The Man Named After a Day School

There are portraits throughout JTS of great minds of the past.

There’s a cluster right next to Alperin Lobby.

Cyrus Adler guards the bathrooms on the first floor.

Abraham Joshua Heschel gets his spot in the library.

But Solomon Schechter’s portrait gets the featured location on the first floor, complete with a gold frame. His piercing eyes stare out of a face with a disheveled beard, his body draped in an enveloping red cloak. In some ways it’s a little like Hogwarts, Schechter’s eyes following you each time you head to the cafeteria line.

Mel Scult’s article on Schechter in Tradition Renewed dubs JTS “Schechter’s Seminary,” a feature of the influence he had when he led the institution, and the vision with which he led it into the future.

To say that JTS is still “Schechter’s Seminary” is hyperbolic. Yet that Chancellor Arnold Eisen’s 2007 inaugural address featured the living ideologies of Schechter’s 1902 inaugural speaks volumes of Schechter’s transcendent message. As Eisen stated two years ago, after African drums ushered him in:

“Let me remind you, as I did at the opening assembly last year, of Solomon Schechter’s emphasis on diversity in his inaugural address of 1902, and particularly of his horror at the thought of a faculty and student body who always agreed with him. We are not here to nod pleasantly at one another. For we have important work to do. If the year ahead passes without the unsettling of some settled convictions and the questioning of at least a few truths until now deemed self-evident, we all will have failed to meet one fundamental purpose of our teaching and learning together…

At JTS we have always known that honest difference for the sake of heaven makes us stronger—just as in-depth knowledge and thoughtful criticism of our tradition make Torah stronger. As Schechter put it in his inaugural lecture, “Faith and scholarship are not irreconcilable…

He meant that as an understatement. So do I. Shamor and zachor must be part of every dibbur we utter at JTS. Nuanced remembrance is key to all that we observe and preserve, including most especially what we preserve by changing it. This is never simple, of course, and there are many who would see the fidelity to both scholarship and Torah as an oxymoron.”

Schechter lays out the Seminary mission quite explicitly: a no-apologies engagement of Jewish tradition in the modern world. It is no surprise that the mission is so applicable to Jewish life a century after his first Seminary address.

A glance at Schechter’s eulogies gives perspective to the scope of his influence during his life (click for the NYT editorial):

“Not only American Jewry, but the Jewry of the world, may well exclaim in the words of old, talmid hacham shemet mi mevi lanu halifto “A great scholar died; who shall bring unto us a substitute for him?” stated Reform Rabbi Samuel Schulman. “As the distinguished and revered president of the Hebrew Union College (Kauffman Kohler) and co-worker in a great enterprise with Solomon Schechter already said, ‘There is no substitute for Solomon Schechter.' And truly it can be asserted that no one can take his place. There was a romance in the life of Solomon Schechter. And this romance reflects the romance in the life of the modern Jew. Many a Jew in this last one hundred years began his career in an humble town within the ghetto walls and, under God’s blessing, unfolded his powers, assimilating all that the modern spirit had to offer and becoming an influence of international scope.’” 1

As Mordecai Kaplan described in his journal: "The crowd of people that had gathered though large (about 1,500-2,000) was by no means commensurate with the significance of Dr. Schechter to Judaism. We may now be prepared for changes of an eventful character." 2

Schechter lived only the final thirteen years of his life in America. Yet he pioneered unique and fitting visions for the American Jewish scene with the eyes of an outsider. Small examples include that he claimed that every rabbi should know how to play baseball — there was no way to bring Judaism to American society without it. His collection of essays, Seminary Addresses and Other Papers features an essay on Abraham Lincoln, on his 100th anniversary, an ode to the American bridge-builder.

Brought from Cambridge University specifically to lead the newly reestablished Jewish Theological Seminary of America, Schechter’s scholarship of the Cairo Genizah, secular education and scientific approach to Judaism preceded his arrival to America.

Even before activating change at the helm of the Seminary, the American Jewish Yearbook gave him a prophetic billing: “In the near future, [America will become] the centre and focus of Jewish religious activity and the chosen home of Jewish learning.” 3

Schechter’s death marked much more than the death of just a man; people despaired that no individual could possibly replace him on the American Jewish scene, and thus the religion as a whole would suffer drastically.

Along with a certain mystique in the walls of the Seminary, his philosophy of Jewish life would reappear throughout Kaplan’s conceptions of Jewish peoplehood and community, and in Finkelstein’s attempts to secure the Seminary as the centerpiece of religious life in America, even the world, during his tenure.

While Schechter did not dub Judaism a “civilization,” his vision of Judaism as an all-encompassing entity, defined in both universal and national terms rings with Kaplan’s conceptions of viewing Judaism as an evolving civilization. Though Schechter would not go near to allowing his greater theology to change the nature of halakha, perhaps the reason why Kaplan was most thoroughly castigated, Schechter viewed Judaism as an evolving religion:

“Judaism was an organism with a natural growth, rooted in the Torah… That certain foreign beliefs and foreign usages should creep in was unavoidable, as Israel neither could nor would shut itself from the influences of the outside world.” 4

Schechter is widely known for his conceptions of the Jewish people being a nation of “Catholic Israel,” an ideal which manifested the unity of the Jewish people throughout the course of Jewish history. Kaplan, in fact, used Schechter’s rhetoric to describe the nature of the Jewish people being an organic community:

“Since the interpretation of Scripture or the Secondary Meaning is mainly a product of changing historical influence, it follows that the center of authority is actually removed from the Bible and placed in some living body, which by reason of its being in touch with the ideal aspiration and religions needs of the age, is best able to determine the nature of the Secondary Meaning.” 5

With the belief in the authority of community, Schechter thus philosophically felt that a unified body, not a denomination would shape the modern American experience; specifically for Schechter, the Seminary would seek to be the embodiment of Catholic Israel, thereby giving the institution the ability, even the mandate, to integrate modern sensibilities with Judaism. 6

Of course, this assumes that there is an entity that could possibly represent the views of the entirety of the Jewish people.

