Title: To Be Holy but Human: Reflections Upon My Rebbe, HaRav Yehuda Amital
By: Rabbi Moshe Taragin
Kodesh Press
Written by American theologian Jonathan Edwards in 1741, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” is a sermon that was the catalyst for the First Great Awakening. Like Edwards’s other works, it combines vivid imagery of the sinner’s everlasting torment in the burning fires of Hell. It was an extremely stern sermon that left listeners petrified and in tears.
If there was a person who was the antithesis of Edwards, it would be the late, great Rabbi Yehuda Amital. In To Be Holy but Human: Reflections Upon My Rebbe, HaRav Yehuda Amital (Kodesh Press), Rabbi Moshe Taragin, a devoted student of Rav Amital, has written an engaging and insightful work that shows the latter’s depth of thought and character.
R. Taragin writes not as a dissociated biographer but someone who worked with Rav Amital. R. Taragin arrived at Yeshivat Har Etzion in the early 1980s and started teaching there a decade later.
Rav Aharon Lichtenstein was co-rosh yeshiva with Rav Amital and appears in many stories. He grew up in the United States and is much more well-known among Anglos, given his fluency in English. Rav Amital did not speak English, visited the U.S. less often, and is not so well-known among Americans. Thus, R. Taragin gives the English-speaking world significant insights into the thoughts of this great man.
The book is divided into two sections: Stories and Teachings. The over 50 chapters combine a unique set of R. Taragin’s memories of his rebbe with stories exploring his worldview.
R. Taragin has called Rav Amital the Menachem Begin of rosh yeshivas. Begin took the political route, Rav Amital the theological one – but both were shaped by the drama of 20th-century Jewish history. Both lived through some of the most significant events in Jewish history: the Holocaust, the War of Independence, the Six-Day War, and the post-1967 era.
Born in Romania, Amital survived being in a Nazi labor camp and made it to Israel in 1944 at the age of 20. He fought in the War of Independence and afterward started teaching at Yeshivat HaDarom.
One of his many accomplishments was that he was instrumental in creating the Hesder yeshiva, a program combining Talmudic studies with military service in the Israel Defense Forces. Although it is now conventional, it was a revolutionary concept then.
After the Six-Day War, he founded and became the rosh yeshiva of Yeshivat Har Etzion, one of the premier Hesder yeshivas. He served and taught there until his retirement in 2008.
The phrase “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler” is attributed to, but was never, in fact, said by Albert Einstein. However, the phrase can apply to Rav Amital as it was his core religious approach. That simplicity does not contradict the complexity of Rav Amital’s thoughts.
That simplicity, which should not be confused with naivety, combined with his insistence on making one’s religious observance authentic, made him a rare leader.
Some yeshiva heads take an elitist approach. Their yeshiva may attract the best and the brightest, who look at their rosh yeshiva with admiration and wonder. That, in turn, can create a gap, make them inapproachable, and, at worst, create a personality cult.
Rav Amital abhorred such an approach. As R. Taragin makes eminently clear in the many insightful vignettes in this excellent book, Rav Amital saw himself as a man of the people. Even though he was a peer of many of the great yeshiva leaders of his time, he felt equally at home speaking with the non-scholarly lay people in his local synagogue.
Regarding the book’s title, being both holy and human seems to be an intractable issue. To be holy means to be removed from the world and metaphorically converse with angels. To be human means to be involved with the mundane and interact with the commoner. The two have inherent tension; navigating these often contradictory worlds can be a struggle.
Not only did Rav Amital effectively navigate this balance, but he also taught generations how to do it, which is an incredible legacy. The challenge between being holy and human is nuanced, and nuance is a trait some religious leaders lack.
Rav Amital’s ability to grow stemmed from two core traits. First, he was deeply attentive to reality. Ideologues often fall into the trap of molding the world to fit their ideas rather than reshaping them to align with the world’s evolving landscape.
That can be seen within some in the charedi world, where they categorize the Israeli government’s attempt to draft some yeshiva students as a decree to shut all of the yeshivas. It’s an erroneous idea that is not based on the reality Rav Amital strove to stay in.
Another core trait of his was his ability to change his opinion, which was grounded in his inner strength and confidence. When people have a strong sense of self – ideally rooted in a deep relationship with G-d – and a secure inner identity, they are not defined by their opinions or positions. Their identity is stable enough to allow their views to evolve without fear of losing themselves.
Conversely, those who derive their sense of self from rigidly held opinions often find change unbearable, as it threatens the core of their perceived identity. Rav Amital taught his students that true strength lies not in unyielding rigidity but in the courage to adapt while remaining deeply anchored in one’s essence.
The term religious Zionism does not reflect how broad a spectrum it encompasses. While Rav Amital was certainly a religious Zionist, he did not share the messianic fervor that many in the camp of Rav Abraham Isaac Kook do.
Through numerous stories in the book, R. Taragin shows how he took a much more conservative approach to viewing events from a cataclysmic messianic viewpoint.
Much of what Rav Kook wrote about a world full of harmony took place before the Holocaust. R. Taragin also explains that since Rav Kook didn’t live through the Holocaust, his visions would likely have been tempered post-Holocaust, which is the approach Rav Amital took.
The Hebrew phrase echad b’doro can loosely be translated as “one of a kind.” Rav Amital was that unique and unparalleled leader who lived at a time when he was needed most.
