“Where the Tree Falls”
For the Shloshim of R’ Walter Wurzburger

by Rabbi Shalom Carmy

 Six years ago, R’ Wurzburger suffered a massive heart attack. By then, he had served in the Rabbinate for half a century, had taught at Yeshiva University for almost thirty years, and had presided over Tradition for over two decades. He had published his Ethics of Responsibility and dozens of articles. Yet until he was hospitalized last March, he maintained a substantial teaching and speaking schedule. He produced another book, God is Proof Enough. Hundreds of students got to know him; the rest of us continued to learn from him. He did not do this alone. He needed the support of his family, and particularly his wife, who in the last year brought him to the steps of Furst Hall when it was too much of an effort for him to walk from the parking lot. For the gift of these six years, we are all in Mrs. Wurzburger’s debt.  R’ Wurzburger was one of R’ Soloveitchik’s most faithful and most authentic students. He was a halakhic man.

 By this I do not mean that he was preoccupied with the metaphysical categories and the epistemology of Torah study that the Rav wrote about. Rather, he was a Jew whose most important experiences occurred in the context of kiyyum ha-mitzvos. Joy was for him the recitation of hallel. Spiritual seriousness was the privilege of observing Yom Kippur. He failed to understand how any Jew could fritter away even a moment of Yom Kippur in idle conversation.

One of the students dug up a published sermon that R’ Wurzburger delivered to his first congregation in 1942. It is a remarkable performance, if only for the command of English displayed by a 22-year old rabbi with only three years of English. The themes he was to repeat for the next sixty years are already well formed and confirm the extraordinary maturity imputed to him by his classmates. What stands out more than anything is the utter avoidance of personal display. Outside, a war was raging. Here was a man who had walked the streets of Berlin the morning after Kristallnacht, whose family had received visits from the Gestapo. How easy it would have been for a young rabbi to hold his flock spellbound with tales of his experience. This was not, for R’ Wurzburger, the theme of Yom Kippur, nor was it the purpose of the Rabbinate. And so he spoke of contrition and sin and wasted opportunity and ethical challenge and the promise and glory of repentance. As far as I know, he never lectured on his personal experiences in Nazi Germany and rarely reminisced about the past in private.

Halacha, for R’ Wurzburger, meant ethics. The family can tell you how fastidiously he shunned the pecuniary “extras” often regarded as natural by-products of a Rabbinical position. He spoke about ethics from the pulpit, at the risk of causing displeasure to some of the individuals who paid his salary. About twenty years ago, he lamented how times had changed: When he served as a R’ in Toronto, his testimony that a member of his congregation was an observant Jew created an automatic presumption that this person’s behavior was above suspicion; now, he told me with enormous pain, this was no longer the case.

Ethical standards, for R’ Wurzburger, were intimately connected to his image of the Torah personality. Halacha, in the narrow sense of the term, he often quoted the Rav, provides a ground floor for ethical growth, not a ceiling. The aspiration for a holy and wholesome life entails going beyond legalism, and that requires the student to be attached to those who have internalized Torah and to emulate them. He rejected the notion that rabbis are primarily technicians of p’sak. This is not the place to survey R’ Wurzburger’s contribution as a philosopher; that is for another time. But it is telling that his most seminal contribution to Jewish thought is probably the idea of “covenantal imperative,” at the core of which is the conviction that religious ethics are learned through contact with authentic teachers of Torah. This is why he learned so much from the Rav, and learned it so faithfully.

R’ Wurzburger was criticized, and sometimes vilified, for being too “tolerant,” that is, for speaking to certain groups. He often represented Orthodoxy in meetings with Christian groups. He addressed gatherings of nominally Orthodox Jews whose outlook he rejected. On occasion he spoke to Conservative and Reform conclaves. His job, as he saw it, was to speak for Torah, wherever this took him. His presentations, often prepared in consultation with the Rav, are models of concise, civilized and uncompromising communication of the word of God to differing audiences. R’ Wurzburger refused to be drawn into public argument about these activities. This was not his teacher’s way and it wasn’t his. More fundamentally, R’ Wurzburger did not believe that public argument settled anything.

