In II Samuel 1, when David learns of the death of Abner, he proclaims to his soldiers and all of Israel, “You well know that a prince, a great man in Israel, has died this day.”
When I learned of the death on Aug. 13 of my friend Leonard “Leibel” Fein at the age of 80, I thought immediately of that line. He truly was “a great man in Israel.”
Fein has been described as a journalist, a writer, an academic and an activist, and he surely was all of these things. He was co-founder and editor of Moment magazine and founder of Mazon: A Jewish Response to Hunger; and he taught at Brandeis University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
However, he was above all, for me, an “echte yid,” a learned and feeling Jew steeped in the values and teachings of the tradition.
The first time I met him in person was in 1978. Fein addressed an informal conference I attended, and I was fortunate to sit at his table at dinner.
He laughed easily and was extremely easygoing and pleasant, speaking in an unaffected manner that belied but did not subvert the important lessons and messages — the challenges — he was sharing.
I found Fein to be like this on every occasion I was fortunate enough to be in his presence. He provided a model of what it meant to be a mensch — a Jewish human being. He made me want to do more, to be a better person.
He was raised as a Labor Zionist in the home of a Baltimore Hebrew College professor. His love for the Jewish people and the State of Israel was unending even as it was often critical.
His commitment to a progressive Zionism was a touchstone of his life, leading him in the 1970s to raise his prophetic voice in defense of the group Breira and its left-liberal viewpoints on Israel, and later to become a founding member of Americans for Peace Now.
In his hundreds of columns, in his academic books and in public and private talks, Fein prodded and provoked Jews to do more. He taught that we could never be satisfied with either the state of the world or the condition of the Jewish people, and he goaded us constantly with his brilliance, his fearlessness, his directness, his ethics and his passion.
He took seriously the biblical command to offer rebuke to our people when reproof was needed — which he always felt it was. He taught that tikkun olam, the repair of the world, was always possible.
Fein expressed his talents in so many ways. He was a major intellectual whose books on Israel and Zionism, American Jews and Judaism, American politics and institutions earned him fame and academic posts. He helped shape scholarly and popular discourse and policy directions on these topics.
In a world where divisions and binary thinking abound, when people all too often think in “either-or” categories, Fein demonstrated that it was possible to be “both-and.”
He was a scholar and intellectual, but he also was a man of action who created some of the most vital and humane organizations and projects in modern Jewish life.
Fein insisted that change could come both within and beyond the world of the Jewish establishment, and he walked easily and always provocatively in both countercultural and established institutional realms.
Maimonides in the Mishneh Torah, Laws of Kings 10:12, wrote, “Our sages have commanded us to visit the Gentile sick and to bury their dead along with the dead of the people Israel, and to support those that are impoverished among them along with the poor of the people Israel.”
Fein internalized this teaching in the depths of his soul and acted upon it with all the powers at his disposal. He embodied the dialectic of both universalism and particularism that Judaism requires, and he realized it in his teachings, his writings and in his many creations.
I, along with so many others within and beyond the bounds of the people Israel, will be eternally indebted to him for the enduring legacy he has bequeathed.
Rabbi David Ellenson is the chancellor of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion and was its president from 2001 to 2013.
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