Rabbi Leon A. Morris: I’m very pleased to be sitting here again with Rabbi Dr. Neil Gillman. Rabbi Gillman serves on our faculty at the Skirball Center for Adult Jewish Learning in New York and has been our scholar-in-residence during this 2007-2008 academic year, in addition, of course, to his responsibilities as Professor of Jewish thought for several decades at the Jewish Theological Seminary. This is the third in our conversations respectively about God, Torah, and Israel, and today we are speaking about Israel. Hello Neil.
Rabbi Neil Gillman: Hi. Good to be back.
LM: Great to have you back. So normally when we speak about peoplehood -- and that’s a big buzz word in the Jewish world today -- we speak about it sociologically, anthropologically, but how does a theologian relate to or make sense of the notion of peoplehood?
NG: Okay can I contextualize this conversation by invoking the name of the thinker who was the first one to affirm the centrality of peoplehood in Jewish self definition? And that, of course, is Mordecai Kaplan.
If there is a central theme -- and I even say a central heresy -- which Kaplan introduced into our conversation about Jewish identity, it was the notion that we eventually called the centrality of peoplehood. But he reversed the formula about the relationship between Jewish religion and Jewish peoplehood by saying that peoplehood comes first.
First and foremost there was a people, a family, an extended family, a set of families who gradually shared a sense of a shared history and a shared destiny and began asking themselves basic questions relating to the nature of human existence and began evolving a set of answers to these questions.
These questions and these answers eventually came to be called Torah. And Torah, of course, is the technical term for the definition of what we call religion. So Kaplan’s notion is that Jewish religion is the religion of the Jewish people.
Judaism is the religion of the Jewish people, that it was the Jewish people who created Judaism. Now, that totally reverses the commonly held assumption…
LM: That we’re a people because of our devotion to Torah?
NG: Or that it was— well, his final step, of course, was having said that Judaism is the creation of the Jewish people. He then seems to have thrown God out of the front door but brought God back in through the back door, as I like to say.
Because then he said it was the God that is within, the naturalist God, the God that is the power within us and within nature that makes for salvation that brought to our consciousness or to our ancestors’ consciousness what eventually became Jewish religion. So yes, that God revealed the Torah, that God revealed Jewish religion, of course, but not from a mountaintop, but from… not from the top down, but from the inside out.
So peoplehood came first, the people created religion, and that of course left Kaplan affirming what is in many ways the most radical part of his teaching which is that since ab initio it was the Jewish people that created Judaism. Then, as he said in class one day and almost knocked me off my chair: Judaism is whatever the Jewish people say it is, because they were the arbitrators originally of our definition of what constitutes Judaism.
So, to ask me what does a theologian, how does a theologian make sense of peoplehood, I have to go back to my encounters with Kaplan. And on this I think he was absolutely right. And incidentally, I think that this has become mainstream. This is no longer limited to Kaplanians, or to Reconstructionists, or even to the liberal half of the Jewish community. I think it is affirmed by pretty much all Jews today that it is the Jewish people that have a stake in defining what it is that Judaism is all about.
I will tell you an anecdote which I always use in these contexts: A very prominent Orthodox day school invited me to help them write their mission statement which they had to do because of self accreditation processes, and I had experience writing mission statements with the schools that I’m affiliated with, so I agreed to help them, and I wrote the sentence, the introductory sentence, I came before this assembly of Orthodox rabbis who constituted the faculty of this Orthodox yeshiva and I read them this sentence.
The sentence read something like: “It is the mission of this school to create proud, creative, loyal students who become members of the two communities to which they belong, the Jewish and the American.” And they loved it, and I didn’t tell them of course that it was Kaplan because it would have killed it.
LM: [Laughs]
NG: But it seems to me that they understood that peoplehood is central to our self definition and that religion is a function of peoplehood. So now when you ask me how does a theologian make sense of peoplehood, I can’t separate cleanly religion from peoplehood because my sense is that what created the sense of ourselves as a people was a very powerful religious thrust, because it’s a religious thrust, it’s a theological thrust.
