Author Archives: Alan Brill

Rabbi Shai Held is Co-Founder, Rosh Yeshiva, and Chair in Jewish Thought at Mechon Hadar. Before that, he served for six years as Scholar-in-Residence at Kehilat Hadar in New York City, and taught both theology and Halakha at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Shai has a PhD from Harvard University with a dissertation on A J Heschel; his main academic interests are in modern thought and Religious Zionism. His canon of authors he admires consists of Rabbis Reines, Kook, Unterman, Reines, Heschel, Soloveitchik, Hartman, and Greenberg.

Two weeks ago, he penned the following op-ed advocating a humanistic religious Zionism based on Rabbis Unna and Kook and that the Torah has humanistic and non-humanistic interpretations. It seems to encapsulate his views.

Speaking in 1945, Orthodox Zionist leader Moshe Unna made an impassioned case for what he called “Jewish humanism.” Unna was calling not for humanism in the sense of putting human beings rather than God at the center of the universe – a view no religious thinker could embrace – but rather humanism in the sense of an uncompromising commitment to universal human well-being and mutual responsibility. Humanistic ideals, Unna emphasized, are inherently universalistic; they are, he said, “moral and cultural values that generate a commitment to the world and to humanity.”

Unna concluded his talk with a courageous declaration:…”It is crucial to emphasize the word ‘humanism.’ It is not enough simply to say ‘according to the Torah,’ because from the Torah many different things can be learned. ‘The Torah has 70 faces,’ and one can even learn from it the obligation to commit acts of terrorism … The word ‘humanism,’ therefore, comes to explain and clarify which values from among those values found in our literature we seek to internalize in our educational system.” What Unna was saying is that we cannot pretend to derive our values from a simple, straightforward reading of Torah, since Torah contains multitudes, and can be read as advocating universal humanism, on the one hand, and radically particularistic chauvinism, on the other

The world is not divided between those who read selectively and those who don’t. It is more accurate to say that the real division is between those who acknowledge that they read selectively, and those who do not – or who, given their assumptions, simply cannot. Read the Rest Here.

Rabbi Held also composed the widely circulated prayer after the Asian Tsunami

Ruler of Creation, Master of the world:
Have mercy on all those who are suffering from the raging waters and the storming waves. Have compassion on Your creatures –
Look, O Lord, and see their distress; Listen, God, and hear their cries.
Strengthen the hands of those who would bring relief, comfort the mourners, Heal, please, the wounded.
Grant us wisdom and discernment to know our obligations,
and open our hearts so that we may extend our hands to the devastated.
Bless us so that we may walk in Your ways,
“compassionate ones, children of compassionate ones.”
Grant us the will and the wisdom to prevent further disaster and death;
Prevent plague from descending upon Your earth, and fulfill Your words,
“Never again shall there be another flood to destroy the earth.”
Amen. So may it be your will.

From my outside perspective, it seems Held finds the Conservative movement unable to support a text-based beit midrash culture, but finds much of contemporary Orthodoxy overly dogmatic and belligerent. I asked him a few questions to clarify his position and received the following interview below. I wanted him to speak about his views of Rabbinic authority, but he demurred, wanting to avoid what he considers overheated polemics in which he thinks no one is persuaded by positions they don’t already agree with. Held reflects the part of Jewish community that wants an halakhic alternative to the perceived negative image of Orthodoxy (as he portrayed in his article on Rav Unna,) a community that Held thinks is predominately hermeneutically closed and increasingly oblivious to moral challenges. He did not want to discuss the topics directly, hence the broader discussion below. Questions to Rabbi Held should be kept polite and educated.

1) People are always asking about the denomination affiliation of Hadar, can you help clarify it for us?

To be honest, I find questions about denominational affiliation unhelpful and unnecessarily confining. I am often reminded of something Professor Heschel one said. Asked whether he considered himself Orthodox or Conservative, he replied: “I am not a noun in search of an adjective.” Now, we know there are many people for whom denominations are extremely important and even constitutive of their identity, and we respect that– but that is not who and what we are. We are a community and an institution that is oriented around Torah and Mitzvot and trying to discern what it is that God wants from us, as Jews and as human beings. We are proud to have students who come from a range of backgrounds who have nonetheless found their way to a shared vision and language of a committed, practicing Jewish life in the contemporary world.

I am not interested in being boxed into some small sliver “between Conservative and Orthodox.” I am not sure it’s helpful in this day and age to cut up the Jewish world that way, and I don’t want to live in some small ideological enclave, hermetically sealed from the passions and insights of the rest of the Jewish world. I am not sectarian: I want to speak to, and learn from, a broader swath of the Jewish world.

By the way, it’s interesting to note that among students at Hadar who identify with a denomination, more think of themselves as Orthodox than as anything else.

The mode of learning we are committed to at Hadar means believing both that Torah is Divine and that there is also wisdom and insight to be gained in and from the broader world. It is a mode of learning and of being religious that does not ask us to check either our minds or our moral intuitions at the door, and that learns from people rather than just seeking to convert or be mekarev them. It’s extremely important to us to take hold of Torah in such a way that I am always open to the possibility of learning from the person in front of me, and to revising my understandings in light of that encounter. In our world, there are a whole array of questions– theological, ethical, and Halakhic– that are open-ended, complex, and elusive; we are far more interested in complexity than in wedge issues and litmus tests. God is far greater and more expansive than the self-appointed arbiters of authenticity usually assume.

Also, I’m really not sure I know what the words Orthodox and Conservative mean in this day and age. Does Orthodox refer to Satmar or to Zvi Yehudah? Does it refer to the Bratzlav of Shuvu Banim, the legal formalism of R. Bleich or the dynamic Halakha in the tradition of Rav Uziel and Rav Hayyim David Halevy, the Misnagdic yeshiva world of Rav Eliyashiv or the post-modern neo-Hasidus of Rav Shagar? How much does this catch-all word “Orthodox” really tell us?

2) Explain your vision of Mechon Hadar.
First, we wanted to create an institution of learning that is truly intellectually open, that takes secular culture and Western philosophy and academic Jewish studies seriously, but never forgets that it is, first and last, a religious institution, a Mekom Torah, that teaches the Divine Torah. Second, we wanted to build a community that is unapologetically egalitarian, that is committed to women and men participating equally in both Torah and Tefillah, but without thereby diluting religious passion. Egalitarianism as an authentic and unabashed understanding of what it means to take Tzelem Elohim seriously in the modern world. Third, we wanted to build a place of learning that taught and embodied the notion that the culmination of the religious life is the commitment to hesed– Vehalakhta BiDerakhav as a commitment both to concrete actions (The Gemara in Sotah) and to the cultivation of virtue (Midrash Sifre Devarim). (That’s why every student who is at the yeshiva for longer than a week becomes a volunteer at the local senior citizens’ home– not as an extracurricular activity of some sort, but as one of the culminating features of what it means to learn Torah.)

3. What has your study of Heschel taught you?

I have tremendous reverence for him, and see it as an enormous privilege to have spent years studying one of the true giants of the spirit. I’ll mention just a few ways he’s impacted me here:
1) Heschel’s genius, in my view, is that he sought to couple Halevi’s personalism with Rambam’s universalism– he spoke of a God who cares, who is deeply personal, and/but who loves all of humanity and not just the Jewish people. For Rambam, the central event in Jewish theology is creation; worshipping the God of creation enables Rambam to be a universalist of sorts. R. Yehudah Halevi, in contrast, worships the God of history, Exodus and Sinai. The strength of this approach is that Halevi maintains a God who cares, who is involved in human life, and who can be engaged personally; the strength of Rambam is his universalism. I use the Rambam-Halevi dichotomy not so much as a historical claim, but more as a heuristic one similar to the distinction Rabbi David Hartman has drawn again and again over the years.

2) Another important lesson I learned from Heschel– and it has been extremely important to me from the time I was in yeshiva until the present day– is the impassioned rejection of what he famously termed “pan-Halakhism,” the idea that Judaism simply is Halakha. Heschel never tired of showing that such an approach is both spiritually deadening and false to the sources of Jewish tradition. One who claims to have Halakha but not Aggada in fact has neither. Religious behaviorism (think of Leibowitz, for example) is a falsification of Torah and its preoccupation with the duties of the heart, the cultivation of virtue, and the importance of theology and (traditionally) metaphysics.

3) Heschel’s critique of modernity (and here there are obvious echoes of Heidegger) is essentially that modern people are focused on what he calls “expediency,” or using the world for our own ends. Torah, in contrast, asks us not just to manipulate but also to appreciate; the best antidote to a culture of expediency is a return to wonder. For Heschel, then, Torah’s preoccupation with wonder is not an esthetic concern, but a radically ethical one– unless we can overcome our propensity to turn everything (and everyone) into a tool for our own benefit, we will eventually bring the world to total destruction and devastation. The animating principle of Jewish ethics and spirituality is the quest for self-transcendence– that is, the realization that I am not the center of the universe, and that “something is asked of us.” One of the primary and paradoxical meanings of self-transcendence, by the way, is that we find the meaning of our lives by getting over ourselves; I find my own purpose by dedicating myself to a purpose that is far greater and more enduring than myself.

4. How has the thought of Rav Soloveitchik influenced your thought?

R. Soloveitchik’s preoccupation with human agency and creativity has been enormously influential for me; his utter rejection of quietism and passivity helped me see the Jewish tradition and the life of faith in new and deeper ways. The notion that we are called upon to be authors of our own destiny, and that we have a distinct purpose assigned to us by God. In addition, the notion of being an agent, being active and rejecting passivity, gave me incredibly inspiring theological language in which to understand Zionism, without the messianic overlay that has led to such theological, political, and moral difficulty.

