My grandfather once attended a conference on the subject of Maimonides, and the multifarious achievements of this famous medieval Jewish polymath were made manifest in the variety of topics that were discussed. One scholar stood up and spoke of “Maimonides as a philosopher”; another addressed Maimonides’s achievements as a physician; still another spoke of the Sephardic sage as a Talmudist. At a certain point, someone sitting next to my grandfather turned to him and innocently asked: “When are they going to stop introducing Professor Maimonides and let him speak already?”

Those reading the articles in tribute to Norman Podhoretz in this issue will find so many different descriptions of who he was and the many and magnificent aspects of his life: Norman Podhoretz as a Jew, as a neoconservative, as a literary critic, as an American, as a student of the Bible, as a defender of Israel, as a hater of Communism. Rightly so. For me, however, they are, in the end, inseparable; they are all Norman, different aspects of the individual that I came to know in the past several years. For it was only in these last years that I had the privilege of spending time with him, visiting Norman in his home. It was he, at the age of 92, who  initiated our friendship, emailing me after I officiated at the funeral of his beloved wife: “I am finally beginning to venture a bit out of the isolation that Midge’s death brought about, and I was hoping that you would be one of the first visitors to help me emerge.” He also reflected that he believed he would enjoy the meetings, “though my world-famous humility prevents me from speculating what it would do for you.”

Thus warmly welcomed, I accepted the invitation. Week by week, our discussions were different; we might speak on one occasion of the Jewish education he had pursued in his teenage years in fulfillment of an oath to his father, when Norman had thought the latter was on his deathbed. Another day might bring us recollections of Norman’s literature studies in Cambridge, his encounter with T.S. Eliot, and his chagrin at the fact that, having returned to Eliot’s work decades later, it seemed the anti-Semite’s literary prowess was not as remarkable as he had thought at the time and therefore the aesthetic excuse of his greatness against the bald fact of his Jew-hatred was a more complicated matter.

We discussed friends who had been intimates but had ended up treading a different political path—such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan—and those to whom he had been an ideological foe who suddenly and surprisingly became friends, such as Henry Kissinger. We might speak of his love of the biblical prophets—some of whose poetry he would recite by heart—or his meeting, as a young man, with David Ben-Gurion. And given the time period in which our meetings took place, our conversation would invariably turn to his concern for what was occurring in Israel, or the way wokeism had utterly destroyed his “beloved Columbia.”

Yet as varied as our discussions may have been, they were all descriptions of episodes in a larger, unified life—a profound plot, an American and Jewish story, and a heroic one at that. Robert Frost may not have been Norman’s favorite poet, but he did admire his work; and in my own favorite poem, Frost gives a sublime summation of a life well lived:

But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.

Norman’s avocation was to write. But in writing, he found his vocation, Heaven-sent: to defend America, the West, the Jewish people, and the Jewish state, to call good and evil by their appropriate names, and to serve as a beacon to so many others.

It could so easily have gone differently. To ponder Norman’s life is to recognize, in Frost’s famous phrase, the roads not taken. Norman might have stayed in England, where he had been a graduate student in 1950, and become a Cambridge don; or, returning to Columbia, he might have adopted the posture of his mentor Lionel Trilling, who, as someone once quipped, approached his own Jewish heritage with a twist on the Cartesian maxim: incognito ergo sum. And then there are the choices in writing that Norman made that he did not have to make. He did not need to attack Hannah Arendt, one of the most admired figures in his circle, when she launched an abhorrent critique of the Israeli trial of Adolf Eichmann; he did not need to abandon the left, to turn friends into ex-friends, to break ranks.

But he did do these things. He made the choices he made. And throughout, he wrote, and argued, and explained why he did what he did, why he chose what he chose. And in so doing, he revealed his inner self. It was through my discussions with Norman that he made mention of a piece he had written some 70 years before, one of his earliest pieces in Commentary, a review of Harry Truman’s memoirs. Its concluding words are as relevant today as they were then:

We can see quite another moral significance in his career when we contemplate the fact that this extraordinary man who has probably done more than anyone else to keep the world alive on the edge of an apocalypse, was able to emerge into greatness only by becoming, in his own eyes and in the eyes of the nation, a perfect symbol of the average American.

