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LIKE FATHER ~ LIKE DAUGHTER

Tova Hartman’s Eulogy for Her Father

 19.02.2013, by Tova Hartman

 Below is the text of the eulogy that Tova Hartman delivered at the funeral of her father, SHI Founder David Hartman.

 When I was nine, you and Mommy were in a hotel, and a fire broke out. You were staying in a room up on the second floor, and you tied sheets together and lowered Mommy down to the ground. And then you jumped. Luckily there was snow to cushion the fall, but you still broke some vertebrae in your back. I was so worried about you I couldn’t stop crying. I was so upset, that people started to worry about me, thinking it was strange: how could a little girl love her father so much?

So much of what I have done in my life has been an outgrowth of that love, channeled through a constant learning and relearning, and re-reading and relearning, of the things you taught me. They have been a main frame of reference, touchstones for my inner conversation. An early, very literal example of this is from when we first came on aliyah, and I was in high school, we learned about sacrifices in the temple. And my teacher said we hold like the Ramba”n, not the Ramba”m…well, as far as I knew, you and Maimonides were one, and so I felt as if he had personally slapped me in the face.

On your 80th birthday, I spoke right here in this room about another way of interpreting one of your favorite Talmudic passages, and I spoke as well about one of your most unique and essential traits—which often elicited puzzlement or frustration from people who didn’t know you. It is expressed in the expression from the Talmud bekol yom yehiu be’eynav ka-hadashim. That youthful, almost naïve way in which every day, every moment, was totally new in your eyes.

This was you as a rabbi, as a thinker, as a person. Every year when we got to Parshat Vayikra in shul, you would get angry: it was not only unintelligible, it was offensive! Every year when we got to the akedah, you would announce that we now have to grapple with the concept of Sacrificial Man. But God forbid we should ever skip over it! You didn’t trust the impulse to excise things from the tradition. They were there to grapple with, and there was no cynicism in this grappling. You were never indifferent or apathetic. It was totally real to you, and totally new every time you opened your eyes to a text, to an idea, and indeed to another human being. 

There were many disparate parts of you: and that, ultimately, is who you were. The anger and the love, the attraction and repulsion, frustration, admiration, adoration, the optimism and despair—your passions, and passionate contradictions, didn’t cancel each other out, but nor did they ever reconcile. Your thoughts and feelings were cyclical, were simultaneous; you continued to question and re-question your own assumptions until your last days.

As a teacher and rabbi, in New York, Montreal, and Israel, there were three things that made you prouder than anything else. One, when you were able to enable Orthodox yeshiva students to remain frum. Normally, if yeshiva students had crises of faith, it was like a freefall down a bottomless pit, and they would just drop Judaism altogether. When you were able to help them reconcile modern concepts and sensibilities with traditional categories and commitments, to interpret a sugya in a way that was both intellectually honest and true to the source, and help the yeshiva bucher to find a way to live with a little more tension and uncertainty than perhaps he was used to, but ultimately to remain inside the fold—that made you so happy. What made you even more happy, in those early years, was the ability to mekarev people to halakhic observance: you’d come home glowing about how you helped this couple, or this family, to kosher their kitchen. You loved to tell about how before you came to Montreal there were no sukkos, and of all the sukkos the people in the community helped each other to build, and by the time you left it was one of the sukka capitals of the world.

And finally, those who perhaps did not alter their practice, but came to understand that Judaism was something to be taken seriously, something compelling. These people were drawn to your driving passion to make sense out of things that didn’t make sense to them or you. And you provided these people a model of a religious leader, indeed a religious authority, who was brutally honest, who was at times exasperated or even infuriated with the tradition or the rabbis or God, or all of the above…but who was tenacious. Who never exited. You wore a talis and tefillin to the end, every morning. Some mornings I would visit and find you draped in your talis and tefillin, reading the New Testament, trying to figure out what did they know, what did they critique.  

You loved quoting the Gemara about how the Anshei Knesset Hagedola reinterpreted prayer so that we can pray and feel we aren’t betraying our own integrity. God wants us to be honest, and we can’t say something that doesn’t make sense. But we can give it new meaning.

You gave these gifts to the Jewish people in your unconditional love for them. I’ve chosen to take these gifts for myself; I wanted to join that conversation. You convinced me that there was reason to re-read. That the system, flawed as it may be, also possesses the seeds of its own self-correction. That you just don’t give up on your tradition, you just don’t give up on your people. You just don’t give up.