Granted, the Seminary could not truly be the centerpiece of world Jewry, as modernity allowed and mandated for personal autonomy and freedom of thought. However, Finkelstein’s efforts to position the Seminary as the beacon of Judaism gave it a particular influence whose base was set with Schechter.

In his inaugural speech, Schechter articulated the notion of the Seminary being a location for all Jews to study – this would not be the headquarters of Conservative Judaism, rather the epicenter of Judaism at large:

“Such a community is indeed a mystery. And this has become perplexing; for it is amidst all these Judaisms and non-Judaisms that my colleagues and myself are called upon to create a theological centre [sic.] which should be all things to all men, reconciling all parts and appealing to all sections of the community. If I understand correctly the intention of those who honored me with their call, and if I interpret my own feelings aright, this school should never become partisan ground or a hotbed of polemics, making ‘confusion worse confounded.’” 7

Defining the Seminary in the broadest possible terms, particularly at its inception, should not be surprising. As with a presidential inauguration, Schechter sought to give a vision for his entire career at the helm of what he hoped to be the bastion of Jewish learning in America. But the speech particularly resonates with Schechter’s ideological conceptions of “Catholic Israel,” which could have functioned independently from his helm at the Seminary. As Mel Scult explains, at least from the outset of his tenure as head of the Seminary, Schechter sought for the Seminary to what Kaplan would later dub, “adjectiveless Judaism.” 8

Finkelstein would seize upon these founding principles as a particular justification why he reached outside of the Seminary during his term, stating in 1945:

“I do not think it is an accident that the Seminary should find itself pushed, as it were, out of the Jewish scene and on the world scene. It did not do it out of choice. It was not that all of a sudden we got a brainstorm and decided we must go had and try to help build peace in the world. It is because the institution itself was built on these very foundations of peace and understanding people who are different, encouraging differences and being grateful for differences.” 9 [emphasis mine]

Schechter’s influence in the Jewish community, as well as his personal qualities, were omnipresent at the Seminary under Finkelstein’s term, so much so that over forty years after he gave his inaugural speech, this precedent could be used as a particular strong reason for why Finkelstein would foster a particular spirit at the Seminary.

If Schechter viewed denominationalism at all during his term, it was between Reform and everybody else, and as Neil Gillman described, the Seminary represented, “everybody else.”

Yet Schechter worked toward including the Reform factions in the community of Catholic Israel despite the deep ideological divides, notably stating in a 1913 speech:

“Thank God, there are still a great many things and aims for which both parties can work in harmony and perfect peace, and unite us… There is also the great work which Judaism can do for humanity at large, in which both parties can combine... We have become so infatuated with the doctrine of the survival of the fittest that we have lost all sensibility to the great moral catastrophes which are passing before our eyes.” 10

During a time when Reform Judaism attracted the largest portion of American Jews, Schechter did not try to convert Reformers to his viewpoint, but rather viewed that notions of denominationalism were particularly dangerous to the fabric of Judaism as a whole. 11


However, anyone else was welcome, anyone “who [had] not accepted the Union Prayer Book nor performed their religious devotion with uncovered heads.” 13 In his 1915 Seminary, Schechter again differentiated between “Reform and everybody else”:

“The greater part of a rather lengthy lecute is devoted to proving that not only was the application of scientific methods to Jewish studies not incompatible with the spirit of conservative 14 , but that it was largely conservative Jews, or at least, men indifferent to Reform tendencies, who availed themselves of the scientific method and became subsequently the most prominent representatives of the scientific movement….” 15


Notably, Rabbi Robert Gordis pointed to the qualification of the term Catholic Israel to illustrate that Kaplan could not be included in this community because of his abandonment of religious law as a binding factor in Jewish life. 16

With the justification of unifying Catholic Israel, Schechter established the United Synagogue of America, an organization that sought to unify the traditional forces in America, manifesting in its name its status as a non-denominational entity. 17 As Finkelstein would indicate in the forties, Schechter saw a unification of American Jewry as the only way to overcome what were inevitable struggles Judaism would have within the scope of modernity.

In his 1913 platform for the United Synagogue, Schechter explained that without a unified front against the inherent problems that would beset Judaism, the religion would dissolve:

“Yes, in view of the danger threatening the historic faith dear to Conservative and Orthodox alike, we regard is as a sacred duty that all forces unite, irrespective of the differences which otherwise divide them. Such cooperation should not be construed as the organization’s approval of all those innovations which some of its bodies have introduced….

Close observation for ten years and more has convinced me that unless we succeed in effecting an organization, which loyal to the Torah, to the teachings of the sages, to the traditions of the fathers, to the usages and customs of Israel, shall and the same time, introduce the English sermon and adopt scientific methods in our seminaries, in our training of Rabbis and schoolmasters for our synagogues and Talmud Torahs, and bring order and decorum in our synagogues, unless this is done, I declare unhesitatingly that Traditional Judaism will not survive another generation in this country.” 18

While “Conservative Judaism” may have been implanted on the movement from the outside, like with the name of the United Synagogue of America, Schechter noted that the name of the “Jewish Theological Seminary of America” was quite purposeful, chosen because it did not include references to a particular branch of Judaism; the directors of the institution had “distinctly shown their intention of avoiding sectarianism, for it is an especial American feature that no preference is given to any denomination or sect or theological richtung. All alike are welcome.” 19

Kaplan’s rhetoric more than forty years later in an address commemorating the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Seminary Teacher’s College resonated with Schechter’s inclusive ideology, seeking to create a Seminary that was true to the realities of its name:

“The precedent of having undergone metamorphoses twice before in the course of its career, as well as the inner restiveness both on its career, as well as the part of its graduates and lay adherents, should impel the Seminary to measure up to the need and opposition of these new times, and become the kind of institution that would resurrect the Jew’s faith in his people and its religion. In order to achieve this, the Seminary must avoid the pitfall of denominationalism.”20

Schechter’s emphasis to unite all non-Reform forces in America seems to indicate that he sought particularly to enact his ideology of “Catholic Israel” at the Seminary; certainly, the lack of a strong statement such as Reform’s 1885 “Pittsburgh Platform” marked the Seminary as not following the only known precedent for creating a new movement in Judaism. Additionally the Wissenschaft scholarship of the Seminary differentiated the institution from those to the right of Schechter’s Seminary. However, this situated the Seminary as a special subset of traditional Judaism, not a new movement in toto.

