The Book of Doctrines and Opinions:

I am proud that two former students are finishing their PHD’s and are continuing as academics. Unfortunately, Modern Orthodox tends to confuse being a wonker or engaging in “hocking” about scholarship with actual academia. Ringel defends on June 30th. Congratulations.

Joseph Ringel, The Sephardic Rabbinate, Sephardic Yeshivot, and the Shas Educational System, Brandeis University (Near Eastern and Judaic Studies)
Joseph Ringel’s dissertation explores the debates over Sephardic identity by examining how Shas’ network of schools and Sepahrdic yeshivot transmit what they consider to be Sepahrdic values in the student body. This process of identity reconstruction includes the search for a usable past in order to confront the challenges modernity poses to the Sephardic religious tradition – this process has resulted in the preservation of certain religious practices and traditions, the creation of new customs and ideas through re-interpretation, and the misinterpretation and distortion of other elements of the Sephardic tradition. In exploring the debates within the Sephardic world surrounding Shas’ reconstruction of Sephardic identity, Ringel’s dissertation explores the complexities of connecting past experiences and traditions to current realities.

Joshua Z. Teplitsky, Between Court Jew and Jewish Court: David Oppenheim, the Prague Rabbinate, and eighteenth-century Jewish politics, New York University

David Oppenheim (1664-1736) was, among other things, the scion of a rabbinic family, the chief rabbi of Moravia and then of Prague and Bohemia, a legal authority, and a Talmudic commentator. Oppenheim’s various roles placed him at the crossroads of several important developments of the early modern period for both the history of Jewish political cultural development and the history of the Habsburg monarchy and its imperial politics. Joshua Teplitsky’s dissertation views the changes in the relationship between the Habsburg state and local Jewish communities in the early modern period through the lens of Oppenheim’s career.

Not a student but a relevant topic. It is on how the whole question of authority (serara) in the public sphere is an American Christian influence.
Caroline Block, The Spirit of Tradition and the Institution of Authority: Knowledge and Community in American Orthodox Women’s Talmud Programs, Johns Hopkins University (Anthropology)
Caroline Block notes that while these women are enrolled in postgraduate programs that are part of the Judaic tradition of preparing for rabbinic ordination through textual studies, they are also profoundly affected by the American practice of denominationalism, particularly due to the way in which the rabbinate in the U.S. has been influenced by the Protestant tradition, and “rabbi” has come to refer not to an academic distinction, but to a job in the public sphere. Block’s dissertation explores the tensions of American Jewish denominationalism and particularly how denominationalism relates to Modern Orthodoxy.

My recent post on the YCT graduation speech generated a large bevy of comments; go read them -many of them are excellent. But is seems to have hit a raw nerve with some readers of the blog. Was this nerve hidden until now?

The comments did not deal with the speech itself. The comments offered several detailed and well thought out comments on Modern Orthodoxy, way beyond what we are used to hearing. Go read them.

It seems to have revealed the live issue among the commenters. But what was the issue? What was the meta-issue at stake? There seems to be two clear sides with at least 6-7 on each side. Neither side was advocates of an intellectual ghetto and neither side wanted to relinquish Orthodoxy. Yet, half the commenters evoked a visceral reaction from the other half who called the first half negative or cynical. So what is the dividing line? Why so emotional?

One side wants to be Orthodox and read Hegel, Derrida, and Biblical criticism but does not work on resolving any problems. This position seems to strike the other side as a rejection of Modern Orthodoxy, as Neo-Haredi, as anti-Orthodox. Why? Is the other side clamoring for synthesis works? And why the emotions?

Is it that one side sees Orthodoxy as a social imaginary in the Charles Taylor sense, non-foundational and not subject to apologetics.

One side wants Torah uMadda volumes of apologetics that are comforting even if they don’t prove anything because maybe they do prove something? Or they show the strength of Orthodoxy to confront modernity.

Is it that one side wants truth claims even if apologetic and the other side relinquishes the need for truth?

Is it that one side thinks that one must be invested in a specific ideological project called Modern Orthodoxy and the other more loquacious side believes that one can be committed to Orthodoxy and Western culture without a specific ideological project, or to a specific project of synthesis?

Is it simply that one side has a double truth theory and the other side has a single truth theory. Why does the position of Averroes, Maimonides, Albalag, Narboni, Ibn Caspi or in modern times Krokhmal and Isaac Breuer seem to betray Orthodoxy to the other side?

Is this mid-brow vs high-brow?

And what about the struggle and angst? Do people on the synthesis side really think that everyone has to have it? Or is it just a need for confrontation of ideas and not necessary angst?

There are lots of good lines to quote in all the substantive comments but to give one:
Isaac- “Maybe the whole struggling trope is an existential answer to the contradictions of modernity and Orthodoxy, rather than a strategy for overcoming or resolving them.”

Deep struggle with ideas in graduate school in a chosen discipline makes sense after training a field for many years and where one knows the prior data and method. Then struggle can lead to new knowledge. But does intellectual struggle to achieve synthesis and confrontation mean something without training or enough prior mastery of the problem so that one can formulate something of significance? Is it important to struggle to go though open doors?

Bottom line- some blogs have their identity on a fault line of pro and con skepticism, others are pro and con feminism, it seems this topic is one of the live fault lines on this blog. So those of you who responded viscerally or felt that the anti-synthesis side is wrong. What is the issue?

So Nachum, Jon, Isaac – how do you explain the fault line? Even if you called the other side negative – what do you offer in its place that AS & EJ did not offer?

I was out of town, but this past month David Barton was featured in the New York Times and on the John Stewart show. Barton is a Christian Conservative author who preaches a Christian view of the past, corresponding to the Jewish history as it should have been, Artscroll approach. He is a revisionist of the first order. What is interesting for me is that lesser authors are arguing with him about how he distorts the truth and is not academic. But the better reviews know right for the start that he is no doing anything corresponding to academic research, so they ask: what is his religious appeal? How does he come up with his opinions? They treat him as object, nor subject.

This had me thinking about the Modern Orthodox types who criticize Artscroll history, as if it was all about comparative methodology. They tend not to treat the Yeshivish versions of the past as object for study or beneath critique.

The debate around Barton opens up questions of how the Evangelical or Orthodox determine who gets to give a homily or write narratives about the past. What is an expert, degrees, and qualifications to write a religious narrative that is not academic? Why are bad credentials seen as good? The Evangelicals have many similar cases of a teacher in an Evangelical school paskening American history, preachers and roshei yeshiva who fracture history, or an implicit providential exceptionalism, which confuses the theological mesorah with the secular activity of the historian.

Actual scholars don’t care or don’t debate the views of Evangelicals on the Founding Fathers, nor do Jewish academics care to even refute Roshei Yeshivah about their views of Maimonides, Rabbi SR Hirsch or the Holocaust. They don’t refute them they are not historical- there is no philology, no historical context, no application of social sciences. They consider the relgious stories as products, manufactured accounts for a specific audience.

This first review is from a trained Evangelical historian Paul Harvey who works on the role of religion in American history, but he feels David Barton does not deserve to be called a historian. And that it does not pay to refute him because his audience wont care.

I don’t question the necessity of pointing out Barton’s history of outright falsehoods, explaining the fallacies of his presentism (as in using a 1765 sermon or a 1792 congressional vote to show that the original intent of the founders was to oppose bailout and stimulus plans), and introducing to non-experts the abundant evidence calling his historical worldview of the Christian Founders into question. Yet while these kinds of refutations are necessary, they are not sufficient. That’s because Barton’s project is not fundamentally an historical one.

Barton v. the Historical Profession

That’s why historians’ takedown of his ahistorical approach ultimately won’t matter that much. Nor will historians’ explanations of his presentism, and his obvious and unapologetic ideological agenda (albeit considerably muted for his appearance on The Daily Show). While all the historians’ refutations are good and necessary, ultimately they won’t matter for the audience which exists in his alternate intellectual universe, one described in much greater detail in my colleague Randall Stephens’ forthcoming book The Anointed: Evangelical Experts in a Secular Age.

And it’s also why insinuations about his pedigree (a degree in education from Oral Roberts University) will only heighten his followers’ sense of the cultural elitism of his critics.

Ideas Packaged as Products

Some of that is because of the skill of Barton and his organization WallBuilders at ideological entrepreneurialism. Barton’s intent is not to produce “scholarship,” but to influence public policy. He simply is playing a different game than worrying about scholarly credibility, his protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. His game is to inundate public policy makers (including local and state education boards as well as Congress) with ideas packaged as products that will move policy.
Historical scholarship moves slowly and carefully, usually shunning the public arena; Barton’s proof-texting, by contrast, supplies ready-made (if sometimes made-up) quotations ready for use in the latest public policy debate, whether they involve school prayer, abortion, the wonders of supply-side economics, the Defense of Marriage Act, or the capital gains tax.

Besides this sort of organizational skill and personal charisma, however, Barton’s success at withstanding the phalanx of professional critics comes because he taps into a long history of “Christian Nation” providentialism.

