Talmud Scholar Speaks Plainly on Everyday Life

Adin Steinsaltz may be the single most influential and revered rabbinical scholar in the world today. He is best known for his commentaries on and translations of the Talmud, the font of Jewish law and ethics, and the so-called Steinsaltz edition of the Talmud is an undertaking of vast scale and enduring importance.

Yet the Talmud is largely absent from the pages of “Simple Words,” a series of musings by Rabbi Steinsaltz on the exalted meanings that can be extracted from ordinary words--”faith,” “friends,” “family,” “love,” “God” and so on. Steinsaltz cites a rich array of sources--Rousseau, Kant, Talleyrand, Mark Twain, George Orwell and the Greek tragedies, among many others--but references to the Talmud are mostly confined to a few pages of footnotes at the back of the book.

“Simple Words” consists of material culled from talks that Steinsaltz delivered in venues around the world over the last two decades and then “transformed,” as he puts it, into a series of short chapters by Elana Schacter and Ditsa Shabtai. Clearly, the author and his editors are hoping to reach beyond the small circle of observant Jews for whom the Talmud is still a subject of daily study and to come in contact with a readership, Jews and non-Jews alike, who might never open a book about God, religion or morality.

“This is not a preaching book,” insists Steinsaltz, but the fact is that “Simple Words” can be best described as a collection of sermons, each one sparkling with the author’s impressive scholarship, deep thinking and good intentions, and each one exhorting us to find a way to be better than we are now.

“The search for a moral system should extend in three directions: It should be wide enough to encompass the vast range of human behavior; long enough to include past, present and future; and high enough to be a bridge to heaven,” he writes. “Is such a multidimensional good easy to achieve? Perhaps it is not; but the search for it may create better people.”

To his credit, Steinsaltz does not content himself with easy answers or simple credos, and he concedes that the search for spiritual truth can be a harrowing experience: “We do not always think about meaning and purpose, but when this question does come to awareness, it becomes a haunting, gnawing pain.” Nor does he focus on the specific beliefs or practices of Judaism or any other organized religion, although he suggests that right living inevitably brings us closer to God. “The atheist who is living a dignified, ethical and spiritual life is an unconscious believer,” he writes. “A rose, by any name, is still a rose; likewise God, by any name, is still God.”

Now and then, Steinsaltz offers a chapter that may cause even the thoroughly secular reader to pay closer attention--”Sex,” for example, or “Hollywood.” Indeed, the rabbi’s take on Hollywood is an especially provocative moment: He argues that the entertainment industry is “a great and very successful religion,” one that “mixes pagan, Christian, and uniquely Hollywood elements.” He compares its obsession with sex and violence to the rituals of ancient pagan cults, but he insists that its core value is something bland and boring.

“The Hollywood dream is to be a successful mediocre person,” he concludes. “The Hollywood message, then, is to create for people a well-planned, technically superb daydream, which says softly, ‘I am all right, you are all right. . . . Everything will be all right.’ ”

Above all, like spiritual teachers in all faiths and traditions, Steinsaltz encourages us to quiet our minds, focus our attention and reflect on the ultimate meaning of language and life. “We are living in a very noisy culture that bombards us with books, magazines, newspapers, radio, television, movies and video games--a multitude of voices trying to guide, advise, influence or convince us,” he writes. “In the search for good, the first step is to throw away the trash--the cultural noise, the ephemeral points of view.”

Steinsaltz is gifted with the ability to stand at the ground zero of traditional Judaism and still make himself heard in places where some rabbis fear to tread. Significantly, most of the talks on which “Simple Words” are based were delivered as teleconferences that originated in Jerusalem and reached audiences around the world--clearly, he is a man who is able to communicate ideas of the greatest antiquity through cutting-edge technology. Still, something is lost when a tradition of surpassing intellectual complexity and moral grandeur is stripped down for export, and that is why “Simple Words” may strike some readers as a bit too simple.

Jonathan Kirsch is a contributing writer to the Los Angeles Times Book Review and is the author of, most recently, “Moses: A Life.”