I find R. Soloveitchik’s idea of prayer as self-redemption masterful– first, he shifts the center of gravity away from “what will God do in response to my prayer”” to “what will ideally happen to me in the very act of praying before God?” And second, he introduces the extremely powerful and challenging notion that speech equals dignity– and even more radically, that it equals redemption (ge’ulat hayahid). It’s also an amazing display of hermeneutical virtuosity– weaving an extremely compelling theological idea out of an ostensibly straightforward Halakhic source (the obligation lismokh geulah litefilah).

5. Besides Heschel and Soloveitchik, which Jewish thinkers influenced you?

R. Yitz Greenberg’s insistence that we take the infinite dignity of every human being seriously and that we bring this Torah with us as we stare at a broken and pain-ridden world is something I carry with me every day of my life– it’s part of what I mean when I talk about refusing to purchase our faith by shutting our eyes to the world. Adderabba, what it means to have faith is to live with the chasm between what Judaism teaches– the infinite value of every human being, and reality as we face it– life is cheap and human beings are expendable. Living with that tension is at the very heart of a life of authentic faith.

Martin Buber in many ways anticipates and critiques the narcissism of a great deal of contemporary spirituality. This is part of what he means when he emphasizes “encounter” rather than “experience”– whereas the former is about me and an other, the latter is ultimately only about me and my own inner world. The way I like to describe this is that much of the time in human relationships there is no me and you, there is only “me and the way you make me feel.” In that case, I may flatter myself that I am having deep spiritual experiences, but in fact I am only pleasuring myself (see Buber’s “Religion as Presence” lectures). In some ways, Rav Amital’s critique of some aspects of neo-Hasidism is an obvious parallel.

6. Which Non-Jewish thinkers influenced you?
My decades-long engagement with Christian theology has taught how important it is for theology to talk and be about love. To be clear: it is not because this is a Christian importation into Judaism, but because it lies at the very heart of Torah itself, and yet somehow (American?) Jews have lost the ability to talk about it, and presumably to feel it. The daily liturgy is fundamentally about a claim that God loves us and has therefore given us Torah (Ahavah Rabbah Ahavtanu) and that we are then called upon to reciprocate that love (VeAhavta). I like to think of Torah as about three loves– love of God, love of neighbor, and love of the stranger. We need to become far less abashed about internalizing and teaching this language. After all, Rabbi Akiva tells us straight out that “God loves you” (Haviv Adam Shenivra Betzelem).

One enduring interest is the work of the Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner, who insists that there is no secular pre-religious reality (no ungraced nature), but that human beings are always already oriented towards the transcendent. There are really interesting parallels in this regard between his thought and Heschel’s.

I have also been deeply influenced by the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, whose clarity about mindfulness and what it entails has been an enormous challenge and comfort to me in my own life, and whose words have also shaped my understanding of what it means to be a teacher and a pastor. His words have also enabled me to see things in Jewish sources, especially but not exclusively Hasidic ones, that I had missed before (the extent of Rebbe Nachman’s emphasis on kindness to oneself, for example).

7. What are your thoughts on Pluralism?
The more I studied Christian theology over the years, the more I took it seriously, the harder I realized pluralistic theology really is. I want to emphasize that I am opposed to cheap and easily purchased versions of pluralism that effectively say that all religions are at bottom the same. There is a sad propensity among many liberal thinkers ironically to flatten and efface difference in the name of celebrating it. I say this not out of disrespect for Christianity, but on the contrary, out of deep respect for it: I want to take theological and metaphysical claims seriously rather than simply eliding them.

To my mind, the deepest problem with the pluralism of thinkers such as John Hick is the presumption that he has a “view from nowhere” (his, you might say, is a “pluralism from nowhere”), that he can stand outside and above all particular religious traditions and point to the universal core they all purportedly share. I share most contemporary philosophers’ suspicion of the plausibility of such a view. More, as a religious person, I’m more interested in what people can find ways to embrace while standing inside of their own religious traditions, rather than presuming to transcend them. I worry about a pluralism that ends up making a claim virtually no actual believer would recognize, let alone embrace.

I have been super busy preparing for a public lecture to a tough academic crowd. And I am on hiatus from editing until I receive my manuscript back from my editor, so my blogging has been light.It was a nice semi-vacation from my computer.

In the meantime, I got a nice shout-out (and email) from David Wolpe

The Dance Of Love
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
David Wolpe

The Talmud in Ta’anit envisions the “future dance of the righteous.” In Alan Brill’s book “Thinking God,” about Rabbi Zadok of Lublin, he quotes Rabbi Zadok’s beautiful comment on this passage:

“The future dance of the righteous” is because the dancing occurs in a circle in which all are equal. … When everything is complete, then one will not need effort to love in one’s heart the creation because then loving creation will be as natural as loving parts of one’s own body.”

A dance expanding the body beyond itself, so that we are swept up in something larger, is the ideal — to gradually expand the circle of our love so that it embraces all of God’s creation. One day we will cherish everything as we cherish our very selves.

Such universality is not possible for a human being to realize now, in this partial and fragmented world. But Rabbi Zadok reminds us to hold out the image of the dance in which the upright heart will also be an all-encompassing heart. He reminds us that at the core of our tradition there is a deep, wild, wondrous vision of the possibilities of love.

Rabbi David Wolpe is spiritual leader of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. Follow his teachings at http://www.facebook.com/RabbiWolpe

Voice of America produced a documentary of interfaith and religious diversity in Teaneck. They emphasize how the Jewish community supports the Muslim mayor. It shows the diversity of the community and the dialogue group. It also offers a better sense of what people mean by dialogue in 2011, in contrast to 1965. Now people discuss facing the challenges of diverse groups working together, issues of location and translocation, race, generation, and assimilation. The website has clips of many of the segments of the documentary- here. I cannot seem to copy or embed  the video here, so go to the website to watch the clips. (I will try and fix it tomorrow, any ideas on how to get it to embed? ).

The Teaneck Story

Hope Town investigates how Americans in one New Jersey community are dealing with the problems, challenges and successes of a culturally and religiously diverse population.

Teaneck is a city of nearly 40,000 people in the New Jersey suburbs outside (6 km) New York City, where Mayor Mohammed Hameeduddin, a Muslim, works every day with Deputy Mayor Adam Gussen, an Orthodox Jew. In some parts of the world, this relationship might be doomed to failure because of historic conflicts between Muslim and Jewish people — but not in Teaneck.

Could this town represent a model for the future of tolerance? Voice of America and Alhurra, an Arabic language television station that broadcasts to 26 million people in 22 Middle Eastern countries, went to Teaneck to find out.

	Teaneck City Hall: Not Politics as Usual Mayor Mohammed Hameeduddin, a Muslim and Deputy Mayor Adam Gussen, an Orthodox Jew, have been friends since childhood. Their political partnership allows for a unique approach to managing the community. (3:43)
	Room for Everyone Teaneck’s diverse population cherishes its multicultural and religiously diverse community. (2:14)
	Four Friends, Four Faiths High school buddies David Kantrowitz, a Jew; Patrick Saardi, a Christian; Albab Ali, a Muslim and John Puzio, an Atheist discuss their friendship. (1:44)
	A Cultural Petri Dish Within the broadly defined cultural and religious communities in Teaneck there are many sub-groups, each with different beliefs and agendas. (3:10)
	Not All Sunshine and Roses Teaneck has been through its share of dark periods. In 1990, racial violence broke out after a shooting involving a police officer and an African-American teenager. (2:47)
	Leaving the Comfort Zone Temple Emeth synagogue and Dar-ul-Islah Mosque in Teaneck have been engaging in a Muslim/Jewish dialogue for two years. (6:07)

There is a new book offering a philosophic treatment of Genocide. The book received a good reviews in the journal Ethics and is a required reading for those who teach anything related to Holocaust or Genocide seeking a philosophic approach.

The reviewer gently notes in the review “the bibliography contains no references even to philosophical papers on genocide, other than one by Larry May himself.” Hence, non-analytic works by those in Continental thought Todorov, Butler, Agamben, Appadurai, and Bauman are not interrogated. One should also read Ben Kierman’s Blood and Soil for the current state of the history of genocide.

May deals with the philosophic definitions of what does it mean to single out a group, what is a group, and the role of agency. May’s nominalist definition of groups will refine the thinking of those who define groups, such as Jews, with essentialist and realist definitions.

Larry May, Genocide: A Normative Account, Cambridge University Press, 2010, $28.99
Reviewed by Chandran Kukathas, London School of Economics
The Polish lawyer and Holocaust survivor, Raphael Lemkin, coined the term ‘genocide’ in a book published in 1944 on Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.[1] Lemkin devoted his energies over the next four years to agitating for the recognition of this crime by international law and was instrumental in the drafting and eventual promulgation of the 1948 Genocide Convention. Since then, legal analysis of this controversial notion has grown as the term has come to occupy a distinctive place in law and, no less importantly, in popular discourse. Everyone knows the term ‘genocide’.
Over the past 60 years there have been countless historical studies of particular genocides, as well as numerous comparative discussions, notably Ben Kiernan’s Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur.[2] Yet while historians, lawyers, psychologists, sociologists, political scientists and international relations theorists have published extensively on the question of genocide, philosophers have been conspicuously silent on the subject. Larry May’s study is the first substantial philosophical work on genocide.[3] This is surprising given the controversy that has surrounded the concept from its very beginnings. It is not so much that disciplinary boundaries matter, or that lawyers and historians are incapable of conceptual analysis. It is rather that there are questions that have preoccupied philosophers that are thrown into particularly sharp relief by the problem of genocide, and there is much that philosophers can contribute — and learn — by paying greater attention to this moral notion.
Larry May’s philosophical study is an outstanding contribution to our understanding of genocide, as well as to our appreciation of a number of theoretical problems that are addressed in the book. Although it is a freestanding work, it is a part of a larger project that produced three other substantial Cambridge books: Crimes against Humanity: A Normative Account (2005), War Crimes and Just War (2007), and Aggression and Crimes against Peace (2008). In combination these works amount to an enormous achievement. The breadth of scholarship is impressive in itself: Professor May has mastered a substantial legal and historical literature in order to address the questions he has posed. Yet he has offered much more than a tour of extant works on war and war crimes. He set out to supply and succeeded in producing an account of the moral foundations of international criminal law. Genocide is a crucial part of the account.
Larry May begins by defending a nominalist view of the idea of a group that he says is inspired by Ockham and Hobbes. From Ockham he takes the idea that groups have no independent existence, but from Hobbes he takes the idea that groups are artificial persons that can be understood as agents. Read the Rest Here.

