Rabbi Lopatin quoted in The New Yorker

Nov. 17 issue, Talk of the Town:

Emanuel In Full
by Lizzie Widdicombe
November 17, 2008

Rahm Emanuel

Federal Bailouts

When Barack Obama appointed Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff last week, a bunch of old stories went back into circulation, clues, perhaps, to how he’ll run the White House: Emanuel wrapping up a dead fish to send to a pollster who’d made him angry; Emanuel stabbing a table with a knife while shouting the names of people who’d betrayed Bill Clinton; Emanuel saying “Don’t fuck it up” to Tony Blair. These are memorable moments, but Rabbi Asher Lopatin, Emanuel’s rabbi at the Anshe Sholom B’nai Israel congregation, in Chicago, pointed out that they don’t capture the whole man. “I don’t know him in a political way,” Lopatin said, “but I wish all our congregants were as loyal to the synagogue and as engaged as he is.” Lopatin said he tries not to get involved with politics, since this can lead to trouble (see Wright, Jeremiah; “Sometimes we spiritual leaders say things we don’t mean,” Lopatin said), but he’d taken the liberty of leaving “a couple messages” on his congregant’s voice mail. “I didn’t push him one way or the other,” he said. “I just wanted to congratulate him and tell him it’s a good opportunity.”

Emanuel, Lopatin emphasized, is “a genius at balancing things.” A few weeks ago, Emanuel consulted Lopatin about working on the financial-bailout package during Rosh Hashanah. The rabbi gave his approval, citing the principle of pikkuah nefesh—“To save a life, you can violate almost any commandment,” he said. “There’s no doubt that somewhere in the world there would be a serious risk to lives and personal survival if the financial system melted down,” he reasoned. So Emanuel tiptoed out of the service to take a conference call. But the rest of the time he was in synagogue. “This year, I’d asked Rahm to open the ark,” the rabbi said. “We had to make sure we gave him an ark-opening time that didn’t conflict with the conference call, so he could get down from the bimah in time.” (Lopatin said that he had missed the episode of “Entourage” in which the character based on Emanuel’s brother, the Hollywood agent Ari Emanuel, sneaks out of Yom Kippur services to talk to a studio head on his cell phone. “That is so funny!” Lopatin said. “I like Jewish characters on TV. I think it’s a good thing.”)

Last week around the same time, Ron Reagan (that Ron Reagan) offered his views on another facet of Emanuel—his training in ballet. Reagan, like Emanuel, is a former dancer. (Emanuel received dance training in high school, and danced for a year at Sarah Lawrence after turning down a scholarship to the Joffrey Ballet School; as a freshman, he appeared in a modern-dance piece called “Desire.”) Reagan, who was a professional dancer for four years, didn’t completely buy the comparison: “I’m not trying to knock him or anything, but, O.K., it’s like if I’m a well-known actor—not a big star, but I appear in movies—and you’re talking about someone who was in the drama club in high school.” He argued that dancing and politics are “really two different parts of your brain.” He said, “Politics is the art of compromise. It’s shades of gray and nuance. There’s nowhere to hide when you’re a dancer. You’re almost literally naked, wearing an outfit that reveals everything about you.” He went on, “There are no Sarah Palins in dance—no one who doesn’t know what they’re doing. They’re weeded out by the time you get to be a professional.”

So that’s body and spirit. Meanwhile, back at Sarah Lawrence, the nicely named Jefferson Adams, a European-history professor, was discussing his former student’s mind. Adams had been Emanuel’s academic adviser. (They hadn’t communicated much except for one post-college phone conversation about the décor of Emanuel’s first Chicago apartment. “Somehow, wagon wheels come to mind,” Adams said.) He recalled that, in college, Emanuel was already raising money for political campaigns on weekends: “There was a now defunct little store, a BFO, and he was buying suits to go around fund-raising.” He loved philosophy, especially the nineteenth-century German thinkers, but, Adams said, “he wasn’t an academic.” His papers were “good, not outstanding. They showed an involvement in the material, but nothing you’d put in an anthology. He was not a stellar writer, and he’s not a great speaker. He’s very effective one on one.” Adams is one of the school’s few conservative professors, and he remembered getting into philosophical discussions with his advisee, trying to temper Emanuel’s infatuation with Hegel by showing how much Hegel had actually been influenced by Goethe—“The fact that nature is not going to be mastered, whatever the system, and that these man-made systems ultimately fail.” He would also try to explain the appeal of Ronald Reagan. Adams said, “I can remember his voice: ‘Mr. Adams, you can’t possibly believe that!’ ” ♦