How he could write! This was written by a young man—26 at the time—who reveals the same figure I knew at 95, who deeply loved America and understood how the American character was part and parcel of its exceptional nature. As I reflected at his funeral, Norman spoke of being a fan, as a child, of the Brooklyn Dodgers, often known as the Brooklyn Bums. Norman stressed to me that one was allowed to apply this appellation only if you were a Dodgers fan from Brooklyn. Criticism was allowed of Norman’s own, but only if it was done with loyalty and love. And if this was true of a baseball team, this was all the more true of America, which had given him so much, as it had to many millions, and it was also true of the Jewish people who, as he would ultimately reflect in a lecture in Jerusalem, had a story so remarkable, only chosenness could explain it. “Only where love and need are one”—Norman did love to write, and he felt a need to write in defense of what he loved. So much about the direction his life took was rooted in his Jewish loyalty, joined with his loyalty to the truth, so that his avocation became his vocation, a fact for which we are all profoundly grateful.

I would joke with Norman that I wished that he had chosen to study literature at Oxford instead of Cambridge, for then he might have come to know C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. This suggested lacuna did not seem to bother him. But C.S. Lewis’s writing is indeed relevant to Norman’s life, for it was Lewis who famously reflected that “courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality.” Courage is the virtue through which Norman’s other virtues were unified, through which they become one, as two eyes become one in sight, making him the man I knew.

Thus it is that I now find myself bidding farewell to Norman and looking back over the past several years. One of his favorite High Holy Prayers was the Ashkenazi composition Unetaneh Tokef, and he would express a great grievance that the Sephardic liturgy of my synagogue did not include it; what he described as “the incomprehensive omission from your prayer book of the greatest glory of the Jewish liturgy.” At the heart of the prayer is the notion that we are all answerable for the way we live and the way in which those choices affected others. God, on the Day of Judgement, reads from the sefer ha-Zikhronot, the book of memories, the story of all humanity, yet this book is not written by Him: “The hand of every man signs it.” We are, in other words, the authors of our own lives. But though we may write our story, we do not choose how it ends. As Norman’s favorite liturgical piece informs us, we are, every year, judged:

On Rosh Hashanah the decree will be written
And on Yom Kippur it will be sealed.
How many will pass,
How many will be born
Who will live,
And who will die.  

Toward the end of Norman’s life, as so many he knew had long ago left this mortal coil, it was the decisions made by the Almighty as to who would live and who would die that truly troubled him. Why had Midge gone before him, while he seemed to be given a longer and longer lease on life? He was also irked that his friend Henry Kissinger, whom Norman had deemed “not human” in his own longevity, had outrageously passed away before him; Norman, in his signature “humility,” had expected the legendary statesman and the universally acknowledged master of the posthumous tribute to eulogize him. As he entered his 96th year, he wryly remarked that perhaps he remained on earth because, with his strong opinions, it was Heaven itself that was not interested in having him around.

I cannot answer for the Almighty. But I cannot help seeing those extra years, in which I was fortunate to get to know and love him, as a blessing. The metaphor of the “book of memories” reminds us that our stories are not only our own, that how we live indelibly affects others. Had Norman not been given these extra years, I would still have read his writings in the pages of Commentary, as well as the pieces he edited, the writers he fostered and brought to full fruition. I would have read his books and discovered Norman Podhoretz the student of the Bible, Norman the American patriot, Norman the Cold War intellectual, Norman the Zionist. But I would not have fully known Norman in the same way. “My world-famous humility prevents me from speculating what it would do for you,” he had said in inviting me. I, in turn, experiencing my own rare moment of humility, wonder what I did to deserve such a gift.

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