Here is a great review of a great new book on Levinas. The book is not an introductory volume but if one has already read some Levinas and some essays about Levinas then this is one of the first books that one should pick up from a Jewish point of view. One of the local rabbi- educators even gave a shiur this summer telling over Fagenblat without attribution.

Michael Fagenblat, A Covenant of Creatures: Levinas’s Philosophy of Judaism, Stanford University Press, 2010, $24.95
Reviewed by Kenneth Seeskin, Northwestern University

In the Preface to this rich and thought-provoking study, Fagenblat raises a good question: “Another book on Emmanuel Levinas?” But it does not take long for the reader to see that this volume is definitely needed. According to Fagenblat, Levinas’s fundamental project was to develop a post-Heideggarian account of ethics, which means an account that retains the binding nature of our most basic ethical intuitions. In Fagenblat’s words:Levinas sought to restore a new sense of an unconditional ethical imperative that could not be dismissed as merely abstract, formal, ahistorical, inauthentic, and ontologically inadequate. He did this by developing a phenomenology of the moral imperative that was derived not from the fact of Reason but from the face of the Other. (p. xix)

Against Heidegger and much of twentieth-century philosophy, Levinas was firmly convinced, as Fagenblat puts it (p. 14), that ethical judgment is exercised over history and not simply within history.

The problem is that for Levinas, the face of the Other is completely transcendent and thus cannot be captured by description, explanation, or narration. As Fagenblat rightly observes (p. xx), it can only be respected or desired, loved or hated. That is why Levinas thinks ethics is first philosophy: it is the source of all meaning and intelligibility and cannot be derived from anything more basic. I will postpone the question of what type of ethics this approach produces until later. For the present, the important point is that, according to Fagenblat, Levinas reaches this conclusion not by conducting an exercise in pure phenomenology but by drawing on sources from Jewish tradition. What results is in fact “a coherent philosophy of Judaism” (p. xxii).

… As Fagenblat sees it, critics like Badiou, Butler, Janicaud, and Rose accuse him of sneaking in religious considerations by privileging “pious and dogmatic” assertions of a non-rational Law that is immune from philosophic critique. Alternatively, Gibbs and Batnitzky accuse him of abandoning revelation by privileging Plato’s “Good beyond Being” or Kant’s Primacy of Practical Reason. For those in the first group, Levinas has no real philosophy; for those in the second, no real Judaism.

Fagenblat argues that both groups miss the point. “It is not a matter of collapsing Judaism . . . into philosophical discourse but of insisting on the constitutive and permanent possibility for radical interpretation of one by the other.” (p. 13) Rather than accepting a sharp dichotomy between philosophy and Judaism or Athens and Jerusalem, Fagenblat’s Levinas provides “a philosophy of Judaism without and or between.” (p. 14) The result is a deep and nuanced discussion of Levinas,

More specifically, Fagenblat sees a “seismic shift” between the Levinas of Totality and Infinity — Levinas 1 — and the Levinas of Otherwise than Being — Levinas 2. Whereas Levinas 1 is content to give a broadly metaphysical account of agency and transcendence that Fagenblat discusses in connection with the problem of creation, Levinas 2 offers a post-metaphysical vision, which turns out to be nothing short of a “Judaic ethical negative theology.”

To apprehend God is not to achieve mastery over a system of interrelated concepts but to treat one’s neighbor with the respect that is owed her. In the words of Jean-Luc Marion (cited by Fagenblat on p. 127): theology “is no longer a matter of naming or attributing something to something but rather of aiming in the direction of . . ., of relating to . . ., of composing oneself towards . . ., of reckoning with . . . — in short, of dealing with . . .”

Needless to say, Levinas is not as overtly theological as Maimonides. Rather than a negative theology of God, we have what one might call a negative theology of the Other. Like God in negative theology, the Other overwhelms thought, resists classification, and cannot be identified by a system of interrelated concepts. As Fabgenblat sees it, transcendence for Levinas is not something the intellect can grasp by means of properties or predicates; it is never positive and has no identifiable essence.

The most authentic response to transcendence is humility, which merits a whole subsection in Fagenblat’s Chapter 4. “Ethical negative theology,” he writes, “is a spiritual exercise that negates knowledge so as to acknowledge the Other.” (p. 118) It acquaints us with the finitude and partiality of anything that can be grasped by means of concepts. As Fagenblat observes, humility is a primary instance of Maimonides’ departure from Aristotle. Humility, or what Maimonides terms “lowliness of spirit,” is thus the negative theological virtue par excellence.

Let us now return to the question mentioned above: what kind of ethics does this approach give us? Classic thinkers like Aristotle, Kant, and Mill produced well-articulated theories with discussions of method, analysis of concepts, and elaborate accounts of the virtues.
If Fagenblat is right, we should not expect Levinas’s ethics to be anything like theirs, and indeed it is not. So let us ask our question again: what kind of ethics is this that defies explanation and description? Put otherwise, if the Other is as unknowable as Levinas insists, can there be an ethics at all? The ultimate outcome of Maimonides’s negative theology is a Jobian-like silence in the presence of God. Is this all Levinas wants for the Other?

As Fagenblat asks, “Without a more or less determined historical horizon of others, can ethics be anything more than subjective individualism and abstract humanism?” (p. 180) The question is particularly telling because subjective individualism and abstract humanism are exactly what Levinas set out to avoid. Again we face a Scylla and Charybdis situation. To the traditional theologian, Levinas has replaced God with the Other. To the traditional ethical theorist, he has replaced a constructive account of our moral intuitions with the dogmatism of the face.

Fagenblat responds by saying that for Levinas there are no formal ethical concepts and no pure ethical intuitions. Instead what we have is an account of the historical conditioning of our concepts and the hermeneutical character of our intuitions; in short, “a descriptive [i.e. phenomenological] argument about who we are” (p. 196).

As for Fagenblat, by any relevant criterion — depth, clarity, originality, or scholarly integrity — this book is first rate. Read the full review here.

In the Spring of 2010, I spoke at the Jewish life center at a local College. A guy came in before I started to speak handing out cards. On the cards were pictures of this guy dressed in various shades and hats to portray himself as a cool and normal- as a greaser, hipster, punk, athlete- and not the Yeshivish guy he was. He promising a free trip to Israel and money to take classes. He was obviously affiliated with the network of kiruv yeshivot in Israel. I wondered what the very informed Jewish Life center rabbi thought of this guy; I didn’t ask.

This year the Jewish Life center is offering its own course and paying $300. This time it is being taught by a liberal Orthodox rabbi educator who is presenting Rabbis Yitz Greenberg and David Hartman as basic Judaism. The ordained Orthodox rabbi does not purport to be teaching orthodoxy and is not interested in carrying a banner of orthodoxy in my educational practice on campus. Moreover, he does not think that orthodoxy is an appropriate educational posture for someone working in my environment.

Unlike the classes by kiruv organizations, these classes differentiate themselves by their pluralism.

Put simply, our goal is to get you to ask “big questions” about being Jewish, not to give you “big answers.” We also have a cooler looking logo.
While JLF is a program rooted in Jewish study and in Jewish community, it is open to all students.. We do not discriminate based on race, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation. We also make no claims about the “right” way to practice or not to practice Judaism. Our job is to help you explore the tradition in a safe space, and find your own place, on your terms, in Judaism’s Great Conversation.

They are offering two classes. One on Asking Big Questions and one on Sex, Love, & Intimacy. Any thoughts on the content? People are always looking for another course on being modern and observant, what do people think? How does it compare to the Shalhevet course for HS students, which I posted?

I also wonder about the bigger effect. The course ends with the question, taken from Bellah’s Habits of the Heart (1985) – Is observance just a lifestyle enclave or will it be communities of memory? Twenty five years later many who expected Orthodoxy to be a community of memory found themselves in a lifestyle enclave. Even the established institutions acknowledge this is what they created. Furthermore, I know people older 10-20 years older than I am who studied with Greenberg and Hartman at YU in the 1960’s and accepted their Torah, then found themselves out of step with the lifestyle enclave. (Even the liberals are caught in the lifestyle enclave.) Is this rabbi once again promising a vision that he cannot deliver? What happens when these bright and creative college grads who consider freedom, diversity and reinterpretation to be their Judaism, then find themselves saddled with those who give out funny cards?

The sex ethics course may be breaking new ground in discussing pleasuring, desire and the possibility of more than two sexes and more than two genders. (Is there a rabbinic work by a liberal rabbi that already covers this ground?)
Thoughts?

Freshman Seminar
ASKING BIG QUESTIONS
Week 1 – Orientation: The Story of the Jewish Family
Big Questions: Who is a member of the Jewish people? What does it mean to be a Jew? What are some of the major narratives Jews tell about themselves? How do Jews today understand themselves differently or similarly than they did in previous ages? In what way does personal history become collective history? Can history “make a claim” on us? What is your story?

Week 2 – The Challenge of Freedom
Big Questions: What does the Bible conceive of God? Is it different or similar to how we speak of God today in popular culture? Are human beings free, or are our actions controlled by forces greater than ourselves? Does it matter?

Week 3 A Partnership to Transform the World
Big Questions: What is the Jewish Covenant and how does it work? How is a Covenant different from a contract? What relationships in contemporary society might we describe as Covenantal?

