Arthur Green Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers

Editor-in-Chief Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, Arizona State University

Editor Aaron W. Hughes, University of Rochester

Volume 16

Leiden • boston The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/lcjp 2015 Arthur Green

Hasidism for Tomorrow

Edited by Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron W. Hughes

Leiden • boston 2015 Cover illustration: Courtesy of Hebrew College

The series The Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers was generously supported by the Baron Foundation.

Green, Arthur, 1941– author. Arthur Green : Hasidism for tomorrow / edited by Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron W. Hughes. pages cm. — (Library of contemporary Jewish philosophers, ISSN 2213-6010 ; volume 16) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-90-04-30840-4 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-30842-8 (e-book) 1. Green, Arthur, 1941– 2. Jewish philosophy. 3. Judaism and philosophy. I. Tirosh-Samuelson, Hava, 1950– editor. II. Title.

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2015034873

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ISSN 2213-6010 ISBN 978-90-04-30840-4 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-30842-8 (e-book)

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This book is printed on acid-free paper. Contents

The Contributors ...... vii

Editors’ Introduction to the Series ...... ix

Arthur Green: An Intellectual Profile ...... 1 Ariel Evan Mayse

Three Warsaw Mystics ...... 53 Arthur Green

Jewish Theology: A New Beginning ...... 105 Arthur Green

Road Back to Sinai: The Post-Critical Seeker ...... 135 Arthur Green

A Neo-Hasidic Life: Credo and Reflections ...... 169 Arthur Green

Interview with Arthur Green ...... 191 Hava Tirosh-Samuelson

Select Bibliography ...... 257

THE CONTRIBUTORS

Ariel Evan Mayse (Ph.D., Harvard University, 2015) is currently a Research Fellow at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the Univer- sity of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His dissertation entitled “Beyond the Letters: The Question of Language in the Teachings of Rabbi Dov Baer of Mezritch,” explores the philosophy of language of one of the most important early Hasidic leaders. In addition to several scholarly and popular articles on Kabbalah and Hasidism, he is a co-editor of the two-volume collection Speaking Torah: Spiritual Teachings from around the Maggid’s Table (Jewish Lights, 2013), and editor of the recent From the Depth of the Well: An Anthology of Jewish Mysticism (Paulist Press, 2014).

Hava Tirosh-Samuelson (Ph.D., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1978) is Irving and Miriam Lowe Professor of Modern Judaism, the Director of Jew- ish Studies, and Professor of History at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. Her research focuses on Jewish intellectual history, Judaism and ecology, science and religion, and feminist theory. In addition to numerous articles and book chapters in academic journals and edited volumes, she is the author of the award-winning Between Worlds: The Life and Work of Rabbi David ben Judah Messer Leon (SUNY Press, 1991) and the author of Happiness in Premodern Judaism: Virtue, Knowledge, and Well-Being in Premodern Judaism (Hebrew Union College Press, 2003). She is also the editor of Judaism and Ecology: Created World and Revealed Word (Harvard University Press, 2002); Women and Gender in Jewish Philosophy (Indiana University Press, 2004); Judaism and the Phenomenon of Life: The Legacy of Hans Jonas (Brill, 2008); Building Better Humans? Refocusing the Debate on Transhumanism (Peter Lang, 2011); Hollywood’s Chosen People: The Jew- ish Experience in American Cinema (Wayne State University Press, 2012); and Jewish Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century: Personal Reflections (Brill, 2014). Professor Tirosh-Samuelson is the recipient of several large grants that have funded interdisciplinary research on religion, science, and technology.

Aaron W. Hughes (Ph.D., Indiana University Bloomington, 2000) holds the Philip S. Bernstein Chair in Jewish Studies at the University of Roch- ester. Hughes was educated at the University of Alberta, the Hebrew viii the contributors

University of Jerusalem, and Oxford University. He has taught at Miami University of Ohio, McMaster University, the Hebrew University of Jeru- salem, the University of Calgary, and the University at Buffalo. He is the author of over fifty articles and ten books, and the editor of seven books. His book titles include Abrahamic Religions: On the Uses and Abuses of History (Oxford University Press, 2012); Muslim Identities (Columbia Uni- versity Press, 2013); The Study of Judaism: Identity, Authenticity, Scholarship (SUNY, 2013); and Rethinking Jewish Philosophy: Beyond Particularism and Universalism (Oxford University Press, 2014). He is also the Editor-in-Chief of Method and Theory in the Study of Religion. EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES

It is customary to begin studies devoted to the topic of Jewish philosophy by defining what exactly this term, concept, or even discipline is. We tend not to speak of Jewish mathematics, Jewish physics, or Jewish sociol- ogy, so why refer to something as “Jewish philosophy”? Indeed, this is the great paradox of Jewish philosophy. On the one hand it presumably names something that has to do with thinking, on the other it implies some sort of national, ethnic, or religious identity of those who engage in such activity. Is not philosophy just philosophy, regardless of who philosophizes? Why the need to append various racial, national, or religious adjectives to it?1 Jewish philosophy is indeed rooted in a paradox since it refers to philosophical activity carried out by those who call themselves Jews. As philosophy, this activity makes claims of universal validity, but as an activity by a well-defined group of people it is inherently particularistic. The question “What is Jewish philosophy?” therefore is inescapable, although over the centuries Jewish philosophers have given very different answers to it. For some, Jewish philosophy represents the relentless quest for truth. Although this truth itself may not be particularized, for such individuals, the use of the adjective “Jewish”—as a way to get at this truth—most decidedly is.2 The Bible, the Mishnah, the Talmud, and related Jewish texts and genres are seen to provide particular insights into the more universal claims provided by the universal and totalizing gaze of philosophy. The problem is that these texts are not philosophical on the surface; they must, on the contrary, be interpreted to bring their philosophical insights to light. Within this context exegesis risks becoming eisegesis. Yet others eschew the term “philosophy” and instead envisage themselves as working in a decidedly

1 Alexander Altmann once remarked: It would be futile to attempt a presentation of Judaism as a philosophical system, or to speak of Jewish philosophy in the same sense as one speaks of American, English, French, or German philosophy. Judaism is a religion, and the truths it teaches are religious truths. They spring from the source of religious experience, not from pure reason. See Alexander Altmann, “Judaism and World Philosophy,” in The Jews: Their History, Cul- ture, and Religion, ed. Louis Finkelstein (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of Amer- ica, 1949), vol. 2, 954. 2 In this regard, see Norbert M. Samuelson, Jewish Faith and Modern Science: On the Death and Rebirth of Jewish Philosophy (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), e.g., 10–12. x EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES

Jewish key in order to articulate or clarify particular issues that have direct bearing on Jewish life and existence.3 Between these two perspectives or orientations, there exist several other related approaches to the topic of Jewish philosophy, which can and have included ethics,4 gender studies,5 multiculturalism,6 and postmodernism.7 Despite their differences in theory and method, what these approaches have in common is that they all represent the complex intersection of Judaism, variously defined, and a set of non-Jewish grids or lenses used to interpret this rich tradition. Framed somewhat differently, Jewish philosophy—whatever it is, however it is defined, or whether definition is even possible—represents the collision of particularistic demands and universal concerns. The universal, or that which is, in theory, open and accessible to all regardless of race, color, creed, or gender confronts the particular, or that which represents the sole concern of a specific group that, by nature or definition, is insular and specific-minded. Because it is concerned with a particular people, the Jews, and how to frame their traditions in a universal and universalizing light that is believed to conform to the dictates of reason, Jewish philosophy can never be about pure thinking, if indeed there ever can be such a phenomenon. Rather Jewish philosophy—from antiquity to the present—always seems to have had and, for the most part continues to have, rather specific and perhaps

3 See, e.g., Strauss’s claim about Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, perhaps one of the most important and successful works of something called Jewish philosophy ever written. He claims that one “begins to understand the Guide once one sees that it is not a philosophic book—a book written by a philosopher for philosophers—but a Jewish book: a book written by a Jew for Jews.” See Leo Strauss, “How to Begin to Study The Guide of the Perplexed,” in The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), vol. 1, xiv. Modern iterations of this may be found, for example, in J. David Bleich, Bioethical Dilemmas: A Jewish Perspective, 2 vols. (vol. 1, New York: Ktav, 1998; vol. 2, New York: Targum Press, 2006). 4 See, e.g., David Novak, Natural Law in Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Elliot Dorff, Love Your Neighbor and Yourself: A Jewish Approach to Modern Personal Ethics (New York: Jewish Publication Society of America, 2006). 5 E.g., the collection of essays in Women and Gender in Jewish Philosophy, ed. Hava Tirosh-Samuelson (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004). 6 E.g., Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid a Clash of Civilizations (London: Continuum, 2003); Jonathan Sacks, To Heal a Fractured World: The Ethics of Responsibility (New York: Schocken, 2007). 7 E.g., Elliot R. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004); Elliot R. Wolfson, Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menahem Mendel Schneerson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Elliot R. Wolfson, A Dream Interpreted within a Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination (New York: Zone Books, 2011). EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES xi even practical concerns in mind. This usually translates into the notion that Judaism—at least the Judaism that Jewish philosophy seeks to articulate— is comprehensible to non-Jews and, framed in our contemporary context, that Judaism has a seat at the table, as it were, when it comes to pressing concerns in the realms of ethics and bioethics. Jewish philosophy, as should already be apparent, is not a disinterested subject matter. It is, on the contrary, heavily invested in matters of Jewish peoplehood and in articulating its aims and objectives. Because of this interest in concrete issues (e.g., ethics, bioethics, medical ethics, feminism) Jewish philosophy—especially contemporary Jewish philosophy—is often constructive as opposed to being simply reflective. Because of this, it would seem to resemble what is customarily called “theology” more than it does philosophy. If philosophy represents the critical and systematic approach to ascertain the truth of a proposition based on rational argumentation, theology is the systematic and rational study of religion and the articulation of the nature of religious truths. The difference between theology and philosophy resides in their object of study. If the latter has “truth,” however we may define this term, as its primary object of focus, the former is concerned with ascertaining religious dogma and belief. They would seem to be, in other words, mutually exclusive endeavors. What we are accustomed to call “Jewish philosophy,” then, is a paradox since it does not—indeed, cannot—engage in truth independent of religious claims. As such, it is unwilling to undo the major claims of Judaism (e.g., covenant, chosenness, revelation), even if it may occasionally redefine such claims.8 So although medieval Jewish thinkers may well gravitate toward the systematic thought of Aristotle and his Arab interpreters and although modern Jewish thinkers may be attracted to the thought of Kant and Heidegger, the ideas of such non-Jewish thinkers are always applied to Jewish ideas and values. Indeed, if they were not, those who engaged in such activities would largely cease to be Jewish philosophers and would instead become just philosophers who just happened to be Jewish (e.g., Henri Bergson, Edmund Husserl, and Karl Popper). Whether in its medieval or modern guise, Jewish philosophy has a tendency to be less philosophical simply for the sake of rational analysis and more constructive. Many of the volumes that appear in the Library of

8 A good example of what we have in mind here is the thought of Maimonides. Although he might well redefine the notion of prophecy, he never rejects the concept. On Maimonides on prophecy, see Howard Kreisel, Prophecy: The History of an Idea in Medieval Jewish Philosophy (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001), 148–56. xii EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES

Contemporary Jewish Philosophers will bear this out. The truths of Judaism are upheld, albeit in often new and original ways. Although Jewish philosophy may well use non-Jewish ideas to articulate its claims, it never produces a vision that ends in the wholesale abandonment of Judaism.9 Even though critics of Jewish philosophy may well argue that philosophy introduces “foreign” wisdom into the heart of Judaism, those we call Jewish philosophers do not perceive themselves to be tainting Judaism, but perfecting it or teasing out its originary meaning.10 The result is that Jewish philosophy is an attempt to produce a particular type of Judaism—one that is in tune with certain principles of rationalism. This rationalism, from the vantage point of the nineteenth century and up to the present, is believed to show Judaism in its best light, as the synthesis or nexus between a Greek-inflected universalism and the particularism of the Jewish tradition. What is the status of philosophy among Jews in the modern period? Since their emancipation in the nineteenth century, Jews have gradually integrated into Western society and culture, including the academy. Ever since the academic study of Judaism began in the 1820s in Germany, Jewish philosophy has grown to become a distinctive academic discourse prac- ticed by philosophers who now often hold positions in non-Jewish institutions of higher learning. The professionalization of Jewish philosophy has not been unproblematic, and Jewish philosophy has had to (and still has to) justify its legitimacy and validity. And even when Jewish philosophy is taught in Jewish institutions (for example, rabbinic seminaries or universities in Israel), it has to defend itself against those Jews who regard philosophy as alien to Judaism, or minimally, as secondary in importance to the inherently Jewish disciplines such as jurisprudence or exegesis. Jewish philosophy, in other words, must still confront the charge that it is not authentically Jewish. The institutional setting for the practice of Jewish philosophy has shaped Jewish philosophy as an academic discourse. But regardless of the setting,

9 This despite the claims of Yitzhak Baer who believed that philosophy had a negative influence on medieval Spanish Jews that made them more likely to convert to Christianity. See Israel Jacob Yuval, “Yitzhak Baer and the Search for Authentic Judaism,” in The Jewish Past Revisited: Reflections on Modern Jewish Historians, ed. David N. Myers and David B. Ruderman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 77–87. 10 Indeed, Jewish philosophers in the medieval period did not even see themselves as introducing foreign ideas into Judaism. Instead they saw philosophical activity as a reclamation of their birthright since the Jews originally developed philosophy before the Greeks and others stole it from them. EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES xiii

Jewish philosophy as an academic discourse is quite distinct from Jewish philosophy as constructive theology, even though the two may often be produced by the same person. Despite the lack of unanimity about the scope and methodology of Jewish philosophy, the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers insists that Jewish philosophy has thrived in the past half century in ways that will probably seem surprising to most readers. When asked who are the Jewish philosophers of the twentieth century, most would certainly mention the obvious: Franz Rosenzweig (d. 1929), Martin Buber (d. 1965), and Emmanuel Levinas (d. 1995). Some would also be able to name Abraham Joshua Heschel (d. 1972), Mordecai Kaplan (d. 1983), Joseph Soloveitchik (d. 1993), and Hans Jonas (d. 1993). There is no doubt that these thinkers have either reshaped the discourse of Western thought for Jews and non- Jews or have inspired profound rethinking of modern Judaism. However, it is misleading to identify contemporary Jewish philosophy solely with these names, all of whom are now deceased. In recent years it has been customary for Jews to think that Jewish philosophy has lost its creative edge or that Jewish philosophy is somehow profoundly irrelevant to Jewish life. Several reasons have given rise to this perception, not the least of which is, ironically enough, the very success of Jewish Studies as an academic discipline. Especially after 1967, Jewish Studies has blossomed in secular universities especially in the North American Diaspora, and Jewish philosophers have expressed their ideas in academic venues that have remained largely inaccessible to the public at large. Moreover, the fact that Jewish philosophers have used technical language and a certain way of argumentation has made their thought increasingly incomprehensible and therefore irrelevant to the public at large. At the same time that the Jewish public has had little interest in professional philosophy, the practitioners of philosophy (especially in the Anglo American departments of philosophy) have denied the philosophical mer- its of Jewish philosophy as too religious or too particularistic and excluded it entirely. The result is that Jewish philosophy is now largely generated by scholars who teach in departments/programs of Jewish Studies, in departments of Religious Studies, or in Jewish denominational seminaries.11

11 See the comments in Aaron W. Hughes and Elliot R. Wolfson, “Introduction: Charting an Alternative Course for the Study of Jewish Philosophy,” in New Directions in Jewish Philosophy, ed. Aaron. W. Hughes and Elliot R. Wolfson (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010), 1–16. xiv EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES

The purpose of the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers is not only to dispel misperceptions about Jewish philosophy but also to help nudge the practice of Jewish philosophy out of the ethereal heights of academe to the more practical concerns of living Jewish communities. To the public at large this project documents the diversity, creativity, and richness of Jewish philosophical and intellectual activity during the second half of the twentieth century, and early twenty-first century, showing how Jewish thinkers have engaged new topics, themes, and methodologies and raised new philosophical questions. Indeed, Jewish philosophers have been intimately engaged in trying to understand and interpret the momen- tous changes of the twentieth century for Jews. These have included the Holocaust, the renewal of Jewish political sovereignty, secularism, postmodernism, feminism, and environmentalism. As a result, the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers intentionally defines the scope of Jewish philosophy very broadly so as to engage and include theology, political theory, literary theory, intellectual history, ethics, and feminist theory, among other discourses. We believe that the overly stringent definition of “philosophy” has impoverished the practice of Jewish philosophy, obscur- ing the creativity and breadth of contemporary Jewish reflections. An accurate and forward looking view of Jewish philosophy must be inclusive. To practitioners of Jewish philosophy this project claims that Jewish philosophical activity cannot and should not remain limited to professional academic pursuits. Rather, Jewish philosophy must be engaged in life as lived in the present by both Jews and non-Jews. Jews are no longer a people apart, instead they are part of the world and they live in this world through conversation with other civilizations and cultures. Jewish philosophy speaks to Jews and to non-Jews, encouraging them to reflect on problems and take a stand on a myriad of issues of grave importance. Jewish philosophy, in other words, is not only alive and well today, it is also of the utmost relevance to Jews and non-Jews. The Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers is simultaneously a documentary and an educational project. As a documentary project, it intends to shape the legacy of outstanding thinkers for posterity, identifying their major philosophical ideas and making available their seminal essays, many of which are not easily accessible. A crucial aspect of this is the interview with the philosophers that functions, in many ways, as an oral history. The interview provides very personal comments by each philosopher as he or she reflects about a range of issues that have engaged them over the years. In this regard the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES xv simultaneously records Jewish philosophical activity and demonstrates its creativity both as a constructive discourse as well as an academic field. As an educational project, the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philo sophers is intended to stimulate discussion, reflection, and debate about the meaning of Jewish existence at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The individual volumes and the entire set are intended to be used in a variety of educational settings: college-level courses, programs for adult Jewish learning, rabbinic training, and interreligious dialogues. By engaging or confronting the ideas of these philosophers, we hope that Jews and non- Jews alike will be encouraged to ponder the past, present, and future of Jewish philosophy, reflect on the challenges to and complexities of Jewish existence, and articulate Jewish philosophical responses to these challenges. We hope that, taken as individual volumes and as a collection, the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers will inspire readers to ask philosophical, theological, ethical, and scientific questions that will enrich Jewish intellectual life for the remainder of the twenty-first century. All of the volumes in the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers have the same structure: an intellectual profile of the thinker, several seminal essays by the featured philosopher, an interview with him or her, and a select bibliography of 120 items, including books, articles, book chapters, and public addresses. As editors of the series we hope that the structure will encourage the reader to engage the volume through reflection, discussion, debate, and dialogue. As the love of wisdom, philosophy is inherently Jewish. Philosophy invites questions, cherishes debate and controversy, and ponders the meaning of life, especially Jewish life. We hope that the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers will stimulate thinking and debate because it is our hope that the more Jews philosophize, the more they will make Judaism deeper, durable, and long-lasting. Finally, we invite readers to engage the thinkers featured in these volumes, to challenge and dispute them, so that Judaism will become ever stronger for future generations.

ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE

Ariel Evan Mayse

Introduction

Rabbi Arthur Green (b. 1941) is a theologian, professor of Jewish mysticism, and the teacher of two generations of American rabbis and scholars. Yet above all he is, by his own description, a spiritual seeker. Green has devoted over five decades to developing a vibrant new expression of Judaism that is “all about challenge and response, one that by definition has to change and grow in each generation and even in the course of single lives.”1 Green argues that without such growth Judaism will not survive the confrontation with modernity and postmodernity. Religious traditions must be reinterpreted and reframed in our day if they are to remain a compelling voice for new generations. The unique challenges facing contemporary Jews include modern science and theories of evolution, biblical criticism, the Holocaust, the reestablishment of a Jewish state, life in an open democracy, impending ecological disaster, and the morally bankrupt materialism of our society. Meeting these challenges with authenticity and integrity may at times demand that we radically reinterpret the Judaism we have inherited from very different eras, but confronting these issues also requires us to listen carefully to the wisdom and vitality embedded in our tradition. The legacy of Jewish learning must be reshaped for contemporary Jews, but tradition’s authentic voice should also challenge and inspire us. As a contemporary reinterpreter of Jewish tradition, Green freely acknowledges that he himself is constantly being shaped and challenged by the traditional texts with which he is working. Green’s theology is grounded in the Jewish mystical tradition. More specifically, he has described his approach as “neo-Hasidic.” This means that Green draws particular inspiration from Hasidic texts but rejects the stric- tures of living in a traditional Hasidic community, including its dismissal

1 Arthur Green, Radical Judaism: Rethinking God and Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 134. 2 ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE of Western education and the critical study of Judaism. Inspired more by the textual sources of early Hasidism than by contemporary Hasidim, he feels free to engage with those teachings somewhat selectively. He values the teachings of Kabbalah and Hasidism as holding deep insights into the human psyche and spiritual life, but does not look to them for any literal sense of metaphysical or cosmological truth. He rejects elements of the mystical tradition, such as the degradation of non-Jews or the disen- franchisement of women, which he feels conflict with his morality. Green understands that these aspects of Jewish mysticism reflect the historical contexts in which these texts were written, and insists that the modern seeker need not accept them whole cloth. This selective reading allows for the possibility of rediscovering the beauty and potential contemporary relevance of the sources. The teachings of Jewish mysticism, argues Green, give us access to some of the deepest wellsprings of human creativity and spirituality, and point toward a mysterious, elusive reality within them that we humans call by the name Y-H-W-H, or “God.” A modern renewal of Judaism can flow forth only from these. Green knows that he lives in an age of seekers. Often confronted by superficial manifestations of Judaism without any deep roots in our authentic spiritual language, many of his generation and those he teaches have turned to other religious traditions for wisdom and guidance. Many others have turned away from religion entirely. This was true in the 1960s and 1970s, and this sense of spiritual emptiness in much of what passes for liberal Judaism has remained a defining element of contemporary Jewish life into the twenty-first century. Answering this call, Green has dedicated his life to developing an authentic Jewish spirituality that is at once boldly creative and deeply grounded in tradition.

Biography and Career

Arthur Green was born into a secular Jewish family and raised in an eth- nically diverse neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey. Green’s mother died when he was eleven, an event that he would later identify as crucial to his entire biography. His maternal grandparents, who were immigrants from Eastern Europe, lived nearby. As a link to the intensely Jewish, Yiddish- speaking cultural milieu of Europe, they were to have an important influence on him. Despite the objections of his militantly atheistic father, Green attended Hebrew school and Camp Ramah, where he developed excellent Hebrew skills and fluency in reading Jewish texts. He became attracted to religion in early adolescence and increasingly took on a strict level of ritual ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE 3 observance. This often put him into conflict at home, leading to considerable anxiety. At the age of sixteen Green left for Brandeis University, where he was free to live the rigorous Jewish practice he had adopted. By the second year of his undergraduate education, however, he had largely abandoned it. Green felt that his strict religiosity had been a form of compulsive behavior, an attempt to replace his tragic loss rather than an honest quest for God. The façade of observance was also challenged when he began studying religion in an academic setting and reading the classics of modern philosophy, especially the existentialists, as well as psychology and literature. In these years he was particularly influenced by the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Erich Fromm, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hermann Hesse, and Nikos Kazantzakis, all of whom had an impact on his later theology. Nietzsche’s description of the collapse of traditional religious authority resonated with the breakdown in Green’s own attachment to orthodoxy, the liberation from which he experienced as itself a religious event, one worthy of celebration. The challenge of finding a source of truth and moral authority in the post-Nietzschean world took him to the existentialists, particularly Sartre and Camus. In their writings, a world without God led, after that first moment of liberating exultation, to a confrontation with emptiness and absurdity, the landscape he also came to know so well also in the pages of Kafka, in whose work he became quite immersed. But Camus in particular, reinforced by Kazantzakis, called for the seeker to seize the day and actively create a meaning beyond absurdity within the realm of human action. Only this could redeem from the bleakness of a world without the God who had once provided that meaning. Understanding that his quest was still a religious one, and continuing to think within a Jewish context, Green took this as a challenge to redraw the face of God in a place where all the old images had failed him, and ultimately to rebuild human community around that new approach to Judaism. But in doing so, he came to understand that he was inevitably—and rather happily—drawing on the wellsprings of the past, ultimately becoming more reinterpreter than revolutionary. Here Brandeis scholar Simon Rawidowicz’s article on Jewish hermeneutics played a crucial role in Green’s development, because it described the ongoing strength of Judaism as lying in its power to constantly and freely reinterpret ancient text and tradition.2 Rawidowicz believed that the Jewish

2 Simon Rawidowicz, “On Interpretation,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 26 (1957): 83–126. 4 ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE interpretive project had essentially ended with Spinoza and his insistence on a rational and scientific reading of the Bible. But over the next several decades, Green became increasingly aware of the fact that he was living in a time of great spiritual and intellectual rebirth. He saw this renewal and rediscovery of meaning as a regeneration of the midrashic paradigm, and a continuation of what the Hasidic masters had done for themselves at the end of the eighteenth century. If Spinoza and Mendelssohn had been the founders of Jewish modernity, Green would seek in Hasidic teachings the foundations of a Jewish postmodernity. Brandeis was home to a number of remarkable middle European scholars cast out by the Nazis in the years preceding the Holocaust, including Nahum Glatzer and Alexander Altmann. Glatzer, a close disciple of Franz Rosenzweig, introduced Green to both Rosenzweig and Martin Buber. Rosenzweig’s “new thinking” and the intellectual atmosphere of the Frankfurt Lehrhaus, in which Glatzer had played a central role, were formative for Green. These scholars gave Green an excellent education in the humanities, especially literature and religion, in addition to his training in Judaic studies. Their new ideas challenged the depth of his adolescent conceptions of religion. Under Altmann’s tutelage, he began reading academic studies in religion, including works by Carl Gustav Jung, Erich Neumann, Rudolph Otto, and Mircea Eliade. In these years Green also drank deeply of the counter-cultural ethos of the 1960s: the exhilarating quest for personal inner freedom and new awareness of the need for deep societal transformation. Already the product of a liberal upbringing, Green’s social and political views became somewhat more radicalized in the era of Civil Rights and the Vietnam War. But thanks to Professor Altmann, at Brandeis University Green also encountered the study of Jewish mysticism in a serious way. He began reading the Hasidic masters and the Zohar, and he quickly fell in love with this literature. An essay by the Polish-Jewish writer Hillel Zeitlin, a prewar neo-Hasidic thinker of great profundity, had a decisive influence on Green’s decision to devote his life to these teachings.3 In these years he also met Zalman Schachter, a charismatic young Chabad Hasid who would later become the founder of the Jewish Renewal movement and Green’s lifelong friend and mentor. By the end of college Green had recommitted himself

3 Some fifty years later Green published an English collection of Zeitlin’s essays; see Arthur Green, ed. and trans., Hasidic Spirituality for a New Era: The Religious Writings of Hillel Zeitlin, prayers intr. and trans. Joel Rosenberg (New York and Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2012). ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE 5 to religious life, but he did so from a very different perspective than in his adolescence. Green had begun his quest to find an authentically Jewish language in which to express his religious yearnings and experiences, without readopting strict ritual observance or dualistic conceptions of a personified (and, in his experience, ultimately punishing) God. Green’s encounter with Jewish mysticism inspired him to pursue a doctorate in Kabbalah and Hasidism. This career would allow him to spend his life immersed in these texts, examining them from both historical and phenomenological perspectives. Green spent a year in Jerusalem, where he honed his philological-historical skills by studying Jewish mysticism with Gershom Scholem and Rivka Schatz-Uffenheimer. In 1962 he decided to attend the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) in New York in order to gain the further text skills necessary for his scholarly project. The intellectual environment was intense, and Green shared many important discussions with fellow students at JTS. However, his experience there was largely unhappy. He found himself confronted by a Jewish discourse in which Talmud and Jewish law were vaunted above any personal spiritual quest, and where scholarly cynicism had, for many, replaced any real search for faith. Green recalls that he metaphorically walked the halls of JTS with a copy of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” in one pocket, and Kedushat Levi (an important early Hasidic book) in the other—both of which were equally unwelcome at the Seminary. Seeing Green’s unhappiness, the administration arranged for him to have a private course of study with Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972), who became his mentor for the next four years. Green had read Heschel’s works of theology in his adolescence and had been deeply moved, but in his college years he had dismissed Heschel as somewhat naïve and overly pietis- tic. Now he had a new appreciation of the profundity of Heschel’s reading of Judaism. Green came to see Heschel’s project of “Depth Theology” as an approach that allowed for multiple levels of truth, appealing to the mythic sense (a term Heschel eschewed) and the imagination more than the rational mind.4 Their relationship was never simple, and Green later reflected that he refused to become Heschel’s hasid—his unwavering disciple.5 But in these

4 This anticipates Green’s interest in R. Nahman of Bratslav, whose theology and especially his tales demonstrate that his mind could penetrate into the fertile realm in which myths are created. 5 “A Conversation with Arthur Green,” interview by William Novak, Kerem: Creative Explorations in Judaism (Spring 1995): 40. 6 ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE years he deepened his knowledge of Hasidic texts and Kabbalah, learning from one of the foremost experts in the field. Heschel also became Green’s role model of a scholar who was an academic, but also a public intellectual, communal activist, and a deeply religious person engaged reading the classical sources to create a Jewish theology for the twentieth century. During his years at JTS, he already became a mentor to a group of fellow rabbinical students, teaching a class in Hasidic sources in the Seminary chapel. In 1967 Green returned to Boston to begin a doctorate at Brandeis under the tutelage of Alexander Altmann. In 1968 he married fellow-seeker Kathy Held, to whom he had been introduced by Zalman Schachter. They lived first in Cambridge, then in Somerville, where Green became the founder of Ḥavurat Shalom. The ḥavurah was a new type of Jewish intentional community and institute for learning and prayer. Green was not alone in feeling alienated by the hyper-institutionalization and formality of American synagogue life that reached its peak in the 1950s. The seekers who joined in forming the ḥavurah in its early years, many of whom later became well- known Jewish scholars and communal leaders, longed to create a new and participatory style of Jewish experience that would be meaningful for the individual in the context of an intense sense of fellowship. Green sometimes characterized it as “a shtibl (an informal prayer-room) for non-Ortho- dox Jews,” where they might find the same sort of intimacy and authentic community as was present in the world of Hasidism, at least as seen through the eyes of their well-thumbed copies of works by Martin Buber. They were deeply committed to Torah study and willing to experiment with forms of Jewish practice, but always with a personal spiritual focus and an eye toward societal change. Ḥavurat Shalom inspired many other such efforts across the United States.6 Something needs to be said here about both the intellectual and the devotional/spiritual world of Ḥavurat Shalom in its early years. The five years Green spent in the ḥavurah, as its founder and sometime leader (problematically so in a self-defined democratic and egalitarian community) were transformative for him, setting the tone for much of his ensuing life and career.

6 Riv-Ellen Prell, Prayer and Community: The Ḥavurah in American Judaism (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989); Chava Weissler, “Worship in the Havura Movement,” in The Life of Judaism, ed. Harvey E. Goldberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001): 79–91; Joseph Reimer, “The ‘Ḥavurah’ as a Context for Adult Jewish Education,” in The Uses of Tradition, ed. Jack Wertheimer (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1992), 393–410. ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE 7

Because Ḥavurat Shalom originally defined itself as both alternative Jewish community and seminary (the fact that it offered “divinity student” draft deferments in the Vietnam War era was not incidental to its initial success in recruiting members), an intensive course of study was central from the beginning. Green taught alongside his fellow Brandeis graduate student Michael Fishbane, rabbis Everett Gendler and Joseph Lukinsky, Reb Zalman, who visited during that first year, and several other friends who had recently been ordained at JTS. Although all but Zalman had been trained in institutions that viewed Jewish texts through a historical-critical lens, they shared a critique of that view and were collectively in search of an alternative way of reading and teaching the sources. The two models toward which they naturally turned were those of Hasidism and religious existentialism. Green, teaching courses primarily on kabbalistic and Hasidic sources, saw the creative midrash that was alive in the Hasidic imagination as a model for a contemporary revival of the ability to “hear” the divine voice from within the text. He insisted, to be sure, that his students retain the ability to distinguish between peshat and derash in reading both the mystical sources and the biblical passages on which they were expounding. In this he remained loyal to the academic training he had received from Altmann and others. But he understood that the living kernel of religious life was to be found in a reopening of the derash process. This was evident within the range of what was considered permissible in the ḥavurah classroom, but was even more present in Shabbat morning “Torah discussions,” replacing the sermon slot in the group’s main weekly service and sometimes lasting nearly an hour. The “existential” aspect of this approach was derived partly from Martin Buber, especially through his rereading of Hasidism, but mostly from the memory of Franz Rosenzweig’s “new thinking” and his Freies Juedisches Lehrhaus in Frankfurt, conveyed to Green but especially to Fishbane by their teacher Nahum Glatzer.7 Already in the 1920s, Rosenzweig had sensed the spiritual dryness of the historical/critical approach to the Hebrew Bible and had insisted in a different approach in the Lehrhaus classroom. This fed directly into the rediscovery of the old/new sacred voice that he and Buber were to seek in their German/Jewish translation of the Bible, beginning in those same years (later rendered into English by ḥavurah member and Fishbane student Everett Fox). Schachter, Gendler, Edward Feld, and other

7 See the enlightening discussion of this same chain of tradition in Sam Berrin Shonkoff’s introduction to the volume on Michael Fishbane in this series. 8 ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE teachers were very sympathetic to this sense of post-critical reading that was emerging in the ḥavurah. So too were some of the more intellectually sophisticated and self-aware students in the group (including Barry Holtz, Joseph Reimer, Michael Brooks, James Kugel, David Roskies, Lawrence Fine, George Savran, and others). The prayer life of the ḥavurah was marked by a combination of creativity and spiritual intensity that paralleled this approach to study. Friday evening and Shabbat morning services included long, drawn-out singing of soulful wordless niggunim, interjected semi-spontaneous interpretations of the traditional Hebrew liturgy (recited in the Sephardic version, a statement of the group’s neo-Hasidic leaning), chanted davening in English, learned from Zalman, and a variety of inserted poetic readings and listen- ings to both classical and contemporary music. Zalman modeled to the group a passionate yet sometimes playful mode of prayer leadership, one well learned and integrated by several of the younger haverim. Green found himself deeply moved by prayer in this context, and especially by the frequent shared silences that were a part of the group’s spiritual rhythms. In 1969, he and several others ḥavurah members, including Kathy, began to experiment with a daily morning meditation period in the Ḥavurat Shalom prayer room. This was Green’s first regular exposure to meditation, another aspect of spiritual life that remained important to him. In general, the sense of religion as expressing both the rich inner life of the individual and the power of intimate community was an essential legacy of the ḥavurah years to Green’s future development, carried forth especially into his work in training and teaching rabbis. Green left Boston when he was offered a position at the University of Pennsylvania in 1973, where he taught in the Department of Religious Studies for the next eleven years. Green enjoyed the opportunity to train his first group of graduate students, but he had a decidedly mixed experience at the university. Most of the undergraduates he taught were in pre- professional tracks of study, and this large professionally oriented school was a shock after his rich education in the humanities at Brandeis, his studies with Heschel at JTS, and the intense devotional community of Ḥavurat Shalom. Green felt that the Department of Religious Studies in which he was located saw little value in his theological writings or communal activ- ism, interests which were actively disparaged by some of the senior faculty. But he gained from exposure to the methodology of comparative religion and teachings of other traditions, engaging also in various interfaith sym- posia and conversations. ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE 9

One of Green’s neighbors in Philadelphia came to be friend and mentor Zalman Schachter, who had also been in Boston for the first year of the ḥavurah and now became professor at Temple University. Schachter embarked on founding a new Jewish religious community called B’nai Or (“Children of Light”), which was deeply influenced by the spirit of the “Age of Aquarius” and New Age religion.8 While earlier iterations of Schachter’s vision—more influenced by a combination of Hasidism and Christian monasticism—had once attracted both Green and his wife, they did not join Schachter in this new project. Green felt that it was too casually syn- cretistic, incorporating language and practices from other faith traditions, and too little demanding of Jewish depth and knowledge. The trajectories of Schachter and Green’s lives had them at different places. Schachter was in the heady days of escaping the confines of Chabad’s disciplined and restrictive framework. Green was in the mode of reexamining and (gradually) re-embracing tradition, for the second time coming at it from the outside. While both had been influenced by countercultural spirituality, and especially by an encounter with psychedelic drugs, Schachter’s embrace of Aquarian religion and its vaunted New Age optimism remained a point of difference between them. Green left the University of Pennsylvania in 1984 to join the Recon structionist Rabbinical College (RRC), serving first as dean and then as president. Green had never previously seen himself as a Reconstructionist, although his theology shares a number of important ideas in common the thought of founder Mordecai M. Kaplan. These include his understanding of Judaism as a full civilization, the embrace of religious humanism, commitment to renewal, a theology that moved beyond a personal God, and a deep respect for tradition without feeling bound to it. Indeed, Green’s was a voice for tradition at the RRC, and there was some conflict both with more classical Reconstructionists and with female students who declared themselves neo-pagans. Though Green continued to publish scholarly works, being outside of a strictly academic setting encouraged him to devote more time to writing about Jewish spirituality. At RRC Green came into his own as a theologian, and during these years he published a series of influential articles in The Reconstructionist and elsewhere. These efforts culminated

8 See Zalman Schachter, “Toward an Order of Bnai Or,” Judaism 13, no. 2 (1964): 185–97. See also Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Fragments of a Future Scroll: Hassidism for the Aquarian Age, ed. Philip Mandelkorn and Stephen Gerstman (Germantown, PA: Leaves of Grass Press, 1975); and Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Paradigm Shift: From the Jewish Renewal Teachings of Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1993). 10 ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE in his first book of Jewish theology, published in 1992, based on a series of lectures first delivered at a Reconstructionist congregation in New York.9 Green returned to Brandeis in 1994 when offered the Philip W. Lown Chair in Jewish Studies, once held by his teacher Alexander Altmann. He continued to train graduate students and published a number of important studies of Jewish mysticism, devoting time to writing theology as well. But Green left this position after a decade. He was still seeking something that could not be afforded by a purely academic environment, and in 2004 he founded a post-denominational rabbinical school at Hebrew College in Boston. There he has been a professor, dean, and now rector, over the past dozen years. Green has maintained his commitment to Jewish scholarship as well as theological writing, and has continued to publish books and articles. At the age of 74 he is still teaching full time, engaged in administra- tive duties, and working on a number of significant publications. He is also an actively engaged caregiver for his wife, who is afflicted with a chronic illness. His daughter, son-in-law, and two grandchildren live nearby.

Literary Works

Arthur Green’s written works may be roughly divided into three categories: academic studies, contemporary theology, and communal affairs. While Green’s greatest originality lies in the realm of theology, he has made significant contributions in all of these areas. Furthermore, one must examine all of Green’s writings in order to understand the totality of his project. The boundaries between them are less than rigid, and Green’s works sometimes deliberately blend scholarship and theology. Their intended audience includes both the scholarly and broader intellectual community. He often presents his work as intended to form a bridge between these.

Academic Studies Green was trained in the classical methods of intellectual history, and his studies of Jewish mysticism draw heavily upon historical context and the complex inner textual and interpretive trajectories of terms and ideas that constitute the fabric of Judaic sources. Jewish tradition is a multilayered one, and the Hasidic writings in which Green has specialized reflect both

9 Arthur Green, Seek My Face, Speak My Name: A Contemporary Jewish Theology (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1992). ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE 11 deep knowledge and a spirit of highly free and sometimes playful reinterpretation of sacred texts. His academic work is best characterized as the history of language and ideas, and several of his important diachronic studies trace the ways in which kabbalistic ideas and symbols have evolved from the rabbinic time onward.10 Green is well aware that vectors of historical influence often move across cultural borders, and he has demonstrated how different religious communities have influenced one another in both subtle and explicit ways. Despite his commitment to intellectual history, Green is also wary of an exclusively reductionist approach that fragments texts into footnotes and excessive references to earlier sources.11 His studies of Jewish mysticism also employ the tools of phenomenology, including the critical and cross- cultural subjective religious experience.12 This allows him to explore the conceptual and theological similarities between texts written in different times and places, while recognizing the uniqueness of each text and thinker, including those writing “late” in the history of Judaism’s highly developed literary tradition. Throughout his career Green has reiterated his belief that the texts as we have them reflect embodied mystical experiences.13 Jewish mystics rarely write in a self-revelatory or confessional manner, and they have produced relatively few autobiographical testimonies. But Green insists that when the writings of mystical illuminati are read carefully, a subtle experiential element begins to emerge from their words; this is true of both complicated theosophical tracts and the relatively accessible Hasidic texts. The “reality” of these experiences may indeed be that of fantasy or imagination, but they need to be treated as legitimate creations of the religious mind. Evaluation of mystical literature reveals that no clean lines may be drawn between fantasy, revelation, and religious experience.

10 See, for example, Arthur Green, Keter: The Crown of God in Early Jewish Mysticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Arthur Green, “Shekhinah, the Virgin Mary, and the Song of Songs: Reflections on a Kabbalistic Symbol in its Historical Context,” AJS Review 26, no. 1 (2002): 1–52. 11 Regarding this approach to the study of Hasidism, Green writes: “In Hebrew I have a term for such reductionism: yesh-kevar-etsel-ism, a rush to find early parallels as a substitute for interpretation.” Arthur Green, “Early Hasidism: Some Old/New Questions,” in Hasidism Reappraised, ed. Ada Rapoport-Albert (London and Portland, OR: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1997), 444. 12 Keter: The Crown of God is another example of a study that combines philology, history, and phenomenology. 13 See the opening remarks to Arthur Green, “Hillel Zeitlin and neo-Hasidic Readings of the Zohar,” Kabbalah 22 (2010): 59–78. 12 ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE

Green believes that mysticism begins with the overwhelming experience of something incredible, profound, and essentially ineffable, which the mystic then seeks to articulate, however inadequately, by means of words. This understanding puts him in the company of the perennialist philosophers, stemming from William James but including Aldous Huxley, Frijtof Schuon, and Wilfred Cantwell Smith, who believed that all mystical experiences share an ineffable core. But Green avoids their tendency to over- simplify and universalize, and underscores that mystical texts of diverse traditions, while reflecting parallel experiences, must be read with attention to nuances in their respective languages. The core experiences that animate Jewish mysticism have much in common with those described by devotional texts of other religious traditions, but the accounts of these experiences in mystical works (which are all the scholar has before him) are distinguished from one another in both cultural context and typology of experience. They are not all reducible to a single notion of “mysticism.”14 Green’s first major academic contribution was a biography of R. Nahman of Bratslav.15 This landmark study, based on his doctoral dissertation, was the first scholarly monograph to examine the life and teachings of an early Hasidic master in a holistic manner. Green gives special attention to psychological aspects of R. Nahman’s spiritual journey, and interprets R. Nahman’s writings as anticipating many of the lessons of modern existentialism. In the appendix “Faith, Doubt and Reason,” he explored this Hasidic master’s relationship with uncertainty. Though written purely as a work of well- documented historical scholarship, to some degree this provocative chapter also reflects Green’s own experience in the struggle with faith and theological uncertainty.16 Since then Green has published a number of interesting

14 This places him at a carefully-poised midpoint, if you will, between the perennialists and radically anti-perennialist thinkers like Steven T. Katz. Green is attracted to Jungian- influenced interpretations of religious phenomena, but kept within a properly conceived and distinctive historical framework. Scholem’s various contributions to the Eranos volumes were important models in his own development, though he is certainly more open to discussion of the experiences underlying the sources than was Scholem. In this respect Green’s approach has parallels to the work of Moshe Idel and his use of cross- traditional typologies. Green, as a theologian, is more attracted to and revealing of personal dimensions of his relationship to the sources than is Idel. See Arthur Green, “Judaism and Mysticism,” in Take Judaism, for Example: Studies Toward the Comparison of Religions, ed. Jacob Neusner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 67–91. On Idel’s approach to the phenomenology and study of Jewish mysticism, see the volume dedicated to his work in this series. 15 Arthur Green, Tormented Master: A Life of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1979). 16 More will be said about this below. ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE 13 and important articles exploring the typologies of Hasidic leadership and the phenomenology of Hasidic spirituality.17 He has also written studies of both Heschel and Zeitlin, in which he discusses their relationship to the Jewish mystical tradition and explores their neo-Hasidic project of reinterpreting rabbinic and mystical sources for contemporary readers.18 While at RRC Green edited a two-volume collection of studies called Jewish Spirituality (Crossroad, 1986–1987). Gathering these articles proved to be a difficult task, since some would-be contributors denied the very existence of “Jewish spirituality.” For these critics, the term “spirituality” is one that is awkwardly imported from other religions, particularly Christianity. The studies brought together in these volumes dispel that notion, offering a very different perspective of Judaism. Green gives the following reflection on his understanding of Jewish spirituality: Life in the presence of God—or the cultivation of a life in the ordinary world bearing the holiness once associated with sacred space and time, with Tem- ple and with holy days—is perhaps as close as one can come to a definition of “spirituality” that is native to the Jewish tradition and indeed faithful to its Semitic roots.19 Spirituality, as Green understands it, includes but is not limited to the type of religious life and experience called “mysticism.” It embraces the life of piety of the prophet, the philosopher, and the halakhist as well as the mystic. It is the innate desire of the human heart to live in the divine presence, whether in the sacred or the mundane realm. The studies assembled in these two volumes demonstrate that spirituality thus defined has been an integral part of Jewish theology and religious life since biblical Antiquity and into contemporary times. There is place within the realm of Jewish spirituality for the Reform prophet-inspired social activist alongside the modern Orthodox devotee of Joseph B. Soleveitchik’s Halakhic Man, together with Zeitlin, Heschel, and the Hasidic masters themselves. All of

17 Arthur Green, “The Zaddiq as Axis Mundi in Later Judaism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 45, no. 3 (1977): 327–47; Arthur Green, “Typologies of Leadership in Early Hasidism, in Jewish Spirituality, Vol. II: From the Sixteenth-Century Revival to the Present, ed. Arthur Green (New York: Crossroad Books, 1987), 127–56; Arthur Green, “Around the Maggid’s Table: Tsaddik, Leadership and Popularization in the Circle of Dov Baer of Miedzyrzec.” Zion 88, no. 1 (2013): 73–106 (Hebrew); and the English version in Arthur Green, The Heart of the Matter: Studies in Jewish Mysticism and Theology (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2015), 119–66. 18 Arthur Green, “Abraham Joshua Heschel: Recasting Hasidism for Moderns,” Modern Judaism 29, no. 1 (2009): 62–79; Arthur Green, “Hillel Zeitlin and Neo-Hasidic Readings of the Zohar,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 22 (2010): 59–78. 19 Arthur Green, ed., Jewish Spirituality, vol. 1 (New York: Crossroad, 1986), xiii. 14 ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE them are seeking a Judaism devoted to the cultivation and embodiment of divine presence in the human heart as a force for the transformation of the outer world. Through this and other more popular writings, Green has had a major role in legitimizing both the word “spirituality” and the complex of notions and attitudes embraced by it within the Jewish community.20 In the introduction to Jewish Spirituality Green also first undertakes his ongoing project of describing and understanding the symbolic language of Kabbalah. One element that has united Jewish mystics across the centuries is a shared commitment to the rich matrix of associations and symbols inspired by biblical verses and rabbinic teachings, expanded and reinterpreted over the centuries. The sefirot (sing., sefirah), a series of ten emanations that bridges between the abstract, unknowable Deity and the immanent presence in this world, are the heart of this language. But when seen functionally rather than metaphysically, they have also become the anchors to which the vast array of symbols adheres. Green understands this symbolic language to be one of the defining elements of Jewish mysticism, and it is a subject treated with great subtlety in his studies.21 Green authored a major study of the evolution of the symbols associated with the first of the ten sefirot in his Keter: The Crown of God in Early Judaism, where he traced the motif of divine coronation back to its early sources.22 Another study, “Shekhinah, the Virgin Mary, and the Song of Songs” deals with the tenth sefirah, malkhut or shekhinah, and the feminine symbols associated with it, emerging in the setting of medieval Christendom.23 Green has also published several volumes of Hasidic texts in English translation. The first of these was a small compendium of teachings on the art of prayer, translated together with his friend Barry Holtz.24 This was followed some years later by selected translations from two of the great classics of Hasidic literature: R. Menahem Nahum of Chernobyl’s Me’or

20 For example, see Arthur Green, “Restoring the Aleph: Judaism for the Contemporary Seeker,” CIJE Lecture Series (New York: Council for Initiatives in Jewish Education, 1996). 21 See Arthur Green, A Guide to the Zohar (Stanford University Press, 2004). This understanding of the sefirot was first developed in his “The Zohar: Jewish Mysticism in Medieval Spain,” in An Introduction to the Medieval Mystics of Europe, ed. Paul Szarmach (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), 97–134; and a popularized version of this is found in Arthur Green, Ehyeh: A Kabbalah for Tomorrow (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2003), 39–60. A comparison of Green’s description of the sefirot in A Guide to the Zohar and Ehyeh will offer an interesting window on the relationship between his scholarly and theological writings. 22 Green, Keter: The Crown of God. 23 Green, “Shekhinah, the Virgin Mary, and the Song of Songs.” 24 Arthur Green and Barry W. Holtz, Your Word Is Fire: The Hasidic Masters on Con templative Prayer (New York: Schocken Books, 1977). ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE 15

‘Eynayim,25 and R. Judah Leib Alter’s Sefat Emet.26 Most recently he edited a two-volume collection of early Hasidic texts entitled Speaking Torah: Spiritual Teachings from around the Maggid’s Table (Jewish Lights, 2013), together with three of his closest students. Green’s efforts as a translator reflect his larger project to make the sources of the mystical tradition accessible and relevant to the modern English readership; this element was inspired by the works of his teacher Nahum Glatzer in particular. The target audience is primarily Jewish, but by no means exclusively so. Indeed, Green’s first two books of translations were published by the Paulist Press, a Catholic publishing house interested in devotional literature and spiritual texts at a time in which no Jewish publishers were printing such works.27

Contemporary Theology Green’s theology may rightly be described as a mystical and monistic panentheism. He is committed to many elements of traditional religious language, but he is ultimately a monist, understanding the Jewish faith in one God as pointing beyond itself toward the ultimate oneness of all being. His ideas are deeply informed by the teachings and symbolic world of Jewish mysticism, which he reads intensively but selectively.28 As a neo- Hasidic thinker, he is attracted to the philosophical underpinnings and spiritual psychology of Hasidism as well as the mythic structures and language of Kabbalah. Green’s project builds upon the work of Martin Buber, Hillel Zeitlin, and Abraham Joshua Heschel, who creatively reinterpreted the legacy of the Hasidic masters in order to share them with modern Jews. As we shall see, Green is decidedly not a rationalist theologian; he has little interest in adducing arguments and proving logical theorems. He has come to understand that religious argumentation is spiritually arid and ultimately unconvincing; it is the soul that must be exposed to religious

25 Arthur Green, ed. and trans., Upright Practices and the Light of the Eyes (New York: Paulist Press, 1982). That volume contained only the homilies on Genesis. He is now at work on a complete translation of that text. 26 Arthur Green, ed. and trans., Language of Truth: The Torah Commentary of the Sefat Emet (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1998). 27 See his foreword to Ariel Evan Mayse, From the Depth of the Well: An Anthology of Jewish Mysticism (New York: Paulist Press, 2014). In recent years many of Green’s works have either been originally published or reprinted by Stuart Matlins’s Jewish Lights, a press entirely devoted to the dissemination of Jewish spiritual and devotional literature. 28 Specifically, one might say that he is a devotee of the Zohar (but not the Idrot), R. Meir Ibn Gabbai and R. Moshe Cordovero (but not Luria and the whole Lurianic school), the SHeLaH, the school of the Maggid of Mezritch (especially the Me’or ‘Eynayim, and R. Aaron of Starosselye), R. Nahman of Bratslav, and the Sefat Emet. 16 ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE truth, not the mind. By this he means to say that the power of religious language lies in addressing a level of human consciousness other than that of logical argumentation, a current that runs deeper not only in its emotional appeal but in its ability to call forth truly binding human commitment, engaging both individuals and communities. The discourse of argumentation that characterizes much of philosophical writing, both medieval and modern, ultimately falls flat. He accepts that the spiritual seeker cannot prove anything, but may indeed bear witness to the Divine through the testimony of his life and religious quest. In this sense Heschel, both in his distinction between theology and depth-theology and in his personal witness, remains crucial for Green, even though he departs from his teacher in some other important ways. Green insists on the distinction (partly learned from Paul Tillich) between emunah as the life-commitment to faith demanded by R. Nahman of Bratslav and the dogmatic assertion to verities characterized by the same term in Maimonides’ Thirteen Articles of Faith. Green’s theology is deeply influenced by the ideas of religious existentialism, humanism, and studies in myth and symbol from the realm of comparative religion. He does not long for a nostalgic return to the shtetl of Eastern Europe (whether real or imagined), and throughout his writings Green reiterates that the modern reader and theologian must be critical of certain elements of the Jewish mystical tradition, including both the grand claims of Kabbalah regarding metaphysical truth, and the wonder stories of miracle-working Hasidic masters.29 Kabbalah may not be “true” on the discursive level, but its poetry and profundity speak to Green and lead him beyond where the existentialists would allow him to go. From existentialism Green has inherited the notion that ours is an age in which grand systems of truth, whether kabbalistic, Hegelian, Marxist, or Freudian, have failed us. He frequently uses the rabbinic rubric of “Both whole and broken tablets were placed in the ark,”30 claiming that ours is an age of broken tablets, when truth can be derived only from fragmentary sources that we struggle to piece together, each in unique fashion. Both the inspiration and essential linguistic/symbolic building-blocks of a modern Jewish spiritual theology for this very different age can in this way be drawn forth from the noblest and most insightful elements of the Jewish mystical tradition. But existentialism proved inadequate because Green is in search of the unitive and the mysterious, and perhaps even the transcendent, though not

29 For example, see Green, Ehyeh, 16–18, 92. 30 b. Bava Batra 14b. ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE 17 in the usually understood sense of a transcendent deity. The existentialist focus on the here and now and the utter insistence on the denial of meta- physics were too limiting for Green. He was so inspired by Zeitlin’s writings precisely because they hinted at a veiled metaphysical truth that could not be proven but that was so rich in its symbolic expressions that he found himself drawn to it. The fact that it was presented in poetic imagery that always stayed short of firm ontological claim gave it a special palatability. Green’s earliest published works of theology are a pair of short essays written in 1968 and 1971.31 These highly provocative articles are clearly influenced by the ethos of the 1960s youth culture, but they already contain many of the core themes of his theological project spelled out over the next forty years. These two essays are a call for radical liberation from older forms of religious thought and practice. Green draws upon the language and theology of Jewish mysticism, combining it with the empowerment and freedom of modern writers like Nietzsche and Kazantzakis. He argues that while some Jewish rituals may indeed still be meaningful, a vibrant Jewish life will depend on a radical and bold reimagining of both Jewish theology and praxis. The first of these essays, “Notes From the Jewish Underground: Psyche delics and Kabbalah,” was published under the pseudonym Itzik Lodzer.32 Green explores the ways in which psychedelic drugs can offer the religious person a different perspective on the world. Careful use of such substances may help to release a person from his ego and ordinary consciousness, thus opening the possibility of seeing the world “with God’s eyes.” Green writes that, with their aid, “one can catch a glimpse of what the Kabbalists must have experienced as Eyn Sof: expanded consciousness seems to have no limit, except of the degree of intensity that the mind can stand.”33 But he reminds the reader that drugs cannot truly provide inspiration; they only have the power to confirm experientially descriptions of mystical insights widely found in the teachings of prior generations. Here we first see Green as revolutionary turned reinterpreter. In this essay we also find Green already reflecting upon the relationship of the infinite Divine and the world

31 These essays, “Notes From the Jewish Underground: Psychedelics and Kabbalah” and “After Itzik: Toward a Theology of Jewish Spirituality,” were republished in The New Jews, ed. James Sleeper and Alan Mintz (New York: Vintage Books, 1971), 176–92 and 193–203. All citations refer to this version. 32 The great-grandfather for whom Green was named was called Avraham-Itzik and he lived for some years in Lodz. The editor of the new journal Response, which first published the essay, was wary about publishing an article that endorsed using illegal substances. 33 “Psychedelics and Kabbalah,” 184. 18 ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE of the sefirot, the progressively self-limiting expressions of that ineffable One. The possibility that human experience can replay and embody this process lies at the heart of the mystical devotional life and the seeker- friendly Judaism that Green has sought to articulate throughout his later theological writings. Green wrote a somewhat more conservative response to “Itzik Lodzer” a few years later, this time publishing it under his own name. In this second essay he describes the feeling of living in two worlds at once, locked in an eternal struggle with God but at the same time trying to hide within the relative safety of academic scholarship. The young Green is drawn to the Divine, but he is tempted to flee from the intensity of this encounter, and certainly from the restrictions of classical Jewish observance. He speaks of a transition away from a spiritual life defined by rigid constancy, toward a path in which the ebb and flow of divine presence is seen as the creative rhythm of movement between worlds. Here we already see Green defining Israel as those who struggle with God, an important claim found in his later works as well. The closing footnote holds many of the theological goals that Green sets out for himself: Desideratum: A Judaism that allows, even accentuates, its mystical self- understanding, while at the same time radically denying the Hellenistic/ Gnostic body-soul and matter-spirit dualisms which have so deeply infected us. Handle carefully and avoid Frankism.34 Green seeks to create an empowered Jewish life infused with the teachings of mysticism, but one that will draw upon the kabbalistic tradition selectively. The older models of self and cosmology inherited from Neoplatonism and Gnosticism create psychological rifts, leading to the rejection (and hence the ultimate disenchantment and secularization) of the natural world and the physical self. Green longs for the integration and healing found in a more world- and body-embracing spiritual path. He has seen aspects of Eastern spirituality (at least as presented for Westerners!) that are more holistic in their fusion of soul and body. But Green also knows very well that embracing the physical world could lead to the hedonistic religious anarchy typified by the eighteenth-century Frankist movement. There are dangers, to be sure, but the goals are too important to be abandoned. The mature Green has reflected upon these writings, and though he expresses

34 Green, “Toward a Theology of Jewish Spirituality,” 203. ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE 19 some trepidation at their naïve radicalism and overblown language, he affirms the importance of those experiences and writings as holding much of what would come later. Green’s greatest contribution to contemporary Jewish theology is his three-part series, written over the course of several decades. He offers his understanding of what it means to write a contemporary spiritual language in the introduction to the very first these books, Seek My Face, Speak My Name: A Contemporary Jewish Theology (1992):35 Theology is also an attempt to articulate that intangible we call ‘religious experience.’ It seeks to use the best of human thinking and the deep reser- voir of religious symbols to create a framework within which we can understand this vital and currently much-neglected aspect of human life. Religious experience is the starting place of all theology, the most basic datum with which the theologian has to work.36 In other words, theology is drawn forth from combining the water of two wells, those of ancient symbolism and personal religious experience. Each enriches and lends meaning to the other, without which it could not be sustained or would be of little value. Green is aware of the complex relationship between the inner life of one nourished by the language and symbols of a particular tradition, and the “choice” of that language as a way of expressing such experiences. The shaping and influence proceeds in both directions: from the tradition to the individual mystic or thinker, and from the individual, through writing and teaching, back to the ever-enriched tradition to be passed forward. Green has charted the evolution and development of Jewish mysticism’s symbolic language in his historical and phenomenological studies, but in his theological writings he creatively expands and reimagines this spiritual vocabulary. To some degree he incorporates the findings of history and science, but Green also seeks to move the theological conversation beyond their limits. He has no interest in reconciling the accounts of Creation given in Genesis and those offered by science. They are two different perspectives, one ancient and mythic and the other scientific and contemporary, ever changing. But at times the two paradigms coexist in Green in an uneasy way, which will be discussed at greater length below.

35 Revised and republished as Seek My Face: A Jewish Mystical Theology (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2003). All citations refer to this version. 36 Ibid., xix. 20 ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE

This trilogy is highly confessional and personal in nature; all three works are self-consciously written in an accessible style. These books are part of a single project, each offering a different voice and perspective. An important element of Green’s heterodox, seeker friendly Judaism is his rejection of the very idea of dogmatic theology. As he has sometimes remarked, Green “does not believe in believing.” Green writes from the heart of his own religious experience, using the storehouse of traditional teachings and rubrics to give it theological language and then sharing it with others. Seek My Face is poetic and especially personal, welcoming the reader into the depths of his heart and personal religious life in an evocative, almost experiential way. Originally a series of lectures offered at a Reconstructionist congregation in New York, it was an attempt to demonstrate to skeptics how a clear-thinking and intelligent person could find mystical language so attractive. It was prepared for publication, however, in the year following the sudden and shocking death of Rabbi Daniel Kamesar, a student to whom Green had felt particularly close, and that added to its personal and emotionally powerful tone. Green begins Seek My Face with a discussion of God, describing why he no longer finds classical notions of a theistic Deity viable. Green insists that the Divine is beyond all words and images, the indescribable Eyn Sof of the kabbalists. We are the ones who give the faceless One expression as “God” (though he much prefers the Hebrew term Y-H-W-H, around which the book’s four chapters are imaginatively structured) through our theological and religious language; the infinite number of “faces,” or names of the Divine, are those given by us. Of course, these conceptual structures are a type of projection, but this is something Green celebrates. The act of projection, in which we attempt to describe the mysterious and infinite Divine through structures and words, and then reflect upon it, is called theology. Thus we offer to the wordless God the human gift of language, and give to the imageless God the gift of a human face, one to which we can relate in intimacy. This understanding of the theological enterprise is key to what Green means in describing himself as a “religious humanist.” Green then moves on to a discussion of Creation. Building on the Jewish mystical mythology, he writes that Y-H-W-H withdrew some measure of the infinite divine light so that the world might have a place. In this moment the nameless One both gave birth to and was born into the diversity of the physical world. In Hasidic terms, the infinite divine consciousness is also making room for the human other, though this process may be viewed from either direction. This transition from the infinite (but inexpressible) ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE 21 divine unity into dynamic multiplicity37 is mirrored by the process of Revelation. Torah, the ever-flowing font of divine wisdom, was first expressed in language—which by its very nature both limits and reveals— on Mt. Sinai (understood metaphorically, as we shall see). But the capstone in this unfolding sacred drama, the ultimate goal toward which both Creation and Revelation are important steps, is the movement toward redemption. We will examine each of these at greater length in our the- matic discussion below. Ehyeh: A Kabbalah for Tomorrow (2003) is the second entry in the series. In its tone and content, Ehyeh is offered as an answer to the need of Jewish seekers attracted to Eastern religion in its various manifestations. In a very different way, this book is also a reply to certain contemporary groups that claim the mantle of the kabbalistic tradition but totally remove its wisdom from the Jewish historical and devotional context. Green sees great opportunity in the revival of interest in Jewish mysticism in the past several decades. The question, he insists, is how that revival should take place. What elements of the kabbalistic heritage are useful to the contemporary seeker, and how might they be reread in a contemporary context? What elements of that tradition, he also dares to ask, might best be left behind? Ehyeh touches on many of the themes in Seek My Face, but specifically addresses the mystical tradition. Green spends more time showing how mystical themes and theological ideas are tied to the life of concrete Jewish praxis. It even offers a small number of devotional practices and specific exercises, something quite rare in Green’s writings. Both as teacher and theologian, Green generally demurs from prescribing how others should act in the realm of religious practice. The third part in the series, Radical Judaism: Rethinking God and Tradition (2010), is in many ways Green’s most mature theological work. Though the picture he draws is largely consistent with his earlier writings, Radical Judaism has a different tone than either of the previous two books in this series. It was written in a more sophisticated style, though still very much from a personal perspective. Here we find Green struggling with issues of intellectual honesty, wrestling with his identity as a postmodern thinker and a monistic Jewish theologian. This compels him to outline a Jewish theology that is still viable after the two great intellectual defeats of traditional religion in the twentieth century: the triumph of evolutionary biology

37 This is the transition from Eyn Sof to sefirot, which exist only from the perspective of humans. Here we see the influence of Hasidic thought, particularly that of R. Aaron of Starroselye. 22 ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE

(and with it a host of other sciences, including astrophysics and geology, in describing the origin of our planet and the emergence of life upon it) over traditional views of Creation, and the wide acceptance of biblical criticism, with its challenges to the divine and mosaic authorship of the Torah. After a short introduction and an important excursus on Creation and evolution, Green turns to exploring the historical development of Jewish conceptions of God. The Hebrew Bible preserves mythic elements absorbed from the Ancient Near East, which were revived and given new life in the symbolic language of medieval Kabbalah. Green celebrates this rich mythos, and argues that modern Jewish theology must draw upon its vital, even erotic, energy. He then goes on to describe his mystical understanding of Revelation, but devotes even more attention to exploring the nature of Torah. He also tackles the question of “Who are the Jewish people, and what is their role in the world?” Thus Seek My Face and Radical Judaism are together subtly woven around the six core themes of Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption: Creation, Revelation, and Redemption in the former; God, Torah, and Israel, in the latter.38 This mystical trilogy is supplemented by an array of articles published over the past thirty years in Tikkun, The Reconstructionist, and elsewhere; many of these same themes echo throughout these shorter pieces. Green’s goal in all of these works has been to create an authentically Jewish spiritual language for modern religious seekers and to do so in an honest and accessible manner. Another of his books, These Are the Words, fulfills this task for the beginner.39 More than an introduction to Judaism or an effort to improve Jewish literacy, this book offers the spiritual vocabulary necessary for seekers turning or returning to Judaism as a language of personal religious self-expression. The philosophical landscape Green has painted in his public writings over the four decades is relatively stable, but some elements of his thought have changed and evolved. For example, we should note that in Seek My Face, which is subtly infused with a type of mystical devotion, Green mentions submission as an important element in the spiritual life. His later writings, as do his very early essays, vigorously emphasize human agency, freedom, and creativity; submission is noticeably absent from them. Yet it

38 At this time Green is at work on a Hebrew-language adaptation of Radical Judaism. It has changed sufficiently, he claims, that a revised second English edition is soon to follow. 39 Arthur Green, These Are the Words: A Vocabulary of Jewish Spiritual Life (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 1999). ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE 23 has begun to resurface in some of Green’s most recent writings, particularly in his ongoing project of a commentary on the liturgy.40 As noted above, there is a subtle but programmatic point of tension through Green’s works: his creative Jewish reinterpretation of mystical literature on one hand, and his reverence and attachment to the tradition on the other. Green is deeply invested in the symbolic language, conceptual frameworks, and the textual fabric of the Jewish tradition. He may protest, even frankly abhor, certain views found in the traditional sources, but he will not abandon them: Even in bemoaning the role of women in the Torah or in screaming out its wrongness in the murderous prescription for the Canaanites or its refusal to permit full sexual expression of same-gender love, we are finding ourselves and our own voices within Torah. We set our own lives, our own quest, into the ever-renewed framework of ancient Torah.41 While Green fully supports changes in our religious behavior and attitudes (both seminaries he has headed are based on full gender egalitarianism and embrace sanctification of same-sex unions), he insists that we continue in our struggle with difficult parts of our tradition, actively reshaping and reinterpreting texts, but not excising them. Green understands the evocative power of religious language, both as a scholar and a theologian. Understanding religious truth to belong more to the realm of art than that of science, his theology is an attempt to persuade the reader less by logic of argument than by grandeur of vision. Like Heschel, Green cares that ideas be beautiful and appealing to the imagination; that has more than a little to do with the “truth” of religion as he understands it. He sees both the world and the tradition through a mythopoetic lens, lending an aura of profundity to his teaching echoing that of his kabbalistic and Hasidic sources. He also has the rare talent of being able to occasionally break out of that mode of speech, explaining to the reader what he is saying, without entirely breaking the poetic spell. Let us now turn to some of the recurrent themes in Green’s writings.