The question is what theology, what kind of theology, made this possible? And for me, at least, it was a theology which affirms a much more naturalist notion of God, a much more naturalist theology of revelation, a statement that God works in and within and through a human community and it is God’s working within the community that enables the community to achieve a measure of identity and of a sense of its historical commitments and its destiny. And all of this then has a religious thrust.
Kaplan’s definition of Judaism was that it was a civilization, but it was a civilization in which religion plays a central role. It is not simply one other dimension of the civilization.
So theologically I affirm the centrality of people but for me that is a theological commitment. That is a theological statement because this is how I read God’s will for us.
LM: So given that we are both a people, a nation, and a faith community, a people committed to a particular set of ideas, what prevents -- and this is something I’m sure that listeners were thinking of when you recalled that memory from sitting in Kaplan’s classroom -- what prevents Judaism from being whatever most members of the Jewish people happen to believe?
Can Judaism be anything that the Jewish people believe? And how does the current reality in which -- let’s say if we were to take a vote, most of the Jewish people would probably deny basic tenants of Judaism -- so how do we work out that interplay between the Jewish people and the Jewish faith?
NG: With great, great difficulty. I think that we have to affirm, first of all, that in the current state of affairs, the Jewish people is made up of a number of overlapping mini-communities. I once tried to count if we begin with the Haredi community on the very far right.
LM: The “ultra Orthodox”...
NG: The ultra Orthodox community on the far right and move through the range of possible mini-communities until we reach the almost totally secular Jews on the very far left, we would count over 30 mini-communities.
There are about eight or nine Orthodox mini-communities, about the same number of Conservative, Reform… and each of them has its own implicit theology, each of them has its own heroes, its own poskim, in a sense, it’s decisors, it’s authority figures, each of them has its own, makes a selection of the Jewish past and decides what to keep, what to adapt, what to drop.
And these mini-communities make a calculated decision to form coalitions and these coalitions we call the Orthodox, Conservative Reform, now Reconstructionist, Secular, whatever we want, okay, but these are very broad-based coalitions.
This of, I don’t know, think of the Democratic party, think of the Republican party, look at the trouble they have patching together a platform for a convention which everybody then proceeds to ignore pretty much, right, but the strength of the party rests on its ability to make a coalition and to make the coalition whole.
And in the process of that each of these mini-communities makes a series of compromises and adaptations in order to be able to say that we belong together and by and large we share enough to be able to call ourselves Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, whatever it is.
I’m also very much thinking of the headlines, the current headlines with the Anglican and the Episcopalian church today going through the same kind of thing. They are just absolutely torn apart by major, major issues but there is a tremendous need or desire to hold the coalition together, and the question is are they going to be prepared to make compromises? Who compromises on what and how does the whole thing go together?
So I think this is the current state of affairs. I don’t think this is radically new. I think if we study Jewish history carefully there were always tremendous divisions of opinion within the community, always mini-communities.
It may be much more radical today because I think what distinguishes the modern age is the right of individuals to say, “This is how I define my Judaism for myself.” I think this is unprecedented. This is what Arnold Eisen and Steve Cohen have discovered in their sociological surveys…
LM: The Jew Within.
NG: The Jew Within, right, they’ve discovered that, to a significant extent, individuals today, that is the major change, the individual today feels that he or she has the right and responsibility to say this is what I keep, this is what I discard, without regard for even the sense of the mini-community so…
LM: Can there be a sense of peoplehood in that kind of reality, of “the sovereign self,” what they call “the sovereign self”?
NG: Because I think that this is what, let me say two things about this. The first is that there’s a very, very powerful sense of historical consciousness that holds us together and a very powerful sense of destiny. We are held together by a common past and memory, communal memory which I think is still very, very strong and by a sense of that we have something to say to the world.
I think that theoretically if we try to define Jewish practice for example, there are very, very few practices that all Jews take seriously today. Passover seems to be one. Mourning rituals seems to be another. Circumcision is a third. The High Holy Days is a fourth. Hanukkah is a fifth.