Week 4 – Radical Rereading: The Rabbinic Revolution
Big Questions: How do the Rabbis understand and reinterpret the theology of the bible? What kind of a new culture is created? In what ways is the rabbinic understanding of the covenant consistent with the biblical? In which ways is it innovative? Can this serve as a model for today?

Week 5 – The Creative Destruction of Modernity
Big Questions: How did the Jewish self-understanding change in the modern era? How was the covenant reinterpreted by Jewish thinkers in the modern era? Is it possible to be “untouched” by modernity? Can a community return to a pre-modern era? What is lost and what is gained by the rupture of modernity?
November 2011 – Retreat at Camp Isabella Freedman

Week 6 – “Zionism: Challenges and Opportunities”
Big Questions: Does Zionism represent a decisive, revolutionary break from the Jewish history or its ultimate fulfillment?

Week 7 – “God in the Ruins: The Impact of the Holocaust”
Big Questions: How are the horrors of the Holocaust to be interpreted in light of the Covenant? Does the Holocaust represent a unique instance of radical evil, or is the Holocaust but another instance of an older theodicy? How does the covenant account for evil and unwarranted suffering?

Week 8 – “Toward the Other: Negotiating Diversity”
Big Questions: What do you do when the demands of your particular culture violate your own moral intuition?
December –Shabbat Dinner at Rabbi’s House

Week 9 – “Doubt and Disbelief”
Big Questions: Must a Jew believe anything? What do we mean by belief in God? What is the difference between belief in and belief that, or what has been called “pragmatic” and “propositional truth”? What role does faith play in an era of uncertainty?

Week 10 – “Judaism in the 21st Century: Lifestyle Enclaves or Communities of Memory?”
Big Questions: Where do we go from here?
Full Version Here

Sex, Love, & Intimacy
JEWISH CONVERSATIONS ON SEX
Week 1 – Orientation
Big Questions: How should we think about sex? Is sex a purely biological act? Should it
be treated as such? Is there anything unique about human sexuality? Can we speak of a
function sex should or should not have? What would that be? Should there be such a thing
as sex ethics?

Week 2 – Creating Sex, Engendering Desire
Big Questions: What do the creation stories tell us about sex and sexuality? What does it
mean to be created in the image of the divine?

Week 3 – Pleasure and Frequency: The “Commandment of Onah”
Week 4 – “But I Can’t Do it Alone”: Auto-Eroticism
Week 5 – Tzniut: Modesty and Immodesty
Week 6 – Niddah: Distance and Closeness in Relationships
Week 7 – Extra-Marital Sex: or, How to Grapple with Tradition

Week 8 – Queerness I: Boys who are Girls and Girls who are Boys
Big Questions: So much of modern sexuality is predicated on two sexes. Can we imagine a
world with more than two sexes and two genders? Can the Jewish tradition? What might
that look like? What would it mean?

Week 9 – Queerness II: Non-Heterosexual Relationships in the Jewish Tradition
Week 10 -“IFAQ: Infrequently Asked Questions”
Full Version Here

Years ago in my corner of academic-educational institutes in Jerusalem, people who worked in Jewish thought remembered the yahrzeit or hillula of the person on whom they were writing. They gave memorial classes or a hug bayit or a photocopied handout. During Elul, many people took note of Rav Kook’s yahrzeit on the 3rd, some noted Maharal on the 18th, and I took note of Rav Zadok’s yahrzeit (Elul 9) followed by Reb Simcha Bunim three days later (Elul 12).

As this blog approaches its second anniversary, I must confess that the original idea for the blog was to post a daily yahrzeit. Since the goal of the blog was to keep me writing on other projects, a daily yahrzeit would be a chance to talk about a sefer or person. I originally envisioned starting with an Elul yahrzeit date, but I scrapped that idea. At first, it seemed like too much continuous work and not in tune with the zigzags of writing academic books. Second, it seemed easier to type up something I was reading or teaching on that day. And third, and probably most important, I saw so much on the internet about the Yahrzeits of these Elul deaths that was gibberish, name dropping, out-of-context, or pop-psych. I did not want to argue with those who gloried in posts of Wiki, Rambi, and Reb Shlomo stories. My goal was to have a personal board for thoughts on these figures such as why they are important. Instead, I choose the post on what I was reading. The earliest, more serious posts were on Sagi, Fishbane, and Novak-and what I was writing. That was the entire purpose of this blog.

Nevertheless, I still like yahrzeits as a means of discussing heritage. Yahrzeits let you parade out a full gallery of potential Jewish exemplars and discuss why they are important or to argue the merits of their positions. They point to what was and is not anymore, as well as what could have been. To discuss the many authors in Shem Hagedolim can capture lost voices and forgotten moments—they move us beyond presentism to consider other ages. Discussing Jews under the Mamluks or Jews under the Hapsburgs does not open up a vista to a new world, as we do not want to change our material culture. But to consider the thought of David Hanagid ben Avraham ben Rambam (Elul 1) or Maharal (Elul 18) awakens potential.

I am drawn to them because they offer saints, mystics, visionaries, and creative authors. They allow one to discuss the unique, the personal, the individual—all of them coming to God. Greatest is not defined in terms of cookie-cutter lives but rather is evaluated in terms of unique personalities. One celebrates and learns from these realized beings. I am not referring to the soul numbing contemporary gedolim tales that cauterize the intellect and emotions, rather the actual books and lives of diverse figures.

The source of yahrzeits goes back to late antiquity; there are several rabbinic texts that were interpreted to imply the importance of the day of the death of a great person. The Zohar speaks of the hillula when the deceased gives special influences every year on the day of their death, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and Meir Baal HaNes were the most famous hillulot. Later centuries assume that one can receive inspiration or even an avatar from the deceased soul. Customs arose of lighting candles on the yahrzeit, either fasting or having a drink, and to visit the grave for communion with the soul. It was important to mention the name of the zaddik because, as Moshe Idel showed, that in Renaissance Jewish thought there was a hermetic-magical power associated with name of the righteous. As late as 1943, the sefer Zikhron Zaddikim advocated these ideas. In addition, they taught that if one prayed for the dead, the dead will pray for you.

Between the 18th to 20th centuries, this approach to yahrzeits generated a genre of Jewish literature that listed at least one person’s yahrzeit daily. Originally, one only celebrated the yahrzeit of those whom one had allegiance to their dynasty. One was either Breslov, or Tolne, or Chabad. But, with the large influx of Jews from Ukraine to Poland, from Poland to Galicia, and from Galicia to Hungary, people could pick and choose which yahrzeits to celebrate. Like Catholic saint calendars which became unmoored from their original monastic context including one’s singular alliance and evolved into reading a calendar in the city and choosing which saint to celebrate. It also reflected the rise of Hasidic pilgrimages within Eastern Europe itself and the ability to have allegiance to a religious organization from a region other than one’s own. It was a way to know about the many new seforim that were being published, republished, or newly discovered.

Yahrzeit allows one to imagine other times and places. On one hand, we have those who visiting the grave of the Lubavitcher Rebbe or engage in the Halakhic Man’s cognitive séance of the Rambam and Rabbenu Tam as each in their own way using the past for a presentist understanding. On the other hand, the antiquarian and those satisfied with the triviality of an obscure document lose the exemplarity. The spiritual path of Rabbi Simchah Bunim is more important than the novelty of his diploma from pharmacy school.

Which yahrzeits can appeal to us today? Those that can serve as a role model or broader horizons for our thoughts, our actions, or simply, our lives. They each have different virtues but can give us insight into the religious life. John Henry Newman wrote essays on the importance of saints in our lives as models of holiness. Not saints because they are officially recognized or because they have exalted angelic sanctity, but rather are people who help us aspire to holiness. They feed our imaginations, give us goals, and show the many paths that one could take. Pascal observed how easily veneration can pass over into a pious trivialization of their challenge. We tend to regard the saints as “crowned with glory and years, judged almost divine before our time.” Gedolim, who are painted as divine preternatural children that grew up to have no knowledge of human life, do not inspire those looking for inspiration. In contrast, we need to see elements that showed how they faced the challenge of faith of their time and place and learn what it can teach us for our time.

“Traditional saints, precisely insofar as they responded to the demands of their own moment, remain a precious resource.” Ascetics, recluses, and gnostics were important in their time and still have much to teach us, today, however, they hold less interest for many of our needs. But what are the needs of the present moment? We need exemplarity for our narrative self, our psychological self, the self that needs both insights and to grapple with applications. Unlike 19th century Galicia, we are not looking for miracles or heavenly interceders.

Back in my high school teaching days, my interest inspired one of the students to add selected dates to the student newspaper. Back then, I asked one of the Jewish publishers if they wanted a book of Zaddik days, (I had graduate school friends who were editing Catholic saint calendars and it was a popular doctoral topic in those years.) the publisher said: no, modern Jews are not interested in these things.

Is he still correct? Listening to news is important for our economic and political decisions, but we mark our days with infotainment news for the very sense of talking about new people each day. If we cannot talk about ideas, then what if we discussed a rabbinic exemplar each day? What if aspiration matters more than creating controversies of the day? Picture a Jewish Exemplar Daily instead of Jewish ideology daily. What if we had one of those tear-sheet daily desk calendars with a description and quotes of Zaddik each day?

