Eugene B. Borowitz: Rethinking God and Ethics : Rethinking God and Ethics [1 ed.] 9789004269996, 9789004267565

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Eugene B. Borowitz

Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers Editor-in-Chief

Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, Arizona State University Editor

Aaron W. Hughes, University of Rochester

Volume 4

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/lcjp

Eugene B. Borowitz Rethinking God and Ethics Edited by

Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron W. Hughes

Leiden • boston 2014

Cover illustration: Courtesy of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. The series Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers was generously supported by the Baron Foundation. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Eugene B. Borowitz : rethinking God and ethics / edited by Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron W. Hughes.   pages cm. — (Library of contemporary Jewish philosophers, ISSN 2213-6010 ; volume 4)  Includes bibliographical references.  ISBN 978-90-04-26756-5 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-26998-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-26999-6 (e-book) 1. Borowitz, Eugene B.—Philosophy. 2. Judaism—21st century. 3. Judaism—Doctrines. 4. God (Judaism) 5. Jewish ethics. 6. Reform Judaism—United States. I. Tirosh-Samuelson, Hava, 1950– editor of compilation. II. Hughes, Aaron W., 1968– editor of compilation.  BM755.B624E94 2014  296.3092—dc23

2013050815

This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 2213-6010 ISBN 978-90-04-26756-5 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-26999-6 (e-book) This hardback is also published in paperback under ISBN 978-90-04-26998-9. Copyright 2014 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Global Oriental, and Hotei ­Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Contents Editors’ Introduction to Series ..................................................................... vii Eugene B. Borowitz: An Intellectual Portrait .......................................... 1  Michael L. Morgan Why I Am a Theologian Rather Than a Philosopher ........................... 37 The Jewish Need for Theology ..................................................................... 41 Through the Shadowed Valley ..................................................................... 51 The Autonomous Jewish Self ....................................................................... 71 ‘Im ba’et, eyma—Since You Object, Let Me Put It This Way ............. 91 Editors’ Interview with Eugene B. Borowitz ............................................ 115  Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron W. Hughes Select Bibliography .......................................................................................... 139

Editors’ Introduction to Series It is customary to begin studies devoted to the topic of Jewish philosophy defining what exactly this term, concept, or even discipline is. We tend not to speak of Jewish mathematics, Jewish physics, or Jewish sociology, 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 Jewish key in order to articulate or clarify particular issues that have direct 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, Culture, and Religion, ed. Louis Finkelstein (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 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.

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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 it 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 even practical concerns in mind. This usually translates into the notion that 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).

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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 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 Contemporary Jewish Philosophers will bear this out. The truths of Judaism 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 abnegates the concept. On Maimonides on prophecy, see Howard Kreisel, Prophecy: The History of an Idea in Medieval Jewish Philosophy (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001), 148–56.

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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 practiced 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, Jewish philosophy as an academic discourse is quite distinct from Jewish    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.

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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 nonJews 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 Anglo-American departments of philosophy) have denied the philosophical merits 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 The purpose of the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers is not only to dispel misperceptions about Jewish philosophy but also to 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.

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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 momentous 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 Philosophy 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, obscuring 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 simultaneously records Jewish philosophical activity and demonstrates its creativity both as a constructive discourse as well as an academic field.

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As an educational project, the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers 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, listing books, articles, book chapters, book reviews, 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.

Eugene B. Borowitz: An Intellectual Portrait Michael L. Morgan For over sixty years, Eugene B. Borowitz has been engaged in the project of understanding modern Jewish existence. This is the task of Jewish theology, and for Borowitz it has been his lifelong task to develop a Jewish theology for the non-Orthodox Jew in the world of late-twentieth-century Jewish life. Borowitz explicitly denies being a philosopher, although his work exhibits an extensive familiarity with the tradition of Western philosophy, nor is he a sociologist or historian, although his writings abound with sociological observations and historical knowledge of modernity and especially of Judaism in its encounter with modernity. He is a rabbi, a teacher of rabbis, an educator, and a theologian, and for much of his career he has been a spokesperson for Reform Judaism in particular and for what he calls “non-Orthodox” Judaism in general.1 In over twenty books and hundreds of essays and articles, he has sought to speak to this audience about its primary responsibilities and to frame for it a portrait of self-understanding which would serve to provoke it to revitalization and renewal. Borowitz’s writing is marked by candor, directness, and accessibility. He avoids jargon, and always has in mind his audience, his readers, and the world in which they live. His style, to my ear, is almost conversational; for Borowitz, writing is less presentation than it is dialogue. This dialogical tone, moreover, is no accident. Probably Borowitz’s deepest intellectual debt is to Martin Buber, and while his thinking exhibits a selective appropriation of Buber’s complex and varied legacy, Borowitz has learned many lessons from Buber, and one concerns the fact that writing, like speaking, is an interpersonal encounter. When he speaks, Borowitz speaks to the reader, and in addition he speaks in a way that is relatively unadorned and accessible.

1 In a response to Elliot Dorff, Borowitz vigorously denies that he is a “Reform ideologue.” His audience, he argues, is much broader: “For over three decades I have addressed myself to and written about that overwhelming mass of modernized Jews who, regardless of labels, exercise the right to make up their own minds about what they will believe and do as Jews.” See “Five Letters to Readers of Renewing the Covenant,” in Eugene B. Borowitz, Judaism after Modernity (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1999), 182–83. See also “’Im ba’et, eyma—Since You Object, Let Me Put It This Way,” in Reviewing the Covenant, ed. Peter Ochs (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000), 148, and republished in this volume.

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No thinker who has written about Jewish life and ideas is any more direct, organized, and uninflated than Borowitz and for good reason. Borowitz is a teacher and an educator. He thinks not only about what he is saying but also, preeminently, about to whom he is saying it and why. By and large, he is speaking to nonprofessionals, nonacademics, lay people, everyday congregants—educated ones, to be sure—and people who have read and who are interested in Jewish life and today’s world. And his purpose in writing or in talking to and for them is largely persuasive. Borowitz has worked out for himself and for them a portrait of what non-Orthodox Jewish life ought to be, and he wants them to understand his portrait, accept it, and then join him in enacting the imperatives, the directives that occur within it. For Borowitz, then, teaching rabbis and Jews is about exploring what Judaism means for those of us who live in contemporary North America, in the Diaspora, and to motivate them to take that understanding seriously, to act on it. Against the background of this conception of his theological goals and his educational purposes, Borowitz tailors his writing and his speech. Much of the time, that writing and that speech will seem clear and unambiguous, although I am not sure that it is always without its nuance and complexity, but all of the time it has the qualities listed above—it is direct and accessible and uncomplicated by jargon or overindulgence. Borowitz began his career in the years following World War II and the destruction of European Jewry that was part of it. As he came to believe, the Jew in modern, postwar America was engulfed in a world in which moral foundations had been undermined and in which religious conviction was deteriorating. He sought intellectual, moral, and religious security, and the Judaism around him, to which he was committed, seemed to provide none of these. In many essays in his early years, this sense of despair and frustration expresses itself. To him, Judaism needed a real God for Jews to engage with, and it could not rely on science, rationality, and intellectual accomplishments to understand that God or make a case for the Jew’s engagement with the divine. Nor could Jews do without such a real God, if morality and moral ideals and purposes were to have a secure, unconditional foundation and not be subject to changing circumstances or power relations or differences of point of view. And after the Holocaust, the horrific events so vividly exposed after the war ended, how could one go on without such a sense of moral confidence? And hence how could Judaism go on without a vivid and compelling understanding of how a real God provided that confidence? Borowitz’s years at the Hebrew Union College in the late 1940s involved an ongoing conversation with his two closest friends: Arnold Wolf, who like

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Borowitz was an American kid trying to figure out what Jewish life was all about, and Steven Schwarzschild, the German-born refugee whose roots were deep in European Jewish life and in its turmoils as well as in European philosophy. With these friends, Borowitz talked, argued, and matured, and from that dialogical crucible, rather than from his teachers, he became committed to a new language and to a new direction.2 The new direction was provided in particular by Martin Buber and the new language by the European existentialism that was then, in the postwar years, finding its way into North American culture. These twin influences, Buber and European existentialism, provided the young Borowitz with several insights and themes that became central for his understanding of Jewish life in the modern world. One is the importance of a real God for Jewish existence. Another is the way in which living with God should be conceived as a relationship, what traditionally is referred to as a b’rit (covenant). A third insight is that any serious account of human existence must be grounded in and enriched by the particularity of how the individual lives; such an account should begin with the particularity or distinctiveness of Jewish life and only touch on the universal when it arises from that very particularized setting. And finally, central to any understanding of Jewish life is the self or person, and since that self or person is a Jew, one will have to understand what it means to be a Jewish self or a Jewish person. Who is such a person? What does she think? How does she act? What is or should be important to her? What makes her the person that she is, a modern Jew? At the early stages of his thinking, Borowitz followed the dominant tendency of postwar intellectual culture; he focused on the individual and on the individual’s self-determination or, as he called it, her autonomy. Typically, when referring to this autonomy, Borowitz explained that what

2 Wolf would go on to become one of the most engaged, thoughtful, and impressive congregational rabbis of his generation. He served congregations in Chicago and was for many years the Hillel director at Yale University. For a sample of his writings, see Jonathan S. Wolf, ed., Unfinished Rabbi: Selected Writings of Arnold Jacob Wolf (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1998), with a forward by Eugene B. Borowitz; Wolf also edited the important collection of essays by the new theologians in Rediscovering Judaism (Chicago: Quadrangle Press, 1965). Schwarzschild served several pulpits and then in 1965 took a position teaching philosophy and Judaic Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. He published widely in philosophy and Jewish philosophy and became his generation’s foremost student of Hermann Cohen. He also, from 1961 to 1969, served as editor of the journal Judaism, an influential Jewish intellectual journal founded in the 1950s. For a selection of his writings, see Menachem Kellner, ed., The Pursuit of the Ideal: Jewish Writings of Steven Schwarzschild (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990).

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he had in mind was the ability to think and decide for oneself. In Jewish life, this meant for him that the serious non-Orthodox or liberal Jew is someone who thinks for him- or herself and who decides what to do in their Jewish lives for him- or herself. This feature of the liberal Jewish self was central to what made such a person liberal and non-Orthodox. Traditional views about the authority of Jewish law (halakha) could not be imported into Borowitz’s conception of non-Orthodox Jewish life. Exactly why and exactly what this means is something we will consider shortly. That it is a central feature of his early view of the Jewish self is undeniable. Existentialism in postwar America was not a simple or clearly defined intellectual or cultural trend. In 1960, when I was a high school senior, a college friend gave me Walter Kaufmann’s Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre with the advice that by reading and studying its contents I would be introduced to the most exciting intellectual thinking of the day. And when, as a college freshman, I chose a philosophy course that began with Søren Kierkegaard and Edmund Husserl and moved on to Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre, I felt that I was becoming initiated into the most important intellectual developments at the most serious level. But existentialism was a complicated, multifaceted phenomenon. It involved focusing on the individual’s particular existence and on the whole person, on that person’s freedom, and on the centrality of decision and deed. It also involved an awareness of what followed from the centrality of such decision for the individual, how much depended upon it, the responsibility that came with it, and the anxiety or dread that cast its shadow over human existence in all its finitude. In postwar America, one learned about this cultural trend by reading Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, and Samuel Beckett as much as by studying Heidegger and Sartre. Furthermore, its tense, desperate, and pessimistic tone raised the issue of existentialism’s relation to religious life. The historical development from Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky, both of whom had powerful religious sensibilities, to Heidegger and Sartre, who were avowedly atheist, might have seemed a natural and beneficial one. That is, many might have seen mature existentialism as radically torn from transcendence. For Borowitz, this was not so. He always believed that the deepest and most advantageous strands of existential thinking could be found among those for whom religion and religious life were central—from Kierkegaard to Karl Barth, Rudolph Bultmann, and Paul Tillich, including importantly two of his central Jewish forbearers, Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig. I would characterize Borowitz not as a scholar of religious existentialism, even though he did write an introduction to it for lay persons; rather

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he was a consumer, an appropriator, and a fellow traveler. Religious existentialism was not a subject matter for Borowitz; it provided him with a vocabulary, an orientation, and several crucial themes. He did not so much examine existentialist works as read them selectively and learn from them, and one of the things that he learned, especially from Buber, is the fundamental importance of relationship to the individual’s life. This insight is not about how having relationships is important to living a rich and flourishing life. It is about how human existence itself is relational. When Borowitz turns to Buber, especially in those early years of the 1950s and 1960s, he regularly comments that Buber teaches us that we are related to one another in two ways, as things and as whole persons.3 The tone of such a statement suggests that what Borowitz is pointing to is the idea that our relationships with others can be either superficial, manipulative, and instrumental, on the one hand, or deep and rich, on the other. And I do not want to deny that there is an element of such evaluation or discrimination in Borowitz’s claim. But more deeply he shows that he has accepted what is fundamental to Buber and not to him alone, that as selves or persons we are not fundamentally isolated atoms or encased egos, waiting to be related to worldly objects and other selves. Rather we are primordially and originally related to the items in our world and especially to the persons with whom we live in it. We are fundamentally relational as the human beings that we are. Because this is so, because as human beings we are fundamentally relational beings, Borowitz believes that Buber’s claim about how we “know” God in our lives, that is, as a distinctive kind of I-Thou, in powerfully intimate moments of relationship, comes as a natural development. There is no question that if God is real in the lives of Jews, that presence must be understood as a mode of relationship. And from Buber, Borowitz learns not only that this mode of relationship is deep and powerful, affecting, a “presence as strength,” but he also learns that this relationship is noncognitive. Borowitz takes existentialism in general and Buber in particular to belie the narrowness of too great a reliance upon human rationality, especially when it comes to understanding what it is to live a human life. And what existentialism teaches about the fullness and emotional richness of human existence in general, Buber teaches about our personal human relationships and also about our very special relationship with God. This is part

3 See, for example, Eugene B. Borowitz, “The Idea of God” (1957), in Studies in the Meaning of Judaism (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2002), 43–44.

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of what Borowitz means, I think, when he says that what the modern Jew needs is a “real” God. She needs a god that is more than the object of thinking, more than a subject for rational identification and analysis. The God of the tradition of Western philosophy simply will not do, if we are to make sense of modern Jewish life. If it is to mean something, to support a life of prayer and Jewish conduct, the Jew’s relationship with God cannot be an exclusively rational one. The relationship with God is like the deep and rich relationships we sometimes have with other persons, ones like a very serious friendship or most of all like that we have with someone we love. Borowitz finds that in order to communicate Buber’s technical themes to a nonacademic audience, it is helpful to use these everyday cases and to exploit them. They are pedagogically very useful, but he also believes, I think, that they are more than just useful. They convey the core of Buber’s insight, that the events of divine-human encounter that Buber speaks of are akin to moments that initiate or punctuate these deep human relationships. If Jewish life has weight or normative force, and if its practices are to be responses to something and to some authority, it is because this force and this authority arises within a determinative divine-human relationship, just as lovers act toward one another in ways that their love calls upon them to act. Moreover, in Judaism, there is a vocabulary for the ongoing relationship with God that can be glossed by characterizing it, to some degree, as one of friendship or love, and that of course is the idea of the Covenant. This legal or quasi-legal expression, originally political and legal in meaning, can now, in a world in which our attention to the individual and to self-determination is central, be reconceived as a relationship of interpersonal love and its ongoing formalization—say as marriage or something akin to it. If the modern Jewish life of non-Orthodox Jews is marked by a significant degree of self-determination and hence self-responsibility, and if at the same time that life is one involved with God and hence is Covenantal, there are certainly questions that arise regarding what contribution the individual Jew makes and what contribution God makes to the deliberations, the decisions, and the actions that make up Jewish life. Borowitz frequently points out that any plausible account will appreciate how much human initiative and human determination must be involved in any clarification of modern Jewish life and what “duties” provide its normative structure. God must play some role, but so must the autonomous individual. Without God, there is no confidence and unconditional security about what Jewish

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life is and how it fits into some picture of human history; without individual autonomy, there is no reason to think that the modern Jew will regularly find any particular “duty” compelling or even worthwhile. In a famous paper of 1961, “Crisis Theology and the Jewish Community,” Borowitz identified the theological movement in Judaism that dated from about 1950 and involved the appropriation of existentialism for the development of Jewish theology, and he called it “Covenant Theology.” As he saw it, this was a wholly nonparochial intellectual development drawing its members from many diverse Jewish backgrounds and dispositions. Moreover, from his point of view, it was the most exciting new development in Jewish theology of the postwar period. It is not inaccurate, I think, to say that Borowitz became, if he was not already, one of its premier advocates. Moreover, I think that the centrality of the Covenantal vocabulary to his conception of modern Jewish life was undisturbed and unchanged, even when, in the 1980s and through the 1990s, his thinking underwent significant developments. Details aside, at least for the moment, we can best understand these developments as refinements in his conception of the modern Jewish self or the modern Jewish person, and it was just such a self that participated in the Covenant. In particular, he comes to a richer appreciation of the relational character of that self and especially the particularity of it, the way in which the Jewish self is situated essentially in a particular community, the people of Israel. There are times when he expresses the complexity of this nexus by writing of the Jewish self as “I (in Israel with God),” and this way of putting it does make utterly perspicuous the self’s features. It is a form of agency that must be viewed from the first person; it involves thinking and acting by an ego whose identity is already shaped by its embeddedness in a particular historical tradition, the people of Israel, and by its relatedness to that people’s God. Whatever the genuine Jewish modern non-Orthodox self does, it does as one fundamentally engaged with God in an intimate and determinative relationship and as part of a people whose character is expressed in a long historical tradition which is constituted within that relationship. With a conception of this communally and historically embedded Jewish self and of a self Covenantally related to God, Borowitz goes on, in these later writings especially, to formulate what he calls a conception of Jewish duty. This is Torah for the non-Orthodox Jew. It is a sketch of what the ideal Jewish life might look like for the contemporary liberal Jew. Borowitz, in various books and essays, discusses how such a Jew might think for herself and arrive at an understanding of what being Jewish requires of her, and he

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clarifies some of the values and issues that would constitute such a liberal, contemporary Jewish life. Biography and Career Eugene B. Borowitz was born in 1924 and raised in Columbus, Ohio. In 1940 he matriculated at The Ohio State University, where he studied philosophy and the social sciences. He frequently recalls in later life that a turning point occurred for him when he came to think that the debates about skepticism in an epistemology seminar were fruitless and that in the end reason could not provide compelling reasons against knowledge nor could it provide a satisfactory theory about how knowledge was possible. After his graduation, he entered the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. There he quickly became disenchanted with the rationalist approach to Judaism that was prominent among the faculty, and he became fast friends with Arnold Wolf and Steven Schwarzschild, who became lifelong conversation partners. He married his wife, Estelle, in 1947, and following his ordination in 1948, he applied to do doctoral work. His application was rejected, and he took a congregational position as an assistant rabbi in St. Louis. When the Korean War broke out, he became a Navy chaplain, stationed in Maryland, and after his service was completed, he was accepted into the doctoral program at the Hebrew Union College, where he received a Doctorate of Hebrew Letters in rabbinic literature, with distinction, in 1952. Borowitz then moved to Port Washington, New York, where he helped to found the Community Synagogue. In 1957, he took the position of Director of Education at the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, succeeding the pioneering Jewish educator Emanuel Gamoran. While in Port Washington, he had begun a doctoral program in religion at Columbia University and the Union Theological Seminary. When hired by the Union, Borowitz was ABD but changed degree programs, a condition of his employment, and in 1958 received an Ed.D. from Columbia Teacher’s College with a concentration in the philosophy of education. For some years after his move to Port Washington, Borowitz taught part-time at the Hebrew Union College in New York City, first in its education program and then in the rabbinical school. In 1962 he was hired to teach midrash and modern Jewish thought in the Rabbinical School of the Hebrew Union College, where he continues to teach as the Sigmund L. Falk Distinguished Professor of Education and Jewish Religious Thought. In 1994 he was given the added distinction of being named the College’s only Distinguished University Professor.

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During the years he directed the educational programs for the Reform Movement, Borowitz was instrumental in developing a serious theological foundation for Reform Jewish education, and he wrote often on issues concerning Jewish education. This he has continued to do throughout his career. His first book, A Layman’s Introduction to Religious Existentialism, published in 1965, was based on a series of lectures that he gave at the 92nd Street Y in New York, as part of their extensive adult educational program, and many of his essays originated as lectures or talks, frequently to audiences regarding Jewish education, interfaith issues, and contemporary Jewish affairs. From early in his career, Borowitz has had a serious interest in ethical issues. That interest is reflected in his work on the role of ethics in Jewish life and also in numerous essays and books that deal with practical issues in Jewish ethics. In the turbulent and tense years of the 1960s, for example, he was invited by Alfred Jospe of the National Hillel Foundations to write a book for college students dealing with sexuality, love, and marriage. Choosing a Sex Ethic: A Jewish Inquiry was published by Schocken Books in 1969 in the Hillel Library series sponsored by the B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundations. In it Borowitz deals with the ethical problems raised by the changing attitudes toward sexuality, proposes and debates several models for understanding the ethical dimensions of sexual relationships, and discusses how sexuality is related to love and marriage. As he deals with this set of issues, so salient in the sixties, Borowitz also turns a careful and critical eye to the rabbinic literature on these issues and evaluates the relevance of halakhic discussion to contemporary decision-making. As he would later say, the method of reflection that he employs in the book is one that he would later refine but not reject, even if new perspective and changes in attitude might mean that the substance of his account is no longer as directly applicable today as it was in the late 1960s. Today, sexuality cannot and ought not to be discussed wholly within the context of procreation, traditional heterosexual marriage, and such. Borowitz’s more recent writings, when they touch upon homosexuality, the character of marriage, the family, and much else, are deeply sensitive to contemporary concerns and recent literature. The situation differed in 1969, and while his book may no longer be directly relevant, it is an exemplary monograph in how a non-Orthodox Jew might take seriously the halakhic tradition as part of a contemporary reflection on a set of moral issues of immediate concern. Borowitz admits to not having a disposition toward political activism, but his commitment to ethical issues expressed itself in more than one way in the course of his life. He often recalls that in the 1960s, at a

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critical moment, he joined fifteen of his rabbinic colleagues in an act of political and moral solidarity with Martin Luther King and his associates in the struggle for civil rights. In 1964, King sent a telegram to the rabbis at the Central Conference of American Rabbis meeting in Atlantic City to come and join the crusade against segregation in St. Augustine, Florida.4 That night Borowitz was among a group jailed for their participation, and as a result he became the principal drafter of a statement made by the sixteen members of their group, “Why We Went: A Joint Letter from the Rabbis Arrested in St. Augustine,” dated June 19, 1964. The letter is reprinted in the volume Studies in the Meaning of Judaism, the volume on Borowitz in the Jewish Publication Society Scholar of Distinction Series.5 But this onetime act only foreshadows what is surely Borowitz’s most influential act of moral advocacy. In 1970, frustrated with the way in which “people regularly prated of the relevance of Judaism to contemporary affairs” and yet rarely “tried to demonstrate what that might mean in our roiling social situation,” Borowitz sought a solution. At the time, he realized that what was needed was a publication which offered a venue for wideranging, open Jewish discussion of the most urgent issues of the day and the relevance of serious Jewish thinking for deliberating about them. And so in 1970, he founded Sh’ma, A Journal of Jewish Responsibility, which he edited for twenty-three years and which still remains a unique, pluralistic expression of moral and social conscience within the Jewish world. In 2000 Borowitz wrote about Sh’ma in “A Life of Jewish Learning: In Search of a Theology of Judaism,” in these terms: The upheaval of the 1960s drove me into another project whose length of endurance and breadth of consequence I could not envision when I began it: the founding of Sh’ma, A Journal of Jewish Responsibility . . . As in the Talmud, “the Jewish view” would now have to emerge more from the dialectic, thoughtful, informed Jewish opinions, expressed side by side, than from merely stating one point of view . . . This private, “underground” little magazine—published without institutional support or “angel,” except for the help in its first three years of a generous printer-friend—soon created a kind of idealized community of Jewish interest among its customary 5,500 subscribers . . . Sh’ma was [a] channel for my continuing interest in Jewish

4 Borowitz refers to these events in “My Pursuit of Prayerfulness,” in Jewish Spiritual Journeys: 20 Essays Written to Honor the Occasion of the 70th Birthday of Eugene B. Borowitz, ed. Lawrence A. Hoffman and Arnold J. Wolf (West Orange, NJ: Behrman House, Inc., 1997), 187. 5 Borowitz, Studies in the Meaning of Judaism, 89–93.

