Author Archives: Alan Brill

On today’s Huffington Post, Gilah Kletenik an alumnus of Stern College’s Graduate Program for Women in Advanced Talmudic Studies (GPATS) has moved from calling herself educator to being an Orthodox Jewish clergy. She has burst beyond her official title of Congregational Scholar at Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun  by officially calling herself clergy and for the removal of the glass ceiling for female clergy.Along the way, she is going to “ameliorate the religious fundamentalism and extremism” through “cooperation across the denominational, religious and secular spectrum.” She can now be counted among America’s rabbis by a simple reorientation of her thinking. 

Republican Congressman Darrel Issa deserves our gratitude for his selection of an all-male panel of clergy witnesses to testify at the recent congressional hearing on reproductive rights and religious freedom. He has unintentionally sounded a startling and overdue wake-up call concerning the face of religion in America. Thankfully, our country is finally able to appreciate the deep disparity in the ranks of our spiritual leadership. According to a 2009 finding by the Census Bureau, women comprise only 17% of our country’s clergy.

As a young Orthodox Jewish clergywoman and former intern at the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, I am especially grateful to the GOP. It has drawn national attention to the need for women religious leaders. Particularly, when our reproductive rights are continuously imperiled in the name of religion. 

The gender disparity amongst clergy is not simply a concern to those among us who belong to synagogues, churches, mosques and other houses of worship or who are actively engaged with our faith. Rather, it affects all Americans, believers and atheists alike, whether we like it or not.

It is time for all citizens to take claim over religious leadership in our country and to push for gender parity throughout its ranks.

Perhaps engaging the other half of our population in the spiritual ranks might even ameliorate the religious fundamentalism and extremism we have come to take for granted here in America.

Together with my female colleagues, on a daily basis, I am engaged in the arduous task of breaking the stained glassed ceiling. However, our efforts will prove unfruitful unless there is cooperation across the denominational, religious and secular spectrum.

 

Read the Rest Here

About two years ago, when I started this blog a document appeared on Torahweb (a website dedicated to the values of the influential Centrist Orthodox Roshei Yeshiva) that is a great primary document about the opinions of a solid plurality of YU in the last decade. The document reflects the tension between the Centrist Torah lifestyle of study, Yirat shamayim, and family on one side and the needs to have a solid upper-middle class well-paying career on the other. The document is 20 pages long, so here are just excerpts- here is a pdf. I am surprised that in the interim no one has gone beyond mere mention and picked up on for definition or fully discussed the document. I see the document as extremely important for understanding certain segments of the community. (I was reminded of it because I went for mincha yesterday to a group that both produced and is reflective of the document, wonderful people).

A Ben Torah’s Guide to Parnassa

The goal of this publication is to share with current talmidim the insight and experience of bnai Torah who are, b’ezras Hashem, succeeding both in their profession and in other aspects of life. They discuss how to prepare for and succeed in their profession, as well as how to strike a proper balance between hishtadlus forparnassa and other mitzvos. We hope that this will give current talmidim the information they need to avoid the trap of spiritual mediocrity.

Hashem is perfectly capable of making things work out for us. However, He requires that we play by His rules, i.e. we must make a realistic hishtadlus, keep our priorities straight, and trust that He will bless our efforts with whatever success we are allocated each year on Yomim Noraim. One who thinks that it is in his hands to earn a living (“kochi v’otzem yadi” – Devarim 8:17) is delusional. At the same time, one who does not play by Hashem’s rules and expects things to work out on all fronts is severely misguided. Of course, our hishtadlus is not limited to parnassa! We must also make a realistic hishtadlus for having learning time and family time.

Invest in Your Future
There is a common, and unfortunate, desire among bnei Torah to “patter up” college as quickly and as easily as possible. This desire, when examined in the context of a life-long pursuit of shleimus in avodas Hashem, must be seen as nothing other than a powerful atzas Yetzer Harah. The modern economy awards those with higher levels of skills and training. One whose goal is to “patter up” college generally chooses an easy major in college which may not provide professional skills that would be in high demand in the economy.

One who wants time to learn, parent, and properly perform the other duties of a ben Torah, is looking for a better than average work situation and must therefore have better than average qualifications and training. One who “pattered up” college and did not go to graduate school will not be in high demand, and the odds are that he will have to work long hours for the majority of his career to make ends meet, thus eliminating learning time, parenting time, etc. Similarly, in tough economic times, it is easiest to fire lower-skilled employees, as they are easily replaced once the economy picks up again.

The Yetzer Harah dresses himself up in the clothing of “tzidkus” and “hasmada,” telling you that you need to over-extend your learning time for the three or four years you are in college by “pattering up” college. But in so doing he undermines your avodas Hashem for the rest of your adult life.

A talmid who seeks shleimus should invest the time to get the higher level of skills and training that will enable him to command a better work situation and thus more time for learning and other mitzvos. This means taking college seriously and, more often than not, going to graduate school.

Of course, one must also spend long hours in the beis medrash during his college years. After all, if one does not learn to correctly balance learning and college, how can he be confident he will balance learning with working, parenting, and more? A talmid in Y.U., for example, should strive to have at least a full morning seder,shiur, and a significant night seder, coupled with serious college studies that are relevant to his parnassa.

Priorities and Lifestyle
It is the priority of a ben-Torah to follow the will of the Ribono shel Olam as outlined by the Torah and interpreted by Chazal. Our priorities have an enormous affect on all of our life decisions: what occupation to choose, whom to marry, and where to live. As early as high school we start making priority-based, career-oriented decisions that will significantly impact our avodas Hashem, be it our bein adam lamakom (learning, tefillah btzibbur, etc.) or our bein adam lachaveiro (being a good spouse, parent, etc.).

Our priorities determine the lifestyle we would like to live and that lifestyle will heavily influence our choice of occupation. WordNet defines the term “lifestyle” to mean “a manner of living that reflects the person’s values and attitudes”. If our true priority in life is to serve Hashem, we will choose a lifestyle which will deemphasize physical luxuries and allows us time to learn and be good parents. If we choose to work long hours for a high salary while sacrificing growth in learning and time with our children, our lifestyle makes a clear statement (especially to our children) about our real priorities, all lip-service to the contrary notwithstanding.

In order to avoid a spiritually bankrupt lifestyle we must differentiate between comfort and luxury. We need to know what is necessary for the level of yishuv hadaasthat will allow us to optimally serve Hashem and know when we have crossed the line into a pursuit of luxury that will pull us away from serving Hashem.

Personal Accounts
In this section bnei Torah in different professions share their own experiences and approaches to balancing work and other mitzvos. Their accounts include both general advice as well as personal reflections. The general advice gives the reader the facts and insights he needs to make informed career decisions. The more personal reflections provide a glimpse into the decisions these bnei Torah made and into the role of yad Hashem in their careers.

Law
So now, instead of working at a prestigious big firm job with a nice window office in midtown Manhattan with a secretary and access to paralegals and junior associates, I work for a company in a windowless office in a boring office park in suburban NYC and I make my own copies. But I usually get home by 7 pm to help my kids with their homework and put them to bed. At my law firm job, working late into the night was routine. For my in-house jobs, it is a rarity. There is no question that my in-house jobs have provided more time outside the office for family and learning than the big law firm jobs. Not being in NYC also helps since the commute is shorter and there are far fewer people in the office that have made their work their life.

Computer Science
1. Live reflectively. Have a daily mussar seder and some kind of daily reminder (ex – daily alarm on your phone) of why/how you work. Otherwise, you are in great danger of “going with the flow” of the corporate culture. The culture of corporate America is a secular religion, and you need to be strong in your real religion to not get sucked in.
2. If possible, learn daily in a yeshiva. Once “grown up”, one is less likely to accept spiritual mediocrity for himself if he is consistently exposed to the ruach of a yeshiva.

Marketing
One of the first things I had to get used to was being called by my English name, which I rarely used in the previous 21 years of my life. Although today, with many other minorities having non-English names as well as many frum Jews deciding to use their Hebrew names, going by one’s Hebrew name is much less of an issue now than it was 15-20 years ago. I would highly recommend keeping your Hebrew name since it goes with my overall theme of maintaining your Jewish identity and not being bashful at all about it. (In fact, as you will see, you will be treated with more respect.)

1. You only have one chance to make a statement about how important Yidishkeit is to you. Once you cross the line, it is almost impossible to go back. If you give-in once, you are doomed. I remember interviewing on a Friday afternoon for my current position, the series of interviews dragged on and the fifth one that day, with my prospective boss, was cutting into my driving home time to make Shabbos. After realizing it is now or never, I politely apologized and informed him that I needed to leave for sundown. He completely understood and was actually a bit embarrassed that he might be infringing upon my Sabbath. After I got the job, he mentioned to me what strong moral courage it took to do this and it was one reason why he hired me.

Medicine 1
In addition, given the length of time spent in training, you should not view these years as time to get through as quickly as possible. Typically you will spend your late 20s and early 30s in training. This a critical time for your personal, family, limud hatorah, and ruchniyos development. During this time you will likely see your family begin to grow, and you will be making decisions that will impact you and your family throughout your working life. The portion of your time outside of classes and clinical activities should center around your family, your shul, and/or your frum friends.

People who have successfully [from the point of view of shmiras mitzvos and yiras shomayim] navigated the long training period in medicine have had their social and family life anchored by individuals and institutions who share values they wish to reinforce. Conversely, people who developed their primary friendships with individuals whose values are not defined by Torah were rarely successful in staying frum.

1. Develop a relationship with a rav or poseik with whom you can freely turn to ask sheilos. These will be numerous. Issues ranging from Shabbos to Yichud toMaacholos Assuros and even end-of-life questions will come up. Patients will turn to you with questions that have halachic ramifications. Make sure you pass them on to a poseik.
2. One of the secrets of getting through medical school and post-graduate training and remaining frum is to develop as many connections as possible with thefrum community. If you are male, tefilla betzibur whenever possible is critical. If there are regular shiurim or chavrusos available, take part. Nowadays, if you don’t have a local chavrusa available, set up a telephone chavrusa. If you are a woman, daven in a shul on Shabbos and Yom Tov. Go to shiurim.

Physics / Engineering
“What’s a good Jewish boy going to do as an engineer/physicist?” I cannot tell you how many times I heard variants of the above question from various relatives and friends throughout my years in high-school and college. Now, more than 15 years later, I still hear the same question.

Read the Rest Here and as pdf file here.

I was traveling so I did not get to write this up until now.

On Thursday February 16th, David Brooks called Lin heroic due to his education and belief in contrast to the vulgarity of sports; he even connected Lin to Rav Soloveitchik. I got a smile about it because I had typed the same thing three days prior on Monday February 13th. That prior Monday I had entered into my computer a paraphrase from a new book that “most contemporary religious American life was dogmatic hierarchy grounded in an absolute transcendent with contrasting foreground of the self-obsessed contingent individuals lost in money, sports, and consumerism.” The new book asked: What happened to the hero of modernity? Where are the heroic visions of Camus, Unamuno, or Niebuhr? I noted to myself that Monday: We should compare contemporary Evangelical or Centrist approaches to Rav Soloveitchik’s Lonely Man of Prayer. And my relationship with Brooks has been going on like this for several years.

When Brooks published his Social Animal last March, I had just written my Orthodox Forum paper. Looking at the footnotes to Brook’s book, I saw that we had very similar reading lists, we kept up on the same authors, journals, and schools of thought, and we agree on what was an important fact. The difference was that he glorified the intuitions of the middlebrow upper middle class life style and I had described problems from both secular and Torah perspectives.

So, on Feb 13th I was reading James S. Bielo’s important new book Emerging Evangelicals: Faith Modernity, and the Desire for Authenticity (NYU Press, Oct. 2011) where he contrasts the heroic religion of mid-twentieth century to the combined authoritarian and self-absorbed religion of today. Bielo relied on several articles written by others in 2009 and 2010, but whether Brooks had just read Bielo or had read the earlier articles we are still keeping pace. The differences was that Brooks offered a self-comforting message that Lin is our religious heroic similar to Soloveitchik and my notes pointed out the contrasts.