Reb Simcha Bunim: “Just as a person must find for himself a teacher in this world, so too a person must find for himself a teacher in the next World.”
Yahrzeit of Reb SImcha Bunim Elul 12

Jews who follow interfaith are always asking: what are those Presbyterians saying today? Unlike Lutherans or Catholics in which there seems to be a clear course of reconciliation, Presbyterians are more hesitant, cautious, and less in common cause.
In 1987, the Presbyterian Church in US issued “A Theological Understanding of the Relationship Between Christians and Jews.” where following Catholics and the majority of mainline American Protestants they repudiated supersessionalism, antisemitism, and any condemnation of Judaism. But by 2004, Jews found the Church’s views on Israel/Palestine not to their liking

The Canadian Church recently issued a statement that reiterated the 1987 statement as understood by recent documents and discussions. They also affirmed their recognition of Israel, prided themselves over the role which Presbyterian countries played in offering Jews religious freedom, yet it concluded by calling for mission to the Jews and messianic synagogues.

A Presbyterian minister married to a Reform Jewish academic offers a full analysis as well as what he wished the document to have actually said.

The proposed statement does very well in making explicit certain Presbyterian beliefs, such as that Christians and Jews worship the same God, that both Jews and Gentiles are included in one covenant of grace which God makes with humankind, and “that Jews have not been supplanted or replaced by Christians” (A&P 2010, 355). The call for solidarity and dialogue and the common pursuit of peace and justice make extremely positive inclusions. The drafters of the statement have also made the important step of formally repudiating anti-Semitism while offering contrition for the church’s “complicity in the persecution, exclusion and expulsions of the Jews” (A&P 2010, 356).

Here are some selections from the document:

Statement of The Presbyterian Church in Canada on our Relationship with the Jewish People

In stating our relationship with the Jewish people we reaffirm a central tenet of our Reformed faith expressed in the Westminster Confession of Faith, that there is one covenant of grace embracing Jews and Gentiles and therefore, not “two covenants of grace differing in substance, but one and the same under various dispensations” (VII, 6).

Accordingly, we affirm that the Jewish people have a unique role in God’s economy of salvation and healing for our world. Jesus himself taught that “salvation is from the Jews” (John 4:22) and the Apostle Paul stated: “to them belong the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship and the promises; to them belong the patriarchs, and of their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ, God who is over all be blessed forever. Amen” (Romans 9:4-5). The Jewish people have a pre-eminent place in God’s covenant, John Calvin finely said, for they are “the firstborn in God’s family.”

We affirm that God has graciously included Gentile Christians, rightly called “posthumous children of Abraham” (J. Calvin), by engrafting them into the one people of God established by God’s covenant with Abraham. This means that Jews have not been supplanted and replaced by Christians in the one covenant. As Paul teaches, God has not rejected or abandoned them: “I ask, then has God rejected his people? By no means!” (Romans 11:1).

We believe that both Christians and Jews worship and serve the One Living God.

We confess God’s grace, mercy and faithfulness in the miracle of Jewish survival and the continuing existence and witness of the Jewish people. We are grateful that the State of Israel is a place the Jewish people can call home and we express our commitment as The Presbyterian Church in Canada to their right to live in peace, both in the Middle East and throughout the world. We also commit ourselves to pray for the peace of Jerusalem so all the children of Abraham may freely worship and live in a place they call holy.

It is always good for us to confess our sins to God. We acknowledge with shame and penitence the Church’s long complicity in the persecution, exclusion and expulsions of the Jews through the “teaching of contempt”, beginning in the first centuries of the Christian era, gathering strength during the Crusades and culminating in the Shoah or Holocaust. As Christians we have failed to demonstrate to the Jewish community and to individual Jews that love which Jesus Christ commanded us to show. Of this lack of love and teaching of contempt and the attitudes and acts which proceeded from it, we humbly repent.

It is also, however, a matter of historical record that countries in which the Reformed tradition and its “one covenant of grace” theology took root have provided refuge for this persecuted people. The Spanish and Portuguese Jewish community has lived in the Netherlands (and Dutch colonies like Curacao) with full citizenship rights since the 17th century. There were no pogroms in Scotland. During the Puritan Commonwealth Jews were re-admitted to England and have flourished as a community both there and in what became the United States. We are thankful for Christians, of all traditions throughout the ages, who have stood in solidarity with Jews. We call upon our people to eschew the use of language and innuendo which may disparage, slander and harm Jews and we urge Christians to show solidarity with Jews when acts of hatred, such as the desecration of graves, synagogues and schools are perpetrated against them.

Both Christians and Jews look forward in hope to God’s full redemption which Christians believe will occur in the Second Advent when Jesus Christ returns, a hope which includes the Jews, for as Paul teaches in Romans 9-11, in Jesus Christ there will be an ingathering of people, whether of Jewish or Gentile background: “so all Israel will be saved” (Romans 11:26). The Presbyterian Church in Canada has sought to serve Jewish people in Canada in the name of our Lord through specific mission efforts in Montreal, Toronto and Winnipeg. The most well known of those was the Christian Synagogue in Toronto which evolved into the Scott Mission. Finally we encourage our congregations and people to take the initiative and to reach out in friendship and hospitality to neighboring synagogues and Jewish people and where they can, to engage in Jewish Christian dialogue to promote better mutual understanding and to pursue and ensure the establishment of peace and justice and the good and betterment of the wider community. Read the full version here.

Last years’ announcement of the attempt to create a trilateral seminary that produced ministers, rabbis, and imams has come to be. They plan on working to include Jains also. I do not know how it would work and I have heard that there is a bot of controversy among some of the potential poll of instructors. There are severla similar projects int he works around the US. The Jewish leader of this project Mel Gottlieb is a RIETS musmakh who is the President of the Academy for Jewish Religion, California (AJRCA). Here is an article he just wrote about introducing hevruta study for three faith purposes.

In June of 2010, the three of us, Rev. Jerry Campbell, Imam Jihad Turk and Rabbi Mel Gottlieb, announced an agreement for our respective institutions to co-create the world’s first inter-religious university — a place where rabbis, ministers, imams and other religious leaders would each be educated in their own traditions, side by side, but also with classes in common. The new university would include academic schools for students who wanted to do world-healing work in non-religious fields as well.

The purpose of this new concept was not to water down the beliefs of each of the different traditions, but rather to create understanding, promote mutual respect and learn how to cooperate across religious boundaries to address the world’s greatest problems.

This Sept. 6, 2011, with the help of a $50 million gift from Joan and David Lincoln, our vision is becoming a reality in the form of the launch of Claremont Lincoln University. We are very excited about the history-making potential of this new institution and the caliber of students it is attracting.

About a year ago we committed to meet for chavruta once a month. Chavruta is Hebrew for an engagement to study holy texts. When it’s done between people of different beliefs, it’s a way of getting to know “the other,” rather than accepting stereotypes.

At our most recent meeting, we chose texts that were troublesome from our own scriptures. We explained them to each other in light of scholarship, historical context and spiritual insight. We’ve discovered that the more fundamentalist members of each of our faiths prefer literal interpretations of such texts, often without considering scholarship and context, and use them to create separation rather than inclusion. We disagree with that approach.

For this session, Imam Turk chose a text from the Quran that is often interpreted as meaning that those who don’t believe in Islam cannot obtain salvation.He pointed out, however, that capitalizing the word Islam in this case is a fundamentalist translation. It implies that those who believe the religion of Islam are superior. Other texts in the Quran (such as 2:62) contradict that assumption.

In fact, said Imam Turk, the correct scholarly translation of this text is to spell islam with a lower case “i,” using the word’s literal meaning: submission/yielding (to God). Since Christians, Jews and other spiritual people, as well as Muslims, yield to the Divine, they are all included in the word islam.

Our chavruta, and many such similar groups around the world, prove that people from very different religious traditions can respect, understand and love each other — and hopefully spread that spirit to their communities.
It is not surprising that leaders from countries with high levels of religious violence are among the most enthusiastic voices of praise for this new model for desegregating religious education. If we can make this concept work here in America, there is hope that similar models will work in their countries as well. May it be so.
Read the Rest Here

Here is a rare fine, a collection of audio lectures that translate and explain the most recondite parts of the Lurianic system. I listened to some of it. The classes are basically recorded chevruta sessions. The rest of the site is pop-psych, life-coaching, kiruv routines, and yeshivish homiletic. But these lectures are ideal for someone who has trouble with the Etz Hayyim, Rashash, Rav Itzhak Haver, or Ramhal. They shiurim are not concerned with bibliography, biography, or chronology. They work out the Ilan Atzilut and how to use kavvanot.

Jewish Heritage Foundation on Kabbalah
Here are the handouts of the charts for those who need a visual of what the shiurim are about.

h/t An Aspiring Mekubal

Professor Zachary Braiterman of Syracuse University, a specialist in modern Jewish thought, takes on the conglomerate of publications coming out from the Tikvah fund. The current version is over 6000 words, over 12 pages. Below are some excerpts, the full version is available at ZEEK – here. Any thoughts?

For some time now, a professional colleague has shared with me his profound misgivings about the presence at his home university of the Tikvah Fund, a right-wing philanthropy that in recent years has invested considerable resources funding academic Jewish Studies programming as well as more popular platforms geared to a broader reading public. The original impetus for writing these critical remarks were occasioned by my deep dismay upon reading the Tikvah-funded Jewish Review of Books (JRB). Of particular concern was a raft of unfairly tendentious reviews of books and ideas relating to liberal, progressive, post-denominational, and secular Judaism. (A survey of such reviews appears below.) Really, I should not have been surprised; everyone knows that the Tikvah Fund is pugnaciously neoconservative. Indeed, anyone interested in connecting the dots between corporate capital, rightwing ideology, and current drifts in academic and popular Jewish thought and culture would do well by starting with the Tikvah Fund.

The problem is how it is rewriting the rules and compact between donors, universities, scholars, and students. An ideological organization with deep pockets that makes use of academic institutions and faculty while masking its own ideological agenda, the Tikvah Fund shows a lack of clear commitment to the values of openness and transparency. In doing so, the Tikvah Fund co-opts scholars and scholarship. This chips away at the independence upon which academic life depends and upon which the very integrity of Jewish Studies relies as a bonafide academic discipline.