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ethics, which had by now become the main area of Jewish practice in which I sought to apply my maturing theological ideas.6

Indeed, Borowitz’s “little magazine” may be and may continue to be his most lasting contribution to moral and political activism within Jewish life, but it marks only one further stage in his growing interest in the practice of Jewish moral thinking and the teaching of it. To Choosing a Sex Ethic of 1969 must be added several later volumes, Exploring Jewish Ethics (Wayne State, 1990), Reform Jewish Ethics and the Halakhah (Behrman House, 1994), and The Jewish Moral Virtues (Jewish Publication Society, 1999), with Francis W. Schwartz. Borowitz’s practical concern—moral, social, and political—is a deep and abiding one. It is, however, rooted in his larger, theological project, which is to frame an understanding of modern Jewish existence. This project, initiated in the 1940s, reached its first serious crystallization in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the publication of three books. The first, A New Jewish Theology in the Making (Westminster Press, 1968), is the most systematic of the three. It sets out the problem of survival for modern Judaism, identifies those elements of secularism and Christian neo-Orthodoxy which a viable Judaism must confront, describes four theological options which can be fruitfully engaged but which in the end prove unsatisfactory—options that he associates with Leo Baeck, Mordecai Kaplan, Martin Buber, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Joseph Soloveitchik—and in conclusion articulates and defends a new existential Jewish stance. The second book, How Can a Jew Speak of Faith Today? (Westminster, 1969), is a collection of essays on themes such as the idea of God in contemporary Judaism, the idea of revelation, Judaism and the secular state, Judaism and Christianity, and the secular situation that Judaism faces. The third book from this early period is an assessment of contemporary Jewish life in North America, its secularity, its self-delusions, and its social and political character. This book, The Masks Jews Wear: The Self-Deceptions of American Jewry (Simon & Schuster, 1973) is a lively and engaging defense of the role Judaism might play in what Borowitz calls “creative alienation,” a posture which “implies sufficient withdrawal from our society to judge it critically, but also the will and flexibility to keep finding and trying ways of correcting it.”7 In the book, 6 Eugene B. Borowitz, “A Life of Jewish Learning,” reprinted in Studies in the Meaning of Judaism, 399–400. Originally published in 2000 by the Hunter College Jewish Social Studies Program, based on the Anne Bass Schneider Lecture in Jewish Studies. 7 Eugene B. Borowitz, The Masks Jews Wear: The Self-Deceptions of American Jewry (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973), 209.

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Borowitz advocates for a new type of Jew, unlike his parents and grandparents, one who can engage critically and actively with his own flawed position and develop a “movement of Jewish self-determination” aimed at bringing Jewish “ethical commitments and social values” from the periphery to the center of Jewish life. It is a defense, that is, for a kind of Jewish wholeness or integrity, a kind of “Jewish health . . . [that] is founded on the rejection of any inner split between self and Jew. It bases itself on our effort to be, at our very roots, Jew and person all at once. We now want to build our existence in such a way that there is regularly no place in the growing integrity of our being where we are not Jews.”8 At the end of The Masks Jews Wear, Borowitz adds “some personal words” that tell us how he had arrived at this point in his career. In these comments, Borowitz points out that from 1950, when he had begun to think seriously about Jewish theology, he had taken his task not to be apologetic, seeking “to validate Judaism to skeptics,” but rather that of “clarify[ing] what Judaism meant to those who still believed in it.” He took his work to be a “series of methodological searches” the outcome of which would be a “systematic exposition of Jewish faith.” However, his project was delayed, he claimed, by the “social upheaval in America” and the challenges that Jews faced when called upon to put their Judaism and especially their commitment to Jewish values into practice. In those turbulent years, “there was no simple, single road from Jewish belief to Jewish social responsibility.” This led him to found Sh’ma. A second delay came about when discussions with his friend Jacob Behrman led to his writing a diagnosis of the contemporary social and political crisis through which American Jews were passing. This resulted in the book The Masks Jews Wear. Moreover, he claims, this book and its analysis are based on an account of the people of Israel as the “people of God’s Covenant,” and this account is “focused on the ground of [Jewish] commitment to value and duty.” To arrive at it, he has “utilized an existentialist analysis of commitments to personal and social values to open up the individual to the transcendent foundation on which he almost certainly grounds them.”9 In short, the book about American Jews and the contemporary moral and social crisis attempts to clarify the problems Jews must face, the values that Judaism provides for dealing with those problems, and the way in which such values are grounded in the Jewish people’s

8 Ibid., 210–14. 9 Ibid., 219–21.

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Covenantal existence. For a preliminary defense of such a theological view of the Jewish people, one should turn to Borowitz’s earlier two books. This was in 1973. For the next two decades, Borowitz would deepen and modify that theological account of Judaism and the Jewish people, and the result is a book that may fairly be called his magnum opus, Renewing the Covenant: A Theology for the Postmodern Jew (Jewish Publication Society, 1991). There is every reason to treat this work as the culmination of all of Borowitz’s forty years of theological work; it is also the foundation for all that follows it. In its preface he tells us that the book is intended for the liberal or non-Orthodox Jew, and its purpose is to clarify for that reader the Covenantal relationship between God and the Jewish people. Moreover, Borowitz points to a crucial methodological commitment, that his theology would be from the inside out, and this came to mean for him that it would involve “a resolute confrontation between the culture’s truth [the truth of the surrounding Western culture] and as faithful an understanding of classic Jewish faith as learning, belief, and practice can provide.” For him, the central theme or motif of that classic Jewish faith is the Covenant, and the central affirmation of modern Western culture that would lead to a modification of the Jewish tradition is the “root belief that personal dignity means having substantial self-determination.”10 In short, the book attempts to clarify theologically the nature of the modern Jewish self and the duties or obligations that bear upon it, its experience of modern society and of the Jewish past, and its situation as a member of a Covenantal people. Renewing the Covenant was widely reviewed and discussed. In 1999, Borowitz published a collection of papers, Judaism after Modernity (University Press of America), many of which reflect upon that work, develop its themes, and respond to readers and critics. In 2000, a volume appeared with academic responses to the book and Borowitz’s replies: Reviewing the Covenant: Eugene B. Borowitz and the Postmodern Renewal of Jewish Theology (SUNY Press) was edited by Peter Ochs. At 89, Borowitz continues to teach at the Hebrew Union College. He has been the recipient of several honorary degrees—from Lafayette College (1982), Colgate University (1988), Gratz College (1991), and The Jewish Theological Seminary (2009)—and has visited at various universities including Columbia, Princeton, City College of New York, Temple, and Harvard. He is a past-President of the American Theological Society, was

10 See Eugene B. Borowitz, Renewing the Covenant: A Theology for the Postmodern Jew (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1991), ix–x.

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the recipient of a National Jewish Book Award, and is the author, coauthor, or editor of over 20 books and 350 articles, essays, and book chapters. Covenantal Theology: Form and Method The core of Borowitz’s theological understanding of Judaism employs a few central notions, which he appropriates from Jewish and Western cultural sources and employs in his own distinctive ways. These notions include Covenant, God, the self, self-determination, the Jewish people (the people of Israel), duty, and value. This is not a complete list of ideas that are important to him, nor are these terms uncommon or rare. But they do form a core, and we can learn a good deal about Borowitz’s thinking by focusing on them. However, we must be cautious. Since these terms are well-known and their sources are often widely acknowledged, we must be careful not to ascribe meanings to Borowitz’s use of them that are inappropriate or mistaken. There are times when the straightforwardness and apparent transparency of his writing can be seductive, and we might be tempted into errors and failures. From early in his career, Borowitz has been deeply concerned about the methodological problem, from what starting point does a responsible theological account begin? Jewish theology has the goal of giving an account that clarifies what Jewish faith is. Where does it begin? There is a time when Borowitz takes this question to mean, Does such an account begin within Judaism or does it begin from some assumptions or views that are found external to Judaism, in the surrounding culture—the intellectual and especially philosophical culture that is outside of Judaism but by which Jews, Jewish beliefs, and Jewish practices are surrounded? More specifically, I think, Borowitz worries that Jewish beliefs and commitments are made subject to truths found in the surrounding culture, so that Judaism is being determined and judged by standards external to itself. The case he most often has in mind concerns reason or rationality. Reason is the source of truth in the Western philosophical tradition and in the domains of scientific investigation and in many other cultural domains in the Western tradition. Should Jewish theology begin with a commitment to the preeminence and reliability of reason and then turn to Judaism, identifying what is valuable and acceptable by judging whether it is itself rationally true and acceptable or is compatible with rational convictions or principles, etc.? Or does this threaten in some way the integrity of Judaism and Jewish belief? This problem or set of problems appears to be another version of the tra-

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ditional problem of faith and reason, and in a sense it is. But for Borowitz it is primarily a problem raised by and during the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century and bequeathed to all Jewish theology ever since—and to much Christian theology as well. In his early writings, Borowitz treats this problem or set of problems as if starting with rational standards or starting within the domain of truths of faith are exclusive and exhaustive alternatives. Indeed, to do the former is to lapse into apologetics, and to hold firm to the latter is to maintain a sense of integrity and dignity for Judaism: these are the outcomes of which Borowitz seems to be persuaded. Because he treats the alternatives as exhaustive and exclusive, moreover, he opposes all forms of rationalism or naturalism in Jewish theology and affirms those accounts that start with Jewish life and Jewish faith. At any rate, these and similar claims are what he defends in an important paper from his early period, “Faith and Method in Modern Jewish Theology” (1963).11 It is a view that Borowitz holds throughout his early essays. What might we say about this orientation of his? First, we might worry that Borowitz is too simplistic about modern Western culture; even during the Enlightenment and certainly thereafter, not all Western culture is predominantly rationalist and/or naturalist. Second, we might worry that he has not clearly articulated what rationality is and how reasoning works; there may be formal features of reason that are unavoidable and desirable in any serious theology, and there may be substantive outcomes of reasoning that are avoidable and can be charged with a kind of bias against Judaism and Jewish faith. But I suggest that we set these worries aside. Borowitz’s point is neither a strictly historical one nor a logical or conceptual one. Borowitz wants us to consider the point of view from which a responsible Jewish theology ought to be developed and its true audience. His point, I think, is that Jewish theology should be an attempt to clarify for Jews what their Judaism ought to be, what Jewish life ought to mean for them. For this reason, Jewish theology ought to articulate a Jewish perspective on Jewish life, and it ought to do so for Jews—and for Borowitz, since the Jews he has in mind also are immersed, embedded, situated in modern Western culture, these Jews are going to be what he early on calls “liberal” and what he later calls “non-Orthodox,” by which he means non-Haredi Orthodox. Such Jewish readers are complex, nuanced, and conflicted persons who take both Judaism and modernity seriously.

11 Eugene B. Borowitz, “Faith and Method in Modern Jewish Theology,” CCAR Yearbook 73 (1963): 215–28; reprinted in Studies in the Meaning of Judaism, 69–84.

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For them, to arrive at a serious and acceptable Judaism, one must not simply use universal or external standards to “regulate” or “determine” what Judaism ought to be like. One must start from within Judaism, but that Judaism must be one that can speak to the Jew who is not only Jewish but also is grounded in modernity. What this means, it seems to me, is that eventually, by the time that he writes Renewing the Covenant, if not before, Borowitz no longer takes this methodological issue to be about faith and reason, or inside and outside, in this simple way. Rather he realizes that any responsible theological account of Jewish life must, by beginning within Judaism and Jewish life, take both the Jewish tradition seriously and also those aspects of modernity which are undeniable ingredients of the modern Jew’s identity, and in particular he takes this to mean a commitment to some significant degree of selfdetermination. Self-determination, of course, is associated specifically with the notion of autonomy; indeed, it is one possible translation of that term’s Greek origins. And therefore it does have a provenance, the Kantian notion of moral autonomy and its foundation in metaphysical freedom. For the moment, let us set aside the issue of what Borowitz means by self-determination and simply notice that for him no responsible theological account of modern Judaism, as he sees it, can dispense with the ways in which selfdetermination influences the beliefs and responsibilities of modern Jews. In other words, no account of what modern Judaism means can be acceptable if it simply ignores self-determination or systematically minimizes it. There may be no global or wholly general way to figure it into an account of Judaism, but it must play a role, both in the basic character of what it is to be a Jewish person or self and in the particular duties that are binding for such a person. This, then, is what Borowitz means when he says that methodology is crucial to how one does Jewish theology and what is acceptable for an account of modern Jewish life. It is a matter of rejecting two features of the approaches that he finds wanting, that they typically begin with rationalism or naturalism and use that view to shape their account of Jewish life and that they begin with universal principles and truths and simply assimilate Judaism to them.12 In A New Jewish Theology in the Making and in many essays, among them “Form and Method in Modern Jewish Theology,” Borowitz’s comments on figures as diverse as Abraham Geiger, Kaufman

12 These two features are clearly identified in “Five Letters,” 170–71.

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Kohler, Hermann Cohen, Leo Baeck, Mordecai Kaplan, Roland Gittelsohn, and a host of others are not meant to be scholarly reviews or general critical analyses; they are focused on what role rationality, science, and such play in their thinking and ultimately on their point of view and what it is to take up such a point of view. Later, moreover, in Renewing the Covenant and in many essays in Judaism after Modernity, it is clear that he comes to appreciate the variegated and pluralistic nature of the modern Jewish point of view. In “The Way to a Postmodern Jewish Theology,” for example, he uses the word “university” to signify the rational-naturalist orientation of the surrounding culture and makes his point this way: “I cannot, as my teachers did, allow the university to define how modern Jews should understand and live their faith.” At the same time, however, Borowitz appreciates the way in which the university does provide various vocabularies and modes of discourse that facilitate the theologian’s formulation of such an understanding. “Nonetheless, respecting greatly what the university might still teach us, I, like many others, seek the fresh understanding that might come from articulating my faith in a university refined language.” Once that was an “existentialist” vocabulary; now, he claims, it is “the dialect . . . that makes up the postmodern conversation.”13 In terms of orientation, then, and what might be called method, by the time Borowitz writes Renewing the Covenant, his views have become refined. Genuine Jewish theology must originate within the particular situation of the modern Jewish self, and it must take into consideration and respond to the many features of that situation that characterize modern Jewish life— that do and ought to. There are Jewish features and modern ones—or, as he comes to call them—postmodern ones. For various reasons, he leaves behind existentialism—as our culture and intellectual discussion has done in general—and appropriates various themes that he takes to be features of the “postmodern conversation.” Like most of us, he is no doctrinaire postmodernist; he identifies features of the modern Jewish situation that echo within postmodern reflections as he understands them. These features include an emphasis on particularity; an appreciation for the constructed nature of selfhood or subjectivity; the communal embeddedness of persons; the primacy of texts, language, and the multivalence of interpretation; a rejection of metaphysics; the interrelatedness of God and persons; and a

13 Eugene B. Borowitz, “The Way to a Postmodern Jewish Theology,” in Judaism after Modernity, 127; also 125–53.

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revised notion of autonomy and self-determination.14 He treats this cluster of themes, interests, and commitments as a “postmodern” articulation of what modern Jewish faith is; he uses a terminology that he believes is part of the “postmodern conversation” and interprets it in his own way. Covenantal Theology: God and the Covenant At the heart of Borowitz’s theology is the notion of the Covenant between God and the Jewish people.15 To formulate a Jewish theology that is rooted in Jewish life is, for Borowitz, to formulate a Covenantal theology, and this means to frame Jewish life as a life lived within the framework of an ongoing relationship between God and the Jewish people. The word “Covenant” signifies this relationship. There is no more central notion for Borowitz’s thinking than this notion of Covenant. But it is an old term and one with many resonances. As always, one needs to ask what exactly Covenant means to him. The first thing to be said about the notion of Covenant is steeped in ancient legal and political history, where it regularly was applied to the relationship between a king or ruler and specific subjects. It denoted an arrangement in which the two parties played roles with regard to one another that were described in the covenantal document or charter; it was a legal relationship. Semitologists and other specialists have identified various types of such covenantal arrangements between contracting parties. Borowitz knows about this history and about the later history of the terminology and the types of relationships that the term was used to designate. He is fully aware that his use of the term, while it has affinities with how the

14 Eugene B. Borowitz, “Postmodernity and the Quintessential Modern Jewish Religious Movement,” in Judaism after Modernity, 155–68; “The Way to a Postmodern Jewish Theology,” 146–53. 15 Famously, in his essay “Crisis Theology and the Jewish Community,” published in Commentary in July 1961, Borowitz “introduced the term ‘Covenantal Theology’ to ­characterize an emerging paradigm shift in non-Orthodox Jewish thought.” This is the way Borowitz himself describes it in the preface to Renewing the Covenant in 1991. See “Crisis Theology and the Jewish Community,” Commentary 32 (July 1961): 36–42, reprinted in Studies in the Meaning of Judaism, 59–68, esp. 64. The term refers to the theological work of Emil Fackenheim, Lou Silberman, Steven Schwarzschild, Jacob Petuchowski, and others, all indebted, he says, in some way to Buber and Rosenzweig, and all interested in the role of human limitations and “authoritative guidance for Jewish living.” To varying degrees and in different ways, all employ existential terms or respond to their use. I follow Borowitz in capitalizing the word “Covenant” when it refers to the particular relationship between God and the Jewish people.

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term b’rit has been used in Jewish life, liturgy, and other texts, is distinctive and limited. While it was once such a term, he does not take it to be a legal or political term. Nor is it a category of interparty relationship. He knows that there are many kinds of covenants into which people have entered and can enter. But to him the term “Covenant” is not a general term. It refers to a very particular relationship, that between the people of Israel (the Jewish people) and the God who freed the Hebrews from Egyptian slavery, led them into the desert, gave them the law at Sinai, and brought them into the land of the Canaanites and Philistines and others in order for them to settle there and become a society, a community, founded on a sense of allegiance to and respect for Him. First, then, the Covenant is a relationship, a social bond, which brings with it expectations, obligations, authority, capabilities, and responsibilities that each party has toward the other. Second, the Covenant is a special relationship, because its parties are God and a specific social group or people, the people of Israel. Borowitz and his colleagues in the postwar period, the new theologians, do not, I think, appreciate the centrality of the term or the idea of Covenant and then develop an interpretation of what it means and implies. Rather, he has reasons to prefer a Judaism in which God has been and is really present to Jews and at times to the Jewish people. Life with such a God of history, a God who is real and present, is best conceived, he believes, in terms that Buber has made famous, the terms of encounter and dialogue, of meeting and the between. Borowitz, as I have said, much prefers not to analyze Buber’s writings in technical terms but rather to expound its central themes in everyday terms and by using the analogies that Buber himself suggests, those of friendship and love.16 And this brings Borowitz to the traditional texts of Judaism with a desire to find there an expression that refers to the relationship between God and the Jewish people and has enough affinity with friendship and love to allow him to take it to be the object of a Buberian reading. In short, Borowitz believes that the best way, the most compelling and acceptable way, for the modern Jew to understand the way 16 There are several good examples of Borowitz’s discussions of Buber that show how selective his treatments are. See, for example, Borowitz, “A Life of Jewish Learning: In Search of a Theology of Judaism,” 391–95; “Existentialism’s Meaning for Judaism: A Contemporary Midrash” (1959), in Studies in the Meaning of Judaism, 55–57; “The Idea of God” (1957), in Studies in the Meaning of Judaism, 43–45; “The Autonomous Jewish Self” (1984), in Studies in the Meaning of Judaism, 220–21; A New Jewish Theology in the Making (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1968), chap. 6, 123–46; “The Way to a Postmodern Jewish Theology,” 137–46. See also Eugene B. Borowitz, Choices in Modern Jewish Thought: A Partisan Guide, 2nd ed. (New York: Behrman House, Inc., 1995) (orig. 1983), 143–65.

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in which God is real in Jewish life is to understand himself as a member of a Covenantal community. From an attempt to understand the divine-human relationship and with the help of Buber, Borowitz comes to the classical expression, the “Covenant.” The most compelling and believable and fruitful way to understand God’s presence for the modern Jew is for him to treat the relationship with God not as a purely or even primarily cognitive or rational one. Rather that relationship is analogous to the way two persons who are in love live with one another or how two friends live their friendship. Such ongoing relationships are founded on moments of intense, determinative encounter, when two persons become deeply attached to one another, and their continuing relationships are then punctuated by moments that confirm their sense of solidarity and interpersonal commitment and then occasionally suffer moments when that sense of solidarity is strained or challenged. Faith, Borowitz thinks, is like this experience. It is an ongoing relationship between the Jew and her God, and it is that because the Jew is a member of a people who has that kind of relationship with God, a Covenantal existence. The Covenant is a very particular historical relationship. The Jewish tradition, for all its complexity and variegated nature, is a very particular history of how the Jewish people has thought and acted as part of that relationship. And the individual modern Jew, if she is committed, is a very particular life lived within the flow of this history and this tradition. In a succinct statement of what he thinks about covenant, Borowitz provides a nice capsule of this account: “By taking some liberties, we may say that our modern thinkers have interpreted berit [covenant] less as contract than as what moderns call ‘a personal relationship.’ ”17 Later in the same essay, he says that such an account “asks us to envision the Covenant as the Jewish people’s long-lasting love affair with God, one that has survived and been strengthened by its many fights and reconciliations, its intimacies and its duties, its inspiration and its unfathomability” and that “as in every deep human relationship, it is sometimes overwhelmingly certain and other times troublingly shaky.”18 The critical point of this account is that for Borowitz the link between the divine and the human is a relationship. All human existence is relational, and thus the link between the experiencing subject or self and that which is transcendent, God, must also primordially be relational. Knowing, believing, inquiring, analyzing, aspiring to understand—these too are relations,

17 Eugene B. Borowitz, “Covenant,” in Judaism after Modernity, 198. 18 Ibid., 203.

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of course, but they are not ones in which the whole person is invested; they are not direct, total investments of oneself. They all involve distant, detachment, classification, and analysis. They are not cases of the self giving wholly of itself to the other. Buber helps us to understand that when we are related to other persons, there are moments like this, and then there are ongoing relationships that draw on that depth of reciprocal investment, that shimmer with them, resonate with them, and live both with them and because of them. The relationship with God is like this. Moreover, because this is so, this conception of what it is for individual Jews as members of the Jewish people to be related to God has implications for what the Jew contributes to that ongoing relationship and what it means for the Jew to play her role in maintaining it. In order to say something about this, we need to turn first to Borowitz’s treatment of autonomy or self-determination and his conception of the Jewish self, and then to his account of what he calls Jewish duty. Autonomy and the Jewish Self If there is one set of ideas and themes that underwent significant development for Borowitz, it is this set. His conception of the Jewish self and the role that self-determination plays in it began as a highly individualistic one and eventually became more richly social and embedded in community. The shift is crucial to Borowitz’s mature theological conception of Covenant and to his abandoning existentialist discourse and his appropriation of what he calls the terms of the postmodern conversation. It also involves a development of his commitment to the fundamental role that relationships play in understanding the normative force and the detailed content of Jewish duty, as he calls it. As I have indicated, the early Borowitz took autonomy to be the ability to think for oneself and makes one’s own decisions. In the first chapter of Choosing a Sex Ethic, Borowitz describes autonomy as “the independent value of each man’s conscience,” and he elaborates what this means this way: “No one has the right to tell someone else what is right and thus imply that he should not think about it for himself. Ethical procedure requires one person to encourage another to make up his own mind in as informed, thoughtful, and sensitive a way as he can. Each person’s ethical autonomy is to be respected and encouraged to seek mature and responsible expression.”19 In this book Borowitz is dealing with ethical autonomy, 19 Eugene B. Borowitz, Choosing a Sex Ethic: A Jewish Inquiry (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 3–4.

