Thread by @avitalrachel

A transcript of a never-published interview with Rav Adin Steinsaltz zt"l from June 26 2014, in honor of his first yarzheit.
 
I was 22, interviewing him for @haaretzcom on his biography of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, but eager to discuss with him faith, history, literature...

R' Steinsaltz: "So where is Chizhik from? Your family is an important family in Israel."
 
me: "We're from Kiev, I don’t know if we are related to those Chizhiks...”
 
RS :"It must be your family, a distinguished family...

What are you doing in America, in America your name means nothing, but in Israel, now, that’s yichus [lineage]! They built the state, kibbutzim, the Chizhiks, they had a few martyrs who died for the state, real heroes. Surely people told you?"

me, bashfully, child of Russian baalei teshuva: "that’s not exactly ‘yichus’."
 
RS: "Of course it’s yichus! The creators of the state! Holy work!"

"One was a writer, you know that?...Baruch Chizhik, he wrote an encyclopedia of botany. 900 pages. Brilliant man. But the problem was that when he was only in the aleph volume, he got to ‘agam’, lake, and he began writing about the lake, and then the ecological foundations of it,

then he wrote about all the creatures that live in it, & that mosquitoes tend to live in it, & then all about mosquitoes, & that mosquitoes tend to carry diseases, & then about malaria, the most common one of all, & the effects of malaria on the human body,

& the fact that malaria was treated with wine in ancient times, and then about wine, & its creation, and the make-up of grapes in turn…so he never finished the alphabet. I tell you this now, because whenever I am writing, I keep Baruch Chizhik’s book in my study, to remind me...

....that even if I feel like writing it, sometimes it needn’t be said! Some people have the right, you know, to write long books. You Russians especially (I love Russians, much more than Americans, I love to visit Moscow, but that's for later). So of course Tolstoy could do it,

...or our own Vassily Grossman...But those are very few geniuses, once in a century or so, usually Russian. But we must learn to put our words on a diet - what you Americans do to your women, you starve yourselves, we should do to our books, so that their messages are clearer."

Later: “Haaretz people are snooty people, just like the NYTimes, just like Tel Aviv dreams of being New York....Beware of self-importance, importance only exists in the eye of the beholder. I respect them, but for their arrogance. Who made them so great?"

“I speak of the newspaper as a frustrated lover, you see. They're honest people but sometimes those writers inspire some emotions in me that make me simply want to kick them in the ass." [An exact quote!]

He could not get over that a religious woman was interviewing him for Haaretz and kept returning to it. "But listen, Haaretz, they are believers. They are believers of the same ilk as Hamodia. They just go to different shtiebels."

"I have two proofs of God's existence: 1) Pravda denied it. 2) The continued existence of the State of Israel with the government it has today."

"There’s no special reason for being secular, anti-religious. One gains nothing from being passionately atheist. Atheism of Jewish liberals is simply an expression of Judaism -- that is, ‘anti’, a need to be contrary. That's being Jewish. "

"To stand on a peak is lonely by definition...because you have no one else to turn to...What happens when you are, for people, the last address? The last before God, like Moses on the mountaintop? And if one has no answer – what does it make a person feel? A failure."

"Some secular people...got their knowledge about Judaism from kindergarten. Of course they can’t stand those ideas when they reach the age of 20 – they never developed those ideas since! Go and learn!"

The interview took place in a dark moment — three Israeli teens, two of them students in the Steinsaltz yeshiva, had been kidnapped, the country reeling. “In a time of sorrow, it’s a call for people to go dig within oneself. Find out what is real and what is slogans."

"I believe in the wisdom of little children. Not in that of adults. Children know what infinity is. They know God. Perhaps they think of him as an old man with a long white beard, but they know what is infinity."

Rav Steinsaltz chuckles when he sees me smiling at his long white beard. "Luckily I have not been mistaken for God but I have been mistaken for Santa Claus on several occasions."

“I can tell you’re a real writer because you write instead of using a tape recorder. You delegate words to memory and to what is written, not to a machine.”

In the end, he asked me about my personal life. I was seeing @BenZevG already, weeks away from engagement. I asked him for advice. “The rabbi is an address, someone to talk with. More and more, people come with pain, not just questions.

...So what is a rebbetzin?...A rabbi needs a person who can criticize him from time to time. Because otherwise he can become full of himself. Who else will scold him? It is your duty to scold him from time to time. A wife puts him in his place...

...A rabbi’s work is both intellectual, emotional, and that of belief. A rabbi needs support [from his partner] because he will get it from no one else.”