In any case, James S. Bielo’s Emerging Evangelicals is a good book and worth reading by academics, its notecard summaries of the current data and micro-studies would be too much for a general reader. His book is part of a new trend of Christian Anthropology, that is, not asking questions about the relationship of religion and modernity, rather the more subtle questions that distinguish between congregations.

Bielo points out how many people are now moving beyond their Evangelical religion of the 1990’s to new forms especially the Emergent Church. He contrasts what they are leaving and what they are seeking. You can compare the Evangelical issues to the Orthodox concerns of the gen y and gen z.

1) 1990’s made everything into “objective” facts, into truth claims and dogmatic truth or wrapped themselves up in a mantel of scientific objectivity.
Now people want their religion to speak about the human narrative, human relations, or our problems and frailties.
2)The 1990’s made everything text based and now people want local concerns, local color and lived life.
3)The 1990’s counted heads and wanted outreach and now people want saintliness and sincerity. (Germane to the Brooks discussion, we don’t do kiruv by sports and pop culture. Brooks found the heroic in sports.)
4)The 1990’s dogmatically insisted that one must follow the religious mores and practices of the 1980s and 1990s, now people want to go back to medieval, Renaissance, and even early twentieth century. We can now go back to viable practice and ides from earlier times.
5)Finally, the current trends seek an authenticity in religion – liberation from false beliefs and practices of suburban life that undermine freedom. Now there is desire to overcome fragmented, economic pressured consumerism. For more, see Bielo’s introduction.

The best part, in my opinion, of Bielo’s book is his discussion of deconversion. Bielo contrasts those who go off the path and leave- usually from a more restrictive enclave- to those who are deconverted and are left in a wilderness or looking for a new formulation. The latter group of Emergents find that the religion is not what they were promised or what they think is correct so they go the way of many greats before them and seek a return to true religion. They don’t question religion as a whole, rather they want something different. In Bielo’s case, they become Emergent Church. They are self-conscious about what they want, unlike those who leave religion and their conversion involves an opening of the eyes and a loss of naivete (see Louis Frankenthaler on Haredi Departure Narratives).

Bielo and the hundreds of studies of the last six years show that knowledgeable people are leaving because they find their religious group too dogmatic, or too anti-science, or lacking artistic values, intellectual striving, and creativity. They were promised a religion has the best of Orthodoxy and the modern world and did not find it. This is the point where Bielo shows that they are not leaving the Church but “deconverting.” They are involved in a two step process of turning from their communities and formulating a self-conscious critique. They become more into relgion rather than less into it.

Bielo compares them to the 17th century author John Bunyan in Pilgrim’s Progress, and those who want to leave the association of religion with specific demands of materialism, vanity fair, and a culture of belonging, not one of virtue.

This group does not seek to jettison faith, rather they cultivate a self-conscious highlighting of religious attention because they find that their former their religious lives were wanting. They have hope and choice as effective tools for change. They want a return to the heroic virtues of religion, the aspirations and heights of the heroic struggle. They want to do it as religious individuals not as self-obsessed consumers or submissive to an authoritarian hierarchy.

They are now are concerned about the loss of their soul, they despise the consumerism, they start to read socially banned books and they seek to apply religion to broader realms of their lives.

They show irony and mock the established wisdom like Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life. And they are willing to read negative criticism of their own community or secular books and to ask how their community is lacking. They are self-conscious about living post-Durkheim and acknowledge the social elements of what they do. And they want social change, to go beyond consumer society, and to transform the world into a kingdom of God, not Brook’s acceptance of it.

Brooks saw a tension between the shallow consumerist life and religion and was criticized on a NYT watch for seeing the mere existence of Lin, the future Presbyterian pastor, as a solution to our current consumerist un-self reflective religion. But the real tragedy, is that all the people who took pride that Brooks quoted their patron saint Rav Soloveitchik did not realize that he quoted him wrong and that their own Orthodoxy reflected the very banality that David Brooks and the Emergents decry. But Brooks, and those who linked to it, thought all that is needed to change reality is a good quote rather than seeking to face our human condition with the requisite heroic virtues. For a long detailed take down of the piece with full quotes from Rav Soloveitchik, see here.

Modern Adam the second, as soon as he finishes translating religion into the cultural vernacular, and begins to talk the “foreign” language of faith, finds himself lonely, forsaken, misunderstood, at times even ridiculed by Adam the first, by hinself. When the hour of estrangement strikes, the ordeal of man of faith begins and he starts his withdrawal from society, from Adam the first—be he an outsider, be he himself. He returns, like Moses of old, to his solitary hiding and to the abode of loneliness. Yes, the loneliness of contemporary man of faith is of a special kind. He experiences not only ontological loneliness but also social isolation, whenever he dares to deliver the genuine faith-kerygma. This is both the destiny and the human historical situation of the man who keeps a rendezvous with eternity, and who, in spite of everything, continues tenaciously to bring the message of faith to majestic man. (“The Lonely Man of Faith,” p. 65)

Yes, I assume Brooks just read his copy of Bielo. But our solutions are different.

One of the best academic books of 2010 was Michael L. Miller’s Rabbis and Revolution: The Jews of Moravia in the Age of Emancipation (Stanford University Press). It is an excellent political history of Moravian Jewry in the nineteenth century. Miller takes the well-trodden account of Enlightenment, Edict of Tolerance, and quest for Emancipation in Germanic lands and uses remarkable attention to detail to make it fresh. The book ends with the attainment of Emancipation and its immediate aftermath by Moravian Jews. As a second focus of the book, Miller fixes his sights on Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch who was chief rabbi of Moravia in Nikolsburg during the fight for Emancipation.

Miller paints a vivid picture of life without Emancipation. Jews were subjected to numerous restrictions including the familiant laws of 1726 -1727 which only granted rights for a first born to marry, all other siblings had to marry clandestinely or to the new lands of Hungary to get married. They were 30% tailors, as well as glaziers and butchers, but most were traders. There were very limited numbers of stores or property and rental rights for Jews . Many Jews were village merchants and peddlers, which lead to a degradation of Jewish life. Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch lamented how husbands and wives were always on road with their children elsewhere, they were not together even for holidays.

The Edict of Tolerance mandated elementary school with a curriculum of math, geography, German literature, and Enlightenment morality of universalism and productivity. Many Jewish schools in the Enlightenment spirit were set up. And Rabbinic figures such as Rabbi Eybeschutz, Landau, and Horowitz accepted this moderate haskalah. In Moravia, Mendelsohn’s approach worked. There was no anti- rabbinism among the Enlightened. And more importantly, there was no bunker mentality as developed in Hungary, western aesthetics were accepted, secular studies were the norm, along with the study of Hebrew and medieval works such as Albo. Chief Rabbi Banet treated these fields as extra-Talmudic accompaniments (parperaot le torah). Day schools had secular subjects but left Torah as traditional study with the addition of Bible and Hebrew. The Jewish studies was not put in the hands of anti-rabbinic approaches. In Moravia, even the maskilim remained in fold and were not connected to anti-rabbinic reformist tendencies. Banet’s successor Rabbi Nechimias Tribitsch was more reluctant to accept the Enlightement and was leading the rabbinate into a decline. Rabbi Hirsch was chosen as a modernist arriving to restore the glory to the Rabbinate.

Miller paints a nice picture of the modernizing rabbinic advocates of Enlightenment and Emancipation such as Hirsch. And has a nice presentation of the debates between Rabbis Samson Raphael Hirsch and Hirsch Fassel. They shared similar views of education and enlightenment and both firmly rejected the pre-Enlightenment Yeshiva approach to education but differed they over Jewish practice. Fassel criticizes Hirsch for including in his Horev the kabbalistic custom to look at one’s fingernails at havdalah and for maintaining the Shulkhan Arukh’s requirement to give oneself lashes before Yom Kippur. We see Hirsch at his best in his use of kabbalistic customs, not as a kabbalist, but as an anti-kabbalist who has a good phenomenological sense of synagogue ritual, like Franz Rosenzweig. (Hirsch displayed this same ritual sense in his first year in Frankfort where he almost lost the job for instituting Simhat Torah hakafot at night. He converted a Safed pietistic custom from a theurgic rectification to a children’s holiday of circling the synagogue for sweets.) Hirsch even allowed noisemaking on purim.

In contrast, Fassel wanted to abolish anything irrational and non- Talmudic and he wanted customs abolished if the acceptance was accidental, not universally accepted, or the conditions changed. (For example he abolished kitniyot in 1846 as rabbi of Prossnitz). Fassel is immortalized in Jewish literature as calling, in the course of this debate, Hirsch a siddur-lamdan and not a Rabbinic scholar.

Hirsch focused his efforts on synagogue reform in the spirit of the Enlightenment. He demanded that synagogue attendees wear clean clothes, prayer in unison, wear clean prayer shawls and not bring children under five into the synagogue. Hirsh modeled his service after his friend and colleague the Reformer Isaac Manheimer who devised what became known as the Vienna rite. The service was to have a male choir, the bimah moved up front, weddings in synagogue , and sermons in German. Manheimer created a Unity Prayerbook (Einheitsgebetbuch) of 1840. Manheimer, who preached in German and recited the poetry of Schiller, Lessing, and Goethe in his sermons, was close to Hirsch’s own aesthetic approach. Hirsch implemented an Enlightenment aesthetic of oratory, choirs, decorum, clerical gowns, patriotism, and the use of musical instruments for non-service special events. The lines not to cross were prayer in the vernacular (which was not a problem in Catholic Moravia), no organ during the regular service, and no liturgical change.

In this middle period of Nikolsburg, we see Hirsch working with and friendly with mild Refomers, working with the entire community (gemminde) and willing to follow the practices of Refomers and the Enlightenment. He did not share the prohibitions of the followers of the Hatam Sofer for adopting changes or copying the ways of the Reformers. As chief Rabbi, Hirsch even wanted to institute a modern scholarly seminary based on the seminary in Padua, eventually Rabbi Hildesheimer fulfilled this need for Germanic lands. (Even in Frankfort, Hirsch did not create any form of yeshiva and is best remembered for discussions with rabbinical students about German poetry).

As chief Rabbi, Hirsch sent his synagogue reforms to be posted in front of every synagogue which elicited much bad will. He was seen by the smaller communities as autocratic. And with an ironic twist to Hirsch claim of Orthodoxy as allowing one to realize Schiller’s aesthetic education for freedom, Hirsch was seen by the smaller communities as taking away freedom and was cast as the tyrant Gessler of Schiller’s William Tell.

Noah H. Rosenbloom claimed that sources to discuss Hirsch’s involvement in the events of the the 1848 revolution are sketchy. Miller, in contrast, documents in great detail how “Samson Raphael Hirsch, in his capacity as Moravian Chief Rabbi, was actively involved in nearly every stage of the struggle for Jewish emancipation from the outbreak of the revolution in March 1848 until the attainment of emancipation in March 1849… Hirsch was expected to oversee not only the religious and educational needs of his Moravian Jewish flock, but also their political needs.” Hence, Hirsch was one of the first modern rabbis whose authority derived not only from talmudic erudition, but also from his university education and his ability to serve as political leader of his community in the fight for Jewish rights. In both Oldenburg (1831- 1841) and Emden (1841- 1847), Hirsch had served as a political intermediary between the government and the small German Jewish communities.

Miller collected many of the primary documents in this political battle. On 20 March 1848, in a broadside addressed to “our Christian brethren,” Hirsch adumbrated the basic political philosophy that would guide him through the revolution: the Jews must be emancipated with the Christians as equal citizens, not separately as Jew.

Speak with us, for us and on behalf of us! Show that justice has become a reality in your bosom; show that you want to blot out the indignity of centuries, not just the indignity that you have suffered; no, also the indignity forgive [me] – that you have inflicted! Show that you recognize us as brothers just as we recognize you as brothers, and that you are not capable of enjoying your own rights as long as just one fellow brother still has to complain before God’ s throne that his right to be a human among humans, a citizen among citizens has been denied and trampled on God’ s earth.

Hirsch called for the creation of a unified Committee for Moravian Jewry as a kind of cohesive lobbying organization.

