Hey, Noah here.

It is still summer doldrums and yet another week of quote unquote special programming.

Although I got to say that things just got much less doldrum-y here as the municipality of Tel Aviv Yafo, the city of which TLV1 is proudly the voice, just announced that it is setting up the world's first Marine drive-in by building a huge screen on the inlet in the lake in Ganei, Yeshua, Hayakon Park and renting out the 70 paddle boats for people to locomote to a spot on the lake, at least two meters from the next boat, and watch a film to the gentle bobbing of the lake in the artists rendering that the city sent out.

And this is true.

The movie being shown on the huge screen is Titanic, which has got to be the very best movie to show in a marine drive-in while you're in a boat, maybe in a double feature with the Poseidon adventure.

My point I suppose is that even doldrums aren't what they used to be.

What we have to offer you today is an effort failed inevitably, but an effort all the same to take the measure of a man.

I hope you'll find some value in it.

If you don't remember, you can always shut it off, draw yourself a bath and watch Titanic on your phone or iPad.

And now here's the show.

This is TLV1.

Rav Adin Shtainthalt died of pneumonia on Friday evening, Arab Shabbat at Chari Tzedek Hospital in Jerusalem.

Shtainthalt once told Yer Lapid, then a journalist, today the leader of the opposition and the Knesset, quote, "There was once a king, Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, who was a great king, and he was very worried about his funeral, so he forced everyone to have rehearsals.

They did a full funeral service as he lay in a casket and supervised everyone.

I have no need of rehearsals," end quote.

Which is not to say that Radeen Steintaltz gave no instructions.

He told his wife and two boys that it was his wish not to be eulogized.

In his life, Steinhardt had completed the most ambitious project in Jewish letters that anyone had tried, at least since the 16th century.

He had won the Israel Prize, our highest award.

He was a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the head of an Academy Institute in Moscow.

He was a visiting scholar at Yale, a faculty member at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson Center.

His company was sought by Popes presidents, prime ministers, Nobel Prize winners, and endless parade of professors, rabbis, and students.

He was not shy about enumerating his accomplishments, and he was not falsely modest about his talents, but he hated honors.

On foot, it wouldn't take an hour to walk from Rav Shtain's, Alts's, graves on the Mount of Olives around the old city up Meacharim Street to the house where he was born in Karim Avraham.

And if you had an extra 10 minutes to spare, you could continue on through the Shuk at Mahanayahuda to the Steinholz Institute in Nakhlaoth and see the spot where most of his work was accomplished.

Rav Steinholz was a worldly man and a parapetetic, but he was at the same time and more than anything else, a man of Jerusalem.

When he was born in 1937, Kerem Avraham was, Steinholz later remembered, "a very complicated neighborhood, made up of very different people, all sorts of people.

The neighborhood had its start in the middle of the 19th century, when the British Consul in Jerusalem, a pious Hebraicist named James Finn, brought a big tract of land called Carmelchaleel or Abraham's Vineyard outside the walls of the city and set up what he called a farm in the spirit of the Bible that he called "the agricultural settlement for the employment of the Jews of Jerusalem.

" In 1862, when Prince Edward, the son of Queen Victoria, visited Jerusalem.

He was welcomed by Finn who took him to quote, "pay respects to the children of Israel and his Highness appeared in the Lord's temples in the synagogues of our brothers, the Svaradis Jews, may God watch over them.

" And at the fourth hour before midnight, he came with his high dignitaries and the consuls to the great and glorious synagogues on the ruins of our Rabbi Yehuda HaChasid and honored the nobles of Judah, the leaders of the people, the wise and righteous men who received His Highness.

" This we know from an article published in the Jerusalem, Hebrew paper Hamagid on April 29, 1862.

The article was written by a 24-year-old writer and poet named Joseph Rivlin, the great-great-grandfather of President Roovey Rivlin.

Finn's farm continued to operate long after Finn himself was recalled to England, and it is for this reason that from the start among the residents of the neighborhood were many pious Jews who came from Yemen, some of the children of whom remained in the neighborhood now known by its Hebrew name, Karim Avraham, long after the British captured Palestine from the Ottomans and turned Finn's big house into a reform school for wayward boys.

These second and even third generation residents of the neighborhood were joined in the 1920s and 1930s by immigrants, mostly from Eastern Europe.

As Steinzahl said, these were all sorts of people.

They were day laborers and shopkeeps, tradesmen, teachers, and every variety of Luftmensch.

They did not share a language and they did not share a culture.

If you had to find something common of their denominator, it might be that none of them were free of worries about money.