In contrast, the stated mission at the Tikvah Fund to advance “serious Jewish thought” is meant to sound more open-ended and non-partisan than the political vision actually animating the organization; the neoconservative vision articulated by Roger Hertog goes unmentioned in the information provided to the general public or unmentioned by scholars who may or may not share that vision. The consistent pattern across the full range of platforms funded by the Tikvah Fund reveals a misleading mix of conservative ideological content with non-partisan scholarship or general-interest material. It is my contention that non-partisan and apolitical scholarship and even moderate left of center political opinion (usually related to Israel) are used as cover to insinuate conservative ideas about Jewish religion and culture into a more liberal American Jewish milieu. Platforms that follow a strategy of esoteric programming create a space for promoting conservative ideas about religion and culture far more effectively than would be possible in the type of purely rightwing venues from which many if not most of its intended target-audience would otherwise shy.

The Tikvah Fund acts as an interloper by setting up closed shops inside the university under the guise of misleading mission statements. Surely, any set of principles and practices should be subject to the free exchange of ideas and open argument. The intertwining of money, ideological content, and university life is one that needs to be examined much more forthrightly by all of us who seek to negotiate the creative lines between public political life and the critical and self-critical exploration of ideas inside and outside the university.

In this light, I would propose to my academic colleagues that they consider that, at the very least, their participation in academic programming and other related platforms sponsored by the Tikvah Fund supports an organization in which Jewish ideas are intended to leverage conservative theories regarding the nature of law and the role of religion in politics. It is hard to believe that the organizers and officers of the Tikvah Fund would invest such large sums of money and the extraordinary time and effort without a subtle cost-benefit analysis and an eye to long-term profit. Scholars should understand that their very participation on Tikvah-Funded platforms contributes to an arguably anti-democratic milieu, one that Roger Hertog has called a “high-order community” whose proprietary interest is to educate “new generations of Tikvah scholars.”

No. 1 (Spring 2010)

• The reviewer of the new orthodox prayer book, the Koren Siddur argues for the superiority of the Koren Siddur over Mishkan Tefilah, the new Reform siddur, and the Conservative Sim Shalom. Although the reviewer reveals that he himself is not an observant Jew, there is a nostalgia here for a form of prayer that “cuts to the quick like a knife,” a form of prayer that is in part the product of the reviewer’s own poetic fancy.

• The reviewer of two books on Herzl casts doubts on the integrity of Herzl’s Jewish identity. While recognizing the place of Jewish secular culture in the novel Old-New Land, the reviewer insists that it is nothing more than Judaism-lite. Blamed for post Zionism and even the brain-drain to Silicon Valley, Herzl’s legacy is described in terms of “subversion,” planting “seeds,” and “self-destruction.” These very words will resurface in the same reviewer’s review of David Biale’s book on Jewish secularism in a later issue of the JRB.

• A Reform rabbi is enlisted to review Dana Kaplan’s book on American Judaism. He claims that, with the exception of Orthodox Judaism and a few non-mainstream communities, American Judaism is in precipitous demographic decline. The problem is pinned on secularism. The reviewer complains that Kaplan is disproportionately interested in Renewal, pop-mysticism, and post-denominationalism, which the reviewer finds to be of only marginal importance. Parenthetically, the reviewer adds that David Biale, as a secularist, would view the decline of Jewish religion with some equanimity, but then fails to understand why Biale is in fact concerned about the decline of institutional Judaism. The reviewer also does not care for Zalman Schachter-Shalomi’s afterword to Kaplan’s book, claiming that Schachter-Shalomi soft-pedals his theological radicalism, which is a comment that any reader of Schachter-Shalomi would find strange.

I have seen nothing in the JRB to contest the picture presented here. Each individual review has been paid for by the Tikvah Fund, and presumably serves its interests directly or indirectly. Now, one could argue with the points made in any single one of these reviews, fair-mindedly and on the merits. But once gathered into an aggregate under the auspices of an ideological organization, each single contribution, no matter the intention of the reviewer or even against the express intention of the reviewer, has been marshaled into a polemical bloc whose agenda is clear to see. Greater than the sum of its parts, the intellectual foundations of this agenda have been rendered so unfalsifiably secure that they can only be rejected as a whole from without, not contested from within. Early claims that the Jewish Review of Books was not going to slant rightward, that it would “range broadly from the center left to the center right” do not hold up to critical scrutiny. As per the comments cited above by Roger Hertog, this was never going to be allowed to happen.

Rav Shagar (Shimon Gershon Rosenberg) B’Torato Yehageh: Limud Gemara Kibakashat Elokim (In His Torah He Meditates: The Study of Talmud as a Quest for God) Hebrew, 290 Efrat 2008

I caught up on a variety of summer reading and will post some of my thoughts on what I read. I just got around to reading Rav Shagar’s sefer on how to learn Torah, which came out three years ago.

The Anglo educator who brought me a copy told me how he read the sefer on his flight over and he told me how in Israel everything is now a shitah unlike the monochromatic quest for single lines in the US. People will say I am learning Hazon Ish, or learning Telshe, or learning Brisk or learning Rav Nahman or learning like the Gra. They say: I am using academic Talmud or I am using philosophy or I am using film theory. Discussions of this phenomenon are found in Rav Cherlow’s books on Torat Eretz Yisrael. It is also found in the writings of the Rammim of Othniel, Maaleh Gilboa and Beit Morashah. There is a group think by this generation of middle aged ramim, who wish to broaden the canon and to create many voices. But the acknowledged exemplar of this new approach is Rav Shagar Zl.

Rav Shimon Gerson Rosenberg (Shagar) was educated at the Kerem B’Yavneh Hesder Yeshiva and later moved on to Yeshivat HaKotel. He also studied with Rav Yisrael Gustman and Rav Shlomo Fisher. He became a ram at Yeshivat HaKotel. At a later stage he was the Rosh Bet Midrash of Bet Morasha and then founded Yeshivat Siach-Yitzhak. He died young at the age of 57 in 2007. His lectured caused many to emulate his approach or at least to create their own version. He created the new “Israeli Hasidut” which was a Neo-Hasidism for the Hesder Beit Midrash that combined hasidut, Zionism, new age and post-modernism. And was one of the pillars of the group think that created this new Torah Eretz Yisrael of pluralism and meaning.

Whereas his rabbinic contemporaries tended to discuss the nature of this new Torah, Rav Shagar asked about the person. They formulated the hefza but he focused on the gavra. One cannot spend much time in the Datiim Hadashim world without hearing a call for Rav Shagar’s magical word mashmaut –meaning. All Torah has to have personal meaning. And meaning (mashmaut) transcends words (milim), or even halakhic conclusion (maskanah).

In this thoughtful and fruitful new book, Rav Shagar’s students collect all his speeches, lectures, and essay on Torah study into a very quotable book. It is a light read with discrete separate sections, ideal for a Shabbat or Yom Tov.
Rav Shagar’s thesis is that in addition to traditional learning we also need in our Torah study the fruits of academics, Hasidut, literature, Jewish thought, and aggadah. For Rav Shagar the post-modern pluralistic Jew cannot be satisfied with the older approaches to learning. It needs to be broader and have meaning.

But what is novel in Rav Shagar’s thought is that these other fields cannot and should not be done in the University but in the beit midrash. And they should not supersede Gemara learning rather be part of study session and on the list of sources for the shiur.

Rather, than look to the University or to Chassidus as places of character formation, for Rav Shagar the beit midrash and the study of Talmud is the character formation of the yeshiva student. A ben Torah is formed in the beit midrash and can only create a personal relationship with Torah in a beit midrash. So the hasidut, academic Talmud, mahshevet, poetry, modern literature, scholarship, sociology needs to be done by Ramim in the beit midrash. One should not replace Talmud with a more relevant field because that is doomed to failure, rather the other fields need to be part of Talmud study. Kafka, David Grossman, and Rav Nahman in the tosafot, Archeology and Moshe Idel in the Rambam, Academic Talmud and van Leer conferences in the Talmud shiur.

For Rav Shagar Torah study is the crucial component of the Brit, the covenant, between God and the Jewish People, and the in-depth study of the Talmud must remain the cornerstone of that covenant. The Ramim need to know the other fields and the students should be allowed to integrate them into their Talmud study.

I will return to the outline of the new Torah in the next post, but in order for the English reader to grasp the novelty of the agenda of Rav Shagar I will start with his discussion of Rav Aharon Lichtenstein. On Page 250 of Rav Shagar’s book he quotes the 2001 essay by Rav Aharon Lichtenstein “Teaching Gemara in a Yeshiva HS” [Hebrew] Shanah bShanah 41
Rav Aharon states that those raised on intellectual knees of learned families have the qualities needed for in depth Talmud study, only they see the fruits for the long toil. In addition, the educator cannot overcome the current liberal and individual atmosphere in which the students were raised. Most students do not have the family background or the yirat shamayim to stick to Talmud study. Most of our students have a questionable knowledge of Gemara and do not desire to delve deeper. Therefore they should stick to studying mishnayot and Maimonides Mishneh Torah

Rav Shagar asks: For someone not raised in the closed religious world and who has a liberal and individual upbringing with the whole Western world open to them: why will they be happy studying only mishnayot?

Rav Shagar says he differs with Rav Aharon on two points. (1) Did we as the first generation of Hesder graduates come from learned halakhic homes? No. So do not blame the problem on culture or the level of the parents. (2) The students going to college and engaging in secular studies are not low level workers engaged in practical studies content to have concurrent low level learning. Some of those whom you question their appropriateness for Talmud study, master other fields on the highest levels including philosophy and Jewish thought.
The educated students from which you seek to find your Yeshiva students will find your approach existentially and spiritually cold and they will seek elsewhere personal and existential meaning. And furthermore the post-modern pluralism approaches without a grand narrative strongly clash with your tough emphasis on the normative.

