The Rabbinical Dialogue Begins!

A while back I mentioned that I would soon begin a dialogue on this blog with an Orthodox rabbi.  The day has arrived to share our first exchange.

My dialogue partner is Rabbi Frederick Klein, Director of Community Chaplaincy at the Greater Miami Jewish Federation and Executive Vice President of the Rabbinical Association of Greater Miami.  He holds an advanced degree in philosophy from Columbia University and was ordained at Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary of Yeshiva University. I am not going to say much more by way of introduction because I would rather allow him to speak for himself.   I have known Fred for several years and during that time I have developed a great deal of respect and affection for him.

I am looking forward to a great dialogue.  I would also like to really encourage readers of these posts to jump in with their comments.

Letter #1

Dear Fred,

First of all, I want to thank you for your openness – and even enthusiasm – about the idea of engaging with me in a dialogue for my blog.  When you first called me about my blog, undoubtedly drawn to it by the “controversial” title, I was a bit defensive.  I recall saying that I wasn’t really writing it for people with your point of view.  You in turn pointed out, and I’m paraphrasing, if it’s on the world wide web, the whole wide world will see it!

This planted in me the idea to invite you to this dialogue and, in the wake of a couple of meetings that we had, I agreed with you that it was a good idea to use a book as a jumping off point.  You suggested Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God and, I am happy to say, I have now read and digested the book.  So here goes.

I guess my first question is also the most obvious question and I am not alone in this.  To put it bluntly, why in the world would an Orthodox rabbi recommend this book?  While it is true that Wright has aligned himself with those who claim that a God-idea of some kind is a positive thing, it’s no ringing endorsement.  It’s more like the old Jewish fellow who shrugs his shoulders and says, “It couldn’t hurt.”

Yet on the whole, the book fully embraces the secular humanistic claim that God is the invention of humanity.  The first major section of the book touches upon most major items revealed by biblical and archeological scholarship about early Israelite belief systems.  This includes the widely accepted idea (except by your Orthodox colleagues) that the Israelites were polytheists.

What follows is a well organized and delivered, but by no means original, survey of the development of monotheism.  He traces it from its polytheistic roots through to its monolatrous period and right up to monotheism.  Paralleling this is an examination of some key texts from the Tanakh that emphasize and give support to his presentation.  The text is never treated as any kind of divine record.  It’s historical claims are largely called into question.  And when the text’s historical claims are given some credence, it is with the caveat that they are highly tendentious.

Along the way he presents some slightly less modern views, such as those of Kaufman and Albright.  Even their conclusions, though now largely superseded by more recent discoveries, come nowhere close to anything that I have ever heard in the Orthodox world.  And when he begins to track the specific development of Yahweh (the term he uses for the God your peers generally call “Hashem”) I could only imagine the responses of faculty members at your alma mater, Yeshiva University.

It is accurate to say that my exposure to the Orthodox rabbinate is somewhat limited.  But it is not non-existent.  I have engaged in many discussions with Orthodox rabbis over the years.  As you know, my own daughters were educated in Orthodox girls’ schools.  Not only were they never exposed to contemporary biblical scholarship, they were taught that the earth is 6,000 years young.

Though I have had a sense of you as a much more liberal (my term) version of an Orthodox rabbi – even a Modern Orthodox rabbi – I can’t venture a guess as to how much of the contemporary academic approach you have previously studied.  In my case, nothing in Wright’s presentation of this material was new.  I have spent many years studying Israelite and biblical origins.  I’ve followed the debates closely and have read everything from Dever to Kugel to Friedman.  In my alma mater, the Hebrew Union College, we were deliberately exposed to this approach.

Having now taken up several paragraphs with my first question about why you recommended this book, here are some follow-ups:

To what extent does the (fairly standard academic) story told by Wright reflect your convictions?  If they do accurately reflect your worldview, at least when it comes to the human authorship of scriptures and the evolution of a God-idea, how do you reconcile this with Orthodoxy?  These questions should give me and my blog readers a much better sense of your commitments so you and I can continue the dialogue as two individuals and not merely representatives (or caricatures) of one movement or another.

I have many, many other questions but I will restrain myself until you have had a chance to reply.  I also hope – and know! – that as we go along you, too, will take the opportunity (I know you will!) to challenge my convictions.  That’s when we’ll be in the meat of this discussion.

I greatly anticipate your response and look forward to a stimulating dialogue.

Sincerely,

Jeff

Reply to Letter #1

Shalom Jeff,

I am happy and honored to be engaged in a dialogue with you.   However,  I prefer not to frame our conversation as an ‘atheist’ versus and ‘Orthodox’ Jew.  I say that because I believe both terms are loaded terms.  I engage you in this conversation not to ‘respond’ or ‘defend the faith’.  Indeed, I do not believe I will be able to convince anyone who is truly convinced of their truths.  Rather, I will try to demonstrate that religious people can be thinking and sensitive individuals as well.  They are not the mullahs, fire-and-brimstone preachers, or crazy rabbis that the media may have us believe.  Those are easy targets of ridicule, and you do not need to be an atheist to be concerned by them.

Before I address your questions, I would like to address what it means to be modern.  What do you and I mean when we say we are modern?  Well, I guess I cannot speak for you, but I will at least speak for myself.