In explaining R’ Wurzburger’s approach, I do not mean to imply that no other policy is legitimate.  At times it is necessary to excoriate evil publicly and to expose hypocrisy and error. But this was not R’ Wurzburger’s mode of avodas Hashem. In this area, he conducted himself with special stringency, middas chassidus. To understand R’ Wurzburger, it is necessary to understand this element in his character.  This tendency should not be confused with intellectual cowardice.  Let me suggest two criteria to differentiate between R’ Wurzburger’s model and a tolerance that is indifferent to the truth or value of Torah. The first, to which I have already alluded, is how one reacts to criticism. I suspect that R’ Wurzburger could have drawn the sting from some of his critics had he returned from these encounters with a robust supply of derisive anecdotes about his audience, for the edification of his critics. The same civility that made him an ideal participant in such meetings prevented him from capitalizing on these opportunities. Those who disapproved of his willingness to engage the world outside of Orthodoxy did not need to have their disdain confirmed. He preached what his audience needed to know, not what would entertain them or enhance their feelings about him.

When he saw no alternative, R’ Wurzburger could remonstrate vigorously with individuals whose conduct he found intolerable. There are people whose beliefs are at variance with Orthodoxy, who insist, for social and psychological reasons, on identifying with the “movement.” One can imagine how repulsive this was to a God-fearing man like R’ Wurzburger, for whom honesty was a paramount value. From such a figure he could demand, until his body literally shook with anger, the minimal decency to resign from the Rabbinical Council of America. But when his pleas fell on predictably deaf ears, he did not disparage these people in public for the approval of those who would applaud his rage.

Another criterion: There are rabbis who are quite forbearing when it comes to kevod Shamayim but are jealous for their own personal honor During shiva, we vainly tried to think of occasions when R’ Wurzburger insisted on being treated with the respect due him as a rabbi, let alone as a prominent one. We had no difficulty recalling examples of the opposite. A congregant, not particularly wealthy or pugnacious, once became so upset with R’ Wurzburger’s sermon that he stormed the pulpit. The Rabbi’s reaction was not to demand an abject apology, to be followed by a suitable penalty, as was his right (and some would say, his duty). Instead he invited the man to explain his objections at seudah shlishis.

A less dramatic anecdote may communicate R’ Wurzburger’s instinctive sense of the Rabbinate. When he first came to Far Rockaway, a large percentage of the congregation was lax in religious observance. In that period, he battled to stop social dancing and to otherwise raise halachic standards. After several years’ absence, I visited the congregation and observed that the people in attendance on a Shabbos morning seemed to be the kind of people who would pray on a weekday too. He responded immediately and memorably: “If the old non-observant people were now Orthodox, that would be cause for congratulation. If they were going to some other shul, even if they had moved to a Conservative congregation that suited their beliefs better, one might be relieved to see them go. But you know that they, or rather their children, have, for the most part, dropped out completely. Why should that be considered progress?” Success is not to be measured by the comfort of the rabbi, but by the communication of Torah and mitzvos.

This was the spiritual and ethical discipline that marked R’ Wurzburger’s unflagging sixty years of leadership. It was a discipline lightly worn: had it been ostentatious, it would have defeated its purpose. Most of the time, it was manifested in his delightfully self-deprecating sense of humor. (Just think what he could have done had he employed his quick wit and ability to think on his feet to demolish others!) Because he had the right sense of priority, and took his message more seriously than himself, God gave him in return an incomparable ability to formulate the essence of any question regarding public policy or philosophy clearly, precisely and with integrity, never forgetting the most inevitable, equally incisive, qualifications by which he acknowledged the other sides of the issue. He had the gift of theological perfect pitch.

“If the tree falls in the south or in the north, where the tree falls,

there shall it be” (Koheles 11:4). One may read this verse fatalistically: once the tree has fallen, it cannot give fruit or shade

again. Rashi, however, notes that the root nafal (to fall) also means, “to spread out, to dwell.” Therefore he explains: “When a wise and righteous man dwells in a place, that is where his acts are recognized after his death: his wisdom and virtues and recompense for dwellers of that place where he had guided them in the right path The tree is the sage whose merit protects, like the tree that shades the earth.”

R’ Wurzburger had the right priorities about his vocation. He continued to work as long as he was physically able, and he was fortunate enough to be at his best until the very end. I look around this hall and see many students, some of whom had only a few weeks with R’ WurzburgeR’ From your faces, and from the conversations we have had since his final illness, I know that you appreciated what you had to learn from him. And because you know what you gained, you also know what we have lost. “How many Yom Kippurs are there in a human life?” R’ Wurzburger was in the habit of remarking, as he contemplated the distinctive privilege of the holy day. I can’t help asking the question that would never have occurred to him: How many teachers and rabbis like R’ Wurzburger are there in a human life? May his merit and memory abide with us.

 Note: Eulogy delivered 2 Sivan, 5762 (May 13, 2002) A slightly different version will appear in Jewish Action.