I.

He. He had many faces and they were all one face. Professor Isadore Twersky was the Nathan Littauer Professor of Hebrew Literature and Philosophy at Harvard University. Rabbi Yitzhak Twersky was a leading figure in the Jewish community of Brookline, Massachusetts. The Chassidic Talner Rebbe was the spiritual guide of a small but highly loyal and educated congregation, also in Brookline. The devotee and son-in-law of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, preeminent Talmudist, was one of the Talmudist’s literary representatives and dedicated caretakers at the end of his life, both trusted family heir and awed, humbled disciple. The author of Rabad of Posquierès: A Twelfth-Century Talmudist and Introduction to the Code of Maimonides was arguably the leading figure in academic Jewish studies in his generation. Of each of these persona individually and all of them in their unity, it may be said, as Rabbi Jechiel J. Perr said of the late Rabbi Yisroel Movshovitz, "What was the greatness of Reb Yisroel? That nobody knew who he was."¹

At the end of his preface to Introduction to the Code of Maimonides, he wrote of his wife that any attempt to articulate his indebtedness to her would inevitably ring hollow; yet, "inasmuch as she is attuned to my silences she will understand every nuance and hear every resonance."² Silences. A man who undeviatingly hewed his own line in both life and letters — who recoiled from fads and dug below pervasive but passing cultural prisms — he nonetheless chose to import Simon and Garfunkel into his magnum opus: "One must be attuned to the silences as well as to the sounds of Maimonides’ writing."³

The father of the Talner Rebbe — the previous rebbe, Rabbi M. Z. Twersky — was stricken toward the end of his life. He could not speak. His son helped him into the shtiebl and the rebbe, shaky but able to stand, would pray; then his son would help him out of the shtiebl. What passed between father and son were, of necessity, silences. Toward the end of his life, Rabbi Soloveitchik was stricken with Parkinson’s disease. His son-in-law took requests from other disciples who asked for a few moments with the great Talmudist; of necessity, these requests were denied and the silences reinforced. Where did they begin?

Why did East European immigrant parents, a Chassidic rebbe and his pious wife, send their son to Boston Latin School, then to Harvard University, not to yeshivah? How did their son, a scion of a distinguished line of Chassidic rebbes, find favor with the daughter of the scion of the most distinguished line of opponents of the Chassidic movement, the daughter of Rabbi Soloveitchik? How did the earnest religious seeker, the son of the rebbe and the son-in-law of the great Talmudist, find favor with the skeptic of Harvard, the lonely man bereft of faith, the world’s senior scholar of Judaica, Professor Harry Austryn Wolfson — so much favor that the religious young man became the dispassionate professor’s successor and a trusted literary representative? How did the protégé, an Orthodox Jew, secure permission from his philosophically skeptical mentor, "an unobservant Orthodox Jew," to focus his research on religious conviction and Jewish law?

There are no answers to these questions and never will be, none, at least, that will turn silences into sounds that satisfy, that will reach deeper than generalities and superficialities, that will reveal the core of the man and significantly attenuate the mystery that surrounded him in life, as in death. On one level, however, there is no mystery. On one level, all is pure and clear and simple: Professor Isadore Rabbi Yitzhak Rebbe Twersky was a presence, an unmistakable presence; with this one word he may be summed up. He. His presence will no sooner recur than the European Jewish civilization, the humanities-centered academia, or the softly shimmering piety of his parents, from all of which he sprang, yet surely did not embody: what was the greatness of Isadore Twersky? That nobody knew who he was.

II.

If man is created in the image of God and God is both unknowable and knowable — His essence inaccessible and His will revealed in nature, life, and Torah — then man should also be unknowable and knowable, concealed and revealed, silent and given to sound, to communication, to relationship. If he was unknowable, concealed like God Himself, so to speak, he left a body of work, he revealed a philosophy of the human spirit, he sounded a voice that may be studied, understood, and profoundly absorbed. His style was both ponderous and elegant; he left no nuance unexplored, no line of thought untidied, no word unsummoned.

