law you must be honest," lines that might have resonated with Dick as far as the Synagogue Council was concerned. As far as Jewish ritual was concerned, Dick mostly chose to live inside the law. He was an observant Jew who kept the Sabbath carefully and faithfully. Dick often opined that a ritual needed hundreds, even thousands of years to prove its mettle; hence he was deeply skeptical of the desire of some "alternative" Jewish groups to create new rituals in order to make Judaism more "relevant" to modern Jews. Relevance was a concept for which Dick had little patience.

Dick's personal beliefs at times conflicted with those of the minyan he had helped to found. Some members of the Minyan were surprised to learn that Dick wouldn't count women when adding up the number of adults present to reach the minimum number of ten for collective prayer. In his view Halacha, the Jewish ritual path, held that only men count; end of discussion. Yet he continued to attend services, arriving late enough so that the issue would have evaporated. At the Minyan's town meetings Dick would often express very strong opinions, viewpoints that he considered so sensible and reasonable that it surprised him whenever they were rejected. After the initial shock, Dick would shrug his shoulders, accept that others had chosen a different path, and then continue on his own, unbowed but humble.

Why didn't he simply join an orthodox shul? Well, he did, afterward splitting time between the two groups. When asked about it, he would respond that he still came to the Minyan about half the time, but that at Shaarei Tefila, the Orthodox shul, he could do more of what he loved to do during services: quibble over the meaning of the text! Now Dick did not daven with great intensity, as he readily admitted. Still, he did prefer the norms of traditional Halacha.

How did he balance this commitment to Jewish ritual and intellectual life with such an ambiguous relationship to worship itself? Dick delighted in describing the theology of the Minyan, which in some spiritual sense he still led, as "fuzzy." No litmus test for membership exists in this group other than the implicit desire to follow the cycle of Jewish observance. Do our members believe in God? Many Minyan members consider such a question as out-of-bounds, and Dick certainly would never ask it. Without such agreements, however, all manner of change could potentially slip into our forms of worship, a worrisome prospect for a traditionalist like Dick. Within limits he tolerated the innovations that he personally found mildly offensive. He would smile at some new Minyan practice like adding the names of the matriarchs to the Amidah prayer even as he hoped that the group would eventually realize the "silliness" of such an act. Though he feared the slippery slope of ritual change, he had learned to be stoical and live with it.

This dynamic, intentionally ambiguous approach to Judaism and its deity might explain Dick's view that all American Jews are followers of Mordechai Kaplan. At first glance Dick would seem to have little in common with the great philosopher of Reconstructionism. After all, the movement Kaplan founded constantly tinkers with ritual and liturgy, dropping the Musaf service altogether from its Sabbath service and rewriting the Hebrew texts even of ancient prayers. Dick could scarcely countenance all of that. Yet he had to concede that modern Jews, as Kaplan argued, live their lives more in loyalty to their cultural heritage than in awe of some all-powerful deity hovering menacingly above them. As for Kaplan's desire to rationalize Judaism by eliminating all references to supernatural occurrences, Dick would have scoffed at such efforts as irrelevant and wasteful. Why test the unknowable for its rationality?

Dick's life encompassed more than Jewish ritual practice, however. He had a well-known love of beekeeping and processing honey. He ran marathons and climbed mountains, tinkered with gadgets and generally engaged directly with everyday things. Dick was anything but monastic and meditative; he was very much a man of this world, sophisticated and life-embracing.

Sometimes Dick's practicality could seem brusque and unfeeling. As Jeffrey Summit has pointed out, "You didn't go to Dick for the warm-and-fuzzies." For instance, he loved the Minyan, a love expressed publicly in his annual State of the Minyan drasha delivered Erev Rosh Hashana. In this speech, delivered with humor and affection, Dick would recount the changing fortunes of both the group and its individuals, delighting in the novel developments, lamenting the deaths and misfortunes, and finding some common threads with which to bind the entire thing. Yet Dick would not have shed a tear if the Minyan had broken into pieces. Currently the group is undergoing a growth spurt that threatens to undermine what intimacy and informality remain in it.This growth has continued despite our best efforts to alienate potential new members by, for example, not calling out page numbers and by using a variety of siddurim. We assume that people know their way about a service and, if not, they will learn or leave. Yet once again the group has outgrown the space it occupies, and this time no easy alternative has presented itself.