This past summer was the last time you recommended books to me. In each different period of my life you would give me a pile of books, and tell me to read them. And I would read them, and think about why you would have wanted me to read these theologians or philosophers or psychologists, why you thought they were important, why they were claiming you in this moment. Just that you thought they were important was enough of a reason for me to read them; but still, I was curious. And you never told me.

But this summer you gave me two people to reread—I wondered why them again, and then you told me the reasons. It wasn’t because they were necessarily the most brilliant thinkers who ever lived, or even because they illuminated some core truth of Judaism. It was Heschel—because he had an unconditional love for the Jewish people. And Mordechai Kaplan—because he was one of the most honest Jews who lived.

These were your philosophical pillars. These were you hermeneutic principles. These were your essential qualities. This is to a very large extent who you were.

The Machon is named after my zeyde. My zeyde was from Jerusalem, and he was very poor. You grew up with poverty, and throughout the rest of your life remembered it—in your thought, and in the way you were with people. You were absolutely makpid on the dignity of the people who worked for you, who were dependent upon you for their livelihood.

In your hesped for Arele, my brother-in-law who was killed in the Lebanon war, you said that you didn’t need to have a philosophical conversation about the existence of God, to know there was a God. Because when you stood next to Arele while he prayed, there was no room for doubt. I remember as a young child, when you were a rabbi, you were the ba’al tefila for ne’ila—I remember the anticipation of that final, climactic moment, when you would chant, Hashem hu ha-Elokim! seven times—this moment is imprinted on my soul—I remember the gulp, knowing that God was in the shul, that my abba believed in that God, and it was true. Everybody who was there knew it was true. And I believed that truth, and that truth has nurtured me and directed me until this day. It is because of that, because of you, that I have always tried to take prayer so seriously.

Something most people don’t know is how central singing and davening were to your life. When you were in Lakewood with Shlomo Carlebach, you always would tell the story that Shlomo would play piano at night, and even Aharon Kutler would be moved. And the way they knew he was moved, was that he would tap his finger ever so slightly on the table. And the magic of Shlomo, that he could move anyone, and how your tefila was transformed by him.

In your first shul, Anshei Emmes, you would say, you would teach and Shlomo would sing.

My zeyde’s name was Shalom, and the thing that gave him the most nakhes, the place he felt the most dignified and free, was when he davened as a professional hazan for the Yamim Nora’im. He would take out ads in the local Jewish press: Come Hear Sam Hartman and His Choir! Of course, who was his choir? Khatzkele, Avrohom, and You! You would sometimes talk about seeing the look on your father’s face in those moments – so few and far between – when he seemed unburdened, no longer defined by the trials life had placed before him. Naming this Institute after him was in part, I think, your way of imbuing those rare moments with the permanence and weight of Jerusalem stone.

You fought your whole life against the concept of tehiyat ha-metim, and the world to come, and so I hope you will permit me, for a moment, to be a heretic—and to hope that there is some world, some reality, in which you are with your father and your brothers, with Sam Hartman and his Choir, and you’re singing now again.

LIKE FATHER ~ LIKE SON

LIKE FATHER ~ LIKE SON

Donniel Hartman’s Eulogy for His Father

19.02.2013, by Donniel Hartman

Below is the text of the eulogy that Donniel Hartman delivered at the funeral of his father, SHI Founder David Hartman.

 My Dearest Abba,

It is very hard to say goodbye to you. Yesterday, when I covered your face with a sheet, a big hole was hollowed out of my heart. You were no longer with me.

We have been together for so long, walking together, and dreaming together. There is nothing in my life and for the last 40 years, nothing in yours that we did not either do together or share together or count on each other for support.

We saw each other every day, and even when I was 6000 miles away, there was not a day in which we did not talk to each other. While I can see you under the sheet, today is the first day that we cannot talk. Today I am truly alone.

You were my teacher, and my friend. But most of all you were my Abba.

You were not a simple man, and as you used to tell me, neither am I, and over the years of such closeness, of working day in and day out together, there were also stormy times. But, we had a rule. If we were arguing, no one was allowed to leave the room shouting. We had to hear each other out; continue to talk. Given our personalities, that rule was not always strictly observed, but the principle was maintained. Nothing was going to break us apart and nothing was going to come between us.