Less universal, but common still was a sort of admiration, sometimes passion for words and ideas.

A man named Marcus ran a new and used bookstore on Rochovionna.

also served as a subscription library for the neighborhood.

But unlike the adults who paid Marcus would let kids take books home overnight and return them the next day.

Quote, by the time I was 10 I'd finished all the kids books in the library Steinselz once said, and they had to give me adult books and quote, it was on record Yona probably that what became Steinselz his earliest memory took place.

Quote, I am in a stroller.

I surely had no idea how old I was.

And my mother and I are crossing the very small street when suddenly a bomb goes off nearby.

My mother grabs the stroller and runs.

That is my personal picture of what is called the Palestinian uprising that started in 1936 and continued until the Second World War broke out.

It was my first memory.

It was a sign because after all, what has my life been since those events that I didn't know anything about?

A series of wars that I inherited from my point of view, and they have accompanied me.

" Steinthalts' mother, Rifkelea Steinthalts, was a seamstress who worked from their small apartment.

Steinthalts said, "Emma was a seamstress all her life, a very good seamstress.

In all of my mother's family, there was a sort of true humility.

She could have become a famous seamstress, but instead she sewed fine clothes for everyone, including me.

When I was five, I was very careful about how I dressed.

It's not surprising an only child living not just with his mother and father, but aunt and grandmother as well.

They spoiled me and I got everything I wanted.

" When Rivkalaya died in 1986, the epitaph on her Mount of Olive's graves, quoting the prophet Mihah, read simply, "To love kindness and to walk humbly.

" Shtainthals' father, Avram Meir Shtainthals, was something else altogether.

He was the namesake and the great grandson of Rabbi Avram Weinberg, the first Sloaneamer Rebbe, founder of a Hasidic dynasty from Sloaneem in what is today Belarus and the prized student of a prized student of a prized student of a prized student of a prized student of a prized student of a prized student of the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism.

And if to our ears, that sounds like a diminishment, it is important to understand that it is the opposite.

Avram Meir Steinsault was himself the student of Hillel Zeitlin, a Lebovich Hasid who spent late nights pouring over Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and Spinoza alongside the Rambam and Raabag.

Zeitlin was friends with Joseph Chaim Brenner and he wrote a tribute when Brenner was murdered in Tel Aviv in 1921.

And it may be from his teacher that Avram Steinsault got the notion of moving to Palestine, which he did in 1924.

his father's things, Adin Sheintalt found a letter from Zeitlin sent to Palestine saying that maybe Avraham Meir Sheintalt and Yitzhak Sadeh, another Zeitlin acolyte who had moved to Palestine, could band together and start a religious commune.

Sadeh went on to become the head of the Palmach militia, a founder of the IDF, and he died a very secular man in Tel Aviv.

Avraham Meir Sheintalt found work in construction as good Zionists who for one reason or another lived in the city did.

Sheintalt said of his father, quote, he He came down with malaria, as one did, and he had signs of it that stayed with him for the rest of his life.

" He also stopped observing Jewish law.

He did not keep Shabbat.

He did not keep kosher.

But aside from the obligatory malaria and the obligatory secularism, Abraham Mayer Steintaltz was a Zionist of no easily recognizable fashion.

At a time when most Zionists belonged to well-defined movements that had well-defined identities, Steintaltz said of his father, My great father was everywhere and everywhere I mean everywhere, intellectually, politically, religiously, everywhere, everywhere.

My father was everywhere.

Steinhardt said, quote, "Abba was one of the first members of the Histadrut labor union.

He had a red membership book for years.

That said, he maintained in an odd way close ties intimate with the place he grew up, with his heritage, with his culture.

When I was about 10, he found me someone to teach me Talmud, one of his friends, a man would come from France and was destined to be a Talmud professor.

I asked him, "Why do I need to learn this?

" He said to me, "What you are going to grow up to be, I do not know, but in my family, there will be no ignorant people.

" On the other hand, he was part of the communist Hashomer Atsa'ir movement and the most leftist groups within it.

He was among the founders of two Hashomer Kibbutzim.

Mishmar Ha'emek was one of them.

He wrote for the communist newspaper, "Allah Mishmar.

" He also was a person who traveled, which was not common then.

He fought in the Spanish civil war as a volunteer for the Republicans in the International Brigade.

" In fact, beginning when Adin Steinsholz was three and until he was 10, Avram Mayer Steinsholz was also a member of the Leche, a militant militia fighting to force the British out of Palestine with violence and as a canonical article in the militia's underground newspaper, the front once put it, "terror.