A Manufactured “Debate”

The issue, then, is not Christian conservatives advocating their views in the public square. The problem, rather, is their claim (at least in places such as The Daily Show or the New York Times) that their Providentialist beliefs and readings of documents from the past represent a kind of legitimate scholarship that should have its place in the public “debate.”

Aside from its remarkable influence on the writing of American textbooks, perhaps the biggest success of the Christian nationalist intellectual ideological universe is to insert points of controversy where there aren’t any in actuality.
But the presentation of the American certificates of birth—the “short form” of the Declaration of Independence, and the “long form” of the Constitution—will not quiet the Christian Nation “debate.”

I use the term “debate” in quotes because it is fraudulent. Even advocates of the viewpoint of the “godless Constitution” (such as historians Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore) fully understand the religious base of American history. They suggest simply (as Jon Stewart was trying to get at) that the framers rather deliberately excluded religion, not because they sought an exclusion of religion from the public square, but simply to avoid any special privileges for it at the federal level. Eventually, those views were incorporated into state laws through the 14th Amendment, through the pluralization of American life in the twentieth century, and through the epochal court cases of the 1940s through the 1970s.

The Christian Nation “debate” is not really an intellectual contest between legitimate contending viewpoints. Instead, it is a manufactured “controversy”
On one side are purveyors of a rich and complex view of the past, including most historians who have written and debated fiercely about the founding era. The “other side” is a group of ideological entrepreneurs who have created an alternate intellectual universe based on a historical fundamentalism. In their drive to create a usable past, they show little respect for the past as a foreign country.

This next historian points out how Evangelicals don’t know there are other positions out there and they frame everything as “secular academics” vs Evangelicals. They don’t realize that there could be an Orthodox historian.

But I think what prevents me from doing so is the fact that there are many people out there–mostly evangelical Christians–who embrace Barton’s ideas because they are unaware that any other Christian position on this Christian nation debate exists. I have seen this first hand as I have traveled to churches and taught Sunday School classes. There are a lot of people who can’t imagine that a fellow evangelical could disagree with Barton. When evangelicals learn that such a position exists some of them are open to change.

Here is a major Clearinghouse page of the reviews and reactions to Barton.

My final quote is from the Atlantic, written by a former Maimo Student of mine, Yoni Applebaum. He points out Evangelicals read history the same way the read Bible, directly from the text and without a sense of historical distance. One reads an Eighteenth century documents without philology or context and as having a message for today. How do Orthodox accounts of the past allow carry over their techniques from the beis medrash? Applebaum says that it is not about credentials, method, or peer review.His critics are barking up the wrong tree. It works because it is part of the same process of Evangelical reading of scripture by opening the text and laying on one’s heart. What is the Yeshivish process of history as a phenomena of modern popular relgion?

Barton’s errors, exaggerations, and elisions have been exhaustively cataloged; no credible historian defends his work or his conclusions. And yet millions continue to find his message compelling. Why do they trust him?

Barton himself provides an answer on his organization’s website:

The heart of our educational work, and that which makes WallBuilders so unique, is our library of rare books. We have collected thousands of first-edition works of our Founding Fathers — including their own handwritten documents — and it is primarily in these original sources that we conduct our research.

This emphasis on primary sources is the cornerstone of Barton’s pitch. He explained to Jon Stewart that he is in the business of “historical reclamation,” adding that he has “about a hundred thousand documents from before 1812.” He took the Times reporter on a tour of his library, showing off his volumes and their yellowed pages. And he uses these documents to brush aside complaints that he lacks any formal academic training in history. “I don’t have a doctorate in that, no,” he told Stewart. “I’ve got a lot of documents … and what I got taught and what I’ve seen in the actual documents aren’t the same thing.”

Perhaps most crucially, Barton insists that the meanings of these texts should require no additional context.

Barton’s focus on returning to the original text, and his pointed disdain for the scholars whom he accuses of distorting its plain meaning, seems to resonate with his largely evangelical audience. There is a reason for this. It echoes the general doctrine of sola scriptura, the bedrock of the Reformation, that the text of the Bible alone contains the knowledge necessary for salvation. It draws on the tradition of prooftexting, using verses lifted from a larger text to buttress specific points. And in particular, it mirrors the notion of the perspicuity of Scripture — that its essential teachings are sufficiently clear that “not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them.”

In other words, Barton frames historical texts in the manner that his audience is accustomed to encountering the other texts that it routinely studies. He discards the accreted mass of scholarly interpretations, just as Reformation preachers jettisoned the layers of scholastic traditions. He selects key passages for use as texts, and constructs his historical sermons around them. And, perhaps most crucially, he insists that the meanings of these texts should require no additional context; that they are readily evident to all who have eyes to see, and a mind to understand and discern. He proclaims a professoriate of all believers.

When his critics insist that he subject his work to peer review, or disparage his credentials and his logic, they only reinforce the strength of his appeal to his target audience.

This may be beating a dead horse already. But this past Shabbos, a older speaker who would be a self-described defender of an older Modern Orthodoxy was describing the Ibn Ezra as an ideal Modern Orthodox person. He knew Torah, and he also knew the sciences, poetry, Biblical commentary, grammar, linguistics, and philosophy. He was a rationalist and sought peshat.
In the middle of his presentation, the person sitting in front of me turned to me and whispered:

Ibn Ezra had difficulties earning a living, he was not so successful in business, and had no fixed income. Therefore he could not be Modern Orthodox. It costs a lot to be Modern Orthodox.

The person does not read my blog or my essays, so they are not parroting me. They earn a seven figure income.

I was surprised that no one commented on David Hartman Part I – here. I expected people to come back over the weekend after reading the review. If anyone is interested, the post New Wedding Simplicity went viral and got over 35 facebook posts, without being cross-posted on another blog or JID. It got more hits than a major cross-post. It now gets as many regular hits as half-shabbos. So expect some simple weddings in 2012.
I assume that everyone has read the tikkun articles by now. Go to David Hartman Part I for the links. So now after reading everyone can help me think this through.Let me know the value and innovation of what Hartman said in 1986, so I can evaluate what is new for 2011.

Short version
Landes declares that “My problem with Hartman is that his lovers model is so absolute in and so defined in structure that it ultimately idealizes the divine –human encounter from a frozen embrace.” There is more out there that you are rejecting.
Hartman responds: Look at everything that I am solving. Jews are too magical, too miraculous, too other-worldly, and too irrational- they think God will intervene at any point. They are therefore manic-depressive. They are more Nahmanides than Maimonides. My Living Covenant model solves everything. I have not rejected anything, I just solved everything.

Long Version
Landes on Hartman’s Living Covenant
Landes is in favor of Hartman’s creating a halakhah that accepts some some aspects of modernity such as autonomous moral spirit, human adequacy, commitment to the ethical, universalistic world view, pluralism, and a this worldly focus.

Landes frames the opposition as Satmar who demonized halakhah into a sharp weapon of hate, Rav Kook who spiritualized it into a mystic rite, and Yeshayahu Leibowitz- objectified it into a servant’s blind obedience.

Rav Soloveitchik is indeed the hero who saw the problem was not truth or conflicting truths but the problem that religion as irrelevant in the modern age.

Now a soft critique – Hartman finds Soloveitchik as anti-heroic and self-defeat and in contradiction to a philosophy of victory.

Hartman is correct that morality needs to be national community
And Hartman understands the importance of God as creator who transcends world, and revealer of the law as immanent. Hartman correctly emphasizes creator, God role in history, and Torah.

For Landes worship – tefilah is about submission, dependency, and inadequacy [Sounds like Schleiermacher via Berkovits]

Soft critique – Instead Hartman wants prayer as the intimacy of two lovers & Hartman emphasizes communal liturgy, and fixed times for prayer. Landes complains that Hartman’s version of prayer is a monologue and he does not have the Hirschian elements (Landes would not like Maimonides, Albo, or even other Jewish thinkers like Rav Soloveitchik on prayer.

Landes like that Hartman views the return under Ezra, bait sheni, and the Ten martyrs as showing love for Torah

Hartman’s typology:
Exodus- unilateral divine power and then human responsibility
Sinai — as mutuality through Torah study

Hartman says that Zionism demands this-
Landes’ big critiques-
1] Hartman defines God in a single way and thereby eliminates God’s complex personality His autonomy, and His adequacy.
2] Hartman has an atheistic quality in which we have sole responsibility to make world better- not enough covenantal partner.
3] No criteria for which modern values to accept or critiques.

Hartman Responds (by restating his basic views)
I don’t have a problem with suffering and defeat- just don’t expect God to sort it all out.
I want the God of Maimonides who does not intervene to clean up the problems of life. We live based on our passionate love for God and Torah.
Most in the community are Nachmanideans, in which God is above nature and history and can intervene at any time with miracles and redemption. [AB- so if you want a rational this world Judaism they why all this relationship model and all this covenant talk?- Rather give me a Maimonidean religion.]

Hartman claims that there is religious language of king/subject, master/servant, but I want to develop husband/wife and teacher/student

Yes, Judaism has submission but he wanted to present what would be if there was more human control.