Throughout April 1848, “much criticism had been leveled at Samson Raphael Hirsch and Moravia’ s ‘modern rabbis Hirsch Fassel, Abraham Schmiedl, Moritz Duschak, and Abraham Neuda for their relative inactivity in the political sphere. As chief rabbi and presumptive leader of Moravian Jewry, Samson Raphael Hirsch received the bruntof the criticism – especially after a Sabbath sermon delivered in Nikolsburg in mid-April. As reported in several Jewish newspapers, Hirsch preached that only strict observance of religious rituals would save the Jews from the ‘swelling torrent’ of the times. In a traditional formulation correlating religious laxity with divine punishment, Hirsch called on Jewish women to cover their hair, reprimanded Jewish men for shaving with razors, and warned both sexes against drinking Christian wine

Hirsch served as a deputy in the Moravian Diet and worked closely with his Reform Rabbi friend Isaac Mannheimer a deputy in the more influential Austrian Reichstag. Hirsch delivered no dramatic speeches on the floor of the Diet, Yet he proved himself to be an impassioned advocate of Jewish rights in his behind-the-scenes interactions with Moravian Governor Leopold Graf Lazansk. Hirsch and Mannheimer kept a regular correspondence of politics and friendship from September1848 until March 1849, which is being prepared for publication.

In Miller’s opinion, Hirsch distinguished himself more as a champion of Jewish rights than as an expositor of Jewish law. And Hirsch’s autocratic approach lead to a breakdown of the chief rabbi’s authority as head of the community (gemeinde)authority replacing it with independent synagogues and greater lay decision making. This already foreshadows Hirsch’s later dislike of consensus and working with a geminde.

Miller also ponders a question that has always bothered me: Why do we have no Hasidism in Moravia if the disciple of the Magid of Mezerich Reb Shmelke was rosh yeshiva in Nikolsberg? Furthermore, many Hasidic leaders spent their time in the Yeshiva, including Moshe Leib Sassov, the Hozeh Jacob Isaac of Lublin, The Koznitzer Magid and Kalever rebbi. Why did not nothing rub off on the population? Miller summarizes the answers as follows. Chone Shmurek thinks that the linguistic difference between Moravian Yiddish and Galician Yiddish were an insurmountable divide. Gershon Hundret credited the rise of Hasidism to an adolescent youth culture seeking rebellion and religious experience and Moravia had an aging population. Michael Silber thinks that Moravians already had deep Frankist roots and were therefore weary of even newer spiritualism. And Miller adds without negating the other interpretations is that Shmelke was too somber and ascetic to lead a pneumatic revivalist group.

My biggest complaint about the book is that in many cases I wanted more. Miller mentions many rabbis in the smaller communities who wrote important works about whom I wanted to know more. Miler mentions how by 1829 – there was only one yeshiva left in the region from the dozens that were there sixty years prior. I wanted to know the small decremental decisions by which parents and local rabbis lost interest in yeshivot for their children. Miller covered how Herz Homberg’s catechism Bene Zion was too liberal and that later Moravia rabbis wrote more traditional versions even if they “viewed Jewish catechisms with deep suspicion.” They considered Jewish catechisms by their nature aiming to distill religion to its essence without an appreciation for the slow study of Jewish texts. Yet, this method of religious indoctrination was the way the majority of Western European Jews gained their religion, and their Orthodoxy. These study of these works remains a desideratum. Finally, I wanted translations of many of the important texts in the volume as an appendix. I know a handout of the Hirsch-Fassel debate or the political sermons would make the era come alive in the classroom.

What happens when a professor of Jewish philosophy has to teach the historic survey of Jews in the modern era? They turn it into a semi-philosophic course by posing a philosophic question to examine as they move through the historical narrative. But do you publish the notes of your survey course?

Leora Batnitzky of Princeton University wrote How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to  Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton University Press, 2011) covered the historical narrative of modernity and used the philosophic question of how Judaism became a religion in the modern Protestant sense of the word. For Batnitzky, Mendelssohn removed the coercive body politic from Judaism and she returned to that time bound definition throughout the book even when discussing Eastern European Jewry, Zionism or American Jewry. Jon Levenson reviews the success of the book. I have selected Levenson’s discussion of the political aspects of Graetz and of Reform social action.

Levenson uses the second half of the review to ponder some of the bigger questions. What does it mean to be modern?  It is surely not just the temporality of living in the 19^th or 20^th centuries. Levenson takes issue with Jacob Katz’s treating Orthodoxy as entirely modern because it is self –consciously orthodox. There is a level where the Catholic church and Orthodoxy are less innovations than Unitarian universals. So he is baffled that Batnitzky calls Hirsch “the most modern of modern Judaisms.” Levenson invites us to begin to think about how traditional thinkers set up part of their thought as authentic, traditional, organic, set up other parts as modern, and in the middle employ a wide range of hermenutical and cultural tools to divide their positions into many parts. For example, Levenson corrected Batnitzky in that Rav Soloveitchik’s thought is dialectical, religion is public, communal, and corporate even as faith is non-communicable, Protestant, and private. Read his section on Hirsch below and answer Ernesto Laclau’s question: Were we ever modern? Why do say that? Would Jose Casenova or Asad see modern religion as privatized?

What Are They?: Modernity and Jewish Self-understanding- Jon Levenson
Commonweal February 24, 2012

Even apart from the thoroughgoing traditionalists (about  whom more later), reactions to Reform came swiftly. Henrich Graetz (1817–91), the greatest Jewish historian of the time (and perhaps ever), believed that traditional law was essential to the identity and survival of the Jews. “Judaism is not a religion of the individual,” he wrote, “but of the community.  That actually means that Judaism, in the strict sense of the word, is not even a religion…but rather a constitution for a body politic.” It cannot therefore be reduced to an abstraction like monotheism or anything so vaporous as morality divorced from history and normative tradition. Indeed, it is the study of history that discloses the spiritual power of Judaism and the Jewish people and the deep continuities between ostensibly diverse periods. In Roman Catholicism, perhaps  an analogy to John Henry Newman, Graetz’s contemporary, would be in order. In Judaism, his continuity lies with what in Germany was called the Positive-Historical School and in America, Conservative Judaism, which has traditionally put great emphasis on history and peoplehood, less on the particularities of observance, and almost none on theology.

Unfortunately, Batnitzky’s use of the term “political” is sometimes problematic. One difficulty with it is that the liberal positions that descend from Mendelssohn are not without a political agenda of their own. In the case of American Reform Judaism, for example, theological liberalism has long correlated with an activist agenda in support of “progressive” causes; more recently,  it has correlated with advocacy of positions on issues like  abortion and homosexual behavior that are at odds with the classical rabbinic teachings. This is not apolitical. It may, rather, be hyperpolitical, for it allows a new sociopolitical vision to displace the traditional religious norm

Sometimes, when Batnitzky writes “political,” she seems to mean “communal” or “corporate.” Whatever one calls it, the frame within which she views the many modern Jewish thinkers she discusses necessarily constricts her vision and requires her to give short shrift to important dimensions of their thought.

At times, I found myself wondering whether Batnitzky’s framework has not led her to judgments that are too quick and too sweeping, as when she claims that Soloveitchik (1903–93), the towering figure in Modern Orthodoxy in the twentieth century, “implicitly affirms a Protestant idea that religion is private and individual.”

Beyond her difficulties with Soloveitchik, Batnitzky seems generally averse to the more traditional religious responses to emancipation and too eager to make the highly dubious claim that Orthodoxy is as much “a modern invention” as the other varieties of Judaism in modern times. Noting, for example, the successful effort of Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–88), leader of the Orthodox community in Frankfurt, “to establish a separate community by seceding from the Jewish community recognized by the state,” she concludes that “Hirsch makes Judaism more like the Christianity of his time…relegating itself to private, confessional status”  and thus “leaves room…for a kind of religious pluralism,  despite his disdain for Jews who are not Orthodox.” But in Hirsch’s mind, the basis for the authentic Jewish community lies in something not private but public, not confessional but objectively historical—the revelation of the Torah and the normativity of its rabbinic interpretation. As he puts it, “the Law of God that Moses brought down to us…is also the only standard for testing a Jewish community to see whether it is truly Jewish.” This is as far from religious pluralism as one can get. That the adherents of the traditional law and theology in Hirsch’s time found themselves in a novel situation with the emergence of organized alternatives, can be readily granted, and so can the fact that some rather untraditional and historically inaccurate notes can be seen in his writing. But none of this justifies Batnitzky’s claim that “Hirsch’s Orthodoxy is…the most modern of modern Judaisms.”

For Batnitzky, the mere fact that a community exist in, and responds to, the modern world makes it “a modern invention” and even “modernity’s child.” Perhaps an analogy to Christianity can clarify the weakness in this way of seeing things. It is obvious that the Roman Catholic Church has changed dramatically over the centuries, especially in the past two. Modernity has clearly altered it—if not in its dogmatic core, then certainly in its apologetic strategies, institutional structures, and political relationships. But would it be reasonable to say that Roman Catholicism is therefore every bit as much a creature of modernity as, say, Unitarian Universalism? The historical reality in both the Christian and the Jewish cases calls for a subtler and more nuanced analysis, one that recognizes that modernization occurs across a spectrum and the past, to one degree or another, lives on in the present.

There is a new book on Maimonides that treats Maimonides’ Guide as a work whose intention is to show a reader a method of combining scripture and philosophy and purposefully leaving the questions open without an answer. The secret of the Guide is not philosophy to be kept from the scriptural masses or the secret of a specific answer, rather the open ended nature of the entire intellectual endeavor, even the interpretation of scripture is open ended. Maimonides takes the dialectic arguments of kalam and shows how to do it it better after reading the falasifa. Doing theology better means not to settle on simple answers. The new book does not focus on the metaphysical problem one at a time but takes in the entire project. I like the idea.

For example on the opinions of creation and prophecy, rather than debate the articles of Davidson, Kaplan, Harvey, Ivry, and Seeskin on how to line up the positions in  Guide part II, Davies says that Maimonides does not have an answer only a method. Davies accepts the article by Malino that Maimonides has no answer to creation because of the methodological limits and makes it a paradigm for the entire book. This is somewhat similar to the way Prof G Sermonetta presented the Guide commentary of the 13th century R. Yehudah Romano, as open ended interpretation. (Maybe, echoes of Albert the Great)

Davies also steers clear of Guttman’s Neoplatonic understanding of Maimonides on the Divine as well as the Aristotelianism of Davidison to read Maimonides as already pointing in Thomistic directions.  When  I get to teach using the volume, I will have a better sense of it.

Daniel Davies, Method and Metaphysics in Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed, Oxford University Press, 2011, 215pp., $65.00 (hbk),

Reviewed byJohn Inglis, University of Dayton

Davies does this is to move the focus beyond single issues. For example, in order to offer a fuller picture of the Guide, Davies devotes chapters to issues regarding the eternity of creation, necessity, negative theology, divine existence, divine knowledge, and a cosmologically important vision of Ezekiel. This widening of the discussion marks a significant difference from other approaches, but Davies has another card up his sleeve. Extending recent work on dialectic, he shifts the locus of contradiction to contemporary tensions between common opinions, many rooted in scripture, rather than contradictions grounded in shielding philosophical demonstration.

Davies argues that Maimonides challenges readers to consider completing claims that lie outside of demonstration, frequently based on the Torah. On this reading, Maimonides constructs a dialectical presentation across different topics in order to prepare active readers “to test” various opinions themselves. Since these issues often involve opinions rooted in the Torah, the task is to become skilled at untangling apparent contradictions and this requires extensive philosophical training and dexterity.

A longstanding difference lies between those who see Maimonides’s Guide as a philosophical break from earlier exegetical works and those who do not. By locating the seventh type of contradiction in claims often based on scripture and not on philosophical demonstration, Davies avoids both poles of this dilemma.

On Davies’s interpretation, the Guide remains philosophically and religiously important, because physics and metaphysics can approximate the inner meaning of the Torah. On this reading, Maimonides counsels exegetes in the Guide of the Perplexed to go beyond the face value of scripture by using philosophy to understand that to which scripture alludes. For ordinary people who lack philosophical training, a more literal reading of the Law provides a guide for the practical life.

