The Rabbi With a Reputation : Judaism: Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz has been called a heretic and a brilliant scholar for his translation of the Talmud. He says he’s trying to restore part of the Jewish soul.

In the beginning, the rabbi in the rumpled suit could not compete with Ted Koppel.

In fact, it appeared to be a collision of opposites--the rabbi, known as a grand master of digressions, a storyteller who tells stories within stories, versus the anchorman, known for his slam-dunk questions.

But then, about halfway into “An Evening Dialogue Between Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz and Ted Koppel,” 455 American Jews in the audience seemed to stop breathing after Koppel asked a question about the rabbi’s lifework: “What good is it going to do, sir?”

Adin Steinsaltz--condemned by some as a “heretic,” gushed over by others as a “once-in-a-millenium-scholar”--was ready.

“I’m saying, the Jewish people, in general, are in the strange situation of a person who somehow lost a part of his soul. For many of them it’s like some hereditary malady.

“It’s something like a machine with some of the parts out,” he continued. “For our people, what I’m trying to do is replace some of the parts.”

By translating a book. But not just any book. The Talmud.

And Steinsaltz, 53, of Jerusalem, has found a way to make this complicated work accessible enough so it has made its way into chain bookstores and on to night stands and coffee tables across America.

The Talmud is a centuries-old compilation of the combined wisdom of thousands of debates and discussions among rabbis about Jewish law and life--what is acceptable and what is not. It is an in-your-face, prove-it-to-me discussion that Jews have used for generations as a portable reference to their history, identity and culture. But for scholars who study it in the now-dead Aramaic language and in an exceptionally arcane form of Hebrew, the 2.5 million words often obscure as much as they reveal. And many American Jews don’t even know what the Talmud is.

The rabbi decided they should learn.

For the past 20 years Steinsaltz has been consumed by translating this compendium of Jewish learning into modern Hebrew. He has labored page by page, volume by volume. In keeping with ancient readers’ traditions, he has added his own commentary. He has subsumed others’ into his translation under a rubric he calls “Notes.” His has completed 22 volumes and hopes to finish No. 40 by the year 2000.

Big deal, you say?

It is, in fact, a very big deal.

Almost 1 million copies of the various volumes have been sold in Israel, and young scholars have been known to study the traditional edition in school and keep their Steinsaltz edition at home, under the bed for emergencies.

But the rabbi didn’t stop with the translation into modern Hebrew. Once Steinsaltz began helping would-be scholars unscramble the Talmudic codes in Hebrew he decided to try it in English. And last year, Random House published his inaugural volume in English and a reference guide.

Remarkably, the Talmud sold. At $40 a clip.

Almost 60,000 copies are out there, and in the notoriously unsentimental business of publishing, there is no better evidence of success than what is happening this week: Volumes 2 and 3 of “The Talmud: The Steinsaltz Edition” are on their way to Los Angeles bookstores. Volumes 4 and 5 are expected to be off the presses next fall.

“The extraordinary thing about the project is that it truly works,” says Random House’s Peter Osnos. “We’re talking about the Talmud! We’re talking about something that is one of the great sacred works of Jewish history. There is this whole new audience for it.”

There is much arguing in the Talmud. There is occasional bitterness and one-upmanship. But mostly it is a passionate debate over interpretation of Jewish law, about assumptions and viewpoints.

And as valuable as the text is considered, the Talmud is venerated as a demonstration of a method of learning that has made Jews a skeptical, questioning, learning people.

The rabbi wants to bring all of that and more to his people.

For some, therein begins The Problem.

Since his English edition was issued, the rabbi has been lauded like nobody’s hero. He’s gotten The Treatment: big, splashy newspaper profiles, morning television show appearances, invitations to lecture at prestigious universities, and, of course, the moving testimonies.

They have cascaded upon the rabbi like a thick snow, smoothering him, yet urging him to go further.

The rabbi’s critics, mostly Talmudic scholars, have been less restrained.

They are disdainful that he has done “Good Morning America,” that he talks to People magazine and has these intimate chats with the likes of Koppel, an event sponsored by the Washington, D.C., Jewish Community Center.

It is, they say, as if he is selling the Talmud.

Which he is.

Steinsaltz’s critics call him a “popularizer,” in the worse sense of the word and a “vulgarizer,” in the best sense. They say that while he has added his commentary to his Talmudic translation--something that has not been done for the complete Talmud in 1,000 years--it is not a particularly original addition.

But most of all, they dislike what the rabbi omitted. While a traditional Talmud includes almost a dozen commentators, Steinsaltz dispenses with all but one. Rashi, an 11th-Century French scholar who was the last to comment on the entire Talmud, survived in Steinsaltz’s English edition--in idiosyncratic Hebrew script.

It is this sort of condensation, pre-digestion and fiddling that troubles Steinsaltz’s critics, mostly Talmudic experts. They fervently hold to the ancient Judaic notion that “You should learn from teachers and not from books.”

Arthur Samuelson, a book editor who critiqued Steinsaltz’s English edition for The Nation magazine wrote: “In making the Talmud overly accommodating to strangers, the translators have betrayed its essence. Reading the Steinsaltz Talmud in English is like trying to understand what a crossword puzzle is when the words have been filled in. You get the idea but you miss the point: Process is everything.”

In a long, detailed review in the New York Times Book Review that itself had the cadence of a Talmudic discussion, Leon Wieseltier, the New Republic’s literary editor, expressed concern about what the student loses by this translation: “The duty of the translator, of course, is to provide Talmud, not Talmudism. As a translator, and as an amplifier of his translation, Rabbi Steinsaltz succeeds nicely. But this is not only a translation of the Talmud. It is also a mimicry of the Talmud. It leaves the student on the surface, but it dupes him into feeling that he has dived below.