He is not championing modern autonomy but autonomy to grown like in a relationship and in love – autonomy to apply revelation in relationship. He does not want secular humanism but the humanism from reading Torah with self-dignity.

Kierkegaard ‘s suspension of the ethical is not covenantal, not dignity, not victory minded. Suspension of the ethical – numbs moral integrity and destroys a natural sense of fairness. [ab- Rabbis Amital, Wurzburger, and Jonathan sacks said same thing without all this emotional drama ]

Hartman says that Zionism means to create responsible halakhah. [AB- but didn’t Rabbis Herzog, Unterman, Goren said that already and did not need the discussion of relationship or God as a lover?]

Hartman is against anything mystical or Hasidic as Non-covenantal , pantheistic and theocentric Religious consciousness is not a covenantal moment. Mizvot don’t relate to the mystical they are this worldly. [AB- I would have definitely checked out and rejected this in 1986.]
Following Rav Soloveitchik, Halakhic practice cannot be the carrier of religious emotion rather Torah study should be primary.

Hartman correctly notes that Landes would also be against Rav Soloveitchik’s view of prayer as found in essays like Redemption, Prayer, Talmud Torah. Hartman has nothing against petitionary prayer just prayer that is magical, and other-worldly redemptive and takes away our responsibility for working in the world. Not what God can do for us – but an affirmation of our Sinai commitment He thinks that Landes misreads him if he see a limit on God in his thought, rather he is concern about responsible motives of the one praying

Hartman is in favor of self-sacrifice to keep mizvot, to be shomer Shabbat even if economic loss, to preach Torah to a congregation that does not want to hear. But not for reward in the world to come nor as something forced that one is resentful for doing. One puts on tefillin is love not submission.

Hartman states: God actions do not depend on how I write books but on His infinite wisdom.
Furthermore, Buber and Halevi for whom Judaism is event centered are manic –depressive, since events end.

Landes responds
“My problem with Hartman is that his Lovers model is so absolute in and so defined in structure that it ultimately idealizes the divine –human encounter from a frozen embrace.” He is exclusive in his model. Many other models out there.

Landes is deeply committed to defend prayer as based on typology of dependence like in the Rabbi Saul Berman introduction to the RCA siddur – we learn to pray from different moments of the Avot. Therefore, there are many functions to prayer.

In addition the Lovers model is not a constant. What If one lover is on a self-destructive course then the other one needs to step in to help- it is not always equality.

Using Berkovits terminology, Landes states that hestair panim is temporary not permanent condition of life. [Hartman does not even speak that language of hestair panim]

1986-2011
So why do I need Hartman’s Living Covenant?
Do I need relationship and therapeutic language not to be magical and other worldly?
And did his theology published right before the first Intifada give insight into making a living Zionism?

Here is Rabbi Linzer’s YCT graduation speech to the newly minted rabbis arguing that we do not know what and where the promised land is anymore. We live in an age of unstable reality because of Enlightenment and Emancipation, because of modernity, because of the Holocaust, because of post-modernism. The speech argues that we cannot hide and assume that the basic assumptions are still true. Not accepting all these changes is to be considered as running back into a nostalgia for the past. Who are they criticizing as running away?

According to the speech, there is a need to deal with Biblical criticism and the Holocaust. For the latter, you can tell everyone to read Kol Dodi Dofek, Yitz Greenberg, and Eliezer Berkovits but what are they expecting for Biblical criticism? Are they telling graduates to embrace it or just to spend an afternoon reading Mordechai Breuer? An if the goal is to open afresh: Why be Jewish? What answers do they expect?
He said “did we once again say that halakha will answer all religious questions?” Where are the new answers going to come from? How are they expecting the young graduates to grapple with these topics? Read Newsweek and blogs? Are these the topics that they should bring up with their congregations?

And what does any of this have to do with the quest of the actual graduates for social justice, simplicity, dairy weddings, and AJWS trips to third world countries?

Now, it is relatively easy to construct a perfect system, with Torah and mitzvot, with God in the center, as long as one is in the desert.

Since then, we have been encamped in another stable reality – in a pre-Modernity, galut Judaism. When change came this time, when our reality was shaken – were we ready to move forward? When Modernity and the haskalah presented compelling alternate views of the world, when they posited epistemological assumptions and value-systems that were at odds with those of tradition – did we rise to the challenge or did we build our walls higher? When the Holocaust destroyed a third of our people and raised the most profound questions about God as a God of history – did we begin to think theologically or did we once again say that halakha will answer all religious questions? When post-modernism raised questions about any and all truth-claims, and when feminism raised profound questions about power, equality, and morality – did we also struggle with these, or did we continue to live in an imagined, romantic past?

For many the response at this time was obvious. Judaism had lost all relevance, all claims to truth, all claims to morality. The answer was to leave – כתינוק הבורח מבית הספר. And for many others, the only solution was to pretend as if nothing had happened. To shift from the nice stable reality that they had become accustomed to over all these years, was unthinkable. The solution was to remain firmly encamped in the desert. Only a few understood that we had entered a new parsha, that we needed to move, but that we had to discover how to move – על פי ה’ יסעו- how to move forward with the aron at the center. While this new parsha will undoubtedly mean struggles, challenges, and risks, the alternative is unthinkable – to remain encamped in the desert, to relegate ourselves to irrelevance.

But you also know that to do just this is to keep the Torah from moving forward. You know that to truly face the challenges of today, you must be prepared to take on questions of the relevance of Torah Judaism, questions of faith and Biblical criticism, questions of God and the Holocaust, questions of the legitimacy of the State of Israel, questions of the morality of halakha.

You know that perhaps the most pressing question today is not how to get to the Promised Land, but what and where is the Promised Land? Not in the geographic sense, but in the spiritual, religious sense. What is the purpose of being Jewish? What does God want from us? What is our role in the world? You know that to not address these questions is another type of תינוק הבורח, another way of running away from the demands of the Torah, a Torah that must be brought into our world. You know that this is your responsibility, as you know become our rabbis, our religious leaders. You are the ones that will, that must, lead our people forward, to grapple with these challenges openly and honestly, to find their way out of the desert. Read Full Version Here.

Rav Shagar Z”l of Yeshivat Siah Yitzhak used to speak of the lack of clear direction in the post-modern world. We need to do teshuvah- to return- but to where? Rav Shagar’s solution was to look into the self, Neo-Hasidism, and its fragmented perceptions. I am not sure it is the same here.

Discussion on Synthesis and Modern Orthodoxy continued in later post here.

I have just read David Hartman’s new book
David Hartman with Charlie Buckholtz, The God Who Hates Lies: Confronting and Rethinking Jewish Tradition (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2011).

I am not sure what to make of it since I have never found his published books very interesting. So it is difficult for me to figure out what is new here.

Hartman’s major book A Living Covenant (1985) is 26 years old this year. Many people love it. I have never known what to do with it. I first encountered the book when it was published, I was still enveloped in the thought of Rav Soloveitchik and Rav Aharon Lichtenstein. More than that, I was interested in Polish Hasidut – Izbitz, Reb Zadok, Gur, as well as spirituality in general. I did not see how the book related to any of that.

Over the years, I have taught the writings of Art Green, Arnie EIsen, Eliott Dorff, as well as Rav Aharon, Rav Dessler, and Rav Aharon Kotler. But I have never taught A Living Covenant. I have taught Hartman’s Torah and Philosophic Quest (1976), as an excellent example of a Torah UMadda use of Maimonides. Nevertheless, I never found a way to include his later works.

So what we are going to do is have a public discussion like we did with the new Arthur Green book. I will go back to A Living Covenant in order to be able to evaluate the new book. Those of you submit relevant long comments will have then turned into posts.
Part I –General Intro
Part II- Landes on Hartman’s A Living Covenant, Hartman response, maybe some other 25 year old reviews. I want to understand Hartman’s cental book before commenting on the new one.
Part III Charlie Buckholtz, who co-authored the new book, will answer a few interview questions about the new book.
Part IV- I will attempt to offer a few comments on the new book.

I am not interested in an ad homonym discussion nor am I interested in labeling him Orthodox or not. I am interested in what he has to say and what does it contribute. In order to do that we will start with the book review written by Daniel Landes in Tikkun magazine in the very first year of the journal in 1986, followed by Hartman’s response and then Landes’s response.

I choose this starting place because a liberal review is not starting with Rav Soloveitchik’s halakhah and more conservative Orthodox review would not accept Hartman’s thought. But Landes is an ideal starting point as a Rav Soloveitchik student who is a follower of Rabbis Eliezer Berkovits and Yitz Greenberg and who likes covenant language. Landes earlier this year has shown his commitment to Berkovits over Arthur Green and Neo-Hasidic models.

Here are the three articles. Go Read them carefully and then come back to comment. I will not post comments that do not look like they at least read the reviews in depth.
I also will not post comments by people who parachute in with jingles that are not informed by books or reviews. If you wish to publicly argue for or against Hartman, then get reading.