One important issue taken to involve contradiction is the question whether Maimonides sides with the Torah on the creation of the world in time, or with Plato’s view of matter being eternal. In the not so distant past, historians presented Maimonides as a critic of Plato’s view and as adhering to the scriptural account that the world began to exist in time. But Maimonides also praises Plato for arguing that only matter and not the world is eternal (Maimonides 1995, p. 115). Shifting the focus to Maimonides’s praise for Plato works against his support for the view of the Torah that God created the world with a beginning in time. Should we read Maimonides as building contradictions into his text in order to mislead the orthodox, or is something else going on here? Maimonides also appears at one point to side with Aristotle over the Torah. For example, Davies considers Jonathan Malino’s argument that a careful reading of Maimonides lends support to the view that he in fact agrees with Aristotle that the world itself is eternal (pp. 31-32).

Many scholars dispute which philosopher it is that Maimonides thought got it right, but this is not Davies’s project. Neither does he argue that Maimonides sides with every opinion rooted in the Torah. Instead, Davies proposes that Maimonides trains philosophical exegetes to mine truth hidden in the Torah.

In the central chapters of the book, Davies widens his scope to consider positive and negative attribution in order to clarify that negative attribution does not contradict divine knowledge of particulars (pp. 54-55).

Davies offers a careful account of Maimonides’s account of the bounded nature of individual things and the good that results (pp. 73-77). A thing exists to the degree that it is good, and it does not exist to the degree to which it lacks the fullness of the good. Maimonides denies that God is limited in this way. Since creaturely existence implies limitation, Maimonides argues it is not accurate to apply existence to the divine in any positive sense. It is more accurate to deny of the divine the limitations of creaturely existence. Therefore, through negation we can reason out ways in which the divine does not exist under limitation. In this sense, God does not exist as creatures do, the sort of view that led Julius Guttmann to deny that Maimonides affirms divine perfections in any positive sense (p. 56). Davies counters this interpretation with the claim that while Maimonides is concerned in his Guide to sketch limitations on human knowledge, he does not deny positive attributes of the divine.

Davies’s challenge is to work up an account of Maimonides’s view of the uncreated existence of the divine that does not involve negation (pp. 79-80).

From Maimonides’s perspective of what human beings can know, Guttmann might have a point after all. Davies notes this difficulty when stating that since our words for Maimonides are so completely bound up with the limitations of the created order, we can speak only with “absolute equivocation” about the perfections of the divine (p. 82). But this view of human understanding does not threaten Davies’s point that Maimonides affirms positive perfections in the divine including existence, even if he is unclear regarding what this amounts to. There need be no contradiction between a reliance on negative attribution in human understanding and affirming positive attributes of the divine. Davies’s contribution is to construct arguments for how this works for Maimonides, arguments that Maimonides alludes to and often does not spell out.

In his conclusion, Davies presents the Guide not as a work of philosophical contradictions calculated to hide truth from the uneducated, but as a work for religious and intellectual training. He argues that there is no gulf between religion and philosophy for Maimonides as they are “mutually complementary” to one another (p. 157). Read the rest here.

Are Jews a perpetual outsider, “other” or stranger? Are Jews rootless individuals or communal? We have an important new book exploring the theme of Jew as outsider in French Jewish and non-Jewish thought and a great review of that book by an expert on Sarte’s Zionism. There are other, less focused, reviews out there, but this one captures both the value and limits of Hammerschlag’s volume. I was going to post this last month and did not get to it.

Sarah Hammerschlag, The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought, University of Chicago Press, 2010, 298pp., $25.00 (pbk).

Reviewed by Jonathan Judaken, Rhodes College

Sarah Hammerschlag’s The Figural Jew offers an insightful new interpretation of how a cluster of postwar French thinkers (Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, and Jacques Derrida) represented Jews and Judaism in their thought. To do so, she zeros in on the figure of the wandering Jew. Ahasverus, an icon of the medieval Christian imagination…
The Wandering Jew embodies the figure of the Jew as nomad, stranger, outsider: the uprooted. As such, Ahasverus represents the antithesis of the French nation. This is true for both the universalist Republican legacy of the enlightenment that emancipated Jews in the French Revolution and for the integral nationalist tradition that stems from Maurice Barrès and Charles Maurras.

Hammerschlag seeks to explain how, over the course of postwar French thought, the trope of the wandering Jew, which once served as a quintessentially anti-Semitic icon, was revalorized. Here is her narrative in a nutshell: it began with Sartre’s celebration of an existentialist conception of Self as diasporic. Levinas buttressed this notion with a moral gloss. Blanchot gave Levinas a literary twist that emphasized the figurative elements of the trope. Derrida then gave full play to the self-conscious tropological deployment of the Jew.

For Hammerschlag, there are three key aims to following the trail of the wandering Jew in postwar French thought:
First, to show how Sartre and Levinas mined the resources of anti-Semitism and exploited them in order to define an ideal that could be differentiated from both nostalgic nationalism and the rhetoric of universalizing humanism. What is generated in the process is a figural Jew, an archetype for a new kind of difference in particularity whose function is to suggest that there is a positive moral valence to resisting the discourse of belonging that dominates both the universalist and the particularist versions of political identity (18, emphasis added).

The second aim is to show that in the self-referentiality that figurative discourse entails — that in pointing to Jews as figural — Sartre, Levinas, Blanchot, and Derrida, along with their deconstructive ilk, avoid repeating the dynamics of exclusivity and anti-Semitism through their repetition of Jewish tropes. I will say more about this below.

Hammerschlag rightly praises the central strand of Sartre’s Réflexions, which argues that Jewishness is represented as an intensification of the existentialist’s choice. The Jew is rootless; he is a stranger; he is defined and determined by the gaze of the other. The existentialist hero embraces his circumstances and the freedom and responsibility that exist therein. He does not flee; he chooses and engages. The Jew, as the stranger, as a ‘type who has nothing, no homeland,’ has a function like Kafka’s hero (93).

To her detriment, however, Hammerschlag does not consider Sartre’s long and sustained defense of Zionism and Israel. From 1948 through to his final days, Sartre was an articulate defender of Zionism as a Jewish liberation movement. In one of many statements that make the same point again and again, he wrote:

I will never abandon this constantly threatened country [Israel] whose existence ought not to be put into question. . . . I know that my stance earns me the enmity of certain Arabs who cannot understand that one is able to be at the same time for Israel and for them (Jean-Paul Sartre, “Ce que Jean-Paul Sartre avait dit à ‘Tribune Juive'”).

Sartre laid the philosophical ground for this position in his Réflexions sur la questions juive, where he insisted that Zionism represented one form of Jewish authenticity. Wrote Sartre in Anti-Semite and Jew:

he may also be led by his choice of authenticity to seek the creation of a Jewish nation [nation juive] possessing its own soil and autonomy; he may persuade himself that Jewish authenticity demands that the Jew [Juif] be sustained by a Jewish national community [communauté israélite].

Does not the stance that Sartre took on Israel and Zionism force us to question Hammerschlag’s reading of the figural Jew in his work?[1]

A similar complaint can be made about her interpretation of Levinas. Since what Levinas presents for Hammerschlag is “a philosophy of uprootedness” (119), she is critical of the ambivalence in Levinas’ own position on the State of Israel (see 161, for example). She is troubled as well by the legacy of some of his followers, like Benny Lévy, whose Judaism was defined by a return to orthodox forms of communal ritual observance (see 163, for example).

Lévy complained in his last work, Être juif, that Levinas had too often emphasized the universalist trace in his writings about Jews. Part of what attracted Lévy, the former leader of the French Maoists, to Levinas’s thought was his references to the authority of the Talmud and Halachah (Jewish Law) in his Jewish writings. Clearly entailed by this form of Judaism (in all its permutations) is communal observance: the daily ritual life of Jewish prayer, the shared study of Jewish texts, holy days, and adherence to the ceremonies of the Jewish life cycle.

To cite only one reference of countless in which Levinas calls for revivifying Jewish communal life, we can turn to his essay, “How is Judaism Possible?” In it, he surveys a set of communal institutions that can help revitalize the Jewish community, including new types of Jewish schools, youth movements, Jewish studies in the academy, yeshivot integrated into a Jewish higher-education system, and the State of Israel as a prod to Jewish community building:

The community needs truths that generate life. It needs a doctrinal and philosophical teaching that can be given on the level of cultivated minds. This teaching . . . can be created only by the community itself. It must be sustained, if need be provoked, at all events co-ordinated and unified. Pluralist tendencies do not exclude the unity of the institution in which they might be grouped (“How is Judaism Possible? in Difficult Liberty, 251).

How then do these twin issues of Sartre’s and Levinas’ defense of Israel and Zionism, coupled with Levinas’ advocacy of Jewish communal life sustained by rabbinic Judaism square with Hammerschlag’s rendition of the story of the figural Jew? Clearly Sartre and Levinas were both advocates of modes of Jewish communal life that do not always neatly tear apart the mythic and the figurative.

Glossing these incongruities, in the end, Hammerschlag hangs her hat on a specific deconstructive trajectory that her book rightly celebrates:

First appearing in Blanchot’s texts, and later developed in various directions by Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Georgio Agamben are visions of community that refuse both the universalizing and the particularizing options. What all these figures have inherited from Blanchot is a resistance to and suspicion of communal fusion, a suspicion, that is, of the modes of identification that bind people to a group, whether through territory, language, culture or ethnicity (263).

The risk is that her radically immanent readings, attentive to the deconstructive thrust of her argument, miss the contextual specifics that led Sartre and Levinas to make the claims in their work that augur against Hammerschlag’s reading of that work.

Indeed, without the broader context as an indicator of how writers understand the meaning of the word Juif, I remain unsure about how one disentangles the mythic from the figurative use of images of Jews and Judaism. Barrès clearly recognized that the Jew in his texts were “figural.” He was aware that “Jew” or “Jewish” could be deployed as an adjective that embodied a whole complex of forces. He said so. The texts of Shakespeare and Augustine and St. Paul suggest the same thing. So whether writers recycle myths about Jews and Judaism or creatively disrupt these figures of exclusion depends a great deal on not only what they said, but also how they said it, and crucially in what contextual frame.

What Hammerschlag misses, however, is the anomaly that perplexes some of those interpreters. What in the body of Sartre’s thought enabled him to both critique racial essentialism and reiterate anti-Semitic tropes of Jews and Judaism? How could the thinker whose core insight is “existence precedes essence” himself trot out essentialist stereotypes of Jews and Judaism?
[1] See Jonathan Judaken, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question: Anti-antisemitism and the Politics of the French Intellectual, Nebraska, 2006, chapters 4 and 8. Read the rest of the long Review Here.

The Research of Pawel Maciejko’s The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement 1755-1816 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) set out in clear terms in the course of events that created the Frankest movement and sustained it into the nineteenth century. (My blog post on the book here.)

Frankism is a known part of Polish history when a group of Jews converted into Catholicism and entered the lower nobility (szlachta) and gained title and land. They accepted a spirituality that transcends any one religion. Maciejko claims that in the nineteenth century they became a “mutual aid society” lacking much of the original doctrinal elements. From this article, it seems that Jewish conversion to enter the nobility between 1764-1788 also included many non-Frankist Jews and they later intermarried with Frankist families. Conversion into the nobility allowed many wealthy Jews advantages for land ownership, having serfs, and legal securities.

Recently, however, I had a guest for a Shabbat meal who was a descendent of a Frankist family. He has had an Orthodox conversion years ago. This is not a common occurrence, so I asked a few questions. He recounts how his mother spoke often about kabbalah. As a young child, he asked his mother if they were Frankists, telling his mother that he asks because no other Catholic families discuss Kabbalah as their legacy. His mom repeatedly answered No! they were not. When he grew older, one day his mother turned around in the car and said that yes indeed! they were Frankists. My guest, however, notes the family’s gentry name on the aforementioned list of non-Frankist conversions.