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self-reliance on one’s own thinking through what is right and wrong regarding ethical or moral matters. In this kind of case, as he goes on to elaborate, autonomy is a goal. It may be beyond the grasp of many people. It involves facing up to authorities and others, taking responsibility for thinking carefully, in an informed way, and thoroughly about various matters, and establishing one’s own standard of conduct. Later in the book Borowitz explains that he admires those who resist both the forces of traditional authorities and the temptations of our contemporary “vulgarizing society” and who think for themselves about what is right and wrong. Moreover, since the issues regarding sexual morality are complicated, he realizes that in the end our thinking may not bring us to certitude or complete confidence. “Our decisions are not absolute but the best we have been able to come up with.”20 That is, when we consider what is right or wrong to do, we might not be able to arrive at certain and firm conclusions, but there is value in the fact that we took the task upon ourselves to think about the matter and to make a decision for ourselves. That makes us what Borowitz calls autonomous or self-determining, self-reliant, and mature, and it contributes to our becoming a whole person and entering into interpersonal relations as a whole person. This understanding of autonomy is indebted to Kant and to Buber, among others, but it is clearly an appropriation and modification of their views and not simply a repetition of one or the other.21 Here it is applied to moral matters, but it does not seem to be restricted to them. The value of autonomy for the enrichment of one’s selfhood extends to many areas of one’s life, where one is more mature and more fully human the more one thinks matters through for oneself, takes responsibility for arriving at standards for what is right and what is wrong to do, and then makes decisions about what to do based on those standards and on one’s deliberations. Borowitz suggests—he never provides a thematic account, I do not believe—that what makes autonomy valuable to the self is that its elements of control over one’s dispositions and commitments, of self-reliance on its own thinking through and arriving at conclusions, and of independence all contribute to its very fullness and character as the self that it is. Indeed, it is for each self what makes that self mine. It is as if Borowitz were 20 Ibid., 103. 21 Borowitz gives a sketch of the modern notion of autonomy and the self from Descartes, Rousseau, and Kant to Sartre and Habermas in “The Autonomous Self and the Commanding Community,” Theological Studies 45 (1984): 34–44; see also Renewing the Covenant, 170–78.

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to ask: How much of what we are and what we do is guided and directed by ourselves and how much by other forces—family, tradition, society, and so forth? How many of our commitments are really ones that we arrived at after careful and thoughtful reflection and how many are ones that we simply adopted unthinkingly? And so forth. Selfhood is tied to identity, and identity is grounded in internal rather than external determination, so to speak. And his answer is, in the spirit of existentialism as he saw it, that the more autonomy we express, the fuller a self we are. And this holds for the Jewish self as much as for any self. Kant did not say exactly this, of course, although his views on morality and autonomy can be understood to underlie this kind of view, and neither did Sartre or Buber say exactly this. But something like this is what Borowitz appropriates from existentialism and what he finds also valued in Jewish sources. Such autonomy or thinking for oneself is at the heart of the respect and dignity that Judaism associates with human life, he believes. Judaism respects human life and all human life because human beings are capable of expressing such self-determination and hence of becoming richly autonomous selves. In A New Jewish Theology in the Making Borowitz calls this self-determination “freedom of individual conscience,” and he associates with it “each man’s right to spiritual self-determination.” If Judaism is about beliefs and practices, then the self that believes and chooses what to do must be free to think through for itself what to believe and what to do. There must be “respect for [the individual’s] freedom,” and the “right of dissent [must be] inalienable.”22 Of course, Borowitz realizes that there is a difficulty. If this cluster of values concerning freedom, autonomy, and dissent is absolute, then it will always be a prior condition which any appropriation of tradition must satisfy. It must always come first, so to speak. But if the tradition is primary, then the respect for the individual’s autonomy, for thinking for himself and deciding for himself, is not without restrictions, without limits. But Borowitz wants both and thinks that liberal Judaism turns on having both the unquestioning assent to Judaism and the absolute right to think for oneself. He wants the liberal Jew to rekindle a Jewish faith that will involve “the conscious, personal assent to the unique meaningfulness and significance of the Jewish religious tradition for our lives.” And since this faith is based on individual assent, he says, “it likewise guarantees the right to dissent without thereby raising the self to the status of a prior principle.”23

22 Borowitz, A New Jewish Theology in the Making, 191. 23 Ibid., 192.

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But how can this be assent and yet be unquestioning and still autonomous or free? In short, how is this possible? What does this mean? Borowitz sets out a fourfold process which he believes will clarify this puzzling proposal. First, the tradition is not an object of study; it presents itself to the Jew as texts, practices, and values that “make a claim” upon the Jew, as he puts it, that “confront [him] in authority and challenge.” Second, nothing of that tradition is excluded ab initio; it presents itself in all its complexity, both what seems relevant and what seems irrelevant. The goal is for it to be “self-regulating,” where the decisions to exclude or dissent are made from within and not without. Third, I may dissent, but when I do, I must justify to myself why I am dissenting, why some aspect of what Judaism bequeaths to me no longer applies or should no longer apply. And finally, “from this dynamic process of confronting the claims of the tradition in its fullness, and ­working out concurrence and dissent, the individual comes to know himself fully.” Borowitz calls this process one of “finding oneself.” It involves taking “Judaism as accepted guide and as rejected standard” both, and the outcome will be a “mixture of person and tradition that should mark the modern Jew.”24 One may doubt that this account solves the problem facing Borowitz and his commitment to self-determination as well as to Jewish faith. And there is reason to believe that he was aware of its limitations. What he sought was a way to make what he called the “assent” to tradition, to the resources of Jewish faith” both freely appropriated and in some way normative or compelling, and once that normativity was in place, to confirm the continued role of self-determination. But what the elaboration of this fourfold scheme does is to restate the problem rather than to clarify its structure or seek to clarify how the coordination of authority and autonomy is possible. After all, to say that the tradition makes a claim upon the contemporary Jew is neither to explore what that in fact means, nor is it to show that it does not overwhelm autonomy rather than complement it. The account Borowitz gives simply does not say enough to leave the reader satisfied. But one might think—as I believe Borowitz himself came to appreciate— that the foundation of the problem was already present at the outset, the conception of the Jew as an initially isolated, atomized individual, separate from the Jewish people and its past, and yet capable of taking her place within that people. In short, his conception of the self was insufficiently relational; he 24 Borowitz, A New Jewish Theology in the Making, 192–94; cf. 207.

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did not yet fully appreciate how embedded the self always is in the world and in various communities and traditions within it. To put it starkly, the modern self does not start from nowhere, and this caveat applies to the Jewish self as much as to any other.25 To be sure, Borowitz is addressing those Jews who might be persuaded to return to a Judaism that they could take seriously, that is substantive and yet not dominating; their commitment to Judaism may as yet not be whole-hearted or rich or full. But it is still true that they are Jews, and their embeddedness in Judaism, the Jewish people, and the predicament of contemporary Jewish life should not be ignored. What that embeddedness means becomes increasingly vivid to Borowitz. Already in 1970 Borowitz acknowledged this change in his view of the self by pointing out that while Buber had taken him into the domain of relationship, he had been insufficiently attentive to the particularity of the Jewish experience. Borowitz sought, he claimed, to go beyond Buber.26 More precisely, his concern was expressed as a methodological one. Buber was correct when he gave a relational account of human existence and also when he understood the divine-human encounter as similar and akin to the interpersonal I-Thou encounter. But his account is too universalistic; it derives an account of Judaism from a general philosophical anthropology, and this strategy fails to appreciate that since all selves are embedded in particular situations, any theology of Jewish existence must take the distinctive and historically particular Jewish situation of the Jew into account. Buber’s methodology lends itself to apologetics, but “as a simple matter of self-respect, there ought to be Jewish theology for Jews whose Jewishness is neither incidental nor accidental but a very part of their existence.” The Jew, like everyone, lives a particular existence; no one “can live outside the finitudes of history.”27 Hence, any account of the Jewish self cannot start out at an utterly general or universal level; it must, from the outset, take the Jew as embedded within Jewish life. The Jewish self is embedded in history and in Jewish life, but this requires, as Borowitz later makes very clear, that the Jewish self must 25 See Borowitz, “B’rit, Mitzvah, and Halakha: In Search of a Common Vocabulary,” in Judaism after Modernity, 120: “No one is completely autonomous. All of us are part of families and communities, cultures and histories, and all of us come with specific genetic, emotional, and physical capabilities.” 26 He already made this point in 1970 in “The Problem of the Form of a Jewish Theology,” in Studies in the Meaning of Judaism, 126–27; the essay was originally published in the Hebrew Union College Annual 40–41 (1969–1970): 391–408. 27 Borowitz, “The Problem of the Form of a Jewish Theology,” 126.

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be embedded in the community, in the Jewish people. “The universal— Buber’s ­individual—does not precede any particularity but is rather an outcome of them.”28 The crucial essay that exposes this shift and marks the transition from Borowitz’s early writings on freedom and selfhood to his later thinking is the essay “The Autonomous Jewish Self” (1981), republished below.29 In a sense, Borowitz moves from a highly individualistic notion of selfhood to a deeply situational and communitarian notion.30 His original conception of the self is marked by its universal features and its detachment; the ­conception he comes to develop is more robust and includes all the special relationships and features that are particular to it. As we have seen, a proper understanding of autonomy already points to this particularity of each self as a subject, but that particularity involves appreciating how the self always has more than rational features and features it shares with every other self; it has features that make it the distinctive, particular self that it is, and these arise out of its distinctive embeddedness in history and community. This is the general orientation of the change for Borowitz; it will be helpful to note some of the details. What does Borowitz say in “The Autonomous Jewish Self ” and its companion piece “The Autonomous Self and the Commanding Community”? After surveying the tradition from Descartes to Sartre, as it were, Borowitz turns to Buber, who, he says, already “knows no utterly discrete Descartesian [sic] ego but only a self which is always engaged with another,” at times worldly items and at times other persons. In short, Buber already conceives of the self relationally, as always embedded situationally.31 Moreover, there is a mode of that relational character that is “qualitatively more significant than our more precise customary engagement with others as objects.”32 This of course is the I-Thou encounter and the relationship grounded in it. And what lies behind all of these “qualitatively more significant” relation28 Borowitz, “The Way to a Postmodern Jewish Theology,” 146. For a very important discussion of how Buber had influenced him and yet how he saw himself as going beyond Buber, see 137–46. 29 Borowitz refers to this essay, which was written in 1981 but only published in Modern Judaism in 1984, as a companion piece to “The Autonomous Self and the Commanding Community,” Theological Studies 45 (1984): 34–56. 30 Looked at in this way, Borowitz seems to be leaving a kind of Rawlsian self behind and adopting a notion of selfhood more like the Hegelian one that Michael Sandel describes of the encumbered self in his famous critique of Rawls in Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, first published in 1982. 31 Borowitz, “The Autonomous Jewish Self,” 220. 32 Borowitz, “The Autonomous Self and the Commanding Community,” 45.

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ships is the relationship with God, because of which we know ourselves, Borowitz says, “to be endowed with ultimate worth.”33 Borowitz then explains how autonomy is still present in this account but, as he puts it, in a “transformed fashion.” I think that what Borowitz has in mind here is that the inherited notion of autonomy was about identity and individuality, what makes me the particular person I am and how my character is grounded in what I make my own. Similarly for Buber, even in the I-Thou encounter, the I and the other person maintain their individualities, but with this modification, that who each is cannot be understood without appreciating what each means to the other. He puts it this way: “The autos which now seeks the worthy act must always do so as an encounter partner.”34 This dialogical and yet autonomous conception has “social consequences.” Everyday social life is filled with I-It relations with other people; what we aspire to is “a social existence in which people reach out to one another in dialogic concern,” and Buber calls such social existence a “community” (Gemeinschaft). In the final years of the nineteenth century, Buber had been involved in a movement called the “New Communitarians” and from that time he had argued, in terms inherited from Ferdinand Tönnies and indebted to his friend and mentor Gustav Landauer, that the goal of our social existence is to transform society (Gesellschaft) into community (Gemeinschaft). With his theory of I-Thou of the early 1920s, he is able to articulate this aspiration in a theoretical framework. Borowitz sees this very clearly, and he sees too that there are moments when a particular group— national or ethnic or religious—comes to realize this goal as its national aspiration: “In great historic moments [the experience of such an encounter] happens to a folk and establishes its national character.”35 Buber understands how this functions generally, and how law and practice come into existence and remain in force as long as they are taken to express and reinforce such a national aspiration. He also understands how this h ­ appened to 33 Ibid., 45. 34 Ibid., 45; see also 45–46. See “The Autonomous Jewish Self,” 220–21. “Despite all that you and I now mean to one another, neither of us must now surrender to the other our power of self-determination. Yet because you are here with me, my self, formerly so potentially anarchic, now has a sense of what it must choose and do—and it knows God stands behind this ‘mission.’ ” Ibid., 220. 35 Borowitz, “The Autonomous Self and the Commanding Community,” 46. He goes on to say: “The Hebrews shared such an experience in the events we call Exodus and Sinai— but did so with the unparalleled recognition that they were entering a covenant with God as well as with their newly born nation.” He notes that Buber elaborates this momentous event in his book Moses (Oxford: East and West, 1947), 110ff.

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the ancient Hebrews and continues to operate as the dialectic infusing the life of the Jewish people. Borowitz makes a keen observation: at the turn of the century, when Buber was engaged with communitarian thinking, he “stressed the group rather than the individual” but after the writing of I and Thou in the early 1920s his thinking shifted, and he came to focus on the “struggle against the collective.” Borowitz takes us to the brink of the moment where he believes we must go beyond Buber. Today, he says, we should also be wary of the collective, especially when it threatens our autonomy and all that might mean socially and politically. But we must also, Borowitz proposes, “reemphasize the sociality of the self . . .We need to oppose unrestrained individualism and specify the sources of authority that should limit it . . . To me, then, autonomy is more God-oriented than our secular teachers admit and more social than the older Buber was willing to concede.”36 For the liberal or nonOrthodox Jew, this means that the self thinks and acts as a member of the Covenanted people of God and also as a participant in the contemporary historical situation. Borowitz describes this conception of contemporary liberal Jewish selfhood succinctly: A Jewish self is characterized not only by a grounding personal relationship with God but relates to God as part of the people of Israel’s historic Covenant with God. Being a Jew, then, may begin with the individual, but Jewish personhood is structured by an utterly elemental participation in the Jewish historical experience of God. Jewish existence is not merely personal but communal and even public. In the healthy Jewish self one detects no place, no matter how deeply one searches, where one can find the old liberal schizoid split between the self and the Jew. One is a Jew existentially.37

In order to be a self at all, the Jewish self must be self-constituting; there must be ownership over who I am and the outcome of that ownership is that I am the particular self I am. At the same time, I do not create myself out of whole cloth. Since my very existence is relational and interpersonal and since that embeddedness is historically particular, as a Jew I am embedded in the “people of Israel’s historic Covenant with God.” The content of my particular appropriation of that historical legacy or identity, of course, is dependent upon many factors. But the fact that it is a significant dimen-

36 Borowitz, “The Autonomous Self and the Commanding Community,” 48; see also Renewing the Covenant, 178–81. 37 Borowitz, “The Autonomous Jewish Self,” 221.

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sion of what is bequeathed to the self is fixed by its fundamental situatedness as a human agent.38 The relation within the Jewish self of her autonomy and her inheritance Borowitz calls the “dialectic of freedom and constraint in the liberal Jewish self.”39 That is, the ways in which the Jew takes ownership of who she is, what she believes, and how she acts are complexly related to the resources given to her upon which her thinking and reflection work. The interplay is dialectical and involves selection and construction, on the one hand, and influence and limitation, on the other. Just as we are born into a particular family, with a background of customs, styles, and practices, and yet respond to and appropriate what we are given in distinctive ways as we grow and are socialized into it, so the Jewish self receives, is shaped by, and draws on the Jewish community into which she was born. With regard to Judaism, “Covenant” is the term Buber—and after him Borowitz—uses to name “this kind of open, unsettled, but mutually dignifying relationship.”40 Borowitz’s account of the Covenant, autonomy, and Jewish selfhood is the foundation for framing the enterprise of living a liberal or non-Orthodox Jewish life. Borowitz uses many expressions for this final step in his project, as we shall see, but the broadest and most nontechnical one is the traditional expression. It is the articulation of a life of Torah. Ethics and Jewish Duty The outcome of Borowitz’s thinking about Covenant, autonomy, and Jewish selfhood is the framing of a modern Jewish life for the non-Orthodox Jew. Ultimately, this account concerns how such a Jew and the community of which he is a part think about and make decisions regarding what is right for a Jew to believe and do and what is wrong. Broadly this is about how such a Jew comes to shape Jewish conduct, broadly with regarding all sorts of areas of life and more narrowly regarding those areas that involve moral matters. This goal has been in Borowitz’s mind since the very beginnings of 38 See Borowitz, “The Autonomous Self and the Commanding Community,” 49: “The Descartesian [sic] discrete self is a methodological fiction . . . In truth, we are all very much more the children of our time, place, and community than of our pure thought or free choice.” There is a great deal of valuable discussion of this conception of what he called the hermeneutical self or historically situated agency; Gadamer is one source, and another excellent discussion can be found in the works of Charles Taylor. 39 Borowitz, “The Autonomous Jewish Self,” 221. Cf. Renewing the Covenant, 213–17. 40 Borowitz, “The Autonomous Self and the Commanding Community,” 51; see Renewing the Covenant, chap. 16.

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his theological career in the late 1940s, and it remains central to his project to this day. What, in short, should a Jew do? How should a Jew act? What is the regimen of a Jewish life?41 Borowitz’s original thinking about such issues was focused on moral questions and the moral crisis that he identified in contemporary society. Even then, however, it also had a wider scope, the full range of Jewish conduct. In “The Idea of God” (1957) he called this goal a “criterion of adequacy” for an acceptable idea of God for the modern Jew; it must “make possible for [the modern Jew] the life of Torah.” He elaborates: “A fully adequate Jewish idea of God would move the Jew to fulfill the Torah by showing him the cosmic authority from which it stems and the deep significance of the acts it requires.”42 We might now put it somewhat differently: an acceptable idea of God must show how the relation with God both justifies and motivates Jewish conduct, the life of Torah, and this means, as we have seen, that the idea of God must represent a God who has a Covenantal relationship with individual Jews and with the Jewish people. Why? Because for Borowitz only such a relational view of God and the Jewish people and God and individual Jews can explain how Jews are moved to act out of solidarity with God and how the right Jewish action is defined by what role it plays in maintaining that relationship. This lesson is part of what he learned from Buber and Rosenzweig, that “interpersonal presence” is “the best metaphor” for the divine-human relationship and in particular for God’s relationship with the Jewish people. “In friendship and love it is the other’s presence that, even without words, commands us. Such relationships send us into the world to tasks we must define for ourselves, whether as individuals or as communities.”43 Four years later, in 1961, Borowitz would say that there had grown up in postwar Jewish America a desire for just such a theological program, what he called a “theology of mitzvah, a rationale for the Jewish way of life and belief.”44 41 In one of his earliest papers, his report on the Institute on Reform Jewish Theology, held at the Hebrew Union College on March 20–22, 1950, Borowitz already identifies this problem, whether there is any source of authority in Reform Judaism and what criteria there might be in Reform Judaism to select from the tradition; see “Theological Conference Cincinnati, 1950: Reform Judaism’s Fresh Awareness of Religious Problems,” reprinted in Studies in the Meaning of Judaism, 9. The essay originally appeared in Commentary 19 (1950): 567–72. 42 Borowitz, “The Idea of God,” in Studies in the Meaning of Judaism, 37; the essay was originally published in 1957. For a clear statement of his broader interest in Jewish duty including but not exclusively moral duty, see Borowitz, “Five Letters,” 175–76. 43 Borowitz, “A Life of Jewish Learning,” 393. 44 Borowitz, “Crisis Theology and the Jewish Community,” 62.

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While Borowitz’s personal interests led him to think extensively about Jewish ethics and moral issues, eventually, in Renewing the Covenant and the writings of this later period of his life, he frames the problem in the broadest terms as “the problem of a theology of halakhah” and “a theology of non-Orthodox Jewish duty”—“a compelling theology of ethical-andmore-than-ethical Jewish duty.”45 What, then, does he think that such a theology looks like? Human beings “seek an ultimate and solid ground of values,” and “a significant minority of people in our civilization have turned from the university to religion to help them understand what they intuitively know to be true, that not everything is relative and that humanhood is intimately bound up with acts we do not do and some others we are bound to try to do.”46 There are Jews who feel compelled to meet this challenge—of relativism, historicism, or even skepticism—and who seek this ground of value in their Judaism and in particular in the Jewish people’s Covenantal relationship with God. A significant reason for this challenge and this task, Borowitz suggests, is the Holocaust and the very specific way that its horrors and atrocities challenged contemporary Jews. Many have not abandoned Judaism or religion but rather have sought refuge in increased religiosity and even in mysticism. “They needed a new ground of value,” for “the moral chasm between the death camp Nazis and their Jewish victims cannot be relativized but points to a standard of absolute value.” Once this could no longer be found “in a secular assertion about universal human rationality,” what is left is to find it in Judaism and, for Borowitz, this means in a way of understanding how the Jewish people’s relationship with God grounds a conception of moral obligation and Jewish duty in general.47 45 Borowitz, “A Life of Jewish Learning,” 395–96. 46 Borowitz, “The Way to a Postmodern Jewish Theology,” 146–47. See also “‘Im ba’et, eyma—Since You Object, Let Me Put It This Way,” 158–59. 47 Borowitz, “The Way to a Postmodern Jewish Theology,” 150. See also Borowitz, “A Life of Jewish Learning,” 408–9: “As the seventies became the eighties, it became increasingly clear to me that the death-of-God thinkers had radically misread our social drift. Instead of God fading from the scene and humanism triumphing, a substantial turn to religion was evident throughout Western civilization and, as part of that development, in the Jewish community as well . . . This communal experience cried out for interpretation.” The interpretation Borowitz gives concerns the ultimate failure of rationality to give us any confidence about moral value, a failure exposed by the death camps and Nazism, and the collapse of any optimism about human beings. But, he then asks, “If reason no longer demanded we be ethical, what did?” This general crisis about what grounds the normative force of moral value was only confirmed for Borowitz by his sense that we all felt betrayed by modernity and the “social malaise” we find ourselves immersed in. “The meta-ethical questions refuse to give us peace; where do our values come from? What still commands

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This is the task that the “theology of halakhah” for non-Orthodox or liberal Jews—what Borowitz comes to call a postmodern Jewish theology—must ultimately accomplish. In Borowitz’s later writings, at least from “The Autonomous Jewish Self” and “The Autonomous Self and the Commanding Community” through Renewing the Covenant and beyond, Borowitz employs the account of Covenant that we have described, together with his mature conception of Jewish selfhood and its relation both to God and the Jewish people, in order to discuss how deliberations and decisions about how to live a Jewish life ought to be carried out. In addition, he himself engages in serious substantive thinking along these lines. Together with colleagues and students, especially concerning moral issues, he explores what a contemporary nonOrthodox Jew might think about various issues and how she might choose to act. One can find the results of much of this work in books like Exploring Jewish Ethics (Wayne State University Press, 1990), The Jewish Moral Virtues (Jewish Publication Society, 1999), and Reform Jewish Ethics and the Halakhah: an Experiment in Decision Making (Behrman House, 1994). In the following pages, I will focus on the strategy Borowitz sets out for such decision-making and also on the question about the relation between Jewish duty as he sees it and Jewish law, the halakha itself. We are now in the arena of a classic problem, but we have arrived at it in a circuitous way, through the modification or shift in Borowitz’s thinking about selfhood and autonomy, which leads to the reformulation of the problem. The classic problem has an old lineage but is best known in its Kantian formulation. It pivots on the claim that law is heteronomous while ethics is autonomous, so that the role of autonomy in legal thinking is fraught. Of course, in the actual process of legal interpretation, say by judges, there is some degree of autonomy, even if it is taken to be hedged around by standards it is thought to aim at, such as the intention of the framers of the constitution or founding document or some ideal concep-

human decency and is the criterion of our human worth?” Borowitz arrived at a conclusion: “In the sobering reappraisal of human nature required by the Holocaust, to assert that God was dead really meant that what had really died for us in the Holocaust was not Judaism’s God but our exalted modern view of ourselves and our capabilities . . . Worst of all, our confident proclamation that we alone would bring the Messianic Age is ludicrous.” All this made possible what Borowitz called a “human tzimtzum, a self-contraction that has made some room for God in our lives.” “I believe that we come to God these days primarily as the ground of our values and, in a non-Orthodox but nonetheless compelling fashion, as the ‘commander’ of our way of life. Something similar could be now also be said of the value of Jewish tradition and practice to us.” See also Borowitz, “Five Letters,” 176.