When you click on them the URL will appear in the navigation bar.You may have to double click on the URL in the navigation bar and then reload in order to get the pdf to download.
If the link does not work, then you can quickly find them in a Google search.
Daniel Landes on David Hartman: A Vision of Finitude

Human Autonomy and Divine Providence: Hartman on Human Autonomy: A Response to Landes’ Review

Landes Responds to Hartman.
The later two articles get down to the issues. SO don’t just read the first article.

David Hartman recounts in all of his works how he left Lakewood to discover a wider world, which he did when he was connected to Rav Soloveitchik but he felt there were more issues to deal with. His vision of himself is as Yeshiva bakhur and he is remembered by many as an enthusiastic pulpit rabbi dancing for his love of Torah. Even three years ago, on the shabbos before Shavuot, I heard his exhort everyone he saw to understand that Shavuot was not just lectures but our Torah study that shows our love and commitment to the joy and responsibility of Sinai and the giving of the Torah.

He discovered the wider world in his 30’s during the 1960s. He discovered pop-psych books like Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving which contrasts mature and immature love, and the relationship of parent-child compared to spouses. From also rejected authoritarian approaches and considered fix law as running away from freedom. I am observing a similar phenomena now with guys who were all learning and beis medrash in their 20’s during the 1990s. They were no way associated with the liberal parts of the community. Bu now that they have pulpits- they have been avidly reading as autodidacts everything relevant to the real life of the pulpit including psychology, Evangelical Christianity, and sociology. Now they are seeking to combine their new American horizons with their beis medrash vision.

Hartman’s ideal that the study of Talmud should be the locus for Jewish identity and that all modern Jews should have beis medrash style study has caught on everywhere, The idea that one should find modern Jewish thought in a debate of Maimonides and Nahmanides or another classical text has now replaced lectures on Jewish History or peoplehood.

His beis medrash had direct break off creating Shapells/Darché Noam, then Hamivtar. And his approach of traditional study with modern questions was the inspiration of everything from Beit Morasha, Elul, Pardes, Hadar, Shalem, and Yakar.

Hartman is involved in a recurring recapitulation of wanted to study his love- Gemara and then asking modern questions and then discussing his frustrations in his Lakewood past, his YU past, with the Israeli rabbinate, or in the Gemara itself. From my limited perspective, he keeps promising integration with the modern world, and I keep hearing his frustrations. Yet I do not hear solutions for curriculum, halakhah, theology, or actual integration.

He is asking secular questions and then looking for the answers in the Gemara. That is why you cannot ask where he fits into the spectrum or gamut of Jewish thought because he is asking secular questions and returning to the Talmud. Lakewood to Modern Issues and then he returns to the Talmud. What he is not doing is reading the options of modern Jewish thought or modern Jewish thinkers and then situating himself between several of them. His assigned his classroom to read Locke and then turns to the Talmud to ask what is the political thought of the Talmud?

When Hartman left to Israel in 1971 at age 40 with his family after 15 years in a major pulpit, there was a post-Six Day War euphoria that we will build our ideal Jewish reality and restore Judaism as a living religion. Many of the other American rabbis who moved in those years had a similar utopian liberal vision. But what does he mean here in America?

In the meantime, while I wait for people to read the Landes- Hartman debate of 1986, here is a review of the new book from the Jewish Journal. I only clipped the general parts- I will return to issues germane to the new book itself after the interview with the co-author.

Two adolescent encounters with two important teachers shaped the person I have become and formed the core of my scholarly and personal values. One was with David Hartman, then a young rabbi. I had just given what I thought was an imaginative d’var Torah at a Yeshiva University Young Leadership Seminar. Self-impressed with my seeming erudition, I quoted original sources, Biblical and Rabbinic—even Maimonides commentary on the prohibitions of an Israelite King acquiring too many horses or marrying too many wives. Hartman approached me and asked: “Do you believe what you said and did you say what you believed? Or did you merely want to appear impressive and not rile up your audience?” I internalized his question and have asked it again and again whenever I speak and whenever I write.

Ironically, Hartman preferred to be seen as a religious thinker, not as an institution builder.

If you have not read the books then go download the pdf’s – and come back after shabbos. If have read the prior books and have thoughts to add then please comments.

Q & A – WITH RABBI RISKIN-
[Posted May 21, 2011 on Ohr Torah Stone Website].
Notice the blanket acceptance of Evangelicals and the permission to participate in a Church service if it is for educational purposes.

Question:
Am I allowed to attend my friend’s wedding in a church? Are Jews allowed to enter churches at all?

Answer:
Evangelical churches do not have icons or statues and it is certainly permissible to enter Evangelical churches. Catholic and most Protestant churches do have icons as well as paintings and sculptures. If you enter the church in order to appreciate the art with an eye towards understanding Christianity and the differences between Judaism and Christianity so that you can hold your own in discussions with Christians, then it is permissible. Participating in a church religious service is forbidden unless it is for learning purposes or unless it would be a desecration of God’s name if you don’t attend, as in the case of Chief Rabbi Sack’s attendance at Prince William’s wedding.

Here are a number of things on Orthodoxy and pop culture that I have collected in the last few months.

The first is a local Orthodox synagogue that is promoting “a healthy Jewish lifestyle.” The president of the congregation is going on a diet and “asking congregants to make a donation to the synagogue for every pound lost.”

But beyond his “immediate goal to lose weight and bring in extra finances,” he said, what has been achieved is that “a number of people have been inspired to make changes in their own lifestyles and their family’s lifestyle.” He said this is his “most noble goal: that other people get inspired by this.”

He also periodically sponsored a “healthy table” at the synagogue’s kiddush, where people can discuss any issue while nibbling on healthy food.

With the coming of spring, he said, he is organizing fitness walks with congregants.
“We are talking about not only helping the body, but the spirit as well,”
“Weight loss is not only an American obsession; it’s also a mitzva to take care of your body.”
Read the Full Version Here

Second, there was a local fundraiser for Maalah – the religious film school in Jerusalem. The one running it perceptively noted that to be Orthodox and making films is not the American model of Orthodoxy.

“the Maale offers a vision not found in the American Orthodox community.”
“It broadens the possibilities that exist for professional development and creativity for Orthodox young people,” he said. “It shows that there are ways to fulfill one’s creative urge that go perhaps beyond the box of what many Orthodox people think are the possibilities.”
Read the Rest Here

Third, there is an apologetic website for Orthodox Judaism that first paints nasty stereotypes about Orthodox Jews and then using humor tells you they are not true. There is a curious tension there of still being bothered by those horrible stereotypes, which even most non-religious Jews and non-Jews don’t think are true. The site has a conversion from Conservative to Orthodox orientation and is supported by Maayim Bialek as a poster child for Orthodoxy. But notice the nature of her Orthodoxy that does not observe second day Rosh Hashanah but still thinks she needs to tell people that Orthodoxy is not anti-science.

[I]n the forthcoming episode for which Bialik was filmed, “How do I convey to people that the science that I’ve studied fits in with the Jewish beliefs that I hold dear?”

Bialik said that her desire to wear skirts rather than pants has mostly meshed with the socially-challenged character she plays on “The Big Bang Theory.”

“There was an episode where the character had to wear a casual outfit and the producers said, ‘You’re going to be wearing a sweat suit.’ They allowed me to wear a long shirt over it.

“I don’t have enough power to walk away from the job. Did I get off for the first day of Rosh HaShanah? Yes. The second day? No.”

After her character drunkenly kissed her “non-boyfriend” boyfriend, she received an e-mail from a fan: “I thought Amy was shomer negiah — that she didn’t touch men.”
Replied Bialik: “I thought so too until I got the script.”
Read the Rest Here

Finally, before Passover as I was eating my pre-holiday last chometz meal of pizza and read the free magazines given out in the pizza place. I found a magazine for Orthodox youth put out by the OU called Ignite. What caught my eye was that Rabbi Steven Burg was the only dvar Torah in the issue that was entirely dedicated to how to have fun with pop-culture: laser tag, hiking, karate lessons, karaoke, water-skiing.
But the dvar Torah was truly memorable. It was on the verse “You shall be holy” and the interpretation of Nachmanides.

The Ramban tells us there that this means to elevate ourselves in that which is permitted. It’s all too easy to teach teens to avoid everything but that doesn’t prepare then for life. Rather, NCSY empowers teens by providing them with the skills to discern the kodesh from the chol, the holy from the mundane, and where possible, to elevate the mundane to new spiritual levels.

The dvar Torah stated that according to Nachmanides we have to be holy in all aspects of our lives and embrace the world of popular culture. Not to avoid the secular world but to choose the good and wherever possible make the secular holy. Yet, we have to make sure to take the good and avoid the bad. What made this memorable was that Nachmanides’ own comment was even if you keep the Torah you can still be a glutton with the Torah’s permission, there one needs to sanctify oneself even with the permitted, being puritan with food, sex, and engagement with the world. Here we have the new theologies of “Eyn od Milvado” – everything can be sanctified connected back to sources that said the opposite.