From his opening address, Schechter emphasized the importance of studying the gamut of the history of the Jewish religion, where he specifically named the importance of the scientific study of approach to Judaism, not necessarily as the Truth, but as a viable approach in the history of the religion:

“We cannot, naturally, hope to carry the student through all these vast fields of learning at the cultivation of which humanity has now worked for nearly four thousand years. But this fact must not prevent us from making the attempt to bring the students on terms of acquaintance at least with all those manifestations of Jewish life and Jewish thought which may prove useful to them as future ministers, and suggestive and stimulating to them as prospective scholars….

[Founder of the Wissenschaft approach to Judaism, Leopold] Zunz’s motto was ‘Real knowledge creates action’ and the existence of such men as R. Saadya Gaon and R. Hai Gaon, Maimonides, and Nachmanides, R. Joseph Caro and R. Isaac Abrabanel, Samson Raphael Hirsch and Abraham Geiger, and an innumerable host of other spiritual kings in Israel, all ‘mighty in the battles of the Torah,’ and voluminous authors, and at the same time living among their people and for their people and influencing their contemporaries, and still at this very moment swaying the actions and opinions of men – all these bear ample testimony to the truth of Zunz’s maxim.”21

For Schechter, incorporating the entirety of the Jewish experience was the only educationally honest way to approach learning; ignoring Wissenschaft approaches because of the antagonistic argument that deconstructing religious texts with modern techniques was heretical, was an evasion of the issues. (It should be noted that Biblical criticism was not studied at the Seminary until well into Finkelstein’s term as the head of the institution. During the first several decades of the 20th century, Biblical criticism was wielded as an anti-Semitic axe).

Jews, he said, had an obligation to question, and an additional approach did not have to be threatening: “There is no cause to be afraid of much learning, or rather, of much teaching. The difficulty under which we labor is rather that there are subjects which cannot be taught, and yet do form an essential part of the equipment of a Jewish minister.” 22

Schechter emphasized a complete involvement in Wissenschaft, to the exclusion of other aspects of a rabbinic life, even disliking the term “rabbi” itself.

Schechter sought to establish an institution that, above all, sponsored a feeling of intellectual freedom:

“The Torah gave spiritual accommodation for thousands of years to all sorts and conditions of men, sages, philosophers, scholars, mystics, casuists, school men and skeptics; and it should also prove broad enough to harbor the different minds of the present century…. The teaching in the Seminary will be in keeping with this spirit, and thus largely confined to the exposition and elucidation of historical Judaism in its various manifestations.” 23

The portrait of Schechter hanging down the hallway from the library gives me goosebumps nearly every time I pass it. His visions for living an immersive Jewish and American life still resonate with me unlike many other thinkers in Jewish history. In addition to studying the gamut of Jewish studies, his vision for being a vivid and vital rabbi in America still pushes me as I continue in my rabbinic journey.

- Zachary Silver

--

1. Rabbi Samuel Schulman, “Solomon Schechter,” Proceedings, Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1916

2. Kaplan Journal, Nov. 20, 1915 in Communings of the Spirit: The Journals of Mordecai Kaplan, ed. Mel Scult, (Detroit: Wayne State University Press and The Reconstructionist Press, 2001), 98

3. Jonathan Sarna, American Judaism (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2004)188

4. Myer S. Kripke, “Solomon Schechter’s Philosophy of Judaism,” The Reconstructionist, 1937

5. Kaplan, “Toward the Formulation of Guiding Principles of the Conservation Movement,” to be delivered December 6, 1949, labeled confidential, Ratner Center; also published as a supplement to Conservative Judaism, Vol. VI, No. 4, May, 1950, 1-24

6. The Jewish Encyclopedia, 1904, s.v. “Judaism

7. Solomon Schechter, “Inaugural Address of Solomon Schechter as President of the Faculty of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America,” New York, 1903, delivered Nov. 20, 1902, 7

8. Scult, “Schechter’s Seminary,” in Tradition Renewed, 59

9. R.A., Proceedings, 1945 in Greenbaum, Louis Finkelstein and the Conservative Movement, 235

10. Herbert Parzen, Architects of Conservative Judaism (New York: Jonathan David Publishers, 1964), 53

11. Ibid., 52

12. Ibid., 73

13. Ibid., 72

14. Schechter used the term “conservative” several times throughout his career as an adjective to describe the type of Judaism practiced at the Seminary. He never used Conservative with a capital “C” to describe the movement, however.

15. Schechter, “The Preface,” in Tradition and Change: The Development of Conservative Judaism, ed. Mordecai Waxman (New York: Burning Bush Press, 1958),, 100

16. Robert Gordis, “Authority in Jewish Law,” Proceedings, Rabbinical Assembly, 1942, 83

17. In 1991, the Union would change its name to the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, illustrating its commitment specifically to the Conservative movement.

18. Report United Synagogue of America, 1913, in Parzen, 68-69

19. Max Arzt, “Conservative Judaism as a Unify Force,” Conservative Judaism, Vol. V, No. 4, June 1949, 13

20. Kaplan, “From Strength to Strength: A Proposal for a University of Judaism,” delivered February 4, 1945, Ratner Center Archives, 13

21. Solomon Schechter, “Inaugural Address,” 18-19

22. Ibid., 19

23. Ibid., 24-25

Spinoza and Hagiography Part One

One of the latest works that has come out on Spinoza is the work of Rebecca Goldstein. It's a fun and highly engaging book, but I think that it suffers from this problem of hagiography. This tendency is crucial to the larger objective of Goldstein and others who attribute to Spinoza great personal virtues: If one is going to pose an alternative to the wisdom of the rabbis, one must assert not only the alternative's comparable or superior wisdom but also the alternative's comparable or superior ethical conduct. Certainly Spinoza's intelligence, his cerebral power, is undisputed, but the matter that is more disputable is his ethical conduct. A meticulous reading of Betraying Spinoza reveals that Goldstein is not sufficiently objective in considering Spinoza's character, tending toward the hagiographical, which is a tendency that has been around since the beginning of biographical monographs on him. Of course, one should - to be fair - acknowledge that Spinoza was also vilified extensively by many writers in the late 1600 and 1700s. I do not intend to act out similar responses, which I regard as both inaccurate and historically contingent. That is to say that the vilifying responses were often conditioned by the state of affairs in Europe, where the dogmatic dimension of religion still held great sway.