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tion of the principles of such a document. But in the end, on the traditional view, subjects or practitioners are meant to follow the law and not to reinterpret it, and certainly it is not up to the subjects of a legal system to select which laws are in force and which are not. Moreover, if a subject chooses to disobey the law, he or she must suffer the penalties. In terms of the classic problem, as I have called it, the subject has virtually no authority regarding the law and no autonomy or self-determination. For Borowitz, however, the autonomous Jewish self, situated in a community and in an historical tradition with a substantial legal component, is not simply a subject. The legal tradition permeates her identity but not as law, so to speak; rather she receives the legal tradition as an inherited reservoir of thinking about belief and conduct that manifests certain values and ways of thinking about human beings and history. Every Jew—liberal Jew—faces particular situations where reflection, deliberation, and decision are called for, and the new problem she faces is what to do with this legal inheritance.48 What role does it or should it play in her thinking? What normative force or weight does it carry for her? What are her obligations and duties? What parts of it carry meaning for her and what do not? What norms should she affirm, and from which ones should she dissent?49 Here we return to a notion that I have already noticed, the idea that for the liberal Jewish self the Jewish tradition makes a claim upon her. Part of what it means for the Jewish self to be embedded in the Jewish people is for it to be taken seriously in deliberation and decision about how one ought to act. Borowitz calls this “authentically living in Covenant.” Jewish law would 48 In “The Autonomous Jewish Self,” Borowitz says that authentic Jews should “want their lives substantially to be structured by a continuing involvement with the prescriptions of Jewish law” (224). Of course, the whole question is what the word “involvement” means. He then says “But as autonomous Jewish persons, the provisions of the law would ultimately be tested by appeal to their conscientious individual Jewish understanding.” But if “involvement” means that they remain prescriptions only once they pass the “test” of individual conscience, this seems to beg all the important questions. Borowitz of course knows this and does not stop with these general and imprecise formulations. There may however be no recipes for how this dialectical engagement of traditional law and personal reflection and adjudication works. 49 Borowitz discusses these issues in Renewing the Covenant, chaps. 16–20. There are earlier discussions in various essays, such as “The Autonomous Jewish Self” and “The Autonomous Self and the Commanding Community,” and also later ones, such as “A Life of Jewish Learning” and in his responses to Elliot Dorff. See Judaism after Modernity, 181–86. In “American Jewish Modernity Comes to Self-consciousness,” in Judaism after Modernity, Borowitz describes this as the problem of “how to blend the objectivity of the tradition with modernity’s esteem for autonomy” (117) and calls it “a major theoretical problem.” He also calls this “the Jewish domestication of personal freedom.” “B’rit, Mitzvah, and Halakha: In Search of a Common Vocabulary,” 119.

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not then be law, but everything that one did would be Jewish, Borowitz points out. I would put this somewhat differently: the halakhic tradition as law—in traditional Judaism—enters into one’s thinking as imperatives or obligations, to act in a certain way or not to conduct oneself in a certain way; it enters into Jewish selfhood from the inside and not from the outside. But for the liberal Jew that tradition enters into one’s deliberations without that normative force. They are considerations to be taken seriously because they make a compelling case or express a particular value that is compelling or for any number of reasons. In short, Jewish law becomes materials for deliberation and not a replacement for it. And once that happens, then every act would be Jewish, regardless of whether it follows the prescriptions of the halakha or dissents from them. Ideally, Borowitz goes on, “I also look forward to the day when enough Jewish selves autonomously choose to live in ways sufficiently similar that they can create common patterns among us.”50 Here Borowitz wants to forestall the objection that his account simply lapses into a kind of individualism and never realizes communal practice. His answer is that if a sufficient number of liberal Jews come to share patterns of decision-making and of action, the result would be a distinctive “Jewish style or way [that] would be the autonomous Jewish self’s equivalent of ‘halakhah.’ ” The outcome would be a kind of communal practice that exhibits pluralism but one that does not risk anarchy. As Borowitz admits, there might be some risk in this hope, but in order to be honest about both the contemporary Jew’s individuality and her integrity and the claims made by the Jewish past and its legal tradition, one cannot expect more.51 The decisions the Jewish self makes about what is right to do, what she ought to do, come with a normative force, and that normative force is associated with or derived from the fact that the self is related to God as well as involved with other persons. But if the decision is what the self arrives at after deliberation, what grounds that normative force?52 Borowitz admits

50 Borowitz, “The Autonomous Jewish Self,” 224–25. 51 For an argument that this does not lead to an amorphous kind of identity, see “The Autonomous Jewish Self,” 225–28. Borowitz calls for a solution that for the self avoids anarchy on the one hand and total passivity on the other; with respect to the group as a whole, he wants to avoid law and chaos. What he calls for is the growth and emergence of various patterns of social practice. See also Borowitz, “B’rit, Mitzvah, and Halakha: In Search of a Common Vocabulary,” 122–23; “The Way to a Postmodern Jewish Theology,” 153; and Renewing the Covenant, 221–23. 52 Borowitz sets out this problem and rejects the option that it is the community that grounds this obligation or duty in Renewing the Covenant, chap. 18.

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that this is hard to put into words.53 As he characterizes it, this force arises out of the self’s relationship with God. In that relationship, “the primary mood is of privilege, awe, openness, occasionally love . . . so my departing sense of urgency about doing something because of our meeting is rightly described as ‘commanding’ and to the extent that I (in Israel with God) have legitimately given content to the sending, I know I have violated something precious when I fail to live it.”54 Relationships like love and friendship incorporate mutual commitment and concern and claims made by one upon another. Or we might say that if the relationship is real, then each party has rightful expectations of the other. Something like this is what makes certain behavior expressive of the relationship and other behavior in conflict with it, irresponsible and disruptive. Normative force, then, arises out of the relationship with this particular other, and in all such cases there is a relationship with God, too, and that carries the weight that makes all claims worthy and serious. Something like this, I think, is what Borowitz has in mind when he says that we rightly describe these expectations and claims as “commands” and when we take any failure to comply to be a “sin.” Jewish duties are not laws, but neither are they mere recommendations.55 They are standards or norms that are constitutive of what it is to be a liberal Jewish self.56 From this point, Borowitz’s understanding of Jewish duty leads in two directions. One would be to a consideration of exactly how interpersonal relationships, together with the “overarching” or “determinative” divinehuman relationship, provide reasons for choices and actions. That is, what would advance Borowitz’s conception of Jewish responsibilities and the constitution of Jewish life for the contemporary non-Orthodox Jew would be a philosophical account of how normativity, and specifically moral normativity, is tied to relationships. This is still a desideratum. Second would be concrete examples of how the individual Jew, situated in the Covenant as an historical and cultural reality and related to God as a member of that Covenanted community, arrives at decisions and norms of practice. Borowitz has spent a great deal of time in doing the latter, both in his own thinking and in his teaching. As I have mentioned, one can find some results 53 See “‘Im ba’et, eyma—Since You Object, Let Me Put It This Way,” 163–64. 54 Borowitz, “Five Letters,” 180. 55 Borowitz, “‘Im ba’et, eyma—Since You Object, Let Me Put It This Way,” 164: “Relationship commands, but it is too personalistic to yield what we normally think of as law.” 56 Borowitz’s fullest account of how the normative force of Jewish duty is grounded in the relationship with God can be found in Renewing the Covenant, chaps. 19–20, esp. 289–95.

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in his early book Choosing a Sex Ethic, in various of the essays in Exploring Jewish Ethics, and then in the books Reform Jewish Ethics and Halakhah and The Jewish Moral Virtues. The Essays That Follow In addition to an interview with Eugene Borowitz and a select bibliography, this volume contains five essays. The first two essays, “Why I Am a Theologian Rather Than a Philosopher” and “The Jewish Need for Theology,” deal with the theological character of Borowitz’s project. Here he clarifies why and how he is a theologian and not a philosopher, emphasizing the universality of the latter and the particularity of the former and the increasingly important role of Jewish particularity for his conception of the Jewish self. He also defends, in an early essay, the significance of theology for Judaism. The third selection, “Through the Shadowed Valley,” is a chapter from Renewing the Covenant in which Borowitz critically reflects on post-Holocaust Jewish thought and its implications for understanding what the Holocaust has meant for Jewish thought and Jewish life. This leads Borowitz to clarify various features of post-Holocaust Jewish life and to introduce his intriguing interpretation of the kabbalistic notion of tzimtzum as the mechanism whereby human beings, at a time when our once inflated optimism about human accomplishments is now seriously compromised, ought to “contract” and make room for the presence of God in Jewish experience. The fourth essay reprinted here, “The Autonomous Jewish Self,” is the important treatment of the Jewishly embedded self, which was discussed above. The final selection, “’Im ba’et, eyma—Since You Object, Let Me Put It This Way,” is Borowitz’s response to a series of academic comments on Renewing the Covenant, which originally appeared in Reviewing the Covenant: Eugene B. Borowitz and the Postmodern Renewal of Jewish Theology. In it Borowitz clarifies the sense in which he has appropriated the vocabulary of postmodernism and addresses a number of the themes discussed above. It is one of a several essays that Borowitz wrote after the publication of his great work that illuminate the trajectory of his thinking and his latest articulation of it.

Why I Am a Theologian Rather than a Philosopher* Enough people have been puzzled by my calling myself a theologian rather than a philosopher, the more common Jewish term for a religious thinker, that a few words about that seem warranted. (Mentally I add the question, “And does that make any real difference to people who read or listen to me?”) I guess things are so terminologically loose these days that bothering about what anyone calls my kind of thinking seems pretty pedantic. But something useful can be learned about Jewish belief by exploring the difference between these overlapping but diverse ways of looking at reality. Some brief explanations should clarify things. Theologians start their thinking from their belief in a given faith; how extensive that initial commitment is will vary with the faith and the thinker involved. By contrast, ever since René Descartes (1596–1650; “I think, therefore I am”), philosophers have used methodical doubt to clear their minds of everything but the logic of thinking and its consequences. This being the root difference between Jewish philosophers and Jewish theologians, it wasn’t uncommon a few decades back for philosophers to attack theologians as having closed minds, while philosophers celebrated their own open-mindedness, hardly the kind of judgment you’d expect from a truly open-minded person! As Jews emerged into the modern world during the nineteenth century and their approaches to knowledge were shaped by the university, they quickly gave up their old textual forms of reasoning for the then-current philosophical ways of thinking. Two major factors impelled this development. First, the greatest universities of that time were located in Germany, and philosophy was considered their chief glory. So even the majority of Jews who did not specialize in philosophy began to speak in the styles of the philosophers Immanuel Kant or Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel or one of their numerous German successors. Second, modernizing Jews were desperately eager to prove that they were just like everyone else, and philosophy focused on the truths that all rational minds should share, producing an invigorating climate for those seeking to shed their old Jewish baggage. A famous squabble later broke out between some Jews who were so eager to be considered modern Germans that they spurned their ­ethnicity, * For the complete references for this essay please refer to A Touch of the Sacred (Jewish Lights, 2007), where this essay was originally published.

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becoming enthusiastic devotees of philosophy’s openness, and some eastern-European Jewish nationalists who conceived of Judaism as an independent source of value and truth, thus thinking in terms of Jewish philosophy. It was a futile hope for the latter group. This was made clear by the title of Hermann Cohen’s 1919 book, Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism, which once and for all established the academic validity of philosophizing about Judaism. Cohen’s philosophy, neo-Kantianism (a revision of Kant’s thought that restored its academic legitimacy), first establishes what any rational mind should arrive at: religion of reason. Then, if we look at the many religions created over the centuries, we will find from the “sources of Judaism” that the Jewish religion, as Cohen interprets it, exemplifies religion of reason uniquely well. Though the boundaries have loosened since Cohen wrote, his thesis pretty much describes what the many fine academic philosophers who now write about Judaism try to do: first provide a philosophic truth and then give this concept its Jewish identity. Ironically, today we have relaxed enough to call this enterprise Jewish philosophy. In the 1970s, when American colleges were becoming hospitable to the notion of academic Jewish studies, the old argument over parochialism was reborn. While it may sound self-defeating, it was the Jewish professors who fought the introduction of such courses on many campuses. Some had come to university life to escape their Jewish origins and devote themselves to universal culture. They vigorously opposed programs that might remind people of Jewish particularity. Other professors who were fervent Jewish secularists did support courses in Jewish culture but opposed those that might teach about the Jewish religious tradition. They argued that because religion rests on belief and often seeks converts, it has no place in an academic life that exalts open-mindedness. While these professors are now the exceptions, there are still a few American universities where Jewish studies departments exclude courses based on Judaism as a religion. My chief encounter with this problem came in 1962, when my article in Commentary magazine on the need for Jewish theology was severely criticized as seeking to introduce dogma into Judaism. The criticism ended when I countered that while practice was traditionally required in Judaism, belief was largely a realm of personal judgment. What modern Jewry needed, I contended, was to pay more attention to what we believe and why we held those beliefs. My challenger illustrated the problems that philosophy increasingly came upon as the twentieth century moved forward. His own brilliant skepticism kept him from ever making a major positive statement about the values a rational person should hold.

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I could not have imagined then that succeeding decades would validate my youthful insight: Thoughtfully examined belief, i.e. “theology,” would become an important ingredient in the spiritual life of American Jewry. That happened because with the passage of time, it became increasingly apparent that the vaunted objectivity of modern philosophy was actually founded on some fairly subjective assumptions—cultural, political, racial, and sexist. Moreover, Jewish philosophers learned the impossibility of thinking without specific content in mind. One must have a sense of something in order to begin to think. With philosophy itself transformed, it did not seem unreasonable to suggest that religious belief might also involve quite deep thinking, though not always in the forms pioneered for us by the great Greek philosophers. As I see it, contemporary Jewish theology often centers on clarifying the balance in our faith between belief and reasoning; those of us who refer to ourselves as Jewish theologians will emphasize one or another as we believe Jewish truth requires. Only future generations of Jewish believers will be able to judge which statements best explained what Torah meant in our times.

The Jewish Need for Theology* The Christian, particularly the Protestant, often thinks of religion as the ability to affirm a creed, a given content of belief, as well as the life, individual and communal, which flows from this faith. But for the Jew religion cannot be so easily identified with the affirmation of a creed, and consequently the distinction between the “secular” and the “religious”—which is so basic to Christian thought—has never been strictly applicable to Judaism. The Jews were a people in the simple ethnic sense of that term before they met their God at Sinai, and the maintenance of that peoplehood has been critical to them in all the centuries that have followed. If Mordecai Kaplan has performed any lasting service in Jewish theology, it is his emphasis on this ethnic component as the inescapable base of all Jewish religiosity, and his insistence that a Judaism which knows only God, but not Israel, His people, is no authentic link in the tradition. Indeed Kaplan’s therapy for the ills of contemporary Jewish religious life is a thoroughgoing revival of the sense of Jewish peoplehood and its expression in every cultural dimension. The natural result of a healthy Jewishness, he feels, would be a rebirth of Jewish piety in appropriately modern terms. In one form or another, Kaplan’s diagnosis has become an accepted axiom in responsible American Jewish theology. To proclaim one’s faith in God may—so most Jewish thinkers today would agree—yield a general religiosity, but Judaism is reached only when one is equally ready to affirm the special relation of the Jewish people to Him. The Kaplan thesis, however, has had an interesting “underground” history which is only now beginning to bear fruit. From the very start, the emphasis on the concept of peoplehood has served the needs of those who wanted to be Jewish but could not think of themselves as religious—either because they did not believe in God, or (more frequently) because they were anxious to be rid of the discipline of traditional Jewish observance and its European or immigrant overtones. With the help of Kaplan’s theory or some variation of it, such non-believing or non-observant Jews (lay and rabbinic alike) could nevertheless devote themselves in all good conscience to Jewish life in its new American style, and they could feel themselves to be making a contribution to the maintenance and growth of Jewish culture without any * Originally published in Commentary (August 1962).

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commitment to theology or commandments. These would eventually come of themselves, or not. In either case, the present had its rationale. Now, whatever else may be said of this position, it most certainly involved a distortion of Kaplan’s view. Kaplan has never divided Jewish existence into two seperate realms, that of the folk and that of the faith. He has never sought to introduce the categories “secular” and “religious” into Judaism in a way that would cut the one aspect off from the other. What he has done is to develop a theory of Jewish existence according to which the people, the social reality, has always had priority over its theology, and he has built a program for the people’s future on the basis of this order of priorities. At the same time he has always insisted that a people’s most significant cultural achievement is its religion and that true fulfillment can only come to a people as its religion suffuses its culture. Kaplan has not been unmindful of the dangers posed by those who would use him to set up a fundamental distinction between Jewishness and Jewish religiosity. Thus, while he began by speaking of Judaism as a civilization, the years since have seen him regularly speaking of it is a religious civilization. While the secularity of the average synagogue member in America cannot be understood without reference to this ideological background, he himself is unaware of the sources of his attitudes. He comes, in increasing numbers, to join the synagogue because there are few if any socially acceptable alternatives to synagogue affiliation for one who wants to maintain his Jewish identity and wants his children to be Jewish, in some sense, after him. Though this is not the only motive or level of concern to be found within the synagogue today,1 the Jew who does not rise above such folkfeeling unquestionably and increasingly represents the synagogue’s majority mood. More than that, however, it must be said that he also represents the synagogue’s greatest threat. The damaging effect he has already had on the synagogue requires little new description. His new-found affluence and his need for status within the community have made the big building with the small sanctuary, the lavish wedding with the short ceremony, and the fabulous Bar Mitzvah celebration with the minimal religious significance, well-established patterns among American Jewish folkways. What other

1 For the positive side of this movement and for a glimpse of the creative minority who are searching from within, see my article “Crisis Theology and the Jewish Community,” COMMENTARY, July 1961.

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religious group in America can boast of men who are zealously committed to interfaith activities, but who have no faith of their own, who worship in no church with any degree of regularity, and who observe no commandments but those that their organizational participation requires or common American decency decrees? What does it say of Jewish life in America when Reform Judaism appeals because it demands so little but confers so much status?; when people blandly proclaim that they are non-observant Orthodox Jews?; when Conservative Judaism makes a virtue of not defining the center so that it may avoid alienating those disaffected on either side? In short, the secularism which is endemic to the church is reaching into the synagogue as well. But there is a difference, for in the synagogue it claims to be there as of right, as a legitimate interpretation of Jewishness. The church can protect itself from the invasions of secularism by returning to its roots in faith, by a theological analysis of what makes it a church and who therefore has a right to participate in it. And indeed such a refining return to theology is today well under way in most of the major Protestant groups. The impact of this concern with theology is only just beginning to be felt in Protestant life, and it may well be overwhelmed by the secular tides running through the churches. Nevertheless, a significant if small leadership has found the courage to face the issue and striven to meet it, knowing that even if it proves impossible to divert the massive social energies of our day, it may still be possible to prepare the church within the church that will somehow enable the truth of the gospel to survive. Nothing like this movement in extent or depth is yet to be found in the synagogue. The stirrings of an interest in Jewish theology still affect only a few individuals responding mainly to one another and to that small group within the synagogue who have at least begun to ask the right questions. The leadership of what is purportedly the Jewish religious community is, as a whole, uninterested in theology and is convinced that theology has nothing to do with truly practical questions like the goals of the community’s activity, the methods which are appropriate to reaching them, or the criteria by which either might be judged. If anything, rabbis and laymen alike have a positive antipathy to Jewish theology which among the more articulate and knowledgeable has congealed into an ideology. Judaism, they claim, has never had a theology. Judaism is a religion of deed, not creed. To aspire toward the development of a theology is to assimilate a Christian concern, to impose on Judaism a perspective decidedly uncongenial to it—in other words, it is an attempt to translate Jewish experience into a language appropriate only to Christianity. Moreover, there are practical risks to the theological enterprise. Let a Jewish theology arise and the

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next step would be to seek conformity to it, to force it upon others and thus destroy that productive pluralism, that creative intellectual dialectic which has been so precious a Jewish privilege. At the lowest level this view amounts to an elaborate defense of the accomplishments of Jewish organizations, both lay and “religious,” over the past decade. The varieties of Jewish officialdom may be uneasy over the superficiality of Jewish affiliation and concerned about the meaningful continuity of Jewish life, but not to the extent of encouraging a challenge to the assumptions which underlie the mood of achievement that suffuses the organizational world of American Jewry. Only that theology is welcome which can be harnessed to organizational ends and apparatus, which is an ally and an aid to further institutionalization. No welcome is extended to a radical opposition—even an opposition that exists for the sake of heaven. The most respectable rejection of Jewish theology stems from a concern for Jewish uniqueness, for the ethnic base of Jewishness and for its survival in some authentic fashion. Spokesmen for this view know Jewish theology only as an effort to establish the universalism of Judaism, to indicate what Jews have believed that all men might find true. Thus to them, theology inevitably involves a sacrifice of the Jewish people, of its specific historic experience and of its present separate existence. Yet whatever the motives behind it, this position, by restraining the religious explication of what is involved in Jewishness—another way of saying, Jewish theology—is serving as a major if unwitting instrument in the secularization of Judaism and the synagogue. And in any case, the fear of losing the particularity of Jewish experience is groundless, for under the influence of existentialism, contemporary theology (Christian as well as Jewish) has made its very starting point the particular and concrete existence, in which alone all universals are to be seen and find their meaning; this, indeed, is one of the things that distinguishes it most sharply from the rationalist line of 19th-century Jewish thought which was to some extent guilty of sacrificing the idea of Jewish peoplehood to the dream of a “universal” Judaism. Inconsistent is too mild a word; chutzpah alone is adequate to characterize the assertion that theology has no place in Judaism. Because Judaism is basically ethnic, it does not follow that all else in Judaism is optional. What traditional Jewish warrant can be found for the view that Jewish peoplehood is separable from Jewish religiosity? It is only in the last seventy-five years that the idea of Jewishness as a species of secular existence has become so

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much as conceivable. Judaism has throughout its history asserted that to be a member of the Jewish people was to participate in the Covenant with God and that to partake of Jewish ethnicity was simultaneously to serve God’s purpose in history. Modern scholarship has by dint of much diligent toil sought to describe the Jews as they were before Sinai, to picture them as another sub-Semitic group or economic class. But the most important fact about pre-Sinaitic Israel is its utter rejection by classical Jewish literature. Once the secular Hebrews found themselves the people of the Covenant, they knew their only significant origins to be the meetings with God by Abraham and at Sinai. Once the Hebrews had found their new and altered character as God’s people, once they had passed beyond the ethnicity of the Hivites, the Jebusites, the Girgashites, their role as the servant-folk of God was all that mattered. Those, then, who consciously or unconsciously are turning the synagogue into an effectively secular institution are blaspheming a sacred history of millennia, indeed all the history the Jewish people has ever cared to remember until recent years. But if Jewishness, while ethnic, has a religious component, modern man is entitled to know what Jewish belief means today. Perhaps in an earlier period one could have relied on the solidarity of the Jewish community or the continuity of Jewish practice to bring Judaism safely through the danger of secular domination. But it is precisely the Jewish masses who are the source of the growing secularism, while the standards of Jewish practice have by their continual decline shown their lack of independent foundation or authority. If kashrut were still regarded as God’s command, the Jew might well withstand the many-layered temptations which arise to violate it. If study were a mitzvah and not another possibility for leisuretime recreation, then Jewish learning might be a thick hedge surrounding the remnants of Jewish piety. But since neither the spirit nor the practice of “catholic Israel” suffices any longer to assure meaningful Jewish continuity, we are all the more in need of an adequate statement of Jewish faith relevant to our day, for it is only this that can restore the Jewish community to its goals and to the duties they entail. Where another generation might seek to meet its problems by trusting naively to the onward motion of an unfolding organic development, we are deprived of any such trust. History and sociology have shown us where we have been and where we are ­tending— shall we now pretend that we are blind? We have all the sophistication which self-knowledge and self-consciousness confer—where shall we hope

