Adam Sales is a graduate student at the University of Michigan.
HaRav Yehuda Amital, one of the great contemporary Jewish leaders and thinkers–and one of my personal heroes–passed away in Jerusalem last Thursday night, July 9, at the age of 86.
Rav Amital was born Yehuda Klein in Transylvania in 1924, and survived the Holocaust in a labor camp. He moved to Israel after the war, changed his name and joined the Hagana, which he fought with in Israel’s War of Independence. After 1948, Rav Amital emerged as a leader of Israel’s religious Zionist community and encouraged simultaneous engagement in Torah study and modern, secular life. He insisted that his students study in a library with windows that looked out onto the wider world. In opposition to the idea that students could skip the army to study Torah, he helped found the “Hesder†program, which enabled religious boys to alternate between Torah study and army service. In 1968, Rav Amital founded Yeshivat Har Etzion–which would become the largest Hesder yeshiva–in a settlement in the West Bank, and served as its dean, along with Rav Aharon Lichtenstein, until 2008.
After losing many students in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Rav Amital shifted away from the messianic settler movement. He believed in the possibility, not the divine promise, of religious redemption through the state of Israel and began to argue for peace accords with Israel’s neighbors. He founded a political party in the late eighties called Meimad, which in Hebrew stands for “A Jewish state, a democratic state,†and served in Shimon Peres’ cabinet.
Rav Amital was unique because he blended passion with humility. His vision allowed him to found new institutions and pioneer innovative methods, but his drive never kept him from understanding the other side of an issue. When compelled by evidence, he would change his views.
My experience with Rav Amital began 10 years ago when I spent a year at his yeshiva. His personality drew me to him: he carried himself as a humble, simple Jew. And though he was serious about Torah, he did not take himself too seriously. Once, I had learned that a Jewish legal technicality had invalidated a ritual that I enjoyed performing. Rav Amital explained to me that what I had been taught was incorrect and continued, “You don’t have to search for problems. You don’t have to search for stringency. Take it easy! That’s what’s written in the Torah! Take it easy!”
“Take it easy†troubled me for years. Where is “take it easy†written in the Torah? What does it mean? Surely Rav Amital wasn’t advocating lax observance of Jewish law. What bothered me most of all, though, was Rav Amital’s personal experience in light of that advice. Was he taking it easy when he was in a Nazi labor camp? When he was fighting in the War of Independence? When he was founding the Hesder movement or his yeshiva or Meimad?
I’m not sure how to answer those questions, but I think that the focus of Rav Amital’s life was not Rav Amital; he placed the people of Israel and the Torah before himself. Personal anxiety did not factor into his thinking. He wasn’t advocating laxity so much as the easing of stress and anxiety. What’s important is the big picture: the sincere attempt at living a Torah life, not the small personal successes and failures.
Because Rav Amital was so devoted to a cause greater than himself, he was able to put aside his pride and switch camps—from pro-settlement to pro-land swap—when the evidence called for it. That was an outgrowth of his passion, not an obstacle to it.
Regardless of his political accomplishments, at his core Rav Amital was a student and a teacher. A famous rabbinic aphorism states that Torah scholars increase peace in the world. Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, one of Rav Amital’s theological role models, explained that Torah scholars will analyze every side of a legal argument, thereby increasing mutual understanding–which brings peace. That’s how Rav Amital learned, taught and lived: take every side seriously but when it comes to yourself, take it easy.
