(RNS) — Right about now, the angels in the world to come are tearing their hair out.

That is because Abraham Foxman has arrived. They will never know what hit them.

Abe Foxman, the longtime national director of the Anti-Defamation League, died Sunday (May 10) at the age of 86. He joined the organization in 1965 — fresh out of New York University Law School — and served for 50 years, 28 of them as national director. He made the ADL into one of the world’s foremost civil rights advocacy organizations and was the unquestioned dean of the alphabet soup system of Jewish legacy organizations.

And, I dare say that even he could not have predicted the wave of antisemitism we are now experiencing — the very thing he spent his entire life fighting against.

About 13 years ago, during a professional transition, I spent a year working for the ADL. I had long admired its mission and its purpose. I appreciated how their scope went far beyond antisemitism in how they protested discrimination against Black people, immigrants and LGBTQ+ people. Having lived in Atlanta, I was quite familiar with the ADL’s origins — specifically its founding in 1913 in the aftermath of the Leo Frank lynching case, which had happened in that city and traumatized the Jewish community.

When I started working at the ADL, I didn’t quite anticipate the direction my work would take. Abe had seen the documentary film “Bully,” which depicted the devastating impact of bullying on young people — some of whom had taken their own lives. It moved him profoundly. He shifted the ADL’s focus, at least in part, toward anti-bullying measures.

The film moved me as well — not least because I, too, had been the target of bullying as a kid, both because I was Jewish and was a bit of a geek. The anti-bullying initiative shaped my work with the ADL even more perhaps than antisemitism. My role involved visiting public schools around New Jersey, teaching the ADL’s anti-bullying curriculum and training educators to foster resilience in themselves, their staffs and their students.

Reflecting on it now, I see those efforts more clearly than I did then. The bullying I learned about was aimed at students in elementary schools and middle schools who were overweight, LGBTQ+ or neurodivergent. I could not have imagined that the same dynamics would migrate to college campuses, with Jewish students becoming the primary targets. 

Abe was a complex man. He could be cantankerous, volatile, occasionally exasperating and always a force of nature. He could be loving and sentimental. When I told him that I wanted to return to the pulpit rabbinate and to my writing, he said: “That was always your passion, Rebbe.” With the intonation of that Yiddish title, a remnant of his Eastern European background, there was a twinkle in his eye.

But, whatever else Abe was, he was always precise and consistent in his messaging. One lesson I learned from him I have never forgotten.

At a staff retreat, Abe addressed the question of how to respond when someone says or does something antisemitic or hateful. His instruction was counterintuitive and brilliant.

Look, he said, “don’t ever call someone an antisemite. Don’t call someone a bigot, and especially in print. Don’t sink to name-calling. Why? First, because once you do that, it is as if you have drawn a pistol.”

But it was his follow-up point that grabbed me.

“And second,” he said, “you can’t see into someone’s soul. You don’t know who someone really is.”

Then, he told us what to do instead.

“Address the action, not the personality. Tell the person: ‘You are using antisemitic language.’ ‘You are spreading bigoted ideas.’ ‘What you are doing is hateful.'”

It was pure Foxman — sharp, practical and morally serious. He understood that you change behavior before you change hearts, and that the language of accusation rarely persuades anyone of anything. 

But what moved me the most about Abe was his story.

He was born in 1940, in what is now Belarus. When the Germans forced his parents into the Vilna Ghetto in 1941, they entrusted their infant child to the care of their Polish Catholic nanny, Bronisława Kurpi. She baptized him, gave him the name Henryk Stanisław Kurpi and raised him as her own son — a practicing Catholic — and hid his Jewish identity.

After the war, his parents returned to reclaim him. But Kurpi did not want to give him up. 

His parents ultimately won the custody battle, and the family immigrated to the United States in 1950.

Sit with that, for a moment. A Polish Catholic woman, in the middle of Nazi-occupied Europe, chose to risk her life to save a Jewish infant. It was not a passive act of decency. In those years, hiding Jews was a death warrant. She knew that. She did it anyway.

When I think of Kurpi, I think of the unnamed daughter of Pharaoh, who saves the infant Moses floating in a basket down the Nile. The ancient rabbis imagined that at the moment she heard the infant’s cries, her arm elongated itself, and she could reach the child in the middle of the river. 

Kurpi did what conscience demanded even when the world around her had abandoned conscience entirely.

For many decades, Abe Foxman carried that story with him. I would like to believe that it was the foundation beneath everything else he did. It influenced his speeches, press releases and confrontations with heads of state, and his decades of relentless advocacy — not to mention the numerous times that he engaged with those, some of them quite famous, who expressed bigoted ideas to tutor them and make them into better versions of themselves. He knew that individual human beings possess the capacity for moral courage even in the darkest of times. He had the scar — and the blessing — to prove it.

In the end, what made Abe Foxman so consequential was not just what he fought against. It was what he fought for — the stubborn, battle-tested conviction that hatred is not inevitable, that the better angels of human nature are real and that they are worth defending. 

What are you going to do, dear reader — Jew or gentile — to honor his memory?