In addition, the hostile responses to Spinoza - his thought and his person - during this period were primarily penned by Christians. The Jewish community had rendered its verdict of cherem and, until Moses Mendelssohn, that verdict defined the discourse on Spinoza, the thinker and the person. As modernity advanced, the majority of Jews appeared to embrace Mendelssohn's view of Spinoza, which was favorable. All of this is to say that what I write here - though it places Spinoza's character in question - is altogether different from what was written in the late 1600 and 1700s, where the accounts of Spinoza were far from hagiographical.

With that said, for this post, I will examine one item in Betraying Spinoza that will set the stage for this meticulous reading that I promise. Referring to the controversy that Spinoza's works generated in the 1700s, Goldstein writes, "The holy furor aroused by the name Spinoza is in contrast to the man's predilection for peace and quiet. He confessed himself [in a letter to an acquaintance] to have a horror of controversy" (9). I find this characterization hard to reconcile with the fact that Spinoza was placed in cherem by the Amsterdam Jewish community, an event overflowing with controversy. Of course, one could consider his excommunication a case where a man was victimized by the authoritarian elements in the community. Although cherem is a practice that we should not wish to restore, one must understand how it operated at this time. This understanding will demonstrate that the narrative of Spinoza as the victim of authoritarian leadership is not the whole story.

Before a person was placed in cherem, the threat of cherem was made. Often that very threat was enough to compel a person to conform. If it wasn't, the person was excommunicated. But even then, the Jewish community almost always gave a person a route for readmission. All this is to show that the person placed in cherem was rarely blind-sided and often, if not always, given the chance to accommodate himself to the demands of the community and thus avoid cherem. To support her implicit contention that Spinoza was a victim of authoritarian leadership, she writes, "The terms of his excommunication were the harshest imposed by his community, uncharacteristically including no possibility for reconciliation or redemption." The first point to be made here, which was the original purpose of initiating this discussion to begin with, is that already this is evidence that Spinoza did not "have a horror of controversy." In fact, it seems that he was party to the most controversial - not in the sense of being disputed but in the more notorious, publicized sense of the word - excommunication of that period.

But leaving this point aside for the moment, the silence of Goldstein's account of the excommunication is what is most striking. I refer to her silence about Spinoza - his reaction to cherem, or, rather, his handling of his impending cherem. My sense is that the harshness of the cherem - rather than demonstrating the authoritarian nature of the Amsterdam leadership - is a reflection of Spinoza's own attitude to the prospect of cherem.

To what can this be compared? A couple is about to break up. One expresses his interest in staying together. The other not only rejects this prospect but vows wholeheartedly to never try to revive the relationship. In turn, the first, who initially offered the terms of reconciliation, responds in kind - and then some! Indeed, the words of the first will appear harsh, excessive. But, in truth, it is the words of the second that altered the tone of the whole exchange and led to the invective-laced outburst of the first. In short, neither party emerges clean.

It is the same with Spinoza. The harshness of the cherem does not prove that the Amsterdam leadership was authoritarian, though it may have been; rather it reflects the attitude of the excommunicated party. What this attitude was is a matter that will be discussed more in future posts, but for the time being, I hope that I have exposed a hint of the problem of hagiography in Betraying Spinoza.

Jewish Political Thought: Promise and Peril

It seems that Jewish political thinking has reached something of an apogee in our times. As far as I can tell, there are currently two intellectual communities, largely distinct and seemingly unaware of one another, that are engaged in thick, sophisticated and highly non-apologetic projects; what they share is a willingness to explain the Jews and Judaism using political language. One emphasizes the continuity of the political in the Jewish experience; the other seems to emphasize a more recent vintage of Jewish politics. One is truly engaged in political thought; the other is made up primarily of historians of the Jews in Central and Eastern Europe. In addition to the work being done itself, what I find tremendously interesting is the question: what is it about our current moment that has brought Jewish political thinking to the fore?

The first community has come together under the sponsorship of the Shalom Hartman Institute of Jerusalem, their collective yield being a projected four-volume series brought out by Yale University Press titled The Jewish Political Tradition; the first two volumes (Volume 1: Authority and Volume 2: Membership) have already appeared. These works bring together texts, selected by leading political philosophers and theorists and their attendant commentaries The titles of the volumes produced thus far demonstrate the highly thematic structure of the project. Among the many varied texts brought together and mined for political wisdom are Talmudic and Midrashic texts, fragments from Jewish communal records, classical Jewish philosophers and Zionist thinkers, among others. Despite the wide array of texts, an introduction by the political philosopher Michael Walzer elucidates the sustained argument that emerges from the first volume. The Jews, despite a long history of statelessness, still produced a political philosophy. It is a long-held bias of western political thinking that equates politics with the state, and the Jews are among those people who break that mold.

The other scholarly community in question is more amorphous and may not constitute a community at all, or at least not as of yet. Inspired in part by "transnationalism", an au currant academic trend, a crop of young scholars, mainly historians, who all received their PhD's within the last 5 to 10 years, has sought out a usable Jewish political past by focusing on the years before state-centered Zionism and American Judaism became the regnant ideologies that they are today. The result has been a resurgence of interest in Diaspora Nationalism, a non-, or even extra-statist variety of modern Jewish politics, most often associated with the Central/East European Jewish experience. A nice analysis of the trend can be found here (AJS Review (2010), 34: 289-308) in an article (particularly the extensive footnotes) by James Loeffler, one of the young scholars I just mentioned. Another name that could be added to the list is Simon Rabinovitch, who, according to his webpage at Boston University, is editing a reader on Diaspora Nationalism, another on Jewish politics, and a monograph on Autonomism (http://blogs.bu.edu/srabinov/works-in-progress/.) Autonomism, like Diaspora Nationalism more broadly, is often associated with Simon Dubnow, the Russian-Jewish historian, intellectual, and political activist. A day-long conference at YIVO in honor of his 150th birthday (http://www.yivoinstitute.org/index.php?tid=165&aid=778 - includes video) and a feature on Jewish Ideas Daily (http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/content/module/2010/11/8/main-feature/1/the-non-zionist) has brought his name back to the lips of the Jewish cognoscenti in recent months.

