When I visited Notre Dame a few years ago to give a talk, I had a delightful dinner with Mike Signer at that university's dining hall. The conversation drifted to the profound influence my father had on Mike when Mike was a student at UCLA, and I found that Mike was describing my experience as my father's son. That evening I discovered a new brother. My father models the father-child relationship on the teacher-student model, and the teacher-student relationship on the father-child archetype. The Jewish mother-child relationship is a staple of modern fiction, usually involving neuroses and emotional dysfunction. Much less has been written about the Jewish father-child relationship, particularly the father-son variety. At his best, the Jewish father is modeled after the God of the Jewish Bible, the one which the Christians simplistically call the vengeful God. My Jewish father is demanding yet indulgent, full of wrath at our failings yet forgiving. But there is an extra dimension, which raises the discussion of Arnold Band as the archetypical teacher and father from psychobable to divrei-Torah. An intellectual current energizes any relationship with my father. This is particularly Jewish; after all, our God wants us to study Torah, not chant Um. Thus my father preferred to provide a Freudian explanation of English countryside street names in nouveau riche subdivisions than to play Ping-Pong (which became an excuse to clean the garage...). During the summer of 1969 I studied for my Bar Mitzvah--my father did not abdicate my preparation as an adult Jew to a tutor--as we ran around the Midwest visiting caves and airplane museums; I interrupted practicing my haftorah so that we could pull over to listen to Apollo 11 land on the moon. And my father is carrying this relationship to the next generation: the hour he spends each week studying Hebrew with my sons over the telephone is deepening their relationships.

While I was growing up my father's students were a presence in our home, a kind of extended family. Sam Fishman checked up on my Hebrew reading when my father was away on a trip. I remember sailing on Bill Cutter's Auto-Emancipation. My father takes a father-like responsibility for his students; he worries about their future and takes pride in their accomplishments. His guidance extends beyond the intellectual sphere to more personal matters. He has often expressed the conviction that a scholar should be judged by whom he or she has trained. I have tried to emulate my father's personal concern for his students, which unfortunately my one graduate student found rather intrusive.

As is evident from today's program, my father's scholarship is characterized by attention to text. This is clear to anyone who has studied a biblical text or a modern poem with my father. This concern for the text reflects a love of the Hebrew language, and all language. Although my profession is renowned for at best a utilitarian concern for language, I find I have internalized my father's attention to language and its nuances. In teaching my sons Hebrew texts I find myself explaining how an unfamiliar word is related to one they know, and how the conjugation changes the meaning. My father advises me that this detail is boring my sons; this did not seem to be an issue when I was their age... This attention to written expression extends from being the subject matter of my father's scholarship to the means of discussing this subject matter. Thus my father spends a great deal of time and effort on his students' writing. In high school I experienced the trials and tribulations of having my father shred my sentences--this was in the days before word processors--yet today my colleagues comment on the lucidity of my writing.

I seem to have rebelled against the family business by becoming a scientist. When I was in high school my mother was surprised that my father remembered what pi (the number, not the food) was all about, and I suspect that my father read about one too many pine tree on the Nature walks we took in every National Park we visited. My father has pointedly mentioned the relative comprehensibility of my wife's undergraduate thesis on medieval Jewish merchants and my undergraduate thesis on moonquakes. But in a fundamental way my research and my father's scholarship are the same. Although I have a theoretical bent, my work is closely tied to data. My skepticism increases as theories become more removed from observation. In brief, in my field the data are holy, since they are our only connection to the reality we study; the data are our text. And in this, I have joined my father's business because for him the text is the data, and the text, whether it is Torah, Tanach, Mishna, Agnon or Shakespeare, is holy.