On this issue Dick was remorseless. When I was moderator I sometimes consulted with him about some divisive development that I feared would cause the Minyan to crumble. "Good!" he would cry. "That will solve our space problem." Sentimentalist that I am, I would respond, "It's such a wonderful group! Why risk it falling apart?" He'd simply say, "Oh, we'll get by." I later realized that his lack of emotion did not reflect a dislike of anyone, certainly not of the group. He simply saw no virtue in preserving an institution that had outgrown the intimacy that had first driven him and others to found it. Calling the Minyan an institution might itself have been a warning sign to Dick. Yet he did nothing more than express his view that a split would be practical. Of course, the Minyan has enough knowledgeable members to form two or three or four smaller minyanim if that were our desire. Dick probably would have welcomed the fragmentation as it would have allowed a return to shabbas davening in his living room, the group's modus operandi for many years. That was not to be, at least during his lifetime, though he would have approved of the shiva minyanim held there after his death.

Few things pleased Dick more than a well-polished d'var Torah or drasha, the brief biblical teaching that plays the role in the minyan that sermons do in mainstream synagogues. Dick had strong views about divrei Torah: they should focus almost exclusively on one key point; they should clearly connect to the Torah reading of the week; they should rely on traditional sources; having established a solid base in text, they are then free to add a new twist to the ancient commentaries; and, most importantly, they should ideally last no more than ten minutes! A well-considered d'var Torah, in Dick's view, could more than compensate for inept davening and flawed Torah reading. The darshan's reward for a bravura performance might be a subsequent discussion with Dick or his wife, Sherry, for they both delighted in extending the dialogue beyond the end of services. You could count on Dick e-mailing commentary or an alternative reading to you if some topic you raised in a conversation or a drasha engaged him or, conversely, galled him. He loved this give-and-take which, after all, is the method by which Jews have always interpreted the primary texts of their tradition. Dick's own drashot and divrei Torah were themselves works of art; he was thus a superb role model.

Dick also had an aptitude for reaching out even to people with whom he didn't share some common enterprise. He personalized his interactions with others. First of all, he sensed people's individual areas of expertise and delighted in tapping their skills and knowledge. He also encouraged others to use him as a resource, and an excellent resource he was. No one would chase down a citation or biblical allusion with more determination than Dick, and what he didn't know he wanted to learn. Dick also enjoyed sharing his caustic wit if he felt that he had a sympathetic audience. He would kid with me about some of the shamans of the Jewish Renewal movement, whose course offerings (The Baal Shem Tov and Sushi Cuisine) delighted us in their absurdity.

Ironically, I missed my first opportunity to know Dick well when I was a student at Yale and he the Hillel chaplain. At that point of my life, alas, I was more a Buddhist than a Jew; my appearances at Hillel events were rare. I remember a wonderful evening dancing around with Baba Ram Dass as Shlomo Carlebach played and sang. Hillel sponsored it, but was Dick there? Later on he had but a dim enthusiasm for the Rebbele.

As I became more involved in the Minyan, the Israels extended their friendship to my family. I wasn't a close friend of Dick's though we got along well in the context of our shared commitment to the Minyan. To my shock the community elders, of whom Dick and Sherry were a part, recommended that I serve as moderator only two years after I had joined! I felt both honored and appreciative of the opportunity to serve the group that had provided me with the first Jewish community in which I felt truly at home. Whenever some controversial issue arose requiring my swift intervention, it was natural for me to consult with Dick and Sherry and to benefit from their wisdom and experience.

At this moment, less than a week after Dick's untimely passing, it remains impossible to imagine the world without him. Perhaps reflecting on this impressive legacy reminds us that, though it be shmaltzy to say so, he does live on. As long as Jews engage the tradition in a serious but idiosyncratic way, Dick lives. As long as campus Hillels encourage the young and alienated to embrace their Jewish roots, Dick lives. As long as the institutions he nurtured continue to thrive and multiply, Dick lives. As long as individuals find inspiration in his writings and in our memories of him, Dick Israel truly lives.