For me it was easier for one thing I always knew and drew upon, the one thing that I knew I could count on and indeed counted on every day, was that at the end of the day, your love and loyalty and care for my wellbeing, for my success, for my happiness – was a given and the core of our relationship. We were partners in life. You were my Abba.

I don’t think I can ever truly say goodbye to you. I don’t think that I will ever live a day without thinking about you, thinking about what you would think or say, think about something that you did or said that is shaping and influencing my life, my actions, my decisions.

While you were my Abba, you were also bigger than life. As my Abba it took me many years to understand the influence you had on people. As a teenager, carrying your books from lecture to lecture, people would talk to me about how special you are, how you changed their lives forever. People loved you, admired you, and spoke of you with such superlatives. For many years I couldn’t get it. After all, you were just an Abba.  

I don’t think there is any single explanation for your magic, for the secret of your power, influence and impact on so many people. Over the countless years as I watched you change and inspire person after person after person, often with one lecture, I came to understand some of it.

You were bigger than life, because you didn’t yearn to merely understand it but to change it. Reality didn’t define you; it was merely the springboard from which you started to weave your dreams, your vision of a better person, a better Judaism, a better Israel.

The antithesis of your life was the statement you encountered over and again when you came on aliyah – kakha ze ba-aretz, "this is the way it is in Israel." How you hated that statement. You despised it, ridiculed it and when you spoke about it over and again in your lectures, you dared people to free themselves from the prison of its grasp.

You were a dream merchant who swept people off their feet and inspired them to reimagine who they could be, and what they could be. To be close to you was to be a part of a nobler, greater, more inspiring picture of what life could be. To be next to you was to be a part of you, it was to touch what bigger than life could feel like. That was your power. That was your gift to people. Once touched by you, people were no longer the same.

Abba, you were, however, a different type of dream-merchant. You didn’t live in the fantasy world. Dreams were not an alternate reality, a place of escape, but a lens on which to look at the world and recalibrate its rules. You celebrated real life, loved reality. You simply believed that life should be bigger, that it could be better and you and all those around you were tasked to make it so. Through the conviction of your dreams you refused to let reality intimidate or limit you and as a result forged a path of achievements which are simply unimaginable. Any obstacle in your path would disappear through the power of your faith: faith in yourself, faith in your mission, faith in your vision of what the world should look like. Your whole career, this building, this institution and the thousands of students you trained and inspired, are and will always be a living testimony to your practical real worldly skill and genius, to the real-politic wisdom and acumen of a dream-merchant. 

Your magic did not only free people to reimagine themselves. Another secret of your power was that you liberated yourself and others to be free thinkers, uninhibited and unhindered by the convention and compromise of kakha ze, "that is the way it is," within their Jewish lives. To learn with you was to travel on an unpredictable, creative, exciting and unchartered journey to an intellectual and spiritual world of honesty, decency and relevancy, a world where there was room to breathe. Nothing stood in the way of your mind. Your imagination was irreverent, boundless and boundary-less. But unlike so many creative geniuses and path-blazers, you did not teach your students to agree with you, but to push for excellence and that nothing should stand in the way of their minds, their truths and their questions. It was only thus that they could earn your respect.

And so through you and with you, people were able to discover and be inspired by new ideas and new ways of thinking and living as Jews. They were not merely mesmerized by you, but enchanted by what they could experience because of you.

My Dearest Abba. Your lived a great life, a life lived your way until the very end. Even though you had difficulty breathing on your own these last few months, every time you pulled the oxygen away from you face, you were defying reality to limit you. You were not to be bound, confined or told by anyone what to do. As you wrote in your book "A Living Covenant," a book which inspired a generation of searching, questioning and thoughtful Jews, you were God's covenantal partner, and God, Judaism, and anyone who dared to question it, where put in their place by the power of your will and the audacity of your spirit.

In the end, the rules of life, the limitations of the body overcame even you. But even there you won. You assumed that life had destined you to die at an early age like your brother and father, and you dared it to try. With every piece of candy and cake you ate as a diabetic and every salty soup, meat or herring you ate with your condition of congestive  heart failure, you lived another day victorious, bending the rules and indeed life itself to your will. You basked in the glory of your victory.