For those who are new to this blog, especially if you showed up because of the Riskin post then please read the rules for comments- and follow them. That post received the most nasty or inane comments of anything posted since I started. If you parachute in with a phoney email and a comment that did not require reading the post, it will most likely not get posted.

I have lots of good posts ready to post but little time to post them so this may either be a light blogging week or not, depending on my pre-yom tov schedule. Here is a book award a major prize last week.

Last week, the 2011 Michael Ramsay Prize was awarded to Atheist Delusions by David Bentley Hart.

Atheist Delusions:The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies (Yale, 2009).
The book as a response to religion’s cultural despisers is not my cup of tea but the award as best theology by the Anglican Church will propel Hart into a position as a leading apologist. His work will not be accepted by skeptics but those believers out there who want to know what is considered an intelligent response should definitely read his books. Hart will socially fill a role as a CS Lewis or Chesterton for our age.

David Bentley Hart is Eastern Orthodox, but in his personal statements calls himself “Modern Orthodox;” don’t get confused.

In the book, Hart defends the role of Christianity in transforming the world for the better through the ages, contrary to the assertions of critics who assert the faith has done more harm than good. If the critics see region as a negative force in society, Hart defends the positive role for religion.

Archbishop Rowan Williams stated:
“But what makes it more than just another contribution to controversy is the way he shows how the most treasured principles and values of compassionate humanism are rooted in the detail of Christian doctrine.”
“No one could pretend after reading this that Christian theology was lacking in intellectual and imaginative force or in relevance to the contemporary world.”

There is a truly great Full Summary of the book out there on a blog. It is good enough to serve as spark notes. If you want the main ideas of the book then read it at the blog.

First Things review when it first came out.

Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies
From Amazon review:
To begin with, the book should probably be titled “Atheist Delusions About Ancient History.” This book is not so much a debate with our Fashionable New Atheists
It is more a long, and endlessly fascinating, revisit of Ancient History.

It may not be surprising to learn that there are at least two main narratives commonly provided for “The History of Western Civilization.” Here they are (very compressed):

Narrative #1: The Christian Version. “The world was lost in pagan immorality and darkness; man enslaved man and man dominated woman. Then, with the Birth of Christ, came the Divine Light, and the world was forever transformed. The barbarian, knuckle-dragging rapists of Europe were baptised and brought to Jesus, and the world got much, much better. Even today, there is no other known source of European civilization and we reject it at our peril.”
Narrative #2: The Modernist Version. “We had the Glory of Greece and the Splendor of Rome, but alas a bunch of superstitious people completely replaced the glories of Paganism with the knuckle-dragging ignorance of Blind Faith. The result was the Dark Ages, which only ended when Heroic Forces restored the classics of Greece to a benighted Europe. Then came the Enlightenment, and Democracy, and all manner of good things, once the Europeans cast off the shackles of Faith.” Arthur C. Clarke and many other modern thinkers followed this narrative
While classical atheism has often parried with Christianity on metaphysical grounds, the so-called “New Atheism” has for the most part attacked Christianity on historical grounds: that it was intolerant, anti-intellectual, destroyed classical learning, prevented social and political progress, etc. Hart takes on this widely circulated charges and clearly and decisively rebuts them.

Better than the book is the
The David B. Hart Appreciation Blog with many of his essays.
**Better than the book that won the award are his essays.**
After the Asian Tsunami when both Christian and Jewish clerics competed for the stupidest quote to explain why it occurred, Hart wrote a beautiful piece in the WSJ, which he expanded into an 80 page essay against the current trend to offer explanations for tragedies.
Buber’s essays that in the face of tragedy will care about how humans respond and not the theodicy is usually cited as retold by Rav Soloveitchik or Rabbi Sacks. Hart’s little work on theodicy belongs on the same shelf.

David B. Hart’s “Tremors of Doubt” WSJ

What kind of God would allow a deadly tsunami?

On Nov. 1, 1755, a great earthquake struck offshore of Lisbon. In that city alone, some 60,000 perished, first from the tremors, then from the massive tsunami that arrived half an hour later. Fires consumed much of what remained of the city. The tidal waves spread death along the coasts of Iberia and North Africa.
Voltaire’s “Poëme sur le désastre de Lisbonne” of the following year was an exquisitely savage–though sober–assault upon the theodicies prevalent in his time. For those who would argue that “all is good” and “all is necessary,” that the universe is an elaborately calibrated harmony of pain and pleasure, or that this is the best of all possible worlds, Voltaire’s scorn was boundless: By what calculus of universal good can one reckon the value of “infants crushed upon their mothers’ breasts,” the dying “sad inhabitants of desolate shores,” the whole “fatal chaos of individual miseries”?
…
In truth, though, confronted by such enormous suffering, Christians have less to fear from the piercing dialectic of the village atheist than they do from the earnestness of certain believers, and from the clouds of cloying incense wafting upward from the open thuribles of their hearts.

When confronted by the sheer savage immensity of worldly suffering–when we see the entire littoral rim of the Indian Ocean strewn with tens of thousands of corpses, a third of them children’s–no Christian is licensed to utter odious banalities about God’s inscrutable counsels or blasphemous suggestions that all this mysteriously serves God’s good ends. We are permitted only to hate death and waste and the imbecile forces of chance that shatter living souls, to believe that creation is in agony in its bonds, to see this world as divided between two kingdoms–knowing all the while that it is only charity that can sustain us against “fate,” and that must do so until the end of days.
Read his full discussion, here and here.

I recently attended an Orthodox wedding where the reception consisted of a buffet of baked ziti and eggplant parmigiana, along with some salads and bakery cakes. The entire wedding was kept simple- no floral arrangements, no alcohol, no elaborate decorations.The wedding was simpler than the average bris. And even simpler than the Israeli weddings of 20 years ago. It was a joyous celebration. The groom was connected to Uri L’Tzedek so I assumed that this wedding was only an exception. But as I waited outside for my ride, I asked the singles:What was their reaction to the wedding. I received a unanimous answer that they wanted their wedding to be the same way: Simple, Modest, Inexpensive and Thoughtful. They said that this way the love and the simcha shine though. We may be watching the start of a new trend. This wedding may serve as the exemplar. Wedding trends travel quickly and this one will be supported both by idealism and by the financial downturn. This wedding was based on high ideals, and the guests were all idealists but some might embrace the simplicity out of need.
The follow place card was set up on each table- I removed names.

Our Ethical Food Decisions for this Wedding

1. Why did we choose to have a modest buffet meal?

We wanted to embrace the core Jewish value of Histapkut ba’muat (being content with less) and Ben Zoma’s teaching that a wealthy individual is one who is content with one’s lot (Pirkei Avot 4:1). Rav Bachya Ibn Pakuda, an 11th century Spanish philosopher, shared this view and taught that a lifestyle of materialism and overindulgence leads one away from G-d. In fact, throughout various time periods, the Jewish community embraced sumptuary laws (laws limiting personal expenses on religious grounds) as a way of showing “deference to the poor” (Moed Kattan 27). Every simcha (religious celebration) affects the communal standard, and we would like to strive for the virtues of modesty and moderation. We are striving to have a creative and holy celebration that fosters inclusiveness and community building. A wedding, birth, bar/bat mitzvah, funeral, and the like are all great spiritual and ethical opportunities and are a time for families to engage in cheshbon ha’kis (financial introspection). We worry about the effect of consumerism on our celebrations. We struggled with whether or not to use dishes (more environmentally friendly) or disposables (lower in cost), and decided upon the latter.

2. Why did we choose to make the meal dairy?

[The birde] has been a vegetarian for about 14 years and [the groom ] has been for about eight years. One of [groom’s ] rabbis in Israel, Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, once wrote that “the dietary laws are intended to teach us compassion and lead us gently to vegetarianism.” We believe that in an age where it has become apparent that the new age of mass production done in factory farms immensely violates tza’ar ba’alei chaim (the Torah prohibition against inflicting pain upon animals), we must reconsider our consumer habits. In addition to the cruelty of how these animals are caged, fed, and slaughtered, many studies have shown the detrimental effect that meat consumption has upon human health. In a recession where our charity is needed more than ever, and as meat prices increase, the purchase of meat seems even more problematic. However, this is not an ascetic ideal. Alternative meat options are now more accessible, affordable, and similar in taste to meat than ever. In an age where vegetarianism must be viewed as a Jewish ethical ideal, we hope that more will consider this path in the pursuit of striving for truth, justice, peace, and holiness.
After the wedding, we intend to embrace a fully vegan diet as we have learned that many parts of the dairy industry have serious moral and health concerns as well.

