the rabbi of 84th street

One Friday night, a moth was flitting about the window of the Besser dining room during Shabbos dinner. The candles were glowing, warm smells of dinner wafted through the room, and the rabbi got up to open the window to let the confused insect outside.

"It looks like the butterfly would rather be out than in," he said.

A guest corrected him: "It isn't a butterfly, it's a moth."

"I know," the rabbi responded with that smile, "but it's Shabbos and I wanted the moth to feel a little better about itself. Everyone should feel better on Shabbos."

Warren Kozak, a self-described "Conservative Jew who forgot most of what he learned in Hebrew school," is an unusual choice for a biographer of a Hasidic rabbi. But as Kozak readily admits in The Rabbi of 84th Street, "It says more about Rabbi Besser than it does about me." Although in many ways a traditional Orthodox Jew, Rabbi Besser has always been, quite uniquely, very engaged in the secular world. He didn't even plan to be a rabbi originally; he wanted to be an orchestra conductor. His son Naftali explains the game he and his father used to play in the car. Listening to the classical radio station, and with Naftali timing him, Rabbi Besser had to name the composer and piece within six seconds. "He rarely lost," reports Kozak. "Often, he knew the conductor and the orchestra as well."

Haskel Besser was born in Katowice, Poland, on February 14, 1923, in the golden age of Hasidic Judaism. The young Besser gained his modern sensibility from his parents, who read newspapers and contemporary literature and followed world events closely (the latter habit would later save the family during the war), and in particular from his mother, who loved classical music, theatre, and opera and attended performances regularly. Throughout his life, Rabbi Besser has striven to straddle two worlds, one of intense study and pastoral care that his rabbinate required and the other of outreach that allowed him to be "part of larger, richer, and more complex world." It was the ease with which America afforded him this duel participation that led him to choose New York as his home in the early 1950's.

The slim volume is subtitled The Extraordinary Life of Haskel Besser, and a more apt name couldn't have been given. Rabbi Besser's life seemes to have been one fortuitous happenstance after another. I had to catch my breath at the end of the chapter detailing his escape from Poland at the last possible safe moment: he boarded a boat bound for Palestine on September 1, 1939. In Tel Aviv, where the Bessers settled during the war (in contrast to most religious Jews at the time, who generally made Jerusalem their home), they began to grapple with the enormity of what was happening in Eastern Europe. In particular, young Haskel "struggled with a different, more personal issue . . .: the greatest crime in the history of the Jews was committed by the people he most revered." As a child, he spent a great deal of time in Berlin, and Germany exerted a palpable influence on much of Poland, including Katowice (so much so that a local law required all children to have German names--Haskel's mother made the unfortunate choice of "Oswald" for him). Recalling the Deutschesland of his youth, Besser says, "I enjoyed meeting people, and the people I met in those years were good people. I think I'm still affected by these memories, because I cannot believe the way some people have painted all Germans as anti-Semites. Not the people I knew."

The story of Rabbi Besser's marriage to Liba Ludmir--a desicion he calls "the smartest thing I ever did in my life"--amidst his near death from encephalitis and meningitis and the Germans' push through Egypt toward Palestine in 1942 is a strange, complicated mix of religious mysticism and pure serendipity. The rabbi's role in almost single-handedly, it would seem, preciptating the fall of communism in the Soviet Union--a story that involves Nikita Khrushchev's downing twenty-seven shots of vodka in one sitting--pushes the limits of credulity in its hilarity. As one critic noted, "Many anecdotes are preceded with so much in the way of prefatory disclaimers that they may as well have begun, 'You may not believe this, but . . . '" It is fitting, then, that this novel concludes with tales of the quasi-mystical powers of various rebbes (Hasidic holy men), as told by Rabbi Besser to the author. In fact, these stories, as well as the biography itself, are part of a larger Hasidic tradition. Since the era of the Baal Shem Tov and the first Hasidic leaders, one of the primary attractions of Hasidism as a movement has been the Hasidic story: part declaration of faith, part celebration of the rebbe's unique spiritual powers, and part acknowledgement of the world's sheer oddity. While these stories often had a moral lesson to impart to their listeners, they were also simply great fun. So, too, is this wonderful narrative of this exceptional man.