Avi Schwartz
A few weeks ago, my rebbe, Rabbi Dr. Neil Danzig, professor emeritus of Talmud and Rabbinics at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, left this earthly existence for the supernal Yeshiva. His last years were difficult: a stroke had left him without the ability to move, speak, or even focus his eyesight. His health, for as long as I knew him, had always been poor, but he persevered through decades of yissurim shel ahavah, enduring the “suffering of love” for the sake of his beloved children and grandchildren.
Rabbi Danzig once shared with me what great figure of the past he hoped to seek out on his arrival in Gan Eden: Rav Saadia Gaon, an Egyptian man who rose to become the head of one of the famously oligarchical and nepotistic Babylonian Yeshivot, and one of the outstanding Jewish personalities of his time. This grammarian, author, translator, thinker, poet, scholar, teacher, and halakhic authority truly embodied the title of ge’on yaakov, pride of Jacob. I imagine Rabbi Danzig fulfilling his hope as I write these words of appreciation and mourning for the ga’on at whose feet I had the privilege of studying for three years.
My time with Rabbi Danzig began as an accident. After 13 years of day school, I entered college determined to become, of all things, a chemical engineer. I soon discovered that, contrary to my expectations, I was not done with the dual curriculum, and quickly transferred from the polytechnic institute at which I had matriculated to the joint program at JTS and Columbia University, following my closest high school friend. Still thinking that I would study chemistry (if not engineering), I enrolled in Organic Chemistry. This class conflicted with the first course in JTS’s Jewish Thought series, so I registered instead for Advanced Introduction to Rabbinic Literature with Rabbi Danzig. It is no exaggeration to say that the very first class meeting largely set the trajectory of my life.
Rabbi Danzig had his own unique path to that classroom. This yeshiva bochur from Brooklyn once merited a yechidus with the Lubavitcher Rebbe zt”l due to his already obvious genius. After learning in Israel, he went to Yeshiva University, where he would study for many years. Rabbi Danzig claimed to have sat behind a pillar to avoid being called on in Rav Soloveitchik zt”l’s shiur.
It was at YU that he discovered a new derekh ha-limmud: that of the academy, studying with Professors Meir Feldblum z”l and Elazar Hurvitz n”y. The latter would eventually direct his dissertation. His doctoral studies led to his dismissal from one Rosh Yeshiva’s kollel. But the real change came with the arrival of Shraga Abramson for a visiting professorship in 1975–1976. Up to that point, Rabbi Danzig’s research had been focused on Talmud proper, writing on the style of the post-Amoraic Savoraim with attention to the technical term hassurei mehasra (“the text is deficient,” Sinai journal vol. 80, 245–252) different traditions of the number of Mitzvot (Sinai 83, 153–158) and the development of the term Baraita (tannaitic tradition outside of the Mishnah) later in the Amoraic period than previously thought. The latter was actually published twice by the same journal (Sinai 85, 217–224; Sinai 89, 240–247). Disappointed at the lack of a response, Rabbi Danzig had simply resubmitted his work, and the editors, while discerning readers, apparently suffered from short memories.
Professor Abramson’s arrival was epoch-making for Rabbi Danzig. This expert in geonica opened a new world for him. “It was like sod,” he later remarked to me. When learners encounter the geonim, it is usually in citations by the Rishonim. Tosafot are wont to rely on the Halakhot Gedolot and the She’iltot, two codes that emerged from the Babylonian Yeshivot. The Netziv, longtime rosh yeshiva of Volozhin, made his name as a lamdan with his extensive commentary on the latter, Ha’amek She’elah. It must be remembered, though, that prior to the twentieth century, there was a lot less geonic literature. The discovery and publicizing of the Cairo Geniza late in the nineteenth century changed all this. It was, in a very literal sense, like sod—hidden away for centuries in the attic of a synagogue. The Geniza made figures like Rav Saadia Gaon, Rav Shmuel bar Hofni, Rav Sherira, and Rav Hai come alive in ways that were unimaginable just a few years before. It was this world, which linked the Talmud to the Rishonim and laid the first pathways of psak halakhah, especially for Jews in the Islamic world, that Rabbi Danzig found so mysterious as a young graduate student. His own scholarship would again widen our window onto this period and its literature. After years of intensive research, especially into the Geniza, Rabbi Danzig produced a work whose published version is modestly titled Introduction to the Book “Halakhot Pesukot,” the earliest of the geonic codes attributed to Rav Yehudai Gaon of the eighth century. At over 500 pages, to call it comprehensive or even exhaustive would be an understatement. The published version is densely printed, with hundreds of pages and thousands of footnotes, many of which are miniature articles in their own right, as well as a supplement of dozens of new pages of manuscripts from the Geniza, extensively annotated (JTS Press, 1993 [2nd corrected edition, 1999]). This work became, like Simha Assaf’s and Abramson’s decades earlier, a standard point of reference for research on geonica. In addition, Rabbi Danzig later inspired the philanthropist and scholar Dov Friedberg to found the “Geniza Project,” which has since photographed, digitized, and transcribed much (if not all) of the Geniza materials at libraries all across the globe.