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to find the innocence of ignorance? Secularism is rising in religious guise, powered by the social and economic readjustments of a post-immigration, post-depression, and postwar America. To hide from this knowledge is simultaneously to spurn our freedom, and by preferring illusion to reality, to contemn the franchise of modernity. The question can no longer be whether Jewishness has always had a religious content or whether we really need discuss it. The only honest question left to ask is, how shall we speak of Jewish faith? True, we cannot hope to speak out of an unbroken tradition of theology which has grown and developed with Judaism itself. For many reasons, the philosophic explication of faith has not, in the past, seemed a necessary part of Israel’s continuing intellectual activity. Thus, to develop a Jewish theology today, to explain what would purport to be an authentic Judaism, inevitably means using concepts and standards devised in a Christian context for Christian purposes. Such a task of translation seems forbiddingly formidable. Yet similar labor has been done before in Jewish Diaspora experience. Indeed, the classic expressions of Jewish theological creativity were the products of a cross-fertilization of Judaism and some other culture. The incursion of Hellenistic thought into Judaism, for example, made Philo both possible and necessary. And Maimonides was compelled to write the Guide for the Perplexed (and, one might argue, even his Code) because in his time Judaism was challenged by an Islam confident of its own truth and able to argue for itself in neo-Aristotelian terms. Neither Philo nor Maimonides nor any of their colleagues had a traditionally Jewish yet “universal” theological vocabulary to draw upon. They had to fashion one out of the general philosophic material of their day—and they succeeded in doing so without surrendering their Judaism. They succeeded because they did their borrowing in all Jewish self-respect, limiting their acquisitions to what they felt were the limits set by their Jewish faith, and transforming what they had borrowed to suit their Jewish goals. Philo’s logos is qualitatively distinct from that of his Hellenistic predecessors, and Maimonides, who knows Aristotle’s thesis of the eternity of matter so well that he can on its account break with the Moslem philosophic tradition of proving God from creation, will not surrender completely to that thesis because it might imperil Judaism’s insistence upon miracle and freedom. If Jewish theology must always be an “answering” theology, then the risk of falsifying Judaism will always have to be run. Still there is ample Jewish precedent to show that the risks can be overcome and that Judaism can thereby acquire a new vitality. If anything, the fact that Christianity stems from Judaism and seeks indigenously to relate to Judaism’s God, makes it at once easier and more

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necessary to find a means of saying, in language we both can share, where we must differ and where we can agree. Such a quest for intellectual clarity need not restrict Judaism’s traditional freedom in the realm of thought. There is a significant difference between dogmatic and systematic theology. The former is an effort to clarify and explain, perhaps even to justify, what a member of a church with dogmas must believe. The latter also seeks to clarify, explain, and justify faith, but if the church does not insist on defining the content held necessary for membership, then the theology may, at best, come to be pervasive, accepted, and universally relied upon. The sense of discipline or obligation need not appear. Judaism could hardly tolerate a dogmatic theology, for dogma, taken strictly, is alien to its spirit and experience. Rigor and authority are known only in the realm of Jewish practice, of halachah, but have rarely been introduced into the realm of thought. Thus, the closest thing to a dogmatic theology in Judaism might once have been a theology of the halachah. But with authority in the area of Jewish practice as eroded as it has become, such an enterprise, even were it able to surmount the almost insuperable academic difficulties involved, would still only be as coercive as its argument was persuasive. Inhospitality to dogmatic theology, however, still leaves ample room for the systematic theology which would seek to set forth the content of Jewish belief in an integrated and reasoned way. The authority of such a theology would rest on its ability to convince, not on its special ecclesiastical status, and its very presence in the intellectual forum would require those with other views, or none, to meet its arguments and match its standards. Since Jewish theology must be systematic rather than dogmatic, a reawakening of theological concern might very well result in a variety of views and approaches. But so far as the fight against the new religiosecularism is concerned, this would make very little difference, and so far as Judaism is concerned, it would be all to the good. Such disagreements could be resolved in meaningful and constructive debate, and if not resolved, they would at least contribute to the clarification of alternative possibilities in Jewish faith—while showing, incidentally, how baseless is the fear that the development of a modern Jewish theology will lead to creedal compulsion. If more need be said on this point, we might take note of the fact that the nature of such views as have already emerged among the younger Jewish theologians would militate strongly against any effort to impose them upon

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others. There is no absolutistic tendency apparent in the writings of Emil Fackenheim or Jakob Petuchowski or Steven Schwarzschild or any of the other contemporary thinkers who have contributed to the nascent Jewish theological enterprise of the past few years. On the contrary, for most of them, freedom of conscience is the very foundation of thought and their concern with theology stems in the first place from their desire to transform Judaism from a social fate into a free commitment of conscience. What Judaism needs, then, is not a theology, but theological concern, not theological uniformity but theological informedness. Whether expressed in a single pattern or in several patterns, this would make possible the corrected vision we require—a sharp focus on the religious component of Jewishness. It would, of course, be naive to suppose that mere intellectual formulation and discussion could have an immediate or powerful effect on a community as ethnically rooted and as happily integrating as American Jewry. Still, every man of intellectual self-respect would feel himself challenged, and the new, biting quality to the quest for a meaningful Jewish identity would influence many. Through serious theological discussion Jewish identity would be defined, Jewish commitments and obligations outlined. Anyone who had the willingness to do so would finally be given an opportunity to direct his Jewish interest to serious Jewish living, and those who were still standing indecisively at the margins of the congregation would be provided with an incentive to join the community of the faithful. Perhaps a decisive minority could be won. The positive hope is obvious—but there might also be a negative consequence from which we need not shy away. Clarifying Jewish faith might bring many to the conclusion that they cannot honestly participate in Judaism and the synagogue. Jewish theology could thus become a means of driving Jews from the synagogue. No one wishes to lose Jews for Judaism, but the time has come when the synagogue must be saved for the religious Jew. The time has come when we must be prepared to let some Jews opt out so that those who remain in, or who come in, will not be diverted from their duty to God. As the religion of a perpetual minority, Judaism must always first be concerned with the saving remnant, and so long as the synagogue is overwhelmed by the indifferent and the apathetic who control it for their own non-religious purposes, that remnant will continue to be deprived of its proper communal home. By defining the issues, clarifying the goals, challenging the conventions, Jewish theology may help save a faithful seed and thus round out its prophetic function in our time.

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Would there, then, be no place in this community for the secular Jew? Would he be excommunicated, cut off forever from the Jewish people? Surely the answer must depend upon the secularist’s own Jewish concern. Some secular Jews have no interest in the Jewish people at all. They are Jews by birth and their secularism, they say, is purely human and universal, neither having nor requiring any particular foundation (which prompts the obvious comment that, remarkably, this urban, intellectual, universal type is a Jew). The responsibility of the religious community to such Jews would be to help them see what Judaism is and might be. But their right (and perhaps their duty) to stop being known as Jews would be all the more available to them as a matter of free choice. The Jew who is secular in the sense of lacking religious faith but loyal to the Jewish community—the man who wants neither God nor commandments, but who likes Jews, the Jewish approach to life, or the Jewish style of being different—is the more difficult problem, perhaps because he is so new to the Jewish scene. What would an adequate Jewish theology say to him? Concerned with Jewish peoplehood and Jewish history, it would somehow have to come to terms with all the various groupings into which this people has evolved, and with all the transitional forms in which so many of them find themselves—though it would also have to judge the ultimate value of these groupings and forms in terms of their relation to God. Committed to Klal Yisroel as well as to God, the new Jewish theology would probably take an ambivalent attitude to the committed Jewish secularist. He has a place among his people as long as he wishes one—nevertheless he does not stand within its traditional frame. He has his rights as worker, seeker, contributor—but hardly as leader, spokesman, or examplar. He must be called “Jew,” for there is no other useful term for him—nevertheless he is not, in his rejection of the Jewish faith, a “true,” a “real,” a “good” Jew. So long as his Jewish loyalty is limited to the people but not to the God it serves, he must be considered truncated and unfulfilled. Jewish theology therefore has a special responsibility to him, both as challenge and alternative. It must ask him the source of his values, the foundations of his beliefs, in people, in ideals, in Jewishness itself. It must help him reach the profound questions of human existence to which Judaism has been a response. And over against his own implicit faith, it must pose the faith of the Jewish ages, now interpreted fresh and anew. It must help him face the need to believe, which is basic to any life of ideals, and it must then help him build a personal foundation in faith that can reach up to all men and the whole of human history. Within this context it must set before him in cogent fashion the riches, the depth, the maturity in value which

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centuries of experience in many different worlds of culture have brought to Judaism. How many intellectuals there are who know everything there is to know about minor novelists and poets and painters, but—witness the COMMENTARY symposium of last year—dismiss as insignificant a Judaism they stopped studying at the age of thirteen! Such Jews too should feel free—perhaps they should even be encouraged—to leave a Jewish people they discover irrevocably wed to God. But the Jewish theologian affirms his vocation as an affirmation of Judaism, in the faith that Judaism can only benefit from exposition and scrutiny. He trusts that he may communicate not concepts alone, but faith, and that he may arouse not understanding alone, but commitment.

Through the Shadowed Valley* Our Jewish turn from messianic modernism has pivoted on the Holocaust and our response to it. I seek to probe its spiritual footings afresh by analyzing the many anomalies of our religious discussion of the Holocaust. To begin with, why did it take us until the mid-1960s to initiate a widespread discussion of its “meaning”? Why did almost all our thinkers then reject what Richard Rubenstein claimed was its critical theological challenge? Why did our years of theological discussion yield no ideas not well known before Hitler? Why did our largely agnostic community keep talking about the nature of a God it did not affirm? Why didn’t liberated humanism, associated with the “death of God,” conquer the Jewish community, which instead became more interested in Jewish spirituality and mysticism? Why did Orthodoxy, allegedly invalidated by the Holocaust, become newly attractive to modernized Jews yet remain a minority? Why did the State of Israel, our great answer to the Holocaust, lose its salvific significance? Why have the non-Orthodox Judaisms, all tarred by modernity’s failures, retained the spiritual allegiance of most modernized Jews? And how does the religious experience underlying these developments set our Jewish theological agenda? Breaking the Barriers to Debating the Holocaust I begin with the historical background: Emancipation, modernization, secularization. Already in the late 19th century, believing Jewish thinkers created non-Orthodox—that is, liberal—theologies of Judaism while more skeptical types broke with religion and created secular theories of Judaism. This demythologized religion was the accepted ethos of modernized Jews everywhere well before Hitler. This meant that those modem Jews who still spoke about God did so in the terms created by the Jewish rationalists, utilizing Cohenian terms like “God-idea” or “concept of God,” which reduced God to the founding premise of rational ethics, or, in the Kaplanian v­ ersion, to those natural forces that further the development of our human potential.

* For the complete references for this essay please refer to Renewing the Covenant (The Jewish Publication Society, 1991), where this essay was originally published.

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After World War II, the new democratization of American society intensified our community’s uncomfortable inner tension. Our growing acceptance depended on our being one of America’s “three great religions,” and our ­suburbanization largely limited our self-identification as Jews to the synagogue. Only this conflicted with the reality that most modern Jews were agnostics—the prewar atheistic certainties having faded—who tolerated worship with difficulty and contented themselves with supporting the synagogue for its familial and communal uses. Socially and theologically, Jews could not easily discuss the theological implications of the Holocaust, even had they been so inclined. To raise a cry against the God who tolerated such an enormity would expose the full extent of Jewish unbelief to Christian America, thereby undermining Judaism’s status as one of America’s equivalent faiths. This changed only in the mid-1960s when the Protestant death-of-God movement captured the popular imagination and created a new cultural circumstance. The spiritual convulsion that rolled through much of American Christianity can most easily be explained as a consequence of its long overdue secularization. Consider two of its pivotal books: Paul Van Buren’s The Secular Meaning of the Gospels, which argued that the Christ needed to be understood in fully human terms, and Harvey Cox’s The Secular City, which argued for the church’s becoming more worldly and political. With Jesus de-trinitized and social responsibility via politics the major focus of Christian living, God had become superfluous, a philosophical and cultural embarrassment. But if America could tolerate such a humanistic Christianity, it might equally do so for a long-secularized Judaism. When Jews began to join this discussion they did so in a distinctively Jewish way. It had not occurred to any of the seminal Christian death-ofGod thinkers—Paul Van Buren, William Hamilton, Gabriel Vahanian, or Thomas J. J. Altizer—to discuss the Holocaust. Their arguments grew from developments in philosophy, culture, or personal religious experience, not from what recent history might imply about the absence of God. Their abstractness clashed sharply with the traditional Jewish concern about God’s involvement with people in history, which now suddenly became an argument against God. That critical difference noted, American Jewry quickly joined in the death-of-God discussions as an acceptable American context in which they might finally express their old/new religious doubts. Rubenstein’s Death-of-God Challenge The form that our ensuing theological debates took shows them to be a continuation of our ongoing arguments about how best to modernize

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J­ udaism. Richard Rubenstein’s collection of articles entitled After Auschwitz defined much of the discussion. He contended that the Holocaust had made it impossible for a responsible person any longer to believe in the God of the Covenant, the One he said Judaism considered “the ultimate, omnipotent actor in history.” The sages of biblical-rabbinic Judaism had intimately identified the Covenant with God’s justice. When Jews do the good, God blesses them abundantly; when they sin, God punishes them, a theme so significant that the second paragraph of the full shema consists of a passage expounding it (Deut. 11:13–21). This led to the further biblical teaching that God employs the enemies of the Jews to punish them, hoping through their suffering to return them to faithfulness. From the prophets until recent times, at least that of the Chmielnicki pogroms (1648), Jewish calamity evoked from Jewish thinkers the Covenantal judgment: Because of our sins God has properly brought this evil upon us. If so, Rubenstein pointed out, we should in all piety say that God used Hitler to punish and reform us, a view that would give him some vindication, a doctrine Rubenstein considered utterly obscene. It seemed far more blasphemous than inferring from the terrifying reality of the Holocaust that an empty neutrality pervaded the universe and that, at least in our time, God, the God of the Covenant, was dead. The critique stung and aroused much response. But to whom was it directed? Rubenstein’s demand that Jews give up their retributive God, the One who tightly scrutinized actions and responded to them with immediately palpable justice, was addressed to modernized, non-Orthodox Jews. Yet such a God had long had no place in the worldview of those who fled the ghetto. For them, science, not theology, explained what happened in nature, and political commentators, not the prophets, did the same for history. As the 19th century moved on, Jewish thinkers like Hermann Cohen and their rabbinic popularizers had reworked the Jewish view of God to emphasize human agency—­ethics—and so saw secular causation adequately explaining specific events. Rejecting God’s Management of History We can gauge what had already happened to the Jewish view of history from our people’s response to the 1903 pogrom in Kishinev. To the world’s outrage, the Russian police stood by idly and perhaps encouragingly as forty-seven Jews were killed and ninety-two others were severely wounded by mobs. The reaction of Jews to this tragedy—most particularly of those who lived in Russia—reveals how fully God’s retribution had given way

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to a ­secularistic commitment to human responsibility. Perhaps some few pietists could still suggest that Russian mobs and their governmental protectors had been God’s agents; had any modern Jews suggested the notion they would have been thought ridiculous. And one would have to search hard to find a lament that Jewish sin had brought this evil upon the community. Instead, Russian Zionists called for Jewish self-defense units and Hebrew writers derided the passivity of Jews in simply accepting the slaughter. World Jewry also responded by organizing itself for political action, emergency aid, and rescue, not for fasting and prayer. No modern Jewish writer distressfully inquired where God was during the pogrom; moderns knew that human freedom, not God’s retributive pedagogy, lay behind these events. Every major Jewish philosopher of the 20th century reinforced this more reticent view of God’s role in history; surely rationalism permitted little else. In its finest European variety, the neo-Kantianism of Hermann Cohen, God grounds and spurs ethics but a free humanity determines what will happen in history for good or ill. In its favorite American form, Mordecai Kaplan’s naturalism, God was carefully redefined to have only limited power. Kaplan considered the notion of God intervening in human affairs to be the kind of carry-over supernaturalism that made moderns reject Jewish belief. Even in Leo Baeck’s reach beyond reason to religious consciousness, God remains the mystery we sense behind our ethics, not an independent agent dominating history. The existentialism of Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber did not yield a stronger view of retribution. The former denied that the Jewish people truly lives in history while the latter relegated academic, that is, secularistic, history to the realm of I–it relationships, where God, the Eternal Thou, cannot be encountered. In some ways Abraham Heschel’s thought most tellingly instances this distancing of God from events because he alone of our master philosophers wrote his major works after the Holocaust. Though an exalted God dominates his theology, all but a few sentences of his rare comments about the Holocaust refer to human failure, not God’s ineffable wisdom and inscrutable justice. For many years before the Holocaust most rabbis, when they actually referred to God, used the humanized concepts of these master teachers, not a tight reading of Isaiah that might yield the idea that our God is Rubenstein’s “ultimate, omnipotent actor in history.” The God that Richard Rubenstein discovered as a result of the Holocaust had died, had long since been reinterpreted in other fashion by modem Jews. Consequently, when Jewish thinkers began addressing the religious issues posed by the

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Holocaust, they did not consider themselves obligated to defend a strong, Deuteronomic view of God’s justice. Instead, they explored the implications of this awesome evildoing in the context of their modern understanding of God and human nature. .

Denying the Qualitative Uniqueness of the Holocaust Another assertion by a thinker central to the debate over the Holocaust has also been widely rejected, in this case after acknowledging its pertinence. Emil Fackenheim deems the Holocaust a qualitatively unique instance of evil and stipulates that its uniqueness not be trivialized by reducing it to the singleness of every other event in history. Rather, the Nazi effort to kill all Jews merely because of their Jewishness exposed humankind to an utterly new dimension of evil. As a result, no previous philosophic or Jewish religious response to the problem of evil can be remotely adequate to a discussion of the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel goes further still: the stupefying uniqueness of the Holocaust negates any possibility of our even formulating apt questions about it and, therefore, certainly precludes the possibility of our finding answers. Fackenheim and others, conscious that philosophizing might be a blasphemous mitigation of the horror, nonetheless believe that we must attempt to elucidate its implications for contemporary Jewish belief. Fackenheim argues that the Nazis’ unparalleled depravity arose more from their intention than from their acts. They carried out this evil fully conscious of its perversity; worse, they did it for the sheer willfulness of doing so monstrous an evil. He supports this view by citing numerous examples of the Nazis self-destructively pursuing their demonic goal, as in diverting railroad equipment desperately needed to repel the Allied invasion so they could continue transporting Jews to the death camps. Fackenheim’s interpretation of Nazi intentions is ultimately unconvincing because it finds so little direct support in the vast historic evidence about the Holocaust. To the contrary, the more we study the records of the Third Reich the more we see how concretely goal-directed and therefore routinized was the progression from discrimination to degradation and then to murder. Far from consciously seeking to do evil for evil’s sake they applied their fabled ethnic discipline to achieving what their demented logic had identified as a supreme “ethical” good: ridding Europe and the world of a racial strain that would otherwise destroy true human value. Most Jewish thinkers consider the Holocaust a most egregious human evil—if one may use comparative

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terminology when referring to events of awesome inhumanity—but one that needs to be considered on the continuum of other human evils, not in a realm of its own. In somewhat the same spirit, there has been a general rejection of the corollary claim by Wiesel, Rubenstein, Fackenheim, and others that the Holocaust must now become a second Sinai, the determining reality of contemporary Jewish existence. If by this they only mean that Jews should reject any i­nterpretation of Judaism that has not been centrally shaped by the Holocaust, few would disagree. But since they have proposed that we should now view all of existence, human and Jewish, in terms of the Holocaust, their position has been rejected as disproportionate. Genocidal destruction has not been the common theme of many terrifying ills of late 20th-century history, which mostly have arisen from a doleful continuation of the human failings so often seen in history: inaction, ignorance, mindlessness, venality, perversity, and mendaciousness. Little seems new except the scale of our malefaction, the education and efficiency we bring to it, and the immediacy with which the world gets to know about it. Moreover, a Holocaust-centered view of life might easily obscure how much goodness people do day by day. Our people is a case in point for, despite our troubles, we do not spend our days desperately fending off extinction. While the Holocaust must fundamentally figure in our view of Jewish identity, it does not faithfully teach us the reality of Jewish existence. Our Good God, Limited or Inscrutable? When the thinkers turned directly to the issue of theodicy, they mostly followed two lines of interpretation. Jews who above all sought clarity in their beliefs and wanted good reasons for believing, argued that rather than being omnipotent, God has but limited power. God may be as powerful as anything can be and supremely good; God does all the good that God can do. Occasionally that will not be sufficient to counteract an eruption of the evil latent in nature or caused by human freedom. This very human freedom to do good or evil, and thus to affirm or defy our most intimate knowledge of God’s will, decisively proves God’s finitude and rationally explains why evil, slight or gruesome, can occur. This theodicy was not the esoteric possession of a Jewish elite but had been widely disseminated among American Jews by the many disciples of a number of influential teachers. Thus, Mordecai Kaplan, echoing the thought of American religious liberals like William James, taught his ­students at the

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Jewish Theological Seminary the concept of such a finite God already in the 1930s and then wrote a book elucidating it. Henry Slonimsky, the inspiration and spiritual guide of two generations of rabbis trained at Stephen Wise’s Jewish Institute of Religion, taught a similar doctrine in the same period. Utilizing European philosophical trends, he intriguingly suggested that the limited God “grows” as does everything else alive, in God’s case through human partnership in completing creation. The more philosophical rationalists and their followers took an oblique approach to limiting God, developing their theodicy in terms of reason’s proper power rather than by speculation on God’s nature. They generally followed Hermann Cohen’s neo-Kantianism, which maintained that a properly rational mind cannot logically deal with questions about ultimate reality, i.e., metaphysics—in this case, whether God’s power is finite or infinite. Thoughtful people should therefore base their religious belief on what the mature mind can know with certainty, namely, one’s ethical obligations. So the main stream of American non-Orthodoxy communicated a “God-idea” whose religious function essentially was to ground its ethics. But its concept of God had nothing to do with “explaining” the reality of evil, a metaphysical problem that transcends the powers of reason. Instead of worrying about meaningless because unanswerable questions, a rational person would “answer” evil by ethics, that is, by preventive or remedial action. This pragmatic, anti-speculative response to evil has so spoken to the American Jewish soul that it has become a major aspect of every variety of theodicy among us. Theories of God’s finitude are appealing because they clarify how one can intelligently believe in a good God without denying the reality of evil. They also have won wide acceptance because they motivate moral responsibility by their conclusion that human ethics must complete what God’s limited power leaves undone. But they generate a sufficient number of new religious problems, logical and spiritual, that many Jews have rejected them. (I shall return to this issue in chapter 10.) These more traditional believers reaffirm the view commonly considered characteristic of rabbinic Judaism: Though we know much about God, we also know that God far transcends what we can know about God. We do not know why the good God permits the evils of this world but we trust God anyway. We do so out of gratitude and awe. Each day, rising up and lying down, if we can say the hundred blessings required of a Jew, we are reminded of God’s continual gifts. Our observance teaches a piety of the ordinary, a hallowing of the many gifts we might otherwise arrogantly consider ours by right. This daily thanksgiving sets the context for facing the evils beyond

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our control or understanding; it enables many people to accept the unexplainable. For few of us are Job and most of us would acknowledge that God gives us very much more than we deserve or could claim. Of course, the Jobian exceptions are real and they deeply disrupt everyone’s relationship with God. In the hideous evil of the Holocaust, the exceptional threatened to become the norm. No wonder many people spoke of the death of God, and no wonder limited-God theologies gained great currency. Yet large numbers of Jews also took the classic path of Jewish faith: they affirmed God even though they did not understand God. They may have done so with trembling, but as in their experience of human love, they knew that some mysteries require us to give the heart priority over the mind. Both these post-Holocaust positions regarding God and evil had been widely known in the Jewish community before Hitler. Astonishingly, for all that the death-of-God debates centered on theodicy, they produced no new theory or doctrine of God but only some linguistic variations of the old ones. Let me compensate for this sweeping generalization by immediately indicating how our sense of God’s unfathomable absence during the Holocaust did intensify our two pre-Holocaust theodicies. Few thinkers had imagined before Hitler that God was so limited or so utterly inscrutable. No one had ever considered before that God could be so withdrawn. And this awesome sense of God’s potential unavailability gave a terrifying new reality to the best defense that can be offered for God’s tolerance of evil: that goodness is so central to God that God never violates humankind’s freedom to do good or evil—not even in the face of enormities as great as those of the Nazis. The Latent Content of the Holocaust Debates Yet even after noting this radicalization of theological tone, the enigma persists. If our community had not seriously believed in the God whose demise had been announced, if our years of intellectual debate left us with largely the same understandings of God and evil known before the Holocaust, why did these religious debates so trouble our spirits? For one thing, some Jews had never become as modern in their thought as in their life-style and their beliefs never progressed beyond the literalistic notions acquired as children. For another, the trauma of the Nazi barbarity made some Jews regress to their childhood notions of God as the allnurturing Mama-Papa. All such images of God would be under severe stress as a result of the Holocaust debates. But these suppositions hardly explain

