אתו ברא אלוקים בצלם בצלמו האדם את אלוקים ויברא
כז,א בראשית
All of what our Rabbi, Rabbi Ezra Labaton A”H taught and represented stems from this fundamental teaching: each and every person is godly; each and every person is unique and dignified; each and every person should be respected and each and every person’s thoughts and feelings need to be appreciated. The rest is commentary.
Our Rabbi prepared all his speeches with care and attention, but hespedim were different. They were sacred. He stayed up late talking to family members and then shaped the word to express the essence of a person and comfort his family. At the same time, he knew this task was impossible, that even the people he knew well were ultimately too complex and that he did not know the person as well as his family did. He also knew that each person had a different view, his unique perspective, and that he could not capture all the dimensions of a person.
So, too with our Rabbi, each and every one of us has shared a different set of experiences with the Rabbi. He brought each and every one of us into his life, the life of Torah, the ideas, and ideals and values of Torah. He developed different relationships with elders, with children, with high school students and with shul members, who varied, sometimes so greatly and yet he managed to listen to what each person had to say and valued his selem Elokim. This was his signature.
I may be speaking before you today but these words are our words, the words of each and every one of us.
The unique character of our Rabbi, his essence, who he was and how we should remember him, can be summarized as Rav, but a particular kind of Rav: one, strict and unbending, authoritative in his halachic positions and, the other, flexible, warm and welcoming, bringing people into the circle of Torah. He would teach endlessly, teach and speak at every opportunity, teach and speak. He studied Torah as an academic. He believed that the tools of scholarship unveiled beauty, truth, spiritual truth. At the same time, however, he maintained a childlike, personal and emotional relationship with Hakadosh Baruch Hu and Torah. He seemed to have developed this intuitively as a little boy, which his teachers at Magen David, among them Rabbi David Bitton and Hacham Baruch, nurtured.
His academic pursuits, including his thirty-year persistent endeavor, the writing of his dissertation on Rabbenu Abraham Ben HaRambam, and his love of books and ideas never waned throughout his years as the Rabbi of Magen David of West Deal. However, a different kind of education occupied the foreground, a different book to be studied, the book of peoples’ lives and experiences. He served the people and empathized with their plights. He knew that every person, no matter their level of education, could be inspired by these ideas, that every person should engage as a philosopher and wrestle with ultimate questions.
When he and Emily first came to Deal, he thought that he would spend his days learning, teaching, reading, finishing his thesis in a year or two, but almost immediately he learned that the real education he was going to get was from the people he spent his days with. He learned from people much younger and older; he learned about life and its complexity and learned how and when he could help, sometimes just by listening and taking people seriously. He eventually learned about illness and there, too, he learned from people.
He was passionate about the rabbanut. He believed in the power of the rabbanut and the need for devoted, trained rabbis, but he did not have any illusions about the ability of rabbis to do it all. He wanted people to find answers for themselves. He delighted in referring people to books to read for themselves, giving people volumes to read. He wanted families to go home at the end of the week and develop Torah ideas with their children at the Shabbat dinner and lunch table.
He was passionate about his role in the community and he loved what he did every day but he did not take himself too seriously. In moments of insecurity and self-doubt he would ask, “Had I done enough? Have I made enough of an impact?” He believed deeply in unity, for families, the community and the Jewish world. He did not believe, however, in accomplishing unity by erasing differences but by respecting differing ideas, by talking openly about differences and fostering, thereby, deeper connections.
The distinguished and esteemed rabbis can speak volumes about the Rabbi but from a different perspective. He valued his relationship to you. As well, community leaders learned from the Rabbi and he from them. He loved the community, studied its history and its halachic traditions and brought those lessons to his qahal.
The Rabbi reached, as well, beyond our time and beyond our place. He spoke about the past. He took most pride in the Holocaust programs in the shul and, most importantly, the Holocaust Memorial of the one and a-half million children lost in the holocaust. At his spearheading, volunteers collected the pennies, one and a-half million pennies, in bottles, in bottles, and finally represented that collection in a memorial in our shul lobby.
He remembered the past but also focused on the present, on suffering of people and on political oppression. He worked hard to free Ethiopian, Soviet and Syrian Jews and heightened our awareness of injustice around the world. He raised funds and motivated our qahal to do hesed: Darfur, a swimming pool for IDF soldiers, a Sefer Torah in Croatia, cancer research, an ambulance for Magen David Adom. The Rabbi and Emily brought Yachad to our shul and the One Family organization of victims of terrorism; he moved our qahal to stretch our efforts and do more. Even at home, he would make it a practice every Thanksgiving Day to bring a turkey dinner to the Ocean Township Police. He wanted to recognize those who work hard to protect us on a day when everyone else was home with his family.
He believed so strongly in the idea of selem Elokim that he summarized his life’s goal in the following way: to make the world a better place, to make the world a better place by feeding the hungry, caring for the elderly, relieving the pain of the ill, through acts of kindness and charity. At the end of the day, these values remained the most significant. Thank you, Rabbi, for making the world a better place.
החיים בצרור צרורה תונשמ הית
By Elliot Braha, President of Congregation Magen David of West Deal