As you know, Jeff, I work for the Jewish Federation and I am a chaplain.  But many do not know that I spent serious years in rabbinical school and graduate school in an active struggle to work out what it means to be a theistic person in a modern age.  Now I cannot vouch for what other people claim in the name of “Orthodoxy” or “Torah- true” Judaism.  These terms themselves, are products of modernity, as are the terms Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist.  All will be superseded eventually by other terms, and then people will say that the rabbis of the Torah — no Moshe Rabbeinu himself! — were exactly like them.  Such is the way of collective memory, and this is where our story begins.

I would like to begin my conversation with a dialogue I had once with the late Yosef Yerushalmi at Columbia University.  For your readers who do not know, Yerushalmi was one of the seminal Jewish historians in America, and his fundamental essay, Zakhor, is one of the most perceptive works on how Jews perceive the past.

For Yerushalmi, the rise of critical historiography in the nineteenth century created a crisis in Jewish self-definition.  (Actually, as you know Jeff, the first real Biblical critique is Spinoza, centuries earlier, but it took a while to catch on.  Science turned to everything else first, and finally turned towards religion.)  For the first time, the sacred narrative that Jews told about themselves and the collective memories associated with them were challenged by the historical craft, which far from looking at patterns in history, looks to the accidental and contextual.

Modernity has therefore had two major ruptures regarding the Jewish community.  The fragmentation of community and authority with the rise of Jewish emancipation reduced the collective sense of identity with one’s fellow Jews.  The Jewish community in general and the rabbis in particular lost their authority as Jews in Western Europe were granted citizenship throughout the nineteenth century.

However, the second rupture is even more fundamental.  Out sacred narratives have been ruptured.  Let’s see how this goes: if God is a construct, than a construct did not give the Torah, and if the Torah was not given, than indeed we are not a chosen nation, and if we are not a chosen nation, we have not been charged with anything — at least in any transcendent sense, and if this is true, then history is not the stage for the unfolding of the divine history, and if so there will be no return to Jerusalem — at least in the utopian way people think about returning to Jerusalem.  In essence, the Passover haggadah, which I have just formulated, is a myth, and here by myth I mean an invention.

You — like many existentialists — have decided to stoically accept this reality.  While Reconstructionist Jews have tried to reread and salvage the tradition, you have decided to just completely throw out the entire model.

Now we cannot go into all the reasons in my first response to you as to why I believe the belief in God is critical, but suffice it to say at least for our purposes at this second, most people are not philosophers like you.  Most need the sacred narrative, because they provide meaning, normative purpose and direction.  In fact, I personally believe that religious thinking is intrinsic as to how we operate as human beings, as Wright (somewhat) proposes.

I know this answer will not be satisfactory for you, nor would it be for me, because I really believe there is something “out there”, but from an educational standpoint you start where people are.  Maimonides knew this, and therefore wrote different things for different audiences, and had a clear educational theory as to how one educates about God.  (See Hartman’s book on Maimonides and the Philosophical Quest.)

So getting back to Yerushalmi….  I am sitting with him, and he tells me about an ultra-Orthodox graduate student from Brooklyn, who is studying medieval Jewish history with him.  Yerushalmi tells me he gave a lecture on Kabbalah and stated that the work is a thirteenth century work composed by Moshe de Leon. Of course, in sacred memory, it is attributed to the second century Tanna, Rabbi Shimon Bar Yohai. The student confronted him with this fact, and Yerushalmi of course told him about the notion of writing under a pseudonym.  The next week, Yerushalmi asks him what he concluded. “Second century in Brooklyn, 13th century at Columbia University.” Yerushalmi felt that to be intellectually dishonest, but I disagreed with him. Things can be true if one is aware of the frame of reference they are using.  I am willing to stand in a tension, straddling the fence between belief and disbelief, because I believe neither history nor religion has the complete explanatory power to frame who I am at this moment in time.

As I have mentioned, the collective frameworks, the realm of “metaphysics” of our universe has collapsed in the modern era. The world has become to a great extent, disenchanted, although the very human need to connect to a higher power, a greater universe, has not.  For me and billions of people, religion is a framework that helps address their ultimate questions of meaning, in a world that is changing too fast.  The fundamentalism that we see today partly grows out of this “disorientation of the self” in modernity, and a desperate attempt to hold on to models that will change.

Your experience with people who say things you believe are absurd — and I may as well — may reflect your impatience with the inability of certain people to “catch up” and “get on the same page.”  As far as I can see, the scientific narrative, while providing considerable explanatory power, has not provided for the vast majority of people answers to the most fundamental questions people ask — “Why am I here?  What is my purpose?”  What makes us human beings is not just our intelligence, and that our IQs are higher, but as far as we know, we are the only creatures that actually reflect on the given that we exist at all.

That wonderment of being, points to a real God I do believe in.  Like Heschel and Rudolph Otto, I believe the path to God begins with the sense of wonder.  So while I may agree with Wrights argument that the Divine evolves over generations, I do not reduce the relevance of religious experience, even if culturally mediated.

On this, Wright has nothing to say, nor do I expect him to say it.  He is like Freud, when in his “Future of an Illusion,” refuses to accept when his friend has had a mystical “oceanic” experience, because he himself has not experienced this, and therefore attributes this to a delusion.  By definition (in the words of the sociologist and philosopher Peter Berger) a scientist must be a dogmatic atheist.  If not it is not science — it may have explanatory power, but not in a scientific sense.  If one views the world as devoid of divinity, they will not find it, even if confronted by the splitting of the Red Sea.

I look forward to your response.  Shalom Chaver.

-Fred