40 Arthur Green, “Personal Theology,” Reform Jewish Quarterly (Spring 2014): 6–19; and “A neo-Hasidic Life: Credo and Reflections,” in Personal Theology: Essays in Honor of Neil Gillman, ed. William Plevan (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2013). 41 Green, Seek My Face, 159. 24 ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE

God The quest to know the One lies at the heart of Green’s philosophical and spiritual path. He admits to having been attracted to the radical “death of God” theology in the twentieth century, and his works do not affirm a theistic God as classically understood. The cover of Radical Judaism defines him as “neither theist nor atheist.” Green’s personal religious vocabulary includes “God,” but he uses it only with great hesitation. This imprecise term is a hopelessly inadequate way of describing the Divine, and it is heavily laden with baggage of Western theological tradition. He much prefers to use Y-H-W-H, a biblical name of God that the Torah itself derives from the Hebrew root “to be.” Y-H-W-H refers to far more than the usual notion of a supreme Being or even the origin of all creation. Y-H-W-H, Green avers, is Being itself, past, present, and future united in one, the infinite and ineffable One that is the essential unity behind the mask of the world’s multiplicity. Divine unity refers not only to the conception of one God, but rather to the affirmation that all existence is One. All apparently multifarious reality is a levush (“garment”), a term used by Green (as by the Hasidic sources he reads) with great frequency. Y-H-W-H dwells within the human heart and within all existence as well. Every extant form is one of the infinite expressions of Y-H-W-H, one of the endless “faces” of the Divine. Here we must distinguish Green’s theology of panentheism from pantheism, or the belief that God is the sum of all reality; divinity and the world, universe, or cosmos, are identical. In Green’s mystical panentheism, Y-H-W-H is the totality of being and yet infinitely more as well. The Divine infuses the world and is expressed through the cosmos, but nothing—not even the name Y-H-W-H—can adequately convey the infinity of the One. In short, the ontological underpinning of Green’s thought is monistic. Reality as we encounter it is the self-expression of a singular force, one that has always been present within the universe and, in a way almost entirely opaque to our perception, beyond it as well. This infinity is not comprehensible or even credible to the rational human mind that thinks in terms of measure, definition, and limitation. It is, however, perceptible to a different level of human consciousness, one that dwells deep below our ordinary consciousness and lives in subtle contact with it. It is to this level of the human mind that religious language, including both verbal and that residing in symbolic gesture, is meant to appeal. Much of religious teaching is meant to point us toward that level of discourse and open us to it. Here we may say that Green is best understood as a Jewish parallel to the approach to religion and mythology of a Wilfred Cantwell Smith or a Joseph Campbell. ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE 25

Green seeks to deconstruct the “vertical metaphor” in which God is referred to as “above” and we are “below” as His creatures. Instead, he describes God’s relationship to the physical world in terms of “inner” and “outer” reality. Y-H-W-H is the inner truth of all, the soul and the energy that animates the sum totality of existence. All outer manifestations thus garb and protect the radiant Divine within. As we shall see, there is room for an Eyn Sof (sacred endlessness) in Green’s theology, but it remains mysterious, the object of wonder but not of knowledge. Green reads the Lurianic tradition of tsimtsum, the myth in which the infinite Eyn Sof withdrew a measure of the divine light in order to make room for the world, like the Hasidic masters. Y-H-W-H made room for us, and our individual identities, through this withdrawal. A ray of highly contracted divine light reaches us in the form of religious language, developed by the minds of our great religious thinkers but subtly infused with an imminent divine presence as well. This contraction of divinity is illumi- nated by God’s message to Moses in saying hineh makom itti, “there is room here with Me” (Exod. 33:21): the all-embracing One allows the human self to exist as an individual and therefore as both partner and “other.” But this view of existence is ultimately an illusion, for the underlying unity remains, even as our perception has been both enhanced and obscured by the mask of tsimtsum. Green leaves open the question of whether Y-H-W-H know- ingly and willfully withholds light to provide us with freedom or if tsimtsum is a metaphorical way of speaking about the unfolding of human individua- tion and our ongoing quest to understand more of the mystery. Yet tsimtsum is an expression of divine love, not a cruel game. It is given to us as the realm in which we are to live most of our lives, doing our essential spiritual work of uplifting and transformation so aptly described by the Hasidic masters and understood by Green in his own expanded form. Hillel Zeitlin once argued that Spinoza saw the world as a machine immutably governed by the laws of nature, but the Ba’al Shem Tov saw this same world as an ongoing work of art, with God as the Artist/Creator ever fashioning it anew.42 Green stands within this tradition of his Hasidic and neo-Hasidic

42 See Green, Hasidic Spirituality for a New Era, 186. The description of the world (and its eternal becoming) recalls a comment by Green’s teacher Abraham Joshua Heschel, who enjoined the next generation of Jewish seekers to “remember that the meaning of life is to build a life as if it were a work of art. You’re not a machine. And you are young. Start working on this great work of art called your own existence.” See Abraham Joshua Heschel, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, ed. Susannah Heschel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), 412. 26 ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE forebears, but he sees that constant re-creation as taking place within an evolutionary context, one that calls forth the talents of each individual human artist as the expression of that divine art. Green opens Seek My Face with Rabbi Nahman’s famous tale “The Portrait of the King,” which holds great importance to him. This is a tale in which each human being is tasked with creating a unique portrayal of the face of God. He has commented on this tale at three distinct stages of his career.43 Can one live with this non-dualistic, monistic consciousness at all times? Like the Hasidic masters he reads, Green understands that these moments are impossible to maintain, that this type of awareness is fleeting and subtle. Indeed, there is something quite frightening about this unitive vision, for it threatens to totally overwhelm our sense of individuated self. We exist as a part of it, and yet we are protected from becoming totally overcome by that type of expansive consciousness. However, when those self-protective mechanisms are given too much freedom, they become kelippot, “shells” that keep out the flow of divine light. We are present to cosmic oneness in sacred moments, either ritually determined or personal, in the context of human relationships, particularly in moments of shared silence. This very non-constancy of divine awareness is also what allows for freedom of choice and sacred deed, for the majority of one’s religious life takes place in that state of “diminished” consciousness. Y-H-W-H is ever-present, manifested in the infinite expression of being that surrounds us. But Green, as a religious humanist, does not understand God to dictate the course of history. The covenants of Abraham and Sinai, the Exodus from Egypt, Revelation, or the giving of the Torah, and the future redemption are all preserved in Green’s religious vocabulary without being seen as the doings of a personified God who acts on the stage of history. Each, however, is a human response to real and profound encounter with the One. In one passage Green calls this position religious naturalism, a term he usually avoids, preferring the sense that “natural” and “supernatural” reflect different human perspectives on the same events.44 But even if the Divine does not direct history, is there a personal God in Green’s theology? This depends very much on how one uses the term

See also b. Berakhot 10a, where the words “there is no rock (tsur) like our God” (I Sam. 2:2) is interpreted as “there is no Artist (tsayyar).” 43 See Green, Tormented Master, 350–60; Green, Seek My Face, xiii–xxiv; Green, “Ga’agu’ey ha-Elohim el ha-Adam: On Rabbi Nahman’s Tale of the King and the Sage,” Ha-Hayyim ke-Ga’agu’a, ed. Roee Horen (Tel Aviv, 2010), 89–100 (Hebrew). 44 Arthur Green, “Neo-Hasidism and Our Theological Struggles,” Ra’ayonot 4, no. 3 (1984): 15. ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE 27

“personal.” Yes, the relationship with the One is entirely intimate and personal in the seeker’s life. All the personified images of God are understood as human projections, but this does not mean that Green eschews them. If believed in literally and taken as absolutes they can become idolatrous. But as a means of opening the heart to the presence of the One, personified ways of speaking both to and about God can be useful tools.45 It would be overly simplistic and distorting to say that there is no room for traditional theistic language in Green’s thinking. Indeed, the language of Jewish sacred narratives, such as Creation, the binding of Isaac, Exodus, and Revelation, as myth, is central to his philosophy.46 These ancient “histo- ries” are important because they remain existentially compelling and nour- ish the religious imagination. Although not “true” on the factual plane, they give us a rich inheritance of theological structures and devotional rituals. Green does articulate a faith in “a God who seeks us out”47 and refers to the One who delights in each new expression of being.48 Y-H-W-H seeks to be known, and as such may be described as having a will in a highly abstract sense (expressed mostly through the evolutionary process), but this is not the classic divine will with well-defined objectives and desires. At times Green readily affirms the existence of a transcendent God, described as Eyn Sof (the endless One). This aspect of the Divine has no limit and no end, remaining utterly beyond human knowledge.49 But he is not thinking of a transcendent Deity who “dwells” or exists somewhere “outside” or “beyond” the universe. In Radical Judaism he offers a particularly striking understanding of divine transcendence: Transcendence means . . . that God—or Being—is so fully present in the here and now of each moment that we could not possibly grasp the depth of that presence. Transcendence thus dwells within immanence. There is no ultimate duality here, no ‘God and world,’ no ‘God, world, and self,’ only one Being and its many faces. Those who seek consciousness of it come to know that it is indeed eyn sof, without end.50 Thus, paradoxically, transcendence is also described in somewhat experiential terms, as an encounter with the One that is beyond words.51 This

45 See Green, “Personal Theology,” 6–19. 46 Green, Radical Judaism, 40–41. 47 Ibid., 159. 48 Ibid., 20, 172 n. 18. 49 Green, Seek My Face, 47. 50 Green, Radical Judaism, 18 51 Green’s youthful articles, mentioned above, spoke of “the experience of Eyn Sof.” Gershom Scholem, in a letter to young Green, argued with this, claiming that Eyn Sof 28 ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE indescribable moment defies logic; in casual parlance, it “blows” the human mind. It is precisely through the immanent, the expression of God within the dynamic multiplicity of the created world, that such an experience becomes possible. But even as Green describes Y-H-W-H in the language of transcendence, it is clear that this is not a God “who” actively bestows a law upon a people or demands that they obey it. The One’s transcendent dimension is nothing more, and nothing less, than the infinite totality of being. Green likes to say that Y-H-W-H is a transformative reversal of the letters of HaWaYaH (“existence”). The same being, when seen from a wonder-filled holistic perspective, reveals itself as “Being,” the mysterious underlying unity of all.52 In acknowledging the value of thinking about God in personal terms, as long as it is accompanied by the knowledge that this is a projection, Green adopts the Hasidic usage of the terms katnut and gadlut, alternat- ing moments of ordinary and “expanded” consciousness. This projection is important for us in the majority of our lives, which takes place in katnut, because we cannot spend all of our time in radical awareness of the divine unity. But our personal theological language also gives something to God. Green writes, “We are created in the image of God, if you will, and we are obliged to return the favor.”53 Elsewhere, he claims that “we give to Being the greatest gift we have to offer, that of our humanity.”54 In Radical Judaism we read that, “the personal God is a bridge between soul and mystery, a personification of the unknown, a set of projected images that we need and use, rather than an ultimate reality.”55 In a Talmudic and kabbalistic image also invoked by Heschel, Green depicts theology as a human lens (aspeklaria) through which we gaze upon the Divine, a lens that also has about it the property of a mirror. Green is keenly aware of the tension between personal and abstract conceptions of the Divine, and what is at stake. Part of Green’s project is to build a bridge between the devotional life and abstract theology (as well as historical scholarship). He insists that spiritual experiences are available without an ultimate faith in a personified God, and he seeks to cultivate

was declared by the kabbalists to be precisely that aspect of the Divine which is beyond experience. Green was not entirely convinced. 52 Despite obvious parallels between Green’s thought and that of A.D. Gordon, Green came to know Gordon’s work rather late in his career and was not significantly influenced by him. 53 Green, Seek My Face, 31. 54 Green, “Personal Theology,” 6–19. 55 Green, Radical Judaism, 158. ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE 29 a Jewish religious life in a world without a Deity who commands particular acts of devotion. In the context of reciting a passage from the biblical Creation narrative preceding Kiddush (a benediction over the wine on Friday night, Green makes it clear that he does not intellectually believe that this is the way the world came into being. He then goes on to ask, “How do I affirm that which I do not believe? What is the nature of this affirmation in the face of my disbelief? How do we learn to live at peace with these two realities?”56 If we do not take the stories in the Bible to be literally true, and if we lack a traditionally anthropomorphic conception of God, are rituals meaningless and self-deceptive? Green insists that this is not the case. One can indeed have momentary encounters of great intensity with Y-H-W-H, which overwhelm critical consciousness and self-protective distancing. In such moments one may be overtaken by loving surrender to, and awe before, the One. Love and awe, the two great foci of religious devotion, do not stand and fall with the personified God. The classical commandments are traditional Jewish rituals that open up the possibility for such experiences, opportunities for living self-consciously in the divine presence. But they are not the only way. Green is attracted to the images of love between humanity and God. He often invokes expressions of longing and devotion, especially those taken from the Song of Songs.57 Instead of portraying humanity as servants to God, Green chooses to underscore another ancient but too often neglected Jewish metaphor: we are the lovers of God, locked forever in amorous embrace. He even daringly plays with Jacob’s all-night wrestle with the angel, wondering whether clear lines are to be drawn between struggle and embrace.58 The quest to know Y-H-W-H is one undertaken out of love. And this love is by no means one-sided. Y-H-W-H too has the capacity of longing; the mysterious One yearns to become revealed and known. This is a point of tension in Green’s theology, for the notion that Y-H-W-H has both a will that powers evolution and desire to be known with love, introduces what seems like an element of traditional theism into Green’s philosophy. Perhaps we

56 Green, Seek My Faith, 53. 57 The Song of Songs plays a key role in his academic scholarship as well. See Arthur Green, “The Song of Songs in Early Jewish Mysticism,” Orim: A Jewish Journal at Yale 2, no. 2 (1987): 49–63; Green, “Shekhinah, the Virgin Mary, and the Song of Songs”; Arthur Green, “Intradivine Romance: The Song of Songs in the Zohar,” in Scrolls of Love: Ruth and the Song of Songs, ed. Peter S. Hawkins and Lesleigh Cushing Stahlberg (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 221–27. 58 Green, Radical Judaism, 137. 30 ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE are meant to understand Y-H-W-H’s longing for expression as an innate drive or yearning, not as a self-reflective will. Indeed, the desire of Y-H-W-H to become known and manifest is the ultimate goal of Creation, to which we must now turn our attention.

Creation Green laments that discussion of Creation has been largely abandoned in contemporary Jewish theology. Rather than allowing the opening chapters of Genesis to become relegated to those fundamentalists who read the story literally, Green calls for a new Jewish theology of Creation to fill this vac- uum. But why is this narrative so important? Creation is the matrix of many profound existential questions: Who are we humans? Where did we come from? Where are we going? What meaning do our lives, both collectively and individually, hold? But Creation—reread as the ongoing narrative of evolution—is also the dynamic and ever-unfolding story of Y-H-W-H, seeking and finding expression through the physical world. Unlike some more traditional Jewish and Christian thinkers, Green avoids reinterpreting the seven days of the biblical Creation tale as time periods or stages. This story is rather a sustained meditation on the birth of multiplicity out of the original ineffable unity of the One, Y-H-W-H, the Source of all. In a very telling passage in Seek My Face, Green insists that the priority of the One to the many, or of Y-H-W-H to existence, is not necessarily one of time.59 The One that underlies the many, exists “prior” to it, now and always. It is only the force of narration, the way we tell the tale, that makes “God” come temporally first, thus “creating” the universe. Scientific claims, such as evolution or the dating of the universe, which have been vetted and accepted by the scholarly community should be accepted by the seeker as well. This is true even when they contradict religious traditions or biblical stories. It is our job to reframe them and offer new understandings of them. The first chapter of Radical Judaism represents Green’s fullest spirited embrace of the theory of evolution, a view that itself evolved over the course of several earlier iterations.60 His interpretation of evolution is still creative and selective, and he makes no attempt to engage with the varied nuances of Darwinian thought in a scientific manner. This would

59 Green, Seek My Face, 16–18. 60 See ibid., 47–94; Arthur Green, “God, World, Person: A Jewish Theology of Creation,” Journal of Theology (Dayton) 96 (1992): 21–32; Arthur Green, “A Kabbalah for the Envi ronmental Age,” Tikkun 14, no. 55 (1999): 33–38; Green, Radical Judaism, 16–33. ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE 31

undermine his entire project of providing a mythic alternative that comple- ments science rather than competes with it. Green describes the development of species and biodiversity as integral to the sacred drama of Creation. The expansion and unfolding greater complexity of species represent an inbuilt divine desire (or drive) for ever more diverse and complex self-manifestation. Y-H-W-H does not direct this process by saying, “this creature, and not that creature.” But the One longs to be known and to be embodied in the physical world. This inexorably leads to self-manifestation in creatures of higher consciousness, those who are able to absorb and reflect upon the evolutionary process, seeing it in all its dazzling beauty and complexity. The evolution of life, emerging as it has by means of the competition of species and their ongoing struggle for survival, needs to be seen as more than a violent, blood-drenched battlefield. It is most fully described neither by the Nietzschian “will to power” nor by a Schopenhauerian cycle of consumption, but a process of divine self-manifestation through the physical world, expressed in the variety and drive for multiplicity of life. Creation itself was a gift, a divine act of loving self-diminution so that the project of the world might come into being. As will become clearer in our discussion of Green’s approach to the question of evil, the complex vital processes of the living world certainly include elements of pain and suffering. Natural mortality, predation, the food chain, and natural extinctions are all a part of Y-H-W-H’s ever-growing self-expression.61 Classical interpretations of Genesis view humanity as the capstone of Creation. Green rejects this notion, which he sees as having given rise to environmental destruction and callous treatment of the world around us. Creation may well have a telos, but it is not humans. We are one step in the course of that ongoing sacred process, not its ultimate goal or even crown- ing achievement. Evolution, the ever-flowing river of divine self-manifestation, is by no means complete. It will continue into the future (assuming we do not destroy this planet!) and become more complicated, more beautiful, and more elevated, leading to greater vistas of consciousness than are presently conceivable to us. The development and evolution of the human mind is a part of this. This understanding that the One is the heart of Creation does not mean that human beings are unimportant. Indeed, as speaking and self-conscious

61 Green shares much in common with other Jewish ecological thinkers informed by the mystical tradition, such as Arthur Waskow and Zalman Schachter-Shalomi. He, like they, sees environmentalism as one of the necessary moral manifestations of his theology. 32 ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE beings humanity has a very special place. He writes that, “We humans represent a significant step forward in the evolutionary path toward the self- articulation and self-fulfillment of the One.”62 Human self-consciousness and creativity lead us into a partnership with the ongoing unfolding of divinity. The development of religion and our ways of understanding God are part of that evolutionary process, but of course we (and our ideas) are just one more creature, another garb or expression of the Face. The telos of Creation, if there is one, is something much greater than the project of humanity. Contemplating the staggering beauty and sheer magnitude of Y-H-W-H’s constant self-expression through the acts of Creation leads us to a sense of wonder, a key term inherited by Green from both Heschel and Zeitlin, first inspired by the language of the psalms. Wonder has an aesthetic element in which we stand back and appreciate what lies before us, but it does not stop there. Such amazement allows us to transcend our ordinary consciousness and to be present to the infinite Divine. But part and parcel of Green’s new Jewish theology of Creation is an insistence that the Creation narrative, the new as well as the old, inspire us to action. He asks us to read the divine call to man, “ayekah—Where are you?” (Gen. 3:9), as an eternal call posed by the Divine: “The indwelling One asks this of every person, of every human embodiment of its own single Self.”63 Since Creation is a constant process, not a historical moment in time, God’s beckoning is perpetual as well. We are called to action in three realms: the intellectual, emotional, and physical, a translation of the classic triad of Torah, avodah, and gemilut hasadim. The human task is to hold the knowledge of God’s unity in the mind, opening the heart to this consciousness as well, and to act upon it in love, compassion, and generosity of spirit. These foundational principles, what Green refers to as “Jewish moral theology,” emerge from the old/new story of Creation, meaning a post-Darwinian rereading of the narrative through the eye of wonder, itself shaped by Israel’s ancient Creation tale. Part of our response to Creation is embodied in deed and ritual, such as Shabbat, the moment of sacred time at the heart of the Creation narrative. But according to Green, the ongoing self-manifestation process of Y-H-W-H needs human works. Here he draws on the kabbalistic notion of mitsvot tsorekh gavoha (commandments performed for the sake of the divine need). Green’s teacher Heschel saw his campaigns for social justice as an

62 Green, Radical Judaism, 27. 63 Ibid. ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE 33 outgrowth of this theology: in fighting for a more just and compassionate world, we fulfill one of God’s greatest needs and desires. Green argues that today’s most urgent call is to environmental action. He has become increasingly vocal about the current crisis and portents of environmental disaster. Shocked by what he sees as the gross irresponsibility of civic leadership, he feels compelled to speak out as a humanitarian concerned for the fate of our species and as a religious leader concerned for the fate of God’s project of creation on earth. He sees Westernized countries as primarily responsible for the scandalous overconsumption that has led us to the brink. This is a betrayal of our shared religious tradition, and an abuse of the story of Creation. A contemporary Judaism must teach us to honor the dignity and necessity of all species, affirming mankind’s special role in shepherding the ongoing process of existence, Y-H-W-H’s ongoing coming into being.

Revelation and Language A number of early midrashim suggest that the Torah existed before Creation, and several of these texts refer to God gazing into the Torah in order to fashion the world. Building on later kabbalistic interpretations of these midrashim, Green understands them as referring to an infinite primordial divine wisdom that cannot be fully expressed in words. The Revelation at Sinai represents a moment in which the eternal and ineffable aspect of God’s wisdom was drawn into the vessels of language. Green affirms that sacred encounters with the Divine must take place through words; human beings have a deep need for language, even though we also have the capacity for experiences that take us beyond words. This leads Green to offer a radical—though to him quite obvious—way of looking at Revelation. The biblical account of Sinai is “a vertical metaphor for an internal event,” one not to be taken literally.64 The Revelation takes place within the mind of Moses, or whoever “Moses” represents within the biblical authorship. There was a moment, or collection of such moments, of transformative awareness, and this inner event is symbolically desig- nated as “Sinai”—the humble height of understanding. The Torah as it has been passed down represents a human attempt to give articulation to the Revelation at that metaphorical Sinai. God’s call to man is translinguistic, and it is we who bring that divine message into words. In this sense there is little distinction between Written Torah and Oral Torah; both are human

64 Green, Seek My Face, 9. 34 ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE responses to the transverbal divine wisdom, representing in humanized terms an “event” and a reality beyond words. These ideas are an important element of the way in which Green engages biblical criticism, which he identifies as the second of the two great battles fought by religious Jews that were essentially resolved in the twentieth century. Twenty-first century Judaism needs to move forward beyond higher criticism of Scripture, rather than attempting to disprove these theories and rehash old debates. Since the text of the Torah is in effect mankind’s response to a sacred encounter with the Divine, the Bible, both in terms of its laws and its theology, reflects the historical context in which it was written. This also accounts for multiple authorship and the fact that the biblical text has clearly evolved through editing and transmission over time. Indeed, like several other important modern theologians, Green argues that Revelation (like Creation) is not a single historical event, but rather an ongoing and continuous process.65 In this respect his theology shares some elements in common with the process philosophy outlined by thinkers like Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne. However, Green is adamant that his thought reflects his own personal encounter with the Divine and is drawn from radicalized neo-Hasidic reading of Jewish mystical sources; it is not a Jewish answer to process theology.66 The traditions of the Jewish people as they have evolved over time do indeed hold the presence of God within them, since they are manifestations of this eternal process of divine self-revelation within the human mind. But the implication for the personal devotional life is even greater. We re-create and relive the encounter with the Divine on Mt. Sinai whenever we attune ourselves to the infinite One coming into language through

65 See, for example, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Heavenly Torah: As Refracted through the Generations, trans. Gordon Tucker (New York: Continuum, 2005); Benjamin D. Sommer, “Revelation at Sinai in the Hebrew Bible and in Jewish Theology,” The Journal of Religion 79, no. 3 (1999): 422–51; Tamar Ross, Expanding the Palace of Torah: Orthodoxy and Feminism (Lebanon, NH: Brandeis University Press, published by University Press of New England, 2004). Rivka Horwitz’s treatment of Rosenzweig’s theology of Revelation in her essay for Green’s Jewish Spirituality was helpful in his own thinking on this subject. See Rivka Horwitz, “Revelation and the Bible According to Twentieth-Century Jewish Philosophy,” Jewish Spirituality, Vol. II: From the Sixteenth-Century Revival to the Present, ed. Arthur Green (New York: Crossroad, 1987), 346–70. 66 See, by contrast, Bradley Shavit Artson, God of Becoming and Relationship: The Dynamic Nature of Process Theology (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2013); and the studies in Conservative Judaism 62, nos. 1–2 (2010), an issue dedicated to engaging with and critiquing Artson’s work. See also Steven Kepnes, “God is One, All Else is Many: A Critique of Green and Artson,” Conservative Judaism 65, no. 4 (2014): 49–71; and Green’s response in the following issue. ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE 35 our Torah study, our seeking, finding, and creating words to embody that silent presence.67 In the context of this living process, Green insists that the only proper answer to the question of whether the Torah is a divine or human document is “Yes!” As our verbalization of an encounter with the divine Self, Torah is indeed both fully divine and fully human. This sacred meeting with God is part of what Torah offers the contemporary seeker, even though it is not the literal word of God. The Bible also gives us the language of sacred myths, such as Creation, expulsion from Eden, the Binding of Isaac, and the Exodus, which are no less powerful just because they are not historically true.68 Their truth resides in the realm of myth and symbol, a more profound truth than that of history. We might say that the project of Torah, including both the Bible and all subsequent Jewish literature, represents the sustained effort of the Jewish people to use words, narrative, and sacred forms of expression (mitzvot, halakhah) to describe and embody the subtle mystery of the ineffable Divine. Green is fascinated with an interpretation by the Sefat Emet of the blessing recited after the reading of a portion of the Torah.69 Blessing God as the one “who gave us the Torah of truth,” writes Rabbi Judah Leib Alter of Ger, refers to the Written Torah. “And who implanted eternal life within us” refers to the Oral Torah. Only together do they make God noten ha-Torah, the “Giver of Torah” in the eternal present. For Green, “Written Torah” refers to the historical connection we have as Jews to the mythic event of Sinai. But myth is never just myth, for it represents the deep truth embodied within it. “Oral Torah” is not a fixed body of teachings, but rather that which we create anew in every moment of study and interpretation. Together they comprise the giving/receiving of the Torah, a font of truth and blessing that never ceases to flow.

Covenant and the Jewish People The idea of a chosen people presents a twofold problem for Green. First, it seems to predicate that God (either anthropomorphic or abstract) has a specific and differentiated will, expressed by the selection of one people from amongst all the others. Furthermore, the particularistic claim of a single chosen nation is in tension with Green’s universalist sensibility. “Can it be that the infinite Y-H-W-H longs for the service of only the Jewish people, or that above all others?” wonders Green. Does the divine seek to be

67 Green, Radical Judaism, 164. 68 Ibid., 41. 69 Ibid., 117; see also Green, Language of Truth, 71, 157, 272, 404. 36 ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE revealed to them alone? How should we respond to a God who is so bad a Parent as to choose only one among His many children for His special love? Is this a message we would want to carry forward? Green’s answer to the first difficulty is clear. The divine will is indeed expressed through the enduring self-manifestation of Creation, applying to all people and indeed embracing all creatures. It is we, the Jewish people, who have chosen to forge our particular covenant with God, understanding that Y-H-W-H has been revealed to us in a particular and collective way. He writes, “It is we who at Sinai declare our undying devotion to the universal ever-flowing and yet unchanging One.”70 In other words, Y-H-W-H did not “choose” in the way the term has been classically understood, since the covenant shared between the Jewish people and God was established at their behest. He cites Exodus 24 (and the lack of divine commandment of its covenant ritual) to show that Moses, not God, was the one who created the rite of covenant at Sinai. Thus, for Green, the second tablets given at Sinai are even more important than the first, which according to the biblical narrative were both spoken and inscribed by God. For this reason they were beyond the grasp of the Jewish people, who needed to create a molten God who would be closer to them. The second tablets represent a covenant in which both parties have agency.71 This commitment means that the Jewish people do have a particular committed relationship with God. The fact that the covenant was initiated by us does not mean that its terms are any less binding.72 From that day on, God and the Jewish people have been locked in an eternal dance of mutual responsibility. But if we are not a nation chosen and shepherded by God, who are the Jewish people? Here Green’s answers are quite nuanced. He offers three increasingly broad understandings of “Israel”: first is the historical people, linked by heritage and ethnicity, including its legacy of suffering and martyrdom; second, those non-Jews who identify with and relate to the Jewish spiritual and historic legacies (including many Christians) but are not prepared to convert; and third, the broader “community of seekers and strugglers” throughout the world, all of whom wrestle with Y-H-W-H.73 This combination of definitions allows him to accept a certain type of particularism without abandoning his universalist ethos. Green is aware of the

70 Green, Seek My Face, 115–16. 71 Ibid., 167–69. 72 Green, Radical Judaism, 164. 73 Ibid., 139. ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE 37 importance of defining religious boundaries, but he also worries about the dangers of insularity and parochialism.74 He readily admits to feeling spiritual fellowship with seekers and activists from other religious traditions, which he assumes to be authentic paths to the One.75 But his universalistic embrace of humanity is even greater than that. The Jews have a shared symbolic language and history, but the special relationship between God and Abraham must not be read so as to exclude others from being God’s equally beloved children.76 Yet Green writes in the shadow of the Holocaust and is committed to the survival of the Jewish people, “as a distinct human family among the nations.”77 Despite his kinship with those of other faith traditions, Green acknowledges an immutable bond he shares with other Jews even when they depart sharply on issues of politics or religion.78 But if all paths are sacred, and all peoples manifestations of Y-H-W-H, why should one be Jewish? Certainly it does not come from an obligation to a commanding deity who demands obeisance. Nor is commitment to Judaism justified as a matter of bloodline or ethnicity, or guilt after the Holocaust. Green’s answer to “Why be Jewish?” is grounded in the strength and power of the Jewish message and symbolic language; Jewish teachings are compelling, meaningful, and infinitely rich.79 Some elements of Judaism make sense for those who live within Jewish tradition and are committed to that particular covenant. But Jewish theology has universal messages and implications, and he explicitly addresses his books to non-Jewish seekers as well. Contemporary Jews live in a world in which they are less threatened or denigrated than ever before in history, and they are therefore free to share their tradition in new ways. Jews in the United States have opened themselves up to the culture around them, but they also have a unique opportunity to shape American values and culture. This potential influence on the broader society is particularly significant in a country that will greatly impact the collective human future. Green flirts with a seemingly surprising sense of providence in suggesting that this

74 Ibid., 136. 75 Ibid., 141. Green insists that as an existential outsider to these paths, he cannot be in a position to “validate” them. But he rejoices to see the sacred lives created by them, and to read and hear of profound religious experiences of those who follow them. 76 Ibid., 135. 77 Ibid., 133. 78 Ibid., 138. 79 His introductory summary of these ideas may be found in Arthur Green, Judaism’s Ten Best Ideas: A Brief Guide for Seekers (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2014). 38 ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE may be “why” such a thriving Jewish community exists in the United States. Green is a believer and active participant in interfaith conversation as well. He argues that this project should be grounded in a firm commitment to increasing mutual knowledge and understanding while at the same time maintaining a respect for pluralism and diversity.80

Halakhah and Religious Practice Judaism has a rich tradition of rituals and commandments defined in great detail by Jewish law, or halakhah. After a few years of rigorous observance in late adolescence, Green abandoned Orthodox practice while an undergraduate. His fascination with Kabbalah and Hasidism brought him back to a version of traditional practice, but never to a full commitment to normative halakhah. He affirms that Kabbalah is intimately bound together with Judaism and the life of praxis it entails, a response to those he sees as detaching Kabbalah from its Jewish moorings.81 His own personal pre- dilection, however is to, in his own words, “wear the garment of halakhah somewhat lightly.” He is open to and clearly moved by the power of ritual, but insists that halakhah be translated as “path” rather than “law.” It represents a guide with which to walk through life, rather than a binding statute. There is an element of Green’s thought which claims that over- concern with details of the law tends to stifle the creative spirit of Jewish life. He writes, “I crave passion, not conformity; intimacy with God, not normative behaviors within the law.”82 Green frequently affirms the importance of the commandments, cit- ing the Hasidic teaching that “mitzvah” comes from the word tzavta, or “a connection.” Indeed, “all mitzvot exist for the same purpose: the increased realization of divinity in the world through the agency of those who perform the mitzvah.”83 They open us up and attune us to the presence of Y-H-W-H. While all the specific rituals are of human origin, a part of the history of religion, they serve to frame our moments of illumination and insight, becoming vessels that connect those moments of awareness with

80 Green offers some reflections on what this might look like in “To Learn and to Teach: Some Thoughts on Jewish-Buddhist Dialogue,” in Beside Still Waters: Jews, Christians and the Way of the Buddha, ed. Harold Kasimow, John P. Keenan, and Linda Klepinger Keenan (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2003), 231–42. 81 Green, Ehyeh, 98–100. 82 Arthur Green, “Rabbinic Training and Transdenominationalism: Some Personal Perspectives,” in Synagogues in a Time of Change: Fragmentation and Diversity in Jewish Religious Movements, ed. Zachary Heller (Herndon, VA: Alban Institute, 2009), 163. 83 Green, Seek My Face, 73. ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE 39 the physical world around us. Doing them thus reinforces the memory of such moments, even when we cannot attain those same heights. Created by the Jewish people as its way of responding to the universal sacred call of “Know Me!” and “Be aware!,”84 their very antiquity and the devotion placed in them over the ages give them a resonance capable of evoking profound religious feeling. Rituals that engage with sacred time, such as Shabbat and the holiday cycle, are particularly important to Green. This has become increasingly true over the past decades, as technology has encroached farther and farther, increasing the pace of our lives exponentially. The Sabbath, a day of rest and reflection, is a particularly important gift that the Jewish people have to share with the rest of the world. He has written his own “Ten Suggestions for a Contemporary Shabbat.”85 The belief in prayer as a fulcrum of the spiritual life is something Green inherited from the Hasidic masters, and from his teacher Heschel, who placed a tremendous emphasis on the centrality of prayer. In Seek My Face, he writes that, “religion begins not with doctrine, not with tradition, but with the need to pray.”86 Prayer is the greatest tool for cultivating the inner life. It is an opportunity to listen as well as to speak, opening the heart to the divine presence that can change the way we look at the world. Prayer is so powerful not because we can change God’s mind or alter our physical situation, but because it unlocks new areas within the self and offers a gateway to the inner world. Shared prayer in the context of authentic religious community offers a deep channel for sharing and mutual support among the devoted. Green predicts that we are seeing the early stages of another shift in modes of worship, like the first-century move from sacrifice to prayer, in which we will find more room for silent meditation.87 There is some tension, however, between Green’s theological self, which draws energy and inspiration from a radical panentheism, and his liturgical self, which is committed to the traditional language and patterns for worship. He is currently at work on a book on prayer, including an extended commentary on the traditional prayer book, which some readers of Radical Judaism will find surprisingly devotional. While affirming traditional liturgy for himself, he cannot prescribe it for all, and seeks to make room in Jewish religious life for those alienated from the traditional liturgy. Emending

84 Green, Radical Judaism, 97, 113. 85 Green, These Are the Words, 271. 86 Green, Seek My Face, xxiii. 87 Green, Ehyeh, 153–63. 40 ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE the text of the prayer book is something he does only with some trepidation, but occasionally Green feels that moral integrity demands changes to parts of the prayer service. These include changes in prayers that call for the violent destruction of the wicked, and those that are xenophobic or exclude women. Emblematic of Green’s view of prayer, and perhaps of his theological position altogether, is his reading of the Shema‘ (Deut. 6:4, “Hear O Israel, Y-H-W-H our God, Y-H-W-H is One!”) as standing at the heart of Jewish liturgy. The Shema‘, he notes, is really not a prayer at all, but a declaration. It is addressed to Israel, both the people and the human community of those who struggle with God. In several places he quotes a statement by the author of Sefat Emet that offers a monistic reading of the Shema‘. “God is one” means that only God exists, that there is nothing in which the divine presence cannot be found.88 Throughout the rest of the prayer book, a dualistic religious language is used, the human self addressing God as “You.” But this language is intended to lead one to the pinnacle of truth, the awareness that there is no other. Therefore the Shema‘ is encircled from both sides by proclamations of love, God’s love for Israel and Israel’s for God. The highest point of I/Thou dialogue is the declaration of love, the language of the “holy of holies,” the Song of Songs. Love, in other words, leads one into the oneness of the Shema‘, and again leads forth from it, back into life in the “real” world. But that love points toward its own self-transcendence, the place beyond self-and-other, the moment when all we can do is to call out “Y-H-W-H is one.” Study is perhaps the central commandment in Green’s religious path. Learning Torah is a sacred encounter with the divine word shimmering within the text. Here lies a certain sense of mystery within Green’s theology. The words of Torah, and surely of its many commentaries, are of human origin. And yet somehow he retains the sense of the Hasidic masters that the Torah is infused with the divine presence, is indeed nothing less than divine presence crystallized into language. To use a somewhat complex Hasidic metaphor, the “garments of skin” (Gen. 3:21, but here referring to the parchment of the Torah scroll) are also garments that contain the divine light.89 Constant engagement with Torah through studying its words and

88 Green, Language of Truth, xxxvi–xxxvii; These Are the Words, 108–9. 89 Rabbinic tradition records that the words “garments of skin” (kotnot ‘or, Gen. 3:21) were written as “garments of light” (kotnot or) in R. Meir’s Torah scroll; see Bereshit Rabbah 20:12. Following an interpretation offered by many Hasidic homilists, Green takes this to mean that while the ineffable Torah is currently embodied in a linguistic “garment” of ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE 41 traditions allows seekers to develop the vocabulary necessary for their own spiritual quest. Thus the universal quest becomes Jewish, by taking on the language of Torah and coming to see the divine presence refracted through it. This value is clearly reflected in Green’s theological commitment to both scholarship and teaching. Green envisions a future halakhah that is flexible and inclusive, embracing a pluralism of approaches.90 He seeks to appeal to a wide range of Jews, and takes pride in the fact that some of his close students and devoted readers are much more observant than he, and others somewhat less. Rather than abandoning the category of halakhah as an important one, Green calls for its radical transformation and revival. He affirms the deep relationship between halakhah and aggadah, or our sacred narratives (both biblical and postbiblical), writing that, “a new, though much less rigid, halakhah will emerge for Jews in the new era that is just beginning, a halakhah that we are not yet ready to define.”91 Over time halakhah has lost much of its bold- ness, and we have not had the courage to make it live up to the ethics and morality of the cultures from whom we have learned so much. The role of women, including the laws of marriage and divorce, the treatment of homosexuals, and regard for reduction of animals’ pain in the context of ritual slaughter are examples of traditions that must be updated. Where he feels no ethical imperative for change—as in most calendar-based ritual forms—Green is highly traditional, though not preoccupied with fulfilling legal obligation. At times he is impatient with the system of halakhic precedent and thinks the basic Jewish truth of tzelem Elohim, the recognition of the divine image in each person, should suffice to enforce a change in praxis. Regarding the last example, Green (though “not yet” a vegetarian) suggests vegetarianism and concern for ecological sustainability as a complement—or perhaps a coming replacement—for the laws of kashrut.92 He yearns for a more significant restructuring of Jewish practice when needed, based on a sense that each generation is capable of returning to the moment at Sinai and being faithful in its own way to the truth of that encounter. Green understands this as part of the inner truth of Hasidism. He is frustrated by the stories and laws, the discerning student may indeed perceive some of the infinite divine light within it. 90 Green, Radical Judaism, 166. 91 Green, Seek My Face, 72. 92 Green, Seek My Face, 85–88; Arthur Green, “A Kabbalah for the Environmental Age,” in Best Contemporary Jewish Writing, ed. Michael Lerner (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001), 124–25. 42 ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE belief that those who hold the reins of halakhic change have become overly weighed down by the precedents of tradition and have lost the moral courage of their early rabbinic forebears.

Evil The origins and nature of evil present a problem for all panentheistic mystics, who see everything around them as a manifestation of God, as they do for monotheists who see world created by a God of goodness. Classical kabbalists devoted much energy to developing a rather dualistic conception of evil. Some even described it as an independent force, warring with the Divine, reminiscent of ancient Gnosticism. The Platonist trend within Kabbalah associated evil with the exterior material form, whereas goodness and purity are manifest in the inner world of the spirit. These two readings eventually became intermingled in the history of Jewish mysticism, where the “shells,” the “externals” and such mythic figures as Samael and the primordial snake became entirely interchangeable. Hasidism, however, offered a very different perspective. The Hasidic masters sought to break down this dualistic paradigm and frequently underscore that evil is simply a different expression of God, “a platform for the good,” and that the divine energy found even within evil can also bring the mystic closer to the Divine. Evil is thus combated by a paradigm shift, breaking through the externali- ties and being carried by them to a new and reinforced inwardness. Green is attracted to the holistic paradigm offered by Hasidism, although the post- Holocaust consciousness he bears makes the dualistic alternative tempting. Green distinguishes suffering from evil, which he defines as being driven by malice or depraved indifference.93 The forces of nature, including both cancer and tsunamis, are not in this sense “evil.” Green rejects any sense that transgression of the ritual commandments is a source of evil, and affirms that the Divine is present in both sin and suffering. Of evolution and the ever-changing patterns of life in the natural world, he writes: This process . . . is not one of a perfect wise creator who has all the answers, but rather of a spreading life-energy, moved by eternal quest. It engages in that pursuit by the method of trial and error. There have been great blind alleys in evolution, and progress toward higher consciousness has then proceeded in other, more fruitful directions.94

93 Green, Ehyeh, 140–43. 94 Ibid., 149–50. ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE 43

Thus God is behind all processes of natural extinction, and the suffering implicit in the food-chain and the web of life. The aggressive and violent instincts we have within us, often manifest in human anger and competition, are marks of our evolutionary heritage. As noted above, Green nevertheless ultimately seeks to view the ever-evolving world not as a violent conflict of wills between different forms of life, but as an organic multifaceted expression of the One. This holds true for human suffering as well. In some cases he invokes the Hasidic motif of yeridah le-tzorekh aliyah (“descent for the sake of ascent”) as an answer for what to do with the experience of suffering. We are called to uplift difficult experiences and transforming them into “light.”95 In theory, everything may be uplifted and redeemed. Yet Green recognizes his place as a post-Auschwitz theologian, and he frequently refers to the challenges and tragedies of the Holocaust even though he never treats it systematically.96 The question of how the Holocaust could happen is painful but not theologically impossible, since God does not exercise control over human history. In fact, the Divine needs human deeds. Therefore God did not “cause” or even “allow” the Nazis to murder the Jews of Eastern Europe. The Holocaust is the greatest example of human depravity in light of the freedom given to us by God, a violation of the divine image in both perpetrators and victims. Green’s theology has been shaped by his struggles with theodicy as something that challenged his personal faith.97 The tragic death of his mother when he was an early adolescent, and growing up in the 1940s and 1950s in a Jewish world surrounded by Holocaust survivors made it difficult to imagine a God responsible for the horrible suffering and evil found in the world. He found himself attracted to the absence of God described in the teachings of R. Nahman.98 God has withdrawn the divine light from the physical world, thus allowing for both goodness and evil, even though there is an even deeper truth in which God is still present. Divine absence is not just an illusion, but a true reality that we experience. Faith is refus- ing to believe that the world is only darkness, and asserts that there is ultimate meaning beyond absurdity. But this does not deny or invalidate our

95 Green, “Neo-Hasidism,” 15. 96 Green, Seek My Face, 13, 30, 49, 87, 118; Green, Ehyeh, 104, 121, 138. 97 Green, Radical Judaism, 2. 98 Arthur Green, “The Problem of Evil: A Conversation,” Reconstructionist 57, no. 3 (1992): 15–20. 44 ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE

experiences of divine absence or life’s absurdity. While valid and authentic, they are an incomplete portrayal of the cosmic picture.

Redemption Our world is one of great fracture, deeply in need of healing and redemption, both cosmic and personal. But Green’s theology places much more importance on the quest than on actually achieving ultimate perfection; many of the “rewards” of the spiritual life and smaller measures of healing are to be found within the search itself. The messianic age, a time of restoration, may indeed be the telos of Creation, for Y-H-W-H is born into multiplicity, which then seeks to return to unity. Yet Green often reminds his readers that Judaism offers no single vision of this time or process. What does redemption mean? Green harbors no fantasies about the advent of a divinely ordained messianic figure who will rebuild the Temple and gather the exiles in a historic process. Redemption, he believes, must come from us. Indeed, Green writes that “redemption is essentially a human task, that wrought by our living in active and engaged response to revelation.”99 Just as the voice of Revelation at Sinai was spoken by Moses, so too are we the agents of Y-H-W-H in the ongoing process of redemption.100 Our yearning for the spiritual quest and awareness of the divine presence has been dimmed over time, dulled by exiles both physical and spiritual. Part of our redemption entails recapturing this longing, thus rekindling the flame of inspiration and action. But this leads us into a paradox. The same constriction of the Divine that allows for evil and makes our world in need of redemption is what enables us to exist as individuals. Green’s answer is that while some withdrawal on God’s part is necessary, we humans are called upon to increase the visibility of the divine light and transform the darkness into light. In a broader sense, redemption means a process of returning home and restoring balance to the land of Israel, to our inner selves, to the tradition, and to gender (including an understanding that both “male” and “female,” or giver and receiver, lie within each of us). The return of the Jewish people to their ancestral home and their empowerment as a sovereign state in the twentieth century means that our physical exile is over. But the spiritual exile is still quite deep. We remain outside of the Garden of Eden, or perhaps more precisely, outside of the Edenic consciousness and intimacy

99 Green, Radical Judaism, 163. 100 Green, Seek My Face, 173. ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE 45 with the Divine we once enjoyed. Green even suggests that Adam and Eve were not banished but chose to flee from Eden, a symbolic expression of the continuing human flight from the divine presence.101 The process of return, like that of flight, is constant; redemption will mean the triumph of the desire to return and rediscover the One over the terror, shame, and self-preoccupation that drive us from it. Israel’s covenanted existence means that we see our collective exile as an embodiment of this universal human situation. Green’s ultimate redemptive dream is, not surprisingly, a monistic one. The day when “earth will be filled with knowledge of Y-H-W-H” (Isa. 11:9) is best described for him by certain pages in Jewish mystical literature in which both time and space are reduced to nothingness and where all distance and separation between the One and its manifestations is swal- lowed up.102

Green as Teacher and Convener of Community

Some parts of the sacred quest to know God must be undertaken alone, and Green’s writings frequently underscore the importance of individual and inward search. But the destiny of the Jewish seeker is intertwined with the fate of the community. Unlike religions with a strong monastic tradition, Jewish mystics rarely conduct the devotional life in permanent solitude. Building upon this, Green underscores that all Jewish learning must lead to the creation of human community, in which the presence of God is to be sought and celebrated, where the integrity of one’s religious life is tested. In this, Green’s lineage both as a student of Hasidism and as a disciple of Heschel is quite clear indeed. For Green, communities are united by a shared commitment to learning, good works, and the spiritual quest. These qualities, not the degree to which each observes the ritual laws, constitute the sort of Jewish community that emerges around him. This “post-denominationalism” is a very important part of Green’s identity and thought. Green has twice held tenured positions at major universities, and each time he left to serve in a leadership role at a rabbinic

101 Green, Seek My Face, 160. 102 See the passage from R. Nahman translated and discussed in Green, Tormented Master, 320–22; and Haviva Pedaya, Nahmanides: Cyclical Time and Holy Text (Tel Aviv: Am Oved Publishers, 2003), esp. 207–437 (Hebrew). 46 ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE seminary.103 Over the past forty years he has thus been committed to training two kinds of Jewish leaders: academics and rabbis. His commitment to textual scholarship demands excellence of all his students in both settings, but his personal religious commitments have repeatedly led him away from the university setting and toward one incarnation or another of the ideal of ḥavurah.104 Invoking a striking interpretation of Genesis found both in one of Kafka’s stories and a commentary by an early Spanish kabbalist, Green writes that the primordial sin was not that of eating of the Tree of Knowledge, but of separating it from the Tree of Life. Knowledge without life can be dangerous, promoting not only arrogance and insensitivity, but also a detached intellectuality intentionally diffident to the fate of real human beings and their lives. Talmud torah, Green has argued, demands that we return to a mode of learning that is not purely intellectual, but engaging of the whole person and demanding involvement with others, the building of community. Ḥevruta, or the paired way of engaging in Talmudic discourse, also means “friendship” or “community.” Thus study of Torah and life in religious community are inexorably bound together. Green has sought to share this lesson, first expressed in the context of Ḥavurat Shalom, with students and colleagues in many contexts. In an age when both the future of Judaism and the fate of humanity hang in the balance, it is no longer sufficient to be comfortably stockpiling an expertise in ancient lore. Knowledge and personal commitment must join together to foster the creation of a vibrant modern Jewish life, based on true community. Because of these commitments, Green has been more comfortable teaching within Jewish institutional frameworks than in the secular university. Green is both a scholar of mysticism and a mystic, though he claims the latter only with serious trepidation. His books of confessional theology often cite the same sources explicated in his historical writings. He avoids compartmentalizing the academic and religious parts of his life, and, like his teachers Alexander Altmann and Abraham Joshua Heschel, he seems to be comfortable living between both worlds. He writes: Over the decades I have come to see myself as a builder of bridges between the scholarly ivory tower, with its great skills in deciphering difficult, obscure

103 Although he held his first position in a rabbinic seminary at a Reconstructionist institution, Green never considered himself fully committed to the Reconstructionist movement or exclusively bound to its doctrines and ideology. 104 Arthur Green, “Jewish Studies and Jewish Faith,” Tikkun 1, no. 1 (1986): 84–90; Arthur Green, “Scholarship Is Not Enough,” Tikkun 2, no. 3 (1987): 37–39. ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE 47

sources, and the community of seekers who want to know if there is any value or wisdom in those sources that might still speak to people who live in a very different age from those in which the texts were written.105 The cadre of Green’s closest students, both past and present, tend to join with him in this attempt to bridge the worlds of scholar and seeker, to infuse greater passion and commitment into the intellectual encounter with Jewish sources, while bringing to seekers and newcomers to the tradition a sense of the depth and breadth of Jewish learning.

Reception and Influence

Arthur Green’s quest to create a seeker friendly Judaism has been an important force in shaping the liberal Jewish American community. As an institution builder, his impact was first visible through Ḥavurat Shalom, which inspired a great number of others throughout the United States. These eventually grew into an entire (mostly spontaneous) movement, but not a denomination, which had a profound effect on American Jewry; for many the ḥavurah is still an attractive alternative (or complement) to the traditional synagogue. He has trained hundreds of future rabbis over two decades, first at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and more recently at Hebrew College. He has also taught already ordained rabbis in many settings, particularly the Institute for Jewish Spirituality and the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. His published works are widely read and often taught by other rabbis as well. It is thus fair to say that a large portion of the liberal rabbinate has been exposed to and influenced by Green’s teachings. Green has devoted several decades of his life to training Jewish leaders, and he is often included in lists of the “most influential rabbis.” But he is one of the few individuals included more for the impact of his ideas than for positions held in the denominational or communal structure. Green’s writings have played a very important role in shaping the world of Jewish life in America. In the 1960s and 1970s the very existence of any kind of authentic “Jewish spirituality” was underappreciated, or even denied, by the vast majority of American Jews. His project of reinterpreting the legacy of Jewish mysticism has helped to correct this imbalance, developing a new

105 Green, Ehyeh, xi. 48 ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE form of spiritual language to several generations of rabbis, teachers, and seekers. Green’s reception in the Orthodox community has been more complicated. While his scholarship is respected and his translations of Hasidic sources are widely used, Radical Judaism in particular was met, perhaps unsurprisingly, with opposition from some Orthodox figures.106 But the very fact that Orthodox scholars felt compelled to write reviews suggests that Green’s theology is taken seriously as a challenge to their intellectual world. Though perhaps unacknowledged, his influence has extended to the Orthodox community and rabbinate. Green’s scholarly works have had an impact on the way Jewish mysticism is studied in the academic community. Tormented Master was an influential book, and his many other historical and philological studies of Hasidism and early Kabbalah are highly regarded by scholars in these fields. Some academics have been suspicious of Green precisely for the close connection between his theology and his scholarship. His more universalistic understanding of mystical phenomena puts him at odds with scholars who emphasize the contextual nature of all spiritual experiences. While Green does not have an essentialist view of religious experience, he is more open than some others to the parallels between spiritual phenomena across religious lines. He has been open as a scholar to the possibility of influence of non-Jewish religion upon Judaism, and as a contemporary theologian he especially welcomes East/West interreligious dialogue, believing that Judaism has much to gain from such an encounter and should not fear it. Here too he is at odds with some other voices in the Jewish community. Green is primarily an American Jewish theologian, but his influence reaches beyond the Unites States. His books have been translated into several languages and his ideas have been embraced by more liberal elements of the international Jewish community. Several of his works have been translated into Hebrew and now enjoy a significant readership amongst Israelis. Tormented Master, available in Hebrew since 1981, has long been a best-seller in Israel and was the first exposure many young Israelis had to serious encounter with spiritual questions. Seek My Face, Speak My Name was harder for Israeli readers, as it did not seem to fit into any of the categories the Israeli reader was able to digest. In more recent years, however, as the post-army journeys of many young Israelis to the Far East

106 See Daniel Landes, “Hidden Master,” Jewish Review of Books (Fall 2010): 20–22; Green’s reply in the Winter 2011 issue; and their subsequent exchange in various online forums. ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE 49 has opened them to a spiritual quest, there is a potential greater openness to his approach. The Hebrew edition of his Jewish spiritual vocabulary list These Are the Words is dedicated to dor shavey Hodu, “the generation returning from India.” A Hebrew translation of Radical Judaism is currently under way. Green visits Israel regularly and is in close touch with the scholarly community there. He has long identified with the left flank of the Zionist movement, and though a deeply religious Jew, he refers to himself as a secular Zionist. Green supports a democratic, liberal Jewish state, but attributes no messianic importance to its existence. Since 1967 he has criticized the decision to build settlements in the territories occupied following the Six-Day War, and Green has pointed out that the noble ideals of early Zionism and the reality of modern Israel have drifted farther and farther apart over the past decades. Green laments the way modern Israelis have belittled the Diaspora, though he sees some progress on that front in recent years. He maintains that the liberal American Jewish community can offer Israelis creative new ways of relating to their traditions without having to accept all of them uncritically. Green’s decision to remain in America reflects his conviction that Judaism has much to say to the American and world communities, Jewish and gentile alike.107

The Essays That Follow

The four essays included in this volume demonstrate the breadth and scope of Green’s theological writings. In each of these works we see the different ways in which he has sought to fulfill the task he set out for himself in the early 1970s: reclaiming the Jewish mystical tradition. Over the past forty years Green has done so through writings that span history, constructive theology, and personal devotion. The first essay, “Three Warsaw Mystics,” was originally published in a memorial volume for Rivka Schatz-Uffenheimer, professor of Jewish mysticism at the Hebrew University. Though this essay is an academic study, it offers a glimpse into Green’s quest for intellectual lineage.108 He compares the thought and theology of R. Judah Leib Alter of Ger (author of the Sefat Emet), Hillel Zeitlin, and Abraham Joshua Heschel. All three

107 Green, Radical Judaism, 150–51. 108 See his remarks in “What Is Jewish Theology?” in Torah and Revelation, ed. Dan Cohn-Sherbok (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), 1–11. 50 ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE of these important figures, who lived in Warsaw in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were what Green calls “experiential mystics.” That is, they used the rich symbolic language of Jewish mysticism to articulate the profound, nearly ineffable wellsprings of their inner spiritual lives. They articulate a powerful unitive vision in which the divine presence is immanently expressed in the world, accessed through moments of intense devotion. Each of these three mystics adds something special to the project. Green sees R. Judah Leib as an authentic Jewish mystic who was deeply influenced by the language of Kabbalah but who moved beyond the limits the hyper- complexity and obsession with details found in its later expressions. The boundaries of R. Judah Leib’s theology were to some degree determined by his role as a leader of a traditional Hasidic community, which tempered his universalistic inclinations. In many ways Green’s religious quest has mirrored that of Hillel Zeitlin. Both grew disenchanted with traditional theistic religion, turning to Western philosophy and religious studies, and then returned to tradition by developing a formulation of Jewish theology inspired by a reinterpretation of Kabbalah and Hasidism. Abraham Joshua Heschel was in many ways Green’s most important teacher. Though Green has since moved away from elements of Heschel’s theology, particularly Heschel’s conceptions of a personal, transcendent God, Green carried forward his project of translating the sources of Hasidism and Jewish mysticism into a theology for the contemporary American community. In fact, the sensitive reader will see that Green has striven to embody parts of all three of these important figures. The next two selections come from Green’s theological trilogy. The essay “Jewish Theology: A New Beginning” first appeared as the introduction and first chapter of Radical Judaism. Here Green offers his fullest reading of Creation as a sacred drama, embracing the theory of evolution as a way of describing the Divine’s endless quest for expression through the fullness of all life. Green moves to a description of his understanding of “God,” a term that he employs only grudgingly because of its personified and theistic con- notations. As a mystical panentheist he prefers to refer to the Divine as Y-H- W-H, a name which signifies nothing less than the totality of Being itself. Though at times he does embrace mythic and personalist language, Green’s philosophy aims to transcend the more dualistic and theistic conceptions of the Divine. Encounters with Y-H-W-H are moments of overwhelming awareness of the immanent presence, to which we are called to respond with sacred deeds. ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE 51

The third essay, “Road Back to Sinai: The Post-Critical Seeker” was originally the third part of Seek My Face. In this essay Green discusses the central questions of Revelation. While this piece is less concerned with incorporating the finds of biblical criticism than his later writings, here we find a mystical reframing of Revelation. Green describes the events of Mt. Sinai as an encounter in which divine wisdom was drawn forth from the innermost realm of silence into the world of language and speech. The text of the Torah is our response to the ineffable sacred encounter with Y-H-W-H. But the biblical account of Revelation, rather than being read literally, serves as a mythic description of an uninterrupted process in which we are called to take an active role. In Torah study, and indeed through Jewish theology, we continue to give verbal articulation to the ongoing self-revelation of divine wisdom. The life of the commandments is our daily embodiment of that revelation. The final essay, “A Neo-Hasidic Life: Credo and Reflections,” was published in a Festschrift dedicated to Rabbi Neil Gillman, a theologian at Green’s alma mater, the Jewish Theological Seminary. This piece was written in Green’s seventies, and it is the most recent work included in this book. Green reflects upon his personal journey of some fifty years. He describes the thrill of finding a Jewish language in which to describe the spiritual quest of his youth, and the long task of articulating it over the succeeding years and decades. Green offers a series of ideas that are the cor- nerstones of his personal religious life; some are theological points, while others are devotional practices. He then comments upon each of them in turn. “Three Warsaw Mystics” and this concluding piece may be seen to serve here as bookends. The former is Green’s quest to establish his intellectual heritage, and “A Neo-Hasidic Life” is his intentional contribution to the ongoing and future-oriented project of revitalizing and reinterpreting Hasidic mysticism for the contemporary Jewish seeker.

Epilogue

Green has been a collector of early American glass for many years. This is a part of his deeply American identity, but it also reflects his profound appreciation of aesthetic beauty and the mysterious qualities of glass. He will permit me, then, to conclude this introduction with a brief text attributed to the eighteenth-century mystic R. Moses Hayyim Luzzatto that employs a metaphor he will appreciate: 52 ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE

The principle is as follows: if you cover the window to a room with a glass of many different hues, the sun will strike it just as it is, without any differen- tiation. Yet a great many colors will be visible in the room. These come from rays of the sun itself—as if it too is polychromatic. This [vision of the colors] is all you can see when you are in the room. It is impossible to understand the ray of light in any other manner. The blessed Infinite One works in a similar way. The veil of tsimtsum has been placed before Him, and all the many colors depend on it. These are the laws of nature, from beginning to end. Of course, all of these things are quite different for the Infinite One, and we cannot ever understand them. But this we do know: the things we see in our reality are not the things as they truly are, for that is something much more sublime. They only appear thus because of the glass covering the sun . . . Understand this well.109 We see the world around us in all of its multiplicity and distinction. While many elements are in need of loving repair, it is also true that this imperfect world is suffused with a radiant and beautiful divine light expressed in many different hues. But only in those rare, fleeting moments of height- ened sensitivity do we remember our perception is based on the light flood- ing through a stained glass window. The polychromatic illusion of tsimtsum holds back Y-H-W-H’s infinite light, granting us the blessings of free choice and individual identity. Beyond this veil, or window, there shines an overwhelmingly brilliant light, which forever seeks out new hues and forms of expression. But perhaps Green would ask us to take this metaphor one step further. We are active partners in the projects of Creation, Revelation, and Redemption. It is not enough for us to study the contours of the stained glass window and thus come to realize that there is a hidden unity expressed in the polychromatic light. Through our quest, our deeds, and our theology, we become the glaziers of the Jewish tradition in each generation. We are charged with the task of recasting the glass window through which the sacred light of Y-H-W-H enters into our world.

109 Moshe Hayyim Luzzatto, Sefer Adir ba-Marom, vol. 2 (Jerusalem, 1988), 150–51. I have rendered this passage in the second person, as Green has often done in his own translations. Luzzatto’s description reads almost like a post-Lurianic version of Pardes Rimmonim 17d–18a; see Daniel Matt, The Essential Kabbalah: The Heart of Jewish Mysticism (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), 38. Three Warsaw Mystics

Arthur Green

Jewish religious thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is identified almost wholly with Jewish religious philosophy in the Western mode, written primarily in Germany and the United States. This is true of anthologies and studies of the subject as well as of course curricula in universities and seminaries. The background of these discussions is dominated by German Idealism, and particularly the thought of Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Various Jewish thinkers are examined in large part for their readings of Judaism in response to, and sometimes in rebellion against, these leading shapers of the continental philosophical mind in modern times. When Eastern Europeans are considered at all in discussion of Jewish intellectual modernity, it is generally secular national alternatives to religion that they are thought to offer. Pinsker, Ahad Ha-’Am, Borochov and others are treated in this way. But the religious thought of Polish and Russian Jewry in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries has seldom been considered or thought to have broader significance. After all, we are taught, this Jewry divided itself sharply between Orthodoxy and irreligion. Orthodoxy was partly that of the yeshiva world, where almost by definition there is no significant attention given to religious thought, since the intellectual focus is entirely upon Talmudic study. For Lithuanian Jewry the exception is the Mussar movement, which has indeed been the subject of significant research. Elsewhere in Eastern Europe the key influence in the religious world was Hasidism, but this movement had been spiritually creative, it is still often assumed, only in its first half-century, a period ending with the deaths of its third generation of leaders around 1815. The early period of Hasidism of course has been very widely treated by scholars. After that time, Hasidism was supposedly so wholly engaged in its life-and-death struggle against haskalah and every incursion of modernity that its energies were dissipated and its creative powers diminished. If it innovated, it

* This chapter was first published in “Three Warsaw Mystics” from Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 13 (pp. 1–58) by Mandel Institute for Jewish Studies, 1996. Reprinted with permission. Some footnotes have been updated. 54 Three Warsaw Mystics did so in a retrogressive way, re-reading its own earlier tradition to elimi- nate or lessen the religious radicalism of the BeSHT and the early Hasidic masters so that Hasidism would be a fitting weapon with which to fight off all modem, non-Jewish, and ‘external’ influences. But the picture in fact is much more complicated than that. There were important thinkers, both in the Hasidic and Mitnaggedic communities, a number of whose works are now being rediscovered and in some cases translated from the mostly Hebrew originals. Lines of influence can be traced among these works, and schools of thought begin to emerge. This paper seeks to trace one such school of thought, claiming a link between a leading figure of later Hasidism and two major figures in Jewish religious thought of the twentieth century. The three have in common an association with the city of Warsaw in the early decades of this century. The three figures who will be considered here are Judah Leib Alter of Gur (1847–1905), the second Gerer rebbe, best known by the title of his book Sefat Emet,1 Hillel Zeitlin (1871–1942), author, journalist, sometime prophet, and martyr of the Warsaw ghetto,2 and Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972), who emigrated to the United States in 1940 and is well-known as a leading

1 The biography of Judah Leib Alter has been treated (unscientifically) in Y.L. Levin’s ADMoRey Gur, Jerusalem 1977, and in the writings of A.Y. Bromberg, Sefat Emet and Ha-ADMOR mi-Gur, in his series Mi-Gedoley ha-Ḥasidut, Jerusalem 1949, now translated into English as Rebbes of Ger, New York (Artscroll) 1987. A more professional historical approach to Gur Hasidism is that of A.Z. Eshkoli’s chapter on Ḥasidut Polin, in I. Heil- prin’s Bet Yisra’el be-Polin, Jerusalem 1953, but he is entirely dismissive with regard to the Sefat Emet (p. 129). The thought of the Sefat Emet has been the subject of critical study by Y. Jacobson, ‘Exile and Redemption in Gur Hasidism’, Da’at 2–3 (1978–9), pp. 175–216; idem, ‘Truth and Faith in Gur Hasidic Thought’, Studies in Jewish Mysticsm, Philosophy, and Ethi- cal Literature Presented to Isaiah Tishby; Jerusalem 1986, pp. 593–616; idem and M. Piekarz, “The Inner Point” of the Admorim Gur and Alexander as a Reflection of Their Ability to Adjust to Changing Times’, ibid., pp. 617–660. Y. Alfasi’s Gur: Toledot Ḥasidut Gur (2nd ed., Tel Aviv 1978) is a combination of history/biography and treatment in an anthological way of certain selected topics. 2 Zeitlin has not yet been the subject of the full study that his work certainly deserves. There is an unpublished doctoral dissertation on Zeitlin’s early years (M. Waldoks, ‘Hillel Zeitlin, The Early Years’, Brandeis University 1984), a slim volume by a disciple (S.B. Urbach, Toledot Neshamah Aḥat, Israel (Shem we-Yafet) 1953, and several articles, most of which seem to have originated as memorial lectures. Among these is the study by Rivka Schatz, ‘Hillel Zeitlin’s Way to Jewish Mysticism’, published in Kivvunim 3 (1979), pp. 81–91. Important information can also be found in the memorial volume Sefer Zeitlin, edited by I. Wolfsberg and Z. Harkavy and published in 1945. See further the treatment by I. Rabinowich in Ha-Tekufah 32/33 (1948), pp. 848–76, and 34/35 (1950), pp. 843–848, including a bibliography by E.R. Malachi. Vivid descriptions of life in the Zeitlin household are found in Zeitlin’s son Elkhonen’s memoir, In a Literarishn Shtub, published posthumously in Buenos Aires, 1946. See now Arthur Green, Hasidic Spirituality for a New Era: The Religious Writings of Hillel Zeitlin, Classics of Western Spirituality, New York (Paulist Press) 2012. Three Warsaw Mystics 55

figure in American Jewish religious life in the mid-twentieth century.3 To this ‘school’ of enlightened (in several senses!) and increasingly universalist East European Jewish mystics, one might consider adding a few more names, including those of Abraham Isaac Kook, about whom a great deal has been written,4 and the less-known Kalonymous Kalman Shapira of Piaseczno, who also died in the Warsaw ghetto, as well as several others.5 From the standpoint of closeness and opportunity for intellectual influence, it is not surprising that the three figures to be discussed here are linked with one another. Young Heschel, son of a Ukrainian Hasidic rebbe recently relocated to Warsaw, was educated as a child prodigy in the Gerer beys medresh and under the watchful eye of Rabbi Abraham Mordecai of Gur, son of the Sefat Emet.6 Heschel’s childhood tutor, Bezalel Levin, who had a great influence upon him, was a Kotsker/Gerer hasid, as was his Talmud teacher Menahem Zemba, also well-known for his later role in

3 A great deal has been written on Heschel, both on his theology and on the role he played in the moral leadership of American Jewry, particularly during the 1960s. A full bibliography through the early 1980s is found in J.C. Merkle’s The Genesis of Faith, New York 1985, pp. 271–278. A noteworthy later publication is D.J. Moore’s The Human and the Holy, New York 1989. Special mention should also be made of the many articles (listed by Merkle) written on Heschel by E. Kaplan and F. Rothschild. Kaplan is the author of a biography published by Yale University Press (vol. 1, 1998; vol. 2, 2007). I am most grateful to him for having shared with me his chapters on Heschel’s early life, and I have drawn upon those materials in the brief characterizations offered here. The reading of Heschel’s poetry and thought is, however, entirely my own. I am also grateful to Avraham Holtz for sharing with me his memories of Heschel and Aaron Zeitlin during their years at the Jew- ish Theological Seminary. 4 S.H. Bergman was the first to violate the Western bias in modern Jewish theology by including treatment of Rav Kook in his Faith and Reason: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought, Washington (B’nai Brith Hillel) 1961. At that point the only English-language work on Kook was J. Agus’ Banner of Jerusalem, New York 1946. In recent years there has been much written on Kook, including the appearance in English of two important monographs: Z. Yaron’s The Philosophy of Rabbi Kook, Jerusalem 1974 (Heb); 1991 (Eng.), and B. Ish-Shalom’s Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook: Between Rationalism and Mysticism, Albany 1993. The best English selection of Kook’s writings is that by B.Z. Bokser, published in the Classics of Western Spirituality series, New York 1978. A collection of essays, The World of Rav Kook’s Thought, edited by B. Ish-Shalom and S. Rosenberg, was published in English in 1991. Of course Kook was a Lithuanian rather than a Polish Jew, and Hasidism played a somewhat lesser role in shaping his mystical thought. A biography of Kook by Yehudah Mirsky, Rav Kook: Mystic in a Time of Revolution, was published by Yale in 2014. 5 Shapira has been studied by N. Polen in his The Holy Fire: The Teachings of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, Northvale, N.J. ( Jason Aronson) 1994, based on a Ph.D. dissertation at Boston University, as well as by M. Piekarz in Ḥasidut Polin, Jerusalem 1990, pp. 373–411 and passim, and in his article ‘The Last Hasidic Literary Testimony in Poland: The Teachings of the Rabbi of Piaseczno in the Warsaw Ghetto’, Yad va-Shem Studies (1979) (Hebrew). Several collections of his teachings have appeared in English translation. 6 This is partly demonstrated and partly assumed in the Kaplan biography mentioned above, n. 3. 56 Three Warsaw Mystics the ghetto era. Hillel Zeitlin, originally from Belorussia, made his home in Warsaw from 1907 until his death. Zeitlin was a regular visitor at the table of Heschel’s uncle the Novominsker rebbe in Warsaw, where the young Heschel spent a great deal of his time, especially after his own father died in 1917. It can be safely assumed that the two met there and that the uncon- ventionally pious and ever-seeking Zeitlin must have impressed young Heschel, about to seek his own unique path of religiosity outside the confines of Hasidic orthodoxy. As a journalist with interests in both religious and Jewish communal affairs, Zeitlin had a good deal of contact, not all of it positive, with the Gerer establishment in Warsaw and its nascent Agudath Israel movement.7 Both the Sefat Emet and Zeitlin were non-Lubavitchers who had clearly read and been influenced by the thought of Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of the Lubavitch/HaBaD dynasty. Sefat Emet is quoted, though rather rarely, in Heschel’s theological writings.8 Heschel devoted a short article to a Yiddish manuscript of portions of the Sefat Emet found in the YIVO archive in New York, a subject to which he seems to have hoped to return.9 In later years Heschel would be a close colleague of Zeitlin’s son, the Yiddish and Hebrew poet Aaron Zeitlin, at the Jewish Theological Seminary. During the Seminary years Heschel would often slip away from his colleagues and join Friday evening or shabbat afternoon prayers at the Gerer shtibl on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where he could sometimes be found, in the dimming light of a Shabbat afternoon, poring over the pages of the Sefat Emet. Involved as he was with America, including both its religious character and the great moral/ethical crises it faced, Heschel never abandoned contact with the remains of the Warsaw Jewry in whose midst he had grown and been nourished. But what is it that these three figures have in common on the intellectual or spiritual plane that allows us to conceive of them as a ‘school’ of religious thought? First, to state what may seem obvious, they are all mystics. Each of them is shaped by inner experiences or by a profound inner awareness of the direct presence of God, a presence that shatters the bounds of our ordinary way of seeing reality. God is the only true Being, before whom all other existence pales by comparison, or from whose existence all other being needs to be renewed in each moment. God is not an idea, not an abstraction, but a, indeed the, living reality. These formulations, reshaped

7 See the bitter reflections found in his fragmentary diary from the days of the First World War, published in his ‘Al Gevul Shney ‘Olamot; Tel Aviv 1965, p. 185. 8 Cf. e.g. God in Search of Man, New York 1955, p. 70, n. 7. 9 ‘Unknown Documents in the History of Hasidism’ (Yiddish), YIVO Bleter 36 (1952), pp. 113–135. My student Ariel Mayse, along with Daniel Reiser, has picked up this thread in several recent articles. Three Warsaw Mystics 57 by each of these thinkers to fit their varied theological styles, derive both from their own experience and from the literature and experience of the early Hasidic masters, a key source of inspiration for all three writers. Each of the three further labors under the burden of living as a Jewish mystic in the period after Kabbalah has run its course. These are post- Kabbalistic Jewish mystics. All of them study the sources, particularly the Zohar itself, which has a major role in each of their literary oeuvres. But none of them thinks or describes his experience primarily in Kabbalistic language: sefirot, partsufim, kawwanot, and tiqqunim (at least in the true Kabbalistic sense) are almost entirely absent from their writings. In Heschel’s case there seems to be a strong avoidance of Kabbalistic language altogether. But this in itself is an old tradition, cloaking mystic insight in the normative vocabulary of tradition, one that has its roots in the MaHaRaL of Prague, not surprisingly a major influence on the Sefat Emet as well as on Heschel. Each of our three figures is a mystic in search of a new (and yet deeply Jewish) religious language, one in which to express and share with others the insights and experiences that have shaped his own encounter with the divine Presence. The joining of these three figures still remains something of a shock to the system. It posits, first of all, that a latter-day Hasidic master had something original to contribute in the realm of religious thought, a notion by no means thoroughly accepted in the scholarly community. It also posits a continuity, rather than a radical break, between late Hasidic thought and at least one major figure in modern Jewish theology, suggesting a broader re-examination of such influences as well. But before we can offer specula- tions of such a general sort, it behooves us to discuss certain key themes as they are found in each of these thinkers, with an eye toward the question of parallels and possible influences. In each case we will be interested in examining the nature of the writer’s mysticism, the limits of the mystical approach, and the relationship between mystical insight and the personalist religious language of Judaism.

