This is one of the most difficult columns I have ever had to write. One of the first people Elaine and I met when we moved to Boston shortly after our marriage was Joel Orent. This friendship began more than half a century ago. Joel died last Shabbos.
Photographer Joel Orent, right, and one of his subjects Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel
It is not the length of our relationship that complicates the task. Everything we knew about Joel over the decades was evident shortly after we first met him.
If ever there were a person greater than the sum of his parts, it is Joel Orent. I can tell you much, and miss everything.
Baker • Business
By way of illustrating Joel’s humility, I could tell you that some people knew him for decades and never knew that he had degrees from Columbia, Harvard and Yale.
By way of illustrating his wisdom, I could tell you that it just tumbled out of him. Poetry. Business. Midrash. Philosophy. Religion. Always, always, it was all interconnected. It shone through in every conversation and on every phone call.
By way of illustrating his desire and capacity to learn from any person, I could tell you of the period Joel spent as a baker, lifting and sifting heavy barrels of grain hours at a time, thereby understanding the life of people who make a living through physical labor. I could tell you of the spirituality Joel discerned in the life of a baker, because it was so humbling.
When Joel learned that the Musar master R’ Naftali Amsterdam had been a baker, Joel grasped Musar spirituality instinctively.
Humility was so congenial to Joel. It is not that Joel never asked for anything in return. It is not that he never expected anything in return. It is that he never needed anything in return.
By way of illustrating his ability to connect a given economic policy of a given president to the role of multinational corporations, I could tell you I listened to Joel’s analyses, but they were way over my head.
Poet • Love
By way of illustrating Joel’s love of Hebrew poetry, I could tell you about the countless handwritten letters I received from him over the years analyzing and celebrating the words of the Prophet Isaiah. Or his love of Aaron Zeitlin’s Yiddish poetry. Or his love of Keats’ English poetry.
By way of illustrating Joel’s love of G-d’s world, I could tell you about the large garden he planted and tended to personally, with pictures of blooming flowers and tall plants regularly dispatched, and about the vegetables he took into his home and the homes of his neighbors.
By way of illustrating his love of G-d’s world in a different way, I could tell you of his countless camping trips, boating trips and mountain hikes.
By way of illustrating his love of humanity, I could tell you that he drove the ill to and from doctor appointments, and to and from the airport. He was once informed of a hospitalized patient suffering from depression, and Joel sat with him for 20 hours! In all this he saw the main beneficiary as he himself.
Photography • Natural Light
By way of illustrating Joel Orent’s photography, I could tell you that covers of books on Joseph B. Soloveitchik and Abraham Joshua Heschel bear Joel’s portraits. I could tell you that the subjects of Joel’s masterful photography include Nobel Prize laureate S. Y. Agnon, Hebrew poet Uri Z. Greenberg, Prof. Isadore Twerski, nature photographer Ansel Adams, architect Buckminster Fuller, history of philosophy Prof. Harry A. Wolfson — and, as you can see on this page, many others.
I could tell you that Joel insisted on never using artificial lighting. Artificial lighting was an unnecessary and even a defeatist crutch. To photograph was to see, Joel would say. If you truly saw the essence of the person, the photograph would capture it. It was up to your insight, not the technology.
To “see” Rabbi Ben Zion Bruk, Joel arranged for the portrait to be taken at 5:30 a.m. as the first morning beams poured through the yeshiva’s tall, oblong windows.
I could tell you that Joel certainly saw the soul of the subject of the single photograph I have hanging on my office wall, that of Rabbi Yehuda Leib Nekritz. Nothing but that relatively small photo is on the wall, and it fills the wall.
By way of illustrating Joel’s capacity for friendship, I could tell you of the correspondence — always handwritten — he maintained with people around the world.
Half a Minute
I could tell you all this, and in doing so I will have told you so very, very little about Joel Orent.
His broad knowledge and wisdom coexisted with a childlike joy and a pietist’s purity. Joel was utterly guileless. His character did not blind him to the inhumanity in human history, nor to its leaders’ failings, but did block him from seeing anything but the finest in each person he met. Literally. Every grocery clerk, every doctor’s assistant, every anyone — Joel turned him, or her, into a friend, inside of half a minute. I cannot describe it.
Impact
I could not tell you that Joel’s actions had a direct, discernible impact on something — like a doctor’s impact on his patients, or a teacher’s impact on his students, or a writer’s impact on his readers — but I can tell you I have met fewer people — perhaps none at all — who seemed to have a larger impact on the world than Joel Orent. In the Jewish tradition we have a personage, and a term, and a concept. It is the Lamed Vavnik, the member of the group of the 36 hidden righteous people who hold up the world. They are anonymous. They are unknown. They are unidentifiable. They are self-effacing. Which means, of course, that I cannot tell you that Joel Orent, tucked away in a suburb of Boston, was a Lamed Vavnik. But I can tell you that I cannot imagine what a Lamed Vavnik would look like other than Joel Orent, whose passing has diminished the big wide world whose every layer Joel relished and humbly served.
Joel Orent, whose photographs have long graced the pages of the Intermountain Jewish News, is survived by his wife Leah, sons Chanania, Chaim and Zion, and grandchildren.
Copyright © 2021 by the Intermountain Jewish News
