My Mentor Rabbi Richard Levy
Congregation B’nai B’rith, Santa Barbara CA
Friday night, June 28, 2019
My mentor Rabbi Richard Levy passed away from this world last Shabbat and I have been caught by surprise at how deeply his death has affected me. This evening I would like to honor my teacher by sharing with you some of the most important Torah I received from him.
Before telling you about Richard, just a word about mentors. Because my own mentor was such a huge influence in my life, I wrote my rabbinic thesis on the mentor-disciple relationship in the Talmud. As we know, Judaism is a book-centered religion. The Torah—a book—is at the heart of our religion. But until a living, breathing human being brings the Torah to life, it is just a book. Our sages recognized that a mentor does not merely impart information. The mentor is the one who brings the Torah to life for us. A mentor is a spiritual father, or spiritual mother. In the words of the Talmud, our biological parent brings us into this world; a mentor brings us into the world to come. Let me tell you about my spiritual father.
I first met Richard Levy in Jerusalem in 1979, 40 years ago. I was a first year rabbinic student and that year in Jerusalem was my first immersion in serious, adult Judaism. In that year I first confronted the dichotomy between religion and science. What theologians refer to as faith and reason. Any serious, thinking Jew wonders if it is possible to hold onto both: religion and science. As a young man, I was wondering. Jewish religion speaks of a hidden, invisible, spiritual reality. Science attempts to provide a single, unified theory of physical existence. Are these two ways of describing reality fundamentally contradictory?
The only way I knew of answering that question is by looking to the flesh and blood human beings in my life. Do the wise, apparently balanced, apparently happy human beings that I know feel compelled to make a choice between science and religion, or do they hold onto both at the same time?
Richard was a towering intellect. A powerful, clear-eyed thinker. And he prayed. He spoke to us first year students openly and without embarrassment about his relationship with God. Richard was my first living proof of the possibility of holding onto both faith and reason. Religion and science.
I was drawn to Richard as a mentor because I saw him embodying the first words of the v’ahavta: v’ahavata et Adonai elohecha, b’chol levavcha, uv’chol nafshecha, uv’chol m’odecha. You shall love Adonai your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. Richard showed me that I could love God with my mind, my heart, my body, my passions, my appetites, my doubts, my curiosity, all of my contradictions.....and be a whole person.
The great medieval rabbi and scientist Maimonides taught that there are two great religious emotions: love and awe. Love is not difficult to understand. Our first and most important religious experience is the blissful time, when we are infants in our mothers arms, held and loved and connected to our mother in the most intimate way possible. In our religious life we seek to recapture some of that feeling of safety and love, with other people and with God. But what is awe? The Hebrew word is yirah, which is sometimes translated as awe, or reverence, and sometimes simply as fear. In all my years in rabbinic school, and really through all the years since then, only Richard spoke of yirah, and he taught us this: yirah is the emotion you feel when standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon. You are in the presence of something supremely beautiful, and if you make a single wrong move it will kill you. Richard taught me to bring that emotion to my relationship with God.
Coming out of rabbinic school, I took the job at Santa Barbara Hillel 34 years ago only because Richard was the regional director and I wanted to continue to learn from him. When Marian and I got engaged to be married, he officiated at our wedding. Once during the months leading up to our wedding, I confided in Richard that I was worried by the fact that Marian did not believe in a personal God. I saw her as a wise, warm, loving and intensely moral person, and I was deeply in love with her. But she did not pray, and I told him that I felt sad that I would not be able to share my prayer life with her. Richard’s responded: “Steve, in prayer it is just you together with God.”
In that simple profound answer, Richard gave me a more realistic expectation about marriage, and he pointed me toward a deep, intimate, one on one relationship with God. I will always think of Richard, when I am standing alone with God.
In fact, Richard has taught many in our community about how to come before God in prayer, through his extraordinary prayerbook for the High Holy Days, which we used every year for twenty years at Hillel, and which I borrowed from here at CBB. Here is Richard’s opening meditation for Yom Kippur evening:
“The night descends once more on the delusive sunlight of our careless lives, closing the door against our fantasies and leaving us to face ourselves. How longed-for! Alone, our privacy at last secured, alone with our own lives, our own yearnings, our own desires and dreams. Yet how frightening! Alone, without the mirror of others to convince us of our worth, without the excuse of others to blame for what disturbs us. In charge of our own mistakes, desires, weaknesses, and longings--our own, whatever their origin, but ours to bear, confront, and overcome--alone.”
That is Rabbi Richard Levy, opening the door into the sacred day of Yom Kippur for all of us; I will never enter Yom Kippur without Richard’s opening meditation.
In addition to teaching me how to pray, Richard gave me my relationship to Torah...which I do not think I would have learned from anyone else at the Reform Rabbinic seminary. As you may be aware, Reform Judaism in the 19th century came to view the Torah as a human document, written by fallible human beings, shaped by their own time and culture. This is the approach that most Reform rabbis take even today. The Torah is a human creation, written three thousand years and so any problems or dissonance that arise in reading the Torah are not problems for us. Anything weird or troubling in the text (and there are a lot of weird and troubling parts of the Torah!) can be dealt with by saying: “we don’t worry about that. It’s weird, but that is because it was written a long time ago. Those parts of the Torah are not important; not sacred; not a problem.”
But Richard taught me a different approach. He said: assume that every single word of Torah is sacred. Do not ignore any of it. if you have a problem with it, good!! Wrestle with it. Push back. Argue with the Torah...and allow it to argue with you. Wrestling with the Torah is exactly the way that Jews embrace the Torah. Richard taught me to look for the strange parts, the troubling parts of the Torah...and to grab hold and to wrestle with the text.
I will give you one example, the animal sacrifices. We read in the Torah that for the first one thousand of Jewish history, our ancestors worshipped God by bringing an animal or grain to the sacrificial altar, and burning it....turning it into smoke which would raise up to God, a reiach nichoach l’Adonai, a pleasing fragrance to God. Many, perhaps most, Reform rabbis simply dismiss the sacrifices as ancient, weird and irrelevant. But Richard taught me this: what happens when we eat? We take grain, or vegetables, or an animal into our body, where it is digested and in molecular form it travels through our bloodstream to every cell of our body, where it is burned....on the altar of our cells...and transformed into energy, into our actions, our thoughts and our emotions. Deep in our cells, our food is transformed into energy, just as the ancient sacrifices on the altar were transformed into spirit and offered up to God. Most Reform rabbis would simply skip over and dismiss the sacrifices, but Richard taught me to stop and look and ask....specifically to focus on the passages that others would rather not read. The sacrifices, the conflicts, The endless geneaologies, the bodily fluids and the skin diseases. And to ask: what is happening here? why do we ignore this? Why does it make us uncomfortable? Richard Levy taught me that wrestling with the Torah means wrestling with ourselves.
A final gift that my teacher Richard gave me, which I have been finding comforting this week...as I grieve the fact that I can never drive down to LA to see him again. Forty years ago, in the first year I knew him, Richard shared with us that he loved the traditional Jewish idea of the afterlife. He had lost his own father, and he said to us: “I love to imagine being with him. I see no reason not to look forward to seeing him again.”
This week I lost my spiritual father, and after so recently lost my close friend Margaret Singer, I am grieving a double grief. But with just a little imagination, I can see Richard....powerfully alive within me. And when my time comes to leave this world, I hope and I look forward to being with him again. Shabbat Shalom.