Isaacson not just an activist, but an awesome Torah scholar and teacher

Thank you for the obituary you published about Rabbi Ben Isaacson, who was my rabbi and teacher in the days when he ran the Emet Women’s Learning Centre in Highlands North. He referred to me as his talmida muvheket (his most faithful/loyal student), a term of endearment I will always treasure.

Though I spent countless hours in Isaacson’s shul, beit midrash, and home when he ran the Emet Centre, some of the anecdotes you recounted were previously unknown to me. I can’t imagine the bravery that was required to view the bodies of protesters gunned down by apartheid police in the Sharpeville Massacre. The image of Thabo Mbeki eating chopped liver at the rabbi’s home is wonderful. I didn’t know that the apartheid police had seized the rabbi’s holy books, seeing them as the source of his belief in the equality, dignity, and value of all people. What greater tribute could there be to Isaacson’s Torah?

I have one criticism of your obituary.

Since you chose to mention aspects of Isaacson’s life that he was ashamed of, it would have been fitting to mention that being a true ba’al teshuva (penitent) was a fundamental pillar of his identity. A true ba’al teshuva, he often used to say, isn’t someone who is born into a family of Jews who know close to nothing about Jewish law and scripture and then learns about and starts to practice Jewish law. Such a person is known as a tinok shenishba. A true ba’al teshuva, on the other hand, is someone steeped in knowledge of Jewish law, who breaks it in full knowledge that he’s doing so, and later, out of deep regret and a yearning to come closer to his creator, makes a conscious decision to return to embrace Jewish law in its entirety. This Isaacson most certainly did, with the last decades of his life steeped in learning, teaching, and writing by hand commentary after commentary on the prophets. I hope that publishing some of his writings will form part of the tribute that the SA Jewish Report pays to this great maverick.