This week’s cover story, “The Scholar and the Heiress,” stretches back to a 700-year-old document, the Zohar, but also has roots in Albany Park, where a melange of garlic, snuff and choldent–Sabbath stew–warmed the home and synagogue of Tribune reporter Ron Grossman’s youth. Ron, affectionately known in these quarters as “The Professor,” because of his previous academic career, grew up attending Bateman Elementary School and afterwards heading off to Mt. Sinai Congregation, where he learned the Torah and all the age-old rituals of Judaism, from the intricacies of the dietary code to how to say a Kaddish at a parent’s grave. In those days, serious Talmudic scholarship did not extend to the mystical traditions and, in fact, his family was rooted in a view that looked down on the more mystical Jews of the Hasidic movement as coarse and unlettered.
Working on this week’s story, Ron became acquainted with the missing mystical part of his religious education, an omission which reflected an earlier generation’s desire for the religion to seem less strange to Gentiles. “Anything that smacked of superstition was suppressed,” Ron reflects, “and with it, the Zohar and Kabbalah.”
As he reported this story, Ron read the Zohar, a kind of running commentary on the Torah, and spent time with Margot Pritzker, the Chicago woman whose financial commitment ensures that the Zohar will reach a wider audience. Ron also journeyed to Berkeley, Calif., to witness the translator, Daniel Matt, bring the Zohar alive. “With Matt,” Ron says, “you have a poet, linguist and a scholar all rolled into one.”
For Ron, this story was a bit of a return home and a way to add a dimension to his education. “The critical apparatus of the Zohar was a refresher course for those, like myself, whose religious education has been spotty ever since fate carried them too far from the streets of Albany Park.”