There were years mixed with joy, success, struggle, and loss. Rabbi Danzig met and married the love of his life, Rivka Ausubel, who earned a doctorate in social work at YU in 1981. She later taught both at Penn and at YU, her research focusing on ba’alei teshuva and Orthodox Jews more broadly. Rabbi Danzig once shared the story of their engagement: while on a walk one evening, Rivka asked him what they were going to do. “I don’t know, maybe get something to eat?” he responded. “No,” she said, “are we getting married?” “Oh. Yes, if you want to,” he said. And that was that. They would go on to have three children together: Hayyim, David, and Sarah. Sarah, who followed her mother’s path into social work, survived cancer as a child, an unimaginable struggle for her and her parents.
Rivka was a truly remarkable woman with a spine of tempered steel: on her first day of work at a clinic in Brooklyn, she talked down an armed man, who had shot her colleague in the head at point-blank range, before the police arrived. While still working on his doctorate, Rabbi Danzig took up teaching at a yeshiva high school on Long Island to help support the family, but lost his position soon after a merger between his and another school. Returning home despondent and ashamed, he shared the news with his wife. Rivka shrewdly asked him whether he had gotten the necessary paperwork to apply for unemployment. When he admitted he had not, Rivka marched him back out the door to swallow his pride and get them. He was able, with that money, to rent a small office and complete his dissertation. Rivka herself would tragically be diagnosed years later with multiple sclerosis, and died in 2006. I do not believe Rabbi Danzig ever recovered from this great loss.
By that point in his career, Rabbi Danzig was firmly ensconced at the seminary, where, in addition to teaching and research, he also supervised three dissertations. He had begun at Dropsie College in Philadelphia, which was later absorbed into the University of Pennsylvania as the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. Decades later, he still felt the loss of this unique institution exclusively dedicated to research and graduate training in Jewish studies, open to anyone regardless of religion, race, or sex. From there, he moved to the nearby Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and finally on to JTS. For much of his career, Rabbi Danzig was the leading expert on the rabbinic material in the Geniza, able to recall even individual manuscript fragments. . As others have written and as his scholarship shows, he was virtually unrivaled in his command of the sources and of nearly two centuries of scholarship.
I met him in 2010. Already at that point he was not well. That semester, he missed so many classes that the provost’s office began monitoring him more closely. But my experience was life-changing, calling to mind Rabbi Danzig’s experience with Abramson. The questions he asked similarly opened up a new world for me—it was like sod. I can still remember some of the questions he started off with. Why does the Mishnah look the way it does? Why does it have this particular form? Why does it include so much material about the Beit Ha-mikdash despite being produced a century and a half after its destruction? And what is its relationship to the Tosefta, which contains many times the volume of similar material? I knew the basic day-school answers: Rabbi Yehudah Hanassi wrote it because imperial oppression made continued oral transmission of Torah She-be’al Peh impossible, problematically fixing the form and content of Oral Torah; the Tosefta contains material that simply didn’t make it into the Mishnah. I learned very quickly that things were far more complex.
Those questions, and others he raised over the next few years, set my “research agenda,” such as it was. He further introduced me to the issues of orality in the transmission of rabbinic literature. Indeed, one of his other major scholarly contributions was a lengthy article demonstrating that the Talmud itself was studied and transmitted orally for centuries in the Babylonian Yeshivot (Bar-Ilan Annual 30–31, 49-112). Under his direction, I studied the question of the relationship between Mishnah and Tosefta in depth, eventually writing my undergraduate thesis on that issue with regard to Mishnah Ta’anit 2:1-5. In his class on rabbinic theology, he showed me the variety of approaches to tradition, novelty, midrash, and authority in the rabbinic canon. (I also took his seminar on Geonim, but it did not pique my interest in quite the same way.) My doctoral dissertation, which I did with Prof. Elizabeth Shanks Alexander at UVA and defended this spring, continues my research on these issues. I worked on characterizing the differences between tannaitic legal writing and its predecessors, and the impact of one such difference, using massekhet Halla as a case study. I grew in new and unexpected ways studying with Prof. Alexander—I have gone so far as to say that she taught me how to read and write anew, and I owe her a great deal. But as a learner I still consider Rabbi Danzig my rebbe muvhak, from whom I gained rov hokhmati, the majority of my knowledge and understanding. It pains me now as then that I was not able to have him as my doktorvater. He expressed—not intending, I think, for me to hear it—that he felt much the same way. By the time I was ready to begin the PhD after four years at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah—one of which I spent at Yeshivat Ha-hesder Yerucham, one of the dati le’umi world’s more venerable yeshivot—he had been transitioned into retirement. His poor health had made it impossible to fulfill his duties as a faculty member.