" "He never told me exactly what he did there," Steinsholz said.

When Avraham Meir Steinthalz died in 1978, Adim chose for his epitaph this passage from Psalms, "He loved righteousness and hated wickedness.

" It was not just what went on inside his small apartment in Karim, Avraham, that molded Adim Steinthalz when he was young.

A short block and a bit away, Amos Oase was growing up.

He was two years younger than Steinthalz.

Aleph Bet-Yehoshua, another of our greatest novelists, lived around the corner.

He was seven months older than Steinzaltz.

Across the way lived the poet Zelda.

In kindergarten, Adin Steinzaltz met and became lifelong friends with the revered late historian and a teacher of mine, Amos Funkenstein.

Of Oz, Steinzaltz said, quote, his semi-autographical book, he means a tale of love and darkness, is not a bad description of the atmosphere of the neighborhood.

Oz wrote of the people among whom he and Yoshua and Funkenstein and Steinzaltz lived that, quote, Most of our neighbors were petty clerks, small retailers, bank tellers, cinema ticket sellers, school teachers, dispensers of private lessons or dentists.

They were not religious Jews.

They went to synagogue only for Yom Kippur and occasionally for the procession at Simchat Torah, yet they lit candles on Friday night to maintain some vestige of Jewishness and perhaps also as a precaution to be on the safe side.

You never know.

They were more or less well educated, but they were not entirely comfortable about it.

They all had very definite views about the British mandate, the future of Zionism, the working class, the cultural life of the land, Düring's attacks on Marx, the novels of Knut-Hamsun, the Arab question and women's rights.

There were all sorts of thinkers and preachers who called for the Orthodox Jewish ban on Spinoza to be listed, for instance, or for a campaign to explain to the Palestinian Arabs that they were not really Arabs, but the descendants of ancient Hebrews, and for a conclusive synthesis between the ideas of Kant and Hegel, the teachings of Tolstoy in Zionism, a synthesis that would give birth here in the land of Israel to a wonderfully pure and healthy way of life, or for the promotion of goat's milk, or for an alliance with America, and even with Stalin with the object of driving out the British, or for everyone to do some simple exercises every morning that would keep gloom at bay and purify the soul.

" It was in this atmosphere that Sainz-Haltz decided still a kid, not yet a teenager, to switch from the regular school to a religious school and to start observing Jewish law.

Didn't you feel you were swimming against a tide?

An interviewer once asked him and his answer was, quote, "I went against the tide.

From a very young age, what I learned was to reject all sorts of things.

It's a little bit my personality, a little bit the society I was raised in, but definitely against the tide," end quote.

Every story about Steinzaltz and this week, every article and every newspaper begins by saying that he is a proselyte, a hoserbe chuva, One who returns in repentance to religion, returns maybe to a religion that he never knew.

But that is not how Adin Steinsalt saw himself.

Steinsalt's often repeated a midrash from Vayikra Rabba, a favorite that goes like this, quote, "Rabbi Anai was once walking along the road and he saw a man who was finally dressed.

Rabbi Anai said to him, would you like to come over to my house?

The man said yes.

Rabbi Anai brought him to his home and gave him food and drink.

As they were eating and drinking together, Yanai tested the man on his knowledge of Bible and learned that he had none.

Yanai examined his knowledge of Mishnah and realized that he had none, his knowledge of legends, and saw that he had none, his knowledge of Talmud, and saw that he had none.

Rabbi Yanai then told him, "Wash and recite grace.

" The guest said, "Let Yanai recite grace in his own home.

" Seeing that the man could not even recite a blessing, Yanai told him, "Can you at least repeat what I say?

" The man said, "Yes.

" Rabbi Yanai said, "Repeat the following, a dog has eaten Yanai's bread.

" Offended the man said, "I once passed by a school and I heard the voices of little children saying, 'Moshay gave us the Torah, the inheritance of the community of Jacob.

'" Torah Tzivalanu Moshe Morasha Kilaat Yaakov from Deuteronomy.

"They did not say," the man continued, "the inheritance of the congregation of Yanai, but the congregation of Jacob.

" The guest said, "I have never heard a bad word uttered about me and argued with the person who spoke it.

I have never seen two people arguing without making peace between them.

" Rabbi Yanai then said, "You have so much derach eretz, human decency, and yet I called you a dog.

" One way to see Steinzalt's life work is this.

He tried to keep Rabbi Yanai's people with heritage, with degrees, with titles, with standing, with respect, from calling decent people dogs.

The first time I ever saw Dean Steinzholz, I was an undergraduate who took a tri-college shuttle van to Bryn Mawr, where I'd learned from a mimeographed page push-pinned into a bulletin board.