He began (in Rabad, 1962) with water, "streams," "tributaries," "offshoots," "rivulets, "eddies," and "waddies," to be exact; with metaphors for the "complex network" pouring into or alongside the mainstream. The network was the "dazzling variety of cultural disciplines: philosophy and mysticism, rationalism and pietism, exegesis and commentary, poetry and belles-lettres, linguistics and grammar."

The courses of these streams deserve to be — and, to a great extent, have been — charted, their ebbs and peaks registered, their force and calm measured; each of them left an imprint on the evolving Jewish intellect and spirit. The mainstream, however, was the halakah (Jewish law) — its ever-expanding corpus of literature and its cumulative body of practice.⁴

Professor Twersky made his mark in the mainstream — in Jewish law — and in doing so he created a new genre. Before him, books on practitioners of Jewish law ("halachists") were written by lawyers (that is, other halachists) or by biographers. The lawyers analyzed the legal reasoning of the halachic scholar. The biographers, for the main, contented themselves with a chronology of the scholar’s life, an exaltation of his works, and sometimes an analysis of his sources or influence. Professor Twersky addressed the halachic work itself, but not as a lawyer. Professor Twersky wanted to know, for example, whether the work’s popular image was correct. Was Rabad, who wrote many biting glosses on Maimonides’ Code, an unremitting critic of the master (the popular image), or was the relationship more complex? Professor

Twersky wanted to know whether the critical glosses of Rabad fell into categories and gradations, and, if so, what they were. He wanted to know why rulings of Maimonides that cried out for critique were passed over in silence by Rabad. He wanted to dismantle the image of a scholar typographically locked into a designated square or rectangle on the mosaic which forms the many-authored, single page of standard editions of classic Hebrew works. He wanted to know what Rabad wrote besides brief, mainly acerbic glosses, duly carved as insets into Maimonides’ printed words; he wanted the full picture of Rabad’s influence on subsequent formulations of Jewish law.

Professor Twersky pursued these and similar goals with verve, doggedness, and conviction, not to mention mastery of both the primary literature, all that Rabad wrote, and the secondary literature, all that others wrote about Rabad and the issues he raised. This was Professor Twersky’s primary focus: correlation of historiography with history, restoration of the mainstream of Jewish thought, refocus on Jewish intellectual history as it was — the corrective reordering of the "dazzling variety of cultural disciplines" under the throne of the most dazzling of all, halachah.

Already in his first major work the theme that governed much of Professor Twersky’s scholarship in the remainder of his fruitful career was present in embryo. The last chapter of Rabad is entitled, "Relation to Philosophy and Kabbalah." After all, the mainstream, Jewish law, was colored by the tributaries, such as philosophy and kabbalah. If the "dazzling variety of disciplines" could not be fully perceived without their relation to Jewish law, the reverse is also true. Jewish law existed in relation to other disciplines. What, precisely, is this relation? This question occupies 42 pages in the 300-page work, Rabad. By the time of Introduction to the Code of Maimonides, 18 years later, its analogous chapter, "Law and Philosophy," occupies 158 pages in the 537-page work — proportionately, more than double the attention. The increase is due not only to the different emphases of Rabad and Maimonides, but to the personal interest of Professor Twersky himself.

His interest was the complexity of reality. Law was not law, he maintained; law was law and spirit, law was a coin with two sides. To be more accurate, Professor Twersky saw the major halachic scholars as seeing their own work in this twofold manner. His research uncovered halachists who took note of, responded to, reflected the concerns of, or (depending on the halachic scholar) even gave pride of place to mystical, philosophical, or pietistic ideals. To be sure, law had its own terms. It could not be reduced to a "value" or any other generality that exempted either scholar or adherent from its many details. Still, law reflected the spiritual dimensions of other disciplines; either that, or bodied forth a spirituality all its own. With his twofold lens, Professor Twersky did not merely create a new and subtle genre of academic or halachic analysis; he set forth a unitive vision of the human spirit.

III.