I think the sense that the creation of the state of Israel is an important event. Memories of the Holocaust, these concerns for Jews wherever they are in the world, the outpouring support, for example, for Soviet Jewry when this was on our agenda, there are significant factors that all Jews feel very, very strongly about.
Where does it get expressed? I recall noticing for example major debates on who is allowed to march in the Israel Day Parade. That was fascinating to me because this was the parade that, if anything, brings together the entire Jewish community, right? And then there were major debates that certain Jews were not allowed to march.
I think there was at that point I think there were some strong feelings that the gay/lesbian community wanted to march by themselves with their own flag and some Orthodox Jews protested to that, not all. Others said that they have a right and let them do it, and they belong, and I think that is interesting, but events like that, I think, tend to bring together the community as a whole and, of course, crises bring together the community as a whole.
So I think there is enough to keep us together but there is absolutely no question that the strains are much more powerful and I think that it is made even more powerful today by the very powerful sense of individualism, the individual, the right of the individual which I think is what modernity has thrown upon us.
This is new. It was not the case even 150 years ago. There was a far greater sense that the community has the right to dictate my Jewishness, my community, my mini-community has the right. This is I think faded.
I find, for example, that I put it this way, my own colorful way of putting it. I need a minyan, okay? I need a minyan because I want to hear the Torah read because I want to be able to say Kaddish, because I can daven it in my living room. I can’t read the Torah in my living room and I can’t say Kaddish without ten Jews.
So, I need a minyan. Because I live in Manhattan I have my choice of 100 different minyans within walking distance of my home but I need a minyan. And am I totally satisfied with mine? No. I don’t think any Jew is.
I said that once, and I got a lot of hate mail for having suggested that every Jew is unhappy with his synagogue, but in any case, I think we ultimately come together for certain things, we make the accommodations, the necessary accommodations. It’s tenuous, and we can change, and we grow, and we move, and we shift.
The minyan that pleases me now may not please me 20 years from now but I think there is enough to hold us together and I think there is still a sense that Jews need each other. That is why I think Jews come to the synagogue. I really don’t believe they come to the synagogue to discover God. I think that they come to the synagogue for community. That is what Jews get in the synagogue.
LM: So in a religious community like ours in which peoplehood predominates, in which it is, as you’ve said, one of the most if not the most motivating piece of what brings someone to the synagogue, what draws someone to community, how do we address the issue of the dialectic between particularism, perhaps even parochialism and universalism for Jews and for Judaism? To what extent am I permitted to care deeply about this people, to care more, to be more preoccupied with this people than with the world at large?
I think, in lots of different ways, this is a real quandary for contemporary Jews. How can I affirm my loyalty to this group but also affirm that I love and am kept up at night over people who have no ethnic or faith connection to me?
NG: This is a major headache and it certainly is mine, too. I recall having a wonderful student a number of years ago. She was an undergraduate and she was struggling with career decisions and one of them was she could spend the summer doing one of two different things.
One was to work on a curriculum for a Solomon Schechter School in her community which she felt was not doing as well as it should and she felt that she could help strengthen the curriculum of that school and the other was to go to South America and to build houses for some impoverished native community in Guatemala.
And I said to her, “Rachel, you have to decide are you going to save the world or are you going to save the Conservative movement?” And she burst into tears, and she said, “I want to do both.” It ended up that she went to Guatemala for the summer but she ended up in Jewish education which is where she is now and doing very well. I reminded her of that exchange, and she said, “I guess I made a decision, did I not?” And I said, “I guess you did."
LM: Do we have to make the decision? Can we not save the Jewish people and save the world?
NG: We have, each one of us has to decide, we have limited time on earth. We have limited resources. We have limited energies. We have to decide, each one of us has to decide for himself or herself this is how, this is what I am going to devote my life to.
That, I think, is less this global issue. I made a certain decision at a certain point that I was going to become a rabbi and a professor of Jewish philosophy. I was not going to get a Ph.D. in philosophy and work on philosophical problems in general.
