Arnold (Avraham) and Ora Band are leaving Los Angeles in early October after more than half a century of teaching and community leadership. They will join their family in Washington, D.C., where they will enjoy the light of children, grandchildren and even a great-grandchild.
Arnold Band is professor emeritus of Hebrew and comparative literature at UCLA, and founder of the UCLA Comparative Literature Program. He was director of UCLA’s Jewish Studies Center from 1994-1996. Ora Band is a prominent Hebrew teacher and mentor to generations of teachers. Their titles barely hint at their impact.
I went to the Bands’ home recently to say goodbye, to celebrate their next stage of life with a farewell meal, and perhaps to snatch a few books from Arnold’s huge library, already scoured by other bibliophile-scholars.
This would be my last time in their home, where I studied, dined, went to receptions and even presided over a few celebrations in the Bands’ life. In the gatherings the Bands hosted with a simple generosity, they welcomed a who’s who of scholars and speakers from the world centers of intellectual activity. There was a time, before Los Angeles swarmed with competing schools and before the real estate boom and distance separated all of us, when the Bands’ home was a stop for nearly every intellectual celebrity who came to town — a stop where prominent academic celebrities from abroad met the local luminaries.
Ora has imparted with pedagogical grace a world of Hebrew language to teachers at Hebrew high schools and in adult education departments throughout the city. Her textbooks are used throughout the United States. And she and Arnie often worked as a team of writers and consultants. Arnold Band may have been a Harvard-educated snob, but he contributed much in Los Angeles to the less-advanced students of the language he loved.
While Ora taught Hebrew to the greater public, Arnie prospered at UCLA, and — what is most important — he prepared dozens of the leading teachers of Hebrew litera-ture in the United States and Israel. People studying in farflung lands consulted with him by mail or phone, and often came to Los Angeles just to see him. At UCLA, he was honored as one of the great teachers of the 20th century, sharing that honor with basketball coach John Wooden. They were distinguished in different spheres, to be sure, but they shared the fact that they enjoyed the devotion of disciples who went on to become great in their own right. And they learned to appreciate other colleagues in a profession that tends to be competitive.
Arnie won other awards and honors throughout his career, and he generously gave his time to developing the Association for Jewish Studies, establishing the Center for Jewish Studies and the program in comparative literature at UCLA. He built up the study of modern Hebrew literature in the United States and in Israel, and modeled for all of us how important it was to write compelling sentences and paragraphs. His essays are, indeed, models of beautiful writing — like the string quartets of the masters.
The boisterous times of the ’60s and ’70s did not stop the Bands from bringing a kind of quiet, persistent steadiness to our cultural lives here — and while they did that, Arnie reminded his UCLA students that the turbulence outside university walls did not permit us to forgo critical engagement.
The community at large is not likely to realize the greatness that is moving away from us. We more easily recall people whose names are on buildings or on freeway interchanges, but we must remember that there is greatness that is seen and felt in places where the attachment is not always obvious. Our tradition teaches us that when a righteous person leaves a community, the effect is etched deeply in a community’s subconscious. We are grateful for having enjoyed the Bands for half a lifetime.
Rabbi William Cutter is Steinberg Emeritus Professor of Human Relations at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.