3. Why did we choose food certified by the Tav HaYosher?

Launched by Uri L’Tzedek, the Tav HaYosher is a local, grassroots initiative to bring workers, restaurant owners and community members together to create just workplaces in kosher restaurants. Rav Yosef Breuer, one of the leading figures of 20th century Orthodoxy, famously stated that “Kosher” is intimately related to “Yoshor.” “G-d’s Torah not only demands the observance of kashrut and the sanctification of our physical enjoyment; it also insists on the sanctification of our social relationships. This requires the strict application of the tenets of justice and righteousness, which avoid even the slightest trace of dishonesty in our business dealings and personal life.” Recent studies have revealed widespread abuse and exploitation of workers in the New York food industry. Thousands of workers are paid below minimum wage. Even more are denied their legal rights to overtime pay and time off. Workers are often subjected to unsafe and abusive working conditions. Given recent events in the kashrut industry, we believe it is imperative that we implement a system that will prevent abuse and exploitation and that we must ensure these abuses are not taking place in kosher restaurants. The Tav HaYosher is an opportunity to harness some of the power and influence we have as an observant community to strengthen tzedek in our world and create a true kiddush Hashem (sanctification of G-d’s name).

I was going to talk about several graves in order to deal with some of the issues of graves in a single post but this one became long enough for its own post.

I set out to visit the grave of the Izbitzer rebbe, Rabbi Mordechai Yosef Leiner of Izbica (pronounced in Yiddish as Izbitz). Izbitz Hasidus is currently fashionable for his vision that we have personal illuminations of God’s will.

Izbica is 30 minutes south-east of Lublin in one of the poorer parts of Poland located on the road to the Ukraine. On the side of the road are endless mustard yellow fields of rape–seed for canola oil. Everything is now modern agriculture with tractors, but many homes still have the older horse plows still rusting the yard. Cows and chickens in the front yards were common sites. One is entering into a realm scarcely populated with little business or industry. I remembered the signs at the Warsaw airport encouraging foreign investment to develop the country.

The town of Izbica goes back to the medieval era and it was briefly conquered by the Austrian-Hungarian Empire in the eighteenth century, but upon return to Poland it became an all Jewish city.

An ordinary Polish town of a noble from the 17-18th century originally had two parts, a Catholic part with a Baroque church and the Jewish side of the town; market was in the middle. (See Moshe Rosman The Lord’s Jews. Magnate-Jewish Relations in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the 18th Century, Cambridge, MA, 1990 Gershon Hundert The Jews in a Polish Private Town. The Case of Opatow in the Eighteenth Century, Baltimore, 1992.)

In Izbica, as in many of the other towns in this region, there was no Christian side nor any Church. Izbica was 95% Jewish. The return of the town to Poland created an all Jewish town. Whereas the end of the arenda system led to poverty in Russia, in the Lublin province of Lublin it lead to financial security as the Jews built factories and help industrialize the country. Izbica was known for having furniture, wood, and comb factories. These new Jewish factory towns suffered a dearth of leadership in the nineteenth century and organized their religious lives around Hasidism- specifically the individualistic and mercantile qualities of Polish Hasidism. We know that the Kotzker had a vinegar and then an apparel factory. The older nobility towns were market towns now we have Orthodox factory owners and proletariat. And whereas the older towns had yeshivot and rationalism, these new towns had Hasidism.(see Raphael Mahler, Hasidism and the Jewish Enlightenment)

Rabbi Mordecahi Yosef was born in Tomaszow located 50km further south and he eventually becoming a student of Menachem Mendel of Kotzk (Koch). Tomaszow was the place of all the wild stories of the court of the Kotzker. In 1830, the Kotzker supported the Polish uprising against Russian so he needed to change his last name and his city to save his life. He moved to Koch and Mordechai Yosef followed. In 1839, there was the famous break between the two and Mordecahi Yosef moved to the all Jewish town needing leadership. He died in 1851.

We arrived into a nineteenth century brick town looking like many an American small town of only four blocks length. Izbica has a depressed rust belt town feel and one website claims that most of the inhabitants were unemployed.

The Jewish cemetery is located behind a yellow house. Everyone in town knew, when asked, where it was.One enters the private driveway and then goes up a narrow and steep hill with dirt steps. One comes to a tangle of bushes and bramble with a dirt path which the locals are walking on to reach the other side of the hill. The grave was located immediately to our left behind a forest of hedges, trees, and vines. We missed it and entered the trail which ran the length of the former Jewish cemetery. We noticed a few recent Post WWII memorial stones to relatives killed in war. One of these was by two siblings to their killed parents, but one of the siblings was Catholic and one Jewish so the tombstone had a Jewish memorial on one side and a Catholic one on the other. Realizing we must have missed the tomb, we went back and saw what looked like a garage set back behind the thicket which must be the ohel. There was no sign to the grave, no Jewish community signs, or clearing of the bushes to get through, nor was there any fence or enclosure.

There was a new black memorial tombstone plaque to all those killed in Holocaust and then a little clearing in which sat a wall made of broken Jewish tombstones and a homemade garage structure made of tombstone fragments held together by cement. The Nazis had destroyed the cemetery at the very start of the war to build a headquarters and prison/ghetto. These were the remnants of the broken stones returns to the cemetery now embedded in two structures. In the garage looking ohel was the grave of Rabbi Mordechai Leiner with a simple new stone and a simple plaque above it. The grave seems to have been built by the members of the Leiner family who live in Brooklyn & Israel in order to pray to their ancestor.

On the way out of town, we were pointed to a brick building and told that it was originally a bakery the only remnants of the former main street. Some of the homes looked similar in age.

The students of Rabbi Mordechai Leiner, Rabbi Zadok Hakohen and Rabbi Leibele Eiger share a common ohel in the new cemetery in Lublin proper but they get little attention and are not mentioned in the guides. If one wanted to show the past of Lublin, they should get greater attention.

But why was the grave of Rabbi Mordechai Yosef give special attention in contemporary Poland? He was not a wonder worker and the Polish Hasidic tradition is not part of the world of Galician wonder working Zaddikim. Those coming from Boro Park to visit the Hozeh, Reb Elimelech, Sanz and Belz do not include the Izbitzer. It seems that there was some Shlomo Carlebach influence on the Polish committee seeking to restore the graves as well as surprise money from German TV because they were doing a documentary of the Nazi responsible for destroying the town.

I am still trying to understand the bigger picture of these isolated acts of reclamation by the small Polish Jewish community, The Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland (FODZ) explained their work in Izbica as follows.

IZBICA JEWISH CEMETERY COMMEMORATION PROJECT
The goal of the project is to restore the neglected Jewish cemetery in Izbica and to bring back its proper look. The project is coordinated by the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland and supported by the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany and by Tvschoenfilm, a German documentary producing company.

Until the end of 2006 the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage had finished the first stage of the project, during which the following results were achieved:

– the matzevot, stolen during World War II and used to build a Gestapo prison in Izbica, were moved to the cemetery and secured;
– a monument commemorating the Jewish community of Izbica was erected at the cemetery;
– a pamphlet presenting the history of Izbica was published;
– a workshop on Jewish history and culture was organized for the students of the Izbica School Complex.

In autumn 2006 the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany had joined forces with the Foundation to realize the IZBICA JEWISH CEMETERY COMMEMORATION PROJECT. The financial support of the Embassy allowed the Foundation to erect a monument commemorating the Jewish community of Izbica, publish pamphlets presenting the history of the town (in Polish and in English), organize educational activities for the students of the Izbica School Complex and, finally, to trace the geodesic boundaries of the cemetery and design a new fence.

On November 16th, 2006, a ceremony of unveiling of the monument commemorating the Jewish community of Izbica took place.

The teachers and students of the School Complex in Izbica have been taking care of the Jewish cemetery in Izbica for many years, trying to discover the past of their town. In September 2005 the School Complex in Izbica joined the educational program “To Bring Memory Back”, launched by the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage.

Within the framework of the „To Bring Memory Back” program the students take care of the Jewish cemetery, discover Jewish history and culture, and explore the history of the Jewish community of Izbica. They also undertake public activities leading to bring to the inhabitants of Izbica the memory of their past.

On December 19, 2006, the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage organized for the students of the Izbica School Complex a workshop on Jewish culture and history, dedicated also to the educational program’s method and the realization of public activities.We certainly hope that thanks to the workshop, led by experienced animators, young people of Izbica will manage to invite many other inhabitants of their town to join them in taking care of the cemetery and exploring the past of Izbica.

The final stage of the IZBICA JEWISH CEMETERY COMMEMORATION PROJECT will be fencing the cemetery. The cost of this undertaking is estimated for 50 000 €. The Foundation is now seeking partners who will help us to complete this task. A pamphlet presenting the history of Izbica: “Izbica. A Story of a Place”»

They had a programs in the local school in 2005-6, but there does not seem to be any programming since 2006. The cemetery has several year’s of growth of bushes so the cleanup has not been maintained. They produced a very nice pamphlet on the town “Izbica. A Story of a Place” which is worth downloading. I have not uploaded my pictures yet. In the meantime page eight of the pamphlet has pictures of the wall of gravestones, and the ohel.

Towns such as Izbica had fewer survivors since there were no Christians in the town to serve as vehicles for escape and protection. In addition, in these towns, everyone spoke Yiddish – no one spoke Polish- so it was hard to blend in outside the town. The most famous survivor of Izbica is the still living Thomas Blatt who survived an escape from Sobibor. The pamphlet quotes Blatt that his father was called Leibele Goy since he was a freethinker who ate ham and spoke with Polish Christans, the latter a trait useful for survival.