My guest remembers that his mother spoke often about kabbalah- but it was actually a midrashic reading of Genesis emphasizing the magical qualities of the Garden of Eden, angels, and the original state of nature. For example, according to midrash fruit trees originally tasted like the fruit they produce. Everything created was originally holy. The most explicit Kabbalistic doctrine was that God had to contract (tzimzum) to make a place for human actions.

In general after the Romantic era, non-Jewish Polish gentry saw themselves in Biblical terms . And in his words: “Almost at every Polish home I know people would talk about the fact that Jewish nation is special and chosen – that comes from romantic vision that Polish nation is the Christ of the nations or like Jewish People because of it’s suffering and unique history.” For examples, think of Henry Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis

However, the telling sign of Jewish lineage in this case was the magical power of the Hebrew Language and greater emphasis on the Old Testament. The mother spoke of the holiness of the Jewish people and the Hebrew language, both extraordinary for a supposed Catholic family. She spoke less in the way of Poles as the chosen Israelites and more about a separate people.

They kept no Jewish ritual, except for some vague acknowledgment of Friday night. She kept a separate pot for warming milk and would not use meat pot but would put butter on meat.

Unlike the typical Polish devotion to the humanity of Christ and the sacred heart, in this family Jesus was portrayed as a religious Jew – practicing and teaching Judaism- and as part of the Rabbis. Jesus taught a doctrine of the need for each of us to rebel against organized religion.

There was a general concern for dreams and spirituality. Adam Mickiewicz, the Polish spiritual author, whom Jews consider to be of Frankist descent, was a family favorite.

The gentry had deep ambivalence and mood swings on the subject of Jews or those of Jewish heritage. My guest said:” In my family they were afraid to be connected with the Jewish People both in religious and in national sense. At this same time there was feeling that something is lost, a sense of disconnection and secrets.” Polish Romanticism with its mixture of facts and fiction, history and sensibility, and the Bible with mysticism had many Jewish elements real and imagined. The Romanticism simultaneously painted Poles in Biblical terms, acknowledged Jewish elements in blood and culture, had a romantic spirituality with “kabbalistic” elements, and also had an exclusion of real Jews. To be of actual Jewish lineage created a surreptitious sense of dislocation.

There was an emphasis on gentry etiquette rules in order to maintain honor and keep separate from the peasants.

During WWII, the Nazis shipped most members of the non-Jewish lower nobility and intellectuals to work camps and most of the older gentry families, along with those of Frankist lineage, were killed in Polish uprising in Warsaw. His grandfather was repeated checked the Nazi to see if he was circumcised, he wasn’t and had paper as gentry.

My guest did not know of any ethnographic studies on late twentieth century Frankists families the way there are studies about the Donmeh. The closest we have is Mateusz Miesus (1938). Polacy–Chrześcijanie pochodzenia żydowskiego, who pointed out as many Catholic Poles of Jewish origins in order to show that Jews are not a separate race.

For those looking for some Frankist tisch Torah,the entire work of over 400 pages translated is available here- Yakov Frank, (1978) Sayings of Yakov Frank. Harris Lenowitz (trans.).
For articles on conversion as a means to enter the gentry and not as the libertine interpretation of Gershom Scholem, see Abraham Duker, “Polish Frankism’s Duration: From Cabbalistic Judaism to Roman Catholicism and from Jewishness to Polishness,” Jewish Social Studies 25 (1963): 288–301; Abraham Duker, “Frankism as a Movement of Polish-Jewish Synthesis,” in Tolerance and Movements of Religious Dissent in Eastern Europe, ed. Béla Király (Boulder, Colo., 1975).

(siteowner- some of the non-historical details have been changed to preserve this person’s privacy.)

Updates:
I received an email about another similar case.
In addition, Pawel Maciejko commented “I know quite a few people from well known Frankist families in Poland. All of them were told by their parents about the FACT that they come from Frankist families. But I have never met anyone in whose family some specifically Frankist tenets or traditions were preserved. In other words, none of them knows anything of Frankism (or of Judaism, for that matter), unless they independently learned about it from academic publications. As for your guest, it is interesting what he says about his mother keeping a separate pot for milk. The late Avraham Duker has some great stuff about descendants of Jewish (not necessarily Frankist) converts in Poland preserving some vestiges of kashrut for dozens or even hundreds of years. Finally, as for the Polish nobility, what you are saying is generally true, but is not linked to Romanticism. Already in the late 16th century you have families of szlachta who trace their genealogies back to King David. You had ennoblements of Jewish converts long before the Frankists and you had Polish noble families acknowledging their link to the Jews.”

Last month, I posted an interview with Daniel Boyarin. To which, I received an email from Kellner shocked that I would interview a non-Zionist who supports enemies of Israel and whose rhetoric was putting his family in danger (see below). To which I answered, that Boyarin is currently the doktorvater of several of my most academically successful students. But, how about an interview for your many readers? He agreed.

Menachem Kellner, Professor of Jewish Thought at the University of Haifa, and Senior Fellow at Merkaz Shalem in Jerusalem, studied philosophy and Jewish philosophy at Washington University (St. Louis) in 1973. Kellner’s Ph.D. dissertation, written under the direction of the late Steven S. Schwarzschild, was on ” Civil Disobedience in Democracy: A Philosophical Justification.” He also studied at the Hebrew Theological College in Skokie, IL and at Yeshivat Merkaz Ha-Rav Kook in Jerusalem in the early 60’s.

Kellner’s works include Maimonides’ Confrontation With Mysticism. (London: 2006 Revised paperback edition: 2010.) Dogma in Medieval Jewish Thought (Oxford 1986; Hebrew translation, Jerusalem, 1991), Maimonides on Human Perfection (Atlanta, 1990), Maimonides on Judaism and the Jewish People (Albany, 1992; Serbian translation, Belgrade, 2000), Maimonides on the “Decline of the Generations” and the Nature of Rabbinic Authority (Albany, 1996), Must A Jew Believe Anything? (London, 1999 — a Koret Jewish Book Award finalist; 2nd, expanded edition, 2006); the editor of Contemporary Jewish Ethics (New York, 1978), The Pursuit of the Ideal: Jewish Writings of Steven Schwarzschild (Albany, 1990).

Much of the debate around Kellner’s work focuses on his mistitled Must a Jew Believe Anything? It seems from the interview and the new Afterword that the goal of the book was to create greater acceptance of the non-orthodox by removing dogma from the equation. But I am not sure that the strategy worked. Kellner’s response to Daniel Statman in the Afterword shows that the book he wanted to write would have looked like this.

1. Commitment to the peoplehood of Israel (klal yisrael), strong enough to overlook differences.
2. A theory of non- Orthodox peoplehood to account for the traditional mesorati, the masses, and the populous. It would have looked to formulate a democratic Judaism like Rabbi Hirchenson or a view like Rav Amsalam.
3. A vision of peoplehood without ontic status or metaphysical difference, one that can connect with the Jewish past and future.
4. Keeping mizvot as the basis of peoplehood to follow God’s command, and produce a stable and structured society. Mizvot without preconditions of belief or authority. “If they were to forsake me, I should forgive them, for they may yet keep my Torah. For if they should forsake me but keep my Torah, the leaven that is in the Torah will bring them close to me.”
5. Kellner wants a Jewish peoplehood stronger than Torah, personal religious experience, or individual fulfillment. He would have to deflect the claims of those who do not put peoplehood before Torah or individual commitment such as Rav Soloveitchk, Levinas, Rav Nahman, or the Kotzker.
6. For Kellner, Modern Jewry is fractured due to challenge of modernity. The Orthodox leadership has been poor and allowed and encouraged the fracture.
7. Therefore, the use of the Mishnah of Sanhedrin to exclude those who don’t believe is unwise and self-destructive to Jewish peoplehood, even though our modern leaders used it. We should not use categories created to combat against Karaites and Sadducees today to combat Reform and Conservative Jews. We need to reject Rabbinic sectarian thinking.
8. Finally, he has to convince his readers that pluralism is wrong and relativistic. And that his standard is not patronizing to Reform, Conservative, Renewal, traditional, non-zionist, and other Jews who favor pluralism.

It seems that Kellner was motivated by points 1, 6, and 7— and that he thought that if he removed dogma then we have enough to substantiate 2, 4, 5, and 7. Statman pinned it down.

Menachem comments: To reply to these points would involve rewriting the book; it is easily available for people to read and judge for themselves.

If Kellner’s motivation was to stop exclusion of Reform and Conservative Jews, then he seems to have bypassed the actual texts that create the exclusions. All the documents were legal and not dogmatic: from the Hatam Sofer calling Reformers Karaites to Rav Moshe Feinstein calling them minim, halakhic sectarians to Rav Soloveitchik saying that they are outside the halakhic legal tradition.The Hazon Ish was speaking about their lacks of halakhic observance not their lack of dogma. In each case it is the halakhah that decides. If Kellner wanted to be inclusive, then say “God or Torah accepts the mizvot of all Jews.” In email correspondence with Kellner, he stated that all of these cases were motivated by dogma, it was the heresy of Reform or Conservative, not the halakhah. Since the halakhic authors all relied on the precedents against Sadducees and Karaites then they are about dogma. I double checked Rav Moshe for a start and read it as legal not dogmatic. For Kellner, since an ordinary Jew who drives to shul can get an aliyah but a Reform Rabbi cannot makes it about dogma.

My own personal opinion is to side with Saadyah and Bahye on the existence of Duties of the Heart and beyond that my views can be can be gleaned from my long questions such as numbers three, four, six, seven, eight and eleven. I also do find disputes over dogma in Judaism. A social historian may reduce them to politics, paedeia, purity, and power, but that would work just as well regarding Christian heresy hunting. And the leading copied book of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologia was “the book of sales and acquisitions.” I would also recommend historic discussions of what was a sectarian such as Aharon Shemesh. Maimonides has kalam, falasifa, and sufi arguments about dogma which were blurred.

I do not find that belief and dogma were sufficiently defined. I could exclude most Christian texts. And all the followers of “dogmatists” such as Karl Rahner or even Avery Dulles would find the rigid definition foreign. Most academics who follow in the lines of Bourdieu, or Certeau follow Pascal’s statement as understood by Althusser: “kneel and pray, and then you will believe”. For Althusser, beliefs and ideas are the products of social practices, not the reverse. What is ultimately important for Althusser are not the subjective beliefs held in the “minds” of human individuals, but rather the material institutions, rituals, and discourses that produce these beliefs. More importantly, today I was reading a volume about the transition from Evangelicals to Emergents and the author stressed, seriously stressed, that it is invalid to ask “What do Evangelicals Believe? And that the only valid question is: :”What beliefs and practices are the focus of Evangelical interest, whether they agree or not.” Belief or not – you are still of the same discussion.

Finally, Kellner thinks that Boyarin has written himself out of the Jewish community by giving sympathy to the Palestinian cause and drawing an analogy in the loss of faith between the Holocaust and the Occupation. Much as some Christians said that their religion died at Auschwitz, Boyarin fears that “Judaism may be dying at Nablus.” Steven S. Schwarzschild, Kellner adviser was a liberal anti-Zionist of the Reform- ethical variety. However, Kellner rejects Boyarin for, in his words, going beyond mere anti-Zionism by twisting facts, supporting murders and those driven to destroy Israel, as well as his rejection of attacking Hamas. “Daniel Boyarin and the Herd of Independent Minds,” in Edward Alexander and Paul Bogdanor (eds.), The Jewish Divide Over Israel: Accusers and Defenders (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2006): 167-176.) and here are some online links of Kellner’s politics:
“Israel Reverses Gravity,”; “The War in Lebanon: A View from Haifa,”; “Resisting Falsehood and Protecting Integrity” (Reply to Omar Barghouti, “Resisting Israeli Apartheid: Why the Academic and Cultural Boycott?”); “Israel’s Gaza War: Five Asymmetries.”

1. Your dissertation was on ethics and human rights, what happened to that early interest and writings? Do you recognize the immense role your volume on Jewish ethics had in shifting the field to halakhic ethics?