Judah Leib Alter of Gur (1847–1905)

The author of Sefat Emet was the grandson of Isaac Meir Rothenberg (1799–1866), founder of the Hasidic dynasty associated with the town Gora Kalwaria10 near Warsaw. Isaac Meir, often known by the title of his book

10 Two interesting studies on the Jewish community and Hasidic court of Gora Kalwaria, based partly on the surviving physical remains, have been published by Eleonora Bergman of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. The first, ‘Gora Kalwaria: The Impact of a Hasidic Cult on the Urban Landscape of a Small Polish Town’, appeared in Polin 5 (1990), 58 Three Warsaw Mystics

Ḥiddushey ha-RIM, was an accomplished Talmudist and legal authority. He belonged to the group of Hasidic masters in the movement’s second period11 who combined Hasidic leadership with a significant reputation for Talmudic learning, including publication in both fields.12 Though he had been a part of the Hasidic circle around Simha Bunem of Przysucha, he is chiefly known as a disciple and the leading successor of Menahem Mendel of Kotsk (Kock; 1787–1859), one of the most important and enigmatic figures among Polish Jewry in the mid-nineteenth century.13 Kotsk is partly to be seen as a puritanical reform movement within Hasidism, the most influential of several that have come to be during the course of the movement’s history.14 The Kotsker rebbe conducted relentless war against sham piety, especially that of a Hasidism defined by ‘style’ and outward manifestations of religiosity. He dismissed as false any display of extreme acts of piety such as were not required by Jewish law. One aspect of this campaign was denunciation and even mocking of those who claimed to have attained understanding of mystic truths or to have achieved high levels of Kabbalistic knowledge. Such understanding was beyond the ken of our generation, the Kotsker taught, and claims to the contrary were to be treated with the greatest suspicion. The chief object of study among the Kotsker’s disciples was nigleh, the ‘revealed’ Torah, consisting of Talmudic and later legal sources, peppered with an occasional sharp flash of spiritual or moral insight into the seemingly dense and often obscure matters at

pp. 3–23, and the second (in Hebrew), in Hasidism in Poland (Hebrew Title: Ṣaddiqim we- Anshey Ma’aseh); Jerusalem 1994, pp. 111–117. 11 I divide the history of Hasidism into four periods, a framework I hope to explicate in writing elsewhere. The second period extends from 1815 to 1881. This is the period of Hasidism’s great success and expansion, of its recogniton as the leading dynamic force within Jewish Orthodoxy throughout most of Eastern Europe, and also the period of its struggle with the Haskalah. 12 Two other well-known members of this group are R. Hayyim of Sanz (Novy Sacz; 1793–1876) and the third leader of the Lubavitch dynasty, R. Menahem Mendel Schneer- sohn, known as the Ṣemah Ṣedeq (1789–1866). All three of these are as famed for their halakhic writings as they are for their ḥasidut. 13 On Kotsk see Heschel’s two-volume Yiddish work Kotsk: In Gerangel far Emesdikeyt, Tel Aviv 1973. While there is no book by the Kotsker, a great many sayings and brief teachings are attributed to him. Many of these are collected in Emet we-Emunah, Jerusalem 1948, and Siaḥ Sarfey Qodesh, Lodz 1928–31. See also P.Z. Glicksman, Der Kotsker Rebbe, Piotrkow 1938 (rep. Israel, 1972); Kotsker Mayses, Warsaw 1924, and Hekhal Kotsk (2. vols.), Tel Aviv 1959. 14 Two others of note are Bratslav, about which I have written at length in Tormented Master: A Life of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, University, Alabama (University of Alabama Press) 1979, and the twentieth century movement founded by R. Arele Roth, first in Hun- gary and later in Jerusalem. Three Warsaw Mystics 59 hand. Kotsk may thus be seen as an extreme case of Hasidism cutting itself off from its earlier moorings in the Jewish mystical tradition. Kabbalists were to be found among ḥasidim in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, but not in Kotsk. The Sefat Emet, heir both to Kotsk and to the earlier Hasidic tradition, was a mystic but not a Kabbalist. Only very seldom in the five volumes of his collected homilies15 do we find him referring to the sefirot in anything but a psychological or moralizing way. There is no reference to the four worlds, the partsufim, or other key features of the language associated with later Kabbalah and present in the writings of the Lubavitch and Zydachov/ Komarno schools of Hasidism, which may at least in this sense be called ‘Kabbalistic’. True, R. Judah Leib often quotes ‘the holy Zohar’, and it is clear that he studied it, as he did the Midrash Rabbah, as he prepared his weekly discourses. But the Zohar provides him essentially with homiletic material that he uses or sets aside at will, rather than with a full system of thought or symbolic expression. Most importantly, the Zohar provides an ancient and venerated example of a spiritualized reading of the parashah, which is precisely what the Sefat Emet is seeking to create for his own listeners and readers. But even if not a Kabbalist, R. Judah Leib remains very much a mystic. He believes fervently that the most real existence—sometimes he insists that it is the only real existence—is that of the innermost point, the source and true essence of all that is. Everything else is mere garb, the infinitely has chosen to cloak itself. This נקודה פנימיות varied costumes with which the term, offered in typically poor Hasidic Hebrew,16 is key to his religious self- expression, and comes up hundreds of times within his writings. It may be translated as ‘innermost point’, ‘core of being’, ‘inward reality’. Sometimes it would be the נקודת החִ יות ;’life-force‘ ,חיות appears combined with the term ‘inner life-point’. Having dispensed with the subtle intricacies of Kabbalistic language, he uses such simple terms to verbalize the basic mystic insight in most direct and sometimes startling ways.

15 Piotrkow-Krakow, 1905–08 and frequently reprinted. There are two further volumes of teachings from R. Judah Leib’s youth, before he began to serve as rebbe. These Liqquṭim, as they are called, were published in Piotrkow, in 1934 and 1936, and reprinted in New York 1957 and Jerusalem 1970. There is also a Sefat Emet commentary on the Psalms, partly an original work and partly selected by a grandson from the Torah homilies. The edition I have seen is London 1952. I do not know if there was a prewar Polish printing. A commentary on Avot was published in Piotrkow, n.d., reprinted in Landsberg in 1948. —נקודת הפנימיות inward point’—or something like‘—נקודה פנימית Does he intend 16 ‘the point of inwardness’? 60 Three Warsaw Mystics

All things are brought into being by Him.17 But the point is hidden and we have to expand it. This depends upon the point within us, for the more we expand our own souls, the more God is revealed to us in every place. This is the meaning of ‘When Y-H-W-H your God widens your border’ (Deut. 12:20)— when the point spreads forth and expands throughout the human soul.18 The ‘jump’ from speaking of Y-H-W-H as Creator to ‘the point’ within all things takes place almost too quickly, here as frequently in this book of briefly summarized homilies19 rather than clearly argued theological discourses. But ‘God revealed in every place’ is clearly identical to the expanded ‘point’. The relationship of both of these to Y-H-W-H is less than clear. Let us try another passage. Here Torah is depicted as God’s agent of creation, a well-known Midrashic motif: Torah gives life to all of creation, measuring it out to each creature. But that which garbs itself within a particular place to give it (נקודה חִ יות) life-point life has no measure of its own, for it is beyond both time and nature. It was of this point that the rabbis said: ‘It [“He?”] is the place of the world, but the world is not its [“His?”] place . . .’20 This is true of the human soul as well; it too has no measure. Scripture refers to the One who ‘forms the person’s spirit within’ (Zech 12:1). The more one transcends the body, the more one is capable of receiving soul. But the soul itself is without limit. The same is true of the world’s soul, since the person is a microcosm.21 The Midrashic passage quoted is the locus classicus in rabbinic sources for theologies of emanation and ultimately for the panentheistic position of early Hasidic theology. It is universally understood as applying to God: ‘He is the place of the world . . .’ Reading it here in reference to the inner point, we come very close to an identification of God with the nequdah. The point is infinite, beyond measure or limit. It remains unclear how aware the Sefat Emet is of the paradox, or perhaps the mathematical ingenuity, of his claim.

probably a play on the name of God. Frequent language—הוית כל הדברים ממנו 17 plays make translation of the Sefat Emet quite difficult. 18 Sefat Emet 5:54. All references to the Sefat Emet are paginated according to the original (and frequently reprinted) Warsaw/Piotrkow 1906 edition. 19 Like most Hasidic works, the Sefat Emet consists of brief Hebrew digests of longer oral sermons that were originally preached in Yiddish. In fact the article to which I refer in note 9 includes Heschel’s discussion about a partial Yiddish manuscript of the Sefat Emet, found in the YIVO archives. No one has yet worked on this manuscript or compared it to the Hebrew version. 20 Bereshit Rabbah 68:6. 21 Sefat Emet 1:9. This passage is discussed by Piekarz, op. cit. (above, n. 1), p. 635. Three Warsaw Mystics 61

A point is by definition infinitesimal; it indeed is smaller than any measure. To say that this infinite smallness is in fact infinite vastness, a limitless Oneness that contains all the world within itself, would be a formulation hardly surprising to either Kabbalist or contemporary physicist. Such a paradoxical formulation is precisely typical of the HaBaD sources that seem to stand in the background of this formulation by the Sefat Emet. There are indeed passages in Sefat Emet where one has the impression of reading a theistic mystic, one who believes in a transcendent and unknown God who has allowed Himself to become manifest in the inner point, this manifestation being knowable to those who turn away from externals, especially of the corporeal sort, and open themselves to seeing what lies within. But in other passages the Sefat Emet seems much closer to a panentheistic theology. Here the discovery of the inner point is a direct experience of knowing God, and thus of re-effecting the cosmic unity. In these passages no distinction appears to be made between Y-H-W-H, the innermost point of all existence, the ḥiyyut or life-energy that sustains the universe, and the cosmic soul. Most commonly, the Sefat Emet gives the impression of a work that treads carefully, seeking to maintain the theistic language of normative Jewish piety to express a theology that leans heavily toward the panentheistic side. Let us have a look at another passage, this time along with its homiletic setting, a comment on the passage immediately preceding Jacob’s first meeting with Rachel at the well: He looked, and there was a well in the field, and there were three flocks of sheep lying down by it, for from that well the flocks were watered. But the stone was large on the mouth of the well. When all the flocks were gathered there, they would roll the stone off the mouth of the well. (Gen. 29:2–3) This reality, the well in the field, is found within every thing and within every one of Israel. Every thing contains a life-giving point that sustains it. Even that which appears to be as neglected as a field has such a hidden point within it. The human mind is able to intuitively know this always. This [knowledge] is the three flocks of sheep, which stand for wisdom, understanding, and awareness. With wisdom and intellect a person understands this inwardness. Within all things [dwells] ‘the power of the Maker within the made’. But ‘the stone was large on the mouth of the well’. When corporeality spreads forth there is hiding; intellect is not always joined to deed. The answer to this lies in ‘were gathered there’—all one’s desires and every part of the body and its limbs have to be gathered together as one places oneself in God’s hands before each deed. Then ‘they would roll the stone’. You might also read ‘they were gathered’ to mean that you should join yourself to all of Israel. For when all of creation is united with God, the 62 Three Warsaw Mystics

hiding will end. This will occur in the future, may it come in our days! Mean- while, we Jews gather everything to Him . . .22 Here the homilist uses allegory to an extent somewhat unusual in the Hasidic sources, but let us not allow that to distract us from the essential teaching. The field stands for inwardness, the unadorned inner simplicity that lies within all things. At its center is a life-giving well. The ‘life-giving is in everything, both in seemingly inanimate ’(נקודה נותנת חיים) point objects and in the human (or Jewish) soul.23 The point is described by a phrase familiar to the reader of earlier Hasidic sources, koaḥ ha-po’el ba-nif al, ‘the power of the Maker within the made’.24 The phrase indicates a subject-object distinction between God and the creation, the nequdah serving as the link between the two, or the continuing presence of the Creator within the world’s innermost self. This situation as described is not the ideal or ultimate one. The hope is with God’, a day toward (מתאחדת) for the day when ‘all creation is united which Israel are actively striving. At that time one can only imagine that the separate existence of all things as well as individual souls will cease, since all will be reunited with the one. But is that unity only a goal for the anticipated future? Here is another passage, also, as it happens, describing a field (the physicist might also be interested in these descriptions of ‘point’ as ‘field’!), but one where cautious speech is set aside, and a more radically mystical and even acosmic view of reality is proclaimed: The Sabbath table-song of Rabbi Isaac Luria contains the phrase ‘To come into the entrance-ways of the apple field25 (a symbolic term for shekhinah or divine presence)’. Why does he refer to the ‘entrance-ways’? Does one not come [directly] into the apple field? The truth is that this apple field is everywhere, as Scripture says: ‘The whole earth is filled with His glory!’ (Is. 6:3) This is also taught with regard to the verse: ‘See, the smell of my son is like the smell of the field’ (Gen. 27:27).

22 Sefat Emet 1:124. The well in the field is already identified with ‘the holy apple field’ by Zohar 1:151b. 23 The Sefat Emet regularly identifies the human soul with the Jewish soul, following an old Midrashic precedent. He seems to evince no interest in the spiritual capabilities of non-Jewish humans. In this he remains quite in line with most of earlier Hasidic literature. 24 Rivka Schatz, in her edition of Maggid Devaraw le-Ya‘aqov, p. 19, attributes this phrase’s origin to Judah Halevi’s Kuzari 5:20. Y. Jacobson, in Da’at 2:3, p. 177, n. 10, suggests Sefer ha-Yashar as the source. A full history of this usage would prove interesting. 25 The Lurianic table-songs have been explicated by Y. Liebes in Molad 4 (1972), pp. 540–555. On the apple field image see also Liebes’ discussion in his Studies in the Zohar, Albany 1993, p. 175, n. 99. Three Warsaw Mystics 63

But the essential task of worship is the opening of this point. On the Sab- bath that gate is indeed open, as is written: ‘The gate to the inner courtyard will be closed on the six workdays and open on the Sabbath and the New Moon’ (Ezek. 46:1) . . . Thus it is easy to experience holiness on the Sabbath. In the same way, we should understand that the glory of God’s kingdom is everywhere, even though it is unseen. This is the faith that every Jew has in God’s oneness. The meaning of ‘One’ is that there is nothing except God Himself; God is the all. Even though we are incapable of understanding this properly, we still need to believe it. This faith will lead us to truth . . .26 The point is that just as God is present throughout the week as well as on the Sabbath, but Israel are open to that presence in a special way on shabbat, so too is God present throughout the spatial realm, even if our own ‘Temple gate’ is to be found only in Jerusalem or the Holy Land. In this sense the Sefat Emet is a good reader of ḤaBaD thought, with its recognition (based in turn on Cordovero and Maimonides) that divinity is equally present throughout the universe. Only our capacity to attain access to that presence is varied in time and space, limited chiefly by our lack of understanding or our only partial subjugation of the lower self. Typically, the Sefat Emet simplifies and presents these ideas in his rather direct and non-dialectical way.27 A careful reading of this passage shows no room for a distinction between ‘God’ and the inner point; we turn in when we are open to inwardness, and there we discover that nothing but the One exists. That One is of course God, the one whose existence makes all other ‘existence’ pale into nothingness. This is the classic acosmic position as taught by Shne’ur Zalman of Liadi and Aaron of Starroselje. The interest of the Sefat Emet in mystical language is not only theoretical, nor is it merely an accident of his Hasidic tradition. R. Judah Leib should not be depicted only as one who seeks to set out a particular position among mystical doctrines. On the contrary, the Sefat Emet is very much a living religious document, and one can feel the enthusiasm with which its author keeps renewing his emphasis on inward vision and the point within. Unlike most Hasidic collections, his book is presented as a series of dated homilies on each Torah portion and festivals over the period of some thirty-three years of his ‘reign’ as Gerer rebbe. If we think of his table-talks (again, in their original oral Yiddish version that lies behind the

26 Sefat Emet 1:247. Emphasis mine. 27 For a full discussion of the HaBaD idea of the equal presence of divinity throughout alt worlds and the implication of that reality for Jewish theology, see Rachel Elior, The Paradoxical Ascent to God, Albany 1993, p. 67ff. 64 Three Warsaw Mystics

Hebrew) as educational sessions at which he was inculcating values into his assembled ḥasidim, we cannot but marvel at how frequently he comes back to the themes of inwardness and spirituality. The reading of Ezekiel 46:1 quoted here must occur a hundred times in the Sefat Emet, even if alluded to only briefly. The same is true of other references to inwardness and the inner source of life. Especially given the battles with secularization and modernity that Hasidism was fighting in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the emphasis he chooses to place on this spiritual theme is absolutely remarkable. It is by no means clear that such emphasis was to his ‘advantage’ in this struggle. Ger was working hard to achieve dominance over Jewish religious life in central Poland; this included the building of yeshivot, educational reform from within, and efforts to overcome remaining religious resistance to Hasidism. The constant spiritualist refrain was addressed primarily to his own ḥasidim, as though to regularly remind them that all their efforts were for the sake of this higher goal of mystical consciousness, one that was not to be lost while at work on building the earthly trappings of a powerful religious movement. If he wanted to remind them of how their value system was essentially different from that of the non-Hasidic—including the non-Hasidic Orthodox—world, he did so by this constant emphasis on inward spirituality as the true goal. There are also passages in the text where R. Judah Leib speaks out quite directly as a mystic. Even through the veiling so familiar in Jewish sources, one can hear in these words an echo of someone speaking of his own religious experience: ‘All the people saw the voices [lit.: the thunder]’ (Ex. 20:15). The meaning is like that of: ‘I am the Lord thy God’ (ibid., 20:2) [in the singular]. Each one of Israel saw the root of his own life-force. With their very eyes they saw the part of the divine soul above that lives in each of them. They had no need to ‘believe’ the commandments, because they saw the voices. That’s the way it is when God speaks.28 The religious consciousness expressed here remains aware of divine transcendence, but in a way that brooks no contradiction to the immediate presence of God within both world and self. It is still the transcendent voice that speaks the words: ‘I am the Lord thy God’. But as that voice is spoken we translate it into a commandment that simultaneously demands and affirms our ability to discover divinity within our own souls. This is the

28 Sefat Emet 2:91. Three Warsaw Mystics 65 transforming power of divine speech, which is able to address each of us in an intimate and unique way. The transcendence one can speak of in this context is surely not about the remoteness of God, nor can it be characterized in Rudolph Otto’s phrase as the transcendence of the ‘wholly other’. God is not ‘wholly other’ here, for something of God’s own undivided Self fills both human self and world. That transcendence remains a quality of this all and ever-present God is a matter of wonder and mystery, expressible more by allusion than by any specific theological formulation. ‘I will sing unto the Lord for He is exalted, exalted’ (Ex. 15:1). The transcen- of God cannot be conceived. Each conception that we attain (רוממות) dence only shows us that God remains beyond it. Thus it is written: ‘You are tran- .forever, O Lord’ (Ps. 92:9); Your power remains supreme (מרום) scendent This is the meaning of ‘exalted, exalted’—the only exaltedness and transcendence to which we can bear witness is that He remains raised high and exalted beyond all of our conceptualizations. In the book Qol Simḥah [by his teacher Simhah Bunem of Przysucha], in the section Ḥayyey Sarah, the author interprets a Midrash on the verse ‘O Lord my God, You are very great’ (or ‘large’; Ps. 104:1). His form is larger than the tablet [on which it is drawn], referring to the parable of a sage who designs a wondrous instrument, for which everyone offers him great praise. Then along comes one person [of greater understanding] who says: ‘The wisdom of this sage is surely much greater than the skill displayed here’. But it was by means of the instrument that they had become aware of the sage’s brilliance. Thus we come to know God through all the wisdom of Creation, but He remains high and exalted beyond all that. So our understanding of God’s blessed wisdom is that He is exalted beyond [our understanding]. This is the meaning of ‘exalted, exalted’.29 This teaching, which may reflect the indirect influence of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav,30 understands God as infinitely transcendent mind, but mind that is nevertheless manifest in all of God’s works, and attainable only through our appreciation of them. In a broader sense, we may see the influence of an intellectualist mysticism here, a tradition reaching back into both the philosophical and mystical works of medieval Jewry, and in turn to their sources in Neoplatonic and Aristotelian thought. God is always transcendent because the human mind always and necessarily fails to fully

29 Sefat Emet 2:80. 30 On Nahman’s view of God as One who constantly eludes comprehensibility see the sources quoted in my Tormented Master (above, n. 14), p. 292ff. 66 Three Warsaw Mystics

apprehend that which is present within it and around it. This failure seems to be a necessary condition of our corporeal state, one that great minds and souls can push back quite considerably by their lives of self-negation, but that cannot be overcome entirely. God does, however, allow us very significant glimpses into that total human transcendence of our intellectual limitations by the regular gift of the Sabbath and its extra measure of soul, a ‘gift without limits’ and ‘a foretaste of the world-to-come’ that comes to us from the world beyond. The Jew knows two types of consciousness, that of the weekday and the special consciousness of shabbat, the time of the extra soul. ‘Six days shall you labor and do all your work’ means that on the weekdays we are supposed to seek out God through the things of this world. Our weekday task is to discover the wisdom of the Sage by appreciating the wonders of the instrument He has fashioned, to return to the language of our parable. That weekday conciousness has something of ‘natural religion’ about it, an appreciation of transcendent mystery within the natural order itself. In fact ‘miracle’ and ‘nature’ should be joined in this mind-set, reflecting together the power of the Creator: On the verse ‘But if you should say: ‘What will we eat in the seventh year, since we neither plant nor reap our harvest?’ I shall command My blessing upon you . . .’ (Lev. 25:20–21), the author of the book No’am Elimelech31 quotes a comment by his brother. He said that it is because of the asking that God will have to command His blessing. The meaning is as follows. What kind of question is ‘What will we eat?’ The One who provided life itself will provide food as well! But this would make the existence of Israel dependent upon a miracle, and not every generation is deserving of miracles. It is of this [situation] that they ask: ‘What will we eat?’ The answer is that sustenance will come about through the blessing [of abundance], and such blessing is partly natural. Israel should really know that miracle and nature are all one. In fact there is nothing so miraculous and wonderful as nature itself, the greatest wonder we can apprehend. When this faith is clear to us, we no longer are concerned with being sustained by miracles. Once we say: ‘What will we eat?’ [realizing that we cannot count on miracles], the answer comes ‘I shall command My blessing . . .’ And in fact the generations when miracles occurred were firm in this faith, and to them nature and miracles were all the same. That is why God performed miracles for them.32

31 Cf. No’am Elimelech, be-har, ed. G. Nigal, Jerusalem 1978, p. 350. 32 Sefat Emet 3:190f. Emphasis mine. Three Warsaw Mystics 67

It may be said that there is nothing new about this sense of the natural world as the greatest of miracles. The ‘amidah prayer, after all, itself reflecting the Biblical Psalter, thanks God for ‘Your miracles that are with us daily, and Your wonders at all times; evening, morning, and afternoon’. The sense of wonder, as Zeitlin and Heschel will both remind us, informs all of religious life. But there does seem to be something added in the claim that God would perform miracles (the out-of-the-ordinary sort) only for a generation that could take such miracles completely in its stride, seeing them as no different than the process of nature itself. It bespeaks a religious consciousness so elevated that it knows both the seemingly ordinary and the unique as events that equally bear witness to God’s presence within them. It is that sort of religious mind that the Sefat Emet seeks to cultivate in those who hear (or read) him. Insofar as the Sefat Emet is concerned, it is clearly Jews alone who have the power to cultivate such a way of thinking. Only Jews are able to discover the structure of God’s Torah, in fact the very structure by which the world was formed, within their own souls, since only the Jews have accepted God’s Torah. This remains true, however, of all Jews, no matter how far they think they may be from God or from Torah. The words of Torah cannot be entirely erased from the tablets that lie deep within the Jewish heart.33 Like most of the Eastern European Jews whom he led, R. Judah Leib had rather low regard for and little interest in the spiritual lives of non-Jews. He frequently makes the jump from ‘person’ to ‘Jew’ without any seeming self- consciousness. He has a strong sense of Jewish vocation as God’s witnessing people in the world, the ones who call forth the divine presence in all of Creation by discovering it within their own souls. There seems to be much influence of Judah Halevi in the frequent references here to the mission of Israel, perhaps conveyed through the writings of the MaHaRaL of Prague and Shne’ur Zalman of Liadi. The unique place that Israel has in the human community and shabbat has in the realm of time is paralleled by the unique sanctity of Ereṣ Yisra’el in the realm of space. Judah Leib is fascinated by the claim of Sefer Yeṣirah

33 The above-quoted article by M. Piekarz (see n. 1) views this as the essential purpose of the idea of the ‘inner point’: it served as a strategy to continue to claim the loyalty of Jews who in their outward lives were no longer loyal to tradition. I would lend greater weight to the fact that the inner point is found throughout nature, not just in the Jewish soul (a point acknowledged but not emphasized by Piekarz), and would see the nequdah penimit chiefly as the basis on which R. Judah Leib sought to construct a mystical or neo- BeSHTian theology for an age that had little patience for the complexities of Kabbalistic language. 68 Three Warsaw Mystics that the three realms of space, time, and soul (‘olam, shanah, nefesh) are parallel to one another, and a great many of his teachings adumbrate this theme in one form or another. These are the three dimensions in which the holiness of the nequdah comes to be manifest in the world. Among souls, it is those of Israel, or sometimes specifically that of Moses or of the High Priest that reflect the inner holiness of existence; among times it is the holy days of the Jewish calendar, but especially shabbat (the holiness of which is not derivative from Israel’s, since it was declared holy by God at creation and its arrival is not determined by calendrical considerations); among places it is the Holy Land, Jerusalem, the Temple or the Tabernacle that is the manifestation of the nequdah, brimming with life-energy and bathed in holiness. It is by working through these three categories that holiness can be brought from abstraction into real and daily existence. The flow of the passages [in the Torah-portion Emor]: from the holiness of priests and the High Priest among all souls; ‘You shall sanctify him . . . for he offers the food of your God’ (Lev. 21:8). Because the priest draws the souls of Israel near to the blessed Holy One. The same is true of the festivals [that follow the discussion of priests], ‘callings of holiness’; they too draw the souls upward and near. That is why it says: ‘You shall sanctify him’. The same is true in the dimension of space; the Temple and the Holy of Holies raise souls up to take greater care for their holiness.34 Regarding the Sabbatical Year: ‘The land shall rest’ (Lev. 25:2). The Children of Israel were created in order to redeem space and time, as it is written: ‘I made the land and created man upon it’ (Is. 45:12). ‘Man’ here refers to Israel as in: ‘You are [called] “man” [and the nations of the world are not called “man”]’. Just as there is redemption in the soul, so ‘shall you give redemption to the land’ (Lev. 25:24). Just as Israel were previously mixed in among the nations in general, and were only later chosen . . . and at the Exodus they were redeemed physically and spiritually, so too was the land of Israel formerly under the seven nations, and later it proceeded to become the Land of Israel; that is both a physical and a spiritual redemption. The same is true of time. Previously the holy times were all mixed together [with other times]. Later they were purified, sabbaths and festivals drawn out of the category of times. This happened by means of the redemption of Israel. That is why the festivals are ‘in memory of the Exodus from Egypt’, since it was through the Exodus that their potential light was realized . . .35 Here the emphasis seems rather clearly to be placed upon Israel. It is their soul-work to raise all things up to God or to uncover the presence of divinity as ḥiyyut or nequdah penimit throughout the twin domains of time and

34 Sefat Emet 3:186. 35 Sefat Emet 3:197. Three Warsaw Mystics 69 space. But depending upon the homiletical need, sometimes one of the other two dimensions is given priority, and Israel’s holiness follows along with it. In the verse: ‘The land upon which you lie’ (Gen. 28:13). Our sages said that the blessed Holy One folded the entire Land of Israel beneath him. We have already written frequently that an innermost point exists within space, time, and soul. [This point] includes all, and is referred to in the verse: ‘In every place where I mention My name’ (Ex. 20:24). That is the Temple, which includes all places; that is why it is called ‘every place’. All of space is folded up within that single place. On the verse ‘The Lord God created man from the dust of the earth’ (Gen. 2:7) it is said that He gathered his dust from the four directions, or else from that place of which it says ‘You shall make an altar of earth’ (Ex. 20:24). See RaSHI’s comment there. But the two interpretations are now one, since this dust [of the altar] contains the entire earth! Jacob was as beautiful [i.e. perfect] as Adam, and that is why it is said that ‘he reached the place’ (Gen. 28:11)—he reached that place which belongs to him. It did not say which place, since that place contains all places. The same is true of Jacob’s soul, which contained all souls, just as Adam’s had. Only in Jacob’s case the good souls had been separated [and they] alone [were present]. The same is true in time, since shabbat contains all the six weekdays as we have said elsewhere.36 Or we might choose an example where sacred time has the primary role: ‘God blessed the seventh day’ (Gen. 2:3). The Midrash says that He blessed it with lights. ‘The light in a person’s face on a weekday is not the same as it is on the sabbath’. This refers to the revelation of inwardness, that of which it says ‘A man’s wisdom lights up his face’ (Eccl. 8:1)—that is the revelation of the extra soul. For the inwardness of space [lit.: ‘the world’] as a whole is also revealed on the holy sabbath. Thus it says: ‘And there was light’, which the sages said was stored away for the righteous [in the world to come]. But ‘Let there be light’ meant that [divine light] should be present in every particular [of creation]; all of creation has a part in this light, except that it is hidden. But on shabbat something of this light is revealed. The weekdays are compared to an opaque glass, but the sabbath to a shining one. That is why there is a commandment to light candles for the sabbath, to show that light is revealed on the holy sabbath. Israel look forward to this holy light and feel the darkness of this world . . .37 There is something surprisingly modern about the use of these three categories, even though cloaked in the timeworn methods of homiletic association. There are passages where R. Judah Leib seems as much

36 Sefat Emet 1:138. 37 Sefat Emet 1:13. 70 Three Warsaw Mystics

phenomenologist of religion, a role to be taken up more self-consciously by both Zeitlin and Heschel, as he does Hasidic preacher. He understands the interplay between space and time as realms for potential spiritualization as well as the fact that the difference between them is nullified when both turn out to be mere garb for the self-manifestation of the nequdah that underlies and animates them. It would seem that the mystic, understanding that all things are one in God (or that the same nequdah is the being that underlies all, to use his language), has the need to test the extent of this insight by seeing through the most basic of distinctions that ordinary consciousness makes among categories of being, including such fundamental dualities as time/space, self/other, and microcosm/macrocosm. I wish to conclude this treatment of some key mystical themes in the Sefat Emet by calling attention to the title of the work itself. The brief introduction to the first volume, reprinted in later offset editions, is signed by ‘the sons and sons-in-law of the holy rabbi, our master, teacher, and rabbi of Gur, may the righteous one’s memory be a blessing unto the life of the world-to-come’. There they tell us that the manuscript of this work, in the author’s own hand, was untitled at the time of his death, and that they called it Sefat Emet, based upon an interpretation of Prov. 12:19 found in the last teaching he had entered into the collection, a comment on parashat va-yeḥi for 1904/05. There emet or truth is associated with the speech of all Israel, ‘because the witness to God is not the individual person but the totality of Israel’. As is often the case in the Sefat Emet, this homily is a variant on one he had offered five years earlier, in the same parashah for 1899/1900. There Jacob represents truth and the sons gathered around his deathbed are the lips that bring this truth to expression in language. Jacob’s truth would be silent were it not for the tribes who bring it into words. I would suggest that in a perhaps only partly conscious way this reading of Jacob’s deathbed scene had another level of meaning to R. Judah Leib Alter as well. Jacob, the quality of truth, represents R. Mendel of Kotsk, who is often referred to as ‘the pillar of truth’, and who was known, as we have said, for absolute devotion to truth and integrity in all walks of life. This utter insistence on truth had the effect of making him a radical minimalist in religious language and of frightening his disciples into the same position. R. Judah Leib realized that this necessary and well-intended cooling of Hasidic exaggeration and hyperbole also had the more far-reaching effect of denying any possibility of religious speech at all. There was nothing one could say regarding the spiritual life or the inner universe of faith that did not fall victim to this ever sharp Kotsker scrutiny. The lips were silenced, and the inner Torah became truly nistar (hidden) once again; only nigleh Three Warsaw Mystics 71 could be spoken of in Kotsk. Now R. Judah Leib has taken on the task of ,of recreating ,אמת to שפה ,restoring speech to the (silent) truth of faith on the far side of Kotsker questioning, a new and simplified religious language, one that can express higher or deeper truth without falling prey to the question of whether anyone in our time can attain to such high rungs of knowledge. He does so by insisting that the insights he offers belong to all of Israel. Expressed in simple terms, they are truths that conform to the intuition emplanted within the soul of each and every Jew. No Kabbalah beyond a bare minimum of vocabulary is required here. The mystical insight offered in Sefat Emet is at once too direct and too profound to be the exclusive property of those who know the occult lore. This creation of a post-Kabbalistic Jewish mystical language is a major goal of the Sefat Emet, which should probably be best translated as Honest Speech.38

Hillel Zeitlin (1871–1942)

The early writings of Hillel Zeitlin, including his book on Baruch Spinoza (1900)39 and his articles on Friedrich Nietzsche (1905)40 hardly predict that their author would later in life become a figure of Jewish mystical piety and the symbol of a modern’s return to Hasidic Judaism. The trajectory of his move was a surprising one, unlikely for the generation in which he lived. Zeitlin was one of the many young men growing up in Russia of the last decades of the nineteenth century who rejected his shtetl and Hasidic past in favor of the ‘new Jew’ whose creation was deemed so vital. In fact he counted himself among the disciples of the most radical of Jewish spiritual revolutionaries, Micha Josef Berdyczewski (1865–1921). Influenced by the writings of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and others, Berdyczewski called for a radical ‘transvaluation’ of the Jewish cultural heritage and literary canon. The group that called itself Ṣe’irim in the Belorussian city of Homel saw itself as cultural shock troops ready to respond to Berdyczewski’s call.

38 I recognize that the same characterization of seeking to create a ‘post-Kabbalistic’ Jewish mysticism could be applied to Hasidism as a whole, as Scholem does in Major Trends, p. 329f. But the focus is much sharper here because of the new critique of would-be ‘Kabbalists’ in Kotsk. Here the need for a new and simple religious language becomes more conscious, and I believe it is one of the major purposes of the Sefat Emet, who recognizes quite well the ways in which his generation differs from prior ages and the need for a type of religious language that can be used in his day. 39 Warsaw, Tushiyah, 1900. 40 First published in the Vilna journal Ha-Zeman, 1905. The articles appear in Vol. 1, pp. 125–135; Vol. 2, pp. 113–124; 398–419; Vol. 3; pp. 389–408. 72 Three Warsaw Mystics

Zeitlin was a key member of this group, and mentor to a younger member, the future writer Joseph Hayyim Brenner (1881–1921). The alienation from and critical evaluation of tradition in this circle (and others like it) set its stamp upon the entire future course of Jewish spiritual and cultural history. That a key figure within the group, one of its most widely acclaimed young writers and activists, would turn aside from revolution-as-norm and return to the thoroughly discarded old way of religious living in an age when the traffic seemed to be moving entirely in the other direction was certainly quite a shock. The surprise only increases when we turn more specifically to the content of Zeitlin’s treatment of Baruch Spinoza: His Life, Works, and Philosophical System. In 1900 he presents himself as quite a convinced Spinozist, willing to defend the sage of Amsterdam against all his critics, including those who found in Spinoza an unacceptable lack of both divine and human free will,41 presumably pillars of classical Jewish theology. When it comes to discuss- ing the ban against Spinoza, both that of the rabbis and that of the Catholic Church, Zeitlin displays no sympathy at all for religious orthodoxy. The final chapter of his book, ‘Spinoza’s System and Judaism’ tends to minimalize the Jewish influences on Spinoza and specifically dismisses any thought of the Kabbalah’s having had a major impact upon the philosopher. At the conclusion of that chapter, Zeitlin turns specifically to the question of Hasidism. Zeitlin had been raised in a Hasidic milieu, and was influenced in adolescence by ḤaBaD Hasidism as taught by the Kopust branch of the Schneersohn family. Since Spinoza is the classic pantheist of Western religious philosophy and Hasidism (ḤaBaD in particular) is known for the pantheistic tendencies of its thought, one might expect that Zeitlin would find some common ground between the two as a path toward a Jewish appreciation of Spinoza. But this is not the case. ‘Spinoza’s strength’, says Zeitlin of 1900, ‘lies not only in his pantheism, but in the freedom of his thought and his scientific point-of-view, and the way in which he makes these consistent with the idea of God’42 (p. 135). This is an attitude hardly to be found among Jewish mystics, who ‘from beginning to end are very far from a scientific view of the world’. From here he goes on to discuss the alleged parallels between Spinoza and Hasidism:

41 Ibid. (above, n. 39), p. 127ff. 42 Ibid., p. 135. Three Warsaw Mystics 73

From this it appears that those who find complete equality between Spi- noza’s view and that of the leaders of Hasidism, particularly ḤaBaD, are mistaken. Spinoza’s primary assumption that nothing ever departs from the laws of nature in any way whatsoever is totally inconsistent with the teaching of Hasidism. Aside from this, they are divided by their views of God, even though the ḥasidim are also pantheists to a certain degree. According to Hasidic views God ‘fills all the worlds’ and ‘surrounds all the worlds’. Spinoza would have God ‘fill all the worlds’, or, in his language, be the internal cause of all things (immanente), but not ‘surround all the worlds’, meaning that God is not their external cause (transcendente). In the Hasidic view, even though God also incorporates nature within Himself (since the Kabbalists had already noted that Elohim is numerically equivalent to ha-ṭeva’), God also hovers above the bounds of nature. For Spinoza there is finally nothing beyond nature. If there is anything in Spinoza’s system that accords with the teachings of Kabbalah and Hasidism it is on the poetic side. God as the center of all ideas, the spiritual love of God, the joy and devotion to Him remind us of the enthusiastic statements in the writings of the Ba’al Shem Tov’s disciples.43 To this discussion Zeitlin appends a footnote: (1) ‘All the worlds, according to this, are but a reflection of His blessed self ’. Occasionally they do think like pantheists, but they generally stand within the bounds of theology and consider God to be a specific being in every way. Even when they express things that tend toward pantheism, it is mostly out of theological enthusiasm. If they knew where the things lead they would be taken aback. Zeitlin in his twenties is still enamored of science. His pantheon of the great includes Darwin and Spencer along with Spinoza,44 and it is the rational and scientific character of Spinoza’s thought that makes him most significant. The unscientific character of Kabbalistic and Hasidic thought leaves Zeitlin cold, and it is only a vague bit of poetic fancy that he can find of value in the Hasidic teachings. Perhaps most significant (and not entirely inaccurate) is his comment in the footnote to the effect that Hasidism is far from being a thought out pantheistic system, such as is Spinoza’s oeuvre, but rather a theism that leaves room for enthusiastic outcries of a pantheistic sort. Quite a few more recent readers of Hasidism have seen it that way as well. This evaluation and self-positioning will change dramatically over the course of the ensuing decade. By 1910, the next time he compares the two,

43 Ibid., p. 135f. 44 Ibid., p. 122f. 74 Three Warsaw Mystics

Zeitlin is identifying with the Ba’al Shem Tov rather than with Spinoza. The subject matter is somewhat different, to be sure, but so is the tone with which Hasidism is treated: Had the BeSHT conceived of divinity as Spinoza did, he would have had to say together with Spinoza that all conceptions of good and evil, whether perfect or imperfect, are purely human. Pure divinity has nothing to do with them. Because people have imperfect ideas, they think that this thing is good and that is bad. The universal self—nature—God—is neither good nor bad. People love, rejoice, suffer, live, die. But this has nothing to do with God. But the BeSHT, even though he was a pantheistic thinker like Spinoza, even though he always saw the oneness of God and world, conceived it in an entirely different manner. God and the world are one, but God is not bound to the world, which is itself a sort of illusion or fantasy of God’s. If He wants, it is already done with. On the one hand, the world is divinity itself. On the other hand, it is a creation, a work of art, a masterpiece. As a creation it has its goal. From time to time it comes closer to that goal, reaching higher and higher, purer and purer. Spinoza’s God is without life, a pure idea. The BeSHT’s God is one that lives, strives, grows, blossoms, suffers and composes, thinks and creates that for which the heart is torn and the soul longs. The BeSHT’s God is in man, even his lacks and sufferings, his sin and smallness.45 Here the identification is clearly with Hasidism, and one can see quite dramatically the change of attitude that has taken place in Zeitlin over the course of a decade. Hasidism has taken on the specific persona of the Baal Shem Tov, a figure about whom Zeitlin wrote and with whom he clearly identified. What was the nature of this change? In the course of ten years Zeitlin has moved from commitment to a scientific worldview to one much more identified with the poetic and spiritualist attitude of Hasidism. His pantheist position is not sacrificed, but the tone in which he enunciates it undergoes significant modification. His concern here is not for philosophical con- sistency, but for the religious and emotional power of ideas. Hasidic pantheism is saved from the Spinozist conclusions by its sense of this world’s unreality. If this God-filled world is, from one point of view, mere ‘illusion or fantasy’, a ‘masterpiece’ spun out by the divine imagination, God indeed remains transcendent to His world even in the pantheistic context.46

45 Di Benkshaft nokh Sheynheyt, in Zeitlin’s Shriftn, Warsaw (Velt-Bibliotek) 1910, p. 34. English translation in Green, Hasidic Spirituality, p. 186. 46 While Zeitlin could have reached these conclusions entirely based on Jewish, and particularly ḤaBaD (as the above-mentioned work by R. Elior [above, n. 27] amply demonstrates) sources, I suspect there is some influence here of Zeitlin’s exposure to Hindu Three Warsaw Mystics 75

The identification of young Zeitlin with the Ba’al Shem Tov in this passage is the beginning of his lifelong involvement with the early Hasidic masters and their teachings. A major part of Zeitlin’s literary efforts was devoted to explication of Hasidic thought, especially that of the BeSHT, R. Shne’ur Zalman of Liadi, and R. Nahman of Bratslav. His writings on Hasidism, when they do not come in biographical form, give the impression of a person teaching a truth that is his own, not merely that which he reports in the name of past masters.47 The other major literary text for Zeitlin is the Zohar, which he hoped to translate from Aramaic into Hebrew to render it accessible to Jews in his day. Only the prologue to the Zohar was published (further work on the project was destroyed in the ghetto fires), but Zeitlin’s disciple and Warsaw neighbor Fishel Lachower carried the idea forward in his collaboration with Isaiah Tishby on the monumental Wisdom of the Zohar.48 While Zeitlin does not seem to have returned to the full pattern of religious observance until somewhat later (perhaps after the First World War), he begins to appear as early as 1903 as a religious writer, one who strives throughout his writings to express a personal vision of his relationship with divinity. His Kawwanot ve-Yiḥudim, published in Luaḥ Aḥiasaf 10 (1903) is mostly a hymn to the beauties of nature and the way in which all of nature sings the praise of God. This prose poem was written during the years preceding 1904, while Zeitlin lived in the small town of Roslavl, close to the then untamed Belorussian countryside. The piece reflects long periods

theological formulations as well. He read William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) before 1913, and I have every reason to assume that his omnivorous spiritual appe- tites would have included the likes of Tagore and Ramakrishna, whose works were already available in Western languages. Zeitlin’s openness to parallels between Judaism and Indian religion is mentioned by Schatz, op. cit., p. 90. 47 Zeitlin’s theoretical writings on Hasidism, beginning as early as 1910, have been collected in two posthumous volumes: Be-Fardes ha-Ḥasidut weha-Kabbalah, Tel Aviv 1960, and ‘Al Gevul Shney ‘Olamot, Tel Aviv 1965. Zeitlin was a most prolific and often repetitive writer; these ‘final editions’ by no means represent the totality of his work, which is to be found scattered throughout the newspaper and periodical literature (in both Hebrew and Yiddish) of Polish Jewry in the first four decades of the twentieth century, and in several prior collected editions. His writings on ḤaBaD were similarly edited in the posthumous Araynfir in Khsides in der Veg fun KhaBaD, New York 1957, and on Bratslav as R. Nakhman Braslaver: der Ze’er fun Podolie, New York 1952. 48 The translation of the prologue to the Zohar and other writings on the Zohar make up the latter portion of the first Hebrew volume mentioned in the preceding note. On the connection to Mishnat ha-Zohar, see the opening page of Tishby’s introduction to that work. On Zeitlin’s project of translating the Zohar, see Jonatan Meir, “Hillel Zeitlin’s Zohar: The History of a Translation and Commentary Project,” Kabbalah 10 (2004), pp. 119–157 (Hebrew). 76 Three Warsaw Mystics spent alone in the woods, lost in meditation on nature that inevitably took the form of prayer. It opens: I pray and the trees pray with me. I bend and they bend with me; I bow and they bow with me. Man and nature are joined in their devotion. Zeitlin here expresses his clear preference for the lone company of tree and hills, fields and forests, over the human community of worshippers. The pattern of lone religious life that will so characterize his later poetry is already well established in these relatively early years. In a Yiddish essay entitled ‘The Longing for Beauty’ first published in 1910 he gives further expression to this way of living and its concommitant dislike of the city and its ways. After telling the tale of how God’s light, created on the first day of Creation, is hidden in the Torah, he adds: But there is another place where one can find that hidden future-light. That is the free49 field, the free forest. If your soul is pure, rise up very early, leave behind you the city with its busy bustle, its grist and grime, and go out to the great free field. Have a look with fresh open eyes at God’s free light-filled world, and you will see the hidden future-light. See! God’s grace is poured forth over all; all is so lovely and mild, good and pure. Everything speaks of deep holiness and eternal goodness, peace and contentment. All speaks of great secrets, of far distant worlds, of a bright, bright future. The city will fall; everything false, soiled, and impure will disappear. Everything petty, narrow, and dull will have no place. All will be free and bright, holy and grand. In the distant future not only all wars will be ended, all acts of violence and battle, but also money, business, and property. Deep, deep future! All of life will become a bright light, an eternal song, an eternal dance of the righteous. God and man will become one, Creator and creature—joined forever, God ‘going dancing with the righteous in paradise where all see Him openly’.50

49 The word frey (Ger.: frei) might better be translated ‘open’ in this context, but I have retained the more literal ‘free’ because of other associations. Frey included a sense of freedom as being ‘unburdened, and particularly unburdened by the weight of religion and tradition. Secular Jews referred to themselves as freye, those ‘liberated’ from tradition. It is this sort of fresh and unencumbered experience that Zeitlin seems to be seeking here. 50 Benkshaft, p. 10. Emphasis mine. English translation in Green, Hasidic Spirituality, pp. 167f. Three Warsaw Mystics 77

The theme of mystical pantheism or oneness with God is found in Kawwanot ve-Yiḥudim as well: We pray . . . and with ‘One’ we intend simply that the blessed Holy One and His name are one, that all is one, that all changes and differences, separations and oppositions, reversals and contradictions, permutations and transfor- mations are mere illusion. We have few specific intentions, but rather one grand one: that not only the Torah is composed entirely of names of God, but the entire world as well.51 Here Zeitlin has already arrived at that radically pantheistic/poetic worldview that will remain with him through most of his later years. One can clearly still see Berdyczewski’s ‘transvaluation of values’ here, but with a greater emphasis on the mystical-religious side. These views will often be manifest in his later writings as readings of Hasidic sources or as an interpretation of the Ba’al Shem Tov.52 There is no more talk of the value of science in Zeitlin, whose writings over the course of his lifetime may be seen as giving increased rein to the imaginative, poetic, and ultimately even prophetic dimensions of Zeitlin’s soul. While it is conventional to view this as a return from Spinozism to Hasidic Judaism, one may also say that the Nietzschean side of Zeitlin triumphs over the Spencerian, or that the Russian mystic in him53 vanquishes the Western critic. The detached and seemingly ‘objective’ tone that Zeitlin had sought to effect in his Baruch Spinoza will not be heard again. There is much in the passages just quoted that also reminds us of the particular time when young Zeitlin was writing. The idealization of field and forest, flowing over easily into a mysticism of nature, sounds as much like young Buber or others of the Blau-Weiss Jewish youth movements of Central Europe as it does like Berdyczewski on the Russian-Jewish side. These in turn were Jewish versions of a larger spiritual and intellectual picture, as George Mosse has shown.54 There is an innocence about these

51 Kawwanot we-Yiḥudim, reprinted in his Sifran shel Yeḥidim, Jerusalem 1979, p. 81. Cf. Waldoks, op. cit. (above, n. 2), p. 36. Sifran shel Yeḥidim was a title already used by Zeitlin for a book published during his lifetime (2nd ed., Warsaw 1930). The 1979 edition is much enlarged, including Demamah we-Qol and Davar la-‘Amim, originally published as separate volumes (Warsaw 1936 and 1929) and a number of other essays. 52 Yesodot ha-Ḥasidut, 1910, which in turn goes back to Le-Ḥeshbono shel ‘Olam in Ha-Shiloaḥ 13:3 (1904), is the prime example, followed by many other passages. 53 Zeitlin was much impressed by a meeting with Lev Shestov in 1904, and he frequently refers to both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in his works, assuming his readers will have read them. 54 G. Mosse, Germans and Jews, New York 1970, and elsewhere. 78 Three Warsaw Mystics

formulations in the pre-World War I period that they were soon to lose forever. But we should also recall that the identification of the city with decay, with commerce, with small-mindedness, all of which are to be rejected by those who have found God in the freedom of field and forest, was to have a major impact upon Jewish life in the twentieth century, not least through its role in shaping the movement that would untimately cost Zeitlin and six million other Jews their lives. The turn that will lead Zeitlin back to tradition has already begun to happen in these very first few years after the publication of his Baruch Spinoza. It has begun with a turn from philosophy to religion, in the broadest sense. But perhaps this is the place to note that religion preceded philosophy in Zeitlin’s life as well as having followed it. He not only came from a Hasidic area, as could still be said of most East European Jews in his day, but he was an adolescent who had taken his religious life most seriously. In an autobiographical fragment published many years later, Zeitlin recalled the great religiosity of his youth: But a while after my departure from Rechitsa I found myself consumed by for more than half a year. I was then (אכול שלהבת־יה) religious enthusiasm about thirteen years old, and I was truly sunk in Eyn Sof. No one knew what was going on in me, since I was modest and a loner by nature. But even today I can recall with an inward joy that wondrous time in which I could almost see the power of ‘the Maker within the made’, or look through ‘the physicality of things, their corporeal and [seemingl reality’ to the ‘divine power that flowed through them in every single instant, without which they were nothing at all’. I then found myself in an ecstatic state that I had not known previously and have never known again. Usually states of ecstacy last for minutes or hours, but I remained in this ecstatic state day and night. My mind was attached to God with hardly a moment’s interruption.55 This ‘confession’ challenges us to wonder whether the turn in Zeitlin during his thirties was a new direction at all, or pehaps just a return to a person he had already been before the liberation from religion that had come with adolescence. It somehow does not seem so surprising that the ‘God- intoxicated’ young adolescent of this passage would have found his way to Spinoza and Nietzsche. Nor is it incomprehensible that critical objectivity wore thin for him, and that he sought his way back to a religious rather than a philosophical stance. The most impassioned account Zeitlin offers of his own conversion or reversion to religious vision is that of the prose-poem ‘The Thirst.’56 The

55 Qitsur Toledotai, included in Sifran shel Yeḥidim (1979), p. 1f. 56 Published in his Ketavim Nivḥarim 2:2; Warsaw (Tushia) 1912. Three Warsaw Mystics 79 work is a kind of intellectual dance macabre, in which the author is led through a vast cemetery of gods, truths, ideals, and values, all of which have been killed by the contemporary belief in science and the unwillingness to retain unprovable beliefs. Among the tombs he passes are those of traditional religion, the soul, the life-force, eternity, Kant’s Ding an sich, Marxist materialism, and so forth, each marked with its appropriate epitaph. But Zeitlin seeks the living God, one who cannot be buried and has not died with the death of all the old religious forms, the One to whom you can call after you’ve lost everything, including your conventional religious faith. In this case he rejects the pantheist alternative offered him by the poet (‘Why do you seek God outside yourself? Is God not within you, in the flow of your blood, the beating of your heart . . . you see your God in all, and He is all’.),57 looking instead for the God of this final and desperate human faith. ‘The Thirst’ seems to indicate that Zeitlin is not satisfied with the Nietzschean liberation from religion. Liberated as he may be from the small-minded religiousness of most of humanity, there is no more exultation here in being free of God. Zeitlin continues to seek. He traverses deserts and climbs mountains, but remains empty-handed. As his journey nears its close a voice asks him: ‘What did the mountains tell you?’ ‘Only what I seek’ is his reply. ‘And what is it that you seek?’ ‘I don’t know yet what it is called’. ‘But what do people call it?’ ‘Wonder’. The search for God is the search for a nameless wonder. This work leads directly to Zeitlin’s most interesting and universalist attempt to articulate the nature of religion, found in his Be-Ḥevyon ha-Neshamah, published in 1913.58 Zeitlin has now read and been impressed by William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, and seeks to use something of James’ method in exploring Jewish religiosity from within. Believing himself to belong to the small band of those formerly pious and still sympathetic to religion, the only group who can truly be called upon to deeply comprehend and explain religious phenomena, Zeitlin would like to create a phenomenology of Jewish religious experience, based both on textual sources and on his own experience of the materials as he has encountered them. James’ account was too neutral for Zeitlin’s taste, even on the crucial

57 Ibid., p. 166. 58 Parts reprinted under title: ‘The Religious Experience and Its Manifestations’, in ‘Al Gevul Shney ‘Olamot. 80 Three Warsaw Mystics question of ‘God’ versus ‘gods’; Zeitlin wants to write in a clearly Jewish and monotheistic context, one that will also demonstrate by its monotheism the ultimate oneness of human religious experience. Continuing directly where he left off in ‘The Thirst’, he claims that the first step in articulating a Jewish religious consciousness is that of ‘wonder’. This is the ‘wonder of the heart’, the power within the mind that leads us to approach the world in an open and receptive manner. Zeitlin notes that Berdyczewski too had spoken of wonder, but had seen it wholly as the creation of the mind itself. In James’ spirit, Zeitlin now seeks to go an important step beyond this humanistic approach. It is the divine spirit within the human soul that causes us to long for God; the search characterized by wonder is circular because the true seeker is the divinity that lies inside us: Because the light of the one God shines within us, we desire, long, and thirst for the hidden and concealed. Were it not for that light, we would create all sorts of cultures in the world but would not seek out the ‘hidden well’. . . . ‘For with You is the font of life; in Your light we see light’ (Ps. 36:10). Because the upper font flows in us, because the upper light shines in us, we see the light.59 Such formulations, familiar to the student of Western mysticism from Plotinus or Pseudo-Dionysius (and quoted as such by James), are to be found in the Hebrew corpus as well. They have a well-known prior history within Hasidism in particular. It is probably upon all of these that Zeitlin is drawing. Even in his later and more fully pious period, Zeitlin continued to see Jewish religiosity in the broadest human context. His own prayers contained some based on originally Christian and other sources.60 the mind as ,(השתוממות) The next step beyond wonder is amazement silenced beyond all the endless questions that wonder asked. Wonder is the author of science and inquiry, the starting-point of all human seeking. But it is amazement rather than wonder that gives birth to religion and its sisters, poetry and song. Amazement joins wonder to a great sense of inner bewilderment and trembling; it is the person shaken to the core by a confrontation with utterly transcendent mystery. Out of our depths we turn to

59 Ibid., p. 17f. 60 Gezangen tsum Eyn-Sof; Warsaw 1931. ‘Ikh Loif tsu Dir’ (I Flee to You) on p. 67 is based on a passage in Augustine’s Confessions, ‘with changes, and naturally omitting those passages which are not in the Jewish spirit’. ‘Dveykes’ on p. 77 is based on the writings of Simeon the New Theologian (1100–1178), an important figure in the Eastern Church, whose work Zeitlin says he knew via Buber’s Ekstatische Konfessionen. Here is a fascinating example of two contemporary Jewish seekers teaching one another, inter alia, the works of a classic Christian mystic. Three Warsaw Mystics 81 the great mystery that lies beyond ourselves. This confrontation combines the senses of love and awe or fear in all their various parts, from the most profound and selfless religious emotions to the fear of death and the love of divine reward. The product of this combination is beyond articulation, but ‘anyone who has tasted of this feeling of amazement in his life, even if just a few times, knows all this from his own self’. Zeitlin attempts description, but regularly falls back on the experiential and the intuitive. Amazement is the human emotion that allows us to be open to the divine presence or revelation. Revelation is constant, present in the life of every religious person who know how to seek it out. ‘The Lord is near to all who call upon Him, to all who call upon Him in truth’ Zeitlin quotes from the Psalter (145:18). This means that there is constant divine response to human prayer, if only we know how to read the many layers of language in which God speaks. The divine presence in nature is a way in which God addresses humans. Opening to that presence is a revelation that may in itself re-direct our lives. So too are symbols, the language ‘understood by great poets’, a form of divine speech. All that happens in life may be read symbolically; ‘the letter-permutations of the divine word’ are there to be found. So too are there ‘special hints’ in our lives, ways in which God calls us to return to the good, to leave behind the vain clamor of the world, and to become more fully and spiritually ourselves. God speaks to us through dreams, through inner voices, longings, and thoughts of penitence, indeed just through the feeling of divine closeness. When we count all of these as ways in which God speaks, we come to realize that the self-revealing God is present to guide us always, not only in those rare moments and individuals which are usually deemed ‘prophecy’ and ‘prophets’. Those are the very highest form of revelation; they represent but the most articulate end of a spectrum that reaches deeply into the life of every person of faith. It seems obvious that this very much unfinished work of Zeitlin’s is the Vorlage of Heschel’s grand introduction to God in Search of Man, surely one of the portions of Heschel’s work for which he is best-known and most highly appreciated.61 Heschel’s version is significantly expanded, going from a distinction between the beautiful and the sublime, thence to wonder and amazement, and on through several additional steps before turning to revelation. This is Heschel’s prose at its finest, and the richness with which he textures the discussion defies description. Heschel is also responding to further developments in the study of religion in the fifty years intervening

61 This was first noted by M. Waldoks in the dissertation referred to above in n. 2. 82 Three Warsaw Mystics between Zeitlin’s writing and his own. In particular one feels the presence of Rudolph Otto’s The Idea of the Holy, as well as subsequent developments both in philosophical phenomenology and in the phenomenology of religion. Nevertheless, the thrust of Heschel’s presentation remains an expansion of Zeitlin’s: it is only by cultivating an openness to the human emotions associated with wonder, awe, and amazement that we will be able to comprehend and appreciate the religious claim for revelation. It is fair to characterize Zeitlin as a theologian of radical immanence. With the young Martin Buber and with the Hasidic sources that he and Buber both so loved to study and quote, he believes that there is no person, no place, no moment devoid of God’s presence. Buber, the great modern re- teller of Hasidic tales, moved from an early embrace of mysticism toward discovery of the dialogic principle, in which preserving the otherness of each other, including the divine Other, came to be of great importance. On this basis, there is considerable debate about whether the mature Buber’s theological position may be considered mystical at all. Zeitlin was always more swayed by the theoretical sources of Hasidism than by the tales. It was ḤaBaD thought in particular, most familiar to him from his youth, that bespoke a theological position with which he identified. But when he sought to simplify the Hasidic message in order to present it to his modern reader, his presentation sometimes sounds remarkably like passages one can find in that slightly earlier simplifier of Hasidic speech, the Sefat Emet. Here is Zeitlin on the Hasidic view of the relationship between God, world, and Torah: The main difference between the conventional religious view and that of Hasidism with regard to the divinity of Torah is this: every religious view believes that Torah was given by God (lit.: ‘from heaven’), but Hasidism, like Kabbalah, believes that Torah is heaven itself. The Torah is not only divine, but in its innermost essence it is the Deity Itself. Just as, according to Hasidism, ‘the category of God is the category of world and that of world is that of God’, i.e. in their innermost hidden root, so the category of Torah is that of world and the category of world is that of Torah. Not only are ‘Israel and Torah one’, but world and Torah are one.62 The ultimate oneness of God and world by means of Torah, the agent of creation, is a theme familiar to readers of the Sefat Emet. But Zeitlin too had some misgivings about ecstatic and uncompromising proclamation of universal oneness. We conclude this section with two contradictory

62 Ha-Ḥasidut le-Shiṭoteha u-Zerameha, Warsaw (Sifrut) 1910, p. 22. Three Warsaw Mystics 83

quotations, the juxtaposition of which will hopefully show the range through which Zeitlin’s thought vascillated on this key topic in the minds of all three of our Warsaw mystics. First we read from the concluding section of Dos Alef-Beys fun Yudntum, published in Warsaw in 1922.63 This collection of ‘letters to Jewish youth’ culminated in a call for akhdes (aḥdut), oneness or unity: Now we shall demonstate that the Torah brought into the world something of which the world had previously known nothing, or almost nothing. First: the principle of oneness or, as it is now called, monism. I say not monotheism but monism. The Torah’s greatness does not consist only of the fact that she recognizes one God rather than many. It includes also her seeing the entire cosmos as a single body with various limbs and functions. In retrospect, Torah’s greatness lies in the fact that it was the first, sharpest, and clearest articulation of the monistic doctrine and in that it drew from that doctrine all possible logical conclusions.64 The desire to present Judaism as a thoroughgoing monism is still tempting to Zeitlin more than twenty years after his fling with Spinoza, a thinker whose approach he never wholly abandoned, even in his years of return to the life of piety. His religious poems, both in Hebrew and Yiddish, are filled with longing for oneness and inclusion within God. Zeitlin and Rav Kook wrote similar poems of longing, and in the translations now found in American prayerbooks it is often difficult to know which of the two one is reading. But when confronted precisely with the monistic vision in someone else’s name, Zeitlin stands ready, in time-old Jewish fashion, to caution against its hybris: Abraham said: ‘I am dust and ashes’. Moses said: ‘What are we?’ This completely negates that frame of mind of the extreme ecstatics (especially among the Christians) who in their intense attachment imagine themselves so fully included within God that they and God are—one. Really the creature has to remember always that he is only a creature, naught, nothing. ‘In the place of joy, there should be trembling’. In the place of the most there should also (התאחדות) intense attachment and most powerful union be tremendous awe, a stepping backward. In the very hour when the soul

63 Ferlag Alt-Yung. There is now a Hebrew translation of this work, Alef Bet shel Yahadut, published by Mossad ha-Rav Kook in 1983. It is interesting that the disciples of Rav Kook, whose theological position was parallel in certain ways to that of Zeitlin, have rediscovered his work. Zeitlin and Kook met privately on Zeitlin’s one visit to the Holy Land. This visit is recalled by R. Zvi Yehuda Kook in his article in Sefer Zeitlin (above, n. 2). A letter from Zeitlin to Kook is also reprinted in that volume. Two reviews by Zeitlin of Kook’s writings are included in the 1979 edition of Sifran shel Yeḥidim. 64 Alef Bet shel Yahadut, p. 119. Translated from the Yiddish original. 84 Three Warsaw Mystics

in its rapture is united with the endless light, she has to recall her absolute nothingness when she is on her own. That recall will bring her to true humility. Then, when humility and joy are united, a person feels the nearness of God. In the place of ‘running forth’ there also has to be the ‘returning’. More precisely, the ‘running forth’ and the ‘returning’ have to happen in the very same moment. ‘If your heart runs, turn backward’. In the very moment of inclusion a person has not only to think, but to feel in the very depths of his soul: Who am I, lowly creature of so little awareness, before the Perfect Mind?65 Torah in its essential message is monistic, teaching that nothing exists but the single one. All else is illusion. Human life is filled with longing to realize this ultimate truth. But as we come close to it on an experiential level, the only way it can be truly grasped, our very humanity is reinforced by the humility we must feel before the majesty of that One of whom we are but an infinitesimal part. The humbling shudder of that final moment—the one in which we see God’s greatness and realize that all the walls between us are illusory, the moment before we step through the doorway—is that of Zeitlin’s greatest joy.