Rabbi Steinzholz was scheduled to speak.

The lecture took place in the great hall of the old library, a room with mullioned, stilted, and arched in thirds gothic stained glass windows, looking to me like nothing so much as a church.

It opened on the cloisters, although an Athena Lemnia statue added in my eyes some high paganism, and the great hooped Gothic brass and crystal chandelier made it regal, and the Tudor English oak paneling that warmed the lowest three meters of the stone walls beneath the vaulted arch ceilings said to me Oxford or Sorbonne, together making the room as high goyish as any place I'd ever seen in my life.

I arrived early and the seats around me filled until there was no more room and people stood on the sides and in the back of the hall.

In time the rabbi came out with a professor who would introduce him and the two took their place on a stage that had been built in the front of the room upon which two chairs were placed on a lectern and a blackboard.

The professor stood at the lectern and began to recount the accomplishments of his esteemed guest.

And as he did, I saw that Rav Shtainthaltz had gotten up from his chair, turned to the blackboard, taken chalk from the small shelf beneath it, and was now drawing pictures, doodles really, of animals, a giraffe, a cat, a mouse, a dog.

His back was turned to the audience and to the professor who was talking about hermeneutics and Wiesenchaft des Judentums, postmodernism and Steinsalt's place among and contribution to all of these things.

I, a kid, awed, silent by anything Gothic, anything ecclesiastical, anything regal, anything scholarly, anything richly paneled in stained English oak, I sat frozen, unable to dope out what it might be like for all of that gravitas to carry no weight at all, as it unmistakably did not for Steinsaltz.

Now, years later, I still can't dope out what that might be like.

The moment, though, has stayed with me ever since, a lesson that if I have never managed fully to learn it, I have also never forgotten.

It was a thing that Steinsaltz returned to over and over again too, an obsession really about how fancy people and fancy places with fancy degrees were worth no more than a doodle in chalk on a board.

In my life, and I just anticipate in my life, I saw not just famous people, quite a number of them, but I saw people with great accomplishments in different fields, from science and politics and literature, in poetry, in art, everything.

But they were what I'm trying to say, to explain.

All of them are peacocks.

Now, I'm not trying to be offensive, but I see, I happened to see a plucked peacock.

It is surely not a beautiful think to look at.

It looks like a especially thin, ugly hand.

Okay, but a peacock in its glory is glorious.

See, the tale of a peacock spread is one of the most glorious sights.

But if you think about it, the tale of the peacock, the peacock himself is what it is.

Now, I saw many people who are like this.

He has a big tail of science or the other person has a big tail of power.

And that is a big thing of other things, but that is the small people.

What got Steinselz to Bryn Mawr and to Yale and to Princeton and to Oxford and the Vatican and the Russian Academy of Sciences was of course his Talmud.

It was his life's epic undertaking.

And it was one that no one, not even himself would have predicted when he was very young.

Alongside Yeshiva, Shainzalt enrolled still a kid at the Hebrew University where he took a degree in physics and math.

After that, he set up one experimental high school and then another.

At 24, he was the youngest high school principal in Israel.

And then he tried to do what Saitland had pressed his father to do, to set up a Hasidic commune in the Negev.

Around this time, he started publishing a journal that drew no clear line between the stuff he'd learned at the Hebrew University and the stuff he'd learned at Yeshiva, like a lot of kids in his 20 he was casting about.

Steinzholz was 27 when he had the idea to translate the Talmud.

It was 1965.

And when he set up the institute, that would be the home for the project and most everything else he did until last week.

To run the institute, Steinzholz hired his irreligious Jewish underground and Spanish Civil War fighter, construction worker father, who remained in the job until not long before he died.

In time, Steinzaltz would hire his son, Rav Menachem, many, Evan Yisrael, Steinzaltz, to take over the job that Steinzaltz's father had earlier done.

Understandably, Steinzaltz's Talmud was at the center of each of the hundreds of appreciations of the man that we read this week.

Joseph Berger and Isabel Kirchner of the Times captured the achievement well when they wrote, quote, "For centuries, the study of Talmud in 2,711 double-sided pages, the record of rabbinical debates on the laws and ethics of Judaism heard in the academies of Babylonia between 200 AD and 500, were confined mostly to yeshivas.

Their students, young and old, hunched over dog-eared volumes of Talmud, sometimes without teachers, would teach one another the meaning of what they were reading largely in Aramaic and argue the implications.