My dissertation, completed in 1973, was on “Civil Disobedience in Democracy – A Philosophical Justification,” written under the direction of the late Steven S. Schwarzschild at Washington University in St Louis, MO (one of three major influences on my life, the other two being my father, Rabbi Abraham Kellner, z”l, u-tibbadel le-hayyim arukhim ve-tovim, my wife, Jolene S. Kellner). The book you mention, Contemporary Jewish Ethics, grew out of my interest in ethical matters (don’t forget, I am a child of the sixties), out of my teaching religious ethics at the University of Virginia and in consultation with my friend, David M L Olivestone, then editor of the Hebrew Publishing Company. I had no idea that the book had any role, let alone an “immense” one, in shifting the field to halakhic ethics, but I will be sure to tell my wife.

2. What motivated you to write Must a Jew Believe Anything?

Actually, to the best of my recollection, it was
(a) annoyance with the ads the Chief Rabbinate would put in newspapers here in Israel every year before the yamim noraim, warning people not to attend services in Conservative or Reform synagogues. It seemed to me then (and seems to me now) that the Rabbinate would prefer to see secular Israelis spend Rosh ha-Shanah and Yom Kippur at the beach or on picnics than in non-Orthodox synagogues.
(b) growing concern over the way in which Orthodoxy, by drawing ever sharper lines of demarcation, pushes Jews away from Torah instead of bringing them closer.
(c) a number of experiences made me realize that the “tinok she-nishba” solution, while well-meaning is deeply patronizing, as well as making very little sense in today’s world.

3. Solomon Schechter and others wrote that Judaism does indeed have theology and dogmas but we have no Council of Nicea for fixed dogma, no dogmatic works, and no inquisition or magisterium. But we do have doctrine. In your afterword, in replying to your critics, you seem to have the same position as Schechter but you label it as “We don’t have to believe rather than “we have dogmas without dogmatisim” Why?

Dogma is a device for determining who is “out”. I think that the demand of the hour is finding ways of keeping Jews “in”.

4. You Maimonides is not Ibn Sina and al Farabi. You seen not to use the intellectualist Neo-Platonism of the Guide of the Perplexed. And both Halevi and Maimonides are reliant on al-Ghazzali and ibn Sina. You seem to have a philosopher’s typology of rational and irrational, natural and supernatural, action or belief that does not correspond to the complexity of the historical data. Are you reading Maimonides thought through the dogmatic lenses of your early work in dogmas in the 14th and 15th century?

Look, you may be right, but you must admit that Rambam invites us to read him in that way. Let me rephrase that. I am writing a book in Hebrew right now, proving (to my complete satisfaction, and, I hope, the satisfaction of my readers) that for Rambam there is no metaphysical, ontological, upfront, innate, etc. difference between Jew and Gentile (as my friend Danny Lasker likes to say, the difference for Rambam is all in the software, not in the hardware). I have been publishing on this for many years; in this new book I address the issue through a very close reading the first, middle, and last halakhot of the Mishneh Torah. The first sentence of the book is: “Maimonides did not know that he was a universalist.” It is obviously the case that we ask questions of Rambam that he may not have asked himself, and we try to follow the implications of his thought to places he may have had no need or interest in getting to (for example: his “proto-feminism”). We are not living in the twelfth century.

5. Does everything boil down to “mymonides” and “yourmonides?”

Hardly; some interpretations make more sense that others, and some are simply ridiculous (for an example, see the discussion in Hakirah 11). I am quite taken with a method proposed by the philosopher Susan Haack (in the context of an argument against epistemological relativism); I see Maimonides’ writings as a kind of crossword puzzle. At any given point in filling out a crossword puzzle, a number of different solutions might satisfy any given hint. But that does not make all solutions equally reasonable. As Haack notes, “How reasonable a crossword entry is depends on how well it is supported by its clue and any already completed entries; how reasonable these other entries are, independent of the entry in question; and how much of the crossword has been completed.” Reading Maimonides as a particularist, for example, demands the revision of a great many already completed entries in the Maimonidean crossword.

6. Rabbinic texts are filled with theological material as read by Schechter, Heschel, and Idel, and the texts of Tanhuma, Pesikta, and Kallir are filled with theological statements. It seems that you are using a 20th century halakhic definition of the rabbis.

Of course there is theological MATERIAL in rabbinic literature ( how could there not be?), but there is no SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY in two sense of the term: (a) an attempt to get clear on the meaning of theological terms (such as “soul”; “free will”; “creation”; “reward and punishment”; “election”) and
(b) there is no attempt to put these (largely inchoate) ideas into any relationship with each other, thus allowing for out and out contradictions, which bother no one. In sum, theology is an answer to questions which did not trouble Hazal one bit.

7. You seem to accept the Buberian distinction between belief and trust and his rejection of dogma, even though you protest that you are not. You accept the rejection of the medieval tradition. I cannot find significant differences between your position and Buber except for the halakhah. Furthermore, you repeat your heavy dependence on Buber in the Irreconcilable Differences? volume, in that case distorting Christianity.

My understanding is that Buber’s distinction is too sharp: Christians also prize trust in God, and Jews do not adopt an “anything goes approach” in matters of belief. But, overall, he is right: emunah means “trust” more than it means “intellectual acquiescence”.

8. You seem heavily dependent on the historical premise that the pressures of modernity causes an intolerance, yet there are lots of 13-18 centuries debates and exclusions over dogma. There were two centuries of Maimonidean debates and then recurrences in 16th- 18th centuries in Poland and Italy. For example, the Gra excommunicated Hasidim because of theology and successfully kept them out of Lita!

It is simply not the case that there “are lots of 13-18 century debates and exclusions over dogma.” As I point out in my book on dogma, Rambam “published” his principles in roughly in 1168 and before 1391 there were next to no “debates and exclusions over dogma.” So, it is hardly surprising that I asked myself why this was the case. Ditto for the lack of “debates and exclusions over dogma” between 1492 and the beginning of the 19th century. As to the Gr”a, you know better than me, but was theology really the main issue between him and the Ba’al ha-Tanya?

9. Are there any orthodox leaders, writers, or thinkers who you follow or inspire you?

Rabbis Marc Angel, Yehudah Amital (z”l), Haim Amsalem, David Bigman, Yuval Cherlow, Edward M. Davis, Ronen Lubitch, Haim Navon, Jonathan Sacks and many others. I am sure that there are others and apologize to those whom I have inadvertently left out.

10. Why have you taken up the case against Torat Hamelekh?

Because:
(a) it is a disgusting book
(b) it adds insult to injury by implying that Rambam would agree with them
(c) it is dangerous, giving rabbinic imprimatur to murderous tendencies

11. It seems that you want your cake and to eat it too, you want to be a universalist but through particularistic texts. You avoid pluralism or non- Jewish texts about universalism for a Jewish universalism in which non-Jews will eventually see their universalism through Judaism. You seem to have a very particularistic universalism?

The following is not a direct answer to your question, but it is a good way to end anyway. It is the closing paragraph of an article of mine in a festschrift coming out in honor of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks:

While not giving up on the idea that revelation (be it Jewish, Christian, or Muslim) teaches truth in some hard, exclusivist sense, putative addressees of revelation ought to be modest about how much of it they understand, and restrained in the claims they make on behalf of revelation and about adherents of other religions.

Admittedly, it may be easier for a Jew to advance this position than for a Christian or a Muslim. This is so for several reasons. First, until the Middle Ages, at least, Jews sought to understand how God instructs them to inject sanctity into their lives, and paid very little attention to the question of how God expects them to think. Given the notion that the Torah contains many level of meanings, and the profound differences among Jewish thinkers about the nature and content of those meanings, a stance of theological modesty ought to be easier for Jews to maintain than for adherents of more clearly theologically based religions.

Second, given the nature of Jewish-Gentile relations over the last two millennia, Jews had very little reason to look to Gentiles for spiritual enrichment. We, however, live in a different world, and I thank God for that.

Last, Jews, not thinking that one must be Jewish in order to achieve a share in the world to come, have traditionally paid little attention to the beliefs and practices of others. But, having left the ghetto and the mellah, we live in a world very different from that of our forbears and, looking around, discover admirable Gentiles from whom we can learn much. We are no longer alone.

The Lord of all the Universe is not too great to have revealed the Torah to us, but is certainly too great to be captured by our puny understanding of Torah. To claim otherwise is to be guilty of cosmic hubris, and to close ourselves off to the possibility of being enlarged by meetings with others who also seek God and whom God does not ignore.

This is continued from my perilous post on Aryeh Kaplan. I may combine both posts into one longer post for posterity.

When Rabbi Leonard Kaplan first showed up to the pulpit in Mason City Iowa, he gave a talk to the sisterhood on the process of his receiving ordination in Israel. I wonder how awkward this was, especially with the head of the sisterhood leading the opening prayer and despite his immense learning, his having to shepherd girl scouts and teach once a week Hebrew school.

Ordination of a “Rabbi in Israel” was the topic discussed by Rabbi Leonard Kaplan at the joint meeting of Adas Israel Sisterhood and Hadassah in the synagogue Thursday. Rabbi Kaplan received his theological training at Yeshiva Torah Vodaas, New York and Mirrer Yeshiva in New York and in Jerusalem. He was ordained in Israel with ordination both at the seminary and by the Chief Rabbinate of the State of Israel.

The Opening prayer was given by Mrs. L. IT. Wolf

The girl scout Sabbath was announced at the March services

A purim cantata.. . wil be presented Sunday evening. At 7:30 PM
Mrs. Kaplan was welcomed as a new member.

Rabbi Kaplan was quite active in interfaith events, our reader David Zinner already pointed to one of them. In a church interfaith meeting and potluck meal, which followed a vote by the Episcopalians allowing women to the vestry, Kaplan addressed them with a universal message. Each relgion speaks for God and we should not limit God to our own faith. Back to his mathematical model, knowing only one religion is flat and one dimensional, to truly know God we need the multi-dimensional view. All religions are one part of the infinite depth of God.

Mason City Globe Gazette – • January 17, 1966 – • Page 15
St. John’s Episcopal Church Sunday night became the first Episcopal Church in the state reported as electing two women to its vestry. Elected to the local congregation’s administrative body…

In the general annual meeting which followed a potluck meal, the group heard Rabbi Leonard M Kaplan of Adas Israel Synagogue say:

“ We often spend much effort in making a god out of our particular religion. Shouldn’t we spend just as much effort in making our religion a religion of God?” Rabbi Kaplan called for efforts to appreciate strange and often exotic religions, understanding that each one speaks for God and may even have a message for us.

For many of the world’s people, Rabbi Kaplan said, religion is the most important thing in their lives and understanding them calls for understanding their view of God.

“In a sense, every religion is an open eye upon God, giving us its own flat, one-dimensional view, He said. It is only the totality of them all that can give us a multidimensional view of the Divine and a panorama of infinite depth.…”

Rabbi Kaplan said that many scholars are finding they must study mankind as “a single gigantic organism… spread over the face of the earth.

“If it were God’s purpose in creating this creature that is mankind, to create a being that perceive the divine, then is it not logical that He should have given it many senses?”

“The eye does not hate the ear for not seeing. The ear does not despise the nose for not hearing. The many religions perceive God, each in a different way. But as long as they all look toward God, they are one.“

Here, in this article, he welcomes Sister Mary Josita and her Bible students to the synagogue and explains the Sefer Torah to them.
After explain the Shofar, he quips that the shofar ‘will probably not be the type to be blown by Gabriel at the second coming.” ” G a b r i el would never put the Beatles out of business.” He seems to have done quite a few wedding jointly with Reform and Conservative clergy- here and here. Among his activities, he took the time to write to Dear Abby about cherubs.

DEAR ‘ABBY: You are not likely to find any girl cherubs (or cherubim) since the Hebrew word “cherub” is a noun of masculine gender. According to the Hebrew grammar, a girl cherub would not be a cherub at all, but a “chewbah.” And the plural of “cherubah” is “cheruboth”— not “cherubim,”—which is the plural of “cherub^’
RABBI LEONARD M. KAPLAN , MASON CITY. IA.