Rav Aharon replied in the article and at the Lavi Conference on which the article is based that Gemara is not cold but springs from the heart of Judaism in which one recognizes the Holy Blessed be He as both norms and religious experience. Our fundamental relationship to God is as the commander who sets boundaries and limits. Rav Lichtenstein claims that if they are not ready to sit to study Talmud then it is a lack of interest and desire. The struggle is to achieve that inner desire. He quotes Rav Soloveitchik that the inner turmoil and the triumph is itself a religious goal.

Rav Shagar responds that Mishnayot do indeed maintain the normative and even foster a return to the balei batish. But Rav Shagar emphatically states that even if Rav Aharon succeeded with his American students to appreciate such balei-batishkeit – he will not succeed with the Israelis. Israeli youth do not want a struggle that they do not understand. They have a large gap between their lives and the norms of the Talmud. Studying mishnayot or Rambam does not address their issues or their need for an intellectual challenge.

Rav Shagar states, and this is the message throughout the book, that Torah study is to seek meaning, connection to life of the student, and integration of Torah and secular, especially the humanities. In addition, we need to use not just the intellect but also imagination, emotions, and desire. We need to connect to their literately sensitivities of the students and not skip the aggadita (and also bring literature into dialogue with the Talmud.)

For Rav Shagar, there needs to be individual creativity in interpretation of the Talmud. The student need to create. And not just chevruta but also individual projects and group discussions.

For Rav Shagar, we need to stress the existential and not the normative. We need to instill a sense that that the Gemara is my world, my culture. A world in which one lives and plots one’s inner life. We need to involve students in all their limbs, embodied and connected. Faithfulness to the Sages wont come through untrue apologetics but through identity, covenant and a recognition that that the beis medrash is one’s place. The Beit Midrash and the acceptance of the Talmud should be my personal choice because it makes meaning in my life, it offers experiential contact with the Infinite as both personal and primal

Should Ramim include Kafka, Academic Talmud, and Jewish thought in their reading of the Gemara? Should knowledge of these fields be based on the untrained auto-didactic interests of the Ramim? How can we combine so many methods of Talmud study: Gra, Brisk, Telshe, Hazon Ish, Rav Nahman, Chabad? To discuss these issues, stay tuned for Part II.

This past Sunday, Stephen King had a superb book review of The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta.

The plot of the novel is that rapture occurred (not specific version), in which people were raptured away leaving behind the leftovers to mull: why they were not chosen? But the rapture did not conform to what believers thought. Naturally, each group assumed that their own group with its narcissism of small differences for inclusion would be saved, but instead they found that rapture ignored religious and denominational lines as well as ignoring profession, sexual orientation or even belief. So now they are hyper-charged for messianic end time and create all sorts of cults and rationalizations for their being the leftovers.

Yet, the novel focuses with exacting detail on their continued concern with their suburban lives: take out pizza, Blackberries, and investments. One reviewer notes: “This, of course, is what Mr. Perrotta does so well: depict with both sympathy and humor the sense of sadness, regret and yearning that ordinary people (even in ordinary times) feel as they drift into adulthood and find that connections — between husbands and wives, parents and children — are way more fragile or elusive than they’d once thought.”

From a promotional blurb:

Author Tom Perrotta is a master at exposing the quiet desperation behind America’s suburban sheen. In The Leftovers he explores what would happen if The Rapture actually took place and millions of people just disappeared from the earth. How would normal people respond? Perrotta’s characters show a variety of coping techniques, including indifference, avoidance, depression, freaking out, and the joining of cults. Despite the exceptional circumstances, it’s really not unlike how people respond to more minor incidents in their lives (excepting cults). The result is a novel that’s a slow burn yet strangely compelling, one that leaves the reader pondering the story long after it’s over. In vivid and occasionally satiric prose, he takes a bizarre and abnormal event–the Rapture–and imagines how normal people would deal with being left behind. –Chris Schluep

What I did not know was that the gothic author Stephen King as a book reviewer is capable of writing intellectual history and social context with a paucity of words. He was a model of showing me, not telling me. King compares our current era to the late 1950’s, 58-64 era of the Twilight Zone. Those years were a time of conformity and convention as well as an acute fear of the Communists, the Atomic bomb, and things unAmerican. The Twilight Zone showed how this fear and conformity lead to disaster and to our destroying ourselves with our own fear. The show was a social commentary on themes such as racism, war, xenophobia, and social conventionality. The fears were the problem not the “other” itself. The show captured the moment when things started to unravel away from the fear to openness by deflecting the issues as parable and fable.

King shows us that the Perrotta captures the post 9/11 conformity, with a sectarian religion as the glue holding society together with visions of an ungenerous God offering limited lifeboat redemption. In King’s take, what happens when those currently keeping the boundaries discover that they do not correspond to God’s plan? Picture a Jewish novel about the dawn of the messianic era where few of the current assumptions hold true, offering a redemption by those outside the sectarian designation. Imagine if Sarah Silverman, Rahm Emmanuel, the cast of the original Law And Order, the Skverer Rebbe, Mahamud Abbas, your shul gabbai, and the teens who only keep half-shabbos were those chosen. How would those not chosen react? Justify their not being chosen? How would they go about their life?

FYI- King is about to release an alternate history novel about 58-63, reflecting our own era. And Perrota’s book is being adapted for TV by HBO.

Perrotta has delivered a troubling disquisition on how ordinary people react to extraordinary and inexplicable events, the power of family to hurt and to heal, and the unobtrusive ease with which faith can slide into fanaticism. “The Leftovers” is, simply put, the best “Twilight Zone” episode you never saw — not “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” but “The Monsters Are Us in Mapleton.” That they are quiet monsters only makes them more eerie.

The rapture’s failure to conform to biblical prophecy has driven some people plumb over the edge. The Rev. Matt Jamison becomes chief among the rapture deniers of the remaining Mapleton population: “He wept frequently and kept up a running monologue about . . . how unfair it was that he’d missed the cut.” The minister’s response to this unfairness is to insist this wasn’t the real rapture, and to prove it with a news¬letter full of scurrilous tittle-¬tattle about the disappeared.

Perrotta suggests that in times of real trouble, extremism trumps logic and dialogue becomes meaningless. Read as a metaphor for the social and political splintering of American society after 9/11, it’s a chillingly accurate diagnosis.
There is Perrotta’s beautifully modulated narration to admire, too. His lines have a calm and unshowy clarity that makes the occasional breakout even more striking, as when Laurie smells a freshly unboxed takeout pizza, the aroma “as full of memories as an old song on the car radio.” Or when a suburban housewife recalls her husband’s job-¬related BlackBerry obsession, his mind “so absorbed in his work that he was rarely more than half there, a hologram of himself.” Lines like that offer their own form of rapture.

After more than a week of power outages, lack of internet and wifi, and flooding followed by subsequent mildew, I can get back to a few posts. Getting upgraded to this year’s MS OFFICE package also was a setback.

What happened to Elul as a time when one has fear of heaven that one is going to gehena if one does not do penance? Were did the primal fear of God that the rabbis of earlier generations had? Do people today believe or not believe that this month is a time to appeal to God for mercy?

What happened to using the month for pious practices of solitude, taanis dibbur, fasting? We have recorded from many sources and I used to know rabbis who took on a vow of a self-imposed silence of no talking for the month. How come I wont run into anyone in the neighborhood who wont be speaking this month. What role model are these rabbis setting? The last time I saw it seriously practiced was by Rav Naftali, the assistant to rosh yeshiva at Yeshiva Netzach Yisrael. He practiced it and encouraged many who studied there to follow suit by only speaking Torah in chevruta and nothing else.

Maybe it is just due to my isolation in East Coast modern communities? Where are they still practiced?

It is important to note that the Shelah was the cornerstone of Eastern European Judaism. The Shelah was the Rav Soloveitchik or Rav Kook for 200 years with many popular kitzur hashelah created. Anyone going back to the tradition? How can we lose the entire character of this time in the Jewish calendar?

The Shelah relaying on the Safed pietistic literature defines teshuvah as
T-taanit -fasting
S – sak -sackcloth
U ve-epher- ashes
V- vechiah crying – penthos
H- Hesped – eulogy and recognizing mortality.

Anyone for ashes, sackcloth, and crying? And if you think we cannot do these anymore, then why not? ANd what do you replace them with?
This period was a time for Tikkun Hamiddot- Jews worked on their character and virtues. They fought pride, practiced self-effacement, and limited their eating if they were not fasting.

Here is one tekhinah, that I found on the web, written for Rosh Chodesh Elul by Sarah bat Tovim:

With lovingkindness and great mercy, I entreat You to do with me; accept my petition….I pray that You may accept my tears as You did those of the angels who wept when Abraham, our father, bound his dear son; but the tears of the angels fell on Abraham’s knife, and he could not slay Isaac [Genesis 22]. So may my tears before You prevent me, my husband, my children, and good friends from being taken from this world….’All gates are closed, but the gate of tears is not closed.’ Merciful Father, accept my tears….wash away our sins with the tears and look on us, with mercy, rather than with justice. Amen.

Other pietistic practices to think about:
Some Breslover Chassidim travel to Meron on Erev Rosh Chodesh Elul in order to recite the Yom Kippur Katan prayers beside the grave of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai. Rebbe Nachman encouraged his followers to recite the Tikkunei Zohar. Reb Noson praises the custom of reading the entire TaNaKH during the days of Elul and Tishrei, finishing on Hoshanah Rabbah.

If we create a tikkun for web use should it be the avoidance of social networking or should it be a specific way to use the web in a way of awe?

Michah Gottlieb is Assistant Professor of Jewish Thought and Philosophy in the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. Previously he taught at Brown University. He earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Indiana University (2003) under the direction of Frederick C. Beiser, one of the leading experts on 18th and 19th century German thought. Gottlieb earned his M.A. in Judaic Studies, New York University; B.A., McGill University.