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why the spiritual dislocation we experienced in those days was so widely and deeply felt. We must seek our understanding elsewhere and we will find it by following up an observation of Elie Wiesel that the death camps, rather than shattering the faith of the traditionalists, most fully undid the worldview of the intellectuals and liberals. This explanation, I am convinced, derives as much from our general cultural situation as it does from our frightful particular experience. With the inner life of modern Jews dominated more by Western civilization than by a distinctive Judaism, the general retreat from messianic modernism could not but deeply affect Jews. To explain how this manifested itself in our community, let me proceed by means of a theory of the mid-19thcentury German theologian Ludwig Feuerbach. Seeking to reestablish religion’s relevance to sophisticates giddy over the advances in human thought and technology, he suggested that, at its core, religion grows from human aspiration, not God’s revelation. In creating our various concepts of God, we are, he argued, really specifying our highest, most ideal human values. Under cover of our God-talk we are celebrating the human potential, projecting the self we desire to be to a transcendent level and, by calling it “God,” investing it with commanding power (a theological notion Freud later adopted and gave rich psychological content). While I do not accept Feuerbach’s insight as anything like the whole truth about our views of God, I believe what he taught us about projection powerfully explains a major part of our response to the Holocaust. If God-talk mostly discloses our human ideals, then our post-Holocaust theological distress was a classic instance of Freudian displacement, of substituting a less emotional topic for a highly disturbing one. Not having believed much in God, we modern Jews could not be deeply troubled by God’s death. But if God-talk projects beliefs about humanity, “the death of God” shielded us from the tragic loss of the one “god” in whom we moderns had avidly trusted—ourselves, humankind. We had expected no other to save us from all our human ills. Our operative faith had been “the perfectibility of man [sic]” which culminated, through our ethical action, in “the Messianic Age.” In high statistical disproportion, Jews had served as the prophets of this humanism and taught the secular salvation of politics, intellect, and high culture. Then we saw Germany Nazified and our people become Nazi Germany’s special victims. This “transvaluation of all values” turned out to be more seismic than any imagined by Nietzsche, who late in the 19th century proclaimed the death of religion’s God and became the darling of optimistic Jewish secularizers. The Holocaust refuted everything we had identified

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with modernity, so much so that, before the evidence of what had occurred become incontrovertible, it was not deemed possible. Trusting human progress as we did, we could give as little credence to the early reports of the mass murder as the hindsight historians now can give to our blindness then. A corollary psychic denial of Western culture’s spiritual bankruptcy operated for years after World War II as American Jews basked in unprecedented social acceptance and economic success. Only America’s own selfdoubt brought on by racial conflict and the Vietnam War made it possible for Jews, like others, to begin to face the clash between their experience and their functional optimism. Even then, our psyches could not stand so direct an attack on the faith on which we had staked our lives. Instead of facing up to the loss of our messianic self-image, we found it easier to agonize about the death of the traditional God we had not really believed in. Human Tzimtzum Makes a Place for God Not the least irony in this ongoing development has been its eventual reversal of course. The Jewish death-of-God movement heralded itself as the triumph of modernity. By ending our dependency on a revealing, saving God it liberated us for maturely independent responsibility. The result, however, has not been the proliferation of socially concerned ethical activists but a radical loss of sure values that has sapped the moral energy of our society and thereby discredited modernity. Even more unanticipated was the unwitting role of the death-of-God debates in bringing our community, or a critical portion of it, back to God. The Holocaust discussions began with many people denying God’s existence out of simple moral indignation. Some, asserting their credo as moderns, believed that human rationality itself mandated ethics. Others claimed human nature was intrinsically good so that once we made society less malignant human evil would disappear. In either case, why should rational people mourn the passing of the God of synagogue and church? But where else shall we gain such secular moral certainty after the Holocaust? Surely not from the old assumptions about human rationality and goodness. German culture and intellectuality abetted more than it challenged the Nazi madness and the democratic, liberal ethos of the Allies did not motivate them to disrupt the Nazi murder. With this dismal record before us, with our continuing exposure to the evil done everywhere by people in places high and low, only a minority of Jews can still unhesitatingly assert that human beings are primarily rational or inherently good.

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Contemporary philosophy does nothing to refute these practical conclusions. Academics once made what appeared to be a convincing case for considering ethics an essential component of human reason; today’s thinkers regularly restrict rationality to logical reasoning, relegating the motive and content of ethics to less compelling aspects of our being or social life. Thus, the commanding sense of rational moral law, which we once took so for granted that it justified our denying God’s value and reality, has been repudiated by history, experience, and intellect. We Jews have not been exceptions to Western civilization’s disillusionment with modernity. If anything, our experience has been a major factor in bringing it to its ­postmodern turn. For decent human beings, the loss of a sure ground of human values must be traumatic. For Jews, it is utterly intolerable, for it blurs the qualitative difference between the Nazis and their victims. Regardless of what the world knows or cares, anything that mitigates the categorical distinction between the S. S. death camp operators and their Jewish victims violates our most fundamental contemporary experience and contravenes a central mandate of our tradition. One need not be a philosopher or intellectual to know this truth; one only needs still to be human. Against all our modem expectations, the Holocaust showed us evil, real and unrelieved, and taught us that, against all our yearning to be tolerant and pluralistic, utter evil must be opposed absolutely. And that mandate makes sense only if we can still honestly affirm the reality of unqualified good. The experience of primal evil, confronting us with its thoroughgoing negativity, has forced us to affirm an equally elemental good. But pure secularity no longer knows so categorical, so definitive a good and our moral indignation therefore forces us to move in an opposite direction. If we insist that our intuition of a commanding goodness is not an illusion, then, as thinking people, we must search for its ground—and this has led the Jewish community, as so much of the rest of Western civilization, to a postsecular spiritual search. If we have even a dim, troubled, barely verbalizable acknowledgment of an unshakable demand for value at the heart of the universe, one that we must, to remain human, answer and exemplify, then we have found our personal way to what our tradition in various ways called “God.” It is this postmodern recovery of spirituality that lies behind our community’s general rejection of the death-of-God movement and a significant minority’s involvement in Orthodoxy, ḥavurot, mysticism, and other forms of religious search. This experience of the absoluteness of the good has been critical to the spiritual change that has come over Western civilization and has, even more

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profoundly, affected the Jews. For the grisly evil of the Holocaust epitomizes all the vileness that, out of revulsion, has been the dominant motive bringing individuals and groups to search for a postmodern, ­realistic spirituality. The Corollary Ethnic Turn of the Postmodern Sensibility There is an important concomitant to postmodern spirituality: ethnic rootedness. Emil Fackenheim identified this post-Holocaust reality famously in postulating what he termed our 614th commandment: “The authentic Jew of today is not permitted to hand Hitler yet another, posthumous victory.” A commanding if unidentifiable Voice from Auschwitz demanded that Jews do what they could to promote the survival and welfare of the people of Israel, and much of the positive tone of Jewish life in recent decades has been due to Jewish acceptance of this responsibility. I focus on two major aspects of this resurgent ethnicity, artificially separating them from one another: The more obvious renewal centered on the State of Israel; its companion development involved Diaspora Jewry in a more explicitly ethnicized—that is, particularistically Jewish—manner of observance and belief. The State of Israel became a central concern of most of world Jewry only as a result of the Six Day War of 1967. Before then only ideological Zionists—a tiny minority among us—found the reality of their Jewish lives substantially altered by the establishment of the State of Israel or its early accomplishments. Few Jews immigrated there who did not have to; few learned Hebrew or involved themselves in political action on its behalf. Only in rhetoric did it serve as world Jewry’s “spiritual center.” The circumstances of the Six Day War and its consequences radically raised our Jewish consciousness toward the State of Israel. The prior public discussion of the Holocaust had made us apprehensive that God would again be absent, and television pictures of demonstrators in various Arab capitals calling for the destruction of the State of Israel made the threat personal. The great Christian churches were silent, the leaders of the democracies noncommittal. The three-day news blackout after the war began was a time of hideous imagination, of deep soul-searching, of religious hope and consternation, and produced an overwhelming, voluntary outpouring of help, most notably from Jews who had never previously included themselves in the community. Then news came of the staggering Israeli victory. World Jewry experienced an elation that transcended relief from dread or rejoicing at Israeli prowess; the Bible calls it deliverance. Jews

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everywhere found themselves uncomprehendingly overwhelmed by the sight of soldiers converging on the Temple Mount’s Western Wall; atheists, agnostics, and believers alike found themselves moved to prayer. I believed then and believe now that we had personally experienced God’s saving power, something I can explain as little as I can God’s absence during the Holocaust—but an experience I remain certain was not illusion, one real enough that it moved a critical mass of our people to rededicate themselves to Jewish existence. Subsequently, the effect of this revelatory moment diminished, but it still powerfully shaped the ensuing ethnic-political struggle, particularly when the 1973 war with Egypt showed how vulnerable the State of Israel remained. Now proudly particularistic, Diaspora Jews demanded that their leaders unabashedly lobby their governments on the State of Israel’s behalf so that this generation would never be accused of repeating the sins of the Holocaust. World Jewry also had positive grounds for its new sense of identification of Jews with the State of Israel. Again and again Jews who visited there returned deeply affected by what they saw Jews achieving as a Jewish society. In what Koestler called “our political ice-age,” the State of Israel appeared a model of moral politics; it also became the shining symbol of our people’s transpolitical, instinctive, life-affirming answer to Hitler’s nihilism, giving it a numinosity, a sacred aura that even a secularized generation could not ignore. Theologically put, it made evident what the Holocaust had made us doubt: that the Covenant between God and the people of Israel continues in full force. With this resurgence of particularity, self-deprecating universalism gave way to the postmodern query, “Is this good for the Jews?” Does God Still Have a Role in Jewish Particularity? I believe the roots of our intensified Jewishness go far deeper than national solidarity or group pride. In these years of danger and self-esteem, many of us partisans of human equality, who had eschewed making special claims for the Jewish people, found that we also believed an absoluteness attached to Jewish survival and flourishing. We had finally become conscious that for us the demise of the Jewish people would mean not merely a social trauma or broken emotional ties, but an irreparable human loss. Whether in response to danger or a result of love for this folk or both, many of us discovered that we believed the Jewish people to be indispensable, not merely to ourselves but to the universe and its scheme of things. We

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now knew there was something transcendent about Jewish continuity. I will dare the overstatement: We believe God “needs” Jews—or, if you prefer, God “wants” Jews to be Jews and not simply Noahides with a Hebraic ethnic coloration. The unconventional Orthodox writer and community leader Irving (“Yitz”) Greenberg has reached the opposite conclusion. His vision of postHolocaust Jewishness rejects any more-than-human mandate for Jewish survival. He contends that the Holocaust teaches us not that God is dead but that God no longer has any right to command Israel, i.e., the Holocaust proclaims the death of mitzvah. Only the Jewish will to continue Jewish existence now keeps the Covenant and Jewish obligation alive. I hear in this radicalism the anguished outcry of a traditional Jew who, for love of Jews and all human beings, cannot bear what the God of classic Jewish practice allowed to happen in the Holocaust. But denying any transcendent significance to Jewish duty raises the issue of how much importance we should attach to it and, more critically, what sacrifices we would make for it. Of course, as long as we find Jewish experience rewarding and have a Jewish memory rich with emotion and knowledge, Jewish life will continue. And as long as Western culture remains spiritually barren, the varied resources of Jewish culture will commend themselves. However, if Jewish living is only a matter of choice, why should we take on its special burdens in the State of Israel or the Diaspora when we can do as much or more for ourselves and others through less troublesome social forms? Greenberg apparently believes that we can count on the endurance of postmodern Jewish ethnicity and he seeks to insure this by educating for Jewish literacy and values. Where he and others believe we can separate the ethnic from the spiritual drives in the postmodern ethos, I believe this exclusively humanistic view of ethnicity returns us to the faulty premise of Jewish modernity, the humanization of Jewish obligation. And as we move toward the 21st century I see considerable evidence in the State of Israel that an increasing number of Jews who feel the extent of their Jewishness is essentially a matter of personal choice are giving it a considerably lower priority than it once generally had. If, on the other hand, we primarily know that Jewish discipline deserves more concern than this, that it has a certain commanding power to it, then we need a more adequate theory of Jewish duty than this. The conflict between these two interpretations of post-Holocaust Jewish particularity will have a considerable influence on the vitality of Jewish life in the generation or so ahead. I return to this issue frequently in the later chapters of this book.

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The Postmodern Integrity of Folk and Faith To some extent, the Jewish turn to religious particularity began as part of the late-1960s search for ethnic roots. Diaspora Jews frequently said they wanted to be “more Jewish,” by which they generally meant more visibly and identifiably part of their folk. Despite their identification with the State of Israel, this led only a few to become dedicated nationalists or Hebraists, a development paralleled in the State of Israel where Zionism as an ideology motivating personal sacrifice evaporated. Significantly, Zionist idealism remained strong mainly when linked to religious belief, and the initial activities of the Orthodox Gush Emunim movement in the 1980s evoked the admiration of secular Israelis because of its adherents’ uncommon willingness to sacrifice for the national good. In the Diaspora, where Jews faced greater obstacles in asserting their Jewish particularity, the drive to be “more Jewish” mainly resulted in people adopting more traditional forms of Jewish observance. For the first time in modernity, a sizable number of young American Jews insisted on being more visibly Jewish than their parents were. Reform Jews became more Hebraic, Zionistic, and ritualistic while Conservative Jews stressed the halakhic aspects of their movement. Responding to the lack of Jewish seriousness and the impersonality of the established institutions, ḥavurot and minyanim burgeoned. Some modern Jews became visibly observant, frum, and many others adorned their life-styles with identifying practices selected from the neotraditionalistic Jewish Catalog—all of this a shock to the comfortably universalized. The most unanticipated surge took place in Orthodoxy. In the decades after World War II, the most visible segment of the movement combined faithful halakhic observance with such cultural pursuits as the halakhah found acceptable and called itself “Modern Orthodoxy.” Ironically, as this modernization reached maturity, fundamentalisms generally became appealing because their God-ordained particularity distanced their adherents from a failing modernity. By the late 1970s, Orthodoxy, once thought a doomed relic of the Middle Ages, began attracting many sophisticated Jews disenchanted with modernity. As the society’s social conservatism grew; separatistic Orthodoxy took on a new self-confidence and challenged the non-Orthodox about the depth of their Jewishness and the grounds of their universalistic ethics. In this shift to the right, Modern Orthodoxy found itself accused of being “too modern.” Ultra-Orthodoxy, the Jewish equivalent of our civilization’s fundamentalist movements, now demanded a Jewish life more absolute

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in tone and less “goyish” in demeanor. They argued that the Holocaust gave Jews every reason to put as much distance between themselves and the gentile world as was compatible with community security. Not seeing the broader context, most community observers were startled by the number of modernized Jews attracted to just those Orthodox communities that appeared to have compromised the least with modernity. Perhaps the most dramatic manifestation of this Jewish rejection of modernity may be seen in those baalei teshuvah who seek out yeshivot of such premodern piety that their leaders, right-wing adherents of Agudat Yisrael or various Hasidic sects, decry the State of Israel itself as un-Jewish. A larger and more politically effective group united their ethnicity and religiosity in an activist Orthodox Zionism, esteeming the State of Israel for enabling Jews to live the fullest form of Torah-centered Judaism. Their Diaspora cohorts, unlike most secular Jews, found aliyah, immigration to the Holy Land, a compelling Jewish obligation while their Israeli compeers took action to fulfill God’s injunction to take possession and settle the whole biblical land of Israel, most notably by settlements in Judea and Samaria. They believe that the laws of the Torah alone define the proper status of Palestinians in the Jewish land; and if this stance or their activism arouses an adverse world response, that is a gentile problem, an assertion of religio-ethnic self-respect that clearly exemplifies one form of the postmodern consciousness. As We Move to a New Secular Millennium Social conservatism and spiritual orthodoxies dominated the ethos of the 1980s, everywhere scoring impressive victories over liberalism. In so doing they also demonstrated the excesses to which they can lead and thereby caused many moderns, and certainly most Jews, to see the limits of their revisionism. I am not saying that the power of the right has so ebbed that it will have few future political victories and the old liberalism will regain dominance. Should antimodernity regain its messianic fervor and social sway, the Jewish spirituality I see arising may well die aborning—but I do not expect that to happen. Rather, in a manner more Hegelian than I am usually comfortable with, the modernist thesis having been succeeded by a conservative antithesis, what appears to be emerging is a spiritual synthesis that learns from yet transcends them both. My own Jewish theological program speaks to this new spiritual sensibility. My analysis of the postconservative mood begins with noting how much those who fought modernity quietly coopted many of its concerns. We see

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this epitomized in the phenomenal burgeoning of right-wing Orthodox publishing, which has made available an extraordinary range of classic Jewish texts with commentary, halakhic literature, how-to books, and general spiritual inspiration. The characteristics of this literature are telling. For one thing, the authors typically keep the reader’s personal interests before them rather than merely communicate their understanding of the tradition, as earlier Orthodox authors did. Moreover, the concerns they often seek to respond to turn out to be quite modern, like ethics, respect for people, and person-to-person relationships. Most important, these books are in English and fully Western in their idiom, making this the first generation of rabbinic Jews that has so substantially sought to communicate its message in what our tradition called laaz, a “foreign” language. Orthodox Zionism furnishes another example. The Jews most resolutely opposed to Western culture became anti-Zionist, deeming political Zionism, as did much of European Orthodoxy, a heretical secularization of Judaism learned from gentiles. Orthodox Zionism itself results from a certain modernization. One sees this even more clearly in the contrast between the politically passive piety of the old Diaspora religious tradition and the contemporary activism of Gush Emunim and its offshoots. In this Orthodoxy, modern political activism has become’ a companion to the mitzvot. Simply put, though many Jews now seek some distance between themselves and the culture, few of us indeed want to re-ghettoize. Overwhelmingly, world Jewry has rejected the two outstanding forms of intensified ethnicity and religiosity, living in the State of Israel and becoming Orthodox. Many have done so out of inertia, self-serving, or a bland refusal to take Jewish identity seriously. Yet assuming most Jews are not simply venal, we have a right to ask about the metaethic that makes them want to stay Jewish but not through such ethnic and religious transformation. In chapters 17 and 18 I argue that though Orthodoxy and the State of Israel have powerfully molded the postmodern Jewish consciousness, each has also given Jews reason to deny it Jewish primacy or ultimacy. Here I want only to indicate my conviction that the limits to our particularization come from our belief that much of the universal ethical message of modern Judaism remains true even in a postmodern era. The Modern in the Postmodern World Jewry’s great pride in the State of Israel had largely been connected with its moral accomplishment. Few Jews expected that one could run a

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state and remain saintly, and for years whenever certain Israeli actions seemed morally questionable they overlooked them. But in the 1980s, with many Jews believing ethics to be central to Judaism and Jewish morality the key to Jewish continuity, the situation changed. The realization that much of Israel’s citizenry and its leaders had a radically different view of Jewish obligation finally brought many of them and even some of their organizations to the point of public dissent and private dissociation from the State of Israel. From this experience I infer that, for all our intensified ethnicity, we so strongly retain a commitment to modern ethics that it can occasionally take precedence over the unique focus of our ethnic pride, the State of Israel. Not the least evidence leading to this conclusion has been the parallel development in the State of Israel itself. The incursion into Lebanon and the response to the Intifada caused many Israelis such unsettling ethical distress that it has led to an unprecedented division over national purpose and character. In their exposed and dangerous situation, Israelis have very much more at stake in whatever decisions are made than anyone else. Nonetheless, they face the same conflict of values that confronts Diaspora Jews: To what extent should the universalistic ethics of Judaism espoused by us in our modernity influence our postmodern Jewish commitment to ethnic self-respect? This same return of our repressed modernity emerges in our renewed spirituality. The attractive assets of contemporary orthodoxies, their certain standards and their close-knit communities, appeal greatly by contrast to liberalism’s moral flabbiness and personal uncertainty. Yet these very strengths contain such potential dangers that they prevent most Jews from accepting our Orthodoxy. Those who truly know what God specifically wants of us can tolerate only quite limited dissent. Seeking or achieving political power, orthodoxies can channel their absoluteness into what most Jews would call extremism, zealotry, and fanatacism—we have seen too many examples of this phenomenon both in our community and without not to be disenchanted with claims to absolute truth. It seems far more reasonable to most Jews to affirm another motif of modem Judaism: that all human beings necessarily have a limited knowledge of God’s will. Though we passionately stake our lives on such knowledge of God as we do possess, we think our limited understanding requires us to live in peaceful mutual regard with those whose faith radically disagrees with ours; our postmodern religiosity must foster pluralism and practice the spirituality of democracy. The continuing modernity of our postmodern spirituality has been epitomized by the anomalous invocation of the concept of tikkun olam as a

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Jewish call to ethical action. This represents a remarkable transformation of the term, which was first used in the Talmud to provide a pragmatic justification for certain compromises the rabbis made between clashing values in the law. Thus, its earliest Jewish meaning was something like “good social policy.” In the 16th century, the Lurianic kabbalah utilized the phrase to designate a human mystical task. Luna’s cosmogony taught that God’s act of creation resulted in a shattered material world, which the Jewish people was brought into being to “mend” (tikkun), thus, eventually, bringing the Messiah. We were to do this by meticulously observing the commandments, accompanying each deed by a mystical intention to restore the channels of grace between the upper and the lower worlds that were specific to this act. In particular, this system stressed the value of kavvanot, the mystic commentary-intentions that the adepts created for each required prayer. Today’s tikkun olam has little or nothing to do with halakhic adjustments or mystical intentions. Rather, it summons us to Jewish ethical duty, most often of a universal cast—but in keeping with our intensified postmodern particularity, it legitimates this remnant of modernity by cloaking it in a classic Jewish term. In sum, this dialectical postmodern evolution has brought much of world Jewry to a paradoxical spiritual situation. We are too realistic about humankind to return to the messianic modernism that once animated us. Instead we sense we derive our deepest understanding of what a person ought to be and humankind ought to become from participating in the Covenant, our people’s historic relationship with God. But not exclusively. The Emancipation was not altogether a lie. It taught us something true about the dignity of each person and this must be carried over into our postmodern Judaism. These affirmations—corporate Covenant and selfdetermination—can easily come into conflict, yet we propose to live our lives affirming both of them. I understand it to be the task of Jewish theology today to give a faithful, thoughtful explication of this paradox. The Particular Self That Undertakes This Effort I cannot bring this section to a close without an additional personal/professional observation. I do not mean by this Jewish historical/spiritual analysis to convey the impression that had these developments not occurred I would not have come to the theological position I detail in what follows. My concern with these issues and the earliest work drawn on for this book preceded most of the history I have been discussing.