Those who know the Torah of the Izbitzer come for pilgrimage and affirmation of his influence. Those Polish Jews who have reclaimed their Judaism come for an sense that just as they recovered their faith – they have an illumination that there is Jewish core to Poland. Some Jews from the US come for an Ozymandias sense of the immense loss and imagined vision of what the town was like when all Jewish. Others like Jonathan Foer Safran came to Eastern Europe and saw nothing but stones so he used his imagination to create his own personal illumination.

Now the goal is the raise money to fence it in. The question is: for whom? Is the goal to place a memorial and a fence around in all surviving cemeteries? But as the decades and centuries pass, who will take care of these places and who will travel to these places? Even with a fence it will soon be impassable due to overgrowth.

This morning a New York paper complained about the neglect and overgrowth of colonial Protestant cemeteries in NY. Thee are no funds to maintain every cemetary even in the United States. Do the well meaning restorers in POland understand the immense commitment for upkeep?

There are hundreds of Jewish graveyards of famous rabbis in Spain, Italy, Greece, Morocco and Russia? Do we preserve them all? Here in Izbica, there are no surviving tombstones. No history to see. No graves left to protect. There is no Jewish community returning to educate and there is not enough cemetery left to create a focal point for Polish education. There are over 350 known cemeteries of shtetlach with destroyed graveyard with no tombstones left, should there be 100’s of projects to fence them in?

To be continued—Visit to Poland Part III: On to Zamosc

Rabbi Riskin has reached the culmination of several years of interfaith dialogue by declaring in a new statement that “Judaism must respect Christian faithfulness to their revelation, value their role in divine history, and acknowledge that Christians have entered a relationship with the God of Israel. In our pre-eschaton days, God has more than enough blessings to bestow upon all of His children.” He does this, in his own proclamation, “as a catalyst for other orthodox Jews and Jewry worldwide…”

In this statement, the general sharing of the universal creator of heaven has become a sharing of the the particular God of Israel, that Christians have a special positive relationship with the God of Israel, that Christianity has to figure positively in a Jewish theory of history, and that we should respect their revelation, implicitly indicating the New Testament. At the same time, Riskin reserves the right to prayer for their escatological conversion of Christians to Judaism but thinks both sides should avoid proselytizing for conversion.

This statement is way beyond Dabru Emet. Will anyone comment or will they ignore it? And if they ignore the statement-will it be because of loyalty to the Riskin of the 1970’s or because they do not take it seriously?
Riskin’s theological dialogue partner was the Hebraic Heritage Christian Center, a small non-accredited Bible college that seeks to return Christianity to its Jewish roots. Here is their concerns and here is their vision. Here is a DVD on their approach to dialogue.

Rabbi Dr. Shlomo Riskin said, “This statement only represents the view of our center but should also be used as a catalyst for other orthodox Jews and Jewry worldwide to consider fostering relationships with Christian communities. Leaders within the mainline Christian denominational world as well as the non-denominational movements of Evangelical Christianity have sincerely become friends of the Jewish people and the State of Israel. It is vital that we strengthen our relationship with them. We are certain that through these relational dialogues we will find far more which unites us than divides us.”

A Jewish Understanding of Christians and Christianity

Many leaders of Christianity today no longer seek to displace Judaism. They recognize the Jewish people’s continuing role in God’s plan for history, and through their own understanding of the Christian Testament, they understand themselves as grafted into the living Abrahamic covenant.

Christians see themselves not merely as members of the Noahide covenant, but as spiritual partners within the Jewish covenant. At the same time, they believe that God does not repent of his covenantal gifts and that the Jewish people continues to enjoy a unique covenantal relationship with God in accordance with its historical 2000 year traditions.

Jewish and Christian theologies are no longer engaged in a theological duel to the death and therefore Jews should not fear a sympathetic understanding of Christianity that is true to the Torah, Jewish thought and values. In today’s unprecedented reality of Christian support for the Jewish people, Jews should strive to work together with Christians toward the same spiritual goals of sacred history¬, universal morality, peace, and redemption under God¬ but under different and separate systems of commandments for each faith community and distinct theological beliefs.

Nearly all medieval and modern Jewish biblical commentators understood Abraham’s primary mission as teaching the world about God and bearing witness to His moral law. Maimonides insisted in his halakhic and philosophical writings that spreading the knowledge of the One God of Heaven and Earth throughout the world was the main vocation of Abraham. Significantly, this understanding of Abraham’s religious mission is exactly the role and historical impact of Christianity as understood by great rabbis such as Rabbis Moses Rivkis, Yaakov Emden and Samson Raphael Hirsch. [1]

[1] R. Moses Rivkis (17th century Lithuania):
The gentiles in whose shadow Jews live and among whom Jews are disbursed are not idolators. Rather they believe in creatio ex nihilo and the Exodus from Egypt and the main principles of faith. Their intention is to the Creator of Heaven and Earth and we are obligated to pray for their welfare (Gloss on Shulhan Arukh, Hoshen Mishpat, Section 425:5).

And Rabbi Jacob Emden (18th century Germany):
The Nazarene brought a double goodness to the world… The Christian eradicated avodah zarah, removed idols (from the nations) and obligated them in the seven mitsvot of Noah…a congregation that works for the sake of heaven¬(people) who are destined to endure, whose intent is for the sake of heaven and whose reward will not denied. (Seder Olam Rabbah 35-37; Sefer ha-Shimush 15-17.

And Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (19th century Germany):
Although disparaged because of its alleged particularism, the Jewish religion actually teaches that the upright of all peoples are headed toward the highest goal. In particular, rabbis have been at pains to stress that, while in other respects Christian views and ways of life may differ from those of Judaism, the peoples in whose midst the Jews are now living [i.e. Christians] have accepted the Jewish Bible of the Old Testament as a book of Divine revelation. They profess their belief in the God of heaven and earth as proclaimed in the Bible and they acknowledge the sovereignty of Divine Providence in both this life and the next. Their acceptance of the practical duties incumbent upon all men by the will of God distinguishes these nations from the heathen and idolatrous nations of the talmudic era (Principles of Education, “Talmudic Judaism and Society,” 225-227).

Israel…produced an offshoot [Christianity] that had to become estranged from it in great measure, in order to bring to the world¬sunk in idol worship, violence, immorality and the degradation of man¬at least the tidings of the One Alone, of the brotherhood of all men, and of man’s superiority over the beast. (Nineteen Letters on Judaism (Jerusalem, 1995).

When we combine this rabbinic appreciation of Christianity with today’s non-replacement Christian theologies toward Judaism, we find fresh possibilities for rethinking a Jewish relationship with Christianity and for fashioning new Jewish-Christian cooperation in pursuit of common values. If so, Jews can view Christians as partners in spreading monotheism, peace, and morality throughout the world.

This new understanding must encompass a mutual respect of each other’s theological beliefs and eschatological convictions. Some Christians maintain that Christianity is the most perfect revelation of God and that all will join the church when truth is revealed at the end of time. Jews, too, are free to continue to believe, as Maimonides believed, that “all will return to the true religion” (Mishneh Torah, Laws of Kings, 12:1) and, as Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik declared, “In the ultimate truthfulness of our views, [we] pray fervently for and expect confidently the fulfillment of our eschatological vision when our faith will rise from particularity to universality and will convince our peers of the other faith community”(“Confrontation” from Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Thought, 1964, 6:2).

The new relationship requires that Christians respect the right of all Jewish peoples to exist as Jews with complete self-determination ¬free from any attempts of conversion to Christianity.

At the same time, Judaism must respect Christian faithfulness to their revelation, value their role in divine history, and acknowledge that Christians have entered a relationship with the God of Israel. In our pre-eschaton days, God has more than enough blessings to bestow upon all of His children.

The prophet Micah offers a stunning description of the messianic culmination of human history:

“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord and the God of Jacob, that He teach us His ways, and we will walk in His paths.…Let the peoples beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nations shall not lift up sword against nation, nor shall they learn war anymore. Let every man sit under his vine and under his fig tree; and no one shall make him afraid….Let all the people walk, each in the name of his God; and we shall walk in the name of our Lord our God forever and ever.” (4:2-5)

Jews and Christians must bear witness together to the presence of God and to His moral laws. If Jews and Christians can become partners after nearly 2,000 years of theological delegitimization and physical conflict, then peace is possible between any two peoples anywhere. That peace would be our most powerful witness to God’s presence in human history and to our covenantal responsibility to carry God’s blessing to the world. It is the very essence of which the messianic dream is made of.

I sit here amidst announcement of ever new studies on the Holocaust that go beyond the death camp iconography. Books that deal with the Holocaust in different countries and forgotten aspects of the inhumanity. There is much to still grapple with now that the original shock has culturally been digested. However, much of the American presentation is so trivial as to be offensive to the victims. So, I was glad to see the recent article in the NYT decrying the connection of the Holocaust with bullying or thinking that holding hands and singing tolerance songs would defeat a foreign nation or stop slavery. I come late to this article written almost a month ago since I was out of the country. I assume it was already discussed on many websites. Nevertheless, it is a great piece to give out to classrooms.