Perhaps the most fully thought-out attempt to recapture Diaspora Nationalism as a program in the here and now can be found in a recent book by Noam Pianko titled Zionism and the Roads Not Taken. The book is something of a hybrid combining intellectual biography with theoretical exposition. Three individuals serve as the main protagonists (though Pianko looks at Ahad Ha'am and Dubnow as well others): Simon Rawidowicz, a Brandeis University Professor best known for his studies of modern Jewish thinkers and his work as a Hebraist; Mordecai Kaplan, best known as the founding father of the Reconstructionist movement; and Hans Kohn, best known as the founder of the modern study of nationalism. In Pianko's hands, however, these three seemingly disparate figures, studied today by three disparate scholarly communities, offer us similar theories of Zionism that were in their time somewhat mainstream, although they were ultimately rejected. What these Zionist thinkers offered then, and can still offer us today, is a vision of Jewish nationalism that does not confine it to a state apparatus, what Pianko calls "nation beyond state". Born of the heady internationlism and national-minority rights culture of the interwar period, these three thinkers pictured the Jewish national movement as an opportunity to de-link nation from sovoreignty, and saws the Jews as models of this project.

Pianko's book is essentially two. There are close readings of Rawidowicz, Kaplan and Kohn along the lines of intellectual biography, and intellectual historians will no doubt take issue with some of what is said about these three very different figures. Is the political theory that Pianko susses out really embedded in their work? As the book begins to get reviewed in journals we will have to see. But then there is the programmatic argument in which Pianko attempts to seize upon the theory he sees and offer it as useful in an age of globalization, mass communication, large-scale access to affordable travel, and diasporic identities.

I have to admit that there is much to recommend this book, and I find myself liking it despite some of its flaws and its generally inchoate political theory. But I take a bird's eye view of the moment and how Pianko's book fits in with The Jewish Political Tradition. I can't help but think that works such as these mean Jewish studies or Jewish self-image has truly come of age. In multicultural America, we seem to have outgrown our need for nervous apologetics of the kind that made German Jewry so productive. We demand our particularist claims by right. Classical Liberalism, undergirded by belief in the efficacy of the individual, has come under attack from new understandings of the self: the Communitarian and the post-modern. Though very different from one another, both understand that our moral and philosophical universe is shaded, inflected, or constructed by that which we share with others similar to us, and each embraces differences among groups of people, to varying degrees. The circle is narrower than a posited universal humanity. (Then again, Jews seem to number disproportionately among those whose universalism is the most thoroughgoing. As Cynthia Ozick once put it, "universalism is the parochialism of the Jews").

The Jewish political thinking coming from the Hartman Institute is employed in an attempt to articulate a status quo favorable to both the reality of Jewish sovereignty and the Diaspora. What precedent does Jewish tradition have governing? For embracing the rights of others? For developing law outside the four ells of Halakha? I believe there is a great deal of overlap between this project and those who embrace Diaspora Nationalism, but there will always be those who want to see beyond the here and now. For some, the Messiah has come, however secularized or neutralized. But there will always be those who believe he tarries - Jews who traffic in what-if scenarios. Do we work to maintain the status quo of Jewish sovereignty, count the blessings it has brought and work to make our new state-arrangement as equitable and just as we can? Or do we insist on pushing history forward, regardless of what the abyss in front of us may or may not hold?

Moses Mendelssohn and the Oral Torah of the Internet

Current questions about how our modes of communication affect our lives are not new, and in fact represent only the latest reactions to the most recent radical changes in the way we interact and exchange information. In his foundational work, Jerusalem, Moses Mendelssohn describes his perceived effect of the printing press on religion and human life in general:

"The diffusion of writings and books which, through the invention of the printing press, has been infinitely multiplied in our days, has entirely transformed man. The great upheaval in the whole system of human knowledge and convictions which it has produced has, indeed, had on the one hand advantageous advantages for the improvement of mankind, for which we cannot thank beneficent Providence enough. However, like any good which can come to man here below, it has also had, incidentally, many evil consequences, which are to be attributed partly to its abuse, and partly also to the necessary condition of human nature. We teach and instruct one another only through writings; we learn to know nature and man only from writings. We work and relax, edify and amuse ourselves through overmuch writing. The preacher does not converse with his congregation; he reads or declaims to it a a written treatise. The professor reads his written lectures from the chair. Everything is a dead letter; the spirit of living conversation has vanished. We express our love and anger in letters, quarrel and become reconciled in letters; all our personal relations are by correspondence; and when we get together, we know of no other entertainment than playing or reading aloud." (trans. Arkush, Brandeis, 1983, p.102)

These words ring strangely in the ears of the 21st century reader, particularly their critical tone. In a world with television and the internet, many parents would be happy to have their children grow up in the environment that Mendelssohn describes. What many cultural critics today share with Mendelssohn, though, is the fear of a decrease in human interaction and communication. Throughout the rest of this essay, Mendelssohn shows why he claims that this change is so dangerous.

This statement by Mendelssohn serves as an introduction to his view of both the cause and perils of idolatry, and the solution in the monotheistic, ritual-based religion of Judaism. He claims that the way societies have attempted to portray language in writing, either through pictures and only later through phonetic alphabets, has profoundly affected the way they learn and believe. Mendelssohn blames the rise of idolatry on the confusion of symbols (like hieroglyphics or other pictographic images) with the ideas that they represent, akin to Saussure’s signified and signifier. Unable to comprehend the symbols and analogies used to describe God, idolatrous peoples began to confuse those symbols for the very God that they were mean to represent, says Mendelssohn.