Rabbi Steinzaltz's achievement was to take the Talmud out of this relatively exclusive sphere and with a Hebrew translation allow ordinary Jews taking the Long Island Railroad to work or gathering in a cafe in Tel Aviv to study those texts on their own.

The Hebrew edition has been translated by publishers into English, French, Russian and Spanish.

" Steinzaltz's Talmud is more than a translation, of course.

Its pages are filled with explanations, some theological, some historical, some entomological, some lexical logical, some anthropological, some archaeological, some botanical, some astronomical, some anatomical, some ornithological, some entomological, and the list could go on.

Steinthalts' aim, as he once told you at Yer Lapid, was to create what he called "a portable teacher.

" And when Steinthalts got the Israel Prize in 1988, 22 years before he finished his 45-year-long project, The committee of judges commended them above all for making the Talmud accessible to the kid in the cafe and to the commuter from Sederhurst on the LIRR.

And Steinzholz had a genius for taking things that were closed and making them open.

In 1984, Steinzholz and his old kindergarten mate, Amos Funkenstein, took time from all the other things they were doing to give a series of radio lectures as part of what was then called the broadcast university, Universitam issue dehreth, and then writing a book together, both on the topic of quote, the sociology of ignorance, end quote, ignorance, they concluded, was the product of living in a closed hermetic world of thought, where there were an infinity of answers and a paucity of questions still open.

This is why it was possible almost likely that highly educated people might for all their knowledge, polished bright like precious stones remain ignorant.

I once happened across Rob Steinzaltz and Professor Funkenstein talking effusively at a table and what I think I remember was the National Library in Jerusalem.

I watched them for long minutes before bumbling up to them, oafish, awkward and starstruck.

Amos Funkenstein, he was my teacher, he introduced me to Rav Shteynsaltz and said that there was no reason to be shy, as each of the two men was nothing more than a "Cactus Volgaris," a common sabar.

It was because of their openness, their constant questioning, their curiosity, that Adin Steinsalt saw something admirable and worth emulating, especially in children.

It's a question that I'm asking everywhere and I've been in quite a number of places.

And that's the question, as you know, most children are both clever and beautiful.

Now what happens to them?

What happens to them, Steinsalt's thought, was that they are taught to be rigid.

Some of the answers are obviously the school system.

The school system is basically made to stupefy people.

- But it went way beyond schools.

In many ways, Steinthalts believes, we are a culture that is hostile to openness.

If he needed any proof of this, the reception of Steinthalts' work gave plenty.

In 1989, Rabbi Elazar Menachem Schach, the most important of the Lithuanian, ultra-Orthodox rabbis, and a dean of the Punevich Yeshiva in Bnei Brak, maybe the most important Yeshiva in the world, wrote a letter that ended, "I am sorry that I must cry out, but in my opinion, Steinzalt's books must be hidden away, and it is forbidden to learn from them or to look at them, or to bring them into a house of study.

And he who fears the Word of God will defend his soul by not having them in his home.

And it was signed, 'written with a tear for the honor of the Holy Name.

May he and his Torah be blessed, Elazar Menachem Shaq.

'" In the letter, Rav Shach wrote that Steinzaltz's books, quote, "undermine the fundamental foundations of the Jewish people upon which all our beliefs are based," end quote.

He wrote that the books, quote, "present the Talmud as though it is a book of the scholarship of the goyim heaven for Fend," end quote.

He wrote that, quote, "I was shocked by the heretical things they contained that degrade the Torah," end quote.

After this, ultra-Orthodox students were careful to keep their Steinzaltz hidden in the backs of their closets and at the bottom of crates.

To Steinzalt, what Rav Shach and religious folks like him objected to really was his taking a book that until then only they could decipher and making it available to anyone, including people beyond their influence and control.

- They are not happy with one thing.

And that is, you see, in many ways, for many years, it was made as a kind of an artificial obstacle race.

in which you had basically to learn the meaning of words, to learn to decipher sentences and so on.

Now, that was considered learning.

Now, when I put some kind of a translation, whether it was in Hebrew, in English, and it's now coming up in French and in Russian.

So in this case, in this case, means that all the things that people claimed fame for, which means knowing how to read a text is no longer important.

So I think that I focused the ideas about what is really important.

Important thing is understand it, explore it, and continue it.

But it wasn't just firebrand Mitnaged Haredi rabbis who for Shintals were dogmatists dead set against openness.

It was equally the rest of us in Israel.

This is the part of Steinthal's project that we usually miss.

And this is the part that to me and to us, I think matters the most.

A few years before Steinthal started his Talmud, he wrote a letter to Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, pressing him to support the establishment of an Institute for Jewish Culture and Education that would be neither religious nor secular, or maybe both at once.