It seems that he did not entirely switch to from Leonard to Aryeh in 72-73. As a Rabbinic consultant for the movie Yentl in 1980, he still used the name Leonard in the stories and byline.

“Rabbi Leonard Kaplan,” the writer reports, “enjoyed advising the cast on ritual and its meaning. He showed them how to sway and bend while they pray, explained what it means to study the Talmud and in general helped the cast understand the outlook of a religious Jew
Rabbi Kaplan was not upset by his association with a play which contains nudity as well as a woman dressed as a man ‘It is an abomination,'” he admitted, “‘But so what?

For those looking for a good introduction to Aryeh Kaplan during the years 73-83, when Kaplan lived and struggled in Kensington, I recommend Perle Besserman, Pilgrimage : adventures of a wandering Jew
Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1979. Perle describes her journeys to India and Israel interspersed with two in-depth visits to Aryeh Kaplan’s living room world. The underemployed Kaplan gave classes in his home on Shabbat and during the week on the deep inner meaning to reality to a variety of seekers including the variety of modern orthodox psychologists listed in the introduction to Jewish meditation, Jews on return from India, those who also hung around Reb Shlomo Carelbach and Reb Zalman, and those who just crashed on his couch. She called Kaplan’s teachings a form of karma yoga, a path of deeds and the deeds that you do cause a perfection of your soul. The book also contains a rare 1970’s interview with Rabbi Zvi Yehudah Kook. (h/t for Pilgrimage- R. Yosef Blau circa 1991).

Over at H-Judaica, there is a hunt for Aryeh Kaplan’s physics MA or any evidence to document his work in the field. They did turn up that the Memphis raised southerner went under his birth name Leonard M Kaplan to University of Maryland and had two co-authored articles in 1965 and 1966. Between 1965 and his burst into NCSY tracts and Chassidism in translation in 1973, he did many activities that are usually not discussed such as elementary school teacher in Louisville Kentucky, Conservative rabbi, and abstract artist. By 1965, he had already relinquished physics graduate school and was a rabbi in Mason City Iowa, a congregation that only had a late Friday night service. Here is a lost homily of his that was syndicated as part of a clergy column where he sees modern science including the synthesis of life in a test tube as pointing to God’s greatness. True scientists marvel at the secret of life.

•”Lift lift your eyes on high, and see: Who hath created these? He that bringeth on their host by number, He calleth them all by name (Isaiah 40:26)

Rabbi Leonard M. Kaplan
Adas Israel Synagogue
7th N.W. & Adams

From the day that man first appeared on this planet, he has looked on high at the stars and the world around him, and he has stood in awe before the great mystery of creation. He would try to reach up to the stars, and he would climb the highest mountain peaks, but still they would appear far away, blinking steadily in their continued silence, mocking the puny man who would presume to fathom their origin, their nature, and their destiny. But man was not easily discouraged. He continued to climb and probe the mystery of the stars, the riddle of the atom, and even the secret of life itself. Today, mankind finds himself on the threshold of creating life. By duplicating conditions of a primeval earth, scientists have already succeeded in bringing forth the most primitive form of pre – life. This has lead many psuedo-scientists of narrow mental gauge to proclaim that man no longer needs to believe in God, and that science has done away with all mystery and miracle.

But the true thinking scientist knows that the exact opposite is true — that science has enormously increased man’s sense of mystery, and that all of nature is nothing but a huge miracle.

When astronomers explore galaxies billions of light years away, they find that they are made of the same matter as the stuff beneath our feet. Only one kind of matter is found to exi st throughout the entire universe. Yet, this unique material has one exceptional property — it can support life, and under proper conditions, it can even give rise to life. The fact that inert matter carries the potential of life cannot be considered a mere random accident. It can be nothing less than the work of a purposeful Creator. How then can we imagine something as simple as the electron carrying within itself the potential of the human brain, had not humanity been anticipated by the Designer of all creation? Even the Bible does not tell us that God created life, but rather that He said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures.” (Genesis 1:24). God created matter — the dust of the earth — with the potential of al! life. If scientists are successful in creating true life, our belief in God should be all the stronger, for who else but an omniscient- God could have created the elementary particles of matter with all the inherent potentialities of the human spirit? The handwriting of God is clear — not on the wall — but in the very heart of nature.
RABBI LEONARD M. KAPLAN

Here we have a JTA bulitein about Kaplan in his role as rabbi of Ohav Shalom, a Conservative synagogue in Albany where he also serves as as Jewish student adviser at SUNY at Albany. He is working to provide kosher food and is involved in outreach. Notice in the language of the announcement the language of the 1960’s “free university” and “eschews formal leadership.” Aryeh Kaplan’s describes his classes as follows: “Many college students turn to drugs and the Eastern religions searching for a mystic and deeply spiritual experience,” the prospectus said. “Most of these are not at all aware of Judaism’s great mystic and spiritual tradition. Especially relevant to this quest is Hassidism, which stands unique as the world’s only popular mystic movement.” Three years later, he starts publishing his Hasidism as popular mysticism and having everything that Eastern mysticism contains.

Project to Rediscover Jewish Values Launched by Students at State University of N.Y.
ALBANY, N.Y., Jul. 6 (JTA) –
A group of students at the State University of New York at Albany (SUNYA) is planning to launch a “Jewish Rediscovery Project” on the campus next fall. Its motivation is “a common desire to rediscover Jewish values relevant to current problems and to act upon such problems as a Jewish group,” according to a prospectus released here. The youngsters are working with Rabbi Leonard M. Kaplan of Congregation Obav Sholom, the Jewish religious advisor at SUNYA. They estimate the Jewish student population at 2,370 or 19.5 percent of the 12,125 total, and the Jewish faculty at 200 members, 9.2 percent of the total. According to Rabbi Kaplan, Jewish student activists are already largely responsible for the creation of the first full Judaica department in the entire New York State University system, which will open in September under the chairmanship of Prof. Jerome Eckstein. They are also responsible for a Free University of Judaica, offering courses that would not normally come under the Judaica Department; a kosher food plan provided by the University, and a special Passover food plan administered by the University, Rabbi Kaplan reported.

“The Jewish Rediscovery Project” is the tentative name for a series of programs expected to attract large numbers of students who find traditional Jewish organizational hierarchies and programs repellant and irrelevant to their interests and their intellectual and spiritual needs. The series eschews formal leadership structure in favor of what the students call sub-cooperatives without chairman and officers, in which leadership is expected to rise spontaneously according to the project’s needs. The student most responsible for the program, according to Rabbi Kaplan, is Tobi Goldstein a sophomore. The prospectus calls for four sub-cooperatives–a Study Cooperative, an Information Cooperative, an Action Cooperative and a Religion Cooperative. In the latter, students will explore Hassidism as an avenue to mystical experience. “Many college students turn to drugs and the Eastern religions searching for a mystic and deeply spiritual experience,” the prospectus said. “Most of these are not at all aware of Judaism’s great mystic and spiritual tradition. Especially relevant to this quest is Hassidism, which stands unique as the world’s only popular mystic movement.”

To be Continued in the next post here- Lost Aryeh Kaplan Part II

We owe Rabbi David Etengoff a thank you for recently placing many of the public lectures of Rav Soloveitchik online in cleaned-up mp3 format.

On the list was one public discourse that I had not heard or read called “5122 KNESSETH TISROEL – DIALOGUE 04/25/78.” It was a real winner. It was a discussion with Orthodox mental health professionals and it discussed several hot topics including the meaning of Lonely Man of Faith, Israeli politics, abortion, homosexuality, Chabad, BT’s, and the role of the social worker.

More importantly, it shows how people related to Rav Soloveitchik and his replies to inquiries. Especially in the last 15 minutes of the tape one can see (1) how Rav Soloveitchik gave his students great latitude to solve problems themselves, (2) how he trusted professionals, (3) how did not think that everything needed halakhic or rabbinic answers (4) and how he took his answers to be his own personal formulation, not some binding or definitive understanding. The tape also show Rav Soloveitchik in several moods from impatient to jovial and it especially showed how Rav Soloveitchik dealt with ideas and not with the bottom line.

If you have never heard a full shiur from Rav Soloveitchik or have not heard one in many years or even if you have forgotten why people where once upset about the current revisionism of the Rav, then please listen to this lecture (or at least the last 15 minutes). It has good audio quality. This lecture will remind you why people were attracted to Rav Soloveitchik. I do not intend to mediate your direct encounter with his shiur, and that is why this one is such a good choice.

The setting is 1978, Annie is the wholesome smash hit on Broadway and Billy Joel’s The Stranger is on the pop radio stations. Picture the younger professionals wearing big tortoise-shell eyeglass frames and long side-burns. Deeply colored sweaters and sports jackets were in style that year, colors like wine, cranberry, and olive- on the tape you will hear people referred to by their clothes color. The Rav himself tended to wear light colored sports jackets to events like this.

It was a decade after his Lonely Man of Faith lecture done originally as a mental health lecture and less than a year after a follow-up lecture in Boston 1977 covering much of the same material. The setting this time is NY and the gathering is of Orthodox mental health professionals, mainly MSW’s and psychologists including Paul Kahn, Rivka Danzig, Lester Kaufman, Carmi Schwartz, and Rabbi Avrach, the Director of Community Services Division. In the 1970’s, psychology, therapy, and existential therapy reigned supreme. The Yeshivish answer was still to ban majoring in psychology. It also produced books like Avraham Amsel’s Rational Irational Man – Torah Psychology (1976), which denigrated psychology as not the Torah’s way since the emotions need to be suppressed into a rational and volitional life. Several people in the room whom I did not mention, were graduates of Chaim Berlin or Torah ve Daas who a few years earlier switched from suits to turtlenecks and under the influence of the early 1970’s discovered the humanistic path of psychology based on not repressing emotions; gestalt, transaction, and existential therapies replaced repression. People were reading Erik Erikson, Irwin Yalom, R. D. Laing, and Fritz Perls. The Bob Newhart show about therapy had just ended its six year run that month. In the 1960’s and 1970’s the seeming only Rosh Yeshiva to field the new questions was Rav Soloveitchik. At the same time notice how philosophic and abstract were his answers.

A mere decade later Rabbi Twerski will make the liberalism of self-esteem humanistic psychology and twelve step as a seminal start of the new Yeshivish self-help books and in contrast some of YU’s graduates will start reading the more conservative works by authors like Dobson. There is a switch to asking what causes the individual to be deviant, rather than creating a role for the individual.Now, thirty years later every Rosh Yeshiva and pulpit rabbi is an expert on psychology and social work without the need for professional trained guidance. But in 1978, the burning question is how do we balance the individualism and lack of repression in therapy with commitment to the group, the halakhah community. In the discussion, notice the lack of a role for evil inclination, or any mussar advice to restrain or repress oneself.

When you listen to the tape notice how often Rav Soloveitchik says “ I created” “personal experience” and “my formulation.” Also notice his joke that he took tranquilizers and they didn’t help him as much as Talmud study helped him.

He discusses the Jewish commitment to the Israel. His politics is old time Likkud. We did indeed dislocate the Arabs but that does not matter. We were the ones who started the trouble in Hebron- why did we did it? Because Israel and our connection to it is our insanity. We are willing to go against the whole world. We are willing to defy common sense because of our connection. Defiance and redemptive go together.

In this discussion, he uses the word mesorah to refer to the continuity of the Jewish people and to the chain of scholars of the mesorah. He does not use it as a body of knowledge or a specific teaching. The Mesorah community extends from Avraham to messiah and offers a sense of calming sense of eternity that transcends the individual. Being part of the mesorah offers a deeper reality that unites past and future. We are joined as part of a covenantal community of every Jew who was in the past and those who have yet to appear. Respect for the elders and our antecendents and a commitment for educating future generations.(similar to LMF)

The Rav says that only when his parents died did he find the malakh hamaves confronting him “My Cartesian awareness included a sense of my parents.”