With the development of alphabets, this problem is traded for another: Mendelssohn recalls the same concerns as the rabbis over the writing down of religious texts (the Oral Torah particularly):

דרש רבי יהודה בר נחמני מתורגמניה דרבי שמעון בן לקיש כתיב (שמות לד) כתוב לך את הדברים האלה וכתיב (שמות לד) כי ע"פ הדברים האלה הא כיצד דברים שבכתב אי אתה רשאי לאומרן על פה דברים שבעל פה אי אתה רשאי לאומרן בכתב דבי רבי ישמעאל תנא אלה אלה אתה כותב ואי אתה כותב הלכות א"ר יוחנן לא כרת הקב"ה ברית עם ישראל אלא בשביל דברים שבעל פה שנאמר (שמות לד) כי על פי הדברים האלה כרתי אתך ברית ואת ישראל

“Rabbi Judah bar Nahmani interpreted, from the spokesman of Rabbi Simon ben Lakish: “It is written ‘write for yourself these things’ and it is written ‘according to these words.’ How (should) this (be interpeted)? Words which are written you are not allowed to say by memory; things which are memorized you are not allowed to say [from a written text]. The House of Rabbi Ishmael taught: [both] may be written down, but you don’t write down halakhot. Rabbi Yochanan says, the Holy One who is blessed [only] made a covenant with Israel [for the sake of] spoken (memorized) words, as it say, ‘for by (at the mouth of) these words I made a covenant with you and with Israel.’"

-Bavli Gittin 60b.

Mendelssohn’s point is that texts, when they are written down, lose their flexible, living character, becoming, in his words a “dead letter.” In a way, this is no less idolatrous than confusing animals for God: the eternal truths present in the evolving set of laws are confused with the individual laws themselves. When these laws are recorded, they then become a fixed set, having a sense of authority on their own, outside of the greater values that they represent. So in Mendelssohn’s view recorded language, for all of the advantages that it brings, endangers greater human understanding of “eternal truths.”

Mendelssohn is not the last up to our day to note the challenges of sea change in the way we communicate and learn. Haym Soloveitchik, in his now famous essay “Rupture and Reconstruction” (Tradition, vol. 28, no. 4, 1994) notices the changes that occurred in Orthodoxy in the twentieth century. Starting with the Mishna Berura, a early 20th century commentary on the first section of Joseph Caro’s Shulhan Arukh, Jewish practice begins to be based less on learned behaviors passed from generation to generation (mimesis), and more based on the printed texts of halakha that were widely available. Before this time, so powerful was common Jewish practice (minhag) that the technical, recorded opinion was reread to incorporate the divergent custom into the law. However, the Mishna Berura, instead of accommodating these views, castigated those whose practice diverged from the norm as it was recorded in the codes, encouraging all God-fearing people to avoid such practices.

This reflects a different attitude towards the conversational, human interactions of everyday lived Jewish experience, rejecting it for the precision, and inhumanity, of the written word. The reasons for this shift are complicated, and include the decreasing religiosity and education of many Orthodox parents and the increasing rancor of denominational politics. Whatever the reason, people started to learn how to keep kosher from manuals, and to learn how to daven from Artscroll (didactic, rather than mimetic). This attitude prevents not only a more fluid, flexible application of the law, it even proscribes anything new to be said about halakhic topics. One of my teachers insists that because of this trend, the period of Aharonim, later halakhic decisors, is over. The current period in which we are living should be called “the anthologies,” in his view, because of the tendency of almost all halakhic works (like Shemirat Shabbat k’Hilkhata and the Artscroll Halachah Series) to simply summarize and reorganize information, adding almost nothing to any halakhic discussion; essentially, the very dead letter about which Moses Mendelssohn wrote.

Isidore Twersky argues persuasively in his “Shulhan Aruk’: Enduring Code of Jewish Law,” (Judaism, 16, 1967, p.141-158) that this tension between codification and standardization on the one hand, and respect for the diversity and fluidity of Jewish practice on the other, is a historical pattern that repeats itself. He observes that throughout the period of the Geonim and the Rishonim there is a sort of accordion effect, where excessive diversity creates the need for codification, and when that codification is found to exclude long-standing customs of communities or other understandings of rabbinic literature, the leadership of those communities pushed for decision-making based on the more democratic responsa rather than codes. Many European rabbis before the advent of Caro’s code were hesitant to write a code, precisely over these concerns, and criticized his code after it was published. Once again, this is the fear of “Oral Torah” becoming “Written Torah.”

Mendelssohn believed that the solution for his linguistic problem, and this tension between Oral and Written Torah, is the religious or “ceremonial” law of Judaism. Rather than committing the instruction of greater religious ideas to the realm of books and knowledge (Written Torah), or to myths and symbols (which can lead to confusion and idolatry), religious instruction of eternal truths would be learned through acts (mitzvot):

"Man’s actions are transitory; there is nothing lasting, nothing enduring about them that, like hieroglyphic script, could lead to idolatry through abuse or misunderstanding. But they also have the advantage over alphabetical signs of not isolating man, of not making him to be a solitary creature, poring over writings and books. They impel him rather to social intercourse, to imitation, and to oral, living instruction. For this reason, there were but a few written laws, and even these were not entirely comprehensible without oral instruction and tradition." (p.119)

Here Mendelssohn is sensitive to the need for the mimetic (to use Soloveitchik’s language) learning of tradition to prevent it from becoming stagnant. Only when the law is practiced in community, through the continuous interpretation of the community can it continue to transmit the eternal truths of Judaism which transcend any individual law. Crucial here, too, is that Mendelssohn recognizes that even to the extent that there is a Written Torah, it will be interpreted through its being lived in real life, through the Oral Torah.

Mendelssohn had essentially three concerns about the way media (in his day the printing press) could affect our lives: 1)that the wide availability of print would cause meaningless speculation rather than meaningful conversation, 2) that the commitment of essentially fluid information to writing would cause stagnation the development of religion and 3) that we would miss greater spiritual truths by focusing on fixed texts that had a particular historical context. Considering our situation today, what would he say?

