Buzzy Porten: The Late, The Great

My Jewish summer camp in the sixties and seventies was a world apart, a secluded universe. Hidden among the lakes of Northern Wisconsin, it was intended as a gesture of recovery from the war, a place where Jews would resurrect themselves.

Full of vivid, brainy young Jewish leaders, it had the snap and promise of the winning team. Despite its commitment to Jewish traditionalism, it had the feel of a countercultural commune, an answer to the ethos of life in the suburbs. We were led by rabbinical students who opposed the war in Viet Nam and demanded that we think Very Big Thoughts.

Its impact on me was profound and exhausting. I tried to become the thing the camp exemplified: some combination of study and activism. I haven’t been to camp in many decades, yet I remain within the fold of its teachings. But it was also relentless in the messages it sent. If you put too many ambitious souls in close quarters you end up with Ender’s Game or a kind of Jewish Hogwarts. Too much jockeying for position and influence.

Yet even in this fellowship of striving intellects, there were memorable standouts with enduring impact. Bezalel “Buzzy” Porten, one of these minds, died last month after a brilliant career. Fifty years ago, he was a budding scholar. When he died, it was a loss to the whole Jewish world.

I regret that I never studied with him formally. I was much closer to his wife, the late Deborah Porten, who functioned as an advisor to senior staffers. She was one of the essential influences on my life and career, and a quietly subversive force in the camp. Buzzy was an excitable, theatrical figure who buzzed around Debbie, anchored by her practicality. She was deeply wise, a kind of Betazoid empath. Lucky for all of us she was not a Bene Gessirit witch. But she, too, valorized Buzzy’s gifts as a scholar.

His area of expertise was a colony of mercenaries, Jewish warriors who had served Egypt in their time. In the language of the camp, “Buzzy discovered Elephantine.” Their garrison was located on the first cataract of the Nile where they defended the crossing in the fifth century BCE. What they left behind has nourished a century of scholarship and gave people like Buzzy Porten material for their careers.

Buzzy didn’t actually discover Elephantine. The papyri and potsherds the mercenaries left behind were first collected in the early twentieth century. What Buzzy did was very first-generation: he organized and published this mass of material, producing notes and translations that made them accessible to his peers. This was not a matter of scholarly scutwork. It is the necessary first step in mastering an archeological treasure. We can see it as a variorum edition of Shakespeare: all the texts, all the notes in one place.

But beyond that, he helped foreground the idiosyncracies of this community. During the period of the First Temple, the mercenaries of Elephantine ran a renegade temple on an island in the Nile, constituting a priesthood and offering sacrifices. That was the kind of thing that was not supposed to happen. If Deuteronomy obsesses about one fundamental principle, it is that there is to be one temple (in Jerusalem) and no other, anywhere.

Elephantine tells us that the story is more complicated. When a law book goes crazy trying to outlaw a practice, there’s a good chance that someone is already practicing the practice. So it was for the mercenaries of Elephantine, who seemed to evoke no blow-back from Jerusalem. We tend to view history as a succession of orthodoxies. Elephantine tells another story.

The other thing about Buzzy’s work is an alternate view of Jewish manhood. When I think of my ancestors, I think of scholars and tailors, or at least ancient scribes in the Jordan Rift Valley. I do not imagine Thor and Wolverine. But I remember thinking when I first learned about Elephantine that there were other ways of embodying Jewish masculinity. I don’t know that the colony was swarming with gladiators, but that’s the way I chose to imagine it. It bumped out the picture and let air into the room.

One of the last things Buzzy did was a kind of tribute to Debbie. In an era when scholars—almost all of them male—were assisted by studious, self-effacing workwives, Buzzy carefully credited his career-long partner. I just did a dive on the works in his bibliography and Ada Yardeni appears on nearly every one. She is not merely credited in an introductory note, but as a full-fledged partner in their shared scholarly project.

Kudos to Buzzy Porten; good for the world. May the memory of the righteous be for a blessing.