Can we help a homosexual alleviate guilt? “I am not a social worker.” But the goal is not to tell him “sin and be happy.” People have freedom and people can change. There is no need to reject any case. We believe people have the ability to do teshuvah. Don’t encourage sin but there is always hope. But, you may not encourage homosexual practices. (Notice what the discussion looked like before the culture wars- neither condemnation not acceptance, just what is the social worker’s responsibility? Notice how Rav Soloveithcik is mainly concerned with what the observant therapist should do and does not make big statements about society or public policy.)

Can one go against respecting one’s parents kibud av ve am as part of the process of therapy. He answers that the goal is to follow the right way but process may be far from it. So temporary violation is OK as part of a bigger process.

What about college women who are sexually active but not using birth control, therapist cannot pasken birth control questions but it may lead to an abortion? Answer- You are not responsible for events in the future.
What about people having an abortion- it is forbidden but what you should do? Answer- Abortion is completely prohibited as murder, we just do not consider it libel for punishment… What to do? I don’t know.

How do we apply these guidelines when the social worker is orthodox and client is not religious.
Rav Soloveitchik- “It is up to the social worker – I cannot advice – it is hard.” This is the Rav Soloveitchik that many remember who left applications in the hands of professionals.

He praises Chabad and its success because they temporarily display tolerance. They show understanding and lend a helping hand.
One cannot condemn client right away. And to earn respect means professional respect as a skilled and understanding professional. (not respect for sticking to one’s opinions.)

He tells the story of certain girl who became a BT but was not ready for taryag mizvot, all the mizvot. First she went to a known gadol –rosh yeshiva, who said it was an all or nothing package either keep Shabbos or else. She wet to another rabbi who said accept one mizvah with the complete letter of the law. She did and eventually became completely observant. (What lesson do you think his listeners drew from the story?)

In the last five minutes, the Rav was asked “is that [the Rav’s approach in LMF] the only method or the [definitive] halakhic method? Is this the necessary approach toward Keneset Yisrael or is there another method?

The Rav answers that his loneliness is his creative experience and his binding himself to the group cures his loneliness. Being part of the group of keneset yisrael is not his creative time. Rather, his individual loneliness which is an “Awareness of self- not mere introversion or introspection.” But, “Community man is not creative. We have a dialectic back and forth. (Notice he did not consider his approach definitive.)

Certain times I don’t want to give or teach. They say I am a good teacher. A good teacher forms a community in his class. Not technical teaching but to discuss and debate problems – and sometimes they are right and I admit it. One needs to be sincere and consistent. Sometimes the students know as much as I do and I have nothing to teach so I retreat. The need to give is called hesed- to teach is a very volatile activity. (Notice that he defines his teaching an shiur not as offering fixed answers but as discussion and debate. Also notice how impatient Rav Solovetichik was in giving over his prepared précis of LMF, and how relaxed he is in fielding questions.)

Final words on being a social worker. “There is no difference between a social worker or a rabbi concerning their duties as a Jew In fact, a social worker can accomplish more. A social worker is perceived as neutral and objective- and can be more effective.

As a closing comment, the moderator said “Rav Soloveitchik does fancy footwork- he wants idea and we want to drag him down.” (Notice they did not see the Rav as practical guidance or halakhah, rather as ideas and big guidelines. This led to each listener interpreting it for themselves. Unless someone violated the guideline in a major way, they were not reigned in).

[I only listened to the tape once, so if I made any mistakes they were inadvertent, and I will be glad to change what I wrote.] If you cannot find time to listen to the entire tape then just listen to the last 15 minutes to get a taste of his personality.

In the past I linked to Prof. M.G Piety’s blog on Kierkegaard and her coverage of the controversy over Kierkegaard’s antisemitism and it got picked up by JID. So, I assumed that people would keep track of her translation work without my prompting, but it seems from her self-posted hit count numbers that other have not linked to her. But she keeps posting good material. She has recently started translating the preface to Peter Tudvad’s book and his discovery of the Nazi use of Kierkegaard. Here are some selections.

I ran across a couple of articles on Søren Kierkegaard from the beginning of the 1940s while doing research for a book about a Danish nurse in the German Red Cross during the Second World War. To stumble on article on Kierkegaard was in itself not surprising. What was surprising was that they were in National Socialisten [the National Socialist] and Jul i Norden [Jul in the North], two strongly anti-Semitic publications associated with the Nazi party in Scandinavia.

“Søren Kierkegaard is without question the greatest genius the Danish nation has produced” began one of the articles. Moreover, continues the author, “his writings contain the best instructions for the liberation of the Danish people from the spirit of Judaism which has come increasingly to dominate Denmark and which he saw himself as called by providence to fight. One could thus to this extent be justified in asserting that Søren Kierkegaard was the first Danish National Socialist.”

The author would not have been able to support such a claim, even if he had done extensive research, given that Kierkegaard was vehemently opposed to every form of both nationalism and socialism. On the other hand, there is something to the claim that Kierkegaard wanted to free the Danish people–or preferably all of Christendom–from “the Jewish spirit” which he, like the Nazis, viewed as materialistic, and which he increasingly portrayed as essentially in opposition to Christianity.

I realized to my own shame, after reading these two articles, that I had also been all too willing to ignore, or to explain away, Kierkegaard’s anti-Semitism. I thus wrote an article on this topic for the magazine of Jewish culture, Guldberg. I cited Kierkegaard’s references, just as had Geill, to a Jewish editor as a “Jøde Dreng” [Jew-boy] and to “en trællesindet Jøde øvende Herskermagt” [a servile Jew exercising power] as well as his observation concerning this same editor and the distribution of his paper that “only a Jew could be fitted for this most equivocal of all tyrannies, even more equivocal than that of a usurer (to which the Jew, however, is best suited).”
He says first that ‘Kierkegaard’s references to the Jews were much harsher than those of other intellectuals of the period, but then that it is believed that he identified himself with Jews whom he thought were fundamentally unhappy.” He observes later that Kierkegaard emphasized “Judaism was the enemy of Christianity, but most of what he objected to in Judaism was precisely what he criticized contemporary Christianity for.”

Once again, the reader is instructed to appreciate that despite Kierkegaard’s apparent anti-Semitism, he was not anti-Semitic in that his overarching purpose was an attack on the Christianity of his day rather an attack on Judaism, and it is in this light that one must understand his possible identification of himself with Jews as an unhappy people.

So far as I know, no one until now has answered these questions, despite the fact that a Danish scholar touched on aspects of the reciprocal relationship between Judaism and Christianity in Kierkegaard’s authorship in 1999. Read the Rest Here.

I just discovered that the Soncino Talmud has been reformatted by Reuven Brauner as a usable pdf, available here. h/t- On the Main Line.

I took a few moments to look at several of the pages and the introduction by Chief Rabbi Hertz caught my eye. He treats the Talmud as a record of the discussions fo the Rabbis that captured everything they said, good and bad, learned and unlearned, noble and degrading. He is willing to say about parts of the Talmud: “some of the customs depicted or obiter dicta reported, are repugnant to Western taste need not be denied. “ And he concludes that the legends, discussions, science, and folkways “consists of mere individual utterances that possess no general and binding authority.”

Hertz’s approach to the Talmud is similar to that of Shadal who in his letters deals with difficult Talmudic texts by declaring that they are just person opinion. WE lack an article on Western European Orthodox rabbinical attitudes to the Talmud. From Shadal to Steinsaltz; they tended to share Hertz view. In contrast, in Eastern Europe every line of the Talmud was sacrosanct. The Mahara”tz Chayes dealt with the folklore, demons, and unwisdom by declaring that it was not to be taken literally, rather it contained hidden didactic messages. It had to be allegory or hyperbole. But Hertz does not look for allegory and treats these texts in a straight forward manner as objectionable personal opinion and therefore rejects them

But the Gemara is more than a mere commentary. In it are sedulously gathered, without any reference to their connection with the Mishnah, whatever utterances had for centuries dropped from the lips of the Masters; whatever Tradition preserved concerning them or their actions; whatever bears directly, or even distantly, upon the great subjects of religion, life, and conduct. In addition, therefore, to legal discussions and enactments on every aspect of Jewish duty, whether it be ceremonial, civic, or moral, it contains homiletical exegesis of Scripture; moral maxims, popular proverbs, prayers, parables, fables, tales; accounts of manners and customs, Jewish and non-Jewish; facts and fancies of science by the learned; Jewish and heathen folklore, and all the wisdom and unwisdom of the unlearned. This vast and complex material occurs throughout the Gemara, as the name of an author, a casual quotation from Scripture, or some other accident in thought or style started a new association in ideas.

HALACHAH AND HAGGADAH
The Talmud itself classifies its component elements either as Halachah or Haggadah. Emanuel Deutsch describes the one as emanating from the brain, the other from the heart; the one prose, the other poetry; the one carrying with it all those mental faculties that manifest themselves in arguing, investigating, comparing, developing: the other springing from the realms of fancy, of imagination, feeling, humour:

Beautiful old stories,
Tales of angels, fairy legends,
Stilly histories of martyrs,
Festal songs and words of wisdom;
Hyperboles, most quaint it may be,
Yet replete with strength and fire
And faith-how they gleam,
And glow and glitter!
as Heine has it.

We have dogmatical Haggadah, treating of God’s attributes and providence, creation, revelation, Messianic times, and the Hereafter. The historical Haggadah brings traditions and legends concerning the heroes and events in national or universal history, from Adam to Alexander of Macedon, Titus and Hadrian. It is legend pure and simple. Its aim is not so much to give the facts concerning the righteous and unrighteous makers of history, as the moral that may be pointed from the tales that adorn their honour or dishonour.

That some of the folklore element in the Haggadah, some of the customs depicted or obiter dicta reported, are repugnant to Western taste need not be denied. ‘The greatest fault to be found with those who wrote down such passages. says Schechter, ‘is that they did not observe the wise rule of Dr Johnson who said to Boswell on a certain occasion, “Let us get serious, for there conies a fool”. And the fools unfortunately did come, in the shape of certain Jewish commentators and Christian controversialists, who took as serious things which were only the expression of a momentary impulse. or represented the opinion of sonic isolated individual, or were meant simply as a piece of humorous by-play, calculated to enliven the interest of a languid audience.’ In spite of the fact that the Haggadah contains parables of infinite beauty and enshrines sayings of eternal worth, it must be remembered that the Haggadah consists of mere individual utterances that possess no general and binding authority.
2 December 1934
Read the Rest Here.

Many of my readers tell me that they like when I only post one good long post rather than many short ones because they don’t have time for many short posts. Some readers have told me that they flag the posts that they like for later with programs such as read-it-later or they forward it to their e-readers. It worked for me this past season because I spent much of the last three months editing my manuscript and then the proofs. However, I am still weighing how much I should post short notes and clippings.

I still have many un-posted pieces since July. The Oliver Roy post took me half a year to get to it.

Those academics and clergy that want an interview about your books or a guest post, then please let me know. I would be glad to oblige qualified people. Please don’t be shy. Everyone has enjoyed the process.

From the analytics available:
My readership is in the places that one would expect: Boston, Baltimore, Evanston, SF, D.C., LA, Miami, Philadelphia, San Diego, Cleveland, Hartford and Atlanta. I have a strong and consistent readership with an IP # in Council Bluffs, IA. If you are from that area and a regular reader, then can you please tell me what Jewish or Christian groups are my readers in IA? I have regular readers in Dallas-Plano, a town that I have not visited the Jewish community and don’t have any personal friends there. Also a solid contingent in Omaha.

I have more readers with Tel Aviv and Ramat Gan IP addresses than Jerusalem.

According to the analytics, my readership for the first two years was mainly people with graduate degrees and good incomes. In the late Fall, I have gained a demographic without degrees. Hmm.

I gained many new readers with the Carr interview. Welcome.

I just got this week a Samsung Tablet- if anyone knows any good apps to download tell me.

I lost the most readers, feed readers, and subscribers with my review of two works of scholarship on Hasidic Tales. I am surprised that about that. Of all the things that I covered, that Hasidic Tales are not real was a breaking point!?

If you are planning on buying my next book Judaism and World Religions , it will be printed in about 4-5 weeks and officially published mid-March. The price will drop greatly for the pre-publication version, but you have price-guarantee from Amazon.