I would go to an Ivy League school if I could but I was going to work specifically on Jewish issues. I was going to work with Jewish students and help them become better Jews, and I would do that through my teaching them Jewish philosophy, Jewish theology, everything that I’ve been doing for the past 50 years.
So, that was a very calculated decision and it came in my own life, it came about at a certain point in my undergraduate career when I suddenly learned for the first time that being a Jew was interesting, that there was something valuable and interesting in this Jewish stuff.
I grew up in a very non-parochial, non-tribal environment. I grew up in a small town. I had no Jewish friends. I had no Jewish classmates. In a sense I was the victim of a great deal of anti-Semitism as a kid, and most of the time we say the people who grow up in this kind of environment grow up in a very tribal sense of particularism you know, of defensiveness about their Jewishness.
That was not the case with me. I grew up. All of my friends were Catholic. I grew up speaking French, English, with a rich sense of what Christianity was all about because I was in their homes, and they took me to their church services. And I grew up. French was my native language and I always felt that was a great boon, and I wrote once that I grew up at the intersection of three great world cultures defined by three great languages: French, English and Hebrew.
And, that made me all the richer because I was well-read in French literature, in French culture. French language to me opened up French civilization. My Christian friends opened Christianity. I was comfortable talking to Christians.
I was a member of an interfaith dialogue group when I was still in high school and this openness, this universal, this sense of the universal, brought me into a philosophy major in my undergraduate school, philosophy and 20th century French literature.
And I was on my way to working in that world until a set of circumstances sort of made me aware for the first time that Jewish stuff was interesting and important and valuable, and that was a turnabout which quickly got me into the more serious study of Judaism, the decision to become a rabbi followed almost immediately from my decision to become a serious Jew with days.
So, in a sense, the particularism won over, right, against a backdrop of a much more universal set of interests and concerns which I’ve always felt has been part of me. I’ve continued work in French. I’ve continued doing interfaith work. I continue reading widely in broad cultural things.
I am a voice in my own school for a rabbinical school curriculum that will create a much more humanist type of rabbi. Gerson Cohen, may he rest in peace, talked about Jewish humanism, and he wanted the rabbi to be a Jewish humanist.
And I have been an opponent of what I see to be a much more narrowing of rabbinical school education emphasizing much more Jewish stuff, Jewish text, Jewish ideas, as opposed to opening it up and using Union Theological Seminary across the street to teach our students something about Christianity, Columbia, Teachers’ College, you know, to use Morningside Heights which is universalism, right.
So I guess my entire life has been sort of an attempt to say that I can be both very tribalistic about my Jewish loyalties and at the same time I have a set of universal concerns and I cannot say that I have a formula for resolving this. It comes up in specific moments when it comes up.
I am on the left as far as what I would consider to be the policy decisions which the state of Israel is being forced to make today, much more concern for world opinion, much more concern for the fate of the non-Jewish Israeli population. That I guess is the universalism that comes out, that piece that comes out in me.
My reading… I am now, especially during the summer when I have time to read, I read widely. I do not read Jewish stuff. I am reading Moby Dick. I just finished The Brothers Karamosoff. I mean this is what I read. I read Moby Dick every three years faithfully and I sort of remember it by heart some things, but this is what I read.
So I do a lot of— I have a lot of interests that are not narrowly Jewish, but I have to tell you that whenever I go to a circumcision ceremony and I feel very tribalist, you know, and I say to myself one more Jew, one more Jew, one more Jew, with pride, because this is the most ancient ritual we have, this is what Jews have been doing.
It is painful. It is bloody. People faint. People did it in the concentration camps. People did it in Soviet Russia during the most difficult periods of oppression. People have kept this up and this is continuity and I am strongly opposed to interfaith marriages because, again, I think this dilutes particularity.
I struggle and I make decisions case by case and by and large I feel that these are my decisions and when I share them with other people I am prepared for the fact that I am going to get hate mail because I frequently will make the decision against particularism and in favor of a much broader, more universalistic appeal.
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