On December 20th, 1962, he received a reply addressed to Mr.

, not Rabbi, Adin Steintals.

After apologizing for the delay in his reply, Ben-Gorian wrote, "I agree with you that the division between secular and religious Judaism is artificial, and what's more, I do not at all advocate such a division.

Distinctions between Jews is foreign, as far as I know, from the spirit of Judaism.

I looked at your plan for an institute for Jewish education and culture, and because I do not have time to address the questions raised by reading your plan, I will tell you my opinion in brief.

It is necessary for us to develop among our people more mutual tolerance.

We must make our peace with the fact that it's not new in my opinion and existed all throughout our existence, that there are about matters of spirit, different opinions, and we must give to the younger generation an understanding of the history of our people and its creation in all the fields of spirit in all the stages of development.

with great respect, Dalit Ben-Gurion.

Although Steinzholz knew that different people saw the world in different ways, and he loved the fact that different people saw the world in different ways, which fact he took to be a sign of God in the workings of Earth, the last thing that interested him was tolerance and making peace.

Steinzholz saw the polite condescension that was interpolated into Ben-Gurion's words.

Much later, he said, "There was an assumption or a general feeling back then, which was also the learned opinion of Ben-Gurion himself, that the entire phenomenon of religion among Jews was a phenomenon that was destined to pass.

That explained some of the concessions that were made to religious people, which were not really made for political reasons, but for this reason, and maybe a little for reasons of sentimental feelings, which Ben-Gurion didn't have, but others did.

There was ultimately an agreement about this, and there is a classic trajectory of the story of the Jews.

The wise son is the first generation.

After that comes the rebellious one, the evil son in the second generation.

After that, the evil son brings a grandson to the grandfather and the grandson asks, what is this?

That is the simple son, the third generation.

The great grandson, the fourth generation already does not know how to ask questions.

That was the feeling that this is the way of the world.

Sheteintalt saw Ben-Gurion as dogmatic, in a way not that different from Rav Shach, and maybe more dangerous.

Sheteintalt said, quote, "What's been created here is a people whose culture is built to a great degree on the Bible, the Tanakh and not on the Talmud.

Everyone who studies the Bible becomes a little prophet.

That is what is happening in Israel.

Everyone is a little prophet, the blacksmith, the tinsmith, the shoemaker, the grocer, and even members of Knesset.

They are all little prophets that tell me what is true.

" This Steinzaltz new was Ben-Gorian's ideal.

It was the ideal of the Zabar of the new Jew upright, heroic, courageous, simple, guileless people of action who saw what needed to be done and did it often sacrificing themselves for the sake of what is true.

It was an ideal that Steinzaltz hated.

If biblical imagery is to be pressed into service, Steinzaltz believed that Ben-Gorian and his sorts of Zionists were willing ourselves from being Jacob's to being Asos, trading our birthright for a mess of pottage.

This is why what Zionism needs, what Israel needs, is Talmud.

It's a book of discussions, mostly.

It's a book of dealing with material, dealing with ideas, dealing with problems.

It is not so much a book that has conclusions or results, but rather discussions about subjects in its own very particular way of dealing with the subject and discussing the subject.

Steinzalt said, "In contrast to Bible, the Talmud is a book of dialectics, a book of negotiation.

That's what is missing here, culturally.

It is an essential deficit.

There is no school or way like Talmud in which I can speak with someone, argue with someone, in which we can agree or disagree.

This is a loss that causes all sorts of damage to Israeli culture, which is so biblical.

" Steinselz spent 45 years of his life translating, glossing, explaining, illuminating, footnoteing 5,422 pages, not only so that those of the rest of us who wanted to could read the Talmud, that was a means to an end, but also, and this was the end, to nudge us to becoming more Talmudic ourselves and less biblical as the early Zionists had told us to be.

It was Steinselt's life work to nudge us to become less like prophets and more like poets, alive to what is ambiguous and fragile, skeptical of sweeping statements in bold language with clear answers.

It was Steinselt's life work to nudge us to be less like know-it-all professors and more like curious and confused students.

It was Steinselt's life work to nudge us to be less like adults who know what's what and more like unschooled children, clever and beautiful.

A lot has been made of the audacity of Steinsalt's ambition, setting out to gloss the entire Talmud and undertaking so big that would have been impossible to know for certain when he started that he would even live long enough to finish.

And Rav Steinsalt said many times that it was only the myopia of youth and the poor judgment that goes with it that allowed him to even begin the project.