“For this reason,” he warned, “it should be issued with a little care. . . . The Steinsaltz Talmud is light only at the beginning of the tunnel, and the road is long.”

It certainly comes as no surprise that this version of the Talmud has created a storm of criticism. Osnos said he was not surprised: “If there weren’t critics, it wouldn’t be the Talmud.”

Yet the rabbi has accumulated scores of defenders--and in some of the oddest places. There are the synagogue sisterhoods and brotherhoods who flock to his lectures across the country; the writers and opinion makers he periodically leads in Talmud classes in Manhattan; and people like the president of Italy and Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.), who are listed as advisers of the Aleph Society, an organization of admirers dedicated to supporting the works of one Adin Steinsaltz.

Although feminist author Letty Cottin Pogrebin finds the rabbi “very problematic on the women’s issue” she ardently praises what his new English text has done for “the people.”

“It’s such nonsense what these arrogant purists and elitists say,” she said. “These are really people who don’t want the masses to know unless they do it step by baby step which simply isn’t the way modern life works in the Jewish community.

The rabbi himself seems the least concerned with the blistering he has taken from his Talmudic contemporaries.

“I’m trying to say, nobody reads the all the commentaries,” he said. “That’s one thing. Nobody reads them.

“You see what I am doing in my work on the Talmud is a very simple thing, which is done and has been done for the last few thousand years, just in a slightly different form. You see, I am not writing a new book. I am just sitting there and teaching a class. It’s like having a portable teacher. . . . Obviously, you never expect, if you are not a complete fool, to get everything that has to be known from that class.”

Steinsaltz is not such an easy man to know.

Ask him a direct question about himself and you get an answer that goes off in many directions; he dawdles, intellectually, at each and every aside; he derails his own train of thought.

In other words, he speaks like a Talmudic scholar.

So here’s a question:

Rabbi, what was going on in your life at age 27, when, of all things, you decided to begin to translate and create a modern Talmud?

First, always, he smiles and squirms his narrow shoulders and bounces a little in his seat. The eyes are so lively that even behind the thick square glasses they radiate a little message--a combination of brilliant scholar and Peck’s bad boy.

“What was in my mind?” he says, finally hunkering down the shoulders. “Well. It is a good question.

“First of all, it is a book that I love. You see, I got entangled with it. I did not intend earlier to do anything like this. It was not that a person plans his life to do one specific thing. It was my hobby, a very big hobby. So I got entangled with a hobby.”

And he goes on for a while about hobbies, until after three detours, several references to the Torah, “Alice in Wonderland,” and, of course, his own writings, he gets back to himself and the “hubris”--his word--that drove him to such an undertaking.

“I have done since many other outrageous things,” he continues. “But in one way, see, there was a feeling that there is something that has to be done. . . . It is like I am walking a long a way and find somebody wounded and I’m the only person that can do something about it. Now I know that I am not qualified, I am not the best person to do it, I am not the right person to do it, but I’m here. So in a way it is not hubris.”

Adin Steinsaltz came to religious life and scholarship the way many a have found a cause--through rebellion.

Born in Israel to a typically secular family of socialists, Steinsaltz read men like Marx and Lenin before he got to Maimonides. It wasn’t until his mid-teens that he discovered the sages of the Talmud. He was introduced to Jewish studies by a private tutor whom his parents hoped would give him not only the knowledge of what he was rejecting but also the skills to refute it.

His father Avraham, an early Zionist, was said to have told him, “I don’t care if you are a heretic, I don’t want you to be an ignoramus.”

But something happened.

The slight boy with the blondish red curls became impassioned by spiritual debate.

At 15, he took a year off from a secular school to attend a Yeshiva. Although he was to complete a university degree in physics and mathematics, he was more engrossed in Jewish studies. As he once explained, “I came to the point that this world was not enough.”

Now a father of three and husband to an Israeli psychologist, Steinsaltz has--in between his work on new versions of the Talmud--written numerous other books including a detective novel and relatively well-known work on Jewish mysticism called “The Thirteen Petalled Rose.” When he is in Israel, he said, he works like a mad man at his computer--10, 12, 15 hours without stop. With success and support from wealthy contributors, he has become a mini-industry. He has about a dozen translators working for him on his various projects, including his newest adventure in the vernacular, translating the Talmud into Russian.

Yet this frail man with a searing wit is also a man for all seasons.

He is as well versed in fundamental Jewish texts as he is in modern literature and scientific studies.

He talks about the “Wind in the Willows” as easily he does Dickens; he knows as much as about zoos across America (he visits them when he is lecturing) as he does biblical landmarks in his homeland. And he’s no stranger to rich and the famous--not that he thinks much of them. But in his own self-effacing way he’s a natural politician and a pretty good schmoozer.

In the course of his Koppel side-by-side he managed to both flatter him for his work on “Nightline” and point out that in his work of informing the people he, as the son of German Jews, was also fulfilling his role as one of the chosen people.

“Our people,” said the rabbi, “for whatever they are, always get involved in somebody else’s business.”

So when Ted Koppel concluded their evening precisely on time at 9:30 p.m. so he could get back to the studio in time for his 11:30 show, the rabbi insisted on having the last word.

After Koppel said he “enjoyed it and I rather suspect everyone else here did too,” the rabbi waited for the applause to die down and tacked on a little thought.

“You see Ted, you asked me to call you Ted so I do it,” Steinsaltz began with an impish grin, “When you said you enjoyed it I was slightly offended because if you said it was an hour or an hour and a half that was most uncomfortable, then when you go to work maybe something I said would stick with you and possibly make somebody else think, then I would really be proud. But that you enjoyed it, no, now I am afraid that I wasted my time.”