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972)

Abraham Joshua Heschel is generally treated as an American Jewish thinker. His influence is felt primarily in North America, and his most important theological works were written in English and published in New York in the 1950s and ’60s. But Heschel arrived in the United States in 1940, at the age of thirty-three. His religious ideas had been largely formed before he came to America, both in the Warsaw of his youth and the Berlin of 1928 through 1938 where he lived as a student and a young adult. Coming to America as a refugee from the devastation of Nazi Europe, Heschel was motivated both by the loss of Polish Jewry and by his perception of the great spiritual poverty of American Jewry to become the leading Jewish theologian of his age and a voice for the Jewish spiritual tradition.65a A great deal has been written on Heschel as theologian, and a full-length biography now exists as well. I shall thus keep my introductory remarks

65 ‘Al Gevul, p. 195. From an essay called ‘Orot’. I have not found where this essay was originally published. 65a See Arthur Green, “Abraham Joshua Heschel: Recasting Hasidism for Moderns,” Modern Judaism 29:1 (2009), pp. 62–79. Three Warsaw Mystics 85 here to a minimum, and focused specifically on the ‘Warsaw’ period of Heschel’s long and varied intellectual career. Heschel was born to a family of the Hasidic élite in Poland, and was named for his great-great-grandfather the famous Abraham Joshua Heschel of Apt (Opatow; 1755–1825), a leading figure among the Hasidic masters of the early nineteenth century. He was also descended, due to the ways in which the families of Hasidic zaddiqim married with one another, from such other luminaries as Doy Baer of Mezritch (Miedzyrzec; 1704–1772), Israel of Ruzhyn (1796–1850), and Levi Yizhak of Berdichev (1740–1809). His family was closely related to the Hasidic dynasties of Kopichenitz (Kopzynce) and Novominsk (Minsk Mazowiecki). But such elegance of lineage did not necessarily make for wealth or power in the much-diminished world of Hasidism at the turn of the twentieth century. Heschel’s own father was a rebbe without a following who had wandered from the family’s Ukrainian home, via Novominsk, where he married, to Warsaw, where he was established in one of the neighborhoods of the city’s Jewish poor and became known as the Pelzovizner rebbe. After his father’s death, when he was ten years old, Heschel was raised partly within the court of his mother’s brother, the Novominsker rebbe, whose table, as we have noted, was frequented by Hillel Zeitlin, among many other guests. Though there were differences of both ideology and style between the Kotsk/Ger traditions of Warsaw and the Galician/Ukrainian origins of Heschel’s family, it would seem that his education took place largely within the Warsaw-style Hasidic milieu. It was from this context that Heschel developed a deep knowledge of and attraction to Rabbi Mendel of Kotsk, a figure to whom he would devote two books late in his career, indeed the only Hasidic figure about whom he would manage to write at such length. Here he also must have spent many hours reading the Sefat Emet, along with some of the other many writings of the Polish Hasidic masters. These probably included the recently published teachings of Rabbi Zadok ha-Kohen of Lublin (1823–1900), toward whom the later Heschel showed great respect. In the heady days of the late 1960s Heschel told the author of these lines that a Jewish ‘radical theology’ should begin with the writings of the Sefat Emet and Rabbi Zadok ha-Kohen. But young Heschel did not grow up to become the pious Hasidic rebbe or typically Polish-Jewish Talmudic scholar that this education predicted. He discovered within himself the soul of a poet, and during his adolescent years, while still studying at yeshiva; began to secretly seek to have his Yiddish poems published in the thriving secular Yiddish literary joumals of Warsaw. At age eighteen he left his native city, attending first a secular 86 Three Warsaw Mystics gymnasium or high school in Vilna and, upon graduating, matriculating to study at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. Of course it was not unusual for young men of Hasidic background to depart from the tradition in Heschel’s day. Since the middle of the nineteenth century there had been a steady attrition of youth from the traditional Jewish community, most seeking to embrace either secular Jewish nationalism or some form of either assimilationist or international socialist ideology. Zeitlin had been such a person, a generation earlier. Over the decades these defections had included even more than a few children of the Hasidic élite, much to the scandal of their families and followers. But Heschel did not become a secular Jew. Though adopting Western dress and relaxing many Hasidic stringencies, he did not fully abandon religious observance and continued to be concerned primarily with issues of faith and the nature of religious identity. Like Zeitlin (though out of different biographical circumstances) Heschel became an unusual religious figure, defying the polarization of religion versus secularism that was rampant in his day, and trying to stake out an independent position vis-à-vis the tradition, one that was hardly ‘orthodox’ from the Hasidic point of view but that also had nothing in common with the only non-orthodoxy known to Polish Jews, that of Warsaw’s single ‘Temple’, bastion of the Jewish assimilationists. Heschel’s first publication was a volume of Yiddish poetry entitled Der Shem Hamefoiresh: Mentsh (The Divine Name: Man), that appeared in Warsaw in 1933. During his student years in Berlin Heschel had continued to write and publish poetry in various Yiddish journals. These and other poems were now collected and sent home to be printed in Warsaw, the capital of the Yiddish literary world in Europe. The poems are very much those of a young person, filled with wonder and joy at living. A majority of the poems could be called religious in the specific sense that they address God or speak of sacred love or of the divine/human relationship. The first poem in the volume is entitled Ikh un Du, a title that surely invokes Martin Buber’s Ich und Du, published in 1923 and surely known to Heschel during his student years. Messages proceed from Your heart to mine exchanging and blending my pains with Yours. Am I not You? Are You not I? My nerves’ tendrils are intertwined with Yours Your dreams meet in mine. Are we not one embraced in multitudes? Three Warsaw Mystics 87

In all others’ form I see my own self Perceiving, in the laments of Man— Distantly voiced, my own whimpering self— As if my own face was behind millions of masks! I live in me and in You. Through Your lips a word proceeds from me to myself. Your own eyes’ tear drop wells up in me. In need’s distress do call on me. If You need a friend, open the door between us. You live in me as well as in You.66 The direct address to God is very strong in this poem, as it is throughout the volume. The young Heschel’s God is one to whom he can talk, cry out, and bare his heart. The identification with God’s pain as well as that of humanity’s multitudes are themes well known from the later Heschel, whose The Prophets is seared with the prophetic identification with both divine and human suffering. But there are other elements in this poem, not characteristic of Heschel the mature theologian, that cannot be denied. There is not yet a clear distinction made here between identifying with God—with God’s love for humanity, with God’s pain and God’s pathos—and a claim that God and man are ultimately identical, something the mature Heschel would not have said. Repeated three times in this poem we have statements of the identity of man and God. Am I not You Are You not I . . . I live in me and in You . . . You live in me as well as in You. While such formulations can be defended by the theologian as extreme expressions of the poetic muse, they seem here to be the direct and unchecked outpourings of one who feels himself to be totally absorbed in God, ‘intertwined’, ‘embraced’. There is no effort here to preserve the ‘otherness’ of God. Given the poem’s familiar title, it is tempting to wonder whether it might not have been written or named in response to Buber,

66 Der Shem Hamefoiresh: Mentsh, Warsaw (Farlag Indzl) 1933, p. 9. Translation by Z.M. Schachter, from his ‘Nachdichtung’, entitled Human, God’s Ineffable Name, privately printed (Philadelphia 1993). In this and one other case I find Schachter’s translation sufficiently literal for use in this context. Wherever not indicated, translations are my own. The poems have been retranslated by Morton Leifman in The Ineffable Name of God: Man, New York (Continuum) 2004. 88 Three Warsaw Mystics whose own I and Thou, we will recall, represents a turn away from his earlier mysticism, and especially from what he had considered the too ready identification of God and man, or self and other. The tendency toward identification of God and self is complemented by another of the most directly religious poems in Heschel’s collection, a poem entitled The Most Precious Word: Each moment is a greeting call to me From timelessness eternal. And all words remind me Of that single word-of-words by which I name Thee: God. Stones shine for me as brightly as the stars And every quiet drop of rain Resounds as an echo of Your call My Father, Teacher, with me still, My All! Your name has become my home. Outside it I am desolate, forlorn. What would I do without You? My only possession is this single word; Rather would I forget My own name than Yours. I hear a cry coming from my heart: I will give You a name in every word! ‘Forest!’ I will call You. ‘Night!’ Ah, yes, Gather together of all my moments, A weave of eternity, a gift for You. I long only to spend eternity Celebrating a holy day for You — Not just a day—a lifetime. How miniscule my offering, My gift, my way of honoring Your presence. What can I do But go about the world and swear Not just believe—but testify and swear!67 Here the personal quality of relationship is stronger; we are closer to religious love poetry in its classic form. Such themes as God’s constant presence and the inadequacy of human response to God’s loving call are well-known

67 Dos Teyerste Vort, p. 24f. Three Warsaw Mystics 89 to the reader of Jewish poets who celebrate divine love, from the Psalmist to the prayerbook to the Golden Age in Spain. But here I am especially interested in a pair of references to God and language: And all words remind me Of that single word-of-words [. . . by which I name Thee]: God! I will give You a name in every word: ‘Forest!’ I will call You, ‘Night!’ All words remind the poet of the single word that stands as the pinnacle of human language: the word ‘God’. At the same time, all of human language itself may be transformed into a series of divine names, as God is named by every word we speak. This is the poet as Kabbalist, if an Azikri or an Alkabetz is the Kabbalist as poet. Though Heschel uses the Yiddish word ‘Got’ in the first passage quoted here, it is clear that he means the shem ha-meforash, which he has already taken as the title of his book. That is the word-of-words, the one that stands at the center of human speech and renders all of language holy. And with that word as his inspiration, the name that can never be forgotten, he can turn back to language and, in good Hasidic fashion, recall that God is ‘garbed’ in everything that is, making all words, representing all things that exist, ways of naming or recalling God.68 Elsewhere the young Heschel says of himself I have come to sow vision in the world, To unmask God, who has disguised Himself as world.69 The closing stanza of another poem articulates in quite perfect brevity a clearly Hasidic understanding of the relationship between God, world, and person: I am a trace of You in the world And every thing is like a door. Let me follow all those traces And through all things come to You!70 In these poems we may see a modern expression of the vision of reality that underlay Hasidism from the beginning. This was the Ba’al Shem Tov’s

68 The passage particularly recalls Shne’ur Zalman of Liadi’s statement to the effect that God’s word stands forever in heavens, that all that exists is merely its garb, and that God does not cease speaking the eternal word for even a moment. Tanya, Sha’ar ha-Yiḥud weha-Emunah, 1. 69 Intimer Himn, p. 29. 70 In Farnakhin IV, p. 33. 90 Three Warsaw Mystics experience of God present throughout the world, cloaked in the varied and ever-renewing garb of all existence. ‘God longs to be worshipped in all ways’ the early Hasidic masters taught. The BeSHT’s disciples, prominent among them Heschel’s own ancestors, taught that this God could be found and served through all things that exist in this world. That everything is a doorway to God is a formulation of which the Maggid of Mezritch or R. Nahum of Chernobyl (1730–1797) would have been proud. It is also the doorway to inwardness that the Sefat Emet found to be open every sabbath. At the same time, we should emphasize the modern context in which these poetic expressions are found. The book contains no reference to mitsvot or religious observance; it is by no means clear from the poems that their author remains an observant Jew. A portion of the book is devoted to ‘A Woman in a Dream’ and contains erotically tinged love poems that would have made Heschel’s Hasidic relatives blush. At the end of the volume he returns to God, but now in a series of more typically modern outbursts against divine silence: In our longing for You—Answer us, O God! Overcome Your own silence, Lord of all words! Prostrated millenia cry out to You: Reveal Yourself . . . Why do You mock our trust? Do You laugh at our pride in You?71 This sort of religious language is to be found more widely in Yiddish literature, and was destined to become a major force in all Jewish expression in the holocaust years. Heschel’s God, as manifest in this volume, is an interesting combination of One who can be discovered in all of being, in the simplest and most natural of human experiences, and in that sense is readily accessible always, along with a God who remains silent, distant, and frustratingly unresponsive to the poet’s—and mankind’s—heartfelt pleas. It is noteworthy that the open path to God is that of immanence, and not particularly that of God as conceived in personalist terms. God is accessible because He can be named by all names, because He is hidden throughout all that is. It is the personal transcendent God who is the object of Heschel’s outcry, the one to whom he turns in bitterness and an anger laced with something of compassion, addressing to Him this Tikn Khatsois (Tiqqun Ḥatsot) or ‘Midnight Lament’:

71 Gebet, p. 97. Three Warsaw Mystics 91

Each midnight the Shechinah weeps and mourns. Sits on lonely stoops of heaven. At Her feet a young man’s prayer shivers: God—O Father, grant me death! And through the smoke of sacrificial ruin On altars of catastrophe A dying man lifts fists and croaks: You cosmic Usurer, be cursed! And ever He blasphemes Himself When heavenward a forest dense Of naked hands that reach for help In prayer protest plead in night. O sunshine, blood of eventides You did not console, did not redeem. And God His breast beats In infinite remorse and pleads: Why am I so ashamed to show mercy?72 But if Heschel the poet finds fulfillment in the God of nature, Heschel the young scholar shows us a rather different face of this already complicated thinker. Only three years after the poems there appeared Die Prophetie, published through the Polish Academy of Sciences in Crakow in 1936 (when it was already difficult for a Jew to publish in Nazi Germany). This book forms the basis of his much more widely known The Prophets, published in 1962. Heschel’s view of prophecy in these works is essentially one of passionate empathy, the prophet identifying with the love and anguish God feels toward His human creatures. In the English version Heschel takes great pains to distinguish prophecy from a variety of other religious and psychological phenomena, including ecstacy and mystical experience. The general tendency of this section of the work is to deprecate these other phenomena. Ecstacy is derived from ‘a thirst to become possessed with a god, or to become one with a god’. Such a thirst is ‘alien to Biblical man’. Ecstacy or enthusiasm means ‘extinction of the person . . . self-extinction is the price of mystical receptivity’.73 Mystical experience implies a deprecation of consciousness; it is an end in itself, a purely private experience. The implication is that the mystical/ecstatic has no connection to society, no

72 Tikn Khatsois, p. 98; Schachter translation. 73 The Prophets, Philadelphia 1962, pp. 355–57. 92 Three Warsaw Mystics value for the world outside the realm of purely interior transformation of the individual. This sharp polemical tone is already found in the earlier version of Heschel’s work on the prophets; indeed the volume practically opens with a clear setting off of prophecy, as Heschel will understand it, from the ecstatic and Neo-Platonic forms of mysticism, all of which, according to Heschel, are but sublimations of the Dyonisiac orgy-cult that longs for ecstatic self-absorption in the deity and loss of individual identity. This sort of self-denying mysticism, Heschel claims, is present in two of the great religions of the West. This ecstacy that turns man into God, in which man feels himself to be one with God, found its way into both Christianity and Islam. It is represented for us by both the Western [i.e. Christian] mystics and the Sufis. A partial parallel is found in the Yogic practices of Indian religion.74 Obviously missing from here is any reference to Jewish mysticism. In The Prophets as well, the entire discussion of prophecy vis-à-vis ecstacy, mysticism, the loss of self, etc. makes no mention at all of the Jewish mystical tradition, and quotes no Jewish sources outside the prophets themselves. The absence of such references demands some explanation. Of course Heschel is well aware of the Jewish mystical tradition, that on which he was raised and with which he lived in some tension. Writers who knew less than Heschel might have claimed that true mysticism is not present in Judaism. Even Gershom Scholem, writing Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism but a few years after Heschel’s Die Prophetie, was to claim that there is no unio mystica in Judaism, a point on which Isaiah Tishby and later Moshe Idel were to sharply diverge from Scholem. But Heschel was intimately connected to the literature of Hasidism, where biṭṭul (self-negation), hitlahavut (ecstasy), and even hitkalelut (absorption) are discussed with some frequency. Can Heschel be avoiding all these just for the sake of a clearer Ausein andersetzung, where Biblical religion needs wholly to stand behind the prophetic and later Judaism dare not be brought in lest it ‘muddy the waters’ of his radical distinction? I think there must be more to the twice-repeated omission than this. In 1936 Heschel is still a young student, considered intellectually suspect by the ḥasidim, to be sure, but not entirely cut off from his own family. To denounce the Jewish mystical tradition, or to use it as a source of negative examples, was more than he could bear to do. This

74 Die Prophetie, Cracow (Polish Academy of Sciences) 1936, p. 13. Three Warsaw Mystics 93 was especially true at a time when Judaism was already receiving a terrible beating from Nazi propaganda. Heschel would not demean his tradition by joining into the attacks upon it. By the time of the The Prophets, a volume dedicated to the martyrs of the holocaust, Heschel was the great voice of Jewish spirituality in America. Now, too, it would have been irreverent and inappropriate for him to choose Hasidic or Kabbalistic teachings on the negation of the self in mystical self-absorption to use as negative exampies with which to contrast prophetic religion. But there is also a more profound and less apologetic reason why Heschel fails to mention Jewish mysticism in this context. He believed that the Jewish mystical tradition was truly different. For Heschel the Kabbalistic- Hasidic tradition had already taken on another hue, one that had a key role in the formation of his own religious philosophy as formulated chiefly in Man Is Not Alone and God in Search of Man. I refer to the Kabbalistic understanding of the commandments and the sense of religious obligation that lies at the very core of Judaism’s distinctive spiritual path. Heschel understood the core of Jewish mysticism’s uniqueness to lie in its claim ,צורך גבוה that the commandments of the Torah as performed by the Jew were the fulfillment of divine, as distinct from human, need. Unlike both the medieval Maimonidians and all modern Jewish ethicists, Kabbalists and ḥasidim understood the mitsvot as mysterious sacramental acts, the performance of which had real power in the ongoing cosmic struggle between good and evil, or between God and the forces of chaos. God needs Israel to fulfill the mitsvot; He calls upon them to perform the commandments as acts of testimony in this world, where Israel are His unique witnesses. Their testimony adds to the quotient of divine energy present in the universe, the energy by which the ongoing struggle against evil is waged. This is the Kabbalistic extension of a version of Judaism Heschel saw as originating in the school of Rabbi Akiba, the Judaism that taught: ‘If you are My witnesses, I am God, but if you are not My witnesses, I am, as it were not God’.75

75 Cf. Heschel’s Torah min ha-Shamayim, I, London 1962, p. 68f. and sources quoted there. See below for Heschel’s interest in this theme in his ‘The Mystical Element in Juda- ism’ and elsewhere. The divine need for fulfillment of the commandments is an aspect of Kabbalistic thought that is particularly emphasized by such later Kabbalists as R. Meir Ibn Gabbai (1481–after 1540; cf. ‘Avodat ha-Qodesh 2:1–6) and R. Isaiah Horowitz (1565?–1630; cf. Shney Luhot ha-Berit [ed. Warsaw repr. Jerusalem, 1959], pp. 41–45, 71). Both of these works were favorites of Heschel’s that he assigned to seminars or individual students at the Jew- ish Theological Seminary. See my discussion in “God’s Need for Man: A Unitive Approach to the Writings of Abraham Joshua Heschel,” Modern Judaism 35:2 (2015), pp. 247–261. 94 Three Warsaw Mystics

Heschel as emerging theologian took this Kabbalistic/Hasidic view of Judaism and its commandments most seriously. He understood that it lent an infinity of meaning to the religious act that no claim of spontaneous celebration of the presence and no debate about autonomy or heteronomy could ever give it. Here one was doing something for God, offering a gift of mysterious and unfathomable significance. But Heschel’s creativity lies in the great subtlety with which he treated this theme, that of ‘the deed’ which serves as the climax and conclusion of his God in Search of Man. Heschel understood that he surely could not present this notion as the Kabbalists had; it would be both unbelievable and unacceptably magical to contemporary thinking Jews. Over the course of a hundred pages he mean- ders through such rubrics as ‘The Divinity of Deeds’, ‘Ends in Need of Man’, ‘The Meaning of Observance’ and ‘The Ecstacy of Deeds’, never quite saying that the mitsvot fulfill a divine need, but regularly claiming that they are something transcendent, mysterious, and more than merely human. God asks a question of man; the deed is our response. God seeks out the human heart; in deeds we show that our heart belongs to God. Thus beyond the idea of the imitation of divinity goes the conviction of the divinity of deeds. Sacred acts, mitsvot, do not only imitate; they represent the Divine. The mitsvot are of the essence of God, more than wordly ways of complying with His will.76 Man and spiritual ends stand in a relation of mutuality to each other. The relation in regard to selfish end is one-sided; man is in need of eating bread, but the bread is not in need of being eaten. The relation is different in regard to spiritual ends: justice is something that ought to be done, justice is in need of man . . . Religious ends are in need of our deeds.77 To do a mitsvah is to outdo oneself, to go beyond one’s own needs and to illumine the world. But whence should come fire to illumine the world? Time and time again we discover how blank, how dim and abrupt is the light that comes from within . . . But there is an ecstasy of deeds, luminous moments in which we are raised by overpowering deeds above our own will; moments filled without outgo- ing joy, with intense delight. Such exaltation is a gift. To him who strives with heart and soul to give himself to God and who succeeds as far as is within his power, the gates of greaness break open and he is able to attain that which is beyond his power.78

76 God in Search of Man, New York 1955, p. 289. 77 Ibid., p. 291f. 78 Ibid., p. 358. Three Warsaw Mystics 95

One of the things Heschel has done here has been to turn around the order of the commandments to which the most mysterious of language was applied. The Kabbalists said these exalted things mostly about ‘commandments between man and God’, or the mysterious ritual acts of the tradition. They especially applied this thinking to certain grand ritual acts of the sacred calendar such as the sounding of the shofar, the waving of the lulav, or the eating of matzot. Heschel rather applied this way of thinking to the other half of the commandments, those ‘between man and man’, or the ethical duties of Judaism. It was these commandments—the life of goodness and justice—that Heschel taught God needed of man. Kabbalistic thinking about the commandments in Heschel was both universalized— applied to all humanity, not just to Jews—and Biblicized. By the latter term I mean that the urgency and cosmic vitality the Kabbalists associated with religious action was re-assimilated to the religion of the Biblical prophets and the absolute demands they made for justice, care for the needy, and compassion for a God who ultimately depends upon man to do His bid- ding. Speaking to an American religious audience, and especially to one that included many Christians as well as Jews, Heschel made almost no reference to the mystical traditions he knew and loved so well, but learned to couch their insights almost entirely in terms of the West’s shared Biblical and prophetic legacy. In doing this he ‘purified’ them of any magical associations; the theurgic power of the deed has been submerged into God’s passionate love of man and His need for a caring humanity to be His partner in a fulfilled Creation. It is for this reason that the Jewish mystical tradition does not even come to Heschel’s mind when he describes other mysticisms as self-preoccupied or purely private. Judaism, including the Kabbalistic portion of the traditional (Heschel almost never uses the word ‘mysticism’ in his theological writings) has been defined in another direction. It is oriented toward the attainment of holiness in the deed, communal in focus, and tied to the life of religious obligation. Examples from within the history of Jewish mysticism who clearly do not fit this description—one might think of Abraham Abulafia or Isaac of Acre seeking their lone mystical illuminations—were little enough known to Heschel’s readers that he could simply ignore them and the questions their presence might raise. The polemic against ecstacy in both versions of Heschel’s The Prophets does not mean that he consistently opposed inner enthusiasm in the religious life. On the contrary, the reader of Man Is Not Alone or God in Search of Man will find frequent passages like those we have quoted, where personal ecstatic experience of God’s presence within human life comes to be a regular part of human existence. 96 Three Warsaw Mystics

. . . the mystery is not apart from ourselves, not a far-off thing like a rainbow in the sky; the mystery is out of doors, in all things to be seen, not only where there is more than what the senses can grasp. Those to whom awareness of the ineffable is a constant state of mind know that the mystery is not an exception but an air that lies about all being, a spiritual setting of reality; not something apart but a dimension of all existence.79 The pious man is possessed by his awareness of the presence and nearness of God. Everywhere and at all time he lives in his sight, whether he remains always heedful of His proximity or not. He feels embraced by God’s mercy as by a vast encircling space. Awareness of God is as close to him as the throbbing of his own heart, often deep and calm but at times overwhelming, intoxicating, setting the soul afire.80 Here we see a Heschel closer to his Hasidic roots. The latter passage in particular is reminiscent of Zeitlin, or perhaps even the young Buber, in describing the spiritual life of the ḥasid. Now Heschel has lifted these from the realm of romantic description of a distant past and made them accessible, almost prescriptive, for his own reader. While ‘the pious man’ in this last paragraph may well be a fitting translation for ‘the ḥasid’, Heschel will use no such alienating terminology. He wants his reader, Jew or Christian, to be able to find himself, in a fully contemporary context, in the ‘pious man’ of whom he speaks. In the course of describing the life as piety, a fitting characterization for much of Heschel’s work, there are times when he clearly speaks of such typically mystical states as absorption into or identification with the Deity. This is particularly true in Man Is Not Alone, the first of Heschel’s major theological works. This presence of God is not like the proximity of a mountain or the vicinity of an ocean, the view of which one may relinquish by closing the eyes or removing from the place. Rather is this convergence with God unavoidable, inescapable; like air in space, it is always being breathed in, even though one is not always aware of continuous respiration.81 Yet he never mentions these as specifically mystical states. He seems to want to avoid the notion—so much a part of his own Hasidic heritage— that there is a special class of spiritual illuminati who are capable of experiences unknowable by others. The whole thrust of Heschel’s oeuvre is the sense that every person of faith may experience the fullness of God’s

79 Man Is Not Alone, New York 1951, p. 64. 80 Ibid., p. 282. 81 Loc. cit. Three Warsaw Mystics 97 presence. There is no room for the Hasidic zaddiq here, except insofar as every reader should be inspired to become a zaddiq. In that sense Heschel’s work—and Zeitlin’s for that matter—harkens back to the earliest Hasidism, the period of Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye or the Maggid of Mezritch, when the zaddiq was not yet an institutionalized figure and the later Hasidic distinction between zaddiq and ḥasid was as yet mostly unknown. The same seems to be true for the words ‘mystic’ or ‘mysticism’. In the 1950s these terms were not yet in good repute, neither among intellectuals nor in the American Jewish community. They were still associated mostly with ‘obscurantism’ or ‘occultist’ thinking. They belonged more to medieval than to modern times, and in modernity were associated either with Catholic monasticism or with the strange experimentalism of the Theosophical Society and its allies. Heschel wanted none of these associations for his work. Though he came increasingly to appeal to Christian readers, perhaps even more than Jews, he did so as a fully authentic Jewish voice. While Heschel surely understood that religion is universal as God is one, there was nothing of syncretism in his approach. Only rarely does he quote a non-Jewish religious text, and there for special emphasis. Within the Jewish world as well, Heschel did not want to represent any particular sect or party. Though he came from the Hasidic world and was often dismissed by his Litvak colleagues at the Jewish Theological Seminary either as ḥasid or as mystic, Heschel did not present himself as a representative of Hasidism. He very much did see himself as an East European Jew and as a survivor of the holocaust. His task, more God-driven than self-appointed, was to bring to American Jews the spiritual depth and richness of piety as he had come to know it—both in his Hasidic youth and in his philosophically trained and sophisticated adulthood. His books are an argument for holy living, for openness to the spiritual dimension of human existence, for awareness of the presence of God. All of these were presented in a deeply Jewish context, obviously drawing richly on the legacy of Heschel’s own knowledge, but always presented without alienating or off-putting ‘foreign labels’. Is Heschel a mystic? Our answer of course will turn on definition. If by ‘mystic’ we mean one who sees inner experience of God as the true core of religious life, I have no difficulty in placing Heschel within that camp. The life of service, toward which his work is geared, is our response to being touched by a real sense of God’s presence in each moment of our lives. Revelation, tradition, and discipline are all important to Heschel, to be sure, but the real reason for living the religious life has most to do with our experience of the world and the way the religious vision transforms it. 98 Three Warsaw Mystics

If ‘mystic’ has also to do with a tendency toward seeing beyond the external veil of existence and discovering the underlying oneness within all things, here too I would well place Heschel within the mystical camp. Heschel, like Zeitlin, is a theologian of radical immanence; in this sense his theology is the faithful continuance of his youthful poems. But this is not to say that Heschel is a denier of divine transcendence. He is repeatedly careful, after letting go with poetic expression of God’s nearness throughout the world, to remind the reader that God Himself lies beyond appearances and is not to be wholly identified with the world, however filled it may be with His own indwelling presence.82 Mystery and awe, two key categories for Heschel’s thought, have much to do with divine transcendence. It would seem that the only way Heschel might not be a mystic is if we insist on the most rigid of definitions, naming the mystic as an experiential monist, one who knows that any distinction between God, world, and soul is false, and that there exists nought but the One. Here indeed it would seem that Heschel parts company with Zeitlin, whom we heard proclaim his monism, as well as with ḤaBaD and certain other parts of the Kabbalistic and Hasidic tradition. Heschel’s God is clearly other, and man’s task is to know Him (which means to become known by Him)83 and to live a life touched by His presence and dedicated to acts of service, rather than to identify with God and to seek to be one with Him. Here there does seem to be a certain retreat from Heschel the poet to Heschel the theologian. Though he does not say so explicitly, I believe it is the encounter with radical evil in the form of Nazism that leads Heschel to this insistence on divine otherness; his source of moral authority has to lie clearly and absolutely beyond the self. In an ultimate and eschatological sense, however, Heschel’s vision retains moments of mystical commitment even in this final sense. The following passage, admittedly an unusual one, represents Heschel at his most Kabbalistic. The world is not one with God, and this is why His power does not surge unhampered throughout all stages of being. Creature is detached from the Creator, and the universe is in a state of spiritual disorder. Yet God has not withdrawn entirely from this world. The spirit of unity hovers over the face of all plurality, and the major trend of our thinking and striving is its mighty intimation. The goal of all efforts is to bring about the restitution of the

82 See for example ibid., p. 122. 83 Ibid., p. 125ff. Three Warsaw Mystics 99

unity of God and world. The restoration of that unity is a constant process and its accomplishment will be the essence of messianic redemption.84 This passage could be translated quite precisely into Kabbalistic language, and as such it would look entirely familiar to Heschel’s great-great grandfather. Indeed its point is quite similar to the Sefat Emet passage we have seen on Jacob at the well. Here the duality of God and world is seen as tragic; it is what leads to the ‘state of spiritual disorder’ in which we find ourselves. Obviously the intent of the Creator is not this, but that ‘His power . . . surge unhampered through all stages of being’. That of course is precisely a Kabbalistic formulation of the relationship between God and world, as well as of the tragedy of our present unredeemed state. If the classical Kabbalist may be classified as a ‘mystic’, there is surely no reason to deprive the author of these lines of that title. Of course Heschel’s strength is not that of the systematic theologian. To say that he is inconsistent on the questions of immanence, otherness of God, ‘personalist’ versus immanentist theology, and so forth, would be unfair and to miss the point. Heschel is carefully trying to walk a tightrope, one not unlike that walked by the Sefat Emet and by Zeitlin, between the personalist language of Judaism and his own experience (and Hasidic tradition) of radical divine immanence. The tension is surely sharpened for the mature Heschel by the trauma of surviving the war and its destruction, but it is all the more marvelous that this experience has not caused him to lose or flee from his sense of the immediate presence of God. In speaking of Heschel as mystic, there is one passage in Man Is Not Alone that demands our particular attention. Here Heschel describes what must surely be called a mystical experience, and I believe it constitutes one of the great such descriptions that we have in twentieth century theological literature. Though he does not use the first person in this passage, I have little doubt that he is telling us of an experience of his own, one described in considerably more color than the parallel description we saw in Zeitlin’s account of such an experience quoted above. Here again we hear Heschel the poet, now garbed in theological prose: But, then, a moment comes like a thunderbolt, in which a flash of the undis- closed rends our dark apathy asunder. It is full of over-powering brilliance, like a point in which all moments of life are focused or a thought which outweighs all thoughts ever conceived of. There is so much light in our cage, in our world, it is as if it were suspended amidst the stars. Apathy turns to

84 Ibid., p. 112. 100 Three Warsaw Mystics

splendor unawares. The ineffable has shuddered itself into the soul. It has entered our consciousness like a ray of light passing into a lake. Refraction of that penetrating ray brings about a turning in our mind: we are penetrated by His insight. We cannot think any more as if He were there and we here. He is both there and here. He is not a being, but being in and beyond all beings. A tremor seizes our limbs; our nerves are struck, quiver like strings; our whole being bursts into shudders. But then a cry, wrested from our very core, fills the world around us, as if a mountain were suddenly about to place itself in front of us. It is one word: GOD. Not an emotion, a stir within us, but a power, a marvel beyond us, tearing the world apart. The word that means more than the universe, more than eternity, holy, holy, holy; we cannot comprehend it. We only know it means infinitely more than we are able to echo. Staggered, embarassed, we stammer and say: He, who is more than all there is, who speaks through the ineffable, whose question is more than our mind can answer; He to whom our life can be the spelling of an answer.85 We do not know when Heschel had this experience, or whether the account might not in fact be a conflate of several moments rather than a single one. But the account here is clearly one of a mystic, complete with obliteration of any distance between self and God, the breaking of the ordinary bonds of self and the shattering of our universe. Brilliant light and lake-like stillness also belong to the description. All of these could be documented, of course, by parallels from the extensive literature on mystical experience in the context of many traditions throughout the world. The reader will also notice the focusing on the word GOD, a motif already known to us from one of Heschel’s poems, written some twenty years earlier. Perhaps this is a memory of an experience of Heschel’s youth, recalled here for inclusion in his first major theological statement. While Heschel was at work on Man Is Not Alone, he was obligated to write another piece which stands as Heschel’s only treatment of ‘mysticism’ per se. In 1949 Louis Finkelstein, chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary where Heschel was teaching, published his collection The Jews: Their History, Culture, and Religion. For this project, he asked Heschel, who had recently joined his faculty, to write an essay entitled ‘The Mystical Element in Judaism’. The young scholar could hardly refuse, though I believe the result shows his great ambivalence and essential unwillingness to deal with this subject as such, as though to write on ‘Jewish mysticism’ were to admit that the mystical tradition were somehow separate from Judaism itself.

85 Ibid., p. 78. Three Warsaw Mystics 101

The entire nineteen-page chapter is based on the Zohar; this choice is justified in a brief concluding note. Heschel opens with a section that seeks to identify the Kabbalist as an uncompromising God-seeker, one who wants to experience divinity wholly and directly, one who knows that our normal consciousness is a state of stupor, in which our sensibility to the wholly real and our responsiveness to the stimuli of the spirit are reduced. The mystics, knowing that we are involved in a hidden history of the cosmos, endeavor to awake from the drowsiness and apathy and to regain a state of wakefulness for our enchanted souls. From here Heschel turns immediately to ‘the exaltation of man’ in Kabbalah, concentrating primarily on the notion of God’s need for man, which we have discussed above. It is clear that the key themes of Heschel’s own thought are already developing, and their roots in his reading of the mystical sources are well illustrated here. The anthropocentric attitude of the Kabbalah is much emphasized, and the reverence for humanity, so much a key to the later Heschel, is seen here in his understanding of the Zohar and the passages he selects from it. Man himself is a mystery. He is the symbol of all that exists. His life is the image of universal life. Everything was created in the spiritual image of the mystical man . . . Man is not detached from the realm of the unseen. He is wholly involved in it. Whether he is conscious of it or not, his actions are vital to all worlds, and affect the course of transcendent events . . . The significance of great works done on earth is valued by their cosmic effects . . . Endowed with metaphysical powers man’s life is a most serious affair . . .86 The sefirot are treated, but very briefly, for an essay on Zoharic Kabbalah. Clearly this is not what Heschel hopes the reader will retain. He is much more interested in ‘The Mystic Experience’ and ‘The Mystic Way of Life’. Here again he turns to the theme of doing for the sake of God, of the commandments and especially prayer as ways of adding strength to God and restoring cosmic Oneness. ‘The essential goal of man’s service is to bring about the lost unity of all that exists’.87 These concerns bring him, quite surprisingly, to a final section called ‘The Concern for God’. Here he starts off by defending the place of mysticism in Judaism, quoting mostly from the Psalter. But then he suddenly

86 ‘The Mystical Element in Judaism’, in L. Finkelstein (ed.), The Jews: Their History, Cul- ture, and Religion, II, Philadelphia 1949, p. 935. 87 Ibid., p. 948. 102 Three Warsaw Mystics makes a switch. From the Psalms he turns to the prophets, and the entire last section of this work, purportedly on mysticism, is on the prophets of Israel, their identification with God’s pathos, their passion for justice, and all the other key themes of Die Prophetie and The Prophets. It is as though he had forgotten that he was writing about the Zohar, and had let himself get carried away by the theme that was really engaging to him. He tries, in a (for Heschel) remarkably weak concluding paragraph, to tie this last section back to the mystics, but does not really succeed in doing so. He had said what was significant for him about the mystical tradition. It called for a life of sacred action dedicated to God. But this was in no way separable for him from his vision of a renewed prophetic Judaism, and it was toward that vision that his attention was really drawn.

Some Final Comparisons

We have depicted three mystical theologians, men who had some contact with one another, either personally or through teachings, all associated with Jewish Warsaw of the early twentieth century. All of them, I believe are Jewish mystics who live in a post-Kabbalistic universe, though they are nourished by the writings of the Kabbalah, especially by the Zohar. They also each have an attraction to the teachings of the earliest Hasidic masters, the Ba’al Shem Tov, the Maggid, and their disciples. These texts are their shared central sources of spiritual nourishment from within the post-Biblical tradition. All are observant Jews, affirming of the normative tradition, but all three see their real interest to be in the spiritual aspect of Judaism rather than in the halakhah itself.88 This defines itself as involvement with the life of the soul and the continued cultivation of an inward view of reality, in all of which the presence of God could be discovered in each moment. In this sense all three have a notion of revelation as a constant process, the manifestation of God through the soul into human consciousness. The Sefat Emet was concerned with sacred space and sacred time as religious categories, an awareness of which Heschel probably first gained from studying that work. Heschel’s selection of time over space for his famous

88 This is not strictly true of the Sefat Emet, since there is also a Sefat Emet on the Talmud, covering the orders Mo’ed, Kodashim, and selected passages of Zera’im. (3 vols., Warsaw, 1925–31). It remains fair to say, however, that in contrast to his grandfather the Ḥiddushey ha-RlM, for example, the Sefat Emet is known more for his ḥasidut than for his legal or Talmudic writings. Three Warsaw Mystics 103 characterization of The Sabbath is, I believe, a result of reflection after many years’ reading in the Sefat Emet, where the characterization of time as sacred is ultimately the more convincing. It was in his Yiddish poetry that Heschel first used the phrase ‘Palaces in time’, there applied to evenings, later to become famous as his designation for the Sabbath. All three of these thinkers may be called theistic mystics. They believe in divine transcendence but are constantly captivated by the experience of immanence. In one way or another we have seen each of them struggle with this issue, working to maintain their faithfulness to the mostly personalist and transcendent language of their Biblical heritage, while seeking to share and teach the ready access to God within the natural world and within the soul that they knew from their own lives. Ultimately there is no contradiction between immanence and transcendece for them, since both are faces of the One that itself transcends all such categorization. There are some other things that the three have in common, matters that take us to their public lives, which have mostly remained beyond the a love for ,אהבת ישראל concern of this paper. All have a strong sense of the Jewish people, evident in all their writings. Each has a strong sense of personal mission and uses both the written and the spoken word in an attempt to influence large numbers of Jews—and, in Heschel’s case, others as well—to take their religious lives more seriously and to develop their own God-given spiritual resources. Jewish Warsaw is gone for more than half a century. There is hardly anyone alive now who bears adult memory of the circle around Zeitlin or the Novominsker rebbe’s tisch. I doubt that there is anyone left who still heard the Sefat Emet; if so, he will be a very old man with a distant childhood memory. But the rich spiritual legacy of Jewish Warsaw lives on, contained in the writings of these men and others, and continuing to shape the lives of seeking Jews who live far from that city on the Vistula, once the home of so much Jewish life and spirit.

Jewish Theology: A New Beginning

Arthur Green

Introduction

Who Is Writing This Book? The author of this book is a Jewish seeker. I have been reading, studying, writing, and teaching theology to Jews—including many present and future rabbis—for nearly half a century. Yet I still think of myself primarily as a seeker. That means living in pursuit of an ever-present yet ever-elusive God, the One of Whom Scripture says: “Seek His face, always” (Ps. 105:4).1 There is no end to such seeking. But it also means questing after truth, or at least my truth, one that wells up from my own life experience and feels authentic to who I am, as person and as Jew. Personal and intellectual honesty are essential to my life as a seeker; I try not to permit them to be overwhelmed by traditional claims or by emotional need. In this I am a longtime disciple of Rabbi Bunem of Przysucha who taught: “ ‘Do not deceive anybody (Lev. 25:17)’—not even yourself!” These two realities, being a God seeker and a truth seeker, might seem to go hand in hand. Supposedly God is truth, after all, But in my case the simultaneous quest for both God and truth presents a terrible yet wonderful conflict. It is this conflict, and my ongoing attempt to resolve it, that the book you have just opened is all about. I have understood since childhood that I am a deeply religious person, one easily moved by the power of sacred language, rites, and symbols. Through them I am sometimes able to enter into states of inner openness to a nameless and transcendent presence, that which I choose to call “God.” Raised in a Jewish atheist household, I was powerfully attracted to the synagogue by the time I was seven or eight years old. The grandeur and mystery of its liturgy, the drama of its sacred calendar, and the infinite beauty of the Hebrew language and its classical literature all drew me in and have never ceased to fascinate me.

* This chapter was first published in Radical Judaism by Arthur Green (pp. 1–33). Copy- right © 2010 by Yale University Press. Reprinted with permission. 1 All biblical translations are my own. 106 Jewish Theology: A New Beginning

At the same time, I have long known that I am not a “believer” in the conventional Jewish or Western sense. I simply do not encounter God as “He” is usually described in the Western religious context, a Supreme Being or Creator who exists outside or beyond the universe, who created this world as an act of personal will, and who guides and protects it. Indeed, I do not know that such an “outside” or “beyond” exists. Challenges to conventional theological views, as well as to all the apologetic reformulations that seek to save them, came at me rather hard at the end of adolescence. I had chosen the religious life on my own, becoming quite fully (and somewhat compulsively) observant as an adolescent. But the regimen of Orthodox practice I had adopted, at the cost of terrible family battles, came crashing down during my college years, when I accepted that its theological underpinnings had been rooted in fantasy and denial of reality. The challenges came from two directions: theodicy and critical history. The former included both personal loss (my mother died when I was eleven, and I had spent much of adolescence mourning her and struggling with that loss) and the fact of being a Jew in the immediate post-Holocaust generation. I remember the day my beloved East European grandfather found out just what had happened to the Jews of his town, as I recall my mother and grandmother going through newspaper lists of “relatives sought” in the early postwar years. These experiences, both personal and collective, made it clear to me that I could affirm neither particular providence nor a God who governed history. The God of childhood dreams, the One who could “make it all better” and show that life was indeed fair after all, was gone. My initiation into adulthood meant full acceptance of the arbitrariness of fate, including the finality of death. At about the same time, I was exposed to Jewish scholarship, including the critical reading of the Hebrew Bible and its history. This exciting intellectual enterprise, which gripped my imagination, also undermined the residue of faith I had in Scripture as revealed. The text was edited, composed of many sources. Each of these represented a particular human community or interest group. What, then, was left of revelation? Where was the authority of Scripture, if the text was merely human? I struggled with what it could mean to claim that God had “given us His Torah” when the Torah text itself seemed to “evaporate” into so many documents. Without that, I had no basis for believing in a God who had commanded specific forms of religious behavior. (This seemed to be the essential “payoff” question in Judaism.) So the pillars of naive faith had given way, and its edifice lay in ruins. I had no answers to the great questions around which my religious life had been constructed. Jewish Theology: A New Beginning 107

I was no longer a believer, in the usual sense of that term, but I learned rather quickly that I was still a religious person, struggling with issues of faith. I still sought after God, perhaps even more so once I had given up on my naïve understandings of reality. That was the true beginning of my quest, one in which the only questions that mattered were the unanswer- able ones. I absorbed much of Nietzsche, Kafka, and Camus in those years of questioning. From Nietzsche came the moment of joy at the death of my childhood God and the liberation from all that authority. But this gave way rather quickly to the bleak and empty universe Kafka so poignantly described, a joyless world from which God was absent and there was no air left to breathe, no room left to live, to love, or to create. From Camus and Nikos Kazantzakis came the noble call to make meaning on my own, to defy meaninglessness with creativity and moral action. But the more I sought to create a framework of meaning, picking up the shattered tablets of my onetime Jewish life, the more I came to realize that I was in fact only rediscovering patterns that were there to be seen, and had indeed been seen and articulated by countless generations before me. It was in the course of this re-creation that I had to come back to the question of God. Who or what was the God I sought—and still seek today, half a century later!—once I had accepted that I was such a “nonbeliever” in the God of my childhood? The question seemed to be whether we post- naïve seekers dare to use the word “God” any more, and what we might— or might not—mean by it, while remaining personally and intellectually honest. To explain this, I have to go back to the phrase “I was still a religious person.” What can it mean to “be religious,” in a Jewish (and not Buddhist) context if one does not “believe in God,” at least as defined by the above parameters? It means that I still consider the sacred to be the most important and meaningful dimension of human life. “The sacred” refers to an inward, mysterious sense of awesome presence, a reality deeper than the kind we ordinarily experience. Life bears within it the possibility of inner transcendence; the moments when we glimpse it are so rare and powerful that they call upon us to transform the rest of our lives in their wake. These moments can come without warning, though they may be evoked by great beauty, by joy, by terror, or by anything else that causes us to stop and inter- rupt our ordinary all-encompassing and yet essentially superficial perception of reality. When that mask of ordinariness falls away, our consciousness is left with a moment of nakedness, a confrontation with a reality that we do not know how to put into language. The astonishment of such moments, that which my most revered teacher termed “radical amazement,” is the 108 Jewish Theology: A New Beginning starting point of my religious life.2 I believe, in other words, in the possibility and irreducible reality of religious experience. Such experience stands behind theology; it is the most basic datum with which the would-be theologian has to work. The awareness that derives from that range of human experiences, distilled by reflection, is the basis of religious thought, and therefore of everything I will have to say in the pages before you. What is the nature of this experience? It is as varied as the countless individual human beings in the world, and potentially as multifarious as the moments in each of those human lives. In the midst of life, our ordinariness is interrupted. This may take place as we touch one of the edges of life, in a great confrontation with the new life of a child, or of an approaching death. We may see it in wonders of nature, sunrises and sunsets, mountains and oceans. It may happen to us in the course of loving and deeply entering into union with another, or in profound aloneness. Sometimes, however, such a moment of holy and awesome presence comes upon us without any apparent provocation at all. It may come as a deep inner stillness, quieting all the background noise that usually fills our inner chambers, or it may be quite the opposite, a loud rush and excitement that fills us to overflowing. It may seem to come from within or without, or perhaps both at once. The realization of such moments fills us with a sense of magnificence, of smallness, and of belonging, all at once. Our hearts well up with love for the world around us and awe at its grandeur. The experience is usually one that renders us speechless. But then we feel lucky and blessed if we have enough ties to a tradition that gives us language, that enables us to say, “The whole earth is filled with God’s glory!” For me God is not an intellectual proposition but rather the ground of life itself. It is the name I give to the reality I encounter in the kind of moment I have been describing, one that feels more authentic and deeply perceptive of truth than any other. I believe with complete faith that every human being is capable of such experience, and that these moments place us in contact with the elusive inner essence of being that I call “God.” It is out of such moments that religion is born, our human response to the dizzying depths of an encounter we cannot—and yet so need to—name. I returned to tradition, the one of my ancestors and my early attempts at faith, because it gave me a language with which to name that inner “place.”

2 I am referring to Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972), with whom I had the great privilege of studying as a rabbinical student in the mid-1960s. I have been reading him, teaching his writings, and engaging in conversation with him for half a century. Much of this book may be seen as a response to, and dialogue with, his work. Jewish Theology: A New Beginning 109

I find myself less convinced by the dogmatic truth claims of tradition than powerfully attracted to the richness of its language, both in word and in symbolic gesture. Through the profound echo chamber of countless generations, tradition offers a way to respond, to channel the love and awe that rise up within us at such times, and to give a name to the holy mystery by which our lives are bounded. I was about twenty years old when I began studying the Zohar (the thirteenth-century classic of medieval Kabbalah) and the teachings of the early Hasidic masters (of eighteenth-century Eastern Europe). This encounter with the mystical tradition saved Judaism for me. Without it I would have wandered away. These works, almost all composed in homiletical form, are the living antithesis to systematic theology. Often they were first offered as oral teachings, appropriate to a certain sacred or personal moment. Only later were they written down, in somewhat disembod- ied form. But they are endlessly rich in insights, insights into the soul, the human condition, and sometimes even the cosmic order. They are marked by the transforming awareness of a mysterious divine presence, to be found everywhere and in each moment, once we open our eyes to it. The combination of deep conviction and playful religious creativity in those sources immediately touched my soul, and continues to do so nearly a half-century later. The essential insights of Hasidism—that God is to be sought and found everywhere and in each moment, that our response to this deeper truth is both a daily practice and a lifelong adventure, and that our ongoing discovery of God can uplift and transform both soul and world—soon became my truths. The best semisystematic work where I found them presented in those early years was a little treatise called Fundaments of Hasidism by Hillel Zeitlin, one of the two key neo-Hasidic thinkers of interwar Europe (along with Martin Buber), and famous martyr of the Warsaw ghetto.3 When I read those pages—Zeitlin’s discussions entitled “Being and Nothingness,” “The Self-Contraction of God,” and “Uplifting Sparks”— I remember somehow knowing that I had found my own religious language, one that spoke deeply to my soul, while challenging rather than offending my mind. It has served me well across the decades, and I hope that I have come to serve it faithfully as well. One of my goals here is to share some of that language—and my enthusiasm for it—with you.

3 I have published a collection of Zeitlin’s writings, including this essay, in a volume entitled Hasidic Spirituality for a New Era: The Religious Writings of Hillel Zeitlin, Classics of Western Spirituality, New York (Paulist Press) 2012. 110 Jewish Theology: A New Beginning

The most important religious questions, I understood from the beginning, are universal: the quest for meaning, the purpose of human existence, the true nature of both world and self. I think about these overwhelmingly universal matters from within the context of a very particular religious language. I am not only a Jewish theologian, working within a religious language and historical context familiar to no more than the tiniest fraction of humanity. As one who draws deeply upon the language and symbolism of the Jewish mystical tradition, I represent a minority within this minority. I am a neo-Hasidic Jew, one influenced by the lives and teachings of the early Hasidic masters, but choosing not to live within the strict parameters of religious praxis that characterize Hasidism, and not sharing the later Hasidic disdain for secular education or for the modern world as a whole. It has long been clear to me that the insights into reality to be found in the texts, lives, and stories of the Jewish mystical and Hasidic tradition need to be shared more broadly, something I have tried to do over a lifetime of writing and teaching. I also have a sense that this spiritual legacy should not belong to Jews alone. Its insights into the great universal questions, though expressed in uniquely Jewish language, have importance for Jews and non- Jews alike, for all who take religious questions seriously and who understand the critical hour in which we live. I also think of myself as a religious humanist. Humanism means an understanding that our fate, along with that of the entire planet, depends on human action. There is no one to hold back our hand, to keep us from destroying this garden in which we have been placed. We are totally responsible. Religious humanism means that we will fulfill that awesome role only by realizing that we are part of a reality infinitely more ancient, more profound, and more unified than any of us can express or know. Much of this book is an unpacking of the ways in which I see mysticism and humanism, two seemingly very distinct approaches to life, complementing one another. The book is clearly and unabashedly Jewish in its language. Its examples are brought mainly from the tradition I know best and from my own life of religious experience. But its address is to a new and broad religious community, one that transcends conventional borders in order to deal with questions too big to be confined. My job is to translate the specifics in a way that carries them beyond the particular Jewish context and renders them accessible to everyone. If I have succeeded, the book will be “heard” as a clarion call, coming from an ancient tradition, for a transformation of human consciousness uniquely befitting this critical hour in human his- Jewish Theology: A New Beginning 111 tory, a new and universal religious awareness that will serve as an enabling vehicle for other changes that will soon be required of us. I have lived much of my life at the juncture of historical scholarship and religious creativity. Trained as a historian of premodern Jewish thought, I am still committed to scholarly understanding, as some sections of this book will attest. But I have become more concerned with what Jews might believe in the uncertain future and what we as an ancient civilization might have to say to humanity at the present moment. This takes on a special urgency in the times in which we live. The most essential truth I glean from Hasidic teachings, the unity and holiness of all life, even of all existence, is one the world most urgently needs to hear. Having reached that point in my own life where you notice “the day is short,” it is time for me to give a full account of what I have learned along this journey and pass it on to another generation. “The day is short,” however, applies not only to the course of my own life. I believe that we stand at a great moment of transition in human and planetary history. Unless we take drastic steps to change our way of living, our patterns of consumption, and our most essential understanding of our relationship to the world in which we exist, we are at great risk of destroying our earthly home and rendering it a waste- land. Our future, and that of our planet, is in our hands. In this moment I believe that a universalized reading of the Hasidic legacy has much to offer. While I do not await a God who will intervene in history to save the planet from us, God may be present in another way as we face the crucial challenge of our age. Religion, a more powerful human force in our day than anyone would have imagined, will have a major role to play in this needed transformation. If something we call God dwells within our sacred traditions (Ps. 22:4), we people of faith may indeed find a way to bring forth a ray of what we might call divine salvation. We need to reshape our religious languages in such a way that they will inspire the great collective act of teshuvah, “return” or “repentance,” required of us at this moment. We need to repent of our cavalier treatment of the biosphere in which we live, of our indifferent overconsumption and waste of resources, of our virtual disdain for nonhuman forms of life. We need to repent of the separation we have created between the sacred and the mundane, between the godly and the natural. Without such teshuvah humanity will not survive. Without marshaling the power of the religious and mythic imagination, we will not be able to make the turn we must in order to exist. Read this book as a call to that collective and universal human effort. 112 Jewish Theology: A New Beginning

Toward a Postmodern Judaism Chapter 1 of the book centers on a discussion of religion and its relationship to evolution, beginning with the biological evolution of species and leading into an evolutionary approach to the history of religion itself. The battle against evolution in the United States, from the Scopes trial to ongoing media fascination with political candidates’ views of the subject, represents the last great gasp of traditional religion’s struggle against the inevitable triumph of modernity. While the modern consciousness was in the making a good century before Darwin, no one defines more than he does the impossibility of going backward and wishing out of existence the great gulf that modernity has opened up between the pursuit of truth and a literalist faith in biblically based religion. It is because of Darwin—and “Darwin” here means not only his evolutionary biology but also the accom- panying evidence of geology, astrophysics, and a host of other scientific data regarding the origins of our planet and its life system—that theology has been transformed. Religion’s response to Darwin has extended over a century. But, as recent headlines tell us, the conversation is not quite over. The “new atheists” of the past decade have come largely from the scientific community, convinced post-Darwinians who are shocked at the resurgence of religion in our society. They have emerged from scientific laboratory and university classroom to take on the public fight against religious, mostly Christian, fundamentalism, often feeling that they need to save the entire modern enterprise from medieval Philistines who would bring it crashing down. Unfortunately some of these writers have little sophistication in approaching religion, tending to view it simplistically and paint it all with a single brush. “Religion,” to them, seems to allow for nothing other than literal belief in nonsensical biblical tales and various accru- ing 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. In fact much of theological conversation in modern times has focused on the idea of God rather than on an actual Being who precedes this universe and is responsible for its existence. Philosophically, of course, it is more Immanuel Kant than Charles Darwin who is responsible for this change. But the inevitability of this move is most loudly proclaimed by the fact that we talk about the biohistory of our planet and its species without recourse to divine intervention. If God is not present in “Creation,” as the medievals already understood, neither providence nor the possibility of miracles remains. With that, there is little more to talk about than the Jewish Theology: A New Beginning 113 human idea of God and the various psychological and social benefits—or perhaps detriments— that such belief entails. The best representatives of modernity in the Jewish theological conversation, Hermann Cohen in the German neo-Kantian context and Mordecai M. Kaplan against the background of American pragmatism, both operated within these bounds. The most impassioned and inspiring Jewish religious voices in the twentieth century were those shaped by religious existentialism and phenomenology, attempts to set aside or “bracket” the seemingly insurmountable modern objections to the claims of faith and to rebuild Judaism around an intimate personal relationship with God, a renewed study of the premodern Jewish sources, and the need for religious community. In varying ways, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, J.B. Soleveitchik, and A.J. Heschel all fall into this category. They opened up for moderns the possibility of a Jewish faith marked by emotional resonance and profundity. But like their existentialist counterparts in Christendom, these thinkers were all longer in passion than in defining precisely what they meant by “God,” invoking the old Pascalian bon mot decrying definition in matters of faith. None of them was quite able or willing to tell his readers just what the God of love, devotion, and demand might have to do with the history of our physical universe, the evolution of life, and the emergence of humanity from among the primates. None of these sophisticated and university-educated thinkers was willing to enter the lists against the Darwinian narrative (as did the late Lubavitcher rebbe, by contrast), but neither were they willing to make it their own or imagine a Judaism that fully embraced it. The same was mostly the case with regard to biblical and Near Eastern scholarship and the obvious challenges they offered to Judaism. Existential religion chose to operate on a plane of reality different from that of the scientific worldview and thus to have little intersection with it. The challenge to modernity that arose in the second half of the twentieth century had much to do with the aftermath of World War II and the onset of the nuclear age, the realization that the scientifically dominated worldview, hallmark of the modern era, had brought us not to peace and understanding but rather to potential and real viciousness and destruction on a previously unimagined scale. Beginning in the 1960s, many of the best minds of the West began to look outside the modern, progressivist, scientific canon and turned instead to areas of human knowledge that had been overthrown or ignored in the rush toward modernity. Some in fact turned to religious existentialism, which had its greatest influence in the early postwar era. Many others, however, sought out more obscure sources of truth. The hope was that somewhere in the recesses of past human creativity we 114 Jewish Theology: A New Beginning would find the wisdom that might help us change our way of life, slow the maddening pace of contemporary existence, and desist from the violent behaviors that social Darwinism seemed to proclaim an inevitable part of our biological legacy. That truth might be found by sitting with a Zen master, by breathing with the Yogis, by smoking a Native American peace pipe, or by climbing the Himalayas (both real and metaphorical) to reach some obscure Tibetan monastery. As we watched the great crisis of our era shift from the threat of imminent nuclear self-destruction to that of environmental degradation and the overconsumption of resources, the urgency of that quest only grew greater. Even Kabbalah, perhaps the best-known of Western esoteric traditions, has come to be considered a possible source of such alternative insight as to how to live in this new era. This perceived weakening of modernity’s hold on intelligent conversation pulled in several directions at once. Surely it reinvigorated the surviving circles of premodernists, those who had all along lived on the sidelines of the intellectual mainstream and continued in their classical premodern constructions of faith, based either on scriptural literalism (Protestant evangelicals and most Muslims) or on theological premises that dated from centuries before modernity (Catholics, Orthodox Jews, and Muslim intellectuals). These bastions of alternative visions of reality have all demonstrated surprising strength in recent decades, both in holding on to their own respective flocks and in attracting significantly numerous converts. To one degree or another, all of them have stood as challengers of modernity, insisting on holding on to truth claims (usually regarding both the twin pillars of Creation and revelation) that modern scientific scholarship denies. Traditionalist Jewish and Catholic intellectuals, following long internal traditions, found more room for accommodation with science but avoided dealing with some of the toughest issues. Muslims, who felt that modernity had been imposed on them from without by dint of imperialist conquest, were the most resentful, fueling the frightening resurgence of fundamentalism that we see today. Only a few Muslim intellectuals were able to defend the old broad-minded traditions of Islam’s hosting and embracing scientific truth. During the same era, however, a very different turn toward religion as the source of an alternative vision has been taking place. Here the emphasis is on consciousness rather than on Scripture or doctrine as the source of truth. Beginning with the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s (quickly corrupted, to be sure, but also much too readily dismissed by both govern- ment and media), there arose an interest in altered states of mind, deeper realms of consciousness, and a sense that our notions of “truth,” based Jewish Theology: A New Beginning 115 on sense perception and logical deduction, might be the limited vision of a narrow range of mental activity, challenged by the vast experience of prophets, mystics, and meditators through the ages. It may be said that this approach to religion took the existentialists’ awareness of inner reality as its point of departure, but sought to anchor it in a nuanced understanding of consciousness that was open to elements of both mysticism and scientific analysis. This new receptiveness generally embraced Eastern rather than Western teachings, primarily because they were offered more in the spirit of experiential learning and without insistence on either dogma or ritual. (Eastern religions in their native habitat are of course replete with both of these, but those who imported them to the West were able to repackage the essential insights, shorn of their traditional baggage.) This branch of the postmodern turn toward religion generally, though not always, eschewed orthodoxies and exclusivist claims, looking rather toward cross-traditional insights and teachings. Whether dressed in the trappings of Buddhism, Vedanta, Sufism, or Kabbalah, it tended to wear them lightly. Its essential faith claim is that there is a truth greater than that offered by the scientific worldview, one lying beneath the surface of reality and accessible by means of meditation, silence, chant, or other forms of disciplined religious praxis. The verbal articulation of such inner realities is often difficult; this too the “new mystics” have inherited from the existentialists. Here the relationship between the rational-scientific perception of reality and this religious (more often called “spiritual”) claim is placed less in confrontational terms than is the case with Western-based fundamentalism. Scientific truth is not “wrong”; it is simply not the entire picture. This book draws on both of these approaches to religion and its role in proclaiming a truth or reality that is an alternative to that of our modern scientific worldview. The reader will immediately see that I take both Scripture and tradition quite seriously, though I am far from literalism or fundamentalism. I am also much influenced by the rediscovery of mystical consciousness that has taken place in our time. Though my theology and the roots of my imagination are deeply and particularly Jewish, I write with a broad awareness of contemporary, including Eastern, religious thought. In proposing a Jewish theology for the twenty-first century (or the approaching fifty-ninth, if you prefer), I proceed from an understanding that the twentieth century’s battles are very much over and that an essential reframing of our response to the great religious questions is needed. I hope the reader will find some pieces of it in these pages. The title of the book shows my roots in the Radical Theology movement of the late 1960s. I have recalled elsewhere a conversation I had with my 116 Jewish Theology: A New Beginning mentor Abraham Joshua Heschel in which I asked him what he thought about Radical Theology, a movement that spoke of the “death of God,” which Heschel had termed blasphemy.4 But this very “death of God,” a realization that conventional Western religious language had reached a point of exhaustion, was also pushing away much theological debris, making room for precisely the sort of “depth theology” that Heschel himself had advocated. “Radical theology is very important,” he answered, “but it has to begin with the teachings of the later Hasidic masters.”5 Some forty years later (a number of some significance among Jewish journeyers!), I hope this book is that theology. The “radicalism” of this work may not be what some readers would expect. I am primarily a thinker and teacher, not an activist. Although I share strong liberal or progressivist views on most political and social issues, this book is about a different sort of radicalism, one that takes us back to our deepest spiritual roots and challenges us to rethink our lives from that perspective. It has implications in the social sphere, to be sure, but its core lies in the realm of a contemporary mystical understanding of who we are, how we got here, and where we are going. In Jewish terms, it is a call to return to our Source, the one that underlies and precedes all our so-venerated “sources.” A few words about some of the readers I have in mind would probably be appropriate here. In earlier times, theology was written only for those who lived within a particular religious community and shared the symbols and liturgical language of that faith. Its function was largely to explicate those symbols and to give an intelligible account of how they bore that community’s message. But given the wider concerns and the urgency of the hour, I have set myself a different goal. I am writing a theological work for a broad and as yet undefined audience. The fact that I am writing in English rather than Hebrew is significant to me. It means that my community of readers should include both Jews and non-Jews. I especially welcome readers of Christian or Islamic heritage. Despite the differences in religious language, they will find many key issues, and much of my own struggle with them, quite familiar. This audience will also, I hope, embrace readers who have been exposed to the religious languages of the East, including some of the many who are making a journey “homeward” after encountering medita-

4 The Language of Truth: The Torah Commentary of the Sefat Emet (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1998), pp. ixf. 5 Heschel actually referred to two specific Hasidic authors, the Sefat Emet (R. Judah Leib Alter of Ger, 1847–1905) and R. Zadok Ha-Kohen of Lublin (1823–1900). Jewish Theology: A New Beginning 117 tion and spirituality first in an Eastern setting. I think they will find the language spoken here to represent a Judaism closer to those teachings than they might have expected. As a teacher, I also think of the broadest circle of “my students” as readers of this book. These include rabbis of all denominations and none, as well as many other Jewish seekers. Some of them will undoubtedly feel pushed beyond their usual comfort zones in confronting the more radical ideas found here, whether with regard to God, nature, and evolution, or those in the later sections dealing with halakhah and Jewish practice or the Jewish people, the state of Israel, and the Jewish diaspora. I speak more frankly and less defensively here than is usual in Jewish circles, and I antici- pate some protest. The object is not just to explicate Judaism, to tell you what our tradition has to say about the world, and why it all makes sense. There are plenty of books, including some good ones, seeking to do that. I want to reflect, as a Jew, on the big and universal issues: what we might mean today by saying “God”; the purpose of human existence, how we got here, where we are going, and what we can do to save this beloved planet. I can do so only by speaking my own religious language. But the objective is never just to explain or defend that language; rather, it is to use it as a pathway to universal insights that lie within it. At times this process will demand your patience and a bit of perseverance, especially as I lead you into the laby- rinth of Kabbalistic symbolism. Please stay with me; I promise you will be well rewarded.

Y-H-W-H: God and Being

In the Beginning I open with a theological assertion. As a religious person I believe that the evolution of species is the greatest sacred drama of all time. It is a tale— perhaps even the tale—in which the divine waits to be discovered. It dwarfs all the other narratives, memories, and images that so preoccupy the mind of religious traditions, including our own. We Jews, Christians, and Muslims are all overinvolved with proclaiming—or questioning—the truth of our own particular stories. Did Moses really receive the Torah from God at Mount Sinai? Did Jesus truly rise from the tomb? Was Muhammad indeed God’s chosen messenger? We refine our debates about these forever, each group certain that its own narrative is at the center of universal history. In the modern world, where all these tales are challenged, we work 118 Jewish Theology: A New Beginning out sophisticated and nonliteralist ways of proclaiming our faith in them. But there is a bigger story, infinitely bigger, and one that we all share. How did we get here, we humans, and where are we going? For more than a century and a half, educated Westerners have understood that this is the tale of evolution. But we religious folk, the great tale-tellers of our respective traditions, have been guarded and cool toward this story and have hesitated to make it our own. The time has come to embrace it and to uncover its sacred dimensions. I believe that “Creation,” or perhaps more neutrally stated, “origins,” a topic almost entirely neglected in both Jewish and liberal Christian theology of the past century, must return as a central preoccupation in our own day. This indeed has much to do with the ecological agenda and the key role that religion needs to play in changing our attitudes toward the world within which we humans live.6 But it also emerges from our society’s growing acceptance of scientific explanations—those of the nuclear physicist, the geologist, the evolutionary biologist, and others—for the origins of the world we have inherited. The finality of this acceptance, which I share, seemingly means the end of a long struggle between so-called scientific and religious worldviews. This leaves those of us who speak the language of faith in a peculiar situation. Is there then no connection between the God we know and encounter daily within all existence and the emergence and history of our universe? Does the presence of eternity we feel (whether we call ourselves “believers” or not) when we stand atop great mountains or at the ocean water’s edge exist only within our minds? Is our faith nothing more than one of those big mollusk shells we used to put up against our ears, convinced we could hear in them the ocean’s roar? Is our certainty of divine presence, so palpable to the religious soul, merely a poetic affirmation, corresponding to nothing in the reality described by science? We accept the scientific account of how we got here, or at least understand that the conversation about that process and its stages lies within the domain of science. Yet we cannot absent God from it entirely. Even if we have left behind the God of childhood, the One who assures and guarantees “fairness” in life, the presence of divinity within nature remains essential to our perception of reality. A God who has no place in the process of “how we got here” is a God who begins in the human mind, a mere idea of God, a post-Kantian construct created to guarantee morality, to assure us of the

6 In the background here are such works as Thomas Berry’s The Dream of the Earth (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1988); Berry and Brian Swimme’s The Universe Story (San Francisco: Harper, 1992); and E.O. Wilson’s The Creation (New York: Norton, 2006). Jewish Theology: A New Beginning 119 potential for human goodness, or for some other noble purpose. But that is not God. The One of which I speak here indeed goes back to origins and stands prior to them, though perhaps not in a clearly temporal sense.7 A God who underlies all being, who is and dwells within (rather than “who controls” or “oversees”) the evolutionary process is the One about which— or about “Whom”—we tell the great sacred tale, the story of existence. I thus insist on the centrality of “Creation,” but I do so from the position of one who is not quite a theist, as understood in the classical Western sense. I do not affirm a Being or a Mind that exists separate from the universe and acts upon it intelligently and willfully. This puts me quite far from the contemporary “creationists” or from what is usually understood as “intelligent design” (but see more on this below). My theological position is that of a mystical panentheist, one who believes that God is present throughout all of existence, that Being or Y-H-W-H underlies and unifies all that is.8 At the same time (and this is panentheism as distinct from pantheism), this whole is mysteriously and infinitely greater than the sum of its parts, and cannot be fully known or reduced to its constituent beings.9 “Transcendence” in the context of such a faith does not refer to a God “out there” or “over there” somewhere beyond the universe, since I do not know the existence of such a “there.” Transcendence means rather that God—or Being—is so fully present in the here and now of each moment that we could not possibly grasp the depth of that presence. Transcendence thus dwells within immanence. There is no ultimate duality here, no “God and world,” no “God, world, and self,” only one Being and its many faces. Those who seek consciousness of it come to know that it is indeed eyn sof, without end. There is no end to its unimaginable depth, but so too there is no border, no limit, separating that unfathomable One from anything that is. Infinite Being in every instant flows through all finite beings. “Know this

7 I have discussed this nontemporal sense of priority briefly in Seek My Face: A Jewish Mystical Theology (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2003), pp. 55f. The point is that the One underlies the many then, now, and forever. This underlying is the true nature of its priority in the mystical context, one which is converted into temporality as mystical insight comes to be expressed in mythic narrative (since stories require a “before” and “after”). The contemporary Midrashist might see this hinted at in the syntactical awkwardness of bereshit bara’. 8 The relationship of “being” and “Being” in English is roughly comparable to that of HaWaYaH (“existence’’) and Y-H-W-H (its consonantal equivalent, rearranged) in Hebrew. 9 This puts me in the camp, as Hillel Zeitlin would have said, of the Ba’al Shem Tov’s pantheism, as distinguished from Spinoza’s. The distinction between these was key to Zeit- lin’s return to Judaism and die starting point of his neo-Hasidic philosophy. See his remarks in Barukh Spinoza (Warsaw: Tushiya, 1914), pp. 135ff., as well as in Di Benkshaft nokh Sheyn- heyt (Warsaw: Velt-Bibliotek, 1910), pp. 34f. See discussion above, pp. 71f. 120 Jewish Theology: A New Beginning day and set it upon your heart that Y-H-W-H is elohim” (Deut. 4:39)—that God within you is the transcendent.10 And the verse concludes: “There is nothing else.” By mystical panentheism I mean that this underlying oneness of being is accessible to human experience and reveals itself to humans—indeed, it reveals itself everywhere, always—as the deeper levels of the human mind become open to it. Access to it requires a lifting of veils, a shifting of attention to those inner realms of human consciousness where mystics, and not a few poets, have always chosen to abide. The “radical otherness” of God, so insisted upon by Western theology, is not an ontological otherness but an otherness of perspective. To open one’s eyes to God is to see Being—the only Being there is—in a radically different way. Such a unitive view of reality is entirely other (ganz andere, in theological German) from the way we usually see things, yet it is the same reality that is being viewed. I am also one who knows that religious truth belongs to the language of poetry, not discursive prose. I recognize fully and without regret that theology is an art, not a science. We people of faith have nothing we can prove; attempts to do so only diminish what we have to offer. We can only testify, never prove. Our strength lies in grandeur of vision, in an ability to transport the conversation about existence and origins to a deeper plane of thinking. My faith, but also my human experience, tells me that this shift profoundly enhances our understanding of our own lives and of the world in which we live. Opening our minds, and ultimately the mind of our society, to the truth accessible from that inner “place” constitutes our best hope for inspiring change in the way we live on this earth. There is nothing mere about poetic vision. This point in the discussion calls for a greater clarification of the terms “One,” “Being,” and “God,” which I now appear to be using quite inter- changeably. Am I speaking of a “what” or a “who,” the reader has a right to ask. Let me answer clearly. When I refer to “God,” I mean the inner force of existence itself, that of which one might say: “Being is.” I refer to it as the “One” because it is the single unifying substratum of all that is. To speak of Being as a religious person, however, is to speak of it not detachedly, in scientific “objectivity,” but rather with full engagement of the self, in love and awe.11 These two great emotions together characterize the religious mind

10 I intentionally quote the verse around which Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi wove his essential mystical treatise Sha’ar ha-Yiẖud veha-Emunah (the second part of Tanya), to indicate the strong Hasidic roots of the theology I am articulating here. 11 Love and awe (ahavah ve-yir’ah, deẖilo u-reẖimo) are taken by the Jewish ethical literature to be the twin pillars of religious emotion, ever to be kept in balance with Jewish Theology: A New Beginning 121 and, when carried to their fullest, make for our sense of the holy. A religious person is one who perceives or experiences holiness in the encounter with existence; the forms of religious life are intended to evoke this sense of the holy. In a mental state that cannot be fully described in words, such a person hears Being say: “I am.” All of our personifications of the One are in response to that inner “hearing.” In biblical language, the “I am” of Sinai is already there behind the first “Let there be” of Genesis.12 Creation is revelation, as the Kabbalists understood so well. To say it in more neutral terms, we religious types personify Being because we see ourselves as living in relationship to the underlying One. I seek to respond to the “I am” that I have been privileged to hear, to place myself at its service in carrying forth this great mission of the evolving life process. To do so, I choose to personify, to call Being by this ancient name “God.”13 In doing this, I am proclaiming my love and devotion to Being, my readiness to live a life of seeking and responding to its truth. But implied here is also a faith that in some mysterious way Being loves me, that it rejoices for a fleeting instant in dwelling within me, delighting in this unique form that constitutes my existence, as it delights in each of its endlessly diverse manifestations.

Creation: Reframing the Tale With regard to “Creation,” I understand the task of the theologian to be one of reframing, accepting the accounts of origins and natural history offered by the scientific consensus, but helping us to view them in a different way, one that may guide us toward a more profound appreciation of that same reality. The tale of life’s origins and development, including its essential building block of natural selection, is well known to us as moderns. But what would it mean to recount that tale with our eyes truly open?

one another. For the Kabbalist they represent the proper human embodiments of ẖesed and din, the right and left hands of the cosmic Self. Classic treatments include Meir Ibn Gabbai’s ’Avodat ha-Qodesh (Venice, 1567), 1:25–28, and (much expanded) Elijah Da Vidas, Reshit Hˍokhmah (Venice, 1579). In this matter I find myself wholly within the classical tradition. 12 In the idiom of Midrash, the hidden aleph of ’anokhi lies behind the dualizing bet of bereshit. See my discussion in “The Aleph-Bet of Creation: Jewish Mysticism for Beginners,” Tikkun 7:4 (1992). 13 The reader may properly hear an echo of Martin Buber’s words in Eclipse of God (New York: Harper and Row, 1952), pp. 7ff. I too recognize the difficulty in continuing to use this word, alongside the impossibility of doing without it. 122 Jewish Theology: A New Beginning

We would understand the entire course of evolution, from the simplest life forms millions of years ago, to the great complexity of the human brain (still now only barely understood), and proceeding onward into the unknown future, to be a meaningful process. There is a One that is ever revealing itself to us within and behind the great diversity of life. That One is Being itself, the constant in the endlessly changing evolutionary parade. Viewed from our end of the process, the search that leads to discovery of that One is our human quest for meaning. But turned around, seen from the perspective of the constantly evolving life energy, evolution can be seen as an ongoing process of revelation or self-manifestation. We discover; it reveals. It reveals; we discover. As the human mind advances (from our point of view), understanding more of the structure, process, and history of the ever-evolving One, we are being given (from its point of view) ever- greater insight into who we are and how we got here. This ongoing self-disclosure is the result of a deep and mysterious inner drive, the force of Being directed from within, however imperfectly and stumblingly, to manifest itself ever more fully, in ever more diverse, complex, and interesting ways. That has caused it to bring about, in the long and slow course of its evolution, the emergence of a mind that can reflect upon the process, articulate it, and strive toward the life of complete awareness that will fulfill its purpose. Here on this smallish planet in the middle of an otherwise undistinguished galaxy, something so astonishing has taken place that it indeed demands to be called by the biblical term “miracle,” rather than by the Greco-Latin “nature,” even though the two are pointing to the exact same set of facts. The descendants of one-celled creatures grew and developed, emerged onto dry land, learned survival skills, developed language and thought, until a subset of them could reflect on the nature of this entire process and seek to derive meaning from it. The coming to be of “higher” or more complex forms of life, and eventually of humanity, is not brought about by the specific and conscious planning of what is sometimes called “intelligent design.” But neither is it random and therefore inherently without meaning. It is rather the result of an inbuilt movement within the whole of being, the underlying dynamis of existence striving to be manifest ever more fully in minds that it brings forth and inhabits, through the emergence of increasingly complex and reflective selves. I think of that underlying One in immanent terms, a Being or life force that dwells within the universe and all its forms, rather than a Creator from beyond who forms a world that is “other” and separate from its own Self. This One—the only One that truly is—lies within and behind all the diverse forms of being that have existed since the beginning of time; Jewish Theology: A New Beginning 123 it is the single Being (as the Hebrew name Y-H-W-H indicates)14 clothed in each individual being and encompassing them all.15 If we could learn to view our biohistory this way, the incredible grandeur of the evolutionary journey would immediately unfold before us. We Jews revere the memory of one Nahshon ben Aminadav, the first person to step into the Sea of Reeds after Israel left Egypt. The sea did not split, the story goes, until he was up to his neck in water. What courage! But what about the courage of the first creature ever to emerge from sea onto dry land? Do we appreciate the magnificence of that moment? Or the first to fly, to take wing into the air? Or the moment (of course each of these is a long, slow process rather than a “moment,” but the drama is no less great) when animals were divided from plants, when one sort of being was able take nourishment directly from the soil while another was able to exist without this form of nourishment, developing the mechanism to “feed” on plant, and then animal, life. How is it possible, with all of them descending from the same single-celled creatures? The incredibly complex interplay of forces and the thick web of mutual dependency among beings are no less amazing than the distance traversed in this long evolutionary journey. The interrelationships between soil, plants, and insects, or those between climate, foliage, and animal life, all leave us breathless as we begin to contemplate them. It is these very intricacies and complexities that have led the religious fundamentalists to hold fast to the claim that there must be a greater intelligence behind it all, that such complexity can only reflect the planning of a supernatural Mind. But they miss the point of the religious moment here. Our task as religious persons is not to offer counterscientific explanations for the origin of life. Our task is to notice, to pay attention to, the incredible wonder of it all, and to find God in that moment of paying attention. There is indeed something “supernatural” about existence, something entirely out of the ordinary, beyond any easy expectation. But I understand the “supernatural” to reside wholly within the “natural.”16 The difference

14 My discussion of this theological viewpoint, including its roots in an understanding of the divine name, begins in my book Seek My Face. 15 Among the rabbinic phrases that leap to mind here are ke-haden qumtsa’ di-levushey minney u-veyh (“like the locust, whose garbing comes forth from his own self” [Midrash Bereshit Rabbah 21:5]) and hu meqomo shel ’olam ve-eyn ha-’olam meqomo (“He is the ‘place’ of the world; the world is not His place” [Bereshit Rabbah 68:10]). 16 The presence of the miraculous within the natural has a long history in Jewish theological conversation. Some key prior participants in this conversation are Nahmanides, the MaHaRaL of Prague, and Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev. On the last of these, see my article 124 Jewish Theology: A New Beginning between them is one of perception, the degree to which our “inner eye” is open. The whole journey is a supernatural one, not because some outside Being made it happen but because Being itself, residing in those simplest and most ancient of life-forms, pushing ever forward, step after simple step, to reach where we are today, continues to elude our complete understanding. The emergence of both bees and blossoms, and the relationship between them, took place over millions of years, step by evolutionary step. How could that have happened? There is an endless ingenuity to this self- manifesting Being, an endless stream of creativity of which we are only the tiniest part. If we do not destroy or do too much irreversible damage to our planet, it will continue to bring forth ever more diverse and creative manifestations long after we are gone. The poetic reframing of our contemporary tale of origins that I am proposing here might be better understood by reference to a prior example, one with which we happen to have an intimate bond. I refer to the opening chapter of the Hebrew Bible. The authors of Genesis 1 effected a remarkable transformation of the creation myth that existed in their day. The common theology of the ancient Near East, reflected in both Canaanite and Mesopotamian sources, featured the rising up of the primal forces of chaos, represented by Yam and Tiamat, gods of the sea, against the order being imposed by the younger but more powerful sky gods. The defeat of that primordial rebellion was the background of Creation; earth was established upon the carcasses of the vanquished. That tale of uprising and its bloody end, now largely forgotten, was well known to the biblical writers and their audiences.17 It is reflected in various passages in the prophets, Psalms, and Job, and is subtly hinted at even within the Genesis narrative. But those who wrote Genesis 1 reframed the story completely. Everything was created in harmony, willfully, by a single God who kept saying: “Good! Good!” in response to His creations, giving His blessing to each. That reshaped tale helped to form and sustain Western civilization for several thousand years. The faith that God loves and affirms Creation provides the moral undergirding for all of Western religion, manifest differently in each of the three dominant faiths. Some believed it naively and

“Levi Yizhak of Berdichev on Miracles” in my volume The Heart of the Matter (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2014), pp. 254ff. 17 Jonathan Day, God’s Conflict with the Dragon and the Sea: Echoes of a Canaanite Myth in the Old Testament (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). For the presence and survival of this theme in later Judaism, see Michael Fishbane’s “The Great Dragon Battle and Talmudic Redaction,” in his The Exegetical Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni- versity Press, 1998), pp. 41–55. Jewish Theology: A New Beginning 125 literally; others interpreted it and tried to reconcile it with various other ways of thinking. I am suggesting that we need to undertake a similar effort of transformation for our current “Creation” story. Our civilization has been transformed in the past century and a half in no small part by our acceptance of a new series of tales of origin, an account that begins with the Big Bang (which itself may turn out to be myth) and proceeds through the long saga of the origins of our solar system, the geohistory of our planet, the emergence of life, and biological evolution. Nuclear physicists and cosmologists have become the new Kabbalists of our age, speculating in ever more refined ways on the first few seconds of existence much as our mystical sages meditated on the highest triad of the ten divine emanations. The picture that science offers is one of unimaginably violent explosion, of particles hurtling through indescribably vast reaches of space, and only then of the emergence of an order—solar systems, gravity, orbits, air, and water—that makes for the possibility of life’s existence.18 As living things emerge and develop we are again presented with a tale of violent and bloody struggle, that of each species and creature to eat and not be eaten, to strive for its moment at the top of the evolutionary mound of corpses. This story too, I am suggesting, is in need of reformulation by a new and powerful harmonistic vision, one that will allow even the weakest and most threatened of creatures a legitimate place in this world and will call upon us not to wipe it out by careless whim. This is the role of today’s religion. How would such a reframed tale read? It would be a narrative of the great reaching out by the inner One that inhabits each of us and binds us all together, a constant stretching forth of Y-H-W-H (“Being”) in the endless adventure of becoming HWYH (Hebrew for “being” or “existence”), or of the One garbing itself in the multicolored garment of diversity and multiplicity. Every creature and each cell within it would be viewed as part of this tale, a mini-adventure within the infinitely complex narrative web that embraces us all. The meaning of this great journey would remain quite mysterious, but with a glimmer of hope that somewhere in the distant future “we” might figure it all out. The evolutionary movement forward would be seen as a striving toward complexity, toward ever-thicker and ever-richer patterns of self-manifestation.

18 Parallel structures of thought in Kabbalah and astrophysics have been noted by several writers, including Daniel Matt, God and the Big Bang (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 1996); David Nelson, Judaism, Physics, and God (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2005); and Howard Smith, Let There Be Light: Modern Cosmology and Kabbalah (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2006). 126 Jewish Theology: A New Beginning

Does this One know where it is going? Here I come trickily close to, yet remain distinct from, the advocates of intelligent design as they are usually understood. On the one hand, I do not attribute human-like consciousness to the One. There is no “plan” of Creation, no sense that humans are the apex or final goal of the process. I do not believe that the complexity or intricacy of the natural order is evidence of such design. As I said, we religious folk have no evidence, only testimony. Any attempt to claim otherwise only confuses the picture. On the other hand, however, it is fair to say that all mind and all consciousness ever to exist are part of the One. Mystics have always understood that this One transcends time, as the name Y-H-W-H itself indicates. All minds are thus one with Mind, as all beings are contained within Being. In this sense we can say that the fullness of Being’s self-manifestation, including our understanding of it, is there from the start, not in the sense of active or intentional foreknowledge, but as potential that is ever unfolding. The One “knows” all because the One is all, all that ever was, is, and will be, in an undivided Self. The reader who is aware of Jewish mystical language will understand that I am rereading contemporary evolutionary theory in the light of Kabbalistic thought. Kabbalah understands all of existence as eternally pouring forth from ẖokhmah, primordial Wisdom or Mind. Hˍ okhmah is the primal point of existence, symbolized by the Hebrew letter yod, which is itself hardly more than a dot. This point, infinitesimally small, is the proverbial “little that contains a lot.” Within it lies the entire unfolding of existence, every stage in the evolutionary journey, every plant and animal as it will live, reproduce (or not), and die, all of humanity and all that lies beyond us in the distant future. All this exists in a literal sense of potential (meaning that its potency, its power, is all fully present) in that primal point. In our contemporary language, that point is the instant of the Big Bang, the moment that contains the energy of existence in all its intensity. From there it flows forward into existence, garbing or “actualizing” itself at each stage in endless forms of existence. To say this in another way, also derived from Kabbalistic language, I am depicting the entire course of evolution as the infinitely varied self-garbing of an endless energy flow. All being exists in an eternal dialectic of hitpashtut, the emanatory flowing forth of that single energy, and hitlabbeshut, the garbing of that energy in distinctive forms. But now we add an important post-Darwinian caveat to that mystical view of existence. The only means this One has in this process of self-manifestation are those of natural selection and its resulting patterns of change and growth. It is nature (yes, “nature” could be another name for that which I have called “God,” “the Jewish Theology: A New Beginning 127

One,” and “Being” as long as its “supernatural” or miraculous dimensions are included). Hence the length and slowness of the journey. But precisely in this lies the utterly marvelous nature of what has come forth, step after single step. To see that process with the eye of wonder is the starting point of religious awareness. As more highly developed forms of animal life emerge, the forward movement of natural selection takes place partly in the form of aggression and competition, each creature and species grasping at its chance to survive and prosper. The competition for food and other resources, the devices created by males and females of various species to attract mates and reproduce, the struggle to find and eat one’s prey rather than be consumed by one’s predators, are all essential parts of the story—indeed, our story. This is an aspect of our biological legacy that we need to own and confront. We cannot understand our own human nature without taking into account the fierce struggle we underwent to arrive, and to achieve the dominance we have over this planet, for better and worse. But that same mysterious inner process also brings about more cooperative forms of societal organization, in which such creatures as ants, bees, and humans learn to work together toward fulfilling their species’ goals. All of this is part of our biological legacy. Indeed, it is in grasping how these two trends, the competitive and the col- laborative, combine and interact that we come to understand how our species survives. This should be a source of significant insight into the human condition. Once we achieve this understanding, we can make the value decisions as to which aspects of that biological heritage we want to take the lead as we proceed with our lives, both as individuals and as a species. But it would also be disingenuous of me as a human to say that the emergence of human consciousness, even the ability to be thinking and writing about these very matters, is nothing more than a small series of steps in the unfolding linear process wrought by natural selection. That is indeed how we came about. But there is a different meaning to human existence that cannot be denied. The self-reflective consciousness of humans, combined with our ability to take a long biohistorical view of the whole unfolding that lies behind (and ahead of) us, makes a difference. All creatures are doing the “work of God” by existing, feeding, reproducing, and moving the evolutionary process forward. But we humans, especially today, are called upon to do that work in a different way. We have emerged as partners of the One in the survival and maintenance of this planet and all the precious attainments that have evolved here. Without our help, it will not continue to thrive. Being has thus turned a corner, or come back in a self-reflexive circle, as it manifests itself in the human mind. 128 Jewish Theology: A New Beginning

The Call to Adam In the long march toward increased complexity and ability of species, the emergence of the human brain is an important and transformative moment. We humans represent a significant step forward in the evolutionary path toward the self-articulation and self-fulfillment of that One. If the purpose of the journey is one of manifestation or becoming known, the development of our powers of reflective conciousness are surely key. But I do not view us humans—surely not as we are now—as the end or purpose of evolution. We, like all other species, are a step along the way. If existence survives on this planet, Mind will one day be manifest to a degree far beyond our present ability to comprehend or predict. On that day, says Scripture, “Earth will be filled with knowledge of Y-H-W-H as water fills the sea” (Is. 11:9)—just that wholly and naturally. Because we humans represent a new and important step in this journey, the One manifest within us calls out to us in a particular human way. It addresses each of us with something more than the cry “Survive!” that is its instinct-borne call to every creature. We children of Adam (that’s how you say “humans” in Hebrew, and note that here the language itself leads me to migrate farther into the realm of myth) are addressed with the word the God of Genesis used to call out to the first human: “Ayekah?”—“Where are you?”19 The indwelling One asks this of every person, of every human embodiment of its own single Self. This question means “Where are you in helping Me to carry this project forward?” Are you extending My work of self-manifestation, participating as you should in the ongoing evolutionary process, the eternal reaching toward knowing and fulfilling the One that is all of life’s goal? That is why you are here, tumbling and stumbling forward from one generation to the next! What are you doing about it? “Where are you?” calls out to us in three distinctly human dimensions. The first of these is mental or intellectual: “Are you stretching your mind to move forward, to carry on the evolutionary process in the realm of understanding, as we think in ever more sophisticated and refined ways about the nature of existence and its unity?” Evolution does not end with the emergence of humanity. The process continues unabated, reflected in the growth of societies and civilizations over the millennia. The imperative

19 See Gen. 3:9. I have in mind also the Hasidic tale of Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi’s use of this verse in confronting his jailer in St. Petersburg. See especially Martin Buber’s retelling of that tale in The Way of Man (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1966), pp. 9ff. Jewish Theology: A New Beginning 129 to stretch the mind includes scientific thought, the ongoing attempt to understand and unpack the mysteries of our universe. But it also embraces the humanities and the arts, the expanding of human consciousness in more subtle ways. Some of the highest manifestation of this ongoing evolutionary process are to be found in our ideas and images of God, as we move from primitive tribal gods and local nature deities through classical poly- theism (the pantheon of gods), on to primitive monolatry (there is but one god worthy of worship), into true universal monotheism, and then toward greater abstraction and depth of thought. All of these are stages on the road toward that total comprehension of Being in its oneness that lies somewhere in our future. We will trace some of this process, as seen through a Jewish lens, in the following pages.19a In our own day this quest takes place both in the scientific community, in the search for a contemporary understanding of the life-force or a unified field theory, and in the growing interest in monistic philosophies, including those rooted in Vedanta or Buddhism, that have begun to take root in the postmodern West. “Where are you?” Are you stretching your mind to its fullest to know the One? The second way in which this “Where are you?” calls out to us involves a stretching of the human heart to become more open, more aware. If you believe as I do that the presence of God is everywhere, our chief task is that of becoming aware. But that job is not only an intellectual one; it involves heart as well as mind. God is everywhere, but we build walls around ourselves, emotional walls, barricades of defensiveness, because we are too threatened by the oneness of Being to let ourselves be open to it, “Where are you?” demands of us a greater openness to our own vulnerability and dependence on forces beyond ourselves than our frail ego is willing to accept. The walls behind which we barricade ourselves are the illusions of our strength and individual immortality, the sense that there is nothing more important than our own egos and the superficial pursuits toward which most of our lives have somehow become devoted. Liberation into the life of the spirit means doing the hard work of breaking through those self-created protections and coming face to face with the ultimate frailty of our lives and the great religious question that hovers over us. Only as we face this challenge do we begin to let go of that which separates us from the totality of Being or the all-embracing presence of the One. The spiritual work that each of us has to do consists primarily of letting go, allowing that

19a See Radical Judaism, chapter 2. 130 Jewish Theology: A New Beginning presence to enter our consciousness and transform us. In the course of this process we enable ourselves to become givers or fonts of blessing in the grand economy of existence, rather than consumers who simply take all for ourselves without giving back to life.20 “Where are you?” Are you stretching your heart to open as widely as it can? The third area in which “Where are you?” calls upon us is that of the human deed. It is not enough to reach forth with mind and heart; these alone will not transform the world. Every human being is the image of God. Every creature and every life form is a garbing of divine presence. The way in which we treat them and relate to them is the ultimate testing ground of our own religious consciousness. The One seeks to be known and loved in each of its endless unique manifestations. The purpose of our growing awareness is to reach out and appreciate all things for what they really are. This is especially true with regard to our fellow humans. That every human being is the image of God is Judaism’s most basic moral truth. We need to help all humans to discover this dimension of their own existence in whatever terms they may choose to articulate it. We recognize that this truth may be depicted differently in the varied religious and secular languages of human culture. We do not require others to accept the language of Judaism, but we do see justice, decency, and civility to one another as universal human imperatives that stem directly from the reality that we call tselem elohim, the image of God. A person cannot be expected to discover the image of God within himself or herself as long as he or she is hungry, or as long as he or she is homeless or degraded by poverty, addictions, or the seemingly overwhelming burdens of everyday life. Our task has to be to lessen and lighten those burdens as ways of helping all to see the radiant presence that surrounds us and fills us in each moment. In the realm of “heart” it was illusory walls we had to remove in order to see that light. But in the realm of “deed” the forces that block out the light are quite concrete—social, political, or economic barriers—and they too have to become the object of our attention as people and communities of faith. “Where are you?” Are you engaged in the work given to you by the call of God? All of these aspects of the call are the stuff of Jewish moral theology. In a sense I am commenting here on the opening teaching of the Talmud, the great treasury of rabbinic law and wisdom. Although the Talmud seems to begin with discussion of prayer and its proper hour, buried within it lies a

20 This is the key theme in the voluminous writings of Rabbi Yehudah Ashlag (1886– 1955), the leading Kabhalistic figure of the early twentieth century. This interesting author has much to teach, though his legacy has been distorted in various popular presentations. Jewish Theology: A New Beginning 131 little treatise called Avot (Principles), an eternal favorite of Jewish moral teachers. This tractate was meant to serve as an introduction to the Talmud (or perhaps as a concluding summation). Hence it begins with a superscrip- tion, telling us whence authority for the Law is derived: “Moses received Torah from Sinai and gave it to Joshua, who gave it to the judges, who gave it to the prophets, who gave it to the elders,” and so forth. But then the first teaching is stated: “The world stands upon three things: on Torah (teaching, wisdom, the cultivation of awareness), on Worship (the struggle to open the heart), and on Deeds of Kindness (the active transformation of the world; the bringing about of ‘God’s kingdom’).”

Because I take this call seriously, when I read the old rabbinic dicta21 that say “God looked at the righteous” or “Israel arose in God’s mind” and “For their sake God created the world,” I surprisingly find myself to be among the affirmers. Of course I don’t read these words literally, thinking of a Roman emperor or a Near Eastern potentate who calls in his advisers and asks, “Should I create humans?” But I do agree that there is a purpose to human existence, and that is what these statements really mean. Reading these ancient words for our day we also understand that “Israel” as generally understood is far too narrow and chauvinistic a term in this context and that even “the righteous” sounds rather smug and elitist. I by no means think that God created the world for the sake of the Jews or the pious Jews or anything like that. I need to universalize the “Israel” of this sentence (and so many others!) to include all those who struggle with God, referring back to the original etymology of that name.22 “The righteous” here has to include all those who do the work of stretching toward the One, by whatever means and methods they employ. I affirm this universalizing of the rabbis’ teaching to be in accord with the often ignored truth that lies at Judaism’s core, rooted in the assertion that all humans are descended from the same parents, those of whom God says: “Let us make humans in our image.”23 The reality of that One is manifest across the great and diverse spectrum of our shared humanity.

21 Bereshit Rabbah 1:4; 8:7. 22 See Gen. 32:28 and commentaries and discussion in Radical Judaism, chapter 4. 23 Key to my theological-moral position is R. Simeon ben Azzai’s preference for Gen. 5:1–2 (creation of all humans in God’s image) over R. Akiva’s choice of Lev. 19:18 (“Love your neighbor as yourself”) as the kelal gadol, the most basic rule of Torah. Talmud Yerushalmi Nedarim 9:4 (41c). Everything else, in both halakhah and aggadah, needs to conform with this. When it does not, it needs to be reexamined. Yes, one may call this an “essentialist” approach to Jewish ethics, but it is one rooted in the rabbinic sources themselves. 132 Jewish Theology: A New Beginning

In asserting that humans are “called” in a distinctive way by the One that dwells within us, I also realize that I am making a claim for our species that sounds as though we are the apex or final goal of this ongoing self-disclos- ing process that takes place within all creatures. Far from it! I do believe that there is an inbuilt drive toward greater complexity and higher forms of consciousness, in which the emergence of the human brain is a most significant step.24 But again I want to acknowledge that the ultimate stages of this process lie far, far beyond us, as far beyond our awareness and sen- sitivities as our mind is from those forms of life we consider much simpler and more “primitive.” Living as we do at the dawn of a new age, one in which the human mind will be augmented and challenged by our golem of “artificial intelligence,” we can hardly imagine the new heights and depths that understandings of reality will attain, even in a relatively short expanse of time. As we unravel the genome and the mysteries of DNA, the truth that each of us bears within us the memory of all earlier generations—indeed, of the whole evolutionary process—becomes ever clearer. What will it take to convert that understanding into conscious memory, and how greatly will that add to our appreciation of who we are and the journey on which we have come? Within the few millennia that we call human history, the tiny tip of evolution’s timeline that we can reconstruct from the remains of human civilization, the evolutionary process continues unabated, manifest in the evolving human brain but also in the societies and civilizations that result from it. Within this ongoing process, a special place belongs to the evolution of religion, as ideas, images, and conceptions of the gods, God, the life-force, or the essence of Being grow and change with the times. This evolutionary approach to the history of religion forms the background for the next section of this book, my treatment of our Jewish and Western views of God, which I seek to address in the combined roles of scholar and seeker. I do this out of conviction that the evolution of species and the evolution of religious ideas, or of our understanding of reality, are continuous parts of a single evolutionary process. I ultimately suggest that the emergence of an explicitly pantheistic or panentheistic theology in our day is a natural result of this complex evolution, some key steps of which I hope to trace in the following pages. The journey from the tribal warrior god and the projected

24 But I am interested in, and think we need to learn more about, the intelligence and communication skills of elephants, whales, primates, and others. We are told that King Solomon knew how to listen to and speak with animals. We will not reach his wisdom until we relearn this lost skill, among many others. Jewish Theology: A New Beginning 133 superhero to the unitive face of Being is indeed a long one, and one in which prior steps are never quite entirely left behind. Because of this, any current discussion of God, particularly in the context of a tradition as ancient as Judaism, is freighted with images, liturgical memories, and literary tropes from each stage along the way. I have been making a transition here from God to “God” in a multilayered way. I began by talking about reality as I understand it, about the existence of a unifying single Being, a constant within all change, that which undergoes the astro-, geo-, and biohistory of our universe and planet. I then immediately complicated matters by referring to that constant as “God,” an English term derived from ancient Teutonic mythology but for many centuries also used to designate other deities as well, including the One who is the chief subject of the Hebrew Bible, and thus of Jewish and Christian faith. I use this term even though I mean it in a way that is quite different from that meant by most Jews and Christians, since I say quite openly that I choose it in order to personify this underlying singularity of being. As “the One” becomes personal, “being” (HWYH in Hebrew) becomes “God” (Y-H-W-H). That which I designate as “the One” remains beyond naming; it is none other than transcendent mystery. My act of naming, my insistence on speaking of (and to) the core of scientific reality in a religious manner is intended as an act of mythopoetic transformation, a remythologization of the cosmos for our postmodern age. In order to understand the context in which I am doing this, we need to know a good deal more about the Western use of the word “God” and its history.

Road Back to Sinai: The Post-Critical Seeker

Arthur Green

Y-H-W-H and Language

Vav, the third letter of the divine name, represents a drawing forth. It lengthens the yod and brings it into the world. Yod, the first letter, is just a point. A point lies at the border between existence and nonexistence, between being and nothingness. This is all we can say of existence at that early stage. In yod, divinity remains entirely hidden. Heh, the most primal field of feminine energy, then joins with the yod and brings forth the universe in an act of cosmic birth. Now vav returns to the yod and lengthens it, drawing it forth in the form of language. It is the source of life become articulate, the primal davar (thing), now received by humanity as davar (word), the One as spoken word. The One as yod is not-yet-thing. As heh it is all-things- in-birth. Now in vav it is manifest as language.1 This manifestation in the word is what allows the One to be known by the human mind, which thinks in the categories of words and language. It is this apprehension of the One- become-word in the human mind that we call revelation. The reader will rise to protest. “We have already seen the two sides of the One! Stasis and movement, Y-H-W-H without and Y-H-W-H within, God ‘before’ Creation and God ‘in’ Creation, sovev and memale, emptiness and fullness, naught and all. What room can there possibly be for another category here? Is not Creation itself sufficient revelation, the One manifest throughout the world, ‘renewing each day, constantly, the act of Creation’? What more could we need?”

* Excerpt is from Seek My Face: A Jewish Mystical Theology (pp. 97–144) © 2003 by Arthur Green (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing). Premission granted by Jewish Lights Publishing, P.O. Box 237, Woodstock, VT 05091, www.jewishlights.com. 1 Vav, representing the six sefīrot around tifʾeret, is associated with voice in kabbalistic sources. This divine voice is still beyond language, not yet “contracted” into words, which would take it to the malkhut level. The kabbalists see this entire process of the emergence of language as taking place within God, revelation as the self-articulation of divinity. I understand language as a human institution, and hence the transition from “voice” to “speech” as the move from pregnant divine silence to human articulation of the divine reality. To say it in kabbalistic language, malkhut (speech, oral Torah) can come about only after netzaẖ and hod, the event of prophecy. The “written Torah” of tifʾeret does not yet have words; it is still the Torah of the single aleph. But we, coming from without, can know it only through the path of Torah as manifest in human language. 136 Road Back to Sinai: The Post-Critical Seeker

Yod Heh is indeed a divine name on its own.2 Were our world simply that of nature, one not transformed for us by human consciousness and creativity, YaH alone would suffice. Adding the vav to Yod Heh is a recognition of our human distinctiveness, our special status as medabberim, speaking, thinking, and conscious beings. The One as manifest in Creation, Yod Heh, belongs equally to all; it is part of human protoplasm in the same way that it is part of animal, plant, and rock. The human may recognize it, but does not own it in any distinctive way. In YaH-in-Creation we are part of the natural order. But now, with the addition of the vav, that One enters in a wholly different way into the human mind; the all-pervasive presence is now spoken within us, and that can happen only to creatures of speech. God becomes word as we become human.3 In turning to address our people’s ancient tale of Sinai from this theological perspective, we find ourselves turning doubly from the general to the specific. We turn both from the universal-natural to the specifically human, and from the universal-human to the specifically Jewish. Yod and heh encompass all existence. Vav belongs to the human alone. Until now, we have been dealing with truths known and revealed to all humans, as discussed in the language of a renewed Judaism. Now we turn to the heart of Judaism itself.

Before the Mountain

We are beset by trembling as we approach Sinai, the mountain peak of Jewish faith. Here is the turning point between the revelation of divinity and the response of humans. We cannot speak of one without the other. Divine voice and human voice are fully intertwined with one another, bound in embrace like the two cherubim over the Ark.4 Divine speech is made accessible to us only through the human vessel,5 one that embodies

2 on the concluding verse of the Psalter, the rabbis comment: Since the Temple has been destroyed, it suffices to praise God with two letters [Yod Heh, rather than the entire name] (Eruvin 18b). In the future, the full name will be restored. 3 Word, not flesh. The theology proposed here is not incarnational in the Christian sense, but it has in common with Christian incarnationalism the central recognition of human distinctiveness. For us, the word remains word, in the form of both written and oral Torah. 4 Yoma 54a. Cf. A.J. Heschel, Torah min ha-Shamayim (London: Soncino Press, 1962), vol. 1, pp. 62ff. 5 the rabbinic sources for this position have been collected and discussed by Heschel, ibid., vol. 2, pp. 264ff. Road Back to Sinai: The Post-Critical Seeker 137 it and hides it at once. Human languages are many, each of them bespeak- ing the divine encounter in its own voice, hiding-revealing the One in its own way. The divine life as manifest in the world is open to all and goes beyond the language of any tradition. The divine light shines on all without distinction; it is only the differences in our own cultural settings that make for religious difference, that receive, refract, and transmit the light through various symbolic vessels. But when we discuss human response to the divine reality, we can discuss only specifics. Humanity has responded to the reality that is God in multiple ways. Here, the One- ness of God is refracted through the variety of human traditions, rites, prayers, and forms of expression. Sinai indeed takes us to the heart of Jewish faith: it claims that there is communication from God to humans and that such communication took place between Y-H-W-H and Moses and Israel at that mountain in the wilderness. Through this revelation, the will of God as manifest in Judaism becomes known. In one form or another, that claim pervades all of classical Judaism. It will be necessary here both to deny this claim and to affirm it. For some people, undoubtedly, the denial will go too far. It may be that the theological position outlined here will be too distant from the simple notion of revelation they had in childhood. Others may find the views expressed here too dangerously humanistic, not providing sufficient basis for the distinctive claims of Judaism, and especially for halakhah. For yet another group of readers, the affirmation will undoubtedly be too strong. The theological tone of the views I express may sound too much like the naive belief in revelation after all, dressed up in some fancy language. I proceed from the premise of seeking a mature and believable Jewish faith, based on an ultimate commitment to a nondualistic vision of the universe. I seek to remain faithful to an understanding that the “portrait of the king” is a mirror of the self and that each of our self-portraits is a mirror of the One. All the rest proceeds from there. If revelation and commandment are the heart of Jewish faith,6 they are also the most difficult and “scandalous” claim made by the religious traditions of Israel. Taken at face value, they form the very essence of Jewish

6 For some background on the treatment of these key motifs in twentieth-century Jewish thought, the reader might want to consult the important essays of Paul Mendes- Flohr and Rivka Horwitz in Jewish Spirituality, vol. 2. The Horwitz essay is especially interesting in this context, showing that the key “dialogic” Jewish theologians of this century, Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, both tend toward mysticism in their discussions of revelation. 138 Road Back to Sinai: The Post-Critical Seeker supernatural claims and seeming theological arbitrariness: God, the Creator of the universe, chooses at a particular moment in human history to be revealed uniquely to the Jewish people, addressing them in words and covenanting eternal loyalty to them if they will accept the divine will as manifest specifically in the practice of Judaism. Both mind and conscience reel at such a thought! What does it mean to say that God speaks? Is there, then, a divine voice, one that knows words, quite independent of language as a human creation? Does God speak to Israel in a language that Israel understands, commanding a Torah made up of laws, ethics, rites, and traditions that seem remarkably related to those of the particular age and society out of which Israel emerged? Does the Creator of the universe (or the One within and without) have a will so specific that it concerns itself with details of Sabbath observance, proper preparation of sacrifices, and all the rest that will comprise the great codes of Jewish law? Can we imagine a God so arbitrary as to choose one nation, one place, and one moment in human history in which the eternal divine will was to be manifest for all time? Why should the ongoing traditions, institutions, and prejudices of the western Semitic tribes of that era be visited on humanity as the basis for fulfilling the will of God? How can a God who visits only Israel deliver a message for all of humanity, especially for the more than half of humanity whose spiritual traditions have nothing to do with Sinai and its legacy? How can we attribute to Y-H-W-H, who is person only through our encounter, this sort of arbitrary willfulness? For these reasons and others, thinking Jews in our time, including many who seek a serious approach to questions of the spirit, balk at accepting the “yoke” of Sinai. There are more than a few intimations in earlier Jewish literature telling us that we modern Jews are not the first to have difficulty with literal and dualistic views of revelation. A well-known midrash claims that God offered the Torah to each nation of the world, only to have it rejected, before coming to Israel.7 Each nation sought to know what the Torah demanded before accepting it, and each found some reason to reject it. Only Israel said, Na’aseh ve-nishma (We will do and listen). Only Israel agreed to receive Torah out of love for God, even before they heard its contents. This story is an ancient apologetic for the exclusiveness of Israel’s claim. We are not the “chosen people,” says this midrash, but merely the only people who were willing to choose God’s Torah. The idea that God has been revealed to other nations, at least in historical action, if not in words, was already apparent to the prophets, even if it tended to be forgotten in later Judaism.

7 Mekhilta Yitro, Ba-ẖodesh 5 (ed. Horovitz-Rabin, p. 221). Road Back to Sinai: The Post-Critical Seeker 139

Human Understanding and Divine Speech

The nature of divine speech has also been debated by philosophers and theologians throughout Jewish history. Each of the great theologies proposed by Jews in both medieval and modem times offered some theory of prophecy or revelation. The prophet is often depicted as a philosopher or contemplative, one whose mind is so open that it reaches beyond the borders of ordinary human understanding. For Maimonides and those who followed him,8 study and rigorous philosophic training were seen as part of the preparation necessary for the ultimate human experience. These serve to train consciousness, allowing the mind to expand in a way that enables it to receive the divine influx. When the intellectual and imaginative faculties are both fully attuned, a revelatory event is virtually assured.9 The ecstatic mystics who followed in Maimonides’ path10 understood him to be saying that they, too, could achieve prophetic states, and they used various meditative techniques in hope of attaining prophecy. In the mystical tradition, a variety of sources point to something beyond dualism. I have already referred to the ancient midrash that speaks of the seeker as being like an animal who wanders into the woods and finds a pond of water. Astonished, the animal looks down and sees “another” animal in the pond. All the prophets but Moses saw “through a darkened glass,”11 explained by commentators as a glass with silvered backing, or a mirror.

8 For a recent treatment of Maimonides’ views of prophecy, see “Maimonides’ View of Prophecy,” H. Kreisel, p. 212. 9 See A. Altmann, “Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas: Natural or Divine Prophecy?” in his Essays in Jewish Intellectual History (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1981), pp. 99ff. 10 See the important treatment of this theme in Moshe Idel, The Mystical Experience in Abraham Abulafīa (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1988), and especially chapter three, which is vital background for the present treatment. The medievals reinterpreted biblical prophecy as an inner revelatory event resulting from patient training of the mind and rigorous contemplative discipline, phenomena that existed in their own day. In effect, the prophetic experience is thus reread as a mystical one, all modern distinctions between these (Heiler, etc.) notwithstanding. On mysticism as prophecy, compare Idel, ibid., pp. 138ff. For an earlier medieval attempt to distinguish mystical (merkavah) experience from prophecy, see Judah ben Barzilai, Commentary to Sefer Yetsirah, p. 22. 11 Yebamot 49b; Va-Yikra Rabbab 1:14. See the extended discussions of this aggadah in Judah ben Barzilai, ibid., pp. 11ff. The view that this “darkened glass” is a mirror is seen by some as evidence of an ancient technique of acquiring knowledge, allegedly used by the prophets. This claim is made in the literature of Ashkenazic pietism in the thirteenth century. See H̱okhmat ha-Nefesh (Lvov, 1876), 29c, and reference in “Sefer ha-Navon,” in J. Dan, Studies in Ashkenazi-Hasidic Literature ([in Hebrew]; Ramat Gan, Israel: Masada, 1975), p. 119. For a kabbalistic comparison of prophecy to seeing in a mirror, see Judah H̱ ayyat’s commentary to Ma’arekhet ha-Elohut, ed. Mantua, 143a. This passage is quoted at length by Isaiah Horowitz of Prague in Shney Luẖot ha-Brit(Jerusalem, 1959; offset of ed. Warsaw), vol. 2, p. 133, and thus was known to later, including Hasidic, thinkers. 140 Road Back to Sinai: The Post-Critical Seeker

Prophetic revelation is the discovery of a deeper self.12 Some sources attribute revelation to a “higher” aspect of soul or consciousness that remains “above” when the soul enters the person at birth. It is the prophet’s “other self” that speaks through the prophet’s mouth, the portion or aspect of the soul that remains one with God, even after the person has become differentiated. Notwithstanding formal declarations to the contrary, there were some among the kabbalists, as well as the philosophers, who thought they could re-create prophecy with proper inner training.13 Even the early rabbis, who are often depicted as quite literalist and naive in their views of revelation, offer us more than a few hints to the contrary. When Exodus 19:19 tells us that “Moses spoke and God responded in a voice,” the rabbis add, “in the voice of Moses.”14 This seems to say that the only voice heard at Sinai was that of Moses,15 sometimes speaking on his own, and sometimes possessed by the divine spirit. Rather than a “voice from heaven,” there was the voice of a prophet transformed by an inner encounter that can only be characterized as “heaven.” Thinking Jews over many centuries have debated how fully to refine the naive biblical depiction of Sinai and the experience of revelation. The fact is that any sophisticated theory of revelation recognizes a moment in which the divine and human minds flow together and are not clearly separable from one another.16 Indeed, we use the word “mind” of the divine whole only by analogy with its human part. If Y-H-W-H is the noncorporeal essence of the universe, and mind or soul is the noncorporeal essence of the person, we call God the mind or soul of the universe. But this is not to claim that the functions are identical. Divinity embraces both body and soul. The noncorporeal essence and its garb are all one as part of being. God as Y-H-W-H knows no distinction between matter and spirit.

12 See G. Scholem’s treatment of this theme in “Eine Kabbalistische Erklaerung. der Prophetie als Selbstbegegnung” in Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Juden- thums 74 (1930): 285ff., and in “Tselem: The Concept of the Astral Body,” now translated in his On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead. 13 cf. A.J. Heschel, “Did Maimonides Strive for Prophetic Inspiration?” in Louis Ginzberg Jubilee Volume, Hebrew Section (New York: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1945), pp. 159ff. On the recasting of biblical prophecy as mystical experience, see also the text by the Hasidic thinker Y.Y. Safrin, quoted by Idel in Kabbalah, p. 95 (322, n. 143). 14 Berakhot 45a. I recognize that the Talmud, and especially Tosafot ad loc., understands this phrase somewhat differently. 15 See Abraham Ibn Ezra’s startlingly radical formulation: “For the speaker is a man and the hearer is a man.” Yesod Mora, ed. Stern (Prague, 1833) chap. 12, 43a. 16 this was true of both Aristotelian and neo-Platonic theories of prophecy in the Mid- dle Ages. On the adaptation of both of these into Jewish mysticism, see Idel, Kabbalah, pp. 39ff. Road Back to Sinai: The Post-Critical Seeker 141

But in seeking to comprehend revelation, we may speak of Y-H-W-H as cosmic mind, present in the depths of each human mind, and here impress- ing itself in a unique way upon consciousness. The universal One seeks out manifestation in the human, seeks to be known by this manifestation of its own self that is also, paradoxically its “other.” Its “seeking,” or its “calling out,” to that “other” is not of language. It is only the human that can make the Divine articulate in words, since words themselves are a human inven- tion. In fact, a more literal reading of Exodus 19:19 would render it, “Moses spoke and God responded in thunder,” as the contemporary translations indicate. Y-H-W-H speaks in thunderclaps; it takes a Moses to translate God’s thunder into words.17 If the Divine and human are regarded as separate in the Jewish imagination, God living in “heaven” and humans on earth, revelation is the act that most overcomes this separation. Moses goes up to the top of Sinai, according to the Torah, and God also comes down upon the mountain (Exodus 19:3, 20). But then the entire top of Sinai is covered by thick clouds—as though to say that the border between the “upper” and “lower” realms is lost at that moment. Later accounts of the revelation18 are more fanciful and actually depict Moses as riding on the clouds, entering the heavenly realms, and holding on to God’s Throne of Glory. Moses returns from the revelation still a human, but his face glows with the light of that encounter in which the uppermost limits of human spiritual attainment had been momentarily cast aside. He returns to the “world of separation” from an experience of transcendent unity, the Torah now “translated” within him. God’s thunder and Moses’ words are now one.

17 A reversal of the passage just quoted from Berakhot 45a. Here, Moses is God’s meturgeman, a relationship surely more to be expected than its opposite! Maimonides’ Guide 2:33 makes it clear that only Moses is able to detect language within the divine revelation. The others hear but a sound or voice; it is Moses who translates that voice into human language for them. The essential debate about the nature of revelation is thus psychologized into a discussion of “What was the nature of Moses’ inner process?” Is his perception of the “word” within that revelation better described as an “auditory” or a “conceptual” event? Does he “discover” the commandment within the overwhelming presence of God, or is it the transformation of his person in response to that presence that comes forth as commandment? This discussion receives its best modern articulation in Heschel’s The Prophets and his Torah min ha-Shamayim, vol. 2, a part of his grand but unfinished attempt to establish biblical and rabbinic grounding for his own theology of revelation. 18 See the many sources collected in L. Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, vol. 3, pp. 109ff. and notes. 142 Road Back to Sinai: The Post-Critical Seeker

The Inner Mountain

But the God who speaks in thunder is still the sky god, still the one who dwells in heaven and atop the highest peak. We are seeking a more fully internalized version of that foot-of-the-mountain experience. Earlier, we suggested turning the high mountain into a deep well. Using either of these metaphors (for the mountain, too, can exist within), we try to understand revelation as the most profound of inner experiences. Seen this way, Moses’ experience has much in common with the creative act, the inner mental activity of the artist, the musical composer, the math- ematician, and others, as well as with the religious figure. The core experience of creativity reaches a depth that necessarily contains an element of mystery. Creative people often describe this as a place within them where the concentration of inner energy allows the ordinary self to be overwhelmed and something “other” to take its place. We are talking about an inner straining of the human mind to the breaking point—but rather than a breakdown that leads to madness or confusion, we envision a breakthrough that leads to new creative achievements. This may come in the form of an insight that did not exist before, a flash of intuition that is instantaneously translated into the medium in which the creator works: into music, into mathematical formula, into words. The creative energy, like the divine light, is undifferentiated. Only the tools and mind-set that lead one to that mysterious inner source cause one to draw upon it in one specific way and not another. (The rabbis say that at Sinai the very senses were confused, and Israel “saw the audible and heard the visible.”19 We can only imagine a state of creative elation from which Einstein would return with a symphony, and Beethoven with a mathematical formula!) At this rung of human inner experience lines between “creativity,” “discovery,” “inspiration,” and “revelation” are impossible to draw. The language we have for drawing such fine distinctions belongs to the analytical mind, a level of consciousness very different than that at which these inner events occur. The broad vision and free flow of inner energies20 that characterize such moments do not admit clear borders between “mine” and “Thine.”

19 Mekhilta Yitro, Ba-ẖodesh 9 (p. 235). 20 no better description of that energy flow can be found than that present throughout the writings of Rav Kook. While Kook fully understands that prophecy and holy spirit are universal inward gifts, he seeks to maintain a different status for the revelation of Torah itself. This effort seems to me highly contrived, and Kook’s broader views on the nature of Torah are the more attractive (and seemingly more authentically experience-based) aspects of his teaching. Road Back to Sinai: The Post-Critical Seeker 143

When that stretching involves the soul, or the human capacity to love and tremble in awe, as well as the mind, the human capacity to understand, then the creative-inspirational-revelatory event takes on a religious character. It becomes a life-transforming event. Out of it may emerge a vision of a new or redeemed social order as well. The human striving for revelation involves a full extension of the emotional, intellectual, and moral life as one. We Jews assert that Moshe Rabbenu (our teacher Moses)—either historically or as a symbol of the ancient Jewish people—was a person who had such experience. The religion of ancient Israel, as embodied symbolically in that moment at Sinai, continues to represent for us the result of one of the great human encounters with divinity. For us as Jews—existentially speaking—it is the greatest such encounter of all time. Indeed, it is the only one we know. We understand that other such encounters may exist as well, and they may take different forms. We should have no need to deny their truth or the authenticity of their claims. On the contrary, we should rejoice at the notion that the divine voice has spoken many times and in many places. But these are not existentially open to us; they are not ours. True participation in a spiritual language requires the whole of the human heart. Each heart can speak only one such language. Our heart is given wholly to this one. While we recognize that there may be others, we cannot truly know them, in the sense that we cannot “set them upon our heart.” But what was the content of that moment at Sinai? If revelation is to be analogized to the experience of creativity or discovery, there needs to be a “something” that is revealed. What was it that Moses or Israel discovered, created, had revealed? Moses is the one who saw beyond the darkened glass, who looked into the brightness. What did he bring back from that indescribable moment? What was the great creative achievement or breakthrough in human awareness that resulted from the revelation that stands at Judaism’s heart? All of Torah, in the broadest sense, may be called an ongoing, stammering, and always inadequate attempt to answer this question. Out of Sinai comes Y-H-W-H, the reality and the word. Sinai offers Y-H-W-H21 as the singular divine presence that pervades all the world and reaches beyond it in ways we humans are not given to fully understand. This reality, Sinai tells us, is accessible to human beings at the greatest moments

21 the name is revealed to Moses at the burning bush, which the Midrash claims was at Mount Sinai (Horeb and Sinai are identified). The first of the ten commandments, said to be the root of all the positive commandments of the Torah, is a restatement of the divine name and the claim that it is the redeeming force. 144 Road Back to Sinai: The Post-Critical Seeker of their lives. The same ecstatic presence that filled the hearts of Israel as they walked proudly out of Egypt, the same presence that so filled the Tent of Meeting that no person was able to enter it, could be found in human life, both for individuals and for the nation, again and again in the future. Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh, “I shall be that I shall be,” is interpreted by the rabbis to mean “I shall be with you again as I was with you then.”22 The manifestation of Y-H-W-H that happened in Israel’s hearts and minds at Sinai is an assur- ance that such manifestation does not happen but once. Revelation reveals the possibility of revelation, not just that once, but whenever the human heart and mind are fully open to it. Israel further comes to understand that this presence that offers inspiration to be free (the revelation at the Sea) and guidance to the one who seeks it (the revelation at the Mountain) was there also before the existence of our world itself and will be there even after our world is gone. The name Y-H-W-H is the very core of this revelation, as bearer of the insight that God was-is-will be, containing all of time in eternal presence.

Torah as the Name of God 23

In saying that the name of God is the core of revelation,24 we are present- ing a theology that is at once entirely traditional and highly radical. “I am Y-H-W-H,” God says to Moses, “I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as El Shaddai, but by My name Y-H-W-H I was not known to them” (Exodus 6:2–3). The revelation to Moses begins with God’s name, both in this passage and in the Ten Commandments. The kabbalists spoke of the entire Torah as the name of God,25 or sometimes of the divine name as the essence of all language.

22 Sh’mot Rabbah 3:6; Berakhot 9b. 23 See the discussions by G. Scholem in “The Meaning of the Torah in Jewish Mysti- cism,” in his On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, pp. 32ff., and “The Name of God and the linguistic Theory of the Kabbala,” in Diogenes 79 and 80 (1972). 24 See the profound discussion of this and related matters in the essays of Walter Benja- min (“The Task of the Translator,” in particular) and the conversations between Benjamin and his friend the young Gershom Scholem. There is much to be learned from the most interesting treatment by Susan Handelman in Fragments of Redemption (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 25 See the famous statement of this by Nahmanides in the introduction to his Torah commentary, quoted by Scholem in the former of the last-mentioned articles. On the relationship between Torah as name(s) of God, visionary experience, and contemplation of the shi’ur komah (the “bodily” form of God), see Idel, “The Concept of Torah in Heikhalot Literature and Its Metamorphoses in Kabbalah” (in Hebrew), Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Road Back to Sinai: The Post-Critical Seeker 145

What is it, in fact, that was “spoken” by God to Israel at Sinai? Jewish tradition contains both maximalist and minimalist views26 on this key question. The Bible’s claim in this regard is fairly obvious: “Y-H-W-H spoke all these words, saying” is followed by the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:1). But some of the early rabbis expand this claim vastly and include the entire Torah within the scope of revelation at the moment of Sinai. (They even discuss whether Moses at Sinai27 wrote the last eight verses of Deuteronomy, beginning “Moses the servant of Y-H-W-H died there.” Some admit that Joshua added these as a postscript, while others insist that Moses, hearing them spoken by God, wrote them down with his tears.) Their later followers expanded the claim even further, insisting that the Oral Torah (including Mishnah and Talmud) was from Sinai as well. The next expansion of this position was given voice in a saying attributed to Rabbi Joshua ben Levi: “Everything a faithful student is ever to say was already given to Moses at Sinai.”28 Here, the scope of revelation is broadened to infinity, encompassing within it (and thus granting legitimacy to) every proper interpretation of Torah to be offered down to the end of time. The final maximalist view is that of the Zohar: “There is nothing that has not been hinted at in the Torah.”29 Thus far we have the view of the maximalists. But there is also a minimalist reading on the question of what was said and heard at Sinai, claiming less than the Bible’s Ten Commandments, rather than more. One midrash claims that Israel in fact heard only two commandments out of

Thought 1 (1981): 23ff. See especially the passage from Gikatilla quoted on p. 61, where the name Y-H-W-H represents God stripped of all garments, the externals of Torah. The Hasidic masters were influenced by passages like this and go the further (or perhaps less precise) step of including the phenomenal world among the “garments” of God, which need to be stripped away in the highest moments of religious perception. 26 The same terms are used by my teacher David Weiss Halivni, “On Man’s Role in Revelation,” in From Ancient Israel to Modern Judaism: Essays in Honor of Marvin Fox, ed. J. Neusner et al. (Atlanta: Scholars’ Press, 1989), vol. 2, pp. 29ff. Halivni uses the categories somewhat differently, as he is examining only rabbinic sources, whereas I am ranging more widely through the history of Judaism. Of course, the rabbinical aspect of this discussion is all based on A.J. Heschel’s Torah min ha-Shamayim, vol. 2, especially pp. 264ff. The implication of Heschel’s work, though not clearly stated by him, is that Torah mi-Sinai is a dogmatic misstatement of what was originally a mystical or apocalyptic vision, in which the entire history of Torah was encapsulated in a single moment. 27 See Heschel, ibid., pp. 381ff. 28 Talmud Yerushalmi Pe’ah 2:6 (17a). Cf. Heschel, Torah min ha-Shamayim, vol. 2, pp. 234ff. 29 Zohar 3:221a and freq., based on Ta’anit 9a. 146 Road Back to Sinai: The Post-Critical Seeker the mouth of the divine Dynamis30—“I am Y-H-W-H your God,” and “You shall have no other gods beside Me”—when they interrupted the revelation out of their great fear. It was at this point that they said to Moses, “You speak with us and we will listen, but let not Y-H-W-H speak with us, lest we die” (Exodus 20:16). This would mean that all the rest of revelation comes to Israel through the mind as well as the mouth of the prophet, shaped by his own translator’s imagination, and only these two utterances are, in the fullest sense, the “word of God.” Here, awareness of Y-H-W-H and the prohi- bition of idolatry in all its forms are described as the basis of Judaism. The philosopher Franz Rosenzweig31 apparently at one point considered a still more restricted formulation, debating whether God had spoken even the first word of the commandments (“I am”). All the rest is Israel’s commentary, elaboration, and response. Another radically minimalist view32 is to be found in the teachings of a Hasidic master. This view has God speaking only the first letter of the first word. That letter, aleph, is by itself silent. God speaks only the great silence; the Divine is a silent womb that contains all of language within it. In seeing the name as the content of revelation, we draw together the maximalist and minimalist views as ends of a circle. All God says is that which cannot be spoken, the pronouncement of the unpronounceable word. But this word is filled to overflowing with the energy of Being. It contains within it all the power of Creation that it bore when it was first spoken as yehi (let there be). Thus it allows us to bring all words to Sinai. Revelation is that which makes for leshon ha-kodesh: it allows for the sanctification of human speech. The name is the divine Self in the form of language; that which Y-H-W-H “gives” at Sinai is nothing other than Y-H-W-H, for “the blessed Holy One and Torah are One.”33 This is the truth of Sinai as I understand it. To this indeed all else is commentary and response.

30 Pesikta Rabbati 22 (ed. Ish Shalom, p. 111a); Shir Rabbath 1:2; Makkot 24a; etc. For the view that all ten commandments were heard spoken by God, see ed. Horowitz-Rabin Mekhilta Yitro, Ba-ẖodesh 9, p. 237. 31 Rosenzweig, “The Commandments: Divine or Human,” included in his On Jewish Learning (New York: Schocken Books, 1955). See the discussion by Rivka Horwitz in Jewish Spirituality, vol. 2, pp. 358ff. 32 This view, attributed to Rabbi Mendel of Rymanow, is stated somewhat equivocally in the two collections of his teachings. See Torat Menaẖem, Yitro (ed. Lvov, 1877, 3a), and Menaẖem Ziyyon (Bartfeld, 1904, 41a). It is clearly understood this way, however, by R. Men- del’s disciple R. Naftali of Ropszyce in his Zera’ Qodesh (Jerusalem, 1971), vol. 2, 40b. Cf. Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, pp. 29ff. 33 a widely quoted statement in Hasidic sources, attributed to the Zohar but actually of later origin. See I. Tishby in Kirjath Sefer 50 (1975): 480–492. Road Back to Sinai: The Post-Critical Seeker 147

Nothing “new” is given to Israel at Sinai. Torah, after all, is said to be the most ancient wisdom, that which dwelt with God before the world’s Creation. The message of Sinai, that the One is ever present and potentially manifest in every creature and in each moment, is also not a new truth. God’s presence, as we have said, is imprinted in all of being through the divine utterances by which the world came to be. What is new at Sinai is that God can be approached and apprehended through language and the conceptual structures that proceed from it. The single divine Word may now fill all the many words of human speech, just as the divine One is present in the infinitely varied forms of being.

Revelation and the Inward Journey

This claim for a point of inner contact between human mind and universal Self is in need of yet another set of quotation marks, which the reader will note are being used so generously at this point in our discussion. The word “between” also needs this designation, for the true nature of the mind’s encounter with the One is not to be seen as a meeting of “self” and “Other.” The human-Divine encounter is more like the breaking down of a wall 34 than like the building of a bridge. It is a discovery that there is no chasm, rather than a claim that the gap can be traversed. Finally, it is the realization that the wall itself was illusory, and the sense of separation lies only in our own unreadiness to uncover the deeper truth. It is not for Moses alone that we make this claim.35 The Judaism of today’s seeker is not that of one who stands faithfully at the base of the mountain (or the edge of the well!), waiting for the leader to return and proclaim the divine message. It is, rather, a Judaism that seeks to go with Moses—or Akiva,36 who is seen by the tradition as a latter-day heavenly

34 See the text from Otsar H̱ayyim, quoted by Idel in Kabbalah, p. 67 and p. 306, n. 69. 35 See Toledot Yaʾakov Yosef 74a (on “You shall be holy”), quoted by S. Dresner, The Zaddik (New York: Schocken Books, 1974), p. 276, n. 23. 36 A contemporary Jewish spirituality would do well to reclaim this figure of Akiva, a nonprophet who lived in “ordinary” historic time, who nevertheless “went in and came forth in peace” and had “things revealed” to him “that had not been revealed to Moses” (Pesikta de-Rav Kahana 4). Interestingly, of the variants on the Pardes tale (H̱agigah 15a and parallels), some say “went up and came down in peace,” whereas others refer to “in” and “out.” See the Jerusalem Talmud version in H̱ agigah 2:1 (77b) as well as the Erfurt manuscript of the Tosefta, ed. Lieberman, p. 381. An interesting example of the interchange- ability of the vertical and internal metaphors! With regard to Akiva’s “journey,” the gaonic commentators are already willing to concede that he went nowhere in the “geographical” sense, but that the entire experience took place “within the chambers of his heart.” See the 148 Road Back to Sinai: The Post-Critical Seeker voyager—to those heights or depths, and to participate in Israel’s ongoing attempt to articulate that encounter. But our claim goes still farther. Every human journey contains within it something of Moses’ trek up that mountainside; every human attempt at making meaning, at understanding the purpose of human existence, at rejecting cynicism in a quest of truth, has something of Sinai within it. Whenever we assert—by deed as well as by word—that life is not absurd, that accident and emptiness are not our only lot, we are climbing up God’s mountain. Believe as we may that it is we who are making life’s meaning, we who are retrieving human dignity from the abyss of chaos, the religious mind sees such activity as response rather than as human creativity alone. We give meaning all its forms, but the need to do so is an act of responding to the divine image cast into our deepest human selves. The inner voice that calls us to this religious creativity is the voice of God. We perform the act of naming, calling the Divine by the names chosen by our tradition. But that need to name exists in us because we are called upon to do so by the One within. We further assert that all of us Jews, in all generations, as the story says, are there with Moses, or—to say it in somewhat less mythical terms—the Jewish people there made an all-time commitment, a covenant to remain faithful forever to the reality of that moment. Each of us, as we lay claim to our spiritual heritage, may return to intimate communion with that ever- resounding event at Sinai, formative of the Jewish spirit for all generations. It is in this sense that I understand the covenantal aspect of Sinai and of Judaism as a whole.

The Role of Covenant: A Reinterpretation

The God-initiated covenant of the Bible, a pillar of classical Judaism’s self- understanding, cries out for reinterpretation in our day. In a Jewish faith where God is not “wholly other,” and where the “will” of God is far from a simple notion, “covenant” cannot be understood in its most obvious sense. The religious language we have inherited speaks of a God who chooses Israel from among all nations to receive the single revelation as manifest in Torah. It is God’s “election of Israel,” to use the classic term, that ini- tiates the covenant. But God as chooser is a highly anthropomorphized

comment of R. H̱ ananel (as opposed to that of RaSHI), ad loc. We, of course, understand the “ascent” of Moses in the same way. Road Back to Sinai: The Post-Critical Seeker 149 notion of Y-H-W-H. Once we see the very depiction of God as person to be the result of human projection onto the universe, divine choosing will also have to be recognized as projection, as Israel’s way of asserting that it stands as a people in a unique relationship with the Divine. It is we who make this covenant,37 we who, in the person of Moses, dash half the blood of a sacramental offering over the altar—representing God—and pour the other half over ourselves, binding ourselves in an act of eternal commitment to the One of Sinai. In doing so, the Jewish people perform an act of eternal living commitment, forging a link between this event and all Jewish generations to come. It is in this sense that we continue to speak of Sinai as covenant. It is we who at Sinai declare our undying devotion to the universal ever-flowing and yet unchanging One. Is the covenant, then, a one-sided affair? What does covenant mean if there are not two partners between whom the commitment is made? Here again, the religious language we speak—that of “self” and “Other”—has to be read anew in the light of our nondualistic point of view. If relationship with God is more like breaking down a wall (or seeing through a veil) than it is like building a bridge across a chasm, covenant, too, becomes a commitment to keeping faith with the deepest Self that is manifest within us. It is a decision to live in such a way that allows this One to be revealed to others through us. Covenant is our willingness to be a channel,38 to serve as a con- duit of God’s presence to those with whom we live. “Israel exists in order to open paths, to light up the ways, and to kindle lamps—to raise everything up, so that all be One.”39 Once again, we may read our projection of covenant “from God’s point of view” as well. The divine light extends to all peoples, as it does to each individual soul. Israel has made the commitment of devoting itself to that light and bringing it into the world, making itself and its history a channel for divine presence. The choice to do so may be Israel’s, but this act of self- dedication (that the Jewish people has called “choosing”) may still be seen as one from which Y-H-W-H is by no means absent. Is it not the God within us who chooses to hear the voice of God?40 Is the voice of Israel that says

37 See Exodus 24, the covenant of Sinai. Note that this act is Moses’ own initiative. 38 The image of the Jew as a channel for divine blessing into the world is widespread in Hasidism. This is the main Hasidic understanding of the special role of Israel in the world, that is, the covenant. Israel among the nations, like the tsaddik within Israel, represents the berit as channel of connection to God. 39 Zohar 2:181b. 40 See Kedushat Levi, Yitro (ed. Jerusalem, 1958), 138b. See also the passage by Dov Baer of Myzedyrzec quoted by Rivka Schatz in Hasidism as Mysticism: Quietistic Elements in 18th 150 Road Back to Sinai: The Post-Critical Seeker na’aseh ve-nishma (We will do and listen) not also one in which Y-H-W-H is speaking? Torah’s narrative of the events at Sinai is famously nonsequential. Even the account given in the main source, Exodus 19–20, is hard to keep in order. When we add to it the parallel tales in Exodus 24 and Deuteronomy 4–6, we find a total jumble. The tale of Sinai is presented by the biblical text staccato, as a series of still photographs, rather than as a running film. You hold the snapshots in your hand and try to find their proper order. The ancient rabbis already engaged in this process, determining that Israel’s proclamation “We shall do and we shall obey” (Exodus 24:7) preceded the divine revelation. If that is the case, however, we acknowledge that our testimony to Sinai is entirely subjective, the witness of those who were already covenanted to the event before it happened. Would there have been a Sinai without our prior covenant, that act by which we opened our hearts to it? A divine voice, the rabbis tell us, goes forth from Sinai every day, calling us to turn to God. Perhaps it was only that same voice, the divine wind and thunder of Sinai, that went forth on that famous sixth of Sivan. But on that day our hearts were open, we declared ourselves ready. That was the day when wind and thunder were transformed into revelation, because we were there to listen. The task of religion is twofold. To return for a moment to the vertical metaphor, we could say that religion has both to take us to the heights of human attainment and to raise up the valleys that lie between them, to make for peak moments in our lives, but also to ensure that we do not sink too low when those special moments seem far from us. Religion is both charismatic and institutional, to say it in other words. Its language coaxes forth in us those peak experiences that become the core of the individual’s and the community’s commitments. But the other no less serious, and perhaps more difficult, task of religion is building institutions that will allow us to shape the rest of our lives in faithfulness to those singularly blessed moments.41 Le-maʾan tizkeru, “so that you remember,” is the way we say this in Hebrew, and it is the basis for all of form in religion. In youth, we are impatient with religion for being overly institutional and not leaving

Century Hasidic Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 191, as well as other sources quoted in that chapter (8). 41 I first wrote about this subject more than thirty years ago in a little essay called “Toward a Theology of Jewish Spirituality,” first published in Worship (1971) and reprinted in J. Sleeper and A. Mintz, The New Jews (New York: Vintage Press, 1971). In those days, I was highly impatient—like a good twenty-seven-year-old in 1968—with the institutional side of religion. Road Back to Sinai: The Post-Critical Seeker 151 enough room for the pure freedom that seems to be required by the spiritual energy churning within us. As we mature, we come to understand that religion faces the great task of uplifting ordinary life, the realms of work, family, and humdrum existence, of bringing these, too, into the spectrum of spiritual awareness. Only the discipline provided by institutional structure (dare I say “halakhah”?) can perform that task. The Jewish people throughout its history has accepted the task of forming a communal religious existence and creating a civilization that stands in response to the event at Sinai. This is what I mean by kabbalat ha-Torah, “accepting the Torah.” What we accept is the reality that divinity is present to humans, in human language and in human institutions, and the challenge is to create a society that embodies this presence. We are no less charged with that task today than we were thousands of years ago. For this reason, the civilization the Jewish people creates in this act of response, by the very definition of its task, has to evolve continually.42 The nature of standing in God’s presence—in this generation after the Holocaust, in this generation of nuclear weapons and threats of terror, and in this generation of threatened ecological disaster—is clearly different from the task of standing in God’s presence in the shtetl a hundred years ago or in Erets Yisra’el in ancient times. As the nature of that task changes, the way the Jewish people responds must continually grow and change. In an age when religion itself has again become the source of grave threats to stability and civilization, the universalist, humanitarian reading of sacred traditions becomes an urgent moral need.

Revelation and Torah

Our written Torah represents the Jewish people’s first attempt to create such a civilization. In it, we made our first transition from wordless revelation, through prophetic speech, to the creation of a holy society, from the

42 Mordecai Kaplan’s evolutionary model for Jewish civilization, including both halakhah and aggadah in their fullest cultural sense, is theologically vital to me. It is quite fully integrated with my neo-kabbalistic theology. If the true core of revelation is the name of God, Torah becomes a “garment” that embodies the name. There is good kabbalistic precedent for this view (see the previous reference to Idel, “The Concept of Torah,” as well as the treatment by Dorit Cohen-Alloro in The Secret of Garment in the Zohar [in Hebrew], pp. 45ff). I differ from the orthodox kabbalist in my insistence that it is we Israelites who, through our love and devotion, weave even that Torah garment (and not only our own soul garments). The name is divine; the garb in which it is contained is human-Divine. Therefore, the garb must evolve as humanity evolves, or else one is left with a relic, rather than an organic garment that “fits” the name of Y-H-W-H in our day. 152 Road Back to Sinai: The Post-Critical Seeker stillness and passivity of becoming aware to the realization and embodiment of that awareness in social form. As such, Torah is the basis of all further attempts. I look upon it not as the specifically revealed will of God, and not as a body of binding legislation, but rather as the ancient and powerful root of our people’s ongoing sacred task of building a religious civilization. It is the firm foundation of all that comes in its wake. Certainly, it still has a hold upon us: not a binding hold of law, but a hold the way one’s deepest and most ancient psyche continues to have a powerful grasp on a person’s actions throughout life. The Torah represents the psychic source from which we all come. We respond to it in deep and personal ways. That response includes love and deep loyalty; at times it may also include rebellion or anger. But Torah, all of Torah, is present throughout the continuing evolution of Judaism. All of Judaism is an ongoing project of commentary, each generation’s struggle with reinterpreting Torah. But this explanation of the relationship between revelation and Torah, a wordless or nearly wordless revelation to which Torah is Israel’s historic human response, does not seem quite adequate. Are the words and religious institutions of Torah, then, only human? Would we say merely human?43 Is there no divine presence about them? Let us remember once again that we are operating in a universe where the lines between the Divine and the human are less than rigid. Can we not say that the tselem Elohim, “the image of God,” is reflected in the religious institutions that human beings create? If we are a part of divinity and bear its presence within us, the Jewish people (or any other religious community) over centuries has the power to sanctify, which is to say “bring the divine presence into,” the essential forms of its religious life for all its descendants. Could this be what Mordecai Kaplan meant when he spoke of the mitzvot as sancta of the Jewish people? The essential forms of tradition are indeed holy and must be followed, not because God dictated them from the mountaintop, but because the Jewish people, using its own sacred energy, declared them holy to its God. This is reflected in the language of our holiday blessings: mekadesh Yisra’el ve . . ., “sanctifying Israel and. . . .”44 The sanctification of the holiday depends upon and comes about through the holiness of Israel. I would apply this model to the entirety of our religious expression.

43 Cf. Rosenzweig’s posing of the question: “Can we really draw so rigid a boundary between what is divine and what is human?” Compare his essay, “The Commandments: Divine or Human,” p. 119. 44 See Betzah 17a and RaSHI, ad loc. Road Back to Sinai: The Post-Critical Seeker 153

To say it somewhat differently, and perhaps more mystically, I offer the following. The Jewish people has invested the forms of its devotional life, including the words of prayer, the cycle of the calendar, its sacred music, and even tales and commentaries that have been told and retold, with bound- less emotional and spiritual energy over many generations. I believe that the power of this kavvanah is never lost. The intensity with which a form is used as a vessel of spiritual life grows and builds through each generation of devotion to it. The treasury of spiritual riches borne by the words of prayer or the form of offering gains in ever-increasing richness over time. A latter- day Jew, especially one coming from outside the tradition, who opens to that form, may discover the tremendous riches of kavvanah that lie waiting within it. The Jewish people has both created and accepted these forms in love. That love is neither lost nor diminished by the passage of time, but it is hidden only until we discover it again. The forms may not have been given by God at Sinai, but they are what we bring to the mountain; we invest them and forever associate them with the holiness we encounter there. Of course, the dangers of institutional religion are also ever present. Overinstitutionalization can indeed block out the transcendent and mysterious core experience that the form was created to preserve. There are those who become loyal to the forms alone. Traditional Judaism contains within it a preoccupation with the detail of form that is truly overwhelming. Surely there have always been those for whom this preoccupation serves as a positive reminder of the true content. But over the centuries, as this ever-extending passion for correct performance in each detail has been allowed to run rampant, Judaism for many has become a religion of devotion to performance, or commitment to religious law, that stands in great danger of forgetting its own spiritual center. The early Hasidic masters certainly knew this, and overemphasis on institutional religion, rather than on its sacred core, was what the Hasidic revival set out to correct. As Hasidism felt the need to take on the mantle of defending tradition, the character of Hasidism changed. It, too, became overly devoted to the protection of outward form, including the specific outward form of Hasidic tradition. The tension between keva and kavvanah, fixed form and inner content, is an ongoing struggle within Judaism, as it is in traditional religions throughout the world. 154 Road Back to Sinai: The Post-Critical Seeker

Revelation, Will, and Law

What room does such a view of revelation and its relationship with mitzvah leave for the role of law in Judaism? The content of revelation is the divine name or Self, the personal face of Being. This may be spiritually fulfilling, but we seem to be left quite entirely without a notion of specific divine will. Is it not the will of God that has always served as the theological underpinning for the authority of Jewish law? We understand that halakhah properly means “the path” and that “law” is a somewhat unfortunate mistranslation. But the codification of human behavior into categories of “permitted” and “forbidden” in accord with the will of God is surely highly characteristic of classical Judaism and remains the divid- ing line between Orthodoxy and all non-Orthodox forms of Judaism in our day. This description of our situation is to a large degree accurate; the theology offered here is clearly that of a non-Orthodox Jew. What you are reading is a heterodox mystical theology of Judaism. I do indeed see a divine intent or will in the life force, as manifest in the evolutionary process, and especially in the ongoing striving toward consciousness.45 This is not “will” in the highly personalistic sense, but a striving inherent in the very existence and evolution of the universe. Our human response to (or participation in!) this “will” is to be found in the affirmation of life, in recognizing the divine image in ourselves and in others, in acts of kindness—primarily in the human community but embracing all living creatures—and in the nurturing of awareness. This response requires human societies to create such forms, including legal institutions, domestic arrangements, and so forth, that will embody this will. The same is true of forms of worship and religious discipline. If awareness of the One is to be cultivated in the human community, ordered forms of spiritual expression will have to exist. In this sense, we may say that religion is our human fulfillment of the divine will or purpose. The need for human societies to create religious forms is rooted, in this sense, in “the will of God” or the desire of the One for balanced and lasting self-manifestation. In another way, I also believe that teshuvah, the turning of all things toward their root in God, may be seen as a reflection of divine will in the creaturely world.46 The turning of all things toward their

45 For a parallel to this understanding of divine will, see Ish-Shalom, Rav Avraham Itzhak ha-Kohen Kook, pp. 68ff., and sources quoted in n. 203. 46 See the discussion by Meshullam Feibush Heller of Zbarash in Likkutim Yekarim (Jerusalem, 1974), p. 137b. This precedes, and may be a source for, the well-known views Road Back to Sinai: The Post-Critical Seeker 155 source in the One is rooted in existence itself. We will discuss this further in the coming chapter. I recognize that none of this quite gets us to the point of explicit divine authority for the specific forms created by the Jewish people. In this gap lies the unorthodoxy of my position. To be sure, we Jews believe in the importance of law in the conduct of human life. When it comes to those areas governed by civil and criminal codes, Judaism stands firmly for the notion of the rule of law, with or without the convention of divine origin. Our questions about law refer primarily to the appropriateness of legal categories to the sphere of worship or religious devotion, but do not touch the importance or value of law itself. I do not know a God who “commands” specific religious behavior or forms of worship. I also believe that our way of response to the Divine within the universe needs to grow and evolve with our history. But it is also clear to me that my very recognition of the divine image in my fellow human, and the need to sustain that recognition (even in his, her, or my least elevated moments), will take us right back to the need for law in the conduct of human affairs. One of the earliest and most interesting exponents of the Torah, but whose work was lost to Jews for many centuries, is the philosopher Philo of Alexandria. Writing in Greek just over two thousand years ago, Philo was the first to attempt to understand the Torah traditions in terms of Greek categories of thought. Philo speaks of a notion of natural law, an eternal way of wisdom that teaches humans how to live in harmony with the natural world. This law, he says, was known to the ancients. Philo claims, as do the later rabbis, that Abraham observed God’s law before the Torah was given.47 But for the philosopher this means that the law our patriarch followed was in fact the natural law of the universe. It was his own inner wisdom that taught him to live in harmony with the universe. This affinity for natural law was the “original” Judaism. The Torah as we have it is Israel’s attempt (Philo would say Moses’ attempt) to approximate this natural law by means of human legislation. The Torah contains within it such important measures as protection for the weak, humane treatment of animals,

of Rav Kook, to be discussed later. On this author and his place in the history of Jewish devotional literature, see the treatment by my student Miles Krassen, Uniter of Heaven and Earth: Rabbi Meshullam Feibush Heller of Zbarazh and the Rise of Hasidism in Eastern Gali- cia (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998). Krassen also offers there an important general discussion of devekut and mystical union in the Hasidic sources. 47 Or so both Philo and the rabbis read Genesis 26:5. See my brief treatment of the Philonic materials in my Devotion and Commandment: The Faith of Abraham in the Hasidic Imagination, pp. 24ff., and the sources quoted there. 156 Road Back to Sinai: The Post-Critical Seeker and regard for the natural environment. The Torah lends us a sense of responsibility for ourselves, our families, and especially those less fortunate than we are. It repeats the law of nature “in human language.” Torah is a way of bringing us to live in harmony with God’s own law. Rabbinic Judaism also contains within it an ancient principle that is quite close to the notion of natural law. According to the rabbis, seven commandments were given to the children of Noah after the flood. These include the prohibitions against murder, incest and adultery, theft, idolatry, and blasphemy; the injunction to establish, courts of justice; and the injunction against dismemberment of living animals for food. These universal moral commandments are incumbent upon all human individuals and societies.48 With the latitude of interpretation and extension offered by our tradition, I believe we could continue to support the notion of the seven Noahide commandments as a basis for universal morality. There is no question that the written Torah was a document of progressive social legislation in its time, as it was also one of great spiritual and moral insight. The rabbis continued in this evolution of Torah, adding such refinements as the virtual abolition of the death penalty, the protection of women in divorce, the replacement of blood retribution by the payment of damages, and countless other refinements of moral legislation. This process remains for us paradigmatic of that which we need to create. For us Jews in the Diaspora, the promulgation of humane legislation is generally something we do as members of the general society, however inspired by our Judaism. In the creation of a Jewish society in Israel, the Jewish people is given the tremendous opportunity and challenge of creating a legal system and a moral code that reflect both its roots in the prior history of Judaism and the best of contemporary moral sensibilities. This is not an easy task, as witnessed by the constant struggles in Israel over the place of Jewish law in the legal and institutional life of that society. Judaism in its next manifestation will continue to need halakhah. This is simply to say that Judaism, like any religious tradition, will have to be defined and recognizable by forms of praxis and cannot afford to let itself be dissipated into proclamation of theological or moral vagaries alone. Although it will not be justified as divine will in the literal sense, this halakhah can become the bearer of divine presence, the davar shebi-kedushah, in our lives. This new halakhah, rather than viewed as the specific will of

48 on the Noahide laws and their implications, sec David Novak, The Image of the Non- Jew in Judaism: An Historical and Constructive Study of the Noahide Laws (New York: Edward Mellen Press, 1983). Road Back to Sinai: The Post-Critical Seeker 157

God, will be understood as a human-Divine embodiment, created by Israel, but in which real holiness is contained. Form as bearer of mysterious content, the outer as the needed vehicle to contain and convey the inner, will remain a vital part of Judaism in the future, as it has been in the past. Our understanding of the relationship between outer and inner may shift, and we may come to describe the origins of our sacred forms in new ways. But the need for them remains no less real than it has ever been. In the preceding chapter, we discussed some areas of this old-new halakhah as it relates to a theology of Creation. As we turn to do the same for revelation, I recognize the vast difference between my approach and most traditional ones. In the past, the entirety of Torah and the commandments were linked to revelation. Whatever other reasons or meanings might be found in the mitzvot, there was an ultimate ground in Judaism that demanded they all be fulfilled because they are the Creator’s will. This is where all modern non-Orthodox Judaisms seriously diverge from their classical antecedents. Still, I believe there are specific halakhic implications to our faith in Sinai and revelation that I have articulated here, as there are to our faith in Creation, and indeed to many other tales that we bear as Jews and tell from one generation to the next.

The Personal Path: Accepting the Yoke

The relationship between the memory of Sinai and our ever-evolving religious lives as Jews is not a simple one. There is divinity to be discovered within the mitzvot, but this is not the divinity of a commanding God who insists on the details of their proper performance. Judaism is a way of reaching inward and outward toward the One, inward toward the heart and outward in manifestation through the mitzvot. This way is sanctified by the generations of those who walked along the path, rather than by the fiat of an overpowering transcendent deity. The light that lies hidden within our Torah, made up of the countless points of love and devotion discovered and placed there by our ancestors, is or ha-ganuz, “the hidden light” of Y-H-W-H. Is it then imperative that Jews seek out this light? Does the God who has dwelt within the hearts of so many generations, and who is given expression through these forms, become an immanent metsaveh, a “commanding One,” who will stand behind the mitzvot as the indwelling embodiment of religious authority? I often find myself close to this position, but I have some strong resistance to it as well. 158 Road Back to Sinai: The Post-Critical Seeker

In my own religious life, I have come to recognize the need for submission to God as a part of religious devotion. I continue to struggle with this aspect of religious life, but I know the vital role it plays in the spiritual path. I accept that there is no room for God—however defined—in our lives until we can overcome our own willfulness, stubbornness, egotism. To thus submit, to “negate your will before God’s will,”49 is essential to accepting the covenant as I have described it, the readiness to serve as a channel for divine presence in the world. In Judaism, this submission, usually described as kabbalat ol malkhut shamayim (accepting the yoke of divine rule), is joined to kabbalat ol mitzvot (accepting the yoke of commandments). I recognize the value of this link, the sense that religious awareness becomes constant in life only through the regularity of religious discipline. But I also remain constantly aware of the pitfalls of submission as a religious value. I am suspicious of the desire to surrender to halakhic authority as a road to escape from the difficulties of life in our era of exceptional human freedom and nearly limitless choices. There is a surrender to religious authority or tradition that replaces, and masks itself as, true surrender to God’s presence. The discovery of God is cause for exultation and joy—“I rejoice over Your word as one who finds a great treasure” (Psalm 119:162). Too often that joy is lost in excessive concern for details, for proper performance, for pleasing the sources of authority. I have traveled that road and found it a blind alley. Today I tend rather to value freedom and do not surrender it lightly. In this sense, I very much feel myself a creature of the modern world, my religious longings pushing me toward a spiritual postmodernity, but not back toward the premodern models of authority. I have fought hard for the measure of freedom I have in my life—including the freedom from religious guilt—and I am not prepared to surrender it, even for the great good of regular religious discipline. Herein lies the deep non-Orthodoxy of my religious life. I know of the human role in the origin of the commandments, and I know that all human creations are fallible. This knowledge provides a rationale for my refusal to hand myself over entirely to the halakhah, which is not the same as giving myself to God. The truth is that I want to hold fast to both freedom and religious authenticity. I will freely decide—often, but not consistently—to live a rather traditional Jewish life, but it is vital to me that I am the one making that decision. I know that the mitzvot are but a means, and an often arbitrary one, to the greater end of spiritual awareness. Out of my love for our

49 Mishnah Avot 2:4. Road Back to Sinai: The Post-Critical Seeker 159 ancestors and the divine spirit that dwelt within them, I mostly choose to live in faithfulness to the religious discipline they created. Each day I seek to affirm anew my commitment to the mitzvot as my religious language, to keep this an act of faith ever chosen in freedom. I, too, must cross the Sea each day, leaving Egypt and coining into freedom, before I can renew the covenant. What, then, becomes of submission? How do I distinguish willfulness from the need for freedom? Am I honestly seeking to be free in order to reach a higher rung of religious discovery, to submit to God’s presence rather than to tradition, or am I simply seeking justification for a life of what the halakhist would dismiss as “enlightened hedonism”? How will I know the difference? Is there any place for absolutes in the world of religious behavior? Is the ability to say “No” to ourselves not an important value? Let us remember that we are not talking about the ethical or interper- sonal sphere, where I certainly do believe in the values of both law and self- restraint. We are considering here the sphere of pure religious behavior, the realm called by tradition “the commandments between person and God.” Here I am committed to a position that maximalizes individual freedom. My absolutes in this realm are rather few, and it is I who have chosen them. I demand of myself that I stare daily into the face of the tradition, doing so with knowledge and respect. The options of observance and nonobser- vance are always before me. The choices I make are my own; only the God who dwells within my heart knows how wisely or not I have chosen. I am helped in this struggle with authority in religion by the very helpless- ness of God. The One who is present in these mitzvot is really no longer the frightening commander on the mountaintop. I thank the ever self-revealing Y-H-W-H for the gifts of biblical scholarship and historical study of religion that have helped break the excessive yoke of that sort of religious authority, making our generation a post- rather than a premodern one. The God I know is a divinity that cannot act or be realized in the human world at all, except through human actions. In the ethical/moral sphere of religious living, “the commandments between person and person,” I find myself guided by traditional Jewish values and concerns, with a few prominent but significant exceptions.50 In the realm of personal religious expression, knowing full well that I live in an age of choice and freedom, I mostly

50 These cover mostly matters surrounding gender and sexuality, including a full commitment to gender egalitarianism and rejection of the traditional reading of Leviticus 18:22 as prohibiting sexual activity between men. It is time that we sanctify loving same-sex relationships rather than pretending that they do not exist. 160 Road Back to Sinai: The Post-Critical Seeker choose to remain “at home” with the life rhythms of the Jewish people. In doing so, I let myself hear that pleading voice of the One that has so long inhabited these traditions and asks not to be abandoned by yet another one of Israel’s children.

Sinai and Languge

In turning to the more specific halakhah of revelation, we are asking: “To what does the presence of Y-H-W-H in language obligate us?” What claim is made on our lives by this connection between the Divine and the verbal, by this drawing forth of the hidden yod into the vav of speech? What demand upon us is made by the specific form taken by our tale, that of the people standing before God at Sinai? The claim that divinity can enter human language, or that the indescribable One of Being, utterly beyond words and language, enters into human speech through the agency of the word Y-H-W-H, is both to elevate human language itself to a new level of respect and to make tremendous demands upon it. It grants that language can, after all, transcend itself and serve as a vehicle for articulating states of consciousness and levels of reality that seem beyond its ken. The word Y-H-W-H is here seen as a token of the promise that language can be reborn in symbolic form, ready to embody heights and depths unknown to its prior ordinary discursive state. The ability of language to reach into the human soul in such a way is both powerful and dangerous. The past century has seen too much of the abuse of myth and symbol as means of control over others for us to regard such claims for language benignly. If we assert that language has such power, this assertion must immediately be accompanied by a statement of commitment to what our sages called brit ha-lashon, “the covenant of the tongue,”51 that is attributed precisely to Sinai. The memory of Sinai demands of us that we use language in pure and sacred ways: that its powers not be used to manipulate or to pervert the truth. We must not use language to set one human community and its symbols over another, doing to others what was so long done to us. We must especially remain ever aware that the same power of language that brings us to the gates of divinity has been used to

51 the phrase goes back to Sefer Yetsirah, which sees this covenant and that of the flesh or sexuality (brit ha-ma’or) juxtaposed to one another. Speech and sexuality are parallel areas of human expression; both need to be guarded by covenantal purity. Road Back to Sinai: The Post-Critical Seeker 161 dehumanize and bring whole peoples (including ourselves) to the gates of hell. Language must be used to bring us back to the One. In our daily lives as well, we must come to understand that language is a precious and sacred vessel. Its power to draw us together in community—especially through sharing the language of prayer—is great. So too is its power of destruction. Malicious talk divides people from one another so deeply that the rabbis compare it to the shedding of blood. To know Y-H-W-H as Torah is to know the power of words and to devote ourselves to taharat ha-lashon, to the purity of language. This faith in the potency of language, expressed in our opening to Y-H-W-H in revelation, carries over also into our commitment to verbal prayer. As Jews, we proclaim that we can find the divine presence in words, phrases, and sacred texts handed down to us by our ancestors. This is what it means to lay claim to a spiritual heritage that is conveyed to us mostly in language. We now take that same language and use it to give, rather than to receive.52 Into it we place our own deepest feelings of love and awe, of affirmation and doubt, of joy and terror. These we offer, a gift wrapped in the garb of sacred speech, to the One in whose presence we stand always.

Sinai and Study

Faith in Sinai also commits us to a life of study. Judaism is a process of ongoing commentary. To be a Jew is to be a student. To be a self- affirming Jew is to love and study Torah. It is no small matter that the rabbis considered study equal in value to all the other mitzvot combined.53 We are a people devoted to a text. Yisra’el ve-oraita ẖad hu; “Israel and Torah are one.”54 We can affirm this fully without denying the human origins of the Torah. We can celebrate it along with recognizing the fallibility of the text, along with agonizing over its moral imperfections, its ancient, rather than modern, sensibilities. A fallible text is one all the more in need

52 See my introduction to Your Word Is Fire: The Hasidic Masters on Contemplative Prayer, as well as several of the Hasidic texts translated in that volume that speak of verbal prayer in Torah as a return of the divine gift of speech. See also the chapter on prayer in my book Ehyeh: A Kabbalah for Tomorrow (Woodstock, Vt.: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2002). 53 Mishnah Pe’ah 1:1. Quoted in the daily prayer book. See Talmud Yerushalmi, ad loc. (15a). 54 on the history of this phrase (and its expansion: “God, Torah, and Israel are one”) see again I. Tishby’s remarks in Kirjath Sefer 50 (1973): 480ff. 162 Road Back to Sinai: The Post-Critical Seeker of commentary, our way of bringing our past into the present before we hand it on to those who will create the future. To be sure, the text has grown over the centuries. In the narrowest sense, our text is still the written Torah, those five books we read, study, and comment on in the synagogue each week. But that which was once commentary has now come to be included within our text: Talmud and Midrash, aggadah and halakhah, Kabbalah and Hasidic tales and teachings are, in the broader sense, a part of our text. Jewish poetry and music, the writings of philosophers and the creations of artisans, woven fabrics for Torah cur- tains and elaborate towers for Havdalah spice—all of these are parts of the text that we may choose to study. So too is the ongoing history of Israel; the lives led by Jewish men and women (the latter were largely excluded from the literary tradition until modern times) over the centuries are also a part of our text, that to which we offer commentary by our own words and our own lives. It is, after all, that historical contextuality, that living “with the text” that places us within the chain of tradition, that makes our generation a con- tributor to the sum of what will be passed on to the future. We do this faithfully only as we submit ourselves to the role of student, as we are willing to allow ourselves to be shaped by the text as we have received it and made it our own. The unchanging text serves as the counterpoint to our constant evolution and development. Yes, Judaism must grow and change in every age. This is true of both halakhah and aggadah. They need to keep faith with the life experience of the Jewish people at each moment in their history. But Judaism also contains a clear fixed point. Each generation struggles with the text, the same text, transformed and brought to life by interpretation, but itself never changing. As we struggle to add to tradition, to reshape it for each new generation, the text is also given a chance at reshaping us, at making a real demand on the way we think and live. It is only insofar as we have been faithful students that we will be good teachers. Tradition is a precious and fragile commodity in our age. We bear it carefully, adding to it our own, to be sure, but not seeking entirely to bend it to our will, lest it break in our hands. But our commitment to Torah study must be understood in a broader context as well. In a traditionally dualistic Western religious system, the need for Torah is quite apparent. The God who created humans in this world and has a specific will for human behavior would not be so cruel as to abandon us without giving us the Law. How could we not commit ourselves to eternal study of God’s own word? But in the theology I outline here, why do we need Torah to know God or to live the good life? If God is manifest Road Back to Sinai: The Post-Critical Seeker 163 in the world, study the world! If divinity is in all of being, study astronomy, botany, or zoology—but why Torah? Let me add here that I fully agree that Judaism in the past has been both overly bookish and excessively narrow in focus. The turn away from nature as the great testimony to Y-H-W-H, which was still essential to our religious life in biblical times, toward a religion where God was known only through the world of books and commentaries, was a terrible narrowing of the Jewish soul. This is being rectified by the generations of Jews who have returned to the land in Erets Yisra’el, finding God in the rocks, soil, and historical remains of that beloved and pain-soaked land. We Diaspora Jews have been slower to learn this lesson, but that too has begun to change. But God is manifest in the human mind and spirit as well as in birds, trees, and human love. God is there in the human longing to comprehend and unite with divinity. This stretching forth of mind and soul to that which is most deeply within us is an essential part of religion’s value. The history of this seeking within the human race is a vital part of the story of Y-H-W-H. Human faith itself is as much testimony to Y-H-W-H as are sunsets, seas, or mountains. The history of the quest for God and for a God-inspired way of life among our people is a part of that story that we Jews alone can tell. We are obligated today, as always, to “tell it to our children.” We are also obligated to preserve it as a part of the much-needed spiritual heritage of all humanity. To build a Judaism that will be of deep meaning to Jews in the future, we need to drink deeply of the teachings of the Jewish past. The religious value of Torah study is a seeking out of the ways in which the divine presence has been manifest in the Jewish people since the most ancient times. Its meaning changes, as it must, but it is still Torah.

Sinai and Community

Sinai was an experience of the entire people, a communal transformation, rather than that of an individual. When Israel arrived at the mountain, say the rabbis, they encamped there (the verb used is in the singular) “with a single heart”;55 only then were they ready to receive the word of God. Our religious language is that of community; it is we who stand before You, we who have sinned, and so forth. To live in faith with Sinai is to love and embrace the entire Jewish people. It is also to seek and build community, a grouping of like-thinking and like-living

55 Mekhilta Yitro, Ba-ẖodesh 1, p. 206; RaSHI to Exodus 19:2. 164 Road Back to Sinai: The Post-Critical Seeker

Jews whose collectivity will serve as a bridge between the individual and klal Yisra’el, the whole Jewish people. We Jews who are still in the process of reclaiming our Judaism and returning to tradition in one way or another often think we do so as the result of our own individual odysseys, life experiences, and struggles that seem to us entirely private and idiosyncratic. But as we identify again with Judaism, we begin to find ourselves living richly in the context of the Jewish people, past, present, and future. Our role in linking the generations becomes a crucial part of our identity. We know too that ahavat Yisra’el, a love and compassionate caring for our fellow Jews, is a part of this heritage to which we return. There is no Judaism without Jews, and this is no mere tautology. Our religion is that of a people; there is no reclaiming the silent sounds or the holy moment of Sinai without reclaiming also as our own the people of Sinai, distanced as they may seem from the foot of that sacred mountain. Yes, the God we know is universal, and the divine image is there in every human. But there is also a strong place in our tradition to celebrate particularity, to stand close with those who share our history and, as we have been shown so strongly in our times, our destiny, as well as the special traditions we have inherited or chosen. This love extends to all Jews, including those with whom we have even the deepest theological or moral disagreements. It is as members of the same extended family that we love one another enough to argue, that we care enough to want to convince one another to mend our ways. Somewhere in the course of living in community, we come to see that the journey is not an isolated one any more. As we build our own individual families and households in a communal context, or as we share in the broader “family” of community itself, we find that we have come home from the long wandering that so characterizes our contemporary society, home to our ancestors (whether biological or adopted), home to the Jewish people. Ultimately, we begin to see this process of odyssey and return as something more than individual, as belonging to the history of Jews in our day, so many of whom are seeking ways to reclaim our tradition. The decision to find our way as Jews, rather than to turn to the many other life paths that stretch before us in this age of choices, turns out to be our response to a Jewish voice that speaks from deep within us. Our homecoming is also a return to Sinai.

The Three Festivals: Sinai and the Sacred Cycle

As creation is celebrated by Shabbat, revelation is celebrated primarily by the cycle of the three annual festivals we call shalosh regalim, the three Road Back to Sinai: The Post-Critical Seeker 165 ancient seasons of pilgrimage to Jerusalem. These three represent a cycle, the high point of which is Shavuot, the day that commemorates Sinai itself. The celebration of these festivals, and with them the rhythm of the sacred calendar as a whole, is our way of making the ancient tales of our ancestors’ wanderings into vessels through which our own inner tales are told. In them, our own seeking and wandering find meaning. The cycle begins with Pesach, the festival of liberation. We set out on our path and begin the journey with liberation from Egypt. The freedom we celebrate here is at once collective and individual, national and personal. The Egypt from which we are liberated is that of national oppression and loss of our distinctive Jewish identity.56 It is also the Egypt of alienation from our root in Y-H-W-H and from the inability both to turn inward to know ourselves and to act to transform our lives. This Egypt is depicted in our sources both as galut ha-da’at, “the exile of the mind,” and galut ha-dibbur, “the exile of language.”57 The Hebrew word for Egypt, Mitsrayim, is regularly described as derived from metsar yam, “the narrow straits of the sea.”58 On these festivals, in the Hallel, we thank the One to whom “I called from the narrow straits” and who “answered me in the breadth of YaH” (Psalm 118:5). Liberation is an opening up of the bonds, a refusal to be dominated any longer by the interests of our narrowest self. It is a seeing beyond ego and its constant demands, an opening to “the breadth of YaH,” the broad vision of God throughout Creation. Mind and word are both in bondage. The series of events that leads to Sinai begins in Egypt; the word cannot be spoken within us until the mind is freed from its own constrictions. But the link between Egypt and Sinai is crucial on other levels as well. Sinai is an act of covenant and commitment, the marriage of God and Israel. We are not able to make such a commitment until we are free, until we are whole enough to turn fully to the One. The fact that Sinai is preceded by liberation from Egypt forces us to recognize that, for others as well as ourselves, liberation takes precedence to commitment. The struggle to be free in all of its many forms (including freedom from religion itself when it becomes a source of bondage) is a sacred struggle. Our calendar connects these two events, the liberation

56 the rabbis say that Israel were redeemed from Egypt because they kept their distinctive Jewish names, maintained the Hebrew language, did not betray their secrets, etc. For the various versions of this list, see Va-Yikra Rabbah 32:5 and parallels. 57 These terms are commonly found in the literature of early Hasidism and are employed to spell out the Hasidic spiritual interpretation of the Exodus from Egypt. Mine is an updated version of that Hasidic reading. 58 R. Hayyim Vital, Peri ‘Ets H̱ayyim, ẖag ha-matsot, “note.” For some Hasidic examples, see R. Elimelech of Lezajsk, Noʾam Elimelech, ed. G. Nigal (Jerusalem: Mossad ha-Rav Kook, 1978), p. 27, p. 160. 166 Road Back to Sinai: The Post-Critical Seeker from bondage and the standing before Sinai, in a special way. Beginning with the day after the Exodus, we count fifty days, the period of the Omer, in anticipation of Shavuot, the anniversary of Sinai. Revelation depends on freedom. The covenant of Sinai could be made only by a free people. True commitment to life in the presence of Y-H-W-H, for the individual as well, must begin with freedom. The miracle that sets the whole process of these great events in motion, according to one Hasidic view,59 takes place neither on Pesach nor on Shavuot, but rather earlier, on the tenth of Nisan. That was the day on which the Israelites in Egypt set aside lambs for the offering in anticipation of the Exodus. On that day, they decided they could no longer live in slavery. They defied their Egyptian masters by preparing to celebrate their liberation, an act from which there was no turning back. This statement of defiance, the realization that there is no life without freedom, is the real miracle, to which all the “signs and wonders” of Egypt are secondary. But liberation is not only a prelude to Sinai. We have had occasion earlier to mention that the rabbis described two moments as those when all Israel saw the divine Glory: at the splitting of the Sea and when standing before Mount Sinai. To describe the splitting of the Sea as a moment of revelation on its own is an important statement. It says that liberation itself is a form of revelation. One of the moments when the face of God is revealed to us is the moment when we set ourselves free. The “handmaiden at the Sea,”60 who saw more than the greatest prophets, had her vision in the moment when she knew she was free. The sacred exhilaration of that moment should not be lost on us. It was human courage (Nachshon walking into the Sea) that brought forth the vision of God’s presence. Sometimes we rush too quickly to link Pesach and Shavuot, as though to say that Pesach itself is incomplete, that it is a “mere” prelude to revelation. Here let it be said that we know of a revelation that happens in the moment when humans are liberated, as we know of one when they proclaim God’s unity and declare themselves to be part of the great One. Each of these sacred moments, in order to be whole, needs completion by the other. Pesach is celebrated by the great sacred meal, the seder, at which we tell again to a new generation with song, story, and feasting the tale of our liberation. Shavuot is celebrated by study, spending the whole night awake in

59 This is the text from Kedushat Levi, by Levi Yizhak of Berdichev, which I translated for B.W. Holtz’s Back to the Sources (New York: Summit, 1984), pp. 361ff. 60 Mekhilta Beshalaẖ, Shirta 3, p. 126. Road Back to Sinai: The Post-Critical Seeker 167 enjoyment of Torah, anticipating the dawn, when the tale of Sinai is read once again. The primary setting for celebration of Pesach is the family. Each household, the Torah tells us, took as much food from the sacrifice as its members needed to eat. In our day, where the community or ẖavurah celebrates Pesach together, it is taking on the family role. But on Shavuot, the primary focus of celebration is that of community. The community of those who share Torah together teach and study through the night, making the text live again for one another. Here, the community embodies that community of old that stood as one before the mountain. The cycle that begins with Pesach and reaches its height on Shavuot is drawn to conclusion on Sukkot, the third of the pilgrimage festivals. Sukkot may best be described as a celebration of living-in-the-world, a time when the lofty realities represented by the earlier festivals and by the just-passed season of teshuvah, or return and renewal, are brought into the ordinariness of daily life. To do this, we forsake the home in a way and thus transform it. We show that we build our lives, after all, in the frailest of dwellings. The sukkah is a place where the smallest of blessings is a great joy. Sukkot is the time when we take nothing more than fruit and branches to “rejoice before the Lord.” It is striking that the holiday cycle ends with Sukkot, which historically commemorates the wandering of Israel in the wilderness. There is no holiday to celebrate our arrival into the land, the conclusion of the journey. We begin by throwing off the oppressor’s yoke, we count the days to the moment of covenant and commitment, then we set off on our wanderings, until we begin again with liberation. There seems to be a message built into this structure that points to a deeper meaning than that of the history of ancient Israel alone. The journey at which the symbols of the sacred year are pointed is an unending and cyclical one. Its fulfillment, as seen from the viewpoint of revelation, lies not in its conclusion (or in “arrival” at the final goal), but rather in its self-renewing power. While there are various messianic themes associated with Sukkot, its redemptive message lies mostly in the contentment of harvest and in our finding God within this world. Here, the tale with which we opened perhaps has to be modified: note that the wise man is still within the kingdom of lies when he comes before the king. Their encounter may be a simpler or more ordinary one than the one the tale describes. The portrait we draw may not be taken all at once, like the snapping of a camera shutter, but may be drawn line by line, day by day, as we wander through that kingdom. 168 Road Back to Sinai: The Post-Critical Seeker

The Word in Our Day

At Sinai, the voice of Moses came to bear the voice of God within it. We who believe that revelation is not a one-time event, but an ongoing process,61 must, with fear and trembling, with deep humility and “holy audacity,”62 allow our voices too to become bearers of that voice. The sound of Y-H-W-H is “a great voice that never ceased.”63 Today it needs us to be its trumpet. Vav has drawn forth the point of the yod, bringing divinity from silence into speech. The many words may indeed be our own, but the single Word nevertheless lives within them. That same vav, we should remember, is also the particle of conjunction: it means “and.” Through it, one is joined to the other, soul to Soul, word to Word. But the vav as that which joins one to the other is also that which acclaims Sinai as the moment of yiẖud, the union of bridegroom and bride. This mystical marriage between the primal pair, conceived alternatively as God and the Community of Israel, or blessed Holy One and Shekhinah, is also the union, according to the kabbalists, of vav and heh. Because vav means “and,” it calls for union. As such, it too is incomplete in itself and seeks after its mate. So too does Judaism as revelation remain but “half a body.” Those who are called to Sinai are sent forth from there to do the work of redemption. The gathering at the mountain is itself a form of tsimtsum, a concentration of energy that takes place only so that those who hear the Word may go forth to realize it in deed. Vav calls out for heh: revelation is the call that sets us on the path in search of a world redeemed.

61 See Scholem’s treatment of this theme in “Revelation and Tradition as Religious Categories in Judaism,” in his The Messianic Idea, in Judaism (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), pp. 282ff., and especially the kabbalistic sources quoted on pp. 298ff. In the past, recognition of the ongoing quality of revelation was largely, though not wholly, limited to the revelation of the divine will in the halakhic decision-making process. I would seek to conceive it in somewhat broader terms, embracing aggadah and religious creativity, as well. 62 the phrase belongs to Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav. See Likkutey MoHaRaN 1:22:4, etc. 63 deuteronomy 5:19. This translation follows the rabbinic understanding as reflected in the Aramaic Targumim. A Neo-Hasidic Life: Credo and Reflections

Arthur Green

Personal Introduction

When I turned seventy years old earlier this year, I did not realize how fully the occasion would turn into a time of reflection. While I have every hope that my productive years are far from over, there is no question that reaching this big number tells one that the final phase of life has begun. There is no more saying “late middle age” or “sixty is the new forty.” The Psalmist’s words, however tempered by medical advances, still resound loudly in the ears of the septuagenarian. Yemey shenoteno shiv’im shanah. Anything more is surely ẖesed ẖinam, a pure divine gift. Although my years have been marked by a number of shifts of direction in both my writing and my professional roles, in the perspective of hindsight I now realize they constitute a single project, one that has taken a number of forms but nevertheless bears a consistent message. I was twenty years old, a senior in college, when I read Hillel Zeit- lin’s essay Yesodot ha-H̱asidut, “The Fundaments of Hasidism.”1 I no longer remember whether it was Zalman Schachter or Alexander Altmann who put it in my hands, but they are the most likely candidates. To say that I fell in love is something of an understatement. I realized then and there that his words were giving expression to a deep truth that my heart already knew, and that this would be my religious language throughout my life. I promised myself (and Zeitlin) that I would translate this essay into English, a promise I fulfilled only half a century later.2 Although I did not yet have the term in my vocabulary, I have ever since then been a committed Neo-Hasidic Jew. Zeitlin joined with Buber, Heschel,

* This chapter was first published in “A Neo-Hasidic Life: Credo and Reflections” (pp. 65–87) from Personal Theology, edited by William Plevan (Academic Studies Press, 2013). Reprinted with permission. 1 originally published Warsaw, 1910, and included in the posthumous volume Be-Fardes ha-H̱asidut veha-Kabbalah (Tel Aviv: Yavneh, 1960). 2 it appears in my volume of Zeitlin’s writings called Hasidic Spirituality for a New Era, published by Paulist Press in the Classics of Western Spirituality series in 2012. 170 A Neo-Hasidic Life: Credo and Reflections and Schachter, whose writings and teachings saved Judaism for me, much as the Hasidic Rabbi Pinhas of Korzec once said that the Zohar had “kept him a Jew.” Collectively, they moved me toward a rather defined faith-stance (I intentionally choose this term over “theology”), from which I have wavered rather little. Zeitlin was the most important, and thus remains my rebbe, because he showed me the abstract truth that lay behind the mask of personalist God-language, which was already problematic for me. He led me to a search within the primary texts of Hasidism, one that has never ceased. My purpose here is to articulate the nature of that quest and to flesh out in specifics my lifelong project of bringing to birth a Neo-Hasidic Judaism that would have broad appeal to contemporary seekers. These seekers include many present and future rabbis, with whom I have tried to share my love of the original Hasidic sources, and who I hope will open this path to others. But I write also for the many spiritually serious Jews (and others) of my and more recent generations who have turned away from Judaism and toward Eastern spiritual paths in despair of finding anything useable in our own spiritual patrimony. My heart goes out especially to this latter group, and I constantly have them in mind as I write. It is for them (though I daresay for myself as well, since I am spiritually so close to them!) that I have sought to use Hasidism in creating what I sometimes call a “seeker- friendly” Judaism. Elsewhere, most recently in Radical Judaism,3 I have outlined a theological position that takes as its departure-point an evolutionary approach, both to human origins and to the origins and development of religion. I take for granted that as the twentieth century ran its course, the two great century-long battles fought by traditional religious forces, one against Dar- win and the other against Biblical criticism, have both been decided, neither coming out the way those forces might have hoped. In articulating a religious language that will speak to twenty-first-century people, we have to leave both of those struggles behind us, accept their conclusions on the scientific/scholarly plane, but then seek out a way of expressing our sacred truth that reaches beyond them. In the course of doing this, I make frequent recourse to the Kabbalistic and Hasidic traditions, since I believe they provide tools that make such a transition possible. Here I would like to work in the opposite direction. Rather than beginning situationally with the present, I want to lay out what I consider to be the key principles

3 Radical Judaism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). A Neo-Hasidic Life: Credo and Reflections 171 of Neo-Hasidism. I offer both original text and commentary, following a format occasionally found in the Kabbalistic corpus. The comments will be historical, theological, and personal, but always with the intent of drawing forth their implications for our contemporary religious situation. Zeitlin’s introduction to Hasidic thought was published just over a century ago. A bit later he published an “interview” with himself in which he described the new Hasidism he sought to create in interwar Poland, emphasizing its continuities with and differences from the old.4 He also wrote fourteen admonitions for members of his intended community, Yavneh, a sort of Neo-Hasidic hanhagot. Although there is no text called a “credo,” one can certainly surmise one from a reading of these in tan- dem. (All are included in the volume of Zeitlin’s writings I have edited.) Schachter wrote something called “A Modern Hasid’s Credo” back in the 1950s, which formed the basis for many of his later writings.5 Here is mine, in the shortest form to which I am able to reduce it, followed by my commentary. It is very much a personal statement, but one that I hope will be useful to others as well.

A Neo-Hasidic Credo

1. There is only One. All exists within what we humans call the mind of God, where Being is a simple, undifferentiated whole. Because God is beyond time, that reality has never changed. Our evolving, ever-changing cosmos and the absolute stasis of Being are two faces of the same One. Our seeming existence as individuals, like all of physical reality, is the result of tsimtsum, a contraction or de-intensification of divine presence so that our minds can encounter it and yet continue to see ourselves as separate beings, in order to fulfill our worldly task. In ultimate reality, however, that separate existence is mostly illusion. “God is one” means that we are all one. 2. God’s presence (shekhinah) underlies, surrounds, and fills all of existence. The encounter with this presence is intoxicating and transformative, the true stuff of religious experience. “Serving God,” or worship in its fullest sense, means living in response to that presence. In our daily consciousness, however, divinity is fragmented; we perceive shekhinah in an “exilic”

4 “H̱asidut shele-ʿatid la-vo,” in Sifran shel Yehidim (Warsaw: 1928). 5 Published in Varieties of Jewish Belief, ed. Ira Eisenstein (New York: Reconstructionist Press, 1966). 172 A Neo-Hasidic Life: Credo and Reflections or unwhole state. Sparks of divine light are scattered and hidden everywhere. Our task is to seek out and discover those sparks, even in the most unlikely places, in order to raise them up and re-join them to their Source. This work of redemption brings joy to shekhinah and to us as we re-affirm the divine and cosmic unity. 3. That joyous service of God is the purpose of human existence. God delights in each creature, in every single distinctive form taken by existence. But we human beings occupy a unique role in the hierarchy of being, having the capacity for awareness of the larger picture and an inbuilt striving for meaning-making. We are called upon to develop that awareness to our fullest ability and to live our lives in response to that awareness, each of us thus becoming a unique image of God. 4. “God needs to be served in every way.”6 All of life is an opportunity for discovering and responding to the divine presence. The way we relate to every creature is a mirror of our devotion to our single Creator. Openheartedness, generosity, fairness, and humility are key virtues of the religious life. Moral courage, honesty, and integrity are also values never to be ignored. 5. The essence of our religious life lies in the deep inward glance, a commitment to a vision of spiritual intensity and attachment to the One. Outer deeds are important; ritual commandments are there to be fulfilled. Each such mitzvah is to be seen as a great gift, an opportunity to stand in the divine presence in a unique way. They are the tools our tradition gives us to achieve and maintain awareness. But the mitzvot are to be seen as means rather than as ends, as vessels to contain the divine light that floods the soul or as concrete embodiments of the heart’s inward quest. 6. Our human task begins with the uplifting and transforming of our physical and emotional selves to become ever more perfect vehicles for God’s service. This process begins with the key devotional pair of love and awe, which together lead us to our sense of the holy. Care for the body, our own and others’, as God’s handiwork is also a vital part of our worldly task. 7. The deeper look at reality should put us at odds with the superficial values of the consumerist and overly individualist society amid which we live. Being, unlike our Hasidic ancestors, citizens of a free society, we can and must take a critical stance toward all that we regard as unjust or degrad- ing in our general culture. Caring for others, our fellow-limbs on the single Adamic body or Tree of Life, is the first way we express our love of God. It is in this that we are tested, both as individuals and societies. Without

6 Tsava’at RYVaSH (Brooklyn: Otsar ha-H̱asidut, 1975), #3. A Neo-Hasidic Life: Credo and Reflections 173

seeking to impose our views on others, we envision a Jewish community that speaks out with a strong moral voice. 8. The above principles all flow directly from an expansive Hasidic reading of Torah, classical Jewish teachings. We live in an abiding and covenanted love relationship to Torah. That means the text, “written Torah,” and the whole of the oral tradition, including our own interpretive voices. We are not literalists about Torah as revelation, but we know that our people have mined endless veins of wisdom and holiness from within that text, and we continue on that path, adding new methods to the old. The whole process is sacred to us. 9. We are Jews. We love our people, past, present, and future. We bear within us the pain of Jewish suffering and the joy of Jewish rebirth. We consider the ingathering of exiles and the renewal of Jewish life that has taken place in the State of Israel to be among the great miracles of our era. We care that our people, bearers of a great spiritual legacy and also a great burden of suffering and persecution, survive and carry our traditions forward. We want this to happen in a creative and openhearted way, and we devote ourselves to that effort. As Jewish seekers, we have a special connection to Abraham our Father, who followed the voice and set off on a journey that we still consider unfinished. 10. Our world suffers from a great imbalance of energy between the typically “male” and “female” energies. Neo-Hasidism needs to be shaped by the voices of women alongside men, as full participants in every aspect of its emergence. We welcome devotion to the one God through the channels of shekhinah and binah, God as saving and protecting Mother. 11. Hasidism at its best and worst is built around the figure of the tsaddik, a charismatic holy man blessed by God and capable of transmitting divine blessing. We too recognize that there are gifted spiritual teachers in our world and we thank God for their presence and our ability to learn from them. But we live in an age that is rightly suspicious of such figures, having seen charisma used in sometimes horrific ways. We therefore underscore the Hasidic teaching that each person has his/her own path to walk and truth to discover. We encourage spiritual independence and responsibility. 12. Hasidism, like Judaism itself, believes in community. The sense of hevrayyah or fellowship among followers of a particular path is one of the greatest tools it offers for spiritual growth. Cultivating spiritual friend- ships that allow you to talk through your own struggles and the obstacles you find in your path, as well as developing an ear to listen well to the struggles of others, is one of the great gifts to be learned from the Hasidic tradition. 174 A Neo-Hasidic Life: Credo and Reflections

13. We recognize that Torah is our people’s unique language for expressing an ancient and universal truth, one that reaches beyond all boundaries of religious tradition, ethnic community, or symbolic language. As heirs to a precious and much-maligned legacy, we are committed to preserving our ancient way of life in full richness of expression, within the bounds of our contemporary ethical beliefs. But we do not pose it as exclusive truth. The old Hasidism limited all of its teachings to Jews, believing that we alone had the capacity to truly serve God, and that Judaism was the only revealed path toward such service. Thankfully we live in a different era of the relationship of faiths to one another. We happily join with all others who seek, each in our own way, to realize these sacred truths, while admitting in collective humility that none of our languages embodies truth in its fullness.7

Commentary

1. There is only One. All exists within what we humans call the mind of God, where Being is a simple, undifferentiated whole. Because God is beyond time, that reality has never changed. The essential faith-claim is that being is one. This is the way I understand the daily proclamation of shema’ yisra’el, the core of my Jewish liturgical practice. Note that I do not say that all being “originates” within God, as though I were offering an account of creation: it was first there, then it emerged from there. I do not believe that change has ever happened. “You are He until the world was created; You are He since the world was created,”8 i.e. unchanged. The language we speak in explaining “creation” may sound temporal, but that is only because we are telling a story. Our existence as one, within God, is a permanent condition, an underlying truth. We still exist “in the mind of God.” It is that simple wholeness of being that we call Y-H-W-H or Being. The capitalization (possible only in English, not in Hebrew, of course) indicates that we revere it, that we accept Being as an object of worship. We fall before its majesty, its mystery, including both its life-giving and its destructive power, as did Job. In doing so, we give to it the highest gift we

7 the number thirteen was not intentional. In fact I tried to avoid it, but failed. I take it as parallel to the thirteen middot ha-rahamim, qualities of compassion, and thus ask the reader to judge its author with mercy. 8 from the daily morning service. A Neo-Hasidic Life: Credo and Reflections 175 humans can offer: we personify it; we give to Being of our most precious humanity, enabling ourselves to address it as atah, “Thou,” to render it not only object of veneration, but subject of prayer. I recognize that a phrase like “the mind of God” is the beginning of anthropomorphism; hence the qualification. What lies behind it is the Kabbalistic hokhmah, the font of existence in which all being is fully present in a not yet differentiated state. H̱okhmah is, for the Hasidic sources, the first of the ten sefirot, the stages of divine self-manifestation. It is also described as ayin or “nothingness,” meaning that no specified identity is yet present in it.9 Like all of the ten sefirot of the Kabbalists, hokhmah is transcendent to both space and time, though it may be depicted in metaphors that derive from both.

“God is one” means that we are one.

This is sod keri’at shema’. The rest is commentary. I have elsewhere10 quoted the comment of the Sefat Emet on this, a completely unequivocal statement of unio mystica at the heart of Hasidism. This is where I depart most clearly from Heschel, who was strongly committed to theological personalism. You might say that we choose to read different parts of the Maggid of Mezritch. I (like Zeitlin) am mostly attracted to the abstract theology of early Hasidism; Heschel preferred the affectionate God-as- Father language that fills the Maggid’s parables.11

Our existence as individuals, like all of physical reality, is the result of tsimtsum, a contraction or de-intensification of divine presence so that our minds can encounter it and yet continue to see ourselves as separate beings, in order to fulfill our worldly task. In ultimate reality, however, that separate existence is mostly illusion.

This non-literalist reading of tsimtsum has its origins in the seventeenth and eighteenth century debates about how to understand the Lurianic myth. It was adopted by the early Hasidic masters as a key part of their

9 this identification of hokhmah and ayin is a specifically Hasidic feature, diverging from most earlier Kabbalistic sources that identified ayin with keter and saw hokhmah as deriving from it. 10 See The Language of Truth (Philadelphia: JPS, 1998), or These Are the Words (Wood- stock, VT: Jewish Lights, 1999; new edition 2012). 11 i am grateful to Shai Held for helping me to formulate this distinction. 176 A Neo-Hasidic Life: Credo and Reflections mystical self-understanding.12 It may be seen as a mystical parallel to Kant’s Prolegomenon: the mind by definition cannot know or make claims about that which lies beyond its scope. We live in a mental universe shaped by individual consciousness and self-awareness. That is the way the human mind is fashioned. (The old Hasidic language would say, of course, “that is in the way God in His wisdom created us.” I am not averse to such language, but want to avoid it here in order to lessen confusion.) But how then do I dare to make the prior statement that all existence is one in the mind of God? Does not tsimtsum make it impossible for me to know or assert such a thing? Here again I need recourse to Kabbalistic language. Da’at, best translated as “mind” or “awareness,” indeed resides within the realm of tsimtsum, the reduced consciousness of our ordinary mental self. But human beings are capable of insight that comes from a more profound realm of existence (or a deeper, pre-conscious level of mental activity). It is called binah, as in the phrase ha-lev mevin, “understanding of the heart.”13 Such insight, often coming in brief flashes and resistant to expression in the prose of da’at’s language, is the transcendent core of religious experience, leading us to an awareness that goes beyond the constricted consciousness within which we mortals are both blessed and cursed to live our daily lives. Religious teaching, often best encapsulated in the multivocality of myth, originates in that deeper level of the mind. Religious experiences, including but not limited to such flashes of deep intuition, are the primary data around which theology is to be shaped.

2. God’s presence (shekhinah) underlies, surrounds, and embraces all of existence. The encounter with this presence is intoxicating and transformative, the true stuff of religious experience. This is the other, and larger, part of religious experience. It is the sense of divine immanence, an awareness that all of being shimmers with an inner glow that marks it as fraught with sacred character. It was well known to the Psalmist and is present in the works of all great religious

12 A very readable treatment of this debate is offered by Louis Jacobs in Seeker of Unity (New York: Basic Books, 1966), 49ff. 13 i have in mind the passage from Patah Eliyahu, the passage from Tikkuney Zohar printed in Sephardic prayerbooks as a daily credo, and recited by hasidim prior to Kabbalat Shabbat. Zeitlin commented on this text; reprinted in Be-Fardes, 147ff. This too was among my earliest readings in Kabbalah. A Neo-Hasidic Life: Credo and Reflections 177 poets (Rumi, Whitman, and Tagore come to mind, along with a host of others). Calling this aura of holiness shekhinah requires a bit of historical foot- noting. The term is first used in early rabbinic Hebrew much as kavod (“glory”) is used in the Hebrew Bible, a euphemistic way of referring to God as present in the world, where use of the term Y-H-W-H or even elohim (the generic Hebrew word for “God”) would somehow diminish divine transcendence. In Kabbalistic parlance, shekhinah took on a specifically feminine characteristic, serving as the mate to the blessed Holy One in the zivvuga qaddisha or sacred coupling that constituted divine wholeness. As this took place, shekhinah came to be seen as a cosmic entity or hypostasis, somehow separate from God but separate from the world as well. Indeed, the Kabbalistic shekhinah, as I have sought to show elsewhere,14 is precisely an intermediary between the upper and lower worlds. Not so in Hasidism. The Maggid and his disciples go back to the insistence that shekhinah ba-tahtonim mamash, that the divine presence truly infuses the lower, corporeal world. This means that the classic western division between matter and spirit, reaching back to Plato, is misguided; the physical world itself is filled with spiritual energy, which alone animates it. Martin Buber wrote that he loved Hasidism because it was the only western mysticism untinged by the Gnostic spirit. Of course, as Scholem has insisted, one has to read the Hasidic sources quite selectively to maintain this view, but it is fair to say that there are some texts that proclaim it clearly. They love the old rabbinic formula “He is the place of the world, but the world is not His place,”15 which they take as implying that this world is totally contained within shekhinah, but that God also exists beyond, in unknown ways. That means that yihud kudsha brikh hu u-shekhintey, the unification of primal “male” and “female” within God, is in effect the union of upper and lower worlds, the utter infusion of matter with spirit. No wonder it is intoxicating and transformative! (“Intoxicating,” by the way, is a translation of the Zohar’s itbassim, from the bosem of the perfumes of Eden, wafting through the verses of the Song of Songs, not the coarse intoxication of Purim and the vodka bottle.)

14 “Shekhinah, the Virgin Mary, and the Song of Songs” in AJS Review 26:1 (2002): 1–52. 15 Bereshit Rabbah 68:10. 178 A Neo-Hasidic Life: Credo and Reflections

“Serving God,” or worship in its fullest sense, means living in response to that presence.

The notion of service, so essential to the devotional life in any tradition, is hard for us modern westerners to swallow. We are too afraid of the loss of both ego and freedom to see ourselves as servants. This is part of the struggle to be a religious person in our era. “Responsiveness” may help in that acceptance process. We stand in love and awe before the greatness of God (I will not argue if you call it “the magnificence of existence”), and feel ourselves called upon to respond by living a life of service. This is how we can mean ana ‘avda de-kudsha brikh hu, “I am the servant of the blessed holy ONE.”

In our daily consciousness, however, divinity is fragmented; we perceive shekhinah in an “exilic’ or unwhole state. Sparks of divine light are scattered and hidden everywhere.

This is our human, all-too-human, situation. We live most of our lives with ordinary, unexpanded consciousness, mohin de-katnut. We may have glimpses into the divine fullness in rare flashes of insight: beauties of nature, great love, great loss, and other transcendent moments in our lives briefly open the haloney raki’a, windows of heaven, and we see how much we are usually missing. But how do we build a life around these moments? Can we fashion a sustained and sustaining vision out of such brief and occasional glimpses? “Both the whole and the broken tablets were placed in the ark,”16 the Talmud tells us. I like to think that the broken tablets were placed there for our generation, a time when whole tablets have ceased to function. That applies to any set of whole tablets. Orthodox Freudianism or Marx- ism are just as alien to many in our age as is Orthodox Judaism; there is no grand system of truth that works for us. We rather rejoice in discovering the fragments and fitting them together—each of us in a unique way—to fashion “our” truth. This does not have to lead to solipsism or chaos, as some fear. As in all ages, the sacred process requires trust in God. Awareness of exile as the human condition is one of the great contributions of Judaism to civilization. There is nothing more eerily prescient about our tradition than the fact that we bore a notion of exile from Eden

16 B. Berakhot 8b. A Neo-Hasidic Life: Credo and Reflections 179 as the essential human situation centuries long before historical exile was to become the dominant and formative experience of Jewish life. The Hasidic masters, building on earlier developments, understood this chiefly as an exile of the mind.17 We are too deeply alienated from God and our own souls to be regularly aware of the ever-presence of the One in and around us. Egyptian bondage was “awareness in exile;” redemption from mitsrayim was release from the metsar yam, the “narrow straits” in which we did not have the breadth-perception to get beyond our inner katnut or exilic mind. This notion of the mind-in-exile appears again in twentieth century literature, most often associated with figures like Kafka, Agnon, and Borges. We moderns also feel ourselves cut off from the deeper well-springs of an inner reality that we somehow know to exist.18 Perhaps that is why the longing to reclaim ancient sources of inner wisdom has attracted so many of the best minds of the past century, stretching from the generation of Zeitlin and Buber (as well as Tolstoy and Hesse) down to seekers of our own day.

Our task is to seek out and discover those sparks, even in the most unlikely places, in order to raise them up and re-join them to their Source.

Surely this is a significant part of what has made Hasidism so attractive, both in its eighteenth-century form and in this Neo-Hasidic garb. There is a sense of spiritual adventure, in which one is ever seeking out the sparks, ever involved in that work of uplifting and transformation. In this sense I find Hasidism to be a remarkably modern, romantic religious movement, and that has much to do with my original attraction to it. Life is depicted as a lifelong quest, filled with struggles to find, uplift, and redeem fallen bits of the single divine Self. When you add the phrase even in the most unlikely places, the drama is pitched to a high point, the journey becomes fraught with danger. Indeed it is. I know from my own failures. For us, living as we do in such a “secular” culture, the task is greater than ever. We have to raise up sparks not only from amid the conversation with

17 Among many other sources, see the classic formulation in Menahem Nahum of Chernobyl’s Me’or ‘Eynayim, shemot, quoted in my Speaking Torah (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2013), 169f., 176f. 18 Erich Heller’s The Disinherited Mind was “on the reading list” during my undergraduate years at Brandeis, where all my key teachers were themselves exiles. Especially formative in my own thinking was Nahum Glatzer’s essay “Franz Kafka and the Tree of Knowledge,” in Between East and West, edited by A. Altmann (London: East and West Library, 1958). 180 A Neo-Hasidic Life: Credo and Reflections the peasant in the marketplace, as the Ba’al Shem Tov taught, but from off the computer and television screens, filled with everything from bla- tant pornography to the less openly pornographic, but equally distressing, worldviews created by both Hollywood and Wall Street.

3. This work of redemption brings joy to shekhinah and to us as we reaffirm the divine and cosmic unity . . . That joyous service of God is the purpose of human existence. God delights in each creature, in every single distinctive form taken by existence. This is probably my most audacious claim, one that I take directly from the early Hasidic sources. How do we dare make it? I can know what gives me pleasure, or what pleases those around me. But “the shekhinah takes pleasure?” “God delights?” What do I mean? Of course, such language exists in the realm of poesis rather than that of scientific discourse. This is the point where some critics dismissed Hes- chel as poet rather than philosopher, or became annoyed by Heschel’s insistence that such poetic assertion indeed has truth-value, or is philosophy. Here I take up the cudgels for my teacher, agreeing that the traditions of philosophia have indeed been read too narrowly in recent generations, and that the “love of wisdom” needs to be restored and made whole again by the admission of categories of human experience that come from levels of mind other than that of logic and provability. Our western encounter with the philosophies of the east is all about this, and I believe that is the most important frontier to be crossed in the development of our self-understanding and humanity, one we indeed need most urgently to approach. The future of theology will have much to do both with this encounter and with growing awareness of the complexity of consciousness. This will be helped by progress in the realm of brain science, but should not be reduced to it. The western intellectual tradition fought a necessary but terrible battle to free itself from ecclesiastical domination. The scientific advance of the past several centuries would not have been possible without that liberation. The way it succeeded in that fight was through establishing a new high altar of objectivity, one that (in unacknowledged paradox) could only be approached by maintaining critical distance. This has led to a bifurcation between poetic insight and philosophic truth, separating the acquisition of knowledge and the quest for wisdom. This is part of why philosophies originating in the East, where that battle did not take place in the same way, have been so attractive. A Neo-Hasidic Life: Credo and Reflections 181

Having said that, the assertion of divine delight is a return to the Psalm- ist’s insight. A glimpse of beatific vision is part of the religious mindset, including a sense that the fullness and radiance of such vision is not the mind’s alone. The vision may present itself as representing an Edenic past or a glorious, not yet disclosed, future. It may be what the Zohar identifies as ‘olam ha-baʼ, a world that is always “coming,” but ever remains just a step beyond our current grasp. This window into divine joy is humbling; the greatest exultation I can feel is but its palest shadow. So the insight that comes from expanded mind (mohin de-gadlut) is at once intellectual and emotional, transformative in both of those realms, though its Source lies beyond them. The truth of which it speaks is that of a universal Self that radiates its light throughout the world. That light can penetrate every human mind that is able to free itself from its kelipot, its self-generated defensive blinders. The light that shines through those cracks in the wall speaks of delight and comes to enlighten.

But we human beings occupy a unique role in the hierarchy of being, having the capacity for awareness of the larger picture and an inbuilt striving for meaning-making. We are called upon to develop that awareness to our fullest ability and to live our lives in response to that awareness and its call.

The shining light, the calling voice—they are one and the same. The sense of religious call does not stand or fall with the personified Caller. The voice sings out to us from within the folds of the earth—mi-kenaf ha-arets zemirot sham’anu19—as much as it does from the highest heavens. It may indeed manifest itself in song or in verse or in the thundering cry of the Biblical prophets. The important thing is that it makes a claim on us and our lives. Awareness of the larger picture takes us back to Job’s hearing “Where were you when I laid the foundations of earth?” We become human when we begin to see beyond the moment, beyond the fulfillment of our immediate creaturely needs. Even though an old prayer tells us that “man is no better than the beasts” (the Sephardic version can’t stand it and rushes in to insert “except for the pure soul!”), we detect “humanity” among our primate ancestors when we see them sublimating eros enough to begin to create art, to decorate beads or to

19 isaiah 24:16. The reading belongs to R. Nahman of Bratslav, Likkutey MoHaRaN 2:63. See my Tormented Master (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1969), 139. 182 A Neo-Hasidic Life: Credo and Reflections paint pictures on the walls of caves. The “uplifting” that is such a key part of Hasidic teaching is surely in part another way of saying “sublimation.” Being human means being able to uplift and transform. Among the great wonders of evolution is the fact that the first creature powerful enough to dominate and determine the fate of all species on earth, the first to have the power to destroy our earthly biosphere, is also the first creature to have enough of conscience and self-awareness to hold back from doing so. Is this a coincidence? The call has been uttered. It waits to be heard. This is the essential mitzvah: da’at elohim, knowing God. Acting on this mitzvah calls upon us to transform our lives, to work to redeem the world. Will we respond in time?

4. “God needs to be served in every way.” All of life is an opportunity for discovering and responding to the divine presence. The way we relate to every creature is a mirror of our devotion to our single Creator. Openheartedness, generosity, fairness, and humility are key virtues of the religious life. It is not only through the specific practices of our tradition that we serve God, but through the entire way we live in God’s world. Trans- form and uplift every act you do, including the fulfillment of your bodily needs, to make every deed an act of worship. This is the way of living taught by Hasidism, both the old and the new. The word hasid in this context is seen as derived from hesed, the realm of unbounded and unearned giving and love. As the world began with an act of hesed, so does all our world-redeeming work have to begin with hesed, compassion. To be a hasid is thus to be a giver, a bestower of love. Our love of God is best witnessed, of course, by our acts of love toward God’s creatures. Beware of anything that may distract you from this effort, especially excessive religious guilt or deprecation of your sacred potential for giving. These will only lead you astray from your task of serving God in joy. The Ba’al Shem Tov understood that oppressive religion can bury the spirit. Our memory of liberation from Egyptian bondage is essential to our identity as Israel. Sometimes that bondage can be brought about by religion itself; we need to be vigilant about that danger, especially among the young. “The handmaiden at the Sea saw more than Isaiah or Ezekiel.”20 Liberation from bondage is a sacred moment, one in which God is revealed, even if that liberation is from too much stifling piety.

20 Mekhilta be-shalaẖ 3. A Neo-Hasidic Life: Credo and Reflections 183

5. The essence of our religious life lies in the deep inward glance. Look more deeply; that’s our message. We apply it to the three realms of person, world, and text. Look more deeply both into yourself and into those around you. Do not be satisfied either with the well-defended ego that first appears, or the needy, craving self that you may see next. Go deeply enough to seek out the soul, the vulnerable innermost self that is the seat of true love and wonder. Cultivate those close love relationships with which you are blessed as paradigms for the way you should learn to see all human beings, each a unique expression of the divine image. World. See the natural world around you in all its magnificence, contained within the small and seemingly “ordinary” as well as within the great. Develop an eye for wonder, both in yourself and especially in those you teach. Devote time and attention to cultivating that awareness; do not take it for granted. Be inspired to do more to save and to protect our world. Text. As above. Our view of Torah should be enriched rather than diminished by critical, especially literary, insights. The presence of a level on which we see the texts in historical perspective should not keep us from engaging with the many other levels of reading, including the playful. Insight comes in all sorts of packages.

Ritual commandments are there to be fulfilled, but they are to be seen as means rather than as ends, as vessels to contain the divine light that floods the soul or as concrete embodiments of the heart’s inward quest.

“Are there to be fulfilled” is intentionally ambiguous. Neo-Hasidism can embrace a wide range of relationships to halakhah, varying in accord mostly with the psychological and devotional needs of the individual. There is no absolute “right” or “wrong” in this realm. The values of Neo- Hasidism as outlined here are lines that barely intersect with those that define American Jewish “denominations.” On the level of religious praxis, that which is “between man and god,” it is all about the inwardness, not quantity of acts or words. Experience has taught me, however, that regular practice is of great value in balancing one’s spiritual life. That means halakhah, not codified as “law,” but as a steady path on which to walk. The Hasidic sources often quote an older play on the word mitzvah, deriving it from the Aramaic tsavta or “togetherness.” A mitzvah is an act in which God and the person are drawn together, an opportunity to find one another in the midst of our eternal game of hide-and-seek. I rather like this reading, but I hear the traditionalist immediately rise to object. 184 A Neo-Hasidic Life: Credo and Reflections

“But where is obligation in all this?” he (probably a “he”) will ask. Go back to the credo. Read it again. There is plenty of obligation: to openheartedness, to compassion, to decency, to Torah, to the Jewish people, to healing the world, and lots more. Traditional observance is not the only way for Jews to have a culture of obligation. Classical Reform’s prophetic call and Zionism’s yishuv ha-aretz are also forms of deep Jewish commitment; they are religious, even though some may not call them that. I say these things as a Jew who happens to care, for my own personal reasons, that the Shab- bat candles be lit before dark, who is careful to hear a hundred kolot of the shofar on Rosh Hashanah, every word of the megillah on Purim, and lots more. But I know that I am selective about these things, and the governing principle is personal/spiritual, certainly not legal obligation, with no need to pretend otherwise. “Keep your eyes on the prize” is my essential message here, on the end of devekut or spiritual openness, rather than on the means. Do not get overly caught up in the game.

6. This process begins with the key devotional pair of love and fear, which together lead us to our sense of the holy. We need to purify these aspects of our lives, coming to realize that all true love bears within it the love of God and that the only worthy fear is our awe at standing in God’s presence. True love and fear, along with other emotions that flow from them, open channels through which God’s blessing can flow into us. Inner discipline and purification of heart and mind are our constant spiritual work.

Care for the body, our own and others’, as God’s handiwork is also a vital part of our worldly task.

The physical self is deserving of respect. The Hasidic sources go a long way toward understanding this, finding God’s service in ordinary physical activities as well as in study and prayer. But they are still afflicted by the deep western/Platonic bias against the body, talking about tran- scending the corporeal self, “stripping off” the physical, and so forth. Neo- Hasidism’s completion of this move is in harmony with the most ancient Jewish insights into tselem elohim, the notion that each human self, body and soul as one, is a unique embodiment of the divine image and thus needs to be protected and kept whole. A healthy Judaism needs to retain our essential values while shedding their medieval shell. A Neo-Hasidic Life: Credo and Reflections 185

7. The deeper look at reality should put us at odds with the superficial values of the consumerist and overly individualist society amid which we live. A Hasidism to be lived within contemporary society, without recon- structing the ghetto walls, will have to deal in complex ways with the secularization of consciousness and its views of self, world or society, and text. On the one hand, we remain a defiant religious minority who need to stand up as a critical voice to modern capitalist society’s superficial and trivialized view of human existence, bringing with it a culture of coarse materialism and the many human degradations of our consumer society. But we must also recognize the blessings of that secularization, our liberation from a society of compelled religious belief and behavior, and be wary of those forces that seek to reverse them. Hasidism’s first battle was fought against socially compelled and routinized religious behavior, just as deadening to true spiritual awareness as is secular superficiality. We have no desire to recreate pre-modern Jewish life or the shtetl, and we should avoid excessive romanticizing of it. Historical Hasidism underwent two great struggles: first against the dominant rabbinic culture, then against haskalah. You might say that our situation more reflects the latter; the secularization of consciousness surely began with the enlightenment, and we continue to live in its midst. Yes, but we need to go about that ongoing struggle in a manner completely different from nineteenth century Hasidism. What they did then is parallel to the current fundamentalist (in all three western faiths) rear- guard rebellion against modernity, against Darwinism, against biblical criticism, etc. We need to understand that those battles are over, deci- sively lost. Our religious consciousness has to awaken from the daze of that loss and seek old/new paths for spiritual expression appropriate to our own era. Yes, there has been a cost as those battles were lost. A certain naïvete about willful divine control of things in such a way that our prayers might make them go our way no longer works for us. Yet we do not stop praying! The sense of the miraculous, al̒ nisekha shebe-khol yom ‘imanu, is not at all diminished by evolution. This wonder remains the object of our prayers. Nor is the transcendent beauty of insight into text, our special Jewish way of reading, lessened by our knowledge of the text’s human authorship. We need to allow ourselves the spiritual freedom to feel those things, liberating ourselves from the tyranny of our own skeptical selves (yes, tyranny exists on that side as well) that holds us back. And that freedom itself, we should recall with no small sense of irony, is a gift of modernity. 186 A Neo-Hasidic Life: Credo and Reflections

Caring for others, our fellow-limbs on the single Adamic body or Tree of Life, is the first way we express our love of God. It is in this that we are tested, both as individuals and societies. Without seeking to impose our views on others, we envision a Jewish community that speaks out with a strong moral voice.

The oneness of being does not mean any less of care for fellow-humans or celebration of the differences between us. On the contrary, it means that we are all joined together in a bond that needs only to be discovered, not forged artificially. In caring for the other, we reassert the One.

8. We live in an abiding and covenanted love relationship to Torah. As readers of Radical Judaism will know, I do not affirm a God who establishes a covenant with the people of Israel. There is too much of both anthropomorphism and religious exclusivism linked to the notion of a God- initiated covenant for me to accept it. Yet I still have a sense that we exist as a covenantal community, a covenant we have made with our memory of transformative events recorded in our people’s historic saga. Remembering both that we were slaves in Egypt and that we stood at the foot of Sinai is what makes us a people, one marked by a sacred legacy and called to a sacred task. Never mind that neither of these can be affirmed by historians; they are events that transcend history. We relive them constantly and they become the language, the echo chambers, through which we speak about many other things that happen in our individual and communal lives. Our sense of covenant with them is abiding and unbreakable. The people of Israel are indeed mushba’im ve-‘omdim me-har Sinai, under oath to remain faithful to them.

The whole process is sacred to us.

The early Hasidic masters had a bold approach to the ongoing process of reading and re-interpreting Torah. Each generation, they taught, has its own soul-root, and needs to discover the meaning of Torah for its own time. Teachers emerge to do that, adding to and enriching the store of tradition as it is passed on to future generations. Anyone who denies this, some of them add, denies the power of Torah itself as a living embodiment of truth.21 Amen.

21 i have documented and discussed this in my essay “Hasidism and Its Changing His- tory,” appearing in a special 2012 issue of the journal Jewish History, entitled “Toward a A Neo-Hasidic Life: Credo and Reflections 187

9. We want this to happen in a creative and openhearted way, and we devote ourselves to that effort. This commitment to the survival of Judaism as a creative force sets us apart from the ongoing traditional Hasidic community, mostly dedicated to preservation of the old way. We believe firmly that Judaism’s most creative centuries may yet lie ahead of us. We encourage ongoing creativity in realms that were familiar to the old Hasidism—Torah interpretation, music, dance—but in many new media as well. This is a vital part of “serving God in all ways.”

As Jewish seekers, we have a special connection to Abraham our Father, who followed the voice and set off on a journey that we still consider unfinished.

The unfinished journey is at the same time a spiritual, familial, and political one. Abraham is the classical Jewish seeker, smashing idols and trying on forms of truth until his path became revealed to him. But he is also avinu, the progenitor of our tribe, which must continue to live in faith with his spirit. And since his journey was one that took him to the Holy Land, the body politic that we Jews have created there in our beloved State of Israel must also be one that shares the open-tent values of the one who set us out on our way. The true Israel is not only about Herzl’s vision, but one much older and wiser. Remember that Abraham was ready to risk everything, even his relationship with God, for the sake of wicked “Palestinians” in Sodom. We are also Jews who live in the shadow of the greatest catastrophe of Jewish history, one of the darkest episodes in human history as well. This leaves us sharply aware of the depths of human evil as well as the responsibility borne by indifferent bystanders. We recognize that the Jew- ish people may have real enemies and promise not to be naïve about that reality; the price is one we cannot afford to pay again. At the same time, our post-Holocaust “Never again!” applies both to ourselves and to all of humanity and commits us to active involvement in standing against the forces of evil in our world, wherever they may be.

New History of Hasidism,” co-edited by Ada Rapoport-Albert, Moshe Rosman and Marcin Wodzinski. 188 A Neo-Hasidic Life: Credo and Reflections

10. Our world suffers from a great imbalance of energy between the typically “male” and “female” energies. The over-valuing of the “male” (present, to be sure in biological women as well as men) is manifest in excessive aggression, war, and rampant capitalism. All these and more are in need of healing. The old Hasidism, born of a deeply misogynist Kabbalah,22 saw that imbalance, but was still part of it. Neo-Hasidism openly seeks to right that wrong, by welcoming both women and female energies into its ongoing creative re-reading of tradition. The sages of the Talmud23 may have already been aware of the dangers caused by this imbalance when they depicted God asking us to bring an atonement sacrifice for Him each Rosh H̱odesh because He diminished the moon, giving it monthly cycles that make it less than the ever-shining sun. The ignoring of women’s potential contributions to our society has indeed weakened us, and not only because they represent half of humanity. It is our male-dominated society that has brought us to the brink of self-destruction.

11. We too recognize that there are gifted spiritual teachers in our world and we thank God for their presence and our ability to learn from them. But we live in an age that is rightly suspicious of such figures, having seen charisma used in sometimes horrific ways. We therefore underscore the Hasidic teaching that each person has his/her own path to walk and truth to discover. We encourage spiritual independence and responsibility. The greatest error of Hasidism was its turn to dynastic succession. Spiritual charisma, as attractive and dangerous as it is, does not pass through the genes. Hasidism became committed to ultra-traditionalism, and hence became frozen as a creative force, partly because leaders whose only legitimacy was based on dynastic succession could offer nothing more than nostalgic preservation of the past. We do not need to repeat that error. The best examples here are those of early nineteenth century Polish Hasidism, where disciple succeeded master, each proclaiming openly the need to strike out on a new and unique path. A variety of diverse paths and teachers seems appropriate to a Neo-Hasidism for our age.

22 see the recent very thorough presentation in Sharon Koren’s Forsaken: The Menstru- ant in Jewish Mysticism (Waltham: New England University Press, 2011). 23 B. Hullin 60a. A Neo-Hasidic Life: Credo and Reflections 189

12. Hasidism believes in community. The sense of ẖevrayyah or fellowship among followers of a particular path is one of the greatest tools it offers for spiritual growth. Judaism is a non-monastic tradition. Our religion is one designed for householders, people committed to raising families, who nevertheless seek an intense spiritual presence in their lives. In this sense Judaism is closest to Islam, as distinct from classical Christianity and Buddhism. The Hasidic community, like the Sufi brotherhood, is meant to create the sort of bond among householders that supports this vision. It is an essential part of the Neo-Hasidic enterprise, where communal energies to some degree supplant the authority of the onetime tsaddik and serve as a check against potential abuses.

13. We are committed to preserving our ancient way of life in full richness of expression, within the bounds of our contemporary ethical beliefs. Yes, there are ethical limits to our traditionalism. We are not ashamed to say that we have learned much that is positive from living in an open society that strives toward democracy and equality. These values should become part of our Judaism. Ultimately they are rooted in the most essential Jewish teaching that each person is a unique tselem elohim, divine image. Traditions that inhibit the growth and self-acceptance inherent in that teaching must be subject to careful examination and the possibility of being set aside. New ways of thinking that enhance our ability to discover the divine image in more ways, or in people we once rejected, need to be taken seriously as part of Torah. Mordecai Kaplan was certainly right in calling Judaism an “evolving religious civilization.” Our ethical norms grew as civilization progressed. We went from a literal “an eye for an eye” to the payment of damages. Setting aside the biblical text, we stopped stoning suspected adulteresses or rebellious children to death. But in the course of our long struggle for self-preservation, halakhic innovation lost its nerve. We need to reassert the early rabbis’ claim to a right to move boldly when faced with moral and ethical norms that we know to be behind the times.24

24 The Conservative rabbis’ Committee on Law and Standards’ rejection of Rabbi Gor- don Tucker’s teshuvah regarding homosexuality, even as one of several legitimate alternatives, is an example of this failure of moral courage in the adjudication of halakhah. To cite another example, our inability to insist on the stunning of animals before Jewish religious slaughter is a blight on our moral courage. 190 A Neo-Hasidic Life: Credo and Reflections

We happily join with all others who seek, each in our own way, to realize these sacred truths, while admitting in collective humility that none of our languages embodies truth in its fullness.

We especially welcome shared efforts in the realm of action. We seek to join with other people of faith and goodwill to reshape our society into one less based on greed and competition and more on human goodness, and to engage in the most urgent task of our generation, that of protecting life on our beloved and much-threatened planet.25

25 I am grateful to my students Ebn Leader, Ariel Mayse, and Or Rose for important contributions to this essay. I shared the credo with participants in a conference on Jewish theology at Hebrew College in the fall of 2011. I am grateful for their input as well. INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN July 2, 2014

Hava Tirosh-Samuelson

Professor Green, we are very grateful to you for agreeing to be included in the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers. Please tell us a little bit about yourself. Where did you grow up, and what kind of Jewish upbringing did you have?

I grew up in Newark, New Jersey. I was born in 1941, so I grew up in the immediate postwar years. I’m a third generation American Jew. My grandparents were all immigrants. My parents were both born in the United States right after their parents’ immigration. My home was very secular. My father was a militant atheist. His parents had already become atheists in the old country. They were children of Hasidim who moved from the shtetl to Łodz and there joined the Jewish workers’ movement. My father’s aunts and uncles on his mother’s side were mostly Communist party members. My father’s parents were not Communists, but shared their negative view of religion. When I decided to become a rabbi, my father’s mother wrote me a letter in her night school English, all in one sentence, that began like this: “Dear Arthur, I hear you still want to be a rabbi I would be prouder of you if you would be a teacher and teach people things that are true because if there was a God in the sky he would have been shot down by Sputnik already.” Period. So that was my father’s family. My mother’s family was more traditional, but not Orthodox. My grandfather’s tailor shop was open on Shabbat, but the home was kosher and certain things weren’t done in the home on Shabbat. And once my grandfather retired, he started going to shul every Shabbat and then every day. He may have been going as much for the schnapps and herring as for the davening. Really it was to be among what he would have called heymishe men- schen, people from back home. He and his wife were very much traditional East-European Jews. My mothers’ parents were very important to me. My mother died when I was eleven years old. I was partly brought up by my grandparents after that. I spent many Shabbatot and holidays in their home and got to know their world quite well. What happened was that my mother died and then her only brother died just two years later. My grandparents were devastated and I was the grandchild attracted both to Judaism and to 192 INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN old people. I was therefore sent to make my grandparents feel better. As a result, I spent a lot of time with them and was quite under their influence. I was attracted to the old world of Eastern Europe from childhood on. I learned Yiddish as a child. I heard my grandparents speak it and I studied German in high school in order to learn Yiddish. I was given a Jewish education as a concession to my grandparents. Each boy in the family was required to have a bar mitzvah. My sister, on the other hand, got no Jewish education at all. I recall that my father took me aside when I was eight years old and said, “You have to do this terrible thing called Hebrew school. And if you hate it, you may quit.” Contrary to his expectation, I apparently loved it. Perhaps I loved Hebrew school as a sort of rebellion against my father. I am one of the rare success stories of the American afternoon Hebrew school system. It was a very progressive school. The rabbi of the synagogue was Joachim Prinz from Berlin, a very famous liberal thinker and a Labor Zionist. I started Hebrew school, I guess, in 1949 and became serious about learning Hebrew a year later. By the time I was ten years old, I had a pen pal in Pardes Chanah in Israel, where my teacher had once lived, and was writing letters and bits of Hebrew. And I fell in love with Hebrew. It was partly the language that I fell in love with and partly the culture that went with it, to be sure. But even at a young age, it was the religious life as well. My father considered it an odd puzzle that his son should be attracted to religion. Eventually it became an embarrassment to him. I moved toward a higher degree of religious observance that was on the edge of Orthodoxy, I would say (although my links were all within the Conservative movement), by the time I was an adolescent. I got into terrible fights with my father, who became quite passionate in his dislike of religion, blaming his in-laws for having taken me from the intellectual and forward-looking world in which he had raised me and trapping me in this arcane way of living. That became a subject of great conflict in our family. When I was twelve years old, a good Hebrew teacher of mine saw an opportunity to get me to go to Camp Ramah. When I was fifteen and sixteen, I spent two very significant summers in Camp Ramah in the Poconos as an adolescent.

Camp Ramah is affiliated with Conservative Judaism. Is that how you became associated with Conservative Judaism?

Yes indeed. Camp Ramah belonged to Conservative Judaism. My Hebrew teacher from Newark, Aryeh Rohn, was head counselor there. That is how INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN 193 the connection was made. I was very fortunate to have wonderful teachers at Camp Ramah. The first year at Ramah my teacher was Yosef Hayyim Yerushalmi, the great Jewish historian, and in the second year my teacher was Gershon Cohen, another great Jewish historian who would become the chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary.

Well, you were quite lucky to be exposed to these great Jewish teachers.

At Camp Ramah my experience was quite different from that of most other campers. The teachers saw that I was serious. My Hebrew had become quite good, but I had never opened the Talmud (our liberal and Zionist Hebrew School emphasized Bible study), so the camp librarian took me aside and taught me how to read a Talmudic text in Aramaic. His name was David Weiss Halivni. He would become one of the most important scholars of rabbinic literature in the twentieth century. As of this date, he is the last of my living teachers.

Well, this is quite an impressive roster of teachers.

Indeed, Camp Ramah in the late 1940s and 1950s offered a superb Jew- ish education, which I was fortunate to receive. Of course, this was on so much higher a level than my secular public school high school that I was attracted to the study of Judaism, because it consisted of more challenging, interesting ideas. I read Heschel’s God in Search of Man and The Sabbath when I was fifteen. And I fell in love with Heschel and with ideas he presented so passionately. The first whole Hebrew book I read after textbooks was Agnon’s novella Bi-levav Yamim (In the Heart of the Seas) when I was sixteen. I fell in love with it and the kind of romantic Zionist fantasy represented in the book. So in my high school years I was very much imbued with that world of romantic piety characteristic of the writings of Heschel and Agnon. But I was also quite bound by fairly compulsive patterns of religious observance, tied to a great sense of guilt and unresolved issues around my mother’s death and our deepening family conflicts. At the age of sixteen years old I enrolled at Brandeis University and was happy to leave my father’s home.

How come you finished high school so early?

Well, in Newark, New Jersey, in those days, if you were a little bit smarter than the average kid, they didn’t know what to do with you, so they made 194 INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN you skip a class because intellectually you were ready to handle the material of the higher grade. In terms of social development, it was not a very clever thing to do, but they were not aware of it at the time. So I started Brandeis when I was sixteen, still in this Orthodox phase. At Brandeis we had a very successful young Hillel director, who was very dynamic but who only lasted one year at Brandeis. His name was Yitz Greenberg, another great person who would exercise deep influence on American Jewry. He was a big influence on my life during that freshman year.

Could you please explain why you choose to go to Brandeis? Why did you not apply to a secular university, whether public or private?

Ah, but Brandeis did see itself very much as a secular university! I wanted a good Jewish education along with my college education. My father did not want it, but I knew that I had to get away from home because things were rather tense there, although I will spare the details. I was going away to college and I applied to four schools: Columbia University, University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins, and Brandeis University.

What about the Jewish population in those schools in the mid-1950s?

As for Columbia, my father didn’t want me to go there because it was too close to Jewish Theological Seminary and he already saw the influence of JTS on me which he didn’t like. I chose University of Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins because they had Jewish studies programs, but my father didn’t know that. I went to Brandeis because they offered me a scholarship. The tuition was $2,000 and I got a $1,000 scholarship, so it made Brandeis very affordable, which convinced my father to send me to Brandeis, even though it was a Jewish institution. You have to understand that Brandeis had a very good reputation, and my father, who was an intellectual, was impressed by my ability to get into Brandeis. He was a high school history teacher in a very fine public high school in Newark, Weequahic High School, where all the Jewish kids went. It’s the school that Philip Roth writes about. My father (he had an M.A. in history from NYU) understood and appreciated colleges that were intellectually demanding; Brandeis had a good reputation among people like him. They all knew that faculty at Brandeis included people like Max Lerner, Irving Howe, and Marie Syrkin, and other liberal Jewish intellectuals. My father had no idea that Brandeis also had a strong Judaica department, but INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN 195

I knew that fact, and thus Brandeis was a respectable place to go as far as my father was concerned and a very attractive place for me as well. So I got to Brandeis, still in this period of piety. During my freshman year, Yitz Greenberg invited a colleague of his from Hillel, a dynamic young Lubavitcher Hasid named Zalman Schachter, to come to a weekend at Brandeis. That’s how I met Zalman, who was an important mentor in my life, intellectually, religiously, and spiritually, as well as a dear friend, for over half a century.

So your upbringing was a kind of “Who’s Who” in American Jewish life, because you were taught by people that shaped American Jewish culture. Right?

In some ways, I see myself as an American Jewish young person who was exactly at the right age to gain maximum benefit from the émigré intellectuals whom Hitler had cast up on our shores. As a child my rabbi was Joachim Prinz from Berlin. When I became too traditional for him, I went to the synagogue of Max Gruenwald in Milburn, New Jersey, who was the rabbi from Mannheim. At Brandeis I studied with Nahum Glatzer and Alexander Altmann as well as with Herbert Marcuse and Aaron Gurevitch in the Philosophy Department, all of them German-educated. At Brandeis I received the best Middle European education one could get in America in the postwar years.

You were very lucky to have that wonderful intellectual experience.

Intellectually, I was attracted to continental philosophy rather than to American philosophy, which by comparison seemed to us something shallow and irrelevant, easily to be dismissed.

Do you refer to analytic philosophy, that is, to the Anglo-American analytic tradition?

Yes, that’s right. At Brandeis the study of continental philosophy meant that we had to deal with Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche, whom I read in six different courses. Of the European thinkers it was the existentialists who really spoke to me. What I remember most of Marcuse’s course on the post-Hegelian reaction was how much he despised Kierkegaard. But being a religious person, I in fact was attracted to Kierkegaard and found his ideas to be profound and meaningful. And so all of that 196 INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN philosophical training was just part of my education as an undergraduate student. After Brandeis I went to the Jewish Theological Seminary for rabbinic school. At JTS I studied with Heschel, yet another East European Jew who was educated in Germany. This educational experience explains why I have come to feel myself an heir of that generation. When I edited my collection of essays called Jewish Spirituality, I dedicated the two volumes to our teachers of that generation. And I somehow see a lot of my work as convey- ing their intellectual seriousness to the next generations of students who no longer have the privilege of knowing those people and their world.

At Brandeis were you aware of the difference between Altmann and Glatzer? Did your teachers appear to you as the same kind of people or did you recognize how they differed as teachers and as educators?

Oh, they differed significantly.

Okay, in what way?

They both had a rather strongly Germanic “Herr Professor” bearing, somewhat intimidating to undergraduates. But Glatzer, remember, was the very close disciple of Franz Rosenzweig and had been one of the key young teachers in the Lehrhaus. At Brandeis he taught very much in the academic mode, but you always had a sense that the texts were personally important to him as well. Exposing people to texts was something Glatzer cared tremendously about; much of his career was devoted to editing and translation of sources. Glatzer believed that you should let the students make what they want of the text. Your obligation as a scholar is to make the texts available so people can read them, but then to stand aside. I absorbed that approach so that my very first published work, an anthology of Hasidic teachings on prayer, was modeled on Glatzer’s anthologies.

How critical was Glatzer? Was he able to subject the sources that he loved to critical analysis?

Glatzer was a well-trained critical scholar, but also a person with broad interests. Once his position was secure, he wrote and taught on what interested him. So he was an expert on Job and on Kafka because they were what mattered to him existentially, and on Rosenzweig, his admired teacher. I must say that Altmann saw Glatzer as less dedicated to pure INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN 197 scholarship than he, Altmann, was. Altmann was very much a scholar’s scholar, and his reputation far exceeded Glatzer’s.

Altmann represented and was the best example of the Wissenschaft des Judentums tradition, namely, the academic study of Judaism.

Yes. Altmann was very much of the Wissenschaft des Judentums tradition, although, he was also personally touched by the material. Let me tell you a story about Altmann to illustrate the kind of person he was. Altmann came to Brandeis in 1959 for a trial visiting semester. And then he was appointed in 1960. In 1960, he taught the first class on Jewish mysticism ever taught in an American university and I was a student in that class. But in 1959 he came in and taught a course called Classical Jewish Thought. It covered the ideas of God, Creation, Revelation, and Redemption in Juda- ism from the Bible through the Kabbalah. And Altmann was a master of this vast tradition from biblical, through rabbinic, to philosophical and kabbalistic texts; he knew them all. Keep in mind that Altmann published first-rate original academic scholarship on everything from Philo to Rosen- zweig. He had a tremendous knowledge, which is very rare today. Today, you couldn’t publish as widely as Altmann did because you’d be called dilettante if you did. But in those days, you could master the whole field of Jewish thought. Well, all semester, Altmann taught without a kippah, even though prior to coming to Brandeis, Altmann worked as an Ortho- dox rabbi in England. But at Brandeis he taught with his head uncovered. One day at the end of the first section of the class, I see him pace over to the door of the classroom (a frosted glass door with a little diamond of clear glass in the middle), peer out the window, quickly slip a kippah onto his head and read a passage from the Zohar. The point of the story is that Altmann could read everything, including the Tanakh, without his head covered, but when it came to the Zohar, he just couldn’t make himself do it. And that taught me, more than anything else, what a holy book the Zohar was. For a kid in the class to notice that act made it memorable; I never forgot it because it conveyed Altmann’s deep reverence toward the material he taught with presumed scholarly objectivity.

At Brandeis were you exposed to the discipline of religious studies?

Altmann exposed me to it and got me to read Rudolph Otto, as well as Mir- cea Eliade along with some of the Jungians. Altmann was very interested 198 INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN in the methodology of religious studies and was intellectually very open to the questions explored by the discipline, even though you don’t see it in his writing. His writing is dominated by philology and history, especially history of ideas, but he was very interested in those areas. He knew Christi- anity and Islam very well and was quite open to comparative perspectives.

You mentioned earlier that you were attracted to Existentialist philosophers. Who was the most influential philosopher on you at that period?

Personally, Albert Camus.

That is surprising since Camus was not a religious Existentialist and his ethic is quite challenging for a religious person.

Well, I didn’t tell you yet that during my sophomore year, on the eve of my eighteenth birthday, I broke completely with religious observance. I decided I’d had enough and that I was fooling myself. I didn’t believe in any of it. I had been using religion as a kind of crutch and shield because I didn’t want to face certain issues in my life. Once I came to that realization, I gave up observance totally. When I was eighteen and nineteen years old I tried very hard to be a secular Jew and I tried on various kinds of secular Jewish identity. For example, I was the chairman of the New England Student Zionist Organization. I also attended lectures at the Yid- dish Culture Club in Boston (which brought down the age of the club by sixty years). It didn’t occur to me that these two organizations represented conflicting secular identities; they were both ways of embracing the Jew- ish heritage outside of religion. I could go to the Yiddish club because I was enrolled in the advanced Yiddish class at Brandeis. In that class, taught by Michael Astour, a recent émigré from the Soviet Union, we read Sholem Aleichem and Y.L. Peretz along with other Yiddish authors all in Yiddish, and I thought of myself as a Yiddishist, as well as a Zionist. I was seriously trying to be a secular Jew, but it took me a year to realize that I really was a religious person. Even though I was not a believer, my questions remained religious questions.

Can you expound on that a little? How could one be a “religious person” without being “a believer”?

I understand that is hard to fathom, so let me explain and note that Glatzer was helpful in sorting out these issues. My questions were those INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN 199 of ultimate meaning: I was looking for some kind of purpose in life. What is this whole enterprise of being a human about? What does being human have to do with how we got here and where we’re going? Mortality was a great issue in my life. After all, my mother had died when I was eleven and my turn to religion had been because of that, so confrontation with mortality was very real, and needless to say, awareness of death underscores the quest for meaningfulness. Camus was so important because he said “Go find it. Go make meaning on your own. If there is no meaning, you create meaning by human action and by the building of meaning.” And that was why I found Nietzsche, Kafka, and Camus so meaningful and important. Nietzsche articulated the exultation I had felt at the breakdown of the old authoritarian God and Kafka represented the bleakness of the landscape afterwards and how difficult it is to escape it. But Camus (also Nikos Kazantzakis, by the way, in his wonderful memoir Report to Greco) suggested a positive and creative response to the Existentialist dilemma. As I followed Camus’s imperative to create meaning I discovered that when you go to make meaning, you are really recreating meaning that so many others have already created before you. In other words, following Camus led me to realize that in my own seeking I was rediscovering a process that had long been going on within the tradition, that of creative reinterpretation. And so I began to come back to some different kind of Judaism, even though at the time I didn’t know what kind of Judaism it would be. As I noted earlier, Altmann taught this course in Kabbalah which was very exciting to me. When I was a senior in college, somebody (either Altmann or Zalman Schachter) gave me an essay by Hillel Zeitlin called “Fundaments of Hasidism.” I read that essay when I was twenty years old and I said to myself, “this will be my religious language for the rest of my life.”

You fell in love with it, in other words?

Yes, I fell in love. I quite fell in love with the language and central con- cepts of Hasidism, including the philosophical way in which Zeitlin (he had already published books on Spinoza and Nietzsche before writing this) presented them. Being and Nothingness ( yesh va-ayin), divine withdrawal (tsimtsum), the raising of divine sparks (ha’alat ha-nitsotsot), and the transformative energy that pervades this worldview were all part of it. He presented human life as a sort of spiritual quest or adventure, one emerging from deep engagement with and love of the world. I just fell in love with that essay and the worldview that it summarized. I promised 200 INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN

I would translate it into English, which I did only fifty years later when I published a little volume of Zeitlin’s writings in English. And I just knew after reading that essay, and after taking Altmann’s course on Kabbalah, that this was what I would pursue. It was both a personal and an academic commitment at once. The study of Kabbalah was already recognized as an academic field and Altmann was the model of the academic scholar for me. But Altmann was also, as I stated already, a committed person who was personally involved with the material he studied. In oral presentations to popular audiences or among friends, Altmann was not afraid to share his emotional stance, and he showed me how you could be a scholar and a religious person at the same time. So the choice of Kabbalah and Hasidism as my life’s trajectory was both personal and academic. I did not distinguish between those two aspects and did not see a conflict between them. By the time I graduated college, I knew that I was going to be a Jewish scholar specializing in Kabbalah. When I was a senior in college I read Hasidic books, and I remember buying my copy of Sefer Ba’al Shem Tov in 1960 (a collection of early Hasidic teachings), a year before I graduated from Brandeis in 1961. I had a habit of writing the dates of purchase in the books I bought, so I can document my entry into the world of Kabbalah and Hasidism pretty accurately.

So, you came into your own intellectually during the sixties right?

Yes.

But you discovered your spiritual path in the beginning of the sixties rather than at the end of the sixties, when America was awash with the pursuit of spirituality.

Yes.

So, how did the culture of the sixties shape your identity?

I was a pre-1960s sixties person in some ways. The famous sixties culture really came into bloom only several years later. Now Brandeis was a pretty precocious place. I still remember my senior year during which there was a party at a friend of mine’s house, where Norman Mailer spoke and he passed around a joint. And a friend of mine tried it but I was too afraid. This was the first time we saw marijuana. That was 1960. Let me tell the INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN 201 story chronologically and then I’ll come back to the question. So, I graduated college in 1961. I went off to Jerusalem for a year. I’d not been to Israel before. I came to Jerusalem and sat in on Gershom Scholem’s lectures and I took a Zohar reading course with Rivka Schatz-Uffenheinmer, who specialized in Kabbalah and Hasidism.

Did these scholars of Kabbalah introduce you to a new way of approaching the material, or were they but an Israeli version of Altmann?

They were much more than an Israeli version of Altmann. Even though the methodology and academic approach were essentially the same, the level of the courses, all in Hebrew, was much higher and more intellectually demanding.

Given your intellectual and spiritual trajectory, did you not feel turned off by the learning at the Hebrew University? Since you already made your personal commitment to Kabbalah and Hasidism, didn’t the Hebrew University feel like you were going backward rather than forward?

No, “personal commitment” did not mean that I was becoming either a kabbalist or a Hasid. I hadn’t made the switch away from academic interest. I still wanted to be an academic. Also do not forget that I’m an Ameri- can, so the skill necessary to reading an Aramaic text (which is what the Zohar is) was something brand new to me and presented a challenge. To learn how to read the Zohar was a valuable experience.

Yes, I agree with you since I took that course a decade later.

That year at the Hebrew University was very serious and intellectually demanding. It also represented a new kind of life for me, since I was eco- nomically on my own. (My father refused to support my year in Israel.) I had no money to support myself, so I got a job teaching English in an evening school for high school students who worked during the day and studied in the evening to prepare for the national matriculation exam. And the kids were all first-generation Jewish immigrants from Eastern countries such as Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Georgia, and various places in North Africa. They were great kids and I had a wonderful time teaching them English and through that experience I got to know Israel in deeper ways than just being a student at the Hebrew University. Teaching English 202 INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN that year was a very important and formative experience for me, because I had to use my Hebrew to conduct a class in Hebrew and control the students. They were very impressed (as was I) that I could do that.

Yes being able to teach in a foreign language is indeed a challenge, so if you managed to do it your knowledge of the language was of high level. At the end of that year did you go back to the United States?

Yes, I had to go back to the U.S. because I had applied to Jewish Theologi- cal Seminary. I had applied to JTS because everybody said that to study Kabbalah, you need to know Talmud. And how can you learn Talmud if you are not going to join a yeshiva? JTS was the only possibility. The problem was that at JTS you had to sign a pledge saying you observed Shabbat, kashrut, and daily prayers. And I was not quite so much into religious observance in those days. I would go to shul and Shabbat was different from weekdays. In Jerusalem I frequented different kinds of synagogues and was exposed to various styles of prayer, but I was not really observant. And the question was, could I lie on the pledge or not? So I wrote to the two rabbis I knew whom I considered most strongly ethical people and solicited their advice. One of them was Steven Schwarzschild, whom I knew because I had been director of the youth group at his synagogue in Massachusetts. Although he was a graduate of the Hebrew Union College, which is a Reform seminary, he had become quite Orthodox. And Schwarzschild said, “You must go to JTS. Go ahead and lie; it will be a mitzvah.”

That is quite surprising advice, coming from a moral philosopher of his stature.

The other person I consulted was Joe Lukinsky, a young rabbi who was an educator in Boston (later a JTS faculty member). He also said, “It’s a mitzvah to lie on that pledge. Besides,” he said, “if you go to HUC, I’ll kick your teeth in.” Lukinsky was a pretty tough guy, so I followed their advice, lied on my application, and entered JTS. At JTS, I became spo- radically more observant but never consistently so. I could never really go back to consistent observance. I had done it very compulsively when I was a teenager. Whenever I went back and became too fully observant, I felt those walls close in on me again and felt a lack of freedom. I then INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN 203 needed to do something silly to violate the halakhah, to show that I was not really observant. This delayed adolescent rebellion went on for a great many years. Only recently can I say that I have overcome it and begun to live a consistently observant life again, one with which I am quite happy.

So you were a kind of a rebel. Is that right?

Yes, I remained a rebel and that is probably why I deeply identified with the protagonist of Camus’s The Rebel, which was an important book to me. Given this inherent rebelliousness, I found it very hard to live within the norms of halakhah. Sometimes I found it attractive and wanted to do it, but one thing or another held me back. Modern Orthodoxy never attracted me at all. I found it too shallow, defensive, and rationalistic in its approach, and far too concerned with justifying its own halakhic status. But the vision of living in a Hasidic community did attract me. I remember when I was a student at JTS, I once visited the Bobover Rebbe in Brooklyn, because I had friends who lived in his community. He was a very beautiful man and teacher. I said to myself: “Wouldn’t this be a wonderful life, to just join this community?” And then I heard the young people talking about “Goyim,” and about nonobservant Jews, and that closed-mindedness made it clear to me that I could never belong in that community. I was still the son of a liberal thinker, a universalist, and it was just totally impossible for me to leave those values behind. A very lovely Chabadnik taught Tanya to a group of us JTS students. I loved the study, but could not see myself following him to Chabad. So that was a door that was quite closed to me, but when I went back to the seminary I found many other students who were only partially observant. In our class in the seminary there were various forms of nonobservant conduct (such as smoking cigarettes on the Sabbath) as well as nonconven- tional and even illegal conduct (such as smoking marijuana, strictly forbidden even on weekdays).

Things have changed at JTS since the sixties, I should say, but those days young people, including Jews, experimented with many other forms of nonconformist behavior.

Yes, yes, yes. Those were heady days, but I was at the Seminary, as JTS is known, and this institution was deeply committed to Wissenschaft des 204 INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN

Judentums, in even more arid form than Brandeis. And indeed studying there was very different from the experience at Brandeis. We used to joke that the Seminary was on the Vilna–Berlin–New York Axis, because it couldn’t decide if it was a Lithuanian yeshiva, a Wissenschaft Akademie in Berlin, or an American rabbinical training program. The problem is that I was not on that train, so to speak, because Hasidut had no place on the Vilna–Berlin–New York track. But Heschel didn’t belong in the Seminary either, even though he was on the faculty. After one year, I was ready to leave the Seminary because I found the place overly repressive and juvenilizing. The people in charge realized I was ready to leave the Semi- nary and my Talmud teacher, Seymour Siegel, said to me, “If you had a private program of study with Professor Heschel, would you stay?” So they authorized a private program of study with Heschel for four years. I was released from many of the other courses and I just took courses in Bible and Talmud and worked with Heschel. That was my training program at JTS. I am very grateful to the Seminary for having given me that opportunity, even though I no longer revered his writing the way I had when I was a teenager. Once I became secular, I had become quite cynical about the beauty of Heschel’s writing, but I still greatly respected him as a scholar and teacher. Years later I came to admire him again as a theologian, and I have been teaching him, especially his book Heavenly Torah, for many decades. I consider the years of study with Heschel to have been one of the great privileges of my life.

And how much philosophy was involved in your training at JTS?

In terms of formal philosophical discourse, the answer is not much, but in terms of conversation about philosophical matters, a great deal. Heschel often defended himself as a philosopher. He talked about the fact that people didn’t consider him a philosopher and he did. He would discuss his attitude toward philosophy.

Well, he definitely was a philosopher of religion.

Yes, yes. I remember Heschel coming back from a lecture and saying to me, “A woman came up to me after the lecture and said, ‘Professor Heschel, you speak so beautifully. Every word was a pearl.’” And he said, “You know, for a philosopher, that’s a tragedy.” He understood that sometimes his language was too beautiful and seductive, enabling his listeners INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN 205 to avoid coming to terms with the ideas behind it. He was a serious person and very much a man of great ideas.

So you’re at JTS studying with Heschel. Who else shaped your intellectual identity in those days?

Let me give a description of myself at JTS: I like to say that in my jeans that I wore in those days, I had a copy of Alan Ginsberg’s “Howl” in one pocket and a copy of Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev in the other. And both books were equally unwelcome at JTS, because the institution was a very mitnagdic kind of place, namely it reflected the attitudes, style, and values of the rationalist opponents of Hasidism. Saul Lieberman and Louis Finkelstein, two great scholars of rabbinic Judaism, dominated the institution, and it was a very cerebral place. But I was different, since I was a seeker of the spiritual life that transcended cerebral rationalism, whether Talmudic or philosophic. Already by my third year at JTS, I had a little coterie of rabbinical students who were studying Hasidut with me. I was learning from Heschel and I was teaching a group of rabbinical students who were just slightly behind me in their studies.

So you were channeling Heschel, so to speak?

I was not just disseminating Heschel’s ideas; I was actually doing my own teaching, and expressing my own ideas. I was also teaching in Hebrew high schools in those days and had some exceptionally bright and interesting students there. I have not told you that I did a great deal of work in teenage Jewish education in those years, both formal and informal. The next thing to tell you about in the sequence of my intellectual and spiritual trajectory happened in 1965. I was teaching at Camp Ramah during the summer and there I had my first LSD trip. That was very important to me.

How did you stay sane afterwards? Some people really don’t do too well, you know.

Well, here I am. I took LSD probably between five and ten times in the course of the next two years and I did see one person carried away in a straight-jacket because he had become terribly distraught. 206 INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN

LSD is a powerful substance; one cannot dabble in it and avoid the damage it does to the brain.

Yes, I agree. Perhaps that is why I have a damaged brain! But I seem to function quite decently with it. The panic about psychedelics was generated by governmental and other agencies in society that were terrified of their power. Although I have not used them in forty years, I continue to believe that with proper controls of set and setting, they can be a tremendous tool for the good. Taking LSD confirmed a lot of the things I had already seen on the pages of the Hasidic texts. It confirmed experientially for me things that I already knew from studying and being attracted to mysticism.

Are you suggesting mystical experiences are based on the use of certain substances?

No, no, not at all. Zalman Schachter once asked Heschel about LSD and Heschel laughed and said, “I had it with my mother’s milk in Warsaw.” I am suggesting parallel processes within the brain that are called upon in both mystical and psychedelic experiences.

We know that Hasidism encouraged the use of wine and hard drinks in order to facilitate altered state of consciousness. So in this regard, Heschel’s answer makes sense, but that is different from experimenting with LSD.

Yes, in many Hasidic courts there was ample use of vodka, but he didn’t mean that. I think that many mystics in Judaism and other religious traditions have achieved altered state of consciousness without using such substances.

In the sixties famous academics experimented with LSD as well as with mysticism. Ram Dass, a Jewish man originally named Richard Alpert, is one well-known example, but there are others as well.

Yes, indeed. Why did I take LSD at Ramah in 1965? Because the person in charge of waterfront at the camp, my very good friend David Mendelson, of blessed memory, was a junior at Harvard, and he was taking the class with Alpert and Leary where he was introduced to hallucinatory drugs, since they were giving LSD to their students at Harvard! INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN 207

This was early in the countercultural revolution of the 1960s, but it was taking place at the very center of the academic establishment. Let me tell you how this drug culture took place. A woman named Lisa Biberman who lived on Harvard Square would sell you little sugar cubes wrapped up in tinfoil. And it was good stuff, acid manufactured by Sandoz in Switzerland, so you knew it was the best. But the experimentation with drugs then took place before this phenomenon went crazy and started to corrode many aspects of American social and cultural life. Zalman had taken LSD the year before in 1964 with Tim Leary. And so when I discovered LSD, and I was much involved in studying Hasidut, Zalman and I began a very intensive correspondence, in which we would each point out particular Hasidic texts and try to elucidate the experience behind them. I suspect we were the only two people at that time who had delved into Hasidut as well as psychedelics. It was a very important couple of years not just for me but also for Zalman, since it gave rise to his New Age Judaism and his advocacy of the Aquarian spirit. I was more conservative in my views of the world and did not go as far as Zalman went. I thought the world was not changing so fast, and the Messianic Age was not about to dawn. By contrast, Zalman thought everybody would soon take LSD and then we’d have new consciousness in the world and our social problems would disappear. Zalman maintained that we should all become licensed LSD practitioners so we could give it out to people. I was not ready to go that far, but experimenting with drugs was an important and positive experience for me and I don’t hide it. It’s not what set me on my spiritual path, since I had been already on the path for several years, but it was an important breakthrough for me. I consider drug taking helpful and under the right circumstances, I think it can be valuable.

Your experimentation with drugs took place while you were still at JTS. Were you ordained as Conservative Rabbi?

Even in my last year at JTS, I did not very much believe in the Conser- vative Jewish enterprise. I used to ask my friends in rabbinical school, “Whom are we kidding? We are not really halakhic Jews. We are traditional Jews with a certain aesthetic. But we don’t do these things because they are commanded by God and therefore are legally binding. I mean, who here has his clothes checked for shatnez? Nobody! And how many wives of students at JTS actually go to the mikveh?” (Nowadays more do, but in those days, there were only one or two such persons, I think.) In terms of religious observance the level among JTS rabbinic students was relatively low. As I saw it, we choose certain things because we find them 208 INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN spiritually meaningful and that’s why we do them. Already then it was quite clear that my Judaism was about spiritual quest, not about normative conformity. And there were so many people at the Seminary who were really obsessed trying to identify the correct way of certain, though not all, religious observances. “Can you eat fish grilled in a restaurant? Do you have to grill it on tinfoil?” We had so many conversations about eating fish out that it drove me crazy. Gershom Scholem once said he had no patience for what he called “kitchen Judaism,” and I fully concurred. While Heschel was quite fully observant, I also shared my impatience with halakhic small-mindedness with him, and he did not disagree. I remember Heschel said once, “How many she’elot (rabbinic queries) are there about whether you may open the refrigerator on Shabbat, and how many about whether you may fight in a nuclear war?” The concern for correct religious observance can become rather petty so that religious life is no longer the spiritual adventure it is supposed to be. So at JTS it became clear to me that I really did not fit into the mold of Conservative Judaism, particularly as it opted ever more for a halakhic self-definition.

Did you experience any tension between scholarship and experience at that time, or was it a nonissue for you?

I don’t think it was much of an issue. Because for me they were part of the same adventure, both intellectual and spiritual. At that time I was discovering the Merkava texts of the ancient Jewish mystics and finding them very interesting. (We studied the Tractate Hagigah during my first year at JTS, where much of the mystical material is found.) I got my copy of Mer- kava Shelemah and began translating some of the texts into English and teaching them. Although I didn’t have Merkava visions, there was something very inspiring about the spiritual journeys described in the texts which had a certain urgency and power. A person who had tried LSD had a certain access to the inner reality of such experiences. So the scholarship and the experience somehow went hand in hand for me. During my years at Brandeis, and especially JTS, I was also something of a political activist. At Brandeis I had joined in early sit-ins for racial integration; I attended one or more marches in Washington. In about 1965, I became active in the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, the earliest phase of the Soviet Jewry movement. I finished my training at JTS in 1967 and during my last semester the world was facing another turmoil: the war in Vietnam. It was Heschel actually who introduced me and my fellow students to the antiwar movement. One night that year, we walked into Heschel’s seminar INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN 209 and there was a fellow sitting there we’d never seen before, wearing a tur- tle-neck shirt. Heschel says, “This is my friend, Dan Berrigan,” a name we all knew. Father Dan Berrigan and Heschel were the co-chairs of what was called Clergy Concerned about Vietnam. Heschel went on to say: “Father Berrigan is here to convince me to go to jail with him. [They were throwing blood on draft files, which was a criminal offense.] Your assignment tonight is to decide whether I should go to jail or not.” This remarkable statement launched a very interesting conversation which was not merely theoretical. Heschel just had his first heart attack and looked very frail, and we were much concerned about his health and very protective of him. So, we coun- seled him “Don’t go to jail,” and the debate ensued whether he could be more influential in jail or out of jail and what the morally right action is. Of course, the famous interchange between Emerson and Thoreau was on our minds. Heschel then turned to Berrigan and said, “Tell us what’s happening in the Catholic Church?” And Berrigan gave a very 1960s, post-Vatican II radical theology and dreams of what Catholicism could become. None of us had heard anything like that before. Berrigan imagined that the parish churches would break up, mostly for lack of priests, that they’d be replaced by quasi-monastic communities of married people who would form the basis of a new Catholic community, that the Church would support radical Catholic workers, and so on. Then Berrigan turned to us and asked: “Tell me what’s happening in the Jewish community?” And I was terribly embarrassed, realizing that nothing like that was happening at all. The Jews were still very self-satisfied with erecting these big, empty buildings in the suburbs. Jewish education was in tatters, but nobody cared. Nobody goes to these synagogues, we all knew. It’s all a lot of empty hypocrisy. Heschel knew it as well since he would often condemn American Jewish life as very shallow. At that very seminar I said to myself: “I’m going to create something different.” I came out of that evening with Berrigan knowing that I wanted to build something different, a counter-synagogue of sorts, so that young people would have a new model that might attract them to Jewish life.

This vision is a Jewish version of the American counterculture movement in the sixties.

Yes, I was inspired by the American counterculture movement and wanted to be a counterculture Jew and a counterculture rabbi. At the same time, I decided to return to Brandeis and get a Ph.D. with Altmann, focusing on Kabbalah, which continued to occupy much of my intellectual and 210 INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN spiritual attention. When I approached Altmann he said to me, “Oh, you want to study Kabbalah? You will learn Medieval Latin and Medieval Ara- bic and you will take another text of Moshe de Leon’s Hebrew writings, as my other students have, and publish it in a critical edition.” And it was 1968, in the midst of students’ rebellion all over the world, and I was too impatient for that kind of scholarship. So a year later, while I was still studying with Altmann, I and several others founded Ḥavurat Shalom as a model Jewish countercultural community.

Who else was among the founders of Ḥavurat Shalom?

I got a call from Alan Mintz, who asked me: “How would you like to help some of your friends stay out of the Army? If you had a seminary, you could give 4-D deferments, exempting people from the draft.” So the resistance to the war in Vietnam and the founding of a Jewish counterculture were together parts of the impetus to create Ḥavurat Shalom. The draft laws changed after two years and the danger subsided, but Ḥavurat Sha- lom only grew, its true reason for existence becoming entirely clear. Ḥavurat Shalom was the expression of my desire to create a countercultural Jewish community. The term “counterculture,” very popular in that era, had to do with everything from generational style of dress and speech to the quest for economic justice to quasi-pacifism to “spirituality” and the drug culture. You might say it was a moving target, depending on the particular individuals and setting. So I began to get friends together and ask whether we might start some kind of new sort of Jewish fellowship group, one based on prayer and study, but also very committed to the building of community itself. You will recognize some of the names in that original group. Among my fellow teachers were Zalman, who visited in Boston during our first year, Rabbi Everett Gendler, Michael Fishbane, Edward Feld, and several other friends who were recent JTS graduates. The first-year students included Michael Brooks, Barry Holtz, James Kugel, Joe Reimer, and David Roskies. Later we were joined by such others as Seymour Epstein, Gershon Hundert, Daniel Matt, George Savran, Larry Fine, Meir Sendor, and Richard Siegel. (I mention only a few names that are well known in Jewish scholarly and professional circles, but there were many other very fine people in the group as well.) The word ḥavurah wasn’t yet in our vocabulary but we knew that we were seeking to create something quite different. Here is an anecdote that illustrates how it all started. INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN 211

I remember one night traveling from New York to Boston with my wife Kathy (we were just married or were getting married) and we stopped in New Haven to visit our friends, Dick and Sherry Israel, who lived there, where Dick was the Hillel director at Yale University. And I told him of this new community and he said, “What are you going to call it?” I said, “I’m thinking about calling it “Kehillat Kodesh” And he responded, “That’s the most pretentious thing I ever heard in my life.”

Well, he was actually right about it.

So, at that time, I was reading about Rabbi Shalom Sharabi, the eighteenth-century kabbalist who had a community called Ahavat Shalom in his famous Beth El community in Jerusalem. The members of the fellowship all signed a certificate stating that they would share their lives and would avoid any rancor. I was very moved by that document. So, since Sharabi called his fellowship Ahavat Shalom, I proposed that our group be called Ḥavurat Shalom.

So that is how one of the most original experiments in American Juda- ism came into existence.

That is how it happened, despite what anybody else will tell you. Eigh- teenth-century Jerusalem kabbalists were in the background. But then so too was Zalman Schachter’s original vision of Bnai Or, meant to be a Jew- ish monastic (but not celibate) community. Zalman had introduced me to my wife in the context of that vision. Kathy (to whom I am now married nearly fifty years) and I both had strong monastic leanings, a deep sense of personal devotion, and a longing to fulfill them in a communal context. Zalman’s vision had, in turn, been influenced by Hillel Zeitlin’s dream of a Yavneh community in interwar Poland—but that is a story I have told elsewhere.

Prior to Ḥavurat Shalom, was there no such thing called ḥavurah?

The Reconstructionists had something they called ḥavurot, but I had not actually heard about it prior to creating Ḥavurat Shalom. But it was Ḥavurat Shalom that created the model for ḥavurot that became quite common in the 1970s. 212 INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN

Ḥavurat Shalom was quite different from other groups that sought to emulate it, because of a particular approach we were taking to Jewish learning. Without much self-awareness, we were beginning to experiment with a way of reading sources that you might term post-academic. We all accepted the validity of historical-philological criticism, as applied to biblical and Talmudic studies, but we were deeply troubled by the question, “What’s the next step? Where do you go after proving that the sacred sources of Judaism are human documents? How are they still sacred texts for us, despite their evolving nature and human authorship?” It was clear to us that such was the case, but we were just beginning to search for language in which to express that. Looking back, I would say that both my theological writings and Fishbane’s are rooted in that early question. Our desire to go beyond historical criticism signified an early birth of postmodernity.

That is an interesting way of putting it. I never made a connection between Ḥavurat Shalom and postmodernism.

In some ways, I believe that Nahum Glatzer and the memory of the Lehr haus under the leadership of Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig played an important role in the creation of Ḥavurat Shalom. The Lehrhaus was searching for a post-academic approach to Judaism already in the 1920s in Germany. In the United States the study of Jewish texts at Hillel foundations of American universities was also influenced by the model of the Lehrhaus. In fact when Hillel at Brandeis had a study group for Jewish texts that was not an academic class, we called it the Hillel Lehrhaus. I don’t remember exactly when Hillel started using the word Lehrhaus, or whether it began at Brandeis, but Glatzer was definitely the link between the Jewish experience on American campuses and that German-Jewish experiment in adult education. In both cases the guiding idea was that you could study Jewish texts differently. Personal questions were relevant and most important to the interpretation of the text. How you felt about the text and what it said to you would be front and center in the act of interpretation rather than dismissed by the teacher by saying “we’ll discuss that in my office,” as professors of Jewish studies have tended to do. So Ḥavurat Shalom offered a new way of being Jewish in America. We were a group of people, clearly non-Orthodox, but not defined by any denominational label, who would study together very intensively several times during the week, as well as spending Shabbat together. INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN 213

So this was a way of being Jewish that revolved around the study of texts but in a nonacademic manner.

In addition to study, members of the ḥavurah would get together on Shab- bat for services (including soulful Hasidic melodies and a long “Torah- discussion” instead of a sermon) and communal meals. Studying together and sharing meals were very intensive social and spiritual commitments. The group was, as you have surely noticed, mostly all male, although my wife and a few other women were deeply involved in it along with their male partners. In essence this was a male brotherhood or bonding group and the women were there through their attachments to the men involved.

The gender imbalance is not so unusual. In the late 1960s women were still considered but extensions of their husbands or fathers, and in this regard Ḥavurat Shalom was rather traditional and conventional. It was precisely the assumption that the woman is not more than an extension of her husband that led Judith Plaskow and other feminists at that very time to challenge traditional Jewish practices and conventions and give rise to Jewish feminism. Plaskow speaks very movingly about her realization that at Yale, where she and her husband were both studying, she was no more than an appendage of her husband at the time, Robert Goldenberg, as far as Jewish life at Yale was concerned.

Yes, it was in our fellow-ḥavurah in New York that Jewish feminist consciousness was first articulated, led by Paula Hyman, Martha Ackelsberg, and others to create Ezrat Nashim, the first group to agitate for gender egalitarianism in Jewish religious life. Judith Plaskow was close to that group. I would say that we thought of ourselves as fully sympathetic to that view (we began counting women for the minyan and inviting them to equal ritual participation in 1969), but our group remained mostly male for several more years.

But to bring the story back to you, in 1968 you were doing your Ph.D. and you were very active in Ḥavurat Shalom. Right?

Despite our deep Jewishness and commitment to learning, we at Ḥavurat Shalom thought of ourselves as belonging to an emerging American 214 INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN counterculture. Indeed many people in 1968 were moving to rural New England, northern California, and elsewhere to build fully embracing communes; others were creating urban communes as alternative modes of life. We were an urban commune, certainly. Although we weren’t living together, we had this ḥavurah house. We had a rule you had to live within walking distance, because a member’s home had to be open to everybody in the ḥavurah. Anybody in the ḥavurah could knock on your door and be welcome. We wanted to be an intentional community, and we saw ourselves that way, although living up to such an ideal was not always easy, and I could not say that we were completely successful at it.

This sounds very nice and very utopian.

Even our program of study was quite utopian. Nobody was allowed to earn money from teaching in the ḥavurah, because we were all supposed to be equals. So we supported the ḥavurah by each person putting in $500 for the year.

Given inflation, $500 in the early 1970s is like $5,000 today.

Yes, but even the students who made little money had to donate the allot- ted $500. That’s how we supported the ḥavurah. Although several of us were studying for our doctoral degrees, which means that we intended to teach for a living, the idea of making money from teaching Torah to our ḥaverim was somehow anathema to us. At least if the university paid your salary, making a living from teaching what we cared about wouldn’t be as bad. At any rate, teaching in Ḥavurat Shalom was a wonderful experience and quite different from teaching at the university. In the first year I taught an introductory class on Hasidut and in the second year I taught a class on Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, which inspired me to write about him. The students were exceptional and the response to the teaching was wonderful because it was all very personal. By comparison, the arid academic style at the university seemed like a dry twig; it was emotionally irrelevant and spiritually empty. The experience in Ḥavurat Shalom transformed me as well. When I finished my coursework at Brandeis I was ready to drop out, because I knew I wanted something different. At some point in my graduate training I had an idea for a doctorate: I was going to write a doctorate on a certain Hasidic master, Hayyim Haikl of Amdur, a very radical type within the early Hasidic INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN 215 circles. He was a rather obscure figure, but as I started reading his work I saw the power and intensity of his mystical teachings. I said, “Am I going to write footnotes on this? I’m going to kill it with footnotes, in order to prove my academic prowess!” I became disgusted with the academic enterprise and saw no hope for it. I never formally dropped out of the program, but I avoided much involvement with Brandeis. But then after four years in the ḥavurah, I saw that my own students were starting to get their doctorates. I said to myself, “If they can do it, I can as well.” I went back to Altmann and said to him, “I want to write a book on Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav. Will you accept it as a doctorate?” To my surprise he said, “Yes” quite enthusiasti- cally. So even though my approach to the study of Hasidism was very different from his own, I learned a great deal from his strict academic discipline, and he was quite open to my own readings. Altmann, it turned out, had studied Rabbi Nahman with Joseph Weiss during his years in England, and was very much interested in him—along with so much else.

Your choice to write a doctoral dissertation on Rabbi Nahman of Brat- slav makes perfect intellectual sense. This dissertation published under the title Tormented Master is an intellectual biography of Rabbi Nah- man. Can you explore the relationship between you, the biographer, and the subject of your biography?

Yes, this is a very good and important question. I started reading Rabbi Nahman already in college or maybe in my year in Israel, and I immediately grasped that he was a Hasidic thinker who understood the absence of God, who understood that there was a level of reality in which God was not present at all. I read Joseph Weiss’s essays on Rabbi Nahman, and I was very impressed with him, both intellectually and spiritually. I wanted to be very close to him but I didn’t want to be his Hasid. Why? Because I saw what the Bratslavers were. They were very extreme in all forms of piety, including total opposition to the modern world. But also they were obsessed with sexuality and sexual guilt, and constantly worrying about it. This was not for me, because I had left that kind of religion behind at age eighteen for good reasons, and I wasn’t interested in going back. Even though the Bratslavers claimed, of course, that Rabbi Nahman had overcome all those struggles and precisely for that reason he could save you from this guilt, I in fact saw them as obsessively wallowing in sexual guilt and the need to be saved from it. I understood that the people attracted to Bratslav Hasidism were often (not exclusively, of course) those who 216 INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN needed somehow to be saved from profound sense of guilt. So Bratslav Hasidim did not attract me.

But Rabbi Nahman himself still attracted you. Right?

Yes, he attracted me because of his profundity, his amazingly creative and associative mind, and because of his honesty. So I wanted a relationship with him that was not structured as a typical dynamic between a rebbe and a disciple. Writing a biography about Rabbi Nahman offered me that relationship, namely, the relationship between the biographer and the subject of the biography. That was an intense opportunity to wrestle with him intellectually and spiritually. Sometimes I had the feeling, in an almost supernatural way, that he was giving me the power to understand him. He was giving me a chance to understand what he was saying, because as long as I was working on him, he had a chance to work on me as well.

Wasn’t that just a pure projection on your part?

Well, on some level, of course, we have to say so. But if you know my theology, I would never say “mere projection.” In order to converse with Rabbi Nahman I had to imagine him, and that is the way my imagination saw it. As his biographer, there was a kind of dialogue between us, not just as the words on a page; he was somehow a living force in my life. My engagement with the Master of the Universe is not entirely different than that.

Now, he was a Tormented Master, as the title of the book indicates. How do you understand his torment? What exactly is at the heart of this conflict that made him so tormented?

Well, Rabbi Nahman had moments of great expansiveness of spirit, experienced as the ascent of soul, true oneness with God. And he had moments where he thought he was utterly worthless, dust and ashes, with nothing to say and nothing to teach. And in his case this was more than humility.

That sounds to me like a manic-depressive personality type.

Well, yes, that may be the case. As you know, Scholem already used that diagnosis in his biography of Sabbatai Zevi. So I wrote Scholem a letter, in INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN 217 which I said, “I think the same diagnosis might apply to Rabbi Nahman, But I don’t want to be the first to say that everyone interesting in Jewish intellectual history is a manic-depressive.” Scholem wrote me back (I still have the letter somewhere) saying, “Who are you to say such a thing? You are not his psychoanalyst. You do not have him on a couch.” Of course, he was saying back to me what his critics had said to him about his biography of Sabbatai Zevi. There is always some risk when we apply contemporary psychological or psychoanalytical categories to understanding past figures. In general I find the category of the manic-depressive personality type too technical a term for me to use. Ultimately I avoided it as much as possible.

So, would you agree to say that Rabbi Nahman had a mood disorder?

He definitely had great swings of mood. And those swings of mood had to do partly with a sense of greatness, ambition, and a sense of terrible guilt. He never overcame all of this guilt; sexual and other kinds of guilt were very big problems for him. But also, he had a sense of being abandoned by God. He had a sense of loneliness, a sense of emptiness. He even tried repeatedly to test his faith and say, “Can I find where God really is?” And sometimes he felt no relationship to God at all. And then, as the initial biography of Rabbi Nahman by his disciple Nathan Sternharz makes very clear, this would happen to him again and again in the same day. He would fall down into the absolute abyss and was able to climb out of it and start from the beginning. But soon afterwards he would fall again.

It sounds very Nietzschean to me.

In a certain way, there is a resemblance here to Nietzsche. But shall we call him too a manic-depressive? And how would the use of such a term really help us to come to grips with his thought? Yes, Rabbi Nahman exemplifies the Dionysian urge which Nietzsche speaks about and that was part of what attracted me to him. That urge, as I remember Nietzsche, is exhilarating, but can also drag one down into hell. It is true that they are similar personalities in some ways.

They both shared great imagination and deep aesthetic sensibility and that makes their temperament somewhat similar.

Yes, I would agree. 218 INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN

How did you find the works of Rabbi Nahman philosophically? Did you find philosophy at all relevant to your understanding of Hasidism?

In the book I wrote a long appendix called “Faith, Doubt, and Reason in the Thought of Rabbi Nahman” which is a kind of philosophical analysis of his writings. I think he’s a dialectical thinker. I talked about the dialectical process and different types of dialectic you find in Kabbalah and in what way Rabbi Nahman is a unique dialectical thinker. In this essay I discussed the meaning of the mood swings and the relevance of psychology and philosophy to the interpretation of this dialectic. Rabbi Nahman was always driving for some higher level of integrity out of the conflict between opposites. His thought always had to move in a dialectical kind of pattern and that is part of what makes him philosophically interesting and significant. So the answer to your question is yes, I certainly used philosophical categories for talking about him. But the philosophical categories were existential, not just propositional or discursive. These existential categories bring together the personality and the intellectual moves or arguments. By the way, I think the recent work of Zvi Mark on Rabbi Nah- man has uncovered many things, particularly about Nahman as a mystic, that both build upon and go beyond what I had seen.

In retrospect, what kind of a book is your Tormented Master? Is it intellectual history? Is it history of ideas? Is it theology?

It certainly is not theology. I would define the book as intellectual psychological biography, an intellectual biography with psychological overtones, or something like that.

If so, how much psychology would you need to know in order to unpack such a complex person? That is another way to rephrase the question that Scholem posed to Shabbtai Zevi. Do we need psychological knowledge in order to understand the writings of Rabbi Nahman?

I tried to keep the psychology within what I call “insights into personality” rather than specific technical terms. I felt I was not a qualified psy- chologist, so I did not use diagnostic terms such as “manic-depressive” or “repressed person.” But I did read Eric Erickson, especially his biography of Martin Luther, and of course I’d read Freud, as well as Herbert Mar- cuse’s psychological book that deals with Freud. I was also very familiar with the psychological works of Norman O. Brown, whose Love’s Body was very important to me, as well as the work of R.D. Laing, and the Jungian INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN 219

Erich Neumann. So I was generally familiar with psychological approaches to literature and they certainly influenced the way I approached the interpretation of Rabbi Nahman, even though I did not pretend to be a psy- chologist. I simply used the insights gained from this literature and sought to offer an insightful narrative rather than technical, clinical psychological categorization.

Now, this psychologically inflected intellectual biography or existential psychology is very different from most of your other writings, which are more exegetical. Right?

Yes. I had written a couple of short personal things early, but I would say that the book on Rabbi Nahman qualified me as a scholar, because it conformed to the style and standards of academic scholarship. And that’s what I thought I would do for the rest of my career. Indeed I wrote several academic articles on the Hasidic Zaddik, and I even thought they would become a book on the figure of the Zaddik in Hasidism. I also had a plan of writing yet another biography about Rabbi Yitzhak of Berdichev.

And it didn’t come about?

Well, after five years at Ḥavurat Shalom, which meant working in a full- time job but with no salary, I had to earn a living. My wife and I were living on practically nothing: she had a little bit of savings and I was giving some lectures at local synagogues and had begun speaking around the country, mostly about the ḥavurah. But it wasn’t enough to make a living. So I had to seek a regular academic position. I got a job offer at the University of Pennsylvania, teaching Classical Jewish Thought. At that time Larry Silberstein was teaching there in Modern Jewish Thought and he was an old friend from Brandeis. He helped me to secure the position at Penn, where I taught for eleven years and where I received tenure as an associate professor. At Penn I learned a great deal about alienation in the modern labor force, about the failure of the American university, and about the demise of the humanities in the American university system.

This was in the 1970s, and you already saw the demise of the humanities? That is remarkable, since these years were considered the heyday of the humanities in American universities.

You see, Penn was even then basically a pre-professional school where undergraduates see themselves as pre-med, pre-law, and pre-business 220 INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN students. They were there more to make future career connections than to study the humanities. Here is an anecdote that tells it: in the first class I taught at Penn a student came up to me after the first lecture and said, “Professor Green, I love that class but I have a conflict. I don’t know if I should take Hasidism or insurance.”

So, I would tell that student, “For your insurance, study both topics!”

Well, I told the student, “Take insurance, when in doubt.”

So it seems that at Penn you became rather disillusioned with American higher education and that would explain why you left it to become the dean of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. Is that the case?

Well, let you more about my experience at Penn to illustrate my shift in attitude toward the academic study of Judaism. I would go to the Penn library, and go the section on Judaism where I would see all these bound volumes and journals. I would say to myself: “Who is going to read all these articles? What’s it for? What kind of system is this, dictating that for people to earn a living in order to feed their children (my daughter had just been born), they have to generate articles that will be bound in these volumes which nobody is going to read?” The more time I spent at Penn, the more I became disenchanted with and skeptical about the academic enterprise. Let me remind you that I was at the Department of Religious Studies, which at the time was very involved in reflections on the nature of interpretation. These were the theoretical debates about E.D. Hirsch and Hans-George Gadamer that revolved around the relationship between the interpreter and the text and discussions about the observer process. The endless focus on these methodological debates felt barren to me, ever farther removed from the real phenomenon of religion that we were supposedly studying. At the time I was thinking of writing a book about Rabbi Levi Yizhak of Berdichev, a well-known and much-loved Hasidic master. But how could I write it? The legends about him were all written down long after his death. Did they have any historical value? And what is the nature of legendary history versus real history? Can it ever be separated out? And my role as reader of the legends? How could I write an objective history on the basis of such subjective sources? And what would be its value, anyway? I felt that the task had become so overburdened with methodological hesitations INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN 221 that I just let it go. At Penn there was a Department of Folklore and they had their own very strong views on these issues as well. But I had been trained as a historian and was interested in writing it as history, based on the precedent of the book on Rabbi Nahman. In this case, however, there wasn’t the same body of historical evidence. So I just did not see how to combine history, legend, and folklore. Essentially I had gotten so intimi- dated by all of the obligations I would have to go through in order to write something with proper scholarly integrity that I just didn’t do it. In retrospect I can say that I was not comfortable at Penn. What was particularly discouraging was that the chair of my department wanted me to take out of my curriculum vitae any article that expressed personal religious commitment. So I got the message very clearly: although I was teaching in the Department of Religion, I could not talk about my own religious faith or experience. Even my enthusiasm for teaching the sources was mere “tradition analysis,” not a contribution to the “real” conversation, the methodological one. It was becoming clear that Penn was just not the right fit for me. In 1983, I was invited to teach a class at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Philadelphia. There I found mature students, eager to learn, much more serious than the undergraduates, and open to the personal questions that had been welcome at Ḥavurat Shalom but were somewhat taboo at Penn. When I received the invitation to become dean of the College, it made sense to accept it, even though I had never been a Reconstructionist, and at the Jewish Theological Seminary I had not been a student of Mordecai Kaplan but rather of Abraham Joshua Heschel. In fact, I never met Mordecai Kaplan, because he retired the year before I came to the Jewish Theological Seminary. I had read some of Kaplan’s works but I found him uninspiring; he was too American for me, too pragmatic, and too rational. I was on the trajectory from existentialism to mysticism, neither of which was appreciated by Kaplan. On the other hand, RRC was a young institution, eager to become a stronger place both academically and spiritually, and they felt I had much to offer. So even though I was not identified with Kaplanian Reconstructionism, I was invited to serve as the dean of the Reconstructionist Rabbinic College.

In retrospect, was it a good decision?

Oh, yes; it was wonderful. I was initially very happy in my work there, especially in my two years as dean, before becoming president. 222 INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN

Can you explore this further? The move from the secular academy to the religious seminary would lead us to discuss the relationship between philosophy and theology.

As I reflect about my life, I would say that twice but really three times I have left a university for a more personal approach to Jewish learning. It happened first at Brandeis when as a graduate student I founded Ḥavurat Shalom. It happened again when I left Penn for RRC. And it would happen a third time when I left Brandeis, where I had assumed the Philip W. Lown Chair of Jewish Thought previously held by Professor Altmann, to start a rabbinical school at Hebrew College. So that’s my pattern: to leave the university world behind, saying, “thanks, but no thanks,” and go off to build a small intense community where learning will be a personal enterprise. In one of my essays I quote Franz Kafka who said that the reason Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden was not because they ate of the Tree of Knowledge, but because they cut it off from the Tree of Life. That insight was already stated by a kabbalist, Rabbi Ezra of Gerona, seven hundred years before Kafka, but he did not have access to that text, because Scholem hadn’t yet published it. This division between the source of knowledge and the source of life is how I experience the dynamics between the university and Jewish religious life. The modern university is too much about acquisition of knowledge, but that knowledge is cut off from life. Nobody would think to go to an American university to seek wisdom. It would almost seem ludicrous to do so. There is no value given to a search for wisdom in American universities. There’s only professional training. The university has become essentially a glorified vocational school for white collar workers, for those professions that need advanced training.

Could you elaborate on this observation?

At one time, in the Western world, the search for learning and wisdom was one. This was true in Plato’s academy, in the early Benedictine mon- asteries, in Augustine’s circle, and in the yeshivot and madrasas of North Africa and Spain in the Middle Ages. In the centuries of scientific discovery, the European university very legitimately felt it had to wrest itself out from under ecclesiastical control. Philosophy and science had become too INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN 223 much the handmaidens of religion. In doing this, however, they set up a new high altar, that of critical distance and scholarly detachment. There was a price to be paid for that, one that ultimately led to a depersonaliza- tion of learning and to this bifurcation between wisdom and knowledge. That is part of why so many Westerners turn to Eastern sages in pursuit of wisdom; in the East things did not break up in that same way, at least not until very recent times.

Now, isn’t that what philosophy’s all about, in principle?

Yes, in principle that is true. As Heschel used to say, that quest for wisdom is exactly what philosophy is about. But most philosophers today have abandoned that task and that is why Heschel was critical of contemporary philosophy.

How do you understand the difference between philosophy and theology?

For most theologians, the enterprise of theology involves reflection on a particular tradition or the religious language of a particular tradition. For a theologian like me, it also involves the universal human reality called religious experience. Philosophy does not see religious experiences as sources of truth. In contrast to most philosophers, I believe that religious experience is a real category of human experience, not reducible to psychological or physiological (i.e., “brainwave”) explanation. I am a James- ian in that sense. Because I see religious experience as a real thing I’m attracted to the comparativist and perennialist thinkers, even though I do not define myself strictly as a perennialist. In the debate about the nature of mystical experience, I am quite far from the view of Steven Katz who sees it chiefly as an expression of cultural context. For me the mystical or religious experience, including the claims it makes on both individuals and communities, must be treated with utter seriousness. Philosophy does not seem to be much interested in that. Philosophy might view it as part of a variety of human experiences, for example like aesthetic experience, but neither of those would be seen as a valid source of “truth” for philosophers today. In contrast to philosophy, I believe that the truth- value of the religious experience is crucial for theologians and for all those who take religion seriously. 224 INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN

You have highlighted the role of religious experience, but what is the role of the sacred text in your understanding of theology? In a scriptural tradition such as Judaism, it is not only the experience that matters but the sacred text that seeks to transmit the experience through postexpe- rience interpretation. How do you understand the relationship between experience and interpretation in the Jewish textual tradition?

In Judaism there is a very complicated and nuanced relationship to the text. I would like to distinguish between three levels of texts: The Torah text itself, the rabbinic sources, and the mystical texts. All three of these follow, however, a more primal “text” that exists beyond language, or perhaps at the birth point of language itself. This is what I would call the divine Torah or, in kabbalistic language, the innermost point of ḥokhmah (wisdom). The Torah text, as I see it, reflects a product of a long editorial process, going from oral tradition into various fragmentary written accounts, and thence into the written document we have before us. In this regard I accept the findings and claims of biblical scholarship and biblical criticism. I take it for granted that the text emerged over hundreds of years and that it was edited by various schools of scribes and scholars. Nevertheless, I also see the Torah as the text through which Jews throughout the tradition have heard a divine voice addressing them.

And what does “divine voice” mean to you?

It means that the text stimulates and calls for a response. The text becomes the occasion for an inner moment of confrontation, of demand, of quest for meaning, of an answer to the question of what it means to be a human being in the presence of our Creator. I refer to the wordless divine voice that demands: “Where are you?” in the call in Eden or that again speaks the “I am” that opens the revelation of Sinai; it is a voice that precedes and underlies all of human language. The Torah text is also relevant to the community because it is being called upon to collectively define itself around a commitment and a quest for meaning (to be a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation”). When I talk about “divine voice,” I do not mean that God uses vocal chords in order to articulate a certain message. Rather, God addresses the human being from within. This is true for the individual as well as for the Jewish community, the community of the people of Israel who encounter God from within the received text. INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN 225

The rabbinic project is the interpretive unpacking of that text over the succeeding centuries. It seeks new and multiple meaning in the old revelation, always asking the mostly unvocalized question: “How do we create a human community that lives up to the ideals and demands of this Torah?”

And what is the mystical understanding of revelation?

The mystic wants to see three things: world, self, and text, in a more profound way than ordinary perception allows for. There is a deeper meaning to all three of those, a level of soul to all of those things, to self, to world and to text. The physical world we encounter through the senses is the result of divine withdrawal (tsimtsum): God underlies everything, but that presence is hidden from us. The relationship of God and the world is not simply the relationship between Creator and creation; the physical world reflects a deeper underlying structure. The kabbalists understood this when they claimed that the physical world manifests the ten sefirot, namely, the ten powers of forces that constellate divine being. The true human self is neither that of bodily or psychological forces; there is an innermost self or soul that radiates through them and constitutes their true essence. What we see with our senses is again only a superficial appearance of a deeper divine structure. And the same thing is true in regard to the sacred text. The text has a superficial level, which is its peshat, and that literal, semantic level functions like the garment of the Torah. Underlying that garment, there is a deeper meaning, which is a secret, or a hidden kind of address. Here I am responding to your specific question about text and experience. In a scriptural tradition like ours, it is most often not the experience of the individual that counts, but the experience encountered within the text. Our mystics tend to tell us rather rarely of what they themselves felt or saw. They would rather unpack for you the depths of what Abraham or Moses felt or saw, as indicated by one or another nuance in the text. My friend Michael Fishbane expresses these ideas most eloquently in his treatment of the complexity of this process of interpretation in which the soul of the reader/interpreter turns toward the inner meaning of the text, somehow responding to an inner voice that speaks within both text and self. If you open yourself to it, if you expose yourself to it, you experience this reading of sacred texts that lies on the border between existential and mystical religion. Where exactly that border lies is an interesting question. But it is fair to say that the experience is a kind of existential exposure to the text and the voice within it. 226 INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN

Would it better to talk about an encounter with the text?

Yes, you can speak about exposure to the meaning of the text as an encounter with the text. And I affirm that I am one of those Jews who belongs to this community that is addressed by the divine voice from within the text. I can’t tell you exactly which words are and which words aren’t part of that, and exactly how it works. It is different for different people at different moments. It is different for me at different times. Sometimes I will find nothing in a particular text and then I will see a new insight—a new insight in some odd midrashic, kabbalistic, or Hasidic interpretation of it that suddenly makes the text come alive. One of the things I like most about both the Zohar and the early Hasidsic masters is the way they have of offering these striking readings of seemingly ordinary texts.

Would you say that Hasidic texts are highly imaginative?

They are highly ingenious, representing something of a midrashic renaissance, much in the way that Yehuda Liebes has described the Zohar. The authors’ creative powers are largely dedicated to this task of forging a new interpretive lens. Only rarely—as in the case of Rabbi Nahman’s tales— do you get truly imaginative creations. But there is something about their original readings that often makes the text come spiritually alive for me. When I encounter Hasidic texts I do feel a kind of divine presence about that moment of insight, that moment of transformative insight where the text that was formerly just words on the page become spiritually alive and I see, feel, hear, something of divine presence in them.

How much of that spiritual experience is dependent on the Hebrew language?

Much, a great deal is. It is very hard to experience this spiritual uplifting in translation. I have spent much of my life, as you know from the bibliography, translating these sources to make them available to people in English, but it’s very hard. The Hebrew of the Hasidic sources is of course actually very poor. Most of the texts are abbreviated Hebrew translations of much longer oral Yiddish sermons. The spoken Yiddish—of which we have only very sparse record—must have been infinitely richer. When you know both languages, sometimes you can hear the Yiddish syntax coming through in the Hebrew. INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN 227

I have tried to convey some of this richness in my translations in my work Speaking Torah: Spiritual Teachings from around the Maggid’s Table. This is a joint project with several of my students, including Ariel Evan Mayse, Ebn Leader, and Or N. Rose, in which we tried to offer the ideas of over forty Hasidic rabbis from 1740 to 1815, all of whom were influenced by the Maggid of Mezerich.

Again, would you say that the poetic dimension of the text make them so powerful?

Yes, Hasidic texts are poetic in a broad sense of that term. But it is a poetry that depends rather little on the authors’ linguistic skills. The poetry lies mostly in the ingenuity of the homiletic craft, the way verses are read anew and a homily is woven out of them. The demand they make on the reader is also part of that poetic magnet. Kierkegaard spoke of the move from the aesthetic to the religious in terms of the demand made on the individual. The religious text or moment is made such by the fact that it evokes a response that entails commitment. The Zoharic text and many Hasidic texts make a demand on me; they call to me in a certain way that is more than aesthetic. You have to act and live in response to them, in response to this powerful sense of a voice or meaning that attracts you. What are you going to do in your life? How are you going to live your life in a way that responds to that voice?

Is it fair to say that this is the definition of Jewish spirituality?

To a large extent; yes, I would say so.

In the past you had to work hard to convince people about the existence of Jewish spirituality, but today it’s no longer an issue either for scholars of Judaism or for the general public. People have come to accept that category.

Yes, it’s a big change in the last thirty years, of course.

So how do you understand the relationship between Jewish spirituality and Jewish theology or Jewish philosophy? Are those three categories that have little in common or one explicates the other?

Oh, they are all linked, but they are distinct. 228 INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN

In what way?

Spirituality is an attitude toward religion that puts the inner life at the center. Spirituality means that a person has an inner self, that is drawn and responds to this kind of religious language. Spirituality pertains to what happens to you in your life as a meditator, in your life as a person of prayer, the interior “places” where you go when you live an intense religious life. I don’t object to associating spirituality with the word “fantasies.” Indeed, the spiritual life consists of the fantasies you have or the voices you hear, or the images that pull you. That is the center of what religious life is all about. It doesn’t have to be mystical. Prophetic spirituality is also quite real, but distinct from that of the mystic. The halakhist may also reflect a profoundly spiritual attitude, as seen in such a work as Rabbi Soleveitchik’s Halakhic Man. Within Hasidism there is a strain of what you might call priestly spirituality, in which the devotee serves God like a priest before the inner altar. That is very much present in some parts of the Zohar as well. So it is possible to have different kinds of spirituality, but all forms of spirituality are about the intense contact with a reality that becomes present to you in the inner life. You may call it “God,” you may call it “Truth,” you may call it “Oneness,” you may call it “Absolute Being.” But there is some greater transcendent power or presence that becomes manifest to you in your inner life. That, to me, is spirituality. And Jewish spirituality would be doing that against the background of Jewish texts, observances, and experience. Jewish theology is a reflection. It’s a reflection on that spiritual process. It’s trying to give it language, to articulate what that spiritual process is about and how it relates to the great historical claims that Judaism has made theologically. So Jewish spiritual life always consists of experiencing God or put differently, what your spiritual life has to do with God.

In other words, Jewish theology is more reflective and it’s one step removed from the actual religious experience.

Yes, and I don’t think you could have a serious Jewish theology without having a Jewish religious life first. Theology is a reflection on the religious life. In my view, too much of theology becomes a barren intellectual exercise because it is divorced from the spiritual life. Unless theology is nourished and enriched by the spiritual life, it becomes trivialized and wooden. INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN 229

And what about philosophy? Is Jewish philosophy two steps removed from the original religious experience?

Yes, philosophy is another step removed, but in truth, I don’t think that religious experience matters as much to philosophy as it does to theology. Put differently, I do not think that religious life has the place of primacy in philosophy in that way. That raises the question of Jewish philosophy as distinct from general philosophy. In all candor, I must say that it is rather difficult for me to say how Jewish philosophy distinguishes itself from Jewish theology but I can say that I am a Jewish theologian and not a Jewish philosopher. As a person who cultivates a Jewish spiritual life, I also try to share it with others and in so doing I engage in Jewish theology. I recognize that in engaging in Jewish theology, you deal with philosophical questions, of course. But I have never called myself a philosopher. And that’s why when you approached me about this series I was rather surprised. But after I saw other people included in this series I agreed to participate. So I belong in this series but I really see myself primarily as a theologian and not as a philosopher.

What is the role of critique within Jewish theology? How much room do you give to the critical modality which I think is part of doing philosophical or theological thinking?

I certainly do find room for it as long as it doesn’t lead to cynicism. I think critique sometimes does that. It becomes of value on its own, and for that reason I worry sometimes about it. I’ve seen too many cynics in the world of Jewish studies and Jewish thought. So I am concerned about that because I care about the future of Jewish life. Cynicism eats away at the engaged commitment it takes to work toward such a future. But I think one has to certainly engage in critical thought and be willing to be critiqued by others. It seems to me that the dialogue among thinkers is very important in that process.

With what kind of critique would you imagine theology or the theologians should be involved? Do you have in mind moral critique, social critique, intellectual critique, or all of these?

I believe you’re using the term “critique” a little bit differently than I was. Yes, I have in mind all of the above. Certainly, a theologian should be 230 INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN involved in social critique and moral critique. I have given much of my life to the training of rabbis. They hopefully serve, among other things, as moral leaders to Jewish communities. This of necessity means that they are engaged in social and moral critique. Much of my study of early Hasidism involves individuals and teachings devoted to what they would have called tikkun ha-middot, which might well be translated as “moral critique.” I have written in Radical Judaism that I understand a key function of Jewry in the world is that of standing up as a contrary “leaven” in otherwise monochromatic societies. That is how the Midrash understands the term ‘ivri (literally, “Hebrew”). “All the world stood on one side,” it says, but Abraham the ‘ivri stood on the other.” There are certain essential conceptions in Judaism that I think require one to engage in moral and social critique. Once you have a commitment to the idea that every person is created in the divine image (tzelem Elohim), which is the basis of all Jewish moral theology, you have to be a critic of certain kinds of things. My reading of our tradition thus forces me to stand up against racial injustice, so horrifyingly still present in our society. It also demands that I stand up for the equal rights of women and sexual minorities, whose full humanity has been diminished by patriarchal and heterosexist societies, including our own, over many centuries.

Let’s explore this point. What does it mean to be created in the image of God? Is it about responsibility, is it about personhood, is it about sentience, is it about subjectivity, or all of these?

Well, I teach a course on creation in the divine image, so it’s hard for me to summarize this idea in a few sentences. The course is arranged historically and it begins with the ancient belief that people look like God.

Do you mean that human beings have the same shape?

Yes, people look like God. Originally the belief in creation in the divine image was anthropomorphic in the literal sense. Certainly that was what creation in the divine image meant biblically and pre-biblically. A recent book by Ben Sommers makes that point quite clearly. INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN 231

Yes, that is indeed Sommers’s argument. But if so, when did people move from such anthropomorphic understanding of divine image to a non-anthropomorphic conception?

The belief in creation in the divine image came to be refined in various ways. Once you say that God has no body, you have to move to a different sense of what the image might mean. But the spiritualization did not happen all at once. When Hillel told his students that he was on his way to do a mitzvah while walking toward the bathhouse, because washing his body was like a faithful servant cleansing statues of the emperor, he still had quite a physical sense about the divine image. The kabbalists maintained some of this in depicting the sefirot in the form of Adam Kadmon, essentially the human bodily structure. It was only those medievals so influenced by Greek thinking who came to insist that the image of God referred only to soul, mind, or freedom of the will. To me, as a theologian, creation in the divine image means that there is something ultimately divine and mysterious about each human being. That has to do with the uniqueness of that individual. And that has to do with the regard we must have for that human life and the value of that human life. I begin my book Seek My Face with a story by Rabbi Nahman, my favorite among his Tales. According to this story, each person has a unique portrait of the king to bring home. The king cannot have that portrait of himself until that person has lived his or her life. And so you create the image of God; you discover the image of God and create the image of God in the way you live. One of my favorite lines from Heschel was that the reason avodah zarah is forbidden in the Torah and the reason the Torah is so concerned with images is not because God has no image, as a Maimonidean philosopher would say. For a Maimonidean, idolatry should just be a theological error; it wouldn’t be a mortal sin. The point is, according to Heschel, that God has an image, and that is you! You are the image of God! But the only material out of which you can fashion the image of God is that of your entire life. You take your life and become an image of God. To take something less than a living human being, like a piece of marble or a canvas, and make an image of God on that, becomes a lessening of the quality of the divine image. The divine image is manifest in every human life. That necessarily includes the entire human being, body as well as soul, and is judged by actions, not by lofty thoughts alone. 232 INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN

This statement of course raises an obvious question: what do you do with human beings who are profoundly evil, such as Hitler. Was he also created in the image of God? Even if we do not use such extreme case of radical evil, what do we do with all kinds of people who are very limited? Are they too created in the image of God?

I did not think about these questions but rather on two alternative interpretations of creation in the divine image: Immanuel Kant on the one hand and Mordecai Kaplan on the other hand. For Kant, to be a human being means to act in accordance with the Categorical Impera- tive which assures that we never treat another human being as a means to an end. The Kantian position allows us to be morally good without belief in creation in God’s image. And Kaplan gives us a secular rendering of creation in the divine image when he claims that God is the power to be at your best. So what’s wrong with either Kaplan or the Kantian approach?

When you say the Kantian understanding, do you mean the heteronomous need for direction?

Yes, and on that score the Kantian position is very compatible with the Jewish perspective.

It has indeed been seen as compatible with many Jewish perspectives, ranging from Mendelssohn to Hermann Cohen to Yeshayahu Leibowitz. But here you encounter a Jew who is not part of that consensus. I reject the notion that moral behavior requires a heteronomous “commander” of moral authority. (Freud has reread the Kantian position as that of projected father-figure or superego.) My own radical reading of Hasidism, based on that of Zeitlin (whom I pose also as a counter to Emanuel Levi- nas) calls for an ethos based precisely on the unity of all humans, indeed all beings, within the oneness that is Y-H-W-H. Because my fellow-human and I are one being, fellow limbs on the cosmic body of Adam, as Hasidic sources would say it, to strike out against another is self-destructive. I have to love the other and treat him/her with full respect because he/she ultimately is no other. Yes, it is true that I need to see the difference between us, to recognize that no other limb on that single body (or “Tree of Life,” if you prefer), is identical to mine. Only that way will I come to true appreciation of it and what it uniquely has to offer to the whole of which I too am a part. You might call this a strongly neo-mystical ethos. INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN 233

As for Kaplan, the glibness with which he used certain phrases sometimes drives me crazy. To speak about God as “the power that makes for salvation” does not have the same power as creation in the divine image. When I was associated with the Reconstructionist movement, I heard a great deal of rattling off of these phrases, more trivialized in the mouths of the followers than they had been when spoken by their creator. I tried at the time to rescue Reconstructionism from what I saw as an overly slavish dedication to outworn Kaplanian language. Just as Kaplan reconstructed Judaism on the basis of such thinkers as James and Dewey in the 1920s, I argued, so do we have to do the same on the basis of such thinkers as Mircea Eliade, Joseph Campbell, or Peter Berger, for the 1980s or 1990s. Reconstructionism, I argued, needs to be an ongoing process, not a frozen doctrine. I believe the argument made sense, but I found people unable to let go of Kaplan, which is essentially why I left both the institution and the movement. Now I have just finished reading Mel Scult’s recent book on Kaplan where he presents a very spiritualized version of the man. He has succeeded in rescuing Kaplan as a deep and complex thinker from the trap of his own language—perhaps in a way parallel to the work that others, including myself, have sought to do in redeeming Heschel from very differently problematic uses of language, to which I have referred above.

I can fully understand this. I invited Mel Scult to give a public lecture in Phoenix and the audience loved the lecture because they could reso- nate with this secular and deeply spiritual person. Many people in the audience said that they could have been more Jewish had they been exposed to Kaplan’s spirituality.

Kaplan comes alive in Mel Scult’s portrayal. And somehow he has become Kaplan’s mouthpiece. So let me explain what I mean by spirituality and how it is different. A sense of mystery is very important to me. I refer to the elusiveness of the divine. When God says to Moses “Eheyeh asher Eheyeh” (“I shall be what I shall be”), it means that if you think you can define me as a noun, if you think “Eheyeh” is a noun, I will show you that you have not captured me in the box of your nominal definition. I will be a verb again and run away. The elusiveness of God is precisely why I see the world differently than Mordecai Kaplan. To say that God is the power that makes you the best you can be, as Kaplan says, allows for a certain moralizing reductiveness. I understand rather that God is some mysterious transcendent entity that’s represented in every human being, in every moment and every place. We must choose to use that universal divine 234 INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN energy with which we are blessed for the good. But that energy, the presence of God within us, can also be perverted and used for evil. We, being in the divine image, contain all of those possibilities. This is the mysterious and elusive, as well as the challenging and demanding aspect of being a person. The mystery of the person remains essential to me. That mystery is not the same as mind. It doesn’t reside in a particular place. But it is the quality of humanity that makes for the sanctity of the human and makes human life invaluable. This is why killing a human being is not the same as killing an animal. Just today, I received an e-mail that was sent to other students and alumni of the Hebrew College Rabbinic School from a person who graduated a year ago. He responded to the atrocity of the killing of three Israeli youths by Palestinians associated with Hamas. The email pondered how to deal with the trauma of the killing theologically and rightly asked how the Torah helps us to make sense of this atrocity. What was troubling was that he referred to the people who killed the three youths as “those animals.” So I wrote back, saying, please reconsider the word “animals.” My point was that their act of murder was an act of dehumanizing people, but we should not dehumanize the perpetrators of the act in response. That’s not what we should be doing when we encounter injustice or inhumanity. I feel the same way about the attempt by some to expand the notion of tzelem Elohim beyond humanity, to include all creatures. This is done in the name to an ecologically sensitive Judaism, a cause toward which I have great sympathy. But I do believe in the uniqueness of humanity, a classical Jewish position with which I fully identify.

That brings up an interesting theological issue: Since for you God is present in the mystery of being a human, is God also present or manifested in the physical world or the physical environment?

Yes, of course. God is present in the physical environment. That is a bed- rock position of all my theological writings.

In what way?

I am in that sense, a panentheist, you know.

Could your elaborate?

The Hasidic adage (originally from the Zohar) “no place is devoid of God” is very important to me. That’s the essential insight of the Baal Shem Tov. INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN 235

Hasidut begins when the Baal Shem Tov awakens us to the fact that there is no moment, there is no act, there is no place that isn’t overflowing with the presence of God, if you open your deeper mind to it. That is his—and its—most essential insight. “All the rest is commentary,” you might say. The cultivation of that awareness throughout daily life becomes the essential task of religion. And that is what I understand by spirituality.

Your explanation is still human-centered because it focuses on human awareness of the Divine. But what’s the ontology that you presuppose when you talk about panentheism? What is the cosmology that make possible your panentheism?

My ontology and cosmology are an updating of that articulated by the kabbalistic worldview that I inherit. I believe there is a One that precedes and underlies all that is. That One was there in an utterly unknowable and indescribable form (Eyn Sof, for the kabbalist) prior to the Big Bang and was present in every molecule of gas and every particle of rock that was hurled forth by it. So too is it present in this hunk of rock we call our earthly home and in every object, both animate and inanimate, upon it. It served as the charge that stirred the chemical brew out of which life first emerged, and it is fully present in every life-form that has emerged since. This is my reading of the kabbalistic understanding of yesh me-ayin, the multiplicity of existence emerging from within the unknowable divine Self. The presence of that One in each creature may be described by the Hebrew phrase koah ha-po’el ba-nif ’al, the power of the Maker within the made. This means that all existence, including the great wonder of the evolutionary process, stands as testament to God and to ultimate religious truth. I am fully aware that Kabbalah as a “science” or grand system of truth was discredited by the end of the eighteenth century and that it more or less collapsed partly because of its over-complexity. Kabbalistic ontology and cosmology, were deeply challenged by modern science and philosophy. So all we have are the broken pieces of that ontology. I do not have an ontological system that tells me how to make sense of the divine presence in the world. I do understand that my religious language is about the oneness of Being, and that oneness of Being is manifested particularly through the process of evolution. That is the One that enters into the process of evolution; the One that undertakes the evolution of all forms. These ideas are expressed in kabbalistic language as the garbings of the One, the disguises of the One, or the masks of the One. And that One Being underlies and essentially constitutes all beings that are. All beings 236 INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN are somehow manifestations of the same single Being, the being which is referred to in Hebrew in the ineffable name of HWYH Havayah, which is Y-H-W-H backwards. In this worldview everything that exists points to the One and in a sense all beings are part of the same reality: the One that underlies them. When you think of those beings as individuals, they collectively make up existence and are HWYH, or Havayah. But when you think of them as One they open to an infinite mystery, a dimension that was not seen before, and that HWYH becomes Y-H-W-H. Being, in other words, gets a capital B or is transformed into a divine infinity, not because there is some divine entity “out there,” but because being itself can be seen both from a secular point of view as existence itself and from a divine point of view as Y-H-W-H. It’s the same being.

So how is this worldview different from Spinoza?

The difference is in perception. The difference between that and Spi- noza is that for me there is always a mystery beyond. When HWYH turns around and becomes Y-H-W-H you are talking about a mysterious reality that you can never plumb the depths of. It is not “nature” that becomes equivalent to God, as in Spinoza. All of nature contains that presence but that presence reaches infinitely beyond anything we can know. I like to say that I believe in transcendence, but in a transcendence that is present within immanence. Transcendence means that the One is present in this moment in such a deep way that we can never fathom it. This is not the same as saying transcendence is “out there” somehow on the other side of the universe, “beyond” us in some “out there” place. I don’t know such a place. I don’t know what that means. And yet, in terms of cognition, I believe there is a transcendence, there is a depth we can never fathom.

The way you put this sounds reminiscent of Heschel’s depth theology, namely, it is an insight about depth rather than about transcendence.

Yes, of course. But that depth is transcendence. That is precisely my point! Yes, I am in that sense Heschelian. There are places where I remain very close to Heschel and there are places where I get off the train, so to speak. The first hundred pages of Heschel’s God in Search of Man remain essential to me. All his talk of depth theology, awe, mystery, wonder, are to me the very building blocks of what the religious imagination is. Once he begins to answer the question about revelation, he becomes too much of INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN 237 a religious personalist for me. Heschel offers a personalist theology with deep mystical undertones. I am a mystical and panentheistic theologian who uses personalist language, especially in my devotional life. But I understand it as metaphor. Nevertheless, in terms of the way we think about what a religious question or the religious mind is, Heschel is right on point and I remain deeply indebted to him.

When you spoke about the divine presence in the world you mentioned the word “evolution.” How do you understand the term? Do you have in mind in a technical sense of Darwin’s theory of evolution, or do you mean it more loosely in the sense of development or unfolding?

By “evolution” I mean that Darwinian evolution itself is that unfolding. In other words, I am a believer in Darwinian evolution, but I think we have to learn to see it with new eyes. We have to learn to see it as the unfolding of that one Being which constantly seeks to be manifested in more and more forms, greater diversity, and greater complexity. The One is in this process of natural selection by which change happens. I do believe in natural selection. And yet if I see that from a Heschelian point of view, with what he calls the eyes of wonder, I see that there was, and still is, a certain magnificence to that process which I call the greatest of all sacred dramas. That’s how I begin the first chapter of my book Radical Judaism.

Darwin’s theory of evolution, however, emphasizes randomness and chance. Can you accommodate these aspects of Darwinian evolution in your understanding of divine presence?

There are indeed nasty aspects to the process of divine unfolding. And that’s where theodicy is still a challenge. I don’t think that panentheism solves the problem of theodicy. The problem is no longer “Why did God choose to make evil people?” Or “Why does God seemingly reward evil people?” Rather, the problem of theodicy should be understood as “Why did we have to evolve through all of this competition and aggression and fierceness?” Why did that species become extinct as part of the evolutionary process? Why did the divine unfolding have to happen that way? And I do not have an answer to that question. I don’t think that question can be answered. I think we have to be present to that question but there is no answer for it. Let’s take Stephen J. Gould, as a representative of evolutionary biology. His insistence on randomness and on the lack of teleology goes a 238 INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN step beyond what I believe he has the right to say as a scientist. There is no doubt that evolutionary biology is correct to state that this whole process of evolution takes place through natural selection, but to say that the whole process does not have any teleology to it is a philosophical or theological statement rather than a scientific one. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not an Intelligent Design person in the usual sense of that term, and I am not asserting that there is somebody “up there” who is figuring it all out. Rather, I am saying that the process of evolution manifests an inbuilt mechanism that moves both toward complexity and toward diversity, though not uniformly. There are places where simpler forms emerge later, but in the big picture there is movement toward diversity and complexity. The emergence of the human brain out of what were once one- celled animals is something that we have to notice with something other than just a statement of randomness. There has to be something between absolute randomness (namely, everything is a matter of sheer chance) and Intelligent Design (namely, God made it that way).

Yet in order to think through these issues we need to get into the intricacies of emergence theory, which, as you know, is receiving a lot of attention in several sciences (physics, biology, psychology, and even the social sciences). So, how do you understand the role of science in enabling us to cope with the intellectual challenges of the twenty-first century? Should we pay more attention to science?

Of course, we should pay attention to science. Of course, religion was transformed in the twenty-first century because the triumph of science in the twentieth century posed two great challenges to religion: both the doctrine of creation and the doctrine of revelation are challenged by scientific findings and theories. Astrophysics and geology have challenged theology of creation which is the foundation of Jewish theology. The great Jewish theologians all understood that Judaism rests on creation theology. You can’t understand Maimonides or the Zohar without creation theology. They both understood that you can’t assert the belief in providence and in miracles, which are so central to Judaism, without creation theology. So creation theology is a very important theme in Judaism, and it was in part because of the twentieth-century scientific challenge to the doctrine of creation that so many Jews moved away from Judaism in the twentieth century. But I think that we have to address the situation by making clear that we believe in evolution and that we are finished with arguing with the theory of evolution or trying to deny it. The problem is once you INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN 239 accept evolution as a fact, where do we go theologically? How can our theology for the twenty-first century endorse evolution while continuing to affirm the great insights of Judaism? While I am not a literal believer in either providence or miracles, the centrality of dealing religiously with the question of origins remains central to me. My careful readers will understand that in fact both of these categories, providence and miracles, do have meaning for me on another level.

Yes, that is indeed our contemporary challenge.

And so, for believing and practicing Jews, science certainly has to be considered and has its own legitimate domain. To address the challenge we may do well to differentiate between “science” and “scientism.” We should also inquire whether science sometimes oversteps itself, as I have just suggested, and asserts claims for which (in principle) there can be no scientific proof. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century there is a certain failure of nerve of the West in terms of its belief in scientific progress as the answer to all questions. I think that the awareness in the limits of science explains why there is such a quest or thirst for Eastern spirituality in recent decades. The traumatic experiences of Auschwitz and Hiroshima are the reason for the failure of nerve in the West. People have finally come to realize the potential dark side of science. To say that scientific progress is somehow going to answer all our moral and spiritual questions has proved to be a mistake or an illusion. These key events have proven that science was not enough, that we need something more. We need to recover some other dimension of human truth. And I think that the contemporary quest for a scientific language that could be appropriate is reminiscent of the quest for Plato and Aristotle by religious people (Jews, Christians, and Muslims) in the Middle Ages. They somehow sought and discovered an ancient language of truth that had to be recovered. Similarly people today are looking for a suitable language that could express new scientific truths. Some find it in Buddhism or Vedanta, reappropriated for the West. I have sought it in a radical rereading of a Western esoteric tradition, one essentially more at home in our culture, but needing very significant updating.

So we are all seekers now?

Yes, today there’s a kind of seeking in the society because we are looking for something that goes beyond the scientific paradigm. But that’s not to say that I reject science at all. 240 INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN

What do you think about the so-called science and religion conflict? Do you believe that conflict is always an illusion or do you try to offer a systematic answer either scientific or religious?

To say that the conflict is always an illusion is certainly too dismissive of the problem, and therefore I wouldn’t say that. I think we sometimes have to look further. I think that religious truth to some degree belongs in a realm that science cannot answer or address. I am not referring only to the existential level, which it is clear that science cannot address, but also more broadly: I think that there are things about the nature of reality that science does not know. Categories like dark energy tell us that science itself recognizes domains which are still not ultimately penetrated by science. Some of the mysteries that religion deals with will have to do with those same cosmic realities. So both science and religion meet places where they are transcended by mystery. And those are some of the places we have to explore together as scientists and as religious believers. I believe that we can overcome the conflict between theism and atheism and I consider much of the current public debate to be full of nonsense because of the shallow stereotyping on both sides.

Let’s take Richard Dawkins, for example, because he is central to these public debates. He is an evolutionary biologist who represents the cause of atheism and who has been very critical of religion. Is he a scientist who causes a lot of damage because he posits a necessary conflict between science and religion, or is he expressing what a lot of people feel and think?

He’s expressed something a lot of people feel, but I think his notion of religion is trivializing and dismissive.

Yes. I would agree with you.

I don’t think he understands religion in the kind of profound way that one might and should. I don’t think he has been exposed to or knows anything about mystical thinking, be it Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or Bud- dhist mystical thinking. I would like to see a genuine dialogue about the nature of Being that includes scientists and religious scholars who are also practitioners. I’ll volunteer to represent Hasidism. I’d like there to be Sufis, Christians, Buddhists (perhaps the Dalai Lama), and Vedanta followers, INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN 241 alongside some proclaimed atheists. I think there are things we could all learn from each other. But when Dawkins and others like him dismiss religion because it means believing in an old fellow in the sky who created the world, that’s just too low level of conversation and it is not worth having it on that level.

What do you think would happen when physicists get together with Buddhists to talk about dark matter. Isn’t that what you propose?

Well, it would be an interesting conversation and I would like the kabbalists to be present in it. Let me make it clear that I’m not a scientist and I don’t pretend to be a scientist. But when I read in the New York Times how scientists are talking about what happened in the first three trillionths of a second after the Big Bang (as distinct from the fourth trillionth, mind you!), I hear something of kabbalists talking about the process in which the first three sefirot emanated from the Eyn Sof (the divine Infinite) in the highest of the four worlds. There is something going on there. This is not mere coincidence; the type of thought is deeply parallel, not just the numbers. So there seem to be two alternatives. Either the kabbalists speak within certain structures of the human mind that lead us to a certain understanding of external reality, and these structures persist, leading astrophysicists to speak the same way, or the kabbalists had some kind of true insight into cosmology that they expressed in a highly medieval and hierarchical language but that somehow still comes through. My instincts tend toward the former explanation, but that’s why we should have the conversation. Even just the parallel between the structure of the human mind and the structure of reality sometimes makes me shudder, remind- ing me of ancient descriptions of the human being as microcosm. And so I would like somebody who knows Kabbalah to be part of that conversation between the scientists and the Buddhists about dark matter. I think we might have something to say or at least learn in that conversation.

How do you explain the popularity of Kabbalah today? Why is Kabbalah today, among Jew and non-Jews, so successful?

I often lecture on this very topic. I say that Jews tried two hundred years ago to excise Kabbalah from the tradition. They created a new concept called “mainstream Judaism,” which you can’t say in Hebrew, because it’s really not a Jewish concept. But so-called mainstream Judaism was 242 INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN created to exclude certain things from the mainstream and that was primarily Kabbalah. To modern Westernizing Jews, Kabbalah was an intellectual embarrassment. Two hundred years later, Judaism is scram- bling to recover it. The desire to recover Kabbalah is based on the awareness that something has gone wrong in the West. Whether it is nuclear danger or the ecological danger, the sense of overconsumption and of living at too fast a pace, we have finally become sensitive to the fact that we are destroying the world and that we are going to destroy one another. There must be, so it is thought by many, some ancient wisdom that was ignored in the course of the rush toward modernity that we must now go back and recover. Maybe on some Buddhist mountaintop in Tibet (a literal or metaphorical mountain) we will find it. Maybe the kabbalists have it. Let’s go seek out the wisdoms of the ancient traditions of the world and see if they can teach us something that will keep us from destroying each other, from destroying ourselves. So I think that quest is real and very meaningful. That’s what I call a postmodern quest for religious truth. Modernity has collapsed. Modernity has shown its inadequa- cies and therefore we look for an alternative to it. Now there are dangers in that, of course. As soon as you open that postmodern door, it turns out the premoderns are happy to welcome you back, because the premodern never disappeared, as we know very well from the experience of living in Jerusalem, where we are holding the interview.

It seems to me that you are proposing a post-postmodernism, because the postmodernism is but a critical posture that does not offer us a framework for living meaningfully.

Yes. I understand what you mean by post-postmodernism. I am reappro- priating the term “postmodern.” I definitely do not mean it in the sense in which it is usually used, originating in the world of literary criticism. That usage leads mostly to a blind alley of incomprehensibility (at least by lesser minds like mine). Instead I mean that the critical assumptions of the modern world, especially its religion of progressive scientism, have been deeply called into question. Since the alternative to it includes a recovery of ancient traditions, the Spinozan insistence that the Bible (and other Scriptures) may be read only at face value needs also to be set aside, hence legitimizing the rebirth of midrashic creativity that has been so prominent in recent decades and thus reviving interest in the mystical/ esoteric readings as well. INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN 243

If I hear you correctly, you claim that ancient wisdom traditions such as Kabbalah or Buddhism offer us a perennial wisdom that we could tap into in order to make sense of our life in the present.

That’s right. And it is not limited to one tradition. This is not zero-sum game among traditions. If mine is true, yours is false. But rather there is some wisdom to be discovered in human history that needs to be recovered. So I think the recovery of Kabbalah is part of that. We have Hindu traditions, we have the various Buddhist traditions, the Christian monastic tradition, the wisdom of the Sufi schools, and we have Native-American traditions, to mention just a few. We also have the kabbalistic tradition which is that part of Judaism that encompasses that once-abandoned and mostly lost esoteric wisdom. I started to study Kabbalah about fifty years ago. At that time a few Jews, mostly in Israel, were attracted to Kabbalah on the academic level. Dare I say that we should thank God for sending us Gershom Scholem, who made the texts and ideas available to the succeeding generation? I say so only partly tongue-in-cheek, knowing how amused he would be by that thought. Today a large number of people have come along and want to recover this tradition beyond academic study. In the past twenty years, we have witnessed a huge number of books written about Kabbalah and Jewish meditation not for mere academic purposes but for Jews who want to live by them. (Some of these, but by no means all, are even good books!). So the question is what should be done with it? What is the value of Kabbalah today? Is it just medieval nonsense that expresses a hierarchical worldview unacceptable to people who believe in egalitarianism or equal rights, or can it be stripped of some of that baggage and still be useful? Although as a pluralist I should be open to diverse approaches, I think the various disciples of Ha-Rav Ashlag have not been helpful here. They began with the overly articulated Lurianic system he encountered in Bet El of the early twentieth century and have tried to strip it down to make it accessible. Some have taken Kabbalah and tried to convert it into a business. They have discovered, lo and behold, that modern people, even some with college educations, can still be afraid of the dark. So you give them an amulet to protect them from the dark. Or you offer them various other protections from the dark or from evil spirits, or promise them success in business or love life or whatever else they desire. That’s nonsense. It is the worst use of Kabbalah for the self-enrichment of the promoters. The 244 INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN profundity of kabbalistic thought is lost in a kind of popular self-help lingo, combined with the more superstitious parts of the kabbalistic legacy.

Is Rabbi Leitman’s appropriation of Kabbalah, which uses modern technology, the right thing?

I don’t think so. However, the fact that he has his own TV channel in Israel is telling me something about the contemporary quest for the recovery of the wisdom of Kabbalah. That’s one of the things I aspired to do when I wrote a book called Ehyeh: A Kabbalah for Tomorrow. The message of this book is that if you’re going to recover Kabbalah for today, here is my own suggestion of how to use it in a positive way, which is mostly about psychological and personal spiritual insight. I’m delighted that this book too, along with Radical Judaism, is now being translated into Hebrew.

Since you also published Radical Judaism, would you say that this recovery of Kabbalah is radical Judaism?

Well, yes. I would. Radical in both senses of the term: first in the sense of being transformative and second, in the sense of going back to the roots.

So why did your book Radical Judaism receive some criticism? How do you understand the critical responses to the book?

Well, I actually think that the book received a very positive and even a very excited response from many Jews. The main challenge came from the Orthodox world, especially from a rather fierce attack by Rabbi Dan- iel Landes of Pardes. The several exchanges between us are available on the Internet, and are very worth reading. I found his critique somewhat annoying in that I didn’t think he read me very carefully. But he is certainly right that there are wide divergences between my views and the theologies currently associated with Orthodoxy. I am not a believer in what he considers particular providence and I am not a literal believer in either creation or the revelation of Torah. I do not believe in any view he would recognize as affirming either God as choosing the Jews as His holy people or in a God-initiated covenant. So if he is ticking off the list of Maimonides’ thirteen articles, he will find me on the negative side of most. I don’t know that he would know what to do with me, a Jew who insists that he is a religious person, who davens daily, who lives within tradition, and who spends all his time studying and teaching Torah. Ah, INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN 245 he finds another such example in Mordecai Kaplan, so he assumes I must be a Kaplanian. But that is not taking me seriously. Perhaps my interpretation of revelation that sees revelatory moments as internal events is threatening to Orthodoxy, even though I have Ortho- prax students who are somewhat close to my theology. Let me just say this. I am happy and proud that among my closest students there is a very wide range of observance. Some of them take my theology and use it to bolster their very traditional Jewish life, which includes deep commitment to halakhah. And some are quite far to the left of where I am in the sense that they interpret Judaism even more radically. I’m a traditional Jew, but I do not think in strictly halakhic categories. I’m happy to see that diversity among my students because my teaching is not about halakhic practice per-se. Judaism is not only about what you should do, precisely, in the sphere of ritual behavior. It does tend to get too caught up in those questions, and the current denominations are all defined around that. My message to my students is, rather that you spend your mental energy on more important questions. Regarding praxis, figure that out for yourself; take responsibility for your own spiritual life. Ultimately I think those decisions are very much about personal needs and personality types. Since I thrive on that diversity, I deliberately created the rabbinical school in Boston as a trans-denominational, pluralistic institution that has people who are very observant and people who are very little observant. But what I’m interested in is challenging their thought and calling them to develop an inner life, a spiritual life of their own, and deciding in the course of that how they want to live as Jews. I am not interested in telling these rabbinic students “this is what you may do and this is what you may not do.” I want to open them to the voice calling from within the text, then seeing how each of them responds.

So, as a communal leader and institution builder, what is your message to Jews today both in America and in Israel in terms of diversity and pluralism? How do you seek to address the internal tensions that Jews experience today?

The Jewish People is reconstituting itself in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. For a very long period of time, we were a closed society. Nobody wanted to become a Jew because becoming a Jew was too dangerous, often even forbidden by law. The fate of the Jews was so abys- mal that nobody wanted to join the Jewish People. Therefore, for 1,600 or 1,800 years, Jews were the sons and daughters of Jewish mothers and a 246 INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN few crazy people who somehow “fell in” or joined the Jewish community through conversion. But now we have a very diverse Jewish People that include various groups and individuals whose biological lineage cannot be proven. For example, Ethiopian Jews have been recovered to Judaism, but who knows if they had any biological connection? An Egyptian rabbi in the sixteenth century said they did and that gave permission for the rabbinate in Israel to recognize Ethiopian Jews as Jews in order to bring them to Israel. The recovery of Ethiopian Jewry was indeed heroic, but it changes the collective body of the Jewish People. Similarly, Israel has a large population of Russian Jews who have migrated here, and half of them intermarried. It is not easy to prove the biological lineage of many Russian immigrants, but we should see them as a new branch grafted unto the Jewish People. In America I see so many people, very interesting people, who want to convert to Judaism. In fact, ten percent of our rabbinical students are now Jews by choice. And some of our very best students and most serious future rabbis are Jews by choice. I’m an adoptive parent, so my daughter is a convert to Judaism; of course, she was converted as a child. So the current interest in Judaism and conversions to Judaism indicate that the Jewish People is reconstituting itself. Unfortunately, many people, a great many people, who were born Jews, are dropping away. If I look at the grandchildren of my own first cousins in America, even from the more traditional part of the family, most of them will not be Jews in another generation. They’re intermarried and they’re not raising their children as Jews, so their Jewishness is finished. So the tree of the Jewish People has a great many branches; some new branches and buds are coming in, while others are ceasing to be Jewish. The total number of American Jewish population is up because of the arrival of Russians and Israelis, not because American Jews are having enough children to replenish their numbers. For these demographic reasons, I am for opening the gates and welcoming those who want to join the Jewish People to do so without too many hurdles. As the late Reform Rabbi Alexander Schindler said a few years ago, I would like to see a campaign, an active campaign of giving Judaism to seeking Americans who are looking for a religion. I think we make a mistake in not doing that. I am all for a kind of high level attempt at trying to find new people who want to become Jewish. This should especially welcome people of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. Then the Jewish People will continue, not as the same biological entity it was for 1,800 years, but in the hands of people who want to carry this tradition forward, in open and creative ways. Some of them will be born INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN 247

Jews, and some of them will become Jews. Some of them will be close to the Jewish People but not formally converting to Judaism. This phenomenon is very common today and you see these people in synagogues especially in the American West: non-Jews go to synagogues because they’re interested and attracted to this tradition. I would like to find some kind of broader community of Bnei Noach, or some other such term, that will include those who are attached to the Jewish People without formal conversion. And some of them might become actual converts later on.

This was exactly the situation in antiquity when many pagans were attracted to Judaism but did not go through conversion. They were called God-fearers and it was this population was most susceptive to Christian preaching.

Well, yes, but that was the best period we ever had for getting our message to the world.

So given this vision, where does the secular Jewish person fit into your understanding of contemporary Judaism? Since you want to be inclusive, do you also welcome secular Jews?

Yes. I want to be inclusive and yet for me, personally, this is all about the spiritual life. So the secular Jew poses a hard challenge for me. I talk to Israelis a good bit because I visit Israel very often. I love being here and I come frequently and I have many connections here. Many people tell me that they are secular (hilonim) and they insist on that word. But once I begin talking to them, I see also spiritual seeking in them and openness to something which does not fall under the category of the “secular.” There are many Israeli spiritual seekers who are coming back from India in these post-army trips who are discovering there really is something to spirituality that they couldn’t discover in Judaism because the hostility to a spiritual interpretation of Judaism is so great in Israel. But I also recognize that there are people who really are secular people. I wish them well and I have lots of things in common with them because of my Zionism and my love of both Hebrew and Yiddish and my love of Jewish culture and Jewish literature. I’m happy to share those things with secular Jews and secular Israelis, but as I see it, they are missing a certain dimension in life, which is what spirituality is all about, and which I would like to expose them to. I try not to act as a missionary to such people. I don’t say, “You must do this” or “Here, put on Tefillin tomorrow.” I do not 248 INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN act like a Habadnik who wants to persuade Jews to become observant. But I would like to share that kind of spiritual dimension which for me is the core of what it means to be a Jew.

If I hear you correctly, there is a tinge of condescension, or paternalism, in your attitude toward the secular Jew. Do you consider the secular Jew a kind of a misdirected person? Is that fair to say?

“Misdirected” is too strong. I wouldn’t say that the secular Jew is misdirected, but I would say that the secular Jew is lacking a certain dimension that I find essential to Judaism. “Misdirected” feels a little bit too accusa- tory. So there’s no accusation there, there’s no failure on that person’s part, yet there is a lack of openness to a certain dimension of experience.

Is it like being tone-deaf, so to speak?

Yes. There are dimensions of experience to which I am pretty tone-deaf. You haven’t heard how bad I am at music. There are also dimensions of human life which I do not experience, for example, physical outdoor experiences or athletic experiences. These are great dimensions of human life about which I know very little and to which I’m not exposed, nor do I make a point of trying to expose myself to them. So there is no condem- nation involved here, just a regret that those people do not share in this element of life that I find so enriching.

It is somewhat ironic, since Zionism to a great extent is the precise attempt to recover and emphasize the physical dimension of being Jewish. Zionism is about living in the physical world as opposed to the world of sacred texts.

Yes. Now, whether Zionism succeeded, of course, is a very big question. Take for example the question of Hebrew labor, which was one of the core goals of Zionism. In Israel today, manual and physical labor is generally performed by foreigners while Israelis enjoy professional life that has little to do with manual labor. Israel is a success story today because of the high-tech revolution, not because of the Zionist return to manual labor.

Yes. That is true, and perhaps Zionists have lost an important connection to the land because of the move away from the initial vision.

Given this transformation it is fair to ask: have Jews really left the life of the mind at all? Has Zionism changed the Jewish character at all? And INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN 249 the answer is “only partially so.” Israel today is a secularized version of what Jews have always been, which is to say intellectuals and entrepre- neurs, once called scholars and merchants. I think that if Ber Borochov were alive today he would be horrified to see Israel as the great high-tech society. The Socialist vision of Borochov and others has become utterly obsolete, failing to remake Jewry in its image.

What do you think are the major challenges to Jewish existence today?

I can name several serious challenge to the future of the Jews: the situation of Israel is the biggest moral and political challenge. The second challenge is assimilation in the West where Jews live in an open society and there is no guarantee they will remain Jewish. I would say that these two are the greatest challenges facing Jewry as such. Of course we are all involved in the great human challenge of whether we will allow our biosphere to survive as a habitable place for human and other forms of higher life—but that is one that we share will all our fellow humans.

When you speak about the moral challenges of Israel what exactly do you have in mind? The attitude toward the Arabs and Palestinians or other social problems such as treatment of the poor and the aged?

Where do you want to begin? The moral challenges are so numerous and so complex. Although I am not particularly a believer in providence, as you know, the opportunity to create a Jewish society, which I deeply believe in, was given to us for a reason. I think history told us that we had a right to as well as a need for a Jewish state, both because of anti- Semitism and because of our need to live in a place where Jewish culture would be the central culture of the society. But that gave us a great opportunity to demonstrate the moral values of Judaism. In Israel we have to take ideas like justice and proper treatment of the stranger and determine how these would apply in a Jewish society where we have a way to express our moral values. And I feel that it has not been a great success. Our ability to be a host society, a welcoming society in which we are a majority, has not worked very well.

Are you talking particularly vis-à-vis the Palestinians, or more broadly vis-à-vis foreigners who work in Israel?

Let me talk first about attitudes toward Arab Israelis first, and the con- quered population of the Palestinians second, and then foreign workers third. But I think that maltreatment of non-Jews began even before the 250 INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN establishment of the State of Israel. In the Jewish tradition there is a certain dehumanizing of the other, a certain failure to recognize the other as a full human being with full human needs. This exists in the kabbalistic and Hasidic sources that I love in a particularly strong degree. It is a failure to understand the other that might have made sense as a strategy of survival for an oppressed minority. But coming to the Land of Israel after centuries of exile necessitated sharing this land with those who had been living here. The Zionist slogan of “People without a land for a land without a people,” was very attractive to European and American Jews, but it was not historically accurate or true. We were not really taught that there was another people living here in the Land of Israel that had to be considered and recognized for its human needs and political aspirations. There is something about Zionism that looks an awful lot like colonialism.

Do you accept that claim which is commonly stated by post-Zionists as well as by Palestinian and Arab critics of Israel?

Well, I don’t accept it entirely, because we Jews were a victim people. We were not a wealthy colonizing people like the British or the French. There’s a great difference between the Zionist experience and colonizing experiences in Asia or Africa. We were not exploiting Palestine to send its riches back to a mother country elsewhere; Jews came to Eretz Yisra’el because we had no other country! But certain attitudes that were conveyed within the Zionist enterprise feel and appear an awful lot like neo-colonialism. And we Jews, all of us, in Israel and abroad, have to be careful that Zionism not be that. Zionism as it exists on the West Bank today looks to me an awful lot like that.

But here is our dilemma. The negation of the other, especially the Arab other, is commonly justified by appeal to the biblical text. This is especially common among Jews who belong to the settlement movement who consider the West Bank not as occupied territory but as a territory which belongs to the Jewish People by divine promise. So, what do you as a religious Jew who cares about the unjust treatment of Arabs or Pal- estinian say to the settlers?

I think we are currently engaged in a great struggle for the soul of Juda- ism. In this struggle, we cannot allow people like Rabbis Yitzhak Ginz- burg or Meir Kahane to claim the tradition. Of course their approach has INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN 251 authentic roots in the tradition, but so does the opposite view to which I subscribe. It is the Talmud, not just some twentieth-century liberal, who asked “Why was only one human created? So that no person say to another: ‘My father is greater than yours.’ ” It was Rabbi Shim’on ben Azzai in the second century who said that the most basic principle of Torah is “God created every person in His image.” These truths apply to Arabs as they apply to all human beings. I believe that Jewish statehood is the toughest moral test to which our people and tradition have ever been put. The jury is still out, but I do not believe we are doing as well as we must. I think it’s a question how the tradition is read and how the tradition is used. If I am doing anything in my life it is to educate a generation, and even several generations, of future Jewish leaders who will engage in that struggle for the soul of the tradition and will see the tradition as a universalizing and humanizing spiritual force and not as a xenophobic, racist, narrowing, exclusive claim of truth. That battle has to be fought every day, and right now we are not doing well in that battle. The forces of xenophobia are very powerful and numerically stronger, partly because the ultra-Orthodox community is producing many more babies than liberal and progressive Jews, and partly because of awful forces at bay in the Muslim world that are truly terrifying. For this reason, what will be the future face of Judaism concerns me greatly. That terrifying prospect is the reason why I do much of what I do. I am in my seventies and I am still teaching rabbis. I’m still training future generations of rabbis because I think people exposed to my kind of thinking and the kind of thinking we represent are the only alternative to a future of those forces taking over Judaism and claiming the tradition as their own.

Your project of claiming the tradition sounds to me as a political project or at least a project that has political implications. Is that right?

Yes, that is correct. My project is indeed political and moral as well as spiritual and theological. I have always refused to make that distinction.

And on the spectrum of the Jewish political spectrum, where would you locate yourself ?

I’m on the left edge of the Zionist movement, the critical edge within Zionism. I’ve always considered myself a Zionist, which means I believe 252 INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN in the right and value of creating a Jewish society in Israel. But I firmly believe that unless we have a two-state solution, there is no future for this Jewish country. And I believe that it has to be a generous two-state solution, meaning all of the 22 percent of Palestine, including joint capitals in Jerusalem. But so far we have had no generosity in our treatment of the Arabs. Generosity has not been a word that has been commonly used in public discourse in Israel; it has not been a virtue that has existed in the Jewish project. What happened to the Talmud’s description of the Jews as the most compassionate of people, raḥmanim beney rahmanim? Rather, the post-1967 settlement project has all been about competition: How much land can we grab for ourselves? How much can we “Judaize” this area or that area? How much can we reclaim this land from the Arabs? How can we declare more to be state land, so that we can build more Jewish settlements and so forth. The people who interpreted Zionism in this manner have not realized that it’s not going to work unless we are going to act in accord with the deepest moral values of Judaism. Yes, some of that went on before the state was established as well. The Palestinians were not wrong in saying that we established our state at their expense. But I think our history justified that; our desperation, and then the Holocaust, created the moral right we had to come to the land and build a Jewish homeland. I see myself as a religious Jew but a secular Zionist. We have a right to return to our ancient homeland not by divine fiat, but due to historical circumstance, much of it tragic. But now, after 1967, we are the victors, the much stronger party, and we need to act with decency and kindness toward the Other. That decency has to begin with Arab citizens of Israel, who must be extended full equal rights and respect. The Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza must be given a state of their own when they are ready to offer us true and secure peace and full acceptance in return. I do not see us doing that, nor, sadly, do I see them being ready to offer what is required. Both sides are failing.

So that’s the challenge that faces all Jews whether they live in Israel or in the diaspora. Is that so?

I think that’s a great moral challenge. And I think we’re not doing well with it and I’m very, very worried about the future here. Because I see that two-state solution slipping away more every day and instead people are talking about unilateral actions and the creation of one-state solutions and I just don’t know what it means. INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN 253

Is that challenge more threatening to Jewish existence than the open society, where Jews could eventually cease to be Jewish, or is it just different?

I don’t know. I don’t know how to put the two on the scales against one another. The open society in the West is also a great challenge. But it is also a great opportunity, as is Israel. Yes, we will be smaller in numbers. I think the Jewish community in the diaspora is going to shrink. But you know, I’m not too worried about numbers. I do see at the core of that community in the diaspora as well as here, a group of people who want to learn and think in ways that hadn’t happened before. When I look at the high level of adult education programs that we have these days, I know that there is a thirst for Jewish knowledge which is very positive and very promising for the future of the Jewish People. The open society is also an opportunity. In the United States Jews participate in great decisions about the future of humanity, environmentally and otherwise, and they do so as the most successful of all immigrant minority groups. In the U.S. our tradition is highly respected so that Jews are asked about Jewish views on a great many issues facing our society. I also take great pride in the presence of Jewish activists in the struggles for equal rights for minorities, gender equality, and many other battles for human decency.

The way you talk about America seems as if for you America is the “Promised Land.”

Well, it’s not quite the Promised Land, America, but there is a sense that Judaism is seen in America, which is this very religious country, as one of the great spiritual traditions. In America many non-Jews want to learn what Judaism has to say about crucial issues of Western culture. We have a voice at the table, so to speak, in the society, and for this reason Judaism can play a very important role in determining the future of humanity. And maybe it’s not accidental. Maybe we have to take that voice and have something positive to say in the world. “Who knows,” as the Book of Esther says, “whether it was not for a moment like that that you came into a position of authority?”

Do you see any role for Jewish studies in that project of saying something positive to society at large?

Do you mean Jewish studies in the university today? 254 INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN

I refer to Jewish studies as an academic endeavor. Can it play a role in your vision?

Well, as I said in the beginning of the interview, I have left the university behind because I wanted to teach and help create a Judaism that would have something vital to say about the survival of humanity, about the great questions that confront us, about how we live in the twenty-first century. The university has abdicated that vision. The university, dedicated to its own high altar of critical distance and objectivity, has become more than a little bit afraid to engage in the great questions that face us.

Well, postmodernism has already undermined that vision of objectivity.

If we find Jewish scholars in the university, or the academic world, who are willing to come back to those questions of personal values and relevance, I would answer your question in the positive. Yes, since Judaism has something to say, gaining access to Judaism through Jewish studies and Jewish scholarship could be relevant to my project. So I want Jewish scholarship to become revitalized in that sense of having something to say about the great questions of our time.

To what extent do all those great questions become more acute because of the Holocaust? So far you said nothing about the Holocaust. Has it become a marginal issue for Jewish identity in the twenty-first century?

The Holocaust, in which a third of world Jewry was meaninglessly slaugh- tered, effected a tremendous trauma upon the body politic of the surviving Jewish People. We were stunned for perhaps half a century, during which the single critical question, especially for the survivors and the Israeli society that embraced them, was “How do we survive?” I think the Holocaust has affected all of us, of course, including our theology, and everything in Jewish culture of the second half of twentieth century. But I am now happy to report that I see some signs of recovery in the collective body of Jews. The new openness to spiritual search, both in North America and increasingly in Israel, has about it an aspect that says: “We are tired of screaming at God. Anger has not helped us to heal. It is time to try another way.” Neither has excessive distrust of humanity, seeing murderous anti-Semitism everywhere, helped us to create a healthy Jew- ish future. So the Holocaust must be remembered and commemorated, to be sure. But we must also allow ourselves to leave it behind as we ask what Jewish life we want to create for the coming generations. INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN 255

I could not agree with you more. As we shift toward a positive and hope- ful view of the future, what do you consider as positive changes in contemporary Jewish life that suggest growth and vitality?

The two greatest changes in the content of American Judaism I have seen in my decades as a Jewish leader are the feminist revolution and the recovery of the Jewish mystical tradition. I would like to say a bit about the relationship—or lack of relationship—between these two phenomena. I have already spoken briefly about the origins of the inner Jewish feminist movement in circles close to the ḥavurot. That group was joined by an Orthodox faction, ably led by Blu Greenberg, and a cadre of the first women admitted to liberal rabbinical schools, eventually in all three non- Orthodox denominations. I have been an active supporter of this effort from its inception; more than half the rabbis I have helped to train and ordain over the course of these decades are female, and I take great pride in the good work many of them are doing throughout the Jewish community. At the top of my list of favorite female students is my dear friend and colleague Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld, my successor as dean of the Hebrew College Rabbinical School. It has not always been easy being a man in a position of authority during this period of great change. Particularly in the early years, many of the women coming into their own in training for Jewish leadership carried a good bit of anger about their former exclusion. Naturally some of this was poured out on older male representatives of the tradition who happened to be handy, even if those were precisely the men working to educate women and welcome them into shared leadership. There were aspects of second-wave feminism that bore a militancy and a sense of righteous indignation that were not always easy to handle. These included a sense among some that women should declare themselves worshippers of the goddess, since men seemed to have created a male deity for themselves. I came to realize that the real issues in these conversations had more to do with a sense of disempowerment than they did with essential theological issues. Theology was a convenient field in which to give expression to deep and justified frustrations. In the other great change in American Judaism, I have taken a leading role over several decades. I was the first one to regularly teach courses on Kabbalah and Hasidism to liberal American rabbis. I am proud to say that the need for such study is now widely recognized, and that some of my own students are serving in that role. In several different settings (Shalom Hartman Institute, Institute for Jewish Spirituality, etc.) I have also had 256 INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR GREEN the opportunity to teach these materials to already ordained rabbis who regretted not having learned them in rabbinical school. As is well known, the issue of gender has a prominent place in kabbalistic symbolism, particularly around the figure of shekhinah, elaborated so richly especially in the Zohar. Interpretation of the Song of Songs and the use of sexual and marital metaphors fill nearly every page of the voluminous kabbalistic literature. Of course all of these figures were produced in the imaginations of men living within a highly patriarchal era. Never- theless, there is great beauty in them, and I believe they might form the basis for a new and expanded Jewish spiritual language to be built by both women and men in this era of new access to learning and openness to Jewish religious creativity. For this to take place on a high level, we need women who will become deep students of kabbalistic literature, while at the same time master- ing contemporary psychology and feminist theory. I have been hoping for several decades to attract such students, but have not succeeded. My doctoral students have all been men. For some reason, the young women who take classical Jewish learning most seriously in this country are nearly all attracted to Talmud, partly with the thought that innovation in Jewish law will be a good platform for female empowerment. (Interestingly, in Israel the situation is quite reversed. Perhaps half of the doctorates in Jewish mysticism are earned by women, while the universities’ Talmud departments are peopled almost exclusively by former yeshiva guys.) I want to take this late opportunity in my career to appeal to young women who have an attraction to spiritual matters to become serious scholars with an eye toward a text-based effort at such neo-Hasidic or neo-kabbalistic creativity. We need you!

This is a powerful ending to a very stimulating discussion. Thank you for sharing your vision for the future of Judaism, the Jewish People, and humanity and for taking the time to hold the interview.

Thank you for including me in this worthy project. SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books

1. Tormented Master: A Life of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav. University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1980; second edition (paperback), New York: Schocken Books, 1991; reprint, Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 1992. 2. Devotion and Commandment: The Faith of Abraham in the Hasidic Imagination. Hebrew Union College, Efroymson Lectures of 1986. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1989. 3. Seek My Face, Speak My Name: A Contemporary Jewish Theology. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1992. Published in Hebrew as Baqqeshu Fanai, Qire’u Vi-Shemi: Emunato shel Meḥapes. Tel Aviv: Am Oved Press, 1997. Revised second edition, published as Seek My Face: A Jewish Mystical Theology. Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2003. 4. Keter: The Crown of God in Early Jewish Mysticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. 5. These Are the Words: A Vocabulary of Jewish Spiritual Life. Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 1999. Published in Hebrew as Eleh ha-Devarim, Leksikon le-Ruḥaniyyut Yehudit. Yedi’ot (Yahadut kan ve-‘akhshav), 2008. 6. Ehyeh: A Kabbalah for Tomorrow. Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2002. 7. A Guide to the Zohar. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. 8. Radical Judaism: Rethinking God and Tradition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. 9. Judaism’s Ten Best Ideas: A Brief Guide for Seekers. Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2014. 10. The Heart of the Matter: Studies in Jewish Mysticism and Theology. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2015.

Edited Volumes

11. Jewish Spirituality. 2 volumes. New York: Crossroad Books, 1986–1987.

Translations

12. (With Barry W. Holtz) Your Word Is Fire: The Hasidic Masters on Contemplative Prayer. New York: Paulist Press, 1977; second revised 258 select bibliography

edition, New York: Schocken Books, 1987; republished, Woodstock VT: Jewish Lights, 1993. 13. Upright Practices and The Light of the Eyes: Homilies on Genesis, by R. Menahem Nahum of Chernobyl. New York: Paulist Press, 1982. 14. The Language of Truth: Teachings from the Sefat Emet by Rabbi Judah Leib Alter of Ger. Selection, Translation, and Contemporary Response. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1998. 15. Hasidic Spirituality for a New Era: The Religious Writings of Hillel Zeitlin. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 2012. 16. (With Ebn Leader, Ariel Evan Mayse, and Or N. Rose) Speaking Torah: Hasidic Teachings from around the Maggid’s Table. 2 volumes. Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2013.

Short Translations

17. “The Death of Our Master,” by Rabbi Nathan Sternharz. Conservative Judaism 28, no. 1 (1973): 82–88. 18. “The Sign,” by S.Y. Agnon. Response 19 (1973): 5–31. Reprinted in A Book That Was Lost and Other Stories, edited by Alan Mintz and Anne Golumb Hoffman, 378–409. New York: Schocken Books, 1995. 19. “Bratslav Dreams.” Fiction 7, no. 12 (1981): 185–202. Reprinted as “The ‘Dream-Talks’ of Nahman of Bratslav.” In Rabbinic Fantasies: Imaginative Narratives from Classical Hebrew Literature, edited Mark Jay Mirsky and David Stern, 333–48. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1990. 20. “On One Stone” and “The Sense of Smell.” Two stories by S.Y. Agnon. In A Book That Was Lost and Other Stories, edited by Alan Mintz and Anne Golumb Hoffman, 136–38 and 139–46. New York: Schocken Books, 1995.

Book Chapters

21. “Rabbi Nahman Bratslaver’s Conflict Regarding Leadership.” In Texts and Responses: Studies Presented to Nahum N. Glatzer on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, edited by Michael Fishbane and Paul R. Flohr, 141–57. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1975. 22. “Sabbath as Temple: Some Thoughts on Space and Time in Judaism.” In Go and Study: Essays and Studies in Honor of Alfred Jospe, edited by Raphael Jospe and Samuel Z. Fishman, 287–305. Washington, D.C.: B’nai Brith Hillel Foundations, 1980. select bibliography 259

23. “Rabbi Nahman’s Journey to the Land of Israel.” In Mystics, Philosophers, and Politicians: Essays in Jewish Intellectual History in Honor of Alexander Altmann, edited by Jehuda Reinharz and Daniel Swetschinski with Kalman P. Bland, 181–212. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1981. 24. “Discovery and Retreat: Hasidism and the Mystical Consciousness.” In The Other Side of God: A Polarity in World Religions, edited by Peter Berger, 104–30. New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1981. 25. “Bride, Spouse, Daughter: Images of the Feminine in Jewish Religious Literature.” In On Being a Jewish Feminist: A Reader, edited by Susannah Heschel, 248–60. New York: Schocken Books, 1982. 26. “Judaism and Mysticism.” In Take Judaism, for Example: Studies toward the Comparison of Religions, edited by Jacob Neusner, 67–91. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. 27. “Teachings of the Hasidic Masters.” In Back to the Sources: Reading the Classical Jewish Texts, edited by Barry W. Holtz, 361–401. New York: Summit Books, 1984. 28. “The Zohar: Jewish Mysticism in Medieval Spain.” In An Introduction to the Medieval Mystics of Europe, edited by Paul Szarmach, 97–134. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984. Reprinted in Essential Papers on Kabbalah, edited by Lawrence Fine, 27–66. New York and London: New York University Press, 1995. 29. “Authority and Autonomy in Rabbinic Education Today.” In The Seminary at 100: Reflections on the Jewish Theological Seminary and the Conservative Movement, edited by Nina Beth Cardin and David Wolf Silverman, 29–32. New York: Rabbinical Assembly, 1987. 30. “Typologies of Leadership in Early Hasidism.” In Jewish Spirituality. Vol. II: From the Sixteenth-Century Revival to the Present, edited by Arthur Green, 127–56. New York: Crossroad Books, 1987. Published in Hebrew in Tsaddik va-Edah, edited by David Assaf, 422–44. Jerusalem: The Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 2001. 31. “God, Prayer, and Religious Language.” In Imagining the Jewish Future: Essays and Responses, edited by David A. Teutsch, 13–28. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992. 32. “What Is Jewish Theology?” In Torah and Revelation, edited by Dan Cohn-Sherbok, 1–11. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992. 33. “Some Words on the Words of Prayer.” In Worlds of Jewish Prayer, A Festschrift in Honor of Rabbi Zalman M. Shalomi-Schachter, edited by Shohama Harris-Wiener and Jonathan Omer-Man, 71–78. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1993. 260 select bibliography

34. “Our Days of Awe.” Foreword to Days of Awe, edited by S.Y. Agnon, vii–xviii. New York: Schocken Books, 1995. 35. “Early Hasidism: Some Old/New Questions.” In Hasidism Re-Appraised, edited by Ada Rapaport-Albert, 441–46. London: Littman Library, 1996. 36. “Three Warsaw Mystics.” In Kolot Rabbim: Essays in Memory of Rivka Schatz-Uffenheimer, edited by Rachel Elior, 1–58. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1997. 37. “Judaism and ‘the Good.’” In Theoria → Praxis: How Jews, Christians, and Muslims Can Together Move from Theory to Practice, edited by Leonard Swidler, 119–38. Leuven: Peeters, 1998. 38. “Judaism, Religious Diversity, and the American Academy.” Education as Transformation: Religious Pluralism, Spirituality, and a New Vision for Higher Education in America, edited by Victor H. Kazanjan, Jr., and Peter L. Laurence, 113–23. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. 39. “To Learn and to Teach: Some Thoughts on Jewish-Buddhist Dialogue.” In Beside Still Waters: Jews, Christians, and the Way of the Buddha, edited by Harold Kasimow, John P. Keenan, and Linda Klepinger Keenan, 231–42. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2003. 40. “Some Aspects of Qabbalat Shabbat.” In Sabbath: Idea, History, Reality, edited by Gerald J. Blidstein, 95–118. Beersheva: Ben Gurion University of the Negev Press, 2004. 41. “Afterword” to John Hammond, A Benedictine Legacy of Peace: The Life of Abbot Leo A. Rudloff, 303–7. Weston: Weston Priory, 2005. 42. “Intradivine Romance: The Song of Songs in the Zohar.” In Scrolls of Love: Ruth and the Song of Songs, edited by Peter S. Hawkins and Lesleigh Cushing Stahlberg, 221–27. New York: Fordham University Press, 2006. 43. “Mystical Sources of the Healing Movement.” In Healing and the Jewish Imagination, Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2007. 44. “Rabbinic Training and Transdenominationalism: Some Personal Perspectives.” In Synagogues in a Time of Change: Fragmentation and Diversity in Jewish Religious Movements, edited by Zachary Heller, 161–73. Herndon, VA: Alban Institute, 2009. 45. “Ga’agu’ey ha-Elohim el ha-Adam: On Rabbi Nahman’s Tale of the King and the Sage.” In Ha-Ḥayyim ke-Ga’agu’a, edited by Roee Horen, 89–100. Tel Aviv: Yedi’ot, 2010 (Hebrew). 46. “Renewal and Havurah: American Movements, European Roots.” In Jewish Renaissance and Revival in America: Essays in Memory of Leah Levitz, edited by Eitan P. Fishbane and Jonathan D. Sarna, 145–64. New York: JTSA, 2010. select bibliography 261

47. “Hasidism: A Brief Introduction.” In A World Apart Next Door: Glimpses into the Life of Hasidic Jews. Catalogue to exhibition at The Israel Museum, 25–31. Jerusalem: The Israel Museum, 2012. 48. “A Monk’s Gift.” In My Neighbor’s Faith: Stories of Religious Growth, Encounter, and Transformation, edited by Jennifer Howe Peace, Or Rose, and Gregory Mobley, 62–67. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2012. 49. “The Hasidic Homily: Mystical Performance and Hermeneutical Process.” In As a Perennial Spring: A Festschrift Honoring Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm, edited by Bentsi Cohen, 237–65. New York: Bentsi Cohen, Downhill Publishing LLC, 2013. 50. “A Neo-Hasidic Life: Credo and Reflections.” In Personal Theology: Essays in Honor of Neil Gillman, edited by William Plevan, 65–87. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2013. 51. “Toward a Theology of Empathy.” In Toward the Future: Essays in Catholic-Jewish Relations in Memory of Rabbi Leon Klenicki, edited by Celia Deutsch, A. James Rudin, and Eugene Fisher. Ramsey, NJ: Paulist Press, 2013. 52. “Wiesel in the Context of Neo-Hasidism.” In Elie Wiesel: Jewish, Literary, and Moral Perspectives, edited by Steven T. Katz and Alan Rosen, 51–58. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013. 53. “Foreword.” From the Depth of the Well, edited by Ariel Evan Mayse. New York: Paulist Press, 2014.

Journal Articles

54. “The Experience of Sinai.” Variant 4, no. 3 (1964). 55. “Notes from the Jewish Underground: Psychedelics and Kabbalah.” Response 2 (1968): 9–21. Reprinted in The New Jews, edited by James Sleeper and Alan Mintz, 176–92. New York: Vintage Books, 1971. 56. “Havurat Shalom: Mikhtav le-Haver Orthodoxi.” Petahim 13 (1970): 2–5 (Hebrew). 57. “After Itzik: Toward a Theology of Jewish Spirituality.” Worship (1971). Reprinted in The New Jews, edited by James Sleeper and Alan Mintz, 193–203 (New York: Vintage Books, 1971). 58. “The Children in Egypt and the Theophany at the Sea.” Judaism 24, no. 4 (1975): 446–56. 59. “The Role of Mysticism in a Contemporary Jewish Theology.” Conservative Judaism 30 (1976): 10–24. 262 select bibliography

60. “The Zaddiq as Axis Mundi in Later Judaism.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 45, no. 3 (1977): 327–47. 61. “On Translating Hasidic Homilies.” Prooftexts 3, no. 1 (1983): 63–72. 62. “Neo-Hasidism and Our Theological Struggles.” Ra’ayonot 4, no. 3 (1984): 11–17. 63. “Jewish Studies and Jewish Faith.” Tikkun 1, no. 1 (1986): 84–90. 64. “The Real Challenge of Orthodoxy.” Reconstructionist 52, no. 2 (1986): 11–15. 65. “Finding God in an Israel That Isn’t Zion: A Response to Arthur Cohen.” Sh’ma 17, no. 327 (February 6, 1987): 54–56. 66. Perush Shir ha-Shirim le-Rabbi Yisḥaq Ibn Sahula. Critical edition with introduction and notes. Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 6, nos. 3–4 (1987): 393–491 (Hebrew). 67. “Reconstructionists and Jewish Unity.” Reconstructionist 53, no. 1 (1987): 9–14. 68. “Scholarship Is Not Enough.” Tikkun 2, no. 3 (1987): 37–39. 69. “The Song of Songs in Early Jewish Mysticism.” Orim: A Jewish Journal at Yale 2, no. 2 (1987): 49–63. 70. “Judaism as a Spiritual Language: A Jewish Mysticism for Our Age.” Manna 19 (1988). 71. “Rethinking Theology: Language, Experience, and Reality.” Recon structionist 54, no. 1 (1988): 8–13, 30. 72. “Shared Homelessness.” Jewish Spectator 53, no. 1 (1988): 9–10. 73. “On Being a Jewish Leader.” Reconstructionist 55, no. 2 (1989): 21–22. 74. “Twin Centers: Sacred Space and Sacred Time in Judaism.” Recon structionist 55, no. 5 (1990): 16–22. 75. “Where We Stand: Contemporary Reconstructionism in Theory and Practice.” Reconstructionist 56, no. 1 (1990): 12–17. 76. “God, World, Person: A Jewish Theology of Creation, Parts 1 and 2.” Melton Journal 24 (Spring 1991): 4–7; Melton Journal 25 (Spring 1992): 4–5. Alternate version, Journal of Theology (Dayton) 96 (1992): 21–32. 77. “Speaking in Thunder.” Tikkun 6, no. 3 (1991). Reprinted in Tikkun: To Heal, Repair, and Transform the World: An Anthology, edited by Michael Lerner, 486–90. Oakland, CA: Tikkun Books, 1992. Revised reprint in Celebrating the Jewish Year: The Spring and Summer Holidays, edited by Paul Steinberg, 172–76. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2009. 78. “The Aleph-Bet of Creation: Jewish Mysticism for Beginners.” Tikkun 7, no. 4 (1992): 45–47, 72–73. 79. “The Problem of Evil.” Reconstructionist 57, no. 3 (1992): 15–20. 80. “A Conversation with Arthur Green.” Interview by William Novak. Kerem: Creative Explorations in Judaism (Spring 1995): 30–52. select bibliography 263

81. “What Do American Jews Believe?” Contribution to Commentary sym- posium. Commentary 102, no. 2 (1996): 42–43. 82. “A Kabbalah for the Environmental Age.” Tikkun 14, no. 5 (1999): 33–40. Revised reprint in Best Contemporary Jewish Writing, edited Michael Lerner, 115–26. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001. Reprinted in Judaism and Ecology: Created World and Revealed Word, edited by Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, 3–15. Cambridge, MA: Havard University Press, 2002. Revised reprint in Religion in a Secular City: Essays in Honor of Harvey Cox, edited by Arvind Sharma, 171–79. Harrisburg: Trinity, 2001. 83. “Shekhinah, the Virgin Mary, and the Song of Songs: Reflections on a Kabbalistic Symbol in Its Christian Context.” AJS Review 26, no. 1 (2002): 1–52. 84. (With Or Rose) “Theology on the Far Side of Myth.” Sh’ma 32, no. 586 (January 2002): 6–7. 85. “A Stronger Moral Force.” Sh’ma 32, no. 591 (May 2002): 11, 16. 86. “Judaism and Creation Theology.” Sh’ma 36, no. 626 (December 2005): 2–3. 87. “God!” European Judaism 39, no. 2 (2006): 83–100. 88. “A Lover’s Lament.” Tikkun 23, no. 3 (May–June 2008): 46–48. 89. “Abraham Joshua Heschel: Recasting Hasidism for Moderns.” Modern Judaism 29, no. 1 (2009): 62–79. 90. “National Repentance.” Tikkun 24, no. 1 (January–February 2009): 61. 91. “Hillel Zeitlin and Neo-Hasidic Readings of the Zohar.” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 22 (2010): 59–78. 92. “Around the Maggid’s Table: Tsaddik, Leadership, and Popularization in the Circle of Dov Baer of Miedzyrzec.” Zion 88, no. 1 (2013): 73–106 (Hebrew). English version in The Heart of the Matter. 93. “From Pew Will Come Forth Torah.” eJewish Philanthropy (October 23, 2013). http://ejewishphilanthropy.com/from-pew-will-come-forth-torah/. 94. “Hasidism and Its Response to Change.” Jewish History 27, no. 2–4 (2013): 319–36. 95. “Awakening the Heart.” Sh’ma 44, no. 708 (April 2014): 1–3, 14. 96. “Personal Theology.” Reform Jewish Quarterly (Spring 2014): 6–19.

Short Articles, Addresses, and Pamphlets

97. “Havurat Shalom: A Proposal.” In Contemporary Judaic Fellowship in Theory and in Practice, edited by Jacob Neusner, 149–54. New York: Ktav, 1972. 264 select bibliography

98. “Creating a Jewish Library.” The Jewish Catalogue, 225–33. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1973. 99. “Response to Richard Rubenstein.” Conservative Judaism 28 (1974): 26–32. 100. “A Contemporary Jewish Approach to Sexuality.” The Second Jewish Catalogue, 96–99. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1977. 101. “How to Be a Mensch.” The Third Jewish Catalogue, 390–96. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1980. 102. “Keeping Feminist Creativity Jewish.” Sh’ma 16, no. 305 (1986): 33–35. 103. “Inaugural Address” as President of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. November 5, 1987. Wyncote PA: Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, 1987. 104. “Judaism and Spirituality: A Jewish Mysticism for Our Age.” Brandeis University: Institute for Distinguished Community Leaders, Pro ceedings, 1987. 105. “L’Affaire Rushdie: A View from Judaism.” The Suburban (March 29, 1989). 106. “Is There Really a God?” In When Your Jewish Child Asks Why, edited by Kerry M. Olitzky, Steven M. Rosman, and David P. Kasakove, 44–46. Hoboken, New Jersey: Ktav Publishing House, Inc., 1993. 107. “New Directions in Jewish Theology in America.” The Third David W. Belin Lecture in American Jewish Affairs, 1993. Ann Arbor, MI: The Jean and Samuel Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, 1994. Reprinted in American Jewish Identity Politics, edited by Deborah Dash Moore, 207–17. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2008. 108. “Judaism for the Post-Modern Era.” The Samuel Goldenson Lecture, 1994. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1995. 109. “Restoring the Aleph: Judaism for the Contemporary Seeker.” CIJE Lecture Series. New York: Council for Initiatives in Jewish Education, 1996. 110. “Mumar la-Ḥofesh: Siḥah ‘im Professor Arthur Green.” Interview by Ohad Ezrahi. Hayyim Aherim 36 (1999) (Hebrew). 111. Contribution to A Dream of Zion: American Jews Reflect on Why Israel Matters to Them, edited by Jeffery K. Salkin, 151–53. Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2007. 112. “These Are the Journeys: Tales of Our Wandering. Reflections on Parashat Massa’ey.” In A Modern Mens’ Torah Commentary, edited by Jeffrey Salkin, 247–50. Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2009. 113. “Kabbala for the Massses, or Money for Magic.” Haaretz (September 30, 2013). select bibliography 265

Book Reviews

114. “The Continuing Redemption of Rabbi Nahman.” Review-essay of J. Weiss, Mehqarim be-Hasidut Bratslav. Conservative Judaism 29 (1975): 97–101. 115. Review of Gates of Light by R. Joseph Gikatilla, English translation by Avi Weinstein. Journal of Hebrew Studies 36 (1995): 235–37. 116. “Kabbalistic Re-Vision: A Review Article of Elliot Wolfson’s Through a Speculum That Shines.” History of Religions 36, no. 3 (1997): 265–74. 117. Review of Moshe Idel, Hasidism: Between Ecstasy and Magic. Journal of Religion 77, no. 1 (1997): 190–92. 118. Reply to Alon Goshen-Gottstein, reviewing Keter: The Crown of God in Early Jewish Mysticism. Kabbalah 5 (2000): 201–6. 119. Review of Moshe Rosman, Founder of Hasidism: A Quest for the Historical Ba’al Shem Tov. History of Religions 40, no. 2 (2000): 185–87. 120. “The Sin of the Church.” Review-essay of James Carroll’s Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews. Tikkun 16, no. 3 (2001): 65–72.