It is true that our smartphones, computers, and social media sites take a lot of our time that could be used for personal interactions. On the other hand, social media has allowed larger circles of friends to stay in touch more easily than ever before. Furthermore, the internet has democratized information in a way that books never could have. We have gone even further than Mendelssohn’s description of “poring over volumes” instead of asking someone, to simply typing our questions into a search bar. However, isn't it possible that the internet might actually represent the synthesis of the Oral Torah and the Written Torah that Mendelssohn wanted to achieve? The internet does record information with an almost frightening permanence (Written Torah), but that information is being constantly debated, commented on, and and reedited on wikis all the time; all this with a record of the changes and those who made them. The technology that we have provides unique opportunities to have a Written Torah with an essentially Oral, democratic method of transmission. Clearly we are not unique in having to deal with the challenges of new forms of communication, and we will adapt to the change. Hopefully we will take advantage of it to advance understanding of the mitzvot as they are lived in real life, and of the practice of Judaism as an expression of the eternal truths of the Torah.

As this site becomes more active, may it and its participants be a part of the transmission of Torat Hayyim, the living Torah, both written and oral.

כן יהי רצון

Spinoza and the Problem of Hagiography

This is the first of a several part series addressing Spinoza and the problem of hagiography. No understanding of modern Jewry is complete without a reckoning with Spinoza. Unfortunately, while the thought of this person has been terribly significant in the shaping of the modern enterprise, his action has been equally significant, but only terrible. Thousands of Christians in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century developed their view of Judaism from Spinoza's books. One could say that what Spinoza writes about Judaism also constitutes thought, but referring to it as action places what he has written on this topic within the realm of בן אדם לחברו an area where Spinoza is a much more questionable figure. For this reason, this post and subsequent posts in this series are about Spinoza and hagiography. One usually sees hagiography disappear as time develops and a person comes under increasing scrutiny, but in the case of Spinoza, accounts up to this very day cast him as a saint.

And here is the rest of it.

This matter is most important because it is a proxy for a larger discussion about traditional Judaism and its dissipation before the modern enterprise. Those that praise Spinoza's person too much betray their desire to cast the modern enterprise too favorably. It is not enough for Spinoza to be a great thinker. His conduct must also win praise. After all, Spinoza's choice - to become a philosopher - was made in juxtaposition to the more traditional alternative of becoming a rabbi. Rabbis are praised for their capacity to think, but if their conduct is poor, they are not revered. Therefore, Spinoza - though he is the anti-rabbi - must abide by the same criterion as rabbis do in the sense that he can not only be a great thinker; he must also be a great person. In other words, if his conduct is questionable, his thought suffers in the eyes of modern and aspiring modern Jews. For this reason, his conduct must be described as good for those who are committed to his thought. And the problem of hagiography ensues.

In upcoming posts, I will be discussing the following scholars, who respond to Spinoza - Leo Strauss, Hermann Cohen, Steven Nadler, and Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. Strauss and Cohen provide a most excellent critique of Spinoza's character and played no small role in reframing the discussion around this most controversial Jew. Newberger Goldstein tends toward the hagiographical, apparently not taking into account the writings of Strauss and Cohen. As for Nadler, I am still reading his book.

I hope to demonstrate that the critique of Spinoza's character is legitimate in order to strike a blow to any current or future hagiographical accounts of him. Nevertheless, I do not mean to belittle his importance as a thinker, and I will give credit where it is his due, as he is one of the founders of the modern political enterprise - liberal democracy - which I cherish. I hope to convince readers that his work must be affirmed, but his person is not one to which we should pay any allegiance.

Judaism as Radical Language

'Boy were you on today. Boy did you ever make that guy look sick. When he hit that one down the line and you got it and fell down and hit that drop-volley Pemulis said the guy looked like he was going to be sick all over the net, he said.'
'Boo, I kicked a kid's ass is all. End of story. I don’t think it's good to rehash it when I've kicked somebody's ass. It's like a dignity thing. I think we should just let it sort of lie in state, quietly. Speaking of which.'
'Hey Hal?'
'…'
'Hey Hal?'
'It's late, Mario. It's sleepy-time. Close your eyes and think fuzzy thoughts.'
'That's what the Moms always says, too.'
'Always worked for me, Boo.'
'You think I think fuzzy thoughts all the time. You let me room with you because you feel sorry for me.'
'Booboo I'm not even going to dignify that. I'll regard it as like a warning sign. You always get petulant when you don’t get enough sleep. And here we are seeing petulance already on the western horizon, right here.'
'…'
'…'
'When I asked if you were asleep I was going to ask if you felt like you believed in God, today, out there, when you were so on, making that guy look sick.'
'This again?'
'…'
'Really don’t think midnight in a totally dark room with me so tired my hair hurts and drills in six short hours is the time and place to get into this, Mario.'
'…'
'You ask me this once a week.'
'You never say, is why.'
'So tonight to shush you how about if I say I have administrative bones to pick with God, Boo. I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not that crazy about, I'm pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I’m not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I, Boo.'
-David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest page 40

