Over a half-century ago Rabbi Eugene Borowitz approached my father, telling him there was a remarkable novel that Behrman House had to pick up. A must.
And so, Behrman House became the publisher of As a Driven Leaf. Sixty years later, it has helped hundreds of thousands of readers explore their Judaism, struggle with issues of reason and revelation, and balance the forces of ethnicity and assimilation while living as Jews in a modern secular world.
Segue to today. Our tradition teaches us that we stand on the shoulders of the generations before us. The artistic world is filled with one generation repeating the behaviors of the previous. All too often, the repetition is of flaws, oddball distinctions, or dysfunctions. From the world of fiction there is The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. From the movies we have Sunshine with Ralph Fiennes (a too-obscure film you must see). But sometimes the present generation repeats the successes of its forebears as well. And so perhaps it is here:
Fifteen years ago, during a phone call about an unrelated history textbook, Dr. Jonathan Sarna said to me “You know, there’s another Steinberg novel.” No, I didn’t. But yes, I was very, very interested. How could such a work have been neglected for the half-century since Rabbi Steinberg’s untimely death at age 46? How could Behrman House give it the same life it gave to As a Driven Leaf?
Many unanswered questions.
This past weekend, from Rabbi Steinberg’s pulpit at the Park Avenue Synagogue in New York, we began to answer those questions as we introduced The Prophet's Wife to the public. But not quite all of it: Rabbi Steinberg wrote his last words on March 19, 1950, from under an oxygen tent in his hospital bed, after suffering his fourth heart attack. He died the next day. He was on page 440 of the typescript manuscript.
Yesterday, from the same bimah, Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, Rabbi Steinberg’s successor, convened a panel of notable Jewish thinkers to discuss Steinberg’s life and contribution to our community. Keynoted by Rabbi Harold Kushner and moderated by Gary Rosenblatt, Editor of The Jewish Week, the panel of Chancellor Arnold Eisen of Jewish Theological Seminary, Dr. Adrianne Leveen of Hebrew Union College, Rabbi Dr. J.J. Schachter of Yeshiva University, and Rabbi Dan Ehrenkrantz of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College discussed Steinberg’s theology, his fiction, and the contributions he might have made had he lived beyond such an untimely death.
Perhaps over time we will collectively answer another question: how would Rabbi Steinberg have finished his novel?
It is a wonderful thing to bring this novel to our community. And I’m so very pleased to be able to engage in my own sort of generational repetition—standing on the shoulders of Rabbi Borowitz and my father—to bring to life another work of such meaning. That Behrman House continues to play such a role, over the span of decades and even generations, is something I am and forever will be enormously proud of.