In addition to this approach, these questions, this content, I imbibed from him the importance of taking earlier scholarship seriously. With Rabbi Danzig, bibliography rose from being scholarship’s handmaiden, becoming queen in her own right. Years later, I made a point of studying Zecharia Fränkel’s Darkhei Ha-mishnah and Nachman Krochmal’s Moreh Nevukhei Ha-zman, on the literary formulation of rabbinic halakhah, and including them in my work. As my other rebbe, Rabbi Dov Linzer shlit”a commented, I had developed a geshmak, a particular pleasure, for academic scholarship. I remain astonished by the breadth and depth of knowledge that Rabbi Danzig still commanded even as his condition worsened. He was, as Prof. Rami Reiner of Ben Gurion University put it after hearing of his passing, anak shebe’anakim, a giant among giants. I do not believe it is possible, jump and stretch as I might, for me to reach above his ankle in terms of sheer information.
In my final semester of college, Rabbi Danzig was not teaching any class I could take, so he set aside time to learn with me in chavruta, studying Lulav Hagazul, the third chapter of masekhet Sukkah. I have two key memories from that time: his carefully correcting my pronunciation of the text, and his declaration that so long as a sefer was open in front of us, we were still learning even while shmoozing. The latter, I can only assume, was offered at least partly in jest.
Rabbi Danzig believed that my further studies at YCT were initiated at his suggestion. While I am certain that he was confusing me with a colleague, I never corrected him, and will continue to let him have this one, as it is, in a sense, true. On the day I met him, he planted a seed of love and desire for Torah learning that continues to grow. It led to years of study with him and over a decade of postgraduate study. My research is driven by the issues he raised beginning that very day. And even as I don’t intend to pursue academia, I am heartened by the fact that he also had gone into hinnukh decades earlier.
It is true that by my time, Rabbi Danzig operated more in the behina of megaleh tefah u-mekhaseh tehafayyim—more remained hidden than he revealed. Only years later, long after graduation, did he share many of the stories I’ve included here. To this day, I know almost nothing of his spiritual life. I never spent Shabbat with him; I am not even sure I ever prayed Shacharit with him. He remarked once on the astonishment he felt at encountering Mordechai Breuer’s groundbreaking Pirkei Mo’adot, breathing, like Keats, the pure serene of his clear and bold approach, but I didn’t probe further. On a personal level, he never met my wife or my three-year-old son. He had a deep love of classical music—a baby grand piano anchored his small apartment—but I know little more about this aspect of life that was obviously dear to him. When he was unable to make it to my wedding after a fall, I dragged my groomsmen to Teaneck to see him that morning anyway. Not necessarily for a bracha, though I did receive one by text message that evening, but just to be able to see my rebbe at an important moment in my life.
Whenever I would tell him about my dissertation, he would always note that in Bavel, they continued the practice of separating halla as rabbinic halakhah kedei shelo tishtakah torat halla me-yisrael, in order that the Torah of halla not be forgotten in Israel (that formulation is from Rambam, Hilkhot Bikkurim 5:7, based on Bekhorot 27a). To be honest, I am not sure that he appreciated the goal of the dissertation. He was not one for the contemporary trends in rabbinics scholarship from which I productively drew. Try as I might, I could not find any place to include his note in the final draft, as my readers frowned upon anything not in service of my thesis. I can cite it here to different ends. Following God’s example, we often remark on the passing of a great scholar haval al de’avdin velo mishtakehin, woe for those who are lost and whose like cannot be found (Sanhedrin 111a). I don’t hope to find another ga’on like him or encounter another source of mystery and wonder like the one he introduced me to, another palace whose center remains enticingly out of reach. But I am certain that he and his Torah will not be forgotten.
May his memory be a blessing.
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