But what was most audacious about Steinsalt's ambition was that he was tilting against an entire culture that made heroes of David and Samson of Trumpldor and Hanasenish and Ariel Sharon, but did not make heroes of Rav Ashi and of Esther Moyal and Jacqueline Kahannov.

Sainzals, after his fashion, said that his aim was to publish a book or a bunch of them.

In fact, it was to shift Zionism and Jewish life on their axis and set them spinning in new ways.

Sainzalz believed he could do this, I think, because of what he believed about God, but mostly because of what he believed about people.

Although for Sainzalz, those two things could never be separated.

For one thing, Sainzalz was certain that everything people included could be changed, including for the better.

You can take everything as a pebble, a piece of wood, or even a human person and make it into a shining sun.

There was a story Ravstein-Toltz told about a sapling he was growing in his garden in his yard that was split in a storm and that he nursed back to health with scotch tape and for years thereafter lived and worked in its shade.

If you want to learn from a tree, there's a lot of things to learn.

If you don't want to learn from a human being, from a sage, from whatever it is, you want to learn it.

I tell my people's story.

It happened to me many years ago in my garden.

It was a small, small tree.

It grew up and it was broken.

It wasn't especially important, especially a tree.

It's just a cypress, an uncommentary.

But I took Peter on it, and I saw that the broken part, the broken upper part, is still connected.

So I put it together very carefully.

As a surgeon puts a broken limb, I put a scotch-tip around it to hold it.

And I lifted what I said.

It seems that they want held, and they continue to go.

Now, when I'm looking at this small tree that was about one meter tall, something like this, I see this giant tree that goes, that was very much many, many meters above my house.

And I think about it, look, I took a pitiful broken tree.

It wasn't a pretty tree, it was just beginning to go.

I did some things with it and see how it would make it go.

So what can you do with people?

- All of this because like a tree wants to reach sunlight where all of us seeking together to make some sense of our lives, of each other, of our world.

- This park is in a way trying to find its way to the main fire.

And then it wants to sink into the main fire.

- And this because what we're here for, our purpose to shine thoughts, our divine purpose is together to fix the world.

- The Lord says, I made the world.

It's pretty good, but there are kinds of holes in it.

You people go and you make the amendments, bigger ones, smaller ones, but that's your duty.

- And the most astonishing thing about all this is that in Steinselt's audacious project, his shifting of a culture, a civilization on its axis, he succeeded sort of not alone, not completely, not enough, not yet, but more than anyone ever could have imagined.

Let me inventory some of the places where I have seen Steinselt's Talmud being studied.

I have learned from Steinselzt's Talmud at a nighttime study session in the beautiful LGBTQ Center in Mayer Park in Tel Aviv around a table with a lesbian mom and a trans woman who studied in the Yeshiva in B'nei Brak.

I have learned from a Steinselzt's Talmud in the Sukkah, in the port put up by Beit Filah Yisraeli, a secular religious community, whatever that is exactly, as people wandered in with their kids from an evening stroll on the Mediterranean.

I have learned from a Steinselztstamud at Alma, the home for Hebrew culture.

I have studied from a Steinselztstamud in the old shul on Yermiyahu Street that long ago, gave a brilliant Tammudist friend of mine, Eitan Darshav, and me the key to the building so that we could come early and whenever we want really to study Dafyomi in the quiet of Old North Tel Aviv.

I have studied from a Steinselztstamud in the Tzavta theater in Tel Aviv where Amos Oz was laid out so that thousands could pay their last respect before he was buried.

I have studied from a Steinthaltsamud on several kibbutzim.

I have studied from a Steinthaltsamud with every sort of Israeli I could imagine and some sorts that I could not have imagined.

On the day of Rav Steinthalts' funeral, Kobe Oz, a singer and a songwriter I love, who went to the Eurovision some years ago with a band called Tipex, was interviewed on the radio and he said this.

For my 40th birthday, which was 10 years ago, almost 11, Ima bought me all of Sheinzhalz's Talmud from start to finish.

And since then I've been learning it.

We're about two-thirds the way through the Gemara and it changed my life entirely.

because the jump from the Bible to the renaissance of the establishment of the state of Israel was strange to me because there was the traditionalism of my parents and then there was the Bible and the re-establishment of the state and everything they taught us in school.

And in the middle, there was a black hole and we didn't know what happened in it.

[Speaking in Hebrew] For me, it was a meaningful change in my identity.

Finally, there was a bridge between my Sabah, my grandfather, who was the classical religious traditional Jew and the secular Jew that I am.

End quote.