Gottlieb recently wrote Faith and Freedom: Moses Mendelssohn’s Theological-Political Thought, Oxford University Press, 2011
and Moses Mendelssohn: Writings on Judaism, Christianity, and the Bible (editor), University Press of New England, 2011

Thirty years ago, Mendelssohn did not seem fresh or interesting because Jews acknowledged that we need tolerance, civil liberties, and rights. As an emigrant community, we acknowledged that we were the heirs of American tolerance. We wanted to be part of democratic America by fighting the intolerant Communists. We also wanted to keep religion and politics separate since based on our European experience that mixture would always lead to the removal of our rights. But with the rise of the religious right in the US and Israel, we now are accustomed to hearing voices that want to mix religion and politics or that do not see the pressing need for tolerance, rights, and liberties. In this new climate, Mendelssohn has taken on new meaning.

Mendelssohn envisioned the removal of irrational dogma and superstition from religion. And the avoidance of using dogma as a litmus test for inclusion or to create boundaries and exclusions. In the last thirty, years we have witnessed more irrationality than the 200 years prior. The Enlightenment project was firmly in place between 1780 until 1980; now we have a return of the magical and dogmatic thinking of the early eighteenth century. We also now have a return to mixing Rabbinic authority with dogmatic criteria of belief.

Many Orthodox considered Mendelssohn was a role model. Samson Raphael Hirsch, the founder of German Neo-Orthodoxy, praised Mendelssohn as ‘a most brilliant and respected personality whose commanding influence has dominated developments to this day.’ Isaac Hirsch, the latter’s son called Mendelssohn “one of the sages of the world, one of the teachers of truth…For us Moses Mendelssohn will always remain the great and noble Jew.” Zev Yaavetz, the secretary for Religious Zionism founder Isaac Reines, is explicit in his seeking to model the movement on Mendelssohn. In the post WWII period, many modern Orthodox rabbis – Belkin, Jung, Agus, Sol Roth, Jacobovits,-wrote articles on how Orthodoxy was tolerant, already assuming the triumph of Mendelssohn on issues of tolerance, for example see Milton Konvitz.

Alexander Altmann, the biographer of Mendelssohn and Orthodox rabbi who studied at the Berlin Seminary, cast the German philosopher in a heroic bronze as exemplar for our own religious lives. It is worth noting that Altmann, following Mendelssohn, considered philosophy and mysticism as opposites, even in his graduate program. For those who do not know anything about Mendelssohn except the misinformation on the web, start with one of the two biographies, Altmann or Feiner or this entry on his philosophy.

Gottlieb who attended Haredi yeshivot in Israel and self-designates his affiliation as “liberal orthodox” returns us to this exemplar Mendelssohn. For those who have not seen his book, Gottlieb sets up two poles in recent scholarship. David Sorkin’s book on Mendelssohn paints the German scholar as a traditionalist, who similar to his contemporary Catholics returning to scholasticism, Mendelssohn returned to medieval thought, what Sorkin calls “Andalusian tradition.” Allan Arkush’s book paints Mendelssohn as a deist who has not worked out the tensions of his system or more pointedly Arkush claims that Mendelssohn actively seeks to hide these tensions. Gottlieb stakes out his thesis that Mendelssohn was creating a modern form of Orthodoxy that uses the best of G. W. Leibnitz and Christian Wolf. The later two thinkers asserted that the truths of religion and philosophy cannot contradict each other, since reason and faith are both “gifts of God.”

1. Why is Mendelssohn relevant to America today?
Mendelssohn is the Jewish thinker closest in spirit to the American founders. His masterwork, Jerusalem was written in 1783 six years after the Declaration of Independence and is grounded in very similar enlightenment principles. His final footnote in Jerusalem even refers to events in the young US congress.

Mendelssohn is relevant to contemporary American discourse about religion and politics because his life and thought call into question many commonly held polarities such as secular vs. religious or America first vs. multiculturalism. He was committed to values that we often call “secular” such as the pursuit of individual happiness in this world, tolerance, and respect for religious diversity, but he saw these values as deriving from religious principles. Similarly, he combined multiple commitments: to Jews and Judaism as an observant Jew, a fighter for Jewish civil rights, and one who sought to revive living knowledge of Hebrew; to the German nation, as one who sought to revitalize German culture and literature: and to humanity as a whole in his concern with upholding individual freedom and dignity. I believe that Mendelssohn’s complex identifications and commitments open up new paths for thinking about religion, secularism, nationalism, and identity.

If I may add a little plug, there will be a public symposium Sunday September 18th at the Center for Jewish History entitled: “Continuing the Conversation: Moses Mendelssohn and the Legacy of the Enlightenment” that will explore these questions.

2. Why should Mendelssohn be important for Modern Orthodoxy?

Modern Orthodoxy typically seeks models to legitimate its project. It has frequently looked to the Maimonides because of his vast Talmudic and halakhic expertise, his synthesizing Judaism with science and philosophy, and his active career as a physician. However, in my view the central dilemmas facing modern Orthodoxy are not whether having a career is legitimate or how to reconcile the Torah with science, but rather with how to square commitment to Torah and halakha with democratic principles such as tolerance, diversity, and individual rights. Maimonides has no concept of human rights and he does not deem tolerance a value. Thus he rules that one who does not perfect his intellect is not truly a human being; that a Jew without proper belief is not an Israelite, but a heretic whom one is commanded to hate and kill; and that one is not permitted to save a dying Gentile.

In contrast, Mendelssohn seeks to show that religious diversity, tolerance, and respect for human rights are Jewish values. For this reason, the slogan “From Moses to Moses there never arose one as great as Moses” was applied to him even in his own life. Mendelssohn addressed perplexities that Maimonides could not even conceive.

Simon Rawidowicz once said that Mendelssohn was unique among German Jewish thinkers. On the one hand, he was widely hailed as one of the greatest philosophers of the German Enlightenment in his lifetime. At the same time, he was a talmid hakham who conducted a high-level halakhic correspondence with Rabbi Ya’akov Emden. To put it in perspective, this would be as if Karl Marx had debated Tosafot with the Netziv or as if Rav Soloveitchik were a phenomenologist philosopher on par with Husserl or Heidegger.

3. Why has Mendelssohn’s had such a bad reputation? Why do people see him falsely?

I believe that a confluence of two factors have caused this. First, many Zionists, most notably Peretz Smolenskin hated Mendelssohn because they saw him as the father of the maskilic dream that Jews could be respected equal citizens in Gentile states. With rising anti-Jewish agitation in the second half of the nineteenth century, many east European maskilim, concluded that Mendelssohn’s philosophy was bankrupt and that Zionism was the only solution to the Jewish problem. Smolenskin accused Mendelssohn of removing the nationalist element from Judaism.

At the same time, some nineteenth century Ultra-Orthodox Jewish thinkers blamed Mendelssohn for the general decline in Jewish religious observance and increasing assimilation, which they saw as caused by the haskalah. Both Zionists and Orthodox Jews pointed to the conversion of four of Mendelssohn’s six children as evidence of the corruption of his thought. Their arguments seemed to receive irrefutable historical confirmation from the Holocaust and the founding of the state of Israel. A sophisticated, learned, and enormously influential example of this approach in the American Jewish context is Michael Meyer’s 1967 The Origin of the Modern Jew, which is essentially an extended (albeit polite) polemic against Mendelssohn. One should remember that Meyer is a Reform scholar.

I think that most Jews today see liberal democracy as beneficial for the Jews. The thesis that Zionism is the definitive solution to anti-Semitism is made more questionable by the day.

Furthermore, most people are not Hegelian idealists who believe that the validity of an idea can be measured by later history. History is complex, messy and filled with contingency and surprises. An idea that may seem dead at one period may suddenly be revived later.

The perils of judging a thinker’s ideas by the fate of their descendants is illustrated vividly by considering the case of the two Rabbis most strongly opposed to Mendelssohn’s Bi’ur, Rabbi Raphael Cohen the chief Rabbi of the triple community of Hamburg-Altona-Wandsbeck and Rabbi Ezekiel Landau, the Nodah Beyehudah, Prague’s chief Rabbi. Rabbi Cohen’s most famous grandson was Gabriel Riesser a fighter for Jewish emancipation in the 19th century who was also a leading Reform Jew. The Nodah Beyehudah’s grandson Moses Landau was a Maskil who in 1836 published a 20 volume edition of Mendelssohn’s Bi’ur with his own commentary. What does then does this say about Rabbi Cohen and the Nodah Beyehudah?

4. The Enlightenment project has taken a beating in recent decades. Universal reason is seen as a chimera in recent thought. Do you have thoughts on the beating?

To my mind, the postmodern critique of the Enlightenment is increasingly a spent force. One problem is that postmodernism was used to justify political programs such as multiculturalism, which claimed to give equal respect to minorities, but in fact created segregated communities in which resentment built and religious extremism flourished. I think that the postmodern critique of rational standards of truth has had very grave social, political, and ethical consequences. It has given intellectual legitimacy to all sorts of fanatical, intolerant worldviews in the name of tolerance. If we are going to inhabit a common world, then we need to have a common language and common standards for judging values and ideologies. Reason is still our best hope.

5. Who are your favorite 20th century thinkers and why?

I believe that once one has internalized historical consciousness there is no going back. My favorite thinkers are those who use exacting historical scholarship built upon deep knowledge of languages and texts, to address contemporary theological and political questions. Leo Strauss, especially in his early work, is a model of such an approach and I have enormous respect for his work although I reject most of his conclusions. In many ways my book on Mendelssohn is an extended argument with Strauss. I also admire Isaiah Berlin who was a more talented synthesizer of ideas than Strauss, but to my mind not as careful a reader of texts. Ernst Cassirer, especially his book on the Enlightenment, is another favorite of mine.