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My theology has evolved primarily from my ongoing personal effort to understand my Judaism. What began as a childhood interest in the ideas behind Jewish living took on intellectual form at the university and led me to my anomalous concern with Jewish theology at rabbinical school. This interest of mine seemed so odd to most other Jews I knew that I was delighted at two discoveries I made there and later. For one, I found a few friends who also wanted to delineate the intellectual system undergirding a richly particular yet universal modern Jewish belief; we were, I can now say, proto-postmodern. We instructed each other by argument and proposal, and perhaps more lastingly by calling attention to the contemporary resources each of us discovered that might be of help to us. The second happy revelation was that, though no one ever mentioned it in class, there had been a century-long though limited tradition of modern Jewish ­theology/philosophy. I found my place in American Jewry as a member of the small subcommunity of abstract thinkers still carrying on this activity. I discovered my compelling problem and appropriate method by comparison and contrast with their ideas, past and present. Dialogue with them, as the following pages testify, remains central to my thought. In the initial stages of groping with my problem and seeking a way of responding to it, I did not anticipate that much of our community would be moved by historic events to the religious situation I was strugging to understand and articulate. I rather thought that were I able to bring my thinking to systematic form—an effort that, in the writing, has taken more than three decades—I would be speaking only to that small minority of Jews interested in thinking about their religion. It came as a special joy to me then when, as postsecularity made its effect felt, the number of people interested in Jewish theology increased. But I never imagined that my thought would speak to the more general experience of less abstractly inclined Jews, as I now think it does. In this experience of being able to comprehend the spiritual depth of what our people has been going through in recent decades, I have found both confirmation of my basic position and much that caused me to refine and amplify it. I still believe it independently persuasive because of its intellectual merits, yet I now dare hope that, by the insight it gives into what we have been living through, my theology may commend itself to many Jews as a reasonable version of their hitherto unarticulated faith.

The Autonomous Jewish Self* Questioners commonly challenge me with a Jewish version of the fallacy of misplaced confidence. For generations now, liberal Jews have made Western culture their surrogate for Torah—with disastrous results. While one might have accepted some Jewish sacrifice as the necessary accompaniment of a seismic shift to living in a new and better world, thinking in such other-directed terms in our situation seems ridiculous. Western civilization itself ails desperately. It not only does not merit being our religion, it seems likely to escape paganization only by the rebirth of the sort of moral devotion which faith in a commanding God can alone provide. Why then do liberal Jews not stop asking first what our society demands from them and attend instead to the claims that Judaism makes of all who wish to be authentic Jews? Socially put, why are liberal Jews so half-hearted about their well-advertised return to traditional practices? Do we not know, no matter to what depth of conscious pride or embarrassment have caused us to repress it, that genuine Jewish piety means living by traditional Jewish law? If we are not ready to accept the whole law, then for the sake of the unity of all Israel, can we not now immediately move in one limited but critical area: to follow Orthodox Jewish law, in all its diversity, as our basis for Jewish marriages and divorces? On rare occasions these challenges sound a metaphysical tone. Questioners cannot understand why Jews who acknowledge that religious duties are largely of human origin cannot simply accommodate those who know their standards are not their own but God’s. How can liberal Jews utter an occasional absolute “no” when they proudly boast that all authority is substantially human and therefore open to revision? My sort of liberal Jews will want to begin a response, I think, by carefully distinguishing between the failures of Western civilization and its lacking any value whatsoever. Many of the vital and creative aspects of contemporary Jewish life arose as a result of our emancipation. Jewish esthetics has moved beyond ritual silver, manuscript illumination and synagogue music to embrace arts and styles that greatly enrich our Jewish lives. Jewish scholarship is not only fecund beyond our fondest expectations of but twenty * Originally published in Modern Judaism 4, no. 1 (February 1984).

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years ago, it excites us intellectually through its use of a Western hermeneutic applied chronologically to texts examined critically. American Jewry exhibits an activism unique in the Diaspora Jewish experience. Zionism was the first great fruit of the fusion of the Western notion of social responsibility and the Jewish commitment to life. By now we consider it a premise of Jewish duty that we should help determine the course of our society and take political action for the State of Israel or Jews in peril. And—limiting this list to four examples—by adapting ourselves to America we have created a Jewish style which shows signs of being a worthy successor to other great amalgams of Jewish life and a host culture, such as Spanish and Polish Jewish life. These and many other smaller triumphs exist because many Jews, against the advice of their leaders, believed that the spiritual survival of the Jewish community would never be assured by seeking to preserve Jewish life as isolated as possible from the newly opened up Western world. Rather, they knew that Jewish well-being depended on accepting the risks of entering the general society and actively seeking to benefit Jewish life from it. In the mid-19th century—and even now in some quarters—this commitment to energetic involvement with Western civilization was seen as the death knell of Judaism. Today, a century or so later, the overwhelming majority of Jews, including a very substantial number of Orthodox Jews, is determined that they and their children shall have the best of both heritages. Liberal Jews like myself see in this historic transformation of Jewish community values a validation of our general sense of commitment to modern civilization and some of its central values. The very most significant idea the Emancipation taught us, I venture to say, is the notion of the autonomous self. As we emerged from the ghetto, shtetl and mellah, we encountered a view of human nature that radically extended ideas which we had occasionally seen mentioned in our traditional texts. The Western world gave these old Jewish notions an emphasis and power the admittedly high Jewish sense of self had not come to. For the Enlightenment thinkers taught that human beings ought to make their own minds and consciences the ultimate basis of their decisions and actions. When they ceded to some external reality—tradition, convention, custom, class, society or even the church—the final right to tell them what they ought to do, they gave away the greatest human capacity: the ability to think for oneself. Instead of utterly depending on others, people need to educate themselves and develop their moral and esthetic faculities, so that they might then responsibly join with other people to freely determine the course of their common existence. Human dignity became identified with

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rational self-actualization rather than with faithful obedience. Liberals today have lost the optimism connected with that 18th century notion but we are far from ready to give up its high estimate of the human value of self-determination. If anything, our experience with the moral failure of every kind of institution and collective has forced us back on the self as the proper, ultimate touchstone of righteous existence. The importation of the notion of the self into Jewish thought has preceded under many guises and still remains incomplete. But, in practice, the masses of American Jews have made it the foundation of their relationship to Judaism. Our “non-observant Orthodox” affiliate with institutions pledged to the halakhah but, after listening respectfully to what the law requires, do “what is right in their own eyes.” The new young traditionalists of whom we are so proud, pick and choose their Jewish law from a three volume catalog. Only the liberal Jews proclaim the autonomy of the self (in their transformed sense of that term, as we shall see) to be a fundamental principle for living Judaism today. When they perceive how much of the Jewish community, regardless of ideology, lives by the autonomous self, they feel confirmed in explicit championing of this Western notion. Emancipated Jewry also enthusiastically adopted the Enlightenment assertion that ethical responsibility has a primary place in the functioning of the autonomous self. In matters concerning inter-human obligation an unparalleled imperative quality enters the life of the liberal Jew. Liberal Jewish duty extends far beyond ethics (in its several explications) but nothing else one must do manifests its supremely commanding power. It confronts us as a transcendent demand and lays an ultimate claim upon us. Not to grasp the compelling power of the ethical upon devout liberal Jews dooms one to misunderstand them. To be sure, Enlightenment thinkers spoke largely in terms of secular ethics (as in Kantian autonomy) and liberal Jews, in adopting their ideas, turned them into religious ones (thus substantially changing the Kantian autonomy). This, rather than mitigating the power of the ethical, only made it stronger. Liberal Judaism proclaimed that a properly autonomous self exists essentially in response to the commanding power of ethics. The point needs emphasis. I wish to provide it by reminding you of the unanimous agreement of the great exemplars of modern Jewish thought in this matter. Our one great philosophic mind, Hermann Cohen, continued Kant’s view that we hear the ethical command as a categorical imperative. The other path-breaking rationalist, Mordecai Kaplan, provides even stronger testimony to the sovereign power of the ethical claim. In Kaplan’s naturalistic understanding of reason, the social group creates all significant human

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value—with one exception (not explained by the common canons of naturalism): moral law. A folk has the right to do anything with its culture that it deems proper (Kaplan’s liberalism) except to contravene ethical standards. They remain so powerful that they constrain the otherwise omnipotent Kaplanian group. In both thinkers the self finds the ground and guarantee of ethics in its idea of God. The non-rationalists also uphold this view of ethics, though one must understand them in their personalistic sense and not insist that because they are not Kantians they have no ethics at all. Martin Buber rejects the concept of a binding rational ethical law (and Kant’s notion of autonomy) but he has a Buberian equivalent for it, the command which arises from genuine ­encounter. Whenever two persons truly meet, God is present as the third, enabling partner of their relationship. And every direct I-thou with God itself provides a mission on which we are sent. Because dialogue brings persons most fully into contact, it also most directly issues forth in a sense of duty to other human beings. The ethical imperative we carry with us as we leave our meeting is, then, our response to God, It comes with such imperative quality that even a received law should not be allowed to stand in its way if they differ. They may be antinomian but it clearly manifests a sense of ultimate religio-ethical claim. Abraham Heschel’s treatment of this theme—and certainly the fashion in which he lived—similarly relates the personal experience of the reality of God to the need for an ethical life. In Heschel’s treatment of revelation, the ethical occupies a powerful place and in what little he wrote about the Holocaust, most of his remarks are addressed to our perverse use of our powers to do the good. On no other single theme I can think of, not God, or the people of Israel, or revelation, or messianism, or law, or how we should think about these issues, do these thinkers so completely agree. For the liberal Jew then, ethics binds the self, regardless of the intellectual form in which one describes it. And, I hasten to add, it has a priority in Jewish duty over all other categories of Jewish responsibility, as necessary to a rounded Jewish life as they are. Despite the current disparagement of the old notion of Prophetic Judaism, the hierarchy of Jewish values proclaimed by many of the prophets still speaks to the religious perceptions of many liberal Jews. Please note that for all these thinkers the old Enlightenment terms have significantly changed their meaning by being organically fixed in a religious context. For them, as for thoughtful liberal Jews of less intellectual distinction, the self is no longer fully understandable independent of God and the autonomy of the self, primarily seen in ethical responsiveness, makes sense

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only in terms of the self’s actualization of God’s will since God is the source and standard of its own being. I have not placed such stress upon the virtual identification of selfhood with religiously autonomous ethics so as to defend the old liberalism and its equation of Jewish duty with universal human ethics. That doctrine now appears to be less a timeless truth about Judaism than a response to the historic situation of liberal Jews in another day. If Judaism was to survive the Emancipation, acculturation was a spiritual duty. In that time one could well take the Jewishness of most Jews for granted. Hence the immediate task of liberal theologians was to clarify the ways in which Jews were not only permitted to be active participants in general culture but should see this as a new Jewish duty. Living in a vastly different time, we have almost the diametrically opposite liberal Jewish theological agenda. Our universalism is largely secure, as our continuity at the university, in large cities and our subsequent secularization attests. Our new Jewish excitement comes from our turn to our particular roots. Liberal theologians now hear themselves summoned to recapture a compelling particularism without sacrificing the gains of the universalization of Judaism. Or, to translate that into my personalist language, we need to transform the older liberal general human self with its accretion of Jewish coloration into what I call the undivided Jewish self. Specifically, I wish to clarify some aspects of the Jewish self’s “autonomy.” In putting the question this way, I have departed from Mordecai Kaplan’s ingenious effort to make a Jewish rationalism commandingly particular. While I admire Kaplan’s rounded sense of Jewish ethnicity, I believe that his sort of religious humanism cannot satisfactorily resolve the critical contemporary human problem, the need of a ground of value. I agree with those many thinkers who deny that any immanentism, even those called a “transnaturalism,” can legitimately call us to prefer one aspect of nature over another and devote ourselves to it to the point of substantial self-sacrifice. Kaplan illogically attempts to use sociology prescriptively and contradicts much of our recent experience when he insists that collectives can properly command autonomous selves. Custom does have power but not to the point of empowering long range imperatives. For several decades now we have continually been disillusioned by groups and institutions to the point where we greet their calls to sacrifice with considerable suspicion. The over-arching symbol of this development is the American involvement in the Viet Nam War. I must therefore leave it to others to clarify how the Kaplanian option can meet our ethical and spiritual needs and what limits it sets for community cooperation in the process.

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For me, Buber took the important first step toward a new theology when he characterized the self as fundamentally relational. To put it starkly, Buber contends that one cannot be a proper self without a relationship to God, whether reached by a direct or an indirect I-thou encounter. The daring of this assertion may most easily be grasped by the contrast to Jean Paul Sartre for whom individuality remains utterly unrelievable. Buber’s self is not only essentially social but involved with God. Thus, while retaining the experiential base of all liberalism, Buber radically breaks with humanism by pointing to God’s role in every I-thou meeting. The Buberian shift from liberal religion as ideas to religion as relationship further transforms the notion of autonomy. Because every relationship manifests distance as well as communion, the self retains its full identity even in its most intimate involvement with the other. Specifically, I-thou involvement creates command without heteronomy. Despite all that you and I now mean to one another, neither of us must now surrender to the other our power of self-determination. Yet because you are here with me, my self, formerly so potentially anarchic, now has a sense of what it must choose and do—and it knows God stands behind this “mission.” For Buber, then, the “autonomy” of the self is fulfilled in relation to the other and God. This interpretation of religious experience is too individualistic for any orthodoxy and too other-involved for anarchy. Because Buber preserves autonomy while guiding it in terms of a social-Divine involvement, his thought has been highly prized by many contemporary liberal religious thinkers. Buber was an enthusiastic particularist, in fact a cultural Zionist, for almost two decades before writing I and Thou. He believed all nations were addressed by God, though the Hebrews had uniquely responded to their summons. He served the Jewish people devotedly, not the least by recalling it to its responsibilities to God, particularly that of bringing reconciliation into Israeli-Arab relations. Yet Buber never clarified how he made his intellectual way from individual “command” to national duty. When pressed on this issue, he insisted on an uncompromising individualism with all its universalistic overtones. To meet our particularist needs we must find a way to reshape Buber’s relationally autonomous self so that it has a direct, primary, ethnic form. I suggest, prompted by some hints in Rosenzweig, that my sort of liberal Jew is constituted by existence in the Covenant. (The capital “C” usage distinguishes between the universal Noachide covenant and the particular Israelitic one.) A Jewish self is characterized not only by a grounding personal relationship with God but relates to God as part of the people of Israel’s

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historic Covenant with God. Being a Jew then, may begin with the individual but Jewish personhood is structured by an utterly elemental participation in the Jewish historical experience of God. Jewish existence is not merely personal but communal and even public. In the healthy Jewish self one detects no place, no matter how deeply one searches, where one can find the old liberal schizoid split between the self and the Jew. One is a Jew, existentially. In responding to God out of the Covenant situation, the relationally autonomous Jewish self acknowledges its essential historicity and sociality. One did not begin the Covenant and one is its conduit only as part of the people of Israel. In the Hebrew Covenant, tradition and community round out what the self of the Noachide covenant already recognizes as God’s behest and the universal solidarity of humankind. With heritage and folk compelling values, with the Jewish services of God directed to historic continuity lasting until messianic days, the Covenanted self acknowledges the need for structure to Jewish existence. Yet this does not rise to the point of validating law in the traditional sense, for personal autonomy remains the cornerstone of this piety. This matter is so important and generally so poorly understood that I would like to devote some space here to analyzing in some detail the dialectic of freedom and constraint in the liberal Jewish self. The relational interpretation of the structure of Jewish selfhood I am suggesting here radically departs from the usual Jewish understandings. Traditionally, the Jewish self is firmly held within the halakhah, Jewish law. With modernity, liberals began to think of the Jewish legal process in terms of its social context. The folk, through its institutions, customs and folkways, could be seen as providing the forms for Jewish self-actualization, including a developing law. These two ways of interpreting the structure of Jewish existence have the advantage of furnishing us with common, public, objective standards of what it is to be a Jew. They do not “command” my sort of liberal Jew precisely because of their external, heteronomous nature. That is, I and many Jews like me can accept Jewish tradition as guiding us, indeed as an incomparably valuable resource, but not as overriding “conscience.” Identifying our dignity as human beings with our autonomy, we are determined to think for ourselves. However, we are not general selves but Jewish selves. Thinking personalistically about our Jewishness, we identity our Jewish variety of self-structure in relational terms, a rather new way of envisioning authentic Jewish existence. Specifically, the Jewish self gives patterned continuity to its existence by a continual orientation to God as part of the people of Israel’s historic Covenant. Four aspects of this situation deserve comment.

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First, as noted above, the Jewish self is personally and primarily involved with God. Jewishness is lived out of a relationship with God which precedes, undergirds, and interfuses all the other relationships of the Jewish self. Where the Biblical-rabbinic Jew had essentially a theo-centric existence, the modern Jewish self may better be described as theo-related in ultimate depth. That being the case, the highest priority must today be given to the fight to overcome the pervasive agnosticism which resulted from the modernization of Jewry. Without a personal sense of involvement with God, this relational, Covenantal Jewish existence cannot be properly attained. Second, and inextricably bound with the first, though subsidiary to it, is the Jewish self’s participation in the Jewish people as part of its ongoing relation to God. All forms of radical individualism on the human level are negated by this stance. The Jewish self lives out the Covenant not only as a self in relation to God but as part of a living ethnic community. This people then seeks to transform its social relations as well as its individual lives in terms of its continuing close involvement with God. Jewish “autonomy” need not be sacrificed to what other Jews are now doing or think right, but the Jewish self will be seriously concerned with the community which is so great a part of its selfhood. Naturally, this individual autonomy will often be channeled and fulfilled through what the Jewish people has always done or now values. For the sake of community unity, the Jewish self will often undoubtedly sacrifice the exercise of personal standards. That most easily takes place when the demands are obviously necessary for community action—e.g., a folk not a personal Jewish calendar—or when the demands are not seen as onerous—e.g., Kiddush over wine and not the whisky or marijuana one might prefer. We shall deal with more significant clashes later. Third, the Jewish self, through the Covenant is historically rooted as well as Divinely and communally oriented. Modern Jews not only did not initiate the Covenant, they are not the first to live it. While social conditions and self-perceptions have greatly changed over the centuries, the basic relationship and the partners involved in it have remained the same. Human nature, personally and socially, has not appreciably altered since Bible times (as we so often note reading ancient Jewish texts). Hence much of what Jews once did is likely to commend itself to us as what we ought to do. More, since their sense of the Covenant was comparatively fresh, strong and steadfast, where ours is often uncertain, weak and faltering, we will substantially rely on their guidance in determining our Jewish duty. But not to the point of dependency or passivity of will. Not only is our situation in many respects radically different from theirs but our identification of maturity with the

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proper exercise of agency (in Covenantal context for a Jew) requires us on occasion to dissent from what our tradition has taught or enjoined. Fourth, the Jewish self, because of its intimate connections with God, folk and tradition, is sensitized to more than the present and its call to decision. All persons, as I see it, but certainly Jews, should put the immediate exercise of autonomy into the framework of attaining personal integrity. For a person lives in time and the self persists as well as chooses. The soul which lives only in the present with little connection to previous experience and minimal thought to the future denies not only the chronological character of creatureliness but the most creative of human acts, to give wholeness to an entire life. Form, habit, institution and structure have a necessary role to play in such fulfillment of the self—as long as they continue to express what the individual, at some level of choice, still wills to do. And almost all of us, out of frailty or indecision, will often depend on previously chosen patterns to carry us through life, particularly its trials. But in the clash between a pressing, immediate insight and an old, once-valuable but now empty practice, we will know ourselves authorized to break with the past and do acts which more appropriately express our deepest commitments. With these theoretical matters clarified, let me now turn to the Jewish self’s attitude to Jewish law. Since the Covenant must be lived, not just believed in or thought about, Jewish law has been the primary means of being an authentic Jewish self until modern times. As the effects of the Emancipation were increasingly internalized, the overwhelming majority of Jews insisted upon an autonomous relation to Jewish law, thereby utterly changing its character for them. But I am arguing that if they could relate to Jewish tradition as liberal Jewish selves and not merely as autonomous persons-in-general, they would find in Jewish law the single best source of guidance as to how they ought to live. That is, wanting to be true to themselves as persons—understood now immediately and not secondarily as Jewish persons and thus intimately involved in faithfulness to God, people and historic devotion—they would want their lives substantially to be structured by a continuing involvement with the prescription of Jewish law. But as autonomous Jewish persons, the provisions of the law would ultimately be tested by appeal to their conscientious individual Jewish understanding. Over a decade ago, in Choosing a Sex Ethic1 I gave an extended example of the way in which a Jew might candidly engage the choices confronting a mature, autonomous self in dialectical involvement with society and the 1 New York, 1969.

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variegated guidance provided by historic Jewish law. While some details of the judgements I made then seem to me now in need of revision, the fundamental delineation of the modern Jewish liberal decision-making process I provided there still seems to me fundamentally correct. Autonomy should not be subservient to the halakhah in sexual matters but at the same time, the law, in all its details, does not hesitate to make its claim on the committed autonomous Jewish self. I suggest that, from a relational perspective, the Jewishness of the Jewish self should now be seen less in its obedient observance than in its authentically living in Covenant. Its Jewish acts result from their expressing that relationship. And, I would add, again following Rosenzweig, that everything one then did and not merely some delimited activities, would be Jewish. Against Rosenzweig, I do not see how, even in principle, Jewish law can be imposed on such a Jewish self. Rather, with autonomy essential to selfhood, I avidly espouse a pluralism of thought and action stemming from Jewish commitment. I also look forward to the day when enough Jewish selves autonomously choose to live in ways sufficiently similar that they can create common patterns among us. A richly personal yet Jewishly grounded and communally created Jewish style or way would be the autonomous Jewish self’s equivalent of “halakhah.” It would give us universalism without assimilation and a commanding particularism which has full respect for the dignity of the individual. This multiplication of simultaneous responsibilities—to self, to God, to the Jewish past, present and future, and to humankind as a whole (through the Noachide covenant of which Jews remain a part)—obviously creates special problems for decision makers. Facing any choice, one must take account of many commitments. And not infrequently there will be conflict among them. This constitutes a further reason for acknowledging the legitimacy, indeed the desirability of pluralistic Jewish practice and thought. More, we must remain continually open to the possibility that new and unanticipated forms may arise to express genuinely the imperatives which flow from existence in Covenant. Does not this reassertion of liberalism’s call for community openness make the character of the Covenant folk so shapeless that it hardly has distinct identity? Has not autonomy again manifested its anarchic and therefore ultimately un-Jewish character? I cannot deny the risks involved in the path I am suggesting. Before saying they are too great to bear I want to direct our attention to one highly esteemed Western value I omitted from my previous list, namely, democracy. Liberal Jews passionately embrace what the Western world has taught

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us about the way in which people ought to conduct their societal life. The universalization of power by the enfranchisement of every citizen remains for all its faults and abuses, the least humanly destructive form of government. Democracy calls for pluralism and tolerance of others’ radically differing views, a concept which has produced social harmony unprecedented in human history. By contrast, wherever absolutisms have attained political power, human degradation has shortly followed, not infrequently in the name of the highest moral ends. Liberalism’s insistence on individualism will surely yield only a flabby sort of structure. But it will have no difficulty directly and organically authorizing and commending democracy. I do not see that the same is true of the orthodoxies I know or have read about. When one possesses the one absolute truth, how can one be expected to turn any significant power over to those who deny or oppose it? The problem of an orthodox doctrine of democracy can only temporarily be settled pragmatically, that is, by arguing that because of the large number of unbelievers or the need to reach out to as many people as possible, one may expect that the true believers will practice democracy. Once the usefulness of the democracy ends, the absolutism will then naturally express itself. It will also not do to discuss how this or that tradition contains resources by means of which one might validate democracy. The hypothetical revisionism must yet make its way against the tradition’s absolutistic beliefs, its history, established tradition, practice and ethos. Consider the situation in the Jewish community were the religious parties to come to full power in the State of Israel. Once their rule was consolidated, what would be the status of Noachides who refused to accept the Noachian laws as revealed by the Torah? What rights would Christians have? Or, a less questionable case of ovde avodah zarah, bakhti Hindus and imagistic Buddhists? Though I have tried to be aware of contemporary Orthodox Jewish theoretical authentifications of democracy as desirable for a Jewish polity, particularly a Jewish state, only one is known to me, Michael Wyschogrod’s paper on “Judaism and Conscience” which appeared in the Msr. John M. Oesterreicher Festschrift, Standing before God.2 Let me summarize its argument. Wyschogrod contends, convincingly to me, that despite some hints of a similar notion, a fully self-conscious concept of conscience does not appear in classic Jewish tradition. This follows consistently from the Jewish 2 New York, 1981.