This week, a week of tennis and theology, I've been thinking about the late-night conversation between (two of) the Incandenza boys, Mario and Hal. The Australian Open, the first Major of the calendar year, will soon be over. And, admittedly, I've been watching too much of it. Luckily there's a good amount of down-time between points, games, sets, matches, which makes tennis a pretty good sport to watch if you have, say, a book of Jewish theology to finish reading for class. So, this week, my heart has been in Melbourne, but I, I have been in Arthur Green's masterful Radical Judaism: Rethinking God and Tradition.
Now if you'd like to see a review of Green's book, and a response to the review and a response to the response, look in the pages of the tasteful “Jewish Review of Books.” Unlike the talented authors writing for that publication, I haven't even finished reading the book; but I'm already pretty confident that it does some very important things. First and foremost, and without getting into particulars, it is an example of what a non-dogmatic theology can be; a theology for moderns who are unwilling to give up their beliefs in what have come to be regarded as social and scientific truths. Equal rights and opportunities for people of all genders and sexual orientations, basic trust that science pretty much gets things like evolution right, etc.
And he does all this without hiding his own embeddedness, his own contingency. On page one he reveals who he is: “Through [sacred language, rites, and symbols] I am sometimes able to enter into states of inner openness to a nameless and transcendent presence, that which I choose to call 'God.'” Green is much like Mario (nicknamed Boo) in the Wallace passage quoted above. He doesn't prove God's existence through logic games or appeals to Scripture. He has moments of transcendence, some of which are “evoked by great beauty,” (4) and he chooses the theological language(s) of Judaism to talk about those experiences. For Mario, the language of God is how one expresses that feeling of being totally “on” in a tennis game. A melding, as it were, of mental and physical reality. Hal, whose conception of God is more about logic than about experience, chooses not to use his brother Mario's “metaphor.” The language we use to describe the world is a choice we make. If we think that there is only one description for something, perhaps we are deceiving ourselves. The question Green forces us to answer is: have we actively chosen the language we use? And if so, why?
Green's book is not just important for us committed Jews who want to be challenged in how we think/talk about God; it is, I think, important for those Jews and non-Jews who are atheists or “new-atheist” anti-God/anti-religion people. Green addresses this latter category: “'Religion,' to them, seems to allow for nothing other than a literal belief in nonsensical biblical tales and various accruing superstitions. This caricature obviates the need for serious dialogue and the encounter thus devolves into mutual distrust and recrimination, great fodder for the media but quite useless for the future of civilization.” (9) Green offers sophistication, and invites everyone into the conversation of Jewish theology in an open and honest way.
It's not about whether you end up reading this book and agreeing with it. The book makes radical claims and interpretations that traditional Jews may be uncomfortable with. But ultimately, the book is an act of faith that the Judaism it promotes is quite useful for the future of civilization.
If you get to the end (page 971, which is almost the end) of Infinite Jest you'll read about how Mario's simple kindness makes a difference to the people around him. And you may wonder if his moral goodness is related to the religious language he chooses to use when he witnesses beauty, like that of Hal's tennis game. The question of how religious language can contribute to the improvement of the world is an important question to ask. I believe that Art Green makes a lasting contribution, outlining in religious language what it means to be thinking Jews in our era, and what it can mean to be “partners of the One in the survival and maintenance of this planet....” (27)

Art Green will be speaking on Radical Judaism on February 03, 12:15 pm - 1:30 pm at JTS, 3080 Broadway, Mendolson Convocation Center

Why I Don't Fear For Conservative Judaism

In the wake of the attacks of September 11th, it seemed that the culture wars of the 1990s would continue to divide us in the first decade of the 21st century. Lines were drawn in the sand because the issues of the day touched on the most fundamental questions of human life: When does the right to life begin and who decides? Is human sexuality hard-wired or learned? Is there a right to die? Fundamental questions are not easily given to subtle answers, and the battles did not easily allow one to occupy middle ground. Nor were we Jews untouched by our own internal battles, often waged along similar lines: Who is a Jew? Who decides who can become a Jew i.e. who controls conversion? Can there be gay rabbis? The culture wars, it seemed, showed little sign of subsiding and are with us even now.

It should come as no surprise then that it has become fashionable to deride Conservative Judaism and to bemoan its prospects. If ours is an age of extremes, the religious moderates of the Jewish people are likely to be on the defensive no less than the moderates of the American people were until recently (and perhaps still are). In a moment of Orthodox triumphalism we are told that we have failed to sufficiently adhere to Torah and what it demands of us. On the other hand, Conservatism's continued insistence on both Tradition and change seems to offer a less courageous, equivocal version of Reform Judaism's dyed-in-the-wool embrace of progressivism, itself a form orthodoxy. "Choose sides" we are told time and again. Either throw in your lot with Halakha and be "authentic" or successfully link your Judaism to a program of ever greater levels of emancipation. But whatever you do, choose and be clear about where you're holding. Like Mordecai Kaplan once quipped: "On the one hand, you have the Orthodox; on the other, Reform. On both hands, you have the Conservatives". He did not intend this as a compliment.

The success of Conservative Judaism has always mirrored the success of the political and moral center more broadly, and if the wider American culture is divisive and partisan then the Jews are going to follow suit. But if ours is an age of extremes, we need only remember the period of moderation that preceded it. At midcentury, when Liberalism constituted a big tent, American power was thought to be a force for good in the world and its form of democracy the best form of government available. True, even then Liberalism benefitted from having clear-cut and definite enemies: Fascism and Communism. But in that moment, religion was a major member of the coalition - it provided the building blocks of the good society and the best means of socializing the individual. As President Eisenhower famously put it: "Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don't care what it is." The particulars of one's faith were less important than the fact that one had a faith and was churched - belonging was itself an act of belief in the American way of life. It was in this period that Conservative Judaism thrived because it best captured the American and Jewish pulse while benefiting from a public culture that successfully sidestepped issues of fundamental divisiveness. Of course, as we all know, this did not last, but this does not mean that there is not a transcendent center to be sought.

What we are experiencing today is a period of realignment, not an ever expanding series of divisions. Regardless of how history will judge President Obama's first term, it seems clear his vision is one of pragmatic idealism, one which in many ways hearkens back to America at mid-20th century, yet is cognizant of the fundamental ethnic, racial, sexual and technological changes the country has undergone since: the Common Good, he reminds us, is difficult if not impossible to achieve, but it is sacrifice and clear-eyed accounting that are required to attain it. Belong. Chip in as individuals and as members of a sacred community, however you define it, and build the society you envision. As he put it in his landmark First Inaugural, with help from 1st Corinthians, "The time has come to put away childish things". If we are truly entering an Obama age, it bodes well for the vital center of American and Jewish life. The Transcendent Good, the place where philosophy and theology meet, is the place that transcends the multifaceted and very real divisions we face. In the American idiom, we might say: E Pluribus Unum. As Jews, we might follow the Zohar and say: God, Torah, and Israel, are one.

The Conservative Judaism I'm referring to transcends the particulars of a movement and refers to a Golden Mean out there, a Conservative Judaism shel malah. It is the province of all those who refuse to occupy a universe like the one described by Yeats, whose apocalyptic vision is preceded by prophetic words: "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold." To be a principled moderate is difficult, but if we truly believe ourselves to be the "best", we cannot "lack all conviction". We truly believe that Orthodox and Reform Judaisms have a certain legitimacy, but they're wrong because they are reductionist. This is what allows them to be "full of passionate intensity".