In addition, the very people who are busy trivializing the message of the Holocaust by associating it with everything are the same ones complaining “the Holocaust is unique” when other groups mention their loss. They also dont see that their trivialization has led to the infotainment news stations to call almost everything a Holocaust.

April 29, 2011 NYT
Making the Holocaust the Lesson on All Evils By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

As proof, below a streaming news ticker (“Gay Basher Gets 12 Years”) are panels about “Confronting Hate in America”: Two Latinos are beaten on Long Island; a white supremacist shoots Jews in Los Angeles; a Sikh is murdered in a post-9/11 “hate crime”; a homosexual student is brutally murdered in Wyoming. On one panel is a description of the Oklahoma City bombing; on another, the attacks of 9/11.

A case of cyber-bullying also solicits our careful assessments. “Think,” we are urged by the signs: “Assume responsibility,” “Ask questions,” “Speak up.”

The museum’s central exhibition about the Holocaust and the murder of six million Jews is preceded by this “Tolerancenter,” as it is called, which strains to tie together slavery, genocides, prejudice, discrimination and hate crimes, while showing even elementary school students (as the museum literature says) “the connection between these large-scale events and the epidemic of bullying in today’s schools.”

In the recently opened Holocaust museum in Skokie, Ill., bullying also plays a cautionary role.

Though Yad Vashem in Israel and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington have remained relatively immune to such sweeping moralizing, in most institutions and curriculums, the Holocaust’s lessons are clear: We should all get along, become politically active and be very considerate of our neighbors. If not, well, the differences between hate crimes and the Holocaust — between bullying and Buchenwald — are just a matter of degree.

Perhaps, though, we should take the lesson even further. What if this were the approach of every historical museum? The Imperial War Museum in London might look at World War I as a result of intolerance and hold out the promise of ending all wars if only its lessons were properly learned; after all, didn’t the French and Germans enjoy a sociable Christmas holiday cease-fire in the trenches of the Western Front?

The history of American slavery might explore the many ways people have enslaved others or forced them to do things against their will. An examination of the Soviet Gulag might emphasize the need to permit greater diversity of opinion in society, or more adventurously, it might attack the notion of imprisonment itself for being so Gulag-like.

As history, this is laughable. Yet we seem willing to accept that in the case of the Holocaust, an exhibition must allude to all forms of genocide, and must offer broad lessons about tolerance.

The impulse to tell the Holocaust story only in the context of elaborate generalizations has also helped justify its inclusion in school curriculums and helped obtain public financing for museums: The goal was not particular but general, not Judeocentric but humanitarian.

And the deeper one looks at the Holocaust itself, the more unusual its historical circumstances become. The cause of these mass killings was not “intolerance,” but something else, still scarcely understood.

Intolerance is almost too easy an explanation, implying a comforting moral message. Instead, why not look at how Hitler’s powers might have been undercut before he began to wage the war in Europe and the war against the Jews? Wouldn’t an examination of those possibilities offer a more profound lesson about how to prevent genocide?

And how central is intolerance to genocide anyway? Many intolerant societies don’t set up bureaucratic offices to supervise efficient mass murder.

There are even intolerant people who would still find genocide unthinkable
Read the Full Version Here

Interesting piece on the quest for macho reckless behavior among the Shuvu Banim followers. Nice quotes from Zvi Mark on their quest for adventure and spontaneous activities. Undertaking a risk places one at a higher level of emunah.

‘Religious macho’
Just three days ago, the Hasidim of the Shuvu Banim Yeshiva, situated in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, were informed that their rabbi, Eliezer Berland, would be returning today from the United States… Berland is an extreme mystic who aspires to be a tzaddik, a righteous person, in the image of Rabbi Nachman. His Shuvu Banim community of Bratslavers numbers more than 700 families. At Pesach one of the students, Ben-Yosef Livnat, was shot to death by Palestinian policemen

But no one denies that Berland has for years urged the Hasidim to visit Joseph’s Tomb and other dangerous places in the West Bank.

According to Dr. Zvi Mark, a scholar of Judaism and an expert on the Bratslav doctrine at both Bar-Ilan University and the Shalom Hartman Institute, Berland wants his followers to visit Joseph’s Tomb precisely because it is dangerous, and not in spite of the danger. “Even people who view highly dangerous backpacking trips by their children to all corners of the globe as a healthy outlet of youthful energies, accuse the Bratslav community of being adventurers,” Mark notes. “This is based on the concept of a separation between the vibrant secular way of life and religiously observant life, which must be spiritual and mystical, without earthly passions. Let them pray quietly in the synagogue and not disturb us during the siesta. But that dichotomy is remote from the Bratslav religiosity.”

The Shuvu Banim community describes Berland reverently as the spearhead of the visits to the tomb of Rabbi Nachman in Uman, Ukraine, that began in the 1980s – with the aid of forged passports and the ability to give the KGB the slip. The Soviet authorities offered a reward of thousands of dollars to anyone with information that would lead to Berland’s arrest. A similar mythology sprang up about his trips with followers to the graves of the patriarchs in the territories during the second intifada, under fire, and was bolstered by the more recent high-speed night rides across highways in northern Israel.

Some of the Hasidim said that Berland had instructed them to elude “dinnim,” negative forces that try to stop their motion, such as traffic lights, road signs and policemen. According to N., Berland taught him that “the moment you undertake a practical endeavor that entails a certain risk, it connects you with the tzaddik at a higher level.” And in the case of Nablus, with the biblical figure Joseph.

Another Hasid, Benny Mahleb, one of the organizers of the visits to Nablus, said: “When I go to Joseph’s Tomb, I know that something is liable to happen to me, but I believe in the rabbi [Berland] and I have a sense of security. I call this the adrenaline of holiness. You enter a city where there are terrorists – and we have already encountered gunfire – but you enter with faith, pray at the tomb and understand that by means of faith and prayer it is possible to change even nature.”
How many Hasidim have been hurt on the way to Joseph’s Tomb?

“One was injured and he has been in a vegetative state since 2003, and one, Ben-Yosef [Livnat], was killed. With all the grief – both were my friends – you have to view it in relation to the level of risk and you understand that it’s nothing, it’s beyond nature.”
Drawn to the Haredi world

The Haifa-born Berland is a product of the state-religious education system and the Bnei Akiva youth movement. He met his wife, Tehila, the daughter of the late Rabbi Shalom-Avraham Shaki – a Knesset member from the National Religious Party in the first half of the 1960s – when they were both members of a settlement group in the Nahal paramilitary brigade, bound for a religious kibbutz. Berland was already drawn to the Haredi world then, and no one was surprised when he entered an ultra-Orthodox Lithuanian yeshiva instead of the IDF.

Dr. Mark, who met Rabbi Berland a few years ago, says: “He has great knowledge. He interweaves material from different aspects of culture. In the course of a conversation he opens an encyclopedia and explains how storms happen and then switches to expert talk about a kabbalah manuscript. That is quite impressive.” Mark adds that, in contrast to other Bratslav rabbis who saw themselves, at least implicitly, as reincarnations of Rabbi Nachman, “I did not find any such claim in Rabbi Berland. On the other hand, I have never seen another Bratslaver rabbi whose demeanor is so close to that of Rabbi Nachman. If you ask yourself how the Hasidic movement started, what it was that people looked for in the tzaddikim, why people went to them, suddenly you have a powerful living example of just that.”

Mark points out that “some Bratslav Hasidim see Rabbi Nachman as being a saintly figure removed from them. Rabbi Berland sees him as a role model. He suddenly goes to Tiberias, suddenly goes to the United States – that is a very familiar pattern to those who know the behavior of Rabbi Nachman. Part of Rabbi Nachman’s ethos was always to renew himself and to change. If you are drawn to something, take action, go with what you feel. ‘Flow.’ Rabbi Berland is exactly that kind of character. If he feels the need to do something in the middle of the night, he will not put it off until morning but will go and do it immediately.”

“As a boy, Rabbi Nachman prayed he would die as a martyr to God,” Mark says. “He lived in Bratslav, but toward the end of his life said he wanted to die in Uman, because thousands of Jews who were martyred in pogroms were buried there. The whole ethos of Joseph and his devotion is interwoven in Rabbi Nachman’s life from beginning to end, and is also interwoven in the life of Rabbi Berland – from his trips to Uman when it was under Soviet rule, to his forays to Joseph’s Tomb.”

Do the Bratslav Hasidim consider the Palestinians, or the IDF soldiers stationed around Nablus, as “dinnim,” who need to be evaded or perhaps confronted?

“They don’t throw stones and don’t hurt anyone,” Mark says, about the Bratslavers. “It is an ethos of confidence in God or in the tzaddik. They take a chance and rely on Rabbi Berland, but they have no intention of hurting a living soul. It’s religious macho, not military macho. They say, ‘We go about without weapons, defenseless, and place our lives in God’s providence.'”
Read the full article here.