As your son, and as my Abba, I used to fight you cake by cake, meal after meal. To eat with you was to acquire an eating disorder. But then I accepted that you were not just my Abba. You were you, Duvi, the poor boy from Brooklyn, who failed in school and was told that he would never amount to much. Who parlayed his basketball prowess into an astounding academic and rabbinic career, driven to make it in the world, make your mark on the world and make the world bow to your will and dreams. With that drive you changed the Jewish world one idea and one person at a time. With that drive you lived to celebrate the defeat of your perceived genetic destiny, living year after year, fearing death all the while daring it to try to govern you and limit you.

So I made peace with your meals, with deep pain I even learnt to smile a little as you charted your chosen and self-directed course, and protected you and made sure that as your strength and capacity dwindled, no one would try to limit or control your spirit - so that you could die in dignity – which for you meant living every day as your own master.

About a year ago, during a particularly hard time - it was the third time that month that I had to rush you to the emergency ward, your body could simply not handle your eating habits - I was helping you down the stairs into the car, and you turned to me and said: "Donniel, I am sorry that I am such a burden on you." The truth was that I was angry and upset at what you were doing to yourself. 

But as we walked together hand in hand, I had a moment of deep understanding that guided our relationship and love throughout the last year of your life. I replied to you: "Abba, its ok. You carried me throughout my life. You were always there for me whenever I needed you. Everything I have, I have because of you. The meaning of a family is that we get to take turns. Now it's my turn to carry you. It's my turn to give back to you a little of what you gave to me." You smiled and said: "It's true. I really was there for you. Wasn’t I?"

Yes Abba. You were really there for me, at my side, on my side, every day of my life.

Abba, I miss you so much. I want my Abba back, but it is not to be. I do, however, have your dreams. They and you will be with me and live within me forever.

 

Be Fathered as Jesus was

Be Fathered as Jesus was

It is not another coming nor is it the idea that these are "the last days" that we are authorized and empowered to extend the Kingdom of God in the earth today.

It is because God incarnate came in the fullness of time to inaugurate "the age to come" and the "New Creation" in the earth, this is that age and we are that New Creation.

Jesus prophesied truthfully, it is hell that is hanging on for dear life and not the church.

Forget the "end-time fables"; those with too much eyesight concocted them.

The Kingdom is advancing, even if we can’t see it.

The weapons of our warfare are not carnal.

Jesus did not rebel against evil to defeat evil and rebellion ought not characterize us.

Jesus continues to defeat evil today through those who are clothed with His righteousness.

Sinlessness is not bliss.

Sinlessness is the requirement to eat from the Tree of Life and be Fathered as Jesus was;

"this is that" said St. Peter (Acts 2:16), "this is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel"

Ken Nielsen

The Law of Moses

The Law of Moses is to Israel what the wife is to her husband

 Curses and blessings are byproducts, not unintended, but not the object or purpose of the law.

 Israel was to come to faith and the taskmaster of the law was to bring them there.

 Eve is the helpmeet (law or taskmaster and not a maid) to Adam.

 The woman walks adeptly by sight and God intends that she be the law until the man comes to faith by God's grace.

 Enmity is our natural manly jealousy at the ability of woman without any anointing to walk so precisely; this makes a natural man violent.

 God made man, la raza, a little lower than the angels and He made man the gender a little lower than the woman; in the natural.

 The woman is the Law of Moses to the man until he comes to Grace at which time the law is complete, not crushed, made whole.

 The weakness in the female as the "weaker vessel" has to be the obstacle to faith that her strong natural ability to see produces.

 When I walk by sight and not by faith there will be immediate consequences and in the home it usually erupts in friction with the law.

 The law detects, exposes and excites sin.

The law is not a contraceptive it is an aphrodisiac.

Ken Nielsen

the spiritual man, adam

The law ministers to natural man, eve, the feminine.

The Spirit ministers to the spiritual man, adam, the masculine.

our own short day of time

“he who is the great and eternal day

came from the great and endless day of eternity

into our own short day of time.”

Saint Augustine, from Sermon 185

It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us

 

Acts 15:28

It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us not to burden you with anything beyond the following requirements:

The Holy Spirit and we have agreed not to place any additional burdens on you. Do only what is necessary

For it has seemed right to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay no further burden upon you except what is absolutely essential

It seemed to the Holy Spirit and to us that you should not be saddled with any crushing burden, but be responsible only for these bare necessities:

For it seemed good to the Holy Spirit, and to us, no more burden to lay upon you, except these necessary things: