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The Formation of a Humanist an Interview with Leon Wieseltier Celeste Marcus Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders a (Trans-Pacifc) Partnership Jonathan Deluty

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The Formation of a Humanist an Interview with Leon Wieseltier Celeste Marcus Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders a (Trans-Pacifc) Partnership Jonathan Deluty The Formation of a Humanist An interview with Leon Wieseltier Celeste Marcus Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders A (trans-Pacifc) partnership Jonathan Deluty Practice Doesn’t Always Make a Perfect Jew The cost of favoring law over values Naomi Kadish Fall 2016 tv Our Mission ”כי עמך מקור חיים, באורך נראה אור:“ תהילים, לו:י “For with You is the source of life; in Your light shall we see light (OR).” Psalms, 36:10 “The prison-house is the world of sight, the light of the fre is the sun……. the journey upwards is the ascent of the soul into the intellectual world” Plato, The Republic OR is dedicated to rigorous intellectual discourse without which life is shallow and im- poverished. Our core values are the commitment that Jewish texts, which animate the Jewish soul and mind, are troves of virtue and wisdom; Zionism; reverence for the American project; diversity of people, views, and beliefs; and civility. OR grapples with the ideas, texts and minds that deal seriously with the complexities of human existence. Its contributors, editors and readership believe these texts equip us with the knowledge to engage in and with contemporary political and philosophical battles, the history that created those battles, and the texts that catalyzed and invigorate them. Cover Design by Evan Risch Anonymous Baroque bust of Seneca, Museo del Prado (Photograph courtesy of Jean-Pol Grandmont) OR Judaism, Philosophy, Politics, and Culture Vol. 1 No. 1, Fall 2016 2 The Formation of a Humanist Celeste An Interview with Leon Wieseltier Marcus 7 Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders Jonathan A (trans-Pacifc) partnership Deluty 12 Practice Doesn’t Always Make a Perfect Jew Naomi The cost of favoring law over values Kadish 14 Divine Devotion Eliana Song of Songs and the Tiruppavai Kahan 17 What We May Lose Aaron Utilitarianism gets it right the wrong way Wolff 20 And Then We Got to College Celeste Three vignettes of spiritual evolution Marcus 24 Break the Boxes Albert Kierkegaard and Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik on why we oughtn’t Kohn compartmentalize religion 27 Worlds Apart? Ben Asher Weiss and Modern Psychotherapy Notis 31 How the West is One Tal Refections on the Orlando Shooting Fortgang orjournal.net The Formation of a Humanist An interview with Leon Wieseltier Celeste Marcus EON WIESELTIER served as the literary editor of Permission was benefcently granted. My stroke of LThe New Republic from 1983 to 2014. He is the good luck was that I chose a course on the Preso- author of Kaddish, an internationally acclaimed book cratics taught by a certain Hans Jonas. I did not and a National Book Award Finalist. Mr. Wieseltier know that he was one of the greatest intellectuals now serves as the Isaiah Berlin Senior Fellow in Cul- of the 20th century, and also a great scholar in the ture and policy at the Brookings Institution. history of religion, and also a really exemplary Zi- onist. He had been Heidegger’s student and then Who were the frst people who made impressions one of Heidegger’s most formidable opponents in on you intellectually? I remember vividly the frst philosophy. After the war he went to Palestine, person to tell me about philosophy. It happened and while the other Jewish thinkers were arguing in a deli in Brighton Beach. The deli was owned by about ideology and history and nationalism and Mr. Haber, who was a Holocaust survivor like my binationalism Jonas volunteered to serve in a vari- parents, and an uncommonly sweet man. In the ety of armies, British and Jewish, to fght the Nazis deli there was a man who ran the cheese counter. and then to defend the yishuv. This was a philos- He stood behind these big bricks of cheese and he opher who picked up a gun -- a hero. Of course, would run a terrifying wire run through them as back in 1969, I’d never heard of him. But his class if he was garroting the cheese. He told me that he changed me forever. I can still hear him discoursing had been a graduate student in philosophy at the on Anaxagoras and Heraclitus and Parmenides. University of Warsaw when the war broke out. He was so charismatic in the quiet authority of his Like all the people I grew up around, he was com- knowledge. He turned me on once and for all to pletely displaced by the war and never had the oc- philosophy. He was the frst humanist mind I ever casion to realize his aspirations. So he would stand encountered. (Decades later we struck up a friend- there and cut the muenster cheese and the Amer- ship. He much enjoyed my story of the Brooklyn ican cheese into exquisitely thin slices, and as the boy in a yarmulke who sat at his feet.) So it was wire went up and down he began to teach me about Hans Jonas and The Cheese Man to whom I attri- the history of philosophy. It was the frst time I bute my narcotic addiction to philosophical ideas. ever heard the names Descartes, Kant, and Hegel. And then you arrived at college and continued How old were you? Old enough for my mother to nurse your addiction. I got to college in the to send me to the deli on my own. Fourteen or so. fall of 1970 and I was unbelievably fortunate in the And a few years later something truly marvelous professors and the graduate students who taught happened. I was a senior at the Yeshiva Flatbush me. An extraordinary graduate student named and I was, well, bored. I approached my beloved Don Scarfe was my teacher for Columbia’s core principal, Rabbi David Eliach – he was mori v’rabi course Contemporary Civilization, which is basi- then and he still is today – for permission to take cally philosophy and politics from Plato to NATO. courses in philosophy at the New School for So- Don was a prodigy in the Political Science depart- cial Research, just a half hour away on the subway. ment and he made every single sentence exciting. 2 OR Journal That course gave me a confdence that I have to And he knew how to show students what he saw? this day. When you have been through the founda- He certainly did. I was told, for example, about his tions, you feel like a person who has been through way of teaching Mondrian. He would take a repro- the foundations. Not that once is enough; but once duction of a Mondrian painting, cut it up into its is a lot. various constituent rectangles, and then show the Did you have an intellectual community in col- class how it was that, of the possible combinations lege? With my teachers I did. They were very gen- of the elements, it was the combination that Mon- erous to me. I fnished my philosophy major in drian chose for his canvas that offered the greatest two years and then launched into the study of art coherence and the greatest aesthetic satisfaction. history. My mentor, as we would say now, was So art and philosophy? And literature. In my Meyer Schapiro, one of the great art historians of senior year I studied a lot of modern literature. the twentieth century, a terrifyingly learned man. When Lionel Trilling announced a course on Aus- But what I remember even more than his erudition ten I showed up. So did a thousand other people, was his magical eyes. He saw things that others so he announced that he would restrict attendance did not see but were – when he showed them to to English majors and graduate students in En- you – plainly there. glish, neither of which I was. But I was not to be He taught you how to see? He did. And also the denied – my humility as a student was mixed with importance of a visual memory. In one of our tu- a certain degree of chutzpah – so I knocked on torials he drew the west façade of Chartres on the the door of his offce in Hamilton Hall. “Professor back of an envelope! I met him when I participated Trilling, I was at the course this morning and I’d in his seminar on the sociology of art. (He could really like-” “There’s no way”, he told me. Then he have announced a seminar on the Manhattan asked me to sit down and tell him about myself. phonebook and I would have signed up for it.) At the end of forty minutes of rather intense con- What is a course on the sociology of art about? versation, he said: “I have an idea. I just published Basically, it examined the social and economic con- a book called Sincerity and Authenticity and I am ditions for works and styles and grappled with the not yet through in my own mind with the writers question of how much those settings do or do not I discuss there [Diderot, Rousseau, Austen, Hegel, explain about aesthetic creation and experience. In others]. Would you agree to a tutorial in which those days this meant confronting the Marxist his- you read them with me?” Again, student heave, tory of art. Schapiro was himself the rare Marxist “Yes, sir. I would”. And as I got up to leave he who never reduced art to sociology or economics. said, pointing to my yarmulke: “Please forgive me His pure delight in form was evident and infectious. for asking this, but what’s a brilliant young man Did he let you come to your own conclusions such as yourself doing with that on your head?” about that thesis? Completely.
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