Remembering Eli Fink

Rabbi Eli Fink was one in a million.

He was an Orthodox rabbi raised in the black-hat world of Baltimore yeshivas where Talmudic learning was the primary source of intellectual nourishment.

His deep knowledge of Torah, however, was not what made him one in a million.

What made him stand out was a genuine affinity for popular culture. There was hardly a new show or film he couldn’t discuss at length with the enthusiasm of a kid.

His love for pop culture wasn’t a means to an end. The enjoyment was the end. Sure, it helped him connect with the new generation and bring them closer to Judaism. But that was a happy bonus.

I know all this because I worked closely with him at The Journal while he supervised our digital operation. I was also a frequent guest at his family’s Shabbat table, so I got to see first-hand how he flowed so smoothly between  Torah and Hollywood.

It was natural, then, that I would ask him to write columns that would combine the two. He hesitated at first because he didn’t want to trivialize his two loves with an “outreach” agenda.

Eventually he agreed and “The Soul of the Biz” column was born. It became one of our most popular columns.

He published his last “biz” column in April 2018, right before moving back east with his family and just before Passover. It was titled “Exodus as Performance Art?”

Fink riffed on the idea that while most of the stories in the Bible are written using a traditional storytelling format, the Exodus was a notable exception.

“To me, nothing in the Bible requires a greater suspension of disbelief than this moment,” he wrote. “Seconds earlier, the Israelites were rescued from certain death by the slimmest of margins. Sure, they felt great relief, but real people in real life do not spontaneously burst into song. That happens only in musicals.”

In “Watching the Watchers,” Fink spoke of the experience of rewatching something popular long after its release.

“By default, rewatching bypasses the hype and hoopla of a new release. All that remains is the actual film. There is no cultural wave to sweep us away but something more meaningful is left in its place.”

He shared those feelings with his sons in the hope that they would feel something, too. “I watch the screen with one eye, the other eye on my boys, to see their reactions to powerful moments in the story. You get only one chance to see your kid’s face when he finds out Darth Vader is Luke’s father.”

The Jewish tradition, he wrote, is very much about feeling what our ancestors felt, about “rewatching” our stories from one generation to the next.

“We weren’t there for the original cultural mile markers. We weren’t liberated from bondage by Moses; we weren’t present when God split the sea; we weren’t imperiled by Haman’s xenophobia; and we weren’t saved by Esther’s heroism,” he wrote. “But those who were there shared their stories with their children so they could feel the same thing as their parents.”

He used words to remind us that words alone can’t compete with experience.

“Sharing feelings with words is clumsy,” he wrote. “Sharing experiences that create those feelings is Divine, and it’s this idea that explains Jewish holiday rituals…That is why we retell our stories and why our holiday rituals are so important. Judaism does not live in the past. It is the past that lives in us.”

Fink, who developed a large following over the years with his unique teachings, passed away early Friday morning in a horrible highway accident in New Jersey. He was 43.

We will honor his memory at The Journal by republishing his “Soul of the Biz” columns in our print edition, starting this week with a Passover column. To give you a sense of some of the columns: “Movies that Stirred My Passovers,” “The Emotional Mission of ‘7 Days in Entebbe,’” “Purim Parallels in ‘Black Panther,’” and “A Charedi Sitcom that Teaches Co-Existence.”

To paraphrase his words, we’ll have a chance to reread his columns long after their release, when the novelty is gone but “something more meaningful is left in its place.”

Fink created a lot of meaningful things in his life, with a Torah-Hollywood voice and a sweetness that made him one in a million. As he said about Judaism, his past will live in us.

So long, friend, and thanks for the memories.