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emphasis upon the affirmation of God’s highly contentful revelation to the people of Israel. Judaism must certainly reject the autonomous conscience in its common, humanistic form for, as Heidegger is used to show, it radically destroys obedience to anything other than ourselves. And I would add, precisely this separation of conscience from its transcendent source has been the intellectual cause of our gradual loss of a social consensus about the standards and nature of moral value. Wyschogrod then carefully delineates a notion of conscience which might be acceptable to Judaism. Here the individual’s sense of right is understood to be a faculty given humans by God so that they might discern and respond to God’s will. Wyschogrod thus follows the philosophical path by which personal autonomy is fulfilled in theonomy, thereby avoiding the problem of a religious ethic being heteronomous. He then sets about assimilating this notion to contemporary traditional Judaism. This he accomplishes by calling attention to the way in which the determination to remain Orthodox today must necessarily be made against the crowd. One can say, he suggests, that a significant measure of autonomy is involved in the continuing will to be a believing, practicing Jew. To be sure, in any possible conflict between the halakhah and the will, one sacrifices one’s self-determination, our personal version of the binding of Isaac. And in the very sense that this can occasionally take place, one phenomenologically detects the role of autonomy within Orthodoxy. Of particular interest, certainly in connection with the theme of this paper, are the motives Wyschogrod manifests for undertaking this unique intellectual enterprise. He acknowledges that the concept of autonomy has correctly pointed our attention to a critical locus of human dignity. Without some such self-actualization, we would be less the creatures that God formed us to be. Hence Orthodox Judaism needs to make room for the idea and function of conscience. A practical consideration is also at work, one not explicitly stated but one suggested by the context in which this paper appears and by the consequences which follow from the argument. Consider the following breathtaking issue Wyschogrod carefully develops. If conscience may legitimately command one, may it still do so when we judge the person utilizing it to be acting in error? That is, if we adhere to an orthodoxy we have an objective notion of God’s true will. Shall we still grant conscience its rights when someone uses it against what we know is true and good? One cannot help but hear in such thinking the overtones of the old Catholic teaching that error has no rights.

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But Wyschogrod strongly argues the opposite, that the individual conscience must be granted rights even when to us it appears to be acting in error. Not to do so would negate the very concept of conscience for a heteronomous revelation would have effectively usurped our God-given right to think and judge for ourselves. Wyschogrod’s purpose in all this, I believe, is to try to make a theological place in Orthodox Judaism for Christians to be allowed to be Christians. He does not sacrifice the absoluteness of God’s revelation but carefully provides room for individual conscience within it. Then those who cannot read its message plainly may still claim the right to go their deviant way. If I remember correctly, John Courtney Murray mounted an argument of this sort for many years within the Roman Catholic church to help it attain a positive attitude toward domocracy and pluralism. His position was substantially adopted by Vatican Council II and now constitutes the church’s official teaching. Perhaps the thought occurred to me because the central citation of Wyschogrod’s argument about the right of the erring conscience is taken from Thomas Aquinas. Wyschogrod makes only one stipulation about the employment of conscience other than genuineness. He requires serious, reverential study of God’s revelation, the sacred texts of Judaism. I shall be most interested to see what sort of reception Wyschogrod’s argument receives in the Orthodox Jewish community. If accepted, it could provide a theoretical basis not only for inter-faith but intra-faith understanding. Specifically, I believe the autonomous Jewish self I have described more than meets Wyschogrod’s conditions for a conscience which Orthodoxy should respect even when it errs. The ethical sense of such liberal Jews is founded on theonomy, not humanism, and, because the Covenant sets the field of its perceptions, they are spiritually guided by classic Jewish texts. By Wyschogrod’s standards, Orthodoxy should acknowledge the legitimacy of authentic Jewish liberalism despite its sinfulness. More, my Jewish Covenantalists can lay claim to even greater Jewish legitimacy. The Covenant clearly links them to the Jewish people and they are mandated to realize their Jewish selves in community. That goes far beyond Wyschogrod’s demands—a further indication that his paper speaks to the question of Christian legitimacy. Of Jews who follow their conscience, it would seem reasonable to demand, certainly in a post-Holocaust time, not only reverence for God and study of texts but passionate loyalty to the Covenant people. One further point about Wyschogrod’s paper—this rare effort to validate tolerance and democracy within Orthodoxy does so by arguing, against

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precedent, for a broad acceptance of the autonomy of the individual. If the well-known liberal move to the right could be met by this kind of Orthodox theoretical opening to the left, we might have another instance of the mutual redefinition of positions which often in the past has made possible greater human unity. In any event, we liberals will, at the least, see Wyschogrod’s noble effort as further proof of our old contention that a vital contemporary Judaism must make greater place for the concept of personal autonomy than did our tradition in the past (though it requires reworking from its rigorous Enlighten­ment individualism to become the new autonomy of a Jewish self). Experience further indicates that we are less likely to run into difficulty seeking communal agreement in practice rather than in theology. Different beliefs often lead to similar acts, as our joint work for the State of Israel, Soviet Jewry and tzedakah demonstrates. Liberal Jews enthusiastically participate in such communal activities for they happily unite autonomy and Covenant responsibility. They become quite troubled, however, when their autonomous sense of their Covenant obligations conflicts with other views of Jewish duty. With regard to marriage and divorce practices, that means the halakhah as interpreted by the sages of contemporary Orthodoxy. I think it will best serve my purpose of getting others to understand liberal Judaism better if, before turning to the contentious area of marriage law, I deal with one likely to arouse less emotion. This case should give us greater insight into the way a liberal as against a traditional posek might balance the conflicting claims of Jewish commitment. J. David Bleich, in one of his summaries of recent halakhic literature3 discussed the issue of dwarfism and the problems its treatment raises. The condition, troublesome to those who have it and often a heavy burden for their relatives, does not constitute a genuine threat to life which would then merit the exceptional activities of pikuah nefesh. Jewish law, it should also be noted, imposes no special disabilities upon dwarfs. Some urgency for the treatment of dwarfism arises from the greater than usual difficulty dwarfs have in conceiving children. They therefore not only merit help for general humanitarian and Jewish medical reasons but so as to enable the males more likely to fulfill their Jewish duty of procreation. However, the accepted therapy, growth hormone, must be collected from human corpses. Poskim (rabbinic decisors) must then seek to reconcile the laws of kibud hamet (honor for the dead) with the desirability of curing a ­distressing 3 Tradition, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Winter, 1980).

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but non-life-threatening condition. Disturbed by the need to cut into the corpse, they give considerable attention as to how this must be done so as to create the least disfigurement. Ruling permissively they are able to find ways to maintain the law and its values while meeting a human need. The autonomous Jewish self would face the situation somewhat differently. A corpse is surely entitled to respectful treatment. Indeed, in our day of lessening concern for the dead—fewer people appear to be saying kaddish and visiting graves—some special effort ought to be made to remind Jews that we cannot envision a self as utterly distinct from its body. While a corpse is surely far from a person, our psycho-somatic sense of personhood requires us to give dead bodies reverential treatment. However, when one thinks primarily in terms of selfhood, there cannot be any value comparison between, much less subordination of, the needs of a living person to a dead body. While the corpse exercises claims upon us, its proper honor must yield to the vastly more significant needs of the living. One can surely be a self and a dwarf, yet the selfsame psycho-somatic view of the self which authorizes honoring corpses requires us to recognize that dwarfism imposes very severe personal handicaps on its victims. Liberal Jews would then likely argue that the human suffering of the dwarf, not respect for the corpse, ought in this case be our primary consideration in determining our personal responsibility under the Covenant. Fortunately, where dwarfism is involved there will be little difference in practice between traditionalists and liberals. But were rigorous poskim to impose such stringent conditions that the collection of pituitary glands was seriously impeded, liberal Jews would demur. We would not believe God would have us act so today to fulfill the Covenant. We might be in error but we could not follow the halakhah then if we were to fulfill what we know to be our Jewish duty. Jewish marriage and divorce laws raise more directly ethical issues, as the two classic conflict cases agunah (“abandoned wife”) and mamzerut (the category of “bastard”), indicate. Traditional Jews do not need liberals to tell them what agony these issues create. However, traditionalists are willing to sacrifice whatever stirrings of autonomous rebellion they may feel in such cases so that they may follow God’s law. Liberal Jews, for whom autonomy tends to be ultimate, cannot easily take that course. They are far more likely to react in ethical indignation. In the name of proper legal procedure a woman can be debarred from remarrying and establishing a fully ramified Jewish home. Or, in compensation for a parental sin, a child is prevented from ever contracting a normal Jewish marriage. These ethical considerations already carry heavy Covenantal weight. They become

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o­ verwhelming when we think of the Holocaust. Does much in Jewish life now take priority as an obligatory response to the Holocaust over contracting a Jewish marriage and creating a Jewish family? Yet also in the name of the Holocaust, liberal Jews are asked to accept traditional Jewish marriage and divorce law. While that will create more uniform practice in the Jewish community, it will necessarily also involve us in preventing some Jews from founding Jewish families! To the autonomous Jewish self, the ethical and Covenantal damage done by the laws of agunah and mamzerut cannot be explained away by any form of mitigating defense. Our overwhelming sense of duty cannot be stilled by hearing that the decisors may be relied on to minimize drastically the numbers of agunot and mamzerim, or that we should consider the few unresolved cases a small price to pay for effecting the familial unity of the Jewish people. The fact is that, with all the compassion and legal creativity contemporary poskim display, there are agunot and mamzerim. And the legal disabilities are enforced on them whenever they come under Orthodox jurisdiction. For liberal Jews to adopt the contemporary Orthodox halakhah with regard to marriage and divorce means retroactively to validate the decisions already made and to put themselves in principle behind the possible creation of new agunot and mamzerim. As we understand our obligation to God under the Covenant, I do not see that we can do that. As I read our community, we believe God does not want Jews to relate to other Jews by categorizing and treating them as agunot and mamzerim. We cannot fulfill our Jewish responsibilities through a system which does so. I am not suggesting that for the sake of community unity traditional Jews give up their understanding of God’s law and the manner of its correct implementation. That would be a quite inconsistent application of the pluralism I have espoused. I do know that there are other Jewish laws which remain in full force but are, in practice, inoperable—an eye for an eye being the example we regularly cite to Christians. I have sufficient confidence in the resources of the halakhah and the creativity of contemporary poskim to believe that even the thorny problems of agunah and mamzerut could be solved once there is sufficient will to do so. We face a far more difficult and complex issue when we deal with the question of women’s rights in traditional Jewish marriage and divorce law. Because most liberal Jews perceive the equality of women as one of the great ethical issues of our time, we remain unpersuaded by all efforts to demonstrate the relative humanity of the halakhah in this area. That Jewish law has treated women better than many other legal systems have, that it has often made special provision to protect women from potential abuses

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of its male-oriented statutes, should inform Jewish pride about the inherent moral thrust in our heritage. To the autonomous Jewish self, all such apologetics do not validate continuing a system which badly discriminates against women. The feminist movement in Western culture has made us aware how blind we Jews have been to our own ethical failings with regard to women. Acknowledging that, we would be untrue to our fundamental commitments were we to agree to operate by a law in which women are not fully equal legal agents with men. I cannot take this issue further. I do not know what traditional authorities might do in this area and I am in no position to say what sorts of practices liberal Jews might accept for the sake of uniform communal practice. Liberal Jewish women will speak for themselves and, considering how they have suffered at the hands of men, I do not expect them to be in a mood to compromise. As a final contribution to this analysis of Covenantal decision-making I should like to make some generalizations concerning it. Should our various Covenant obligations appear to conflict, the duty to God—most compellingly, ethics—must take priority over our responsibilities to the Jewish people or the dictates of Jewish tradition. I acknowledge only one regular exception to that rule, cases when the survival of the Jewish people is clearly at stake. Obviously, without the Jews there can be no continuing Covenant relationship and Covenant, not universal ethics, provides the framework for my Jewish existence. What should a Jew do when confronted by a conflict between a divinely imposed ethical responsibility and a duty upon which the survival of the Jewish people seems to rest? I cannot say. A true crisis of the soul occurs when two values we cherish ultimately can no longer be maintained simultaneously. And we call it a tragedy when, no matter what we decide, we must substantially sacrifice a value which has shaped our lives. May God spare us such choices. Or, failing that, may God then give us the wisdom and courage to face crisis with honest choice and stand by us when we have, as best we could, tried to do so. My liberal subjectivity has now been exponentially amplified by this problem of a multiplicity of basic values. Nonetheless, I believe I can helpfully illustrate how the autonomous Jewish self might function in this situation by quickly sketching in my response to three diverse cases. Many years ago, when I was breaking out of the old liberal identification of Judaism with universal ethics, it occured to me that the Jewish duty to procreate can be objected to ethically. To bring a child into the world bearing the name Jew inevitably subjects that human being to special p ­ otential

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danger. All the joys and advantages of being a Jew cannot compensate for this ineradicable disability. Yet the Covenant absolutely depends on Jewish biologic-historic continuity until the messianic days come. For all its ethical difficulty then, I have no choice but to proclaim the Jewish duty to have children. Why then do I resist establishing one community standard for Jewish marriages and divorces? Many in our community would say that the personal status of Jews will critically effect the survival of the Jewish people. But I read our situation differently. In my thought, the exceptional survivalcategory must be used as restrictively as halakhah uses pikuah nefesh. I am not convinced that the Jewish people will not survive at all without a uniform marriage and divorce law. Though the overwhelming majority of Jews worldwide have given up the authority of the halakhah, they still manifest a will to Jewish continuity. I agree that the Jewish people without one standard of practice in family matters will not continue as it did when it had such consensus—but even without it, the folk as such will survive. In this instance, I cannot therefore invoke the survival clause to overcome my sense of ethical obligation. Then why will I not perform intermarriages? After all, in the contemporary situation, more than half the families formed by an intermarriage apparently try to live as Jews. Accepting their will to be Jewish as a means of Jewish survival would allow me to fulfill an ethical responsibility— that is, to serve two people who might seem humanly well-suited to one another despite their having different religions. I confess that I am moved by such arguments and know that my answer to this disturbing question may appear even more subjective than usual. In positive response to such people’s Jewish concerns, I reach out to intermarried couples with warmth and gladly accept their children as Jews when through education and participation they manifest Covenant loyalty. I cannot go so far as to officiate at their wedding. To do this would give a false indication to them and to the community of my understanding of Covenant obligation. The relation between God and the Jewish people is mirrored, articulated and continued largely through family Judaism. As I see it, we must therefore necessarily prefer a family which fully espouses the Covenant to one which does so with inherent ambiguity. Moreover, I understand myself as a rabbi authorized to function only within the Covenant and on behalf of the Covenant. My Reform Jewish colleagues who differ with me on this issue do so because they read the balance between ethics and Jewish survival differently than I do. They believe, erroneously in my opinion, that performing intermarriages will help win and bind these families to the Jewish people.

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Because I may well be wrong in this matter and because I respect their reading of their Covenant responsibility, I associate myself with them in full collegiality. My sense of liberal Jewish pluralism clearly encompasses this troubling disagreement. Having devoted so much of this paper to my liberal certainties, I wanted to close it with an instance of my more characteristic tentativeness. We will not understand liberalism, at least not the sort which surfaces in my kind of liberal Judaism, without understanding the dialectic of confidence and hesitation which informs it. Perhaps with such insight we can find a way to move beyond community fragmentation to greater unity amid diversity.

‘Im ba’et, eyma—Since You Object, Let Me Put It This Way* All authors hope someone reads them and finds their work engaging. And they dream of having insightful, accomplished people so taken with their effort that they will then want to write about it. Having learned and benefited for years from the work of the friends whose response to Renewing the Covenant is presented here, I am deeply touched by their kindness to me personally and by their searching responses to my ideas. May the Shekhinah long rest upon us all as we carry on this effort at contemporary Torah. Thank you, colleagues; thank you, God. It will help me to respond to the specific issues raised by my colleagues if I first briefly indicate what I think I was doing in my book, for that is the conceptual context of what I now have to say. Some facts about me personally also have a bearing on my approach to these matters, so I will begin there. I am a rabbi, a seminary professor, and my primary reference group is not the secular academy, but the believing, practicing community of non-­ Orthodox Jews, no matter which label they apply to themselves. That will help to explain why Renewing the Covenant is a work of apologetic theology. That is, it seeks to mediate between believers like myself and those who are inquirers, perhaps semi- or occasional-believers. Norbert—­ following Susan’s lead, I cannot, comfortably call a friend of nearly forty years “Samuelson” merely because a stuffy old academic convention thinks that’s dignified—Norbert correctly indicates that I also seek to create a bridge between academic thinking about belief and the minority of believing non-Orthodox Jews who seriously want to think about their faith, a sub-community critical to the ethos of every group.1 Apologetics seem inevitably to disappoint people in each of the communities addressed. Some outsiders always complain that you haven’t properly accepted their

* For the complete references for this essay please refer to Reviewing the Covenant (SUNY, 2000), where this essay was originally published. Reprinted by permission from Reviewing the Covenant: Eugene B. Borowitz and the Postmodern Renewal of Jewish Theology, edited by Peter Ochs, the State University of New York Press © 2000 State University of New York. All rights reserved. 1   On the notion of a Liberal Jewish elite, see the chapter on “Jews Who Do; Jews Who Don’t” in my Liberal Judaism (New York: UAHC, 1984), pp. 459–67.

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truth. Some i­nsiders feel you haven’t been true enough to the faith (David and Susan) while others feel you might have used a more effective way of accomplishing the apologetic task (Edith, Tom and Norbert, with Yudit in both groups, and Peter trying to show what makes us all an intellectual ­family). Essentially, what we are debating in this book is what might constitute the most effective apologetic language for our time. The apologetic argument of Renewing the Covenant proceeds in two unequal steps. The first describes the experiential basis for contemporary belief, chapters 1–3. In these pages, I do not analyze personal religious experience as has been the typical academic and prior non-Orthodox Jewish theological procedure. Rather, in keeping with my understanding of Judaism as the Covenant between God and the people Israel, I seek to lay bare the communal spiritual path of the Jewish people in the second half of the twentieth century, underground though most of it has been. In sum, the Jews, as part of Western civilizations turn from messianic modernism but particularly because of the Holocaust, came to a new openness to God (the contemporary search for “spirituality”) and acknowledgment of the importance of Jewish peoplehood. These two pillars of renewed Jewish faith, God, and Israel (the people), derive from a root intuition: “Regardless of what the world knows or cares, anything that mitigates the categorical distinction between the S. S. death camp operators and their Jewish victims violates our most fundamental contemporary experience and contravenes a central mandate of our tradition” (The italics are in the original, one of only six sentences so distinguished in Renewing the Covenant (p. 43); all page references given in the body of this paper are to this book). This affirmation of a value inherent in the universe is the foundation of Jewish life today. Derridean postmodernism denies such a faith credence; that is the major reason I am not a Derridean postmodern. The second, longer part of the apologetic case consists of an analysis and synthesis of the beliefs uncovered in our recent experience, God, chapters 4–10 and the people Israel, chapters 11–16. This consideration of God and Israel allows me to enunciate my radical recontextualization of the general self as the Jewish self. These foundations being set, I can move on to the classic task of a Jewish theology, creating a theory of sacred obligation, a meta-halakhah, in my case the delineation of what the contents page (vii) announces as “A Postliberal Theology of Jewish Duty.” This is described in the section on Torah, chapters 17–20, with the last of these bringing all these strands together in a rare, systematic analysis of non-Orthodox Jewish decision-making. Its five integrated principles are presented in initial, italicized statements:

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First, the Jewish self lives personally and primarily in involvement with the one God of the universe (p. 289). . . . Second, a Jewish relationship with God inextricably binds selfhood and ethnicity, with its multiple ties of land language, history, traditions, fate, and faith (pp. 289–90). . . . Third, against the common self’s concentration on immediacy, the Covenant renders the Jewish self radically historical (p. 291). . . . Fourth, though the Jewish self lives the present out of the past, it necessarily orients itself to the future (p. 292). . . . Fifth, yet despite the others with whom it is so intimately intertwined—God and the Jewish people, present, past, and future—it is as a single self in its full individuality that the Jewish self exists in Covenant (p. 293).

Keeping this plan in mind will, I believe, lend greater coherence to my comments on the specific issues raised by my readers. In Response to my Colleagues Four words have proved troublesome in my communicating my meaning. The least disruptive of these may be “Absolute,” which I use in one of my discussions of God. Far more contentious has been my applying the label “postmodern” to my thinking. Neither of them, however, has worked as much mischief as have the related terms “self” and “autonomy.” “Would that when I wrote this book I had known Peirce’s logical category of “vagueness,” so tellingly outlined for us by Peter, for I might have mitigated these difficulties by announcing that it guided me.2 Despite the difficulties these terms have engendered I continue to find a certain justification for having employed them. What it means to be a “postmodern” and certain sideissues connected with the term are so significant for the rest of what I have to say that I shall begin with this broad-ranging topic. What Label Should I Sport? The best justification for a taxonomy of thinkers in our time may be that philosophers who work by different methods (who are of different “schools”) 2 Not long after the publication of Renewing the Covenant, when giving some lectures at the University of San Francisco, I gave as one reason for my finding postmodernism congenial: “I am grateful to postmodern discourse for authorizing those who admit they cannot give reasonably unambiguous voice to the logos to speak their truth, sloppy in structure as it may seem to some. This structural untidiness, is abetted by my writing with conscious imprecision, a choice designed to warm my reader that my theology does not allow for geometric clarity.” Our Way to a Postmodern Judaism: Three Lectures (San Francisco: University of San Francisco, Swig Dept. of Jewish Studies, 1992), p. 38.

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cannot easily talk to one another about fundamental matters without first indicating their philosophic “faith.” That people are often seriously misled by these classificatory names has not made labeling obsolete because the information/opinion glut makes these shortcuts to understanding all the more useful. I begin, then, with the thinker’s standard disclaimer: I am not my label(s); I am, of course, me, and so notorious a defender of thinking for oneself should surely be allowed even more than the usual distance from the reductionism of classification [sic]. I begin with a marginal matter, whether I am “a Reform Jewish” thinker. This comes to mind particularly because of a recent exchange of articles with Elliot Dorff whose recent review of Renewing the Covenant insisted that its true meaning could be discovered only in terms of the ideology of the Reform movement.3 Since the (invidious) stereotyping of Reform Jews may lurk in the background of others’ interpretation of what I wrote, I want to begin my response to my critics by citing a bit of what I said to Elliot: “I do not know how I can persuade you that ‘I am not now and never have been a card-carrying Reform ideologue.’ . . . I have always tried to think academically about Jewish belief and its consequences. None of my models—Cohen, Baeck, Kaplan, Buber, Rosenzweig and Heschel—ever did their thinking as part of a movement, or in the context of its ideology. They simply tried to think through the truth of Judaism in their day as best they could understand it, and I have spent my life trying to emulate them. I attempted to nail down my meaning in Renewing the Covenant by mostly speaking about ‘non-Orthodox’ Jews. When I mean Reform Jews there or anywhere, I say so.”4 As to whether I am a “postmodern,” a topic of considerable comment and difference of opinion among these readers, it depends, of course, on your taxonomic standards. Tom suggests that I’m probably better off thinking of myself as a “chastened modern,” which description of me is certainly true. It was that cognitive and, in my case, Jewish “suffering” (to use Peter’s term), that pushed me to go beyond modernity. Edith makes a strong case that my use of the term is intellectually inappropriate and will mislead 3 Elliot insisted that, regardless of what I said in Renewing the Covenant, it must be understood as a statement of Reform Jewish ideology. Note his subtitle: “Autonomy vs. Community, The Ongoing Reform/Conservative Difference,” Conservative Judaism, Vol. XLVIII, No. 2 (Winter 1996): 64–68. My response and Elliot’s rejoinder appeared as “The Reform Judaism of Renewing the Covenant” and “Matters of Degree and Kind” in Conservative Judaism, Vol. L, No. 1 (Fall 1997). (The issues were dated to maintain the consecutive publication of the journal but they actually appeared at a considerably later date.) 4 Ibid., p. 62.

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thoughtful people as to my kind of thinking. She has such stature as thinker and leader in this area that she may well be right. Was it an unconscious ambivalence about this title that caused me not to utilize “postmodern” to refer to myself or my thought in my book’s title but to refer in its subtitle to the cultural situation of my readers? The critical issue, of course, is whether it makes any sense to speak of a