In Rabad, one reads of "faint echoes" and "latent processes of reasoning" and "sleuthing" (in Maimonides’ Code) — all favorite phrases of Professor Twersky’s teacher, Professor Wolfson.⁵ In Rabad, one reads of Rabad as a "man of halakah"⁶ and a "homo absconditus," ⁷ both favorite phrases of his father-in-law, Rabbi Soloveitchik. Unobtrusively tucked away in a note or long paragraph in the Introduction to the Code of Maimonides is a reference to the "hypothetical-deductive method of textual analysis"⁸ or the "covenantal community,"⁹ phrases coined by, respectively, Professor Wolfson and Rabbi Soloveitchik. Professor Twersky imbedded himself in the works of his guides, all the way down to their favored phrases; his guides were not mere predecessors but profound influences, even as he charted his own path in life and letters. No creator works in a vacuum. No creation is empty of external influence. In Professor Twersky’s case, however, the influences run deeper and run in reverse: the deeper influences on him are he himself, cast as a mirror within his works, as well as other mirror images which, like those in an amusement park, defy precise measurement, sequence, or position. Up and down Professor Twersky’s works, sentences jump out that make one ask, who is being described here? Is it Rabad? Maimonides? Or is it Rabbi Soloveitchik? — or Professor Twersky himself? For example, in commenting on Rabad, Professor Twersky writes:

I believe that the "impression" here is as much of the disciplined, fastidious Professor Twersky as it is of Rabad; especially since Professor Twersky gets a very similar impression from Maimonides:

Under Professor Twersky’s lens, two different people, Rabad and Maimonides, who never even met each other, are said to share a fundamental trait: commitment to task above leisurely intellectual pursuit, be it "theorizing" or "discursive writing." Their common trait is fundamentally that of the indefatigable Professor Twersky himself. Perceiving it in two otherwise very different halachists, it mirrors himself as much as them, if not more.

This line of thought is strengthened as we turn to a still more direct impression of Professor Twersky. In one of his seminal articles, he writes of Rabbi Yair Bacharach:

Professor Twersky is a self-conscious stylist. For example, he strives mightily for alliterations. They are present in embryo in Rabad; 18 years later, in the Introduction to the Code of Maimonides, they are, to echo the professor, veritably ubiquitous and virtually uncountable. In a mere eight pages of the Introduction, the reader confronts "candidly and curtly," "leaps or lapses," "calculated and consistent," "import and impact," "sequence and structure," "crowning and consummate," and many more such pairs.¹³

The deeper influences on Professor Twersky are the traits he perceived in the scholars in whose writings he immersed himself and on whose thinking he based himself. No less than his personal mentors, he esteemed these leading halachists; so much so that he exchanged psychic places with them, so to speak, merging their persona with his own, appropriating their many sided spirituality as his own. The many faces of Professor Twersky distilled the waters of the cultural tributaries as well as the halachic mainstream, of the past as well as the present, extending the silences further, across one unforgettable face. He.

Rabbi Goldberg is executive editor of the Intermountain Jewish News and associate editor of Tradition. He is a member of the Jewish Action contributing editorial board and author of The Fire Within, 2 vols. (Mesorah, 1987 and 1992).

Yechiel Y. Perr, "Reb Yisroel — Who Was He?" The Jewish Observer (June, 1969).

Isadore Twersky, Introduction to the Code of Maimonides (Mishneh Torah) (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980), p. xvi

Ibid., p. 235.

Isadore Twersky, Rabad of Posquierès: A Twelfth-Century Talmudist (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. vii.

Ibid., pp. 129, 130, 136.

Ibid., pp. 40, 271.

Ibid., p. 257.

Twersky, Introduction to the Code of Maimonides, p.241

Ibid., pp. 226, 485.

Twersky, Rabad of Posquierès, p. 260.

Twersky, Introduction to the Code of Maimonides, p. 6.

Isadore Twersky,"Law and Spirituality in the Seventeenth Century: A Case Study in R. Yair Hayyim Bacharach," in Isadore Twersky, Bernard Septimus, eds., Jewish Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 451.