A few years ago, Coby Oase took a box of tapes that his Sabah, who was a famous Python or religious singer in Tunisia, made before he died so that his music would not die with him.

And Coby O's wrote a duet with his by then dead grandfather.

That is one of the most beautiful songs I have heard.

It's called Elohai, My God.

(singing in foreign language) [Music] Steinzaltz once asked Coby Oes to come to the Steinzaltz Center to lead a session of Torah study, and he did, as did the writer Aaron Appelfeld, who opened by saying, "I don't know the texts, so I will teach you what I do know.

" And Appelfeld, like Kobe O's and like hundreds of other poets and writers and singers and teachers whom Steinthal's invited to teach Torah, even though their shadows had never darkened the doorway of Yeshiva, could teach Torah because of, well, the spark.

When I grew up, the Israelis I admired were biblical heroes.

They had faced death and they had lost an eye or a leg or an arm defending Jews.

They had parachuted behind Nazi lines to save Jews.

They had heard a voice that said, "Lech Lecha, go to the place I will show you.

" And they did, upon their arrival, doing biblical things like giving Hebrew names to animals that didn't have them and to places that didn't have them and to each other and building settlements and cities and roads and making arid land produce dates and honey and milk in copious amounts.

What Steinzahl's thought is that the time is long past for different sorts of heroes, alongside the first sort.

People who are complicated, not simple.

People who bring questions, not answers.

People who cannot be cataloged into straightforward categories.

people who are argumentative, people who don't invite us to be like them, but instead press us to figure out what it would be like to be ourselves, what it was like to be our grandparents.

All of which sounds abstract until you see it around you, all the heroic sorts who today populate our lives, heroic sorts that Ben-Gurion would never, could never have understood or or even seen really Donna international who taught us to see her and Vicki Knaafo who taught us to see her.

And I'm an Oda who tweets from the sources and says that he will not stop until we see him and Nazir Majali and Emil Shufani who went to Auschwitz with hundreds of Palestinian Israelis and spent the day reciting the names of Jews who perished saying that they will do their best to see us fully, and they will do so until we see them fully.

As many have noticed when the history books are written, Ravadin Steinzholz will be remembered as a person who gave new life to the Talmud, but that is not all.

He will be remembered as one of the first generation of Talmudic heroes whose accomplishments lay not in how they They protected us and not in how they built roads and buildings, but in how they built bridges and how they let us see one another and ourselves in ways that we couldn't before.

At the website of the Olaf Society of the Steinzaltz Institute, an in memoriam page for Rav Adin Steinzaltz reads, "We grieve the loss of a giant in the Jewish world.

We asked you all to read his favorite Psalm, Psalm 139.

Not long ago, as part of the very Stein-Saltzian 929 study project, a wonderful singer named Elitzur Goldsmith recorded a song he wrote based on that same Psalm.

I went to the 929 site to listen to the song in honor of the Rav.

And there on the side of the video was the text of the Psalm.

Inevitably, if you click on any passage, Rav Shneintalt's commentary rises.

I've been fooling you, or you are down, wait until I'm done.

Take money and love even if I'm ixtures made by zebras.

hospital with Uzek but if I could hi out Ad I'm so happy to be here with you.

I'm so happy to be here with you.

I'm so happy to be here with you.

I'm so happy to be here with you.

I'm so happy to be here with you.

I'm so happy to be here with you.

I'm so happy to be here with you.

I'm so happy to be here with you.

I'm so happy to be here with you.

I'm so happy to be here with you.

We are a country that is not a part of our lives.

We are a country that is not a part of our lives.

We are a country that is not a part of our lives.

(gentle guitar music) [Music] Telefoncilter, hakizotí, vádíma, odíma Telefoncilter, hakizotí, vádíma, odíma [Music] And that brings us to the end of our show.

Thank you to Itai Shalem, our station manager, without whom there'd be none of this.

And a special thanks again this week for indulging me.

Thanks to Ashiboli, my favorite band from Kibbutz Geva.

They give us some music at the start and the end of our show.

We'd like to thank all of our Patreon supporters for your generosity and support that keeps the show going and it keeps the station going.

And it is an amazing thing that you do that.

And the kindness of what you do is not lost on us, not at all.

For all those of you who wrote me after last week's show, and there were hundreds of people who wrote, thank you so much.

It was overwhelming and it was beautiful.

Next week, if all goes according to plans, we'll have a special episode with Miriam Herslaug, which is redundant because everything that Miriam Herslaug does is special.

For now, thank you for listening, for being there, for everything.

Be healthy.

We'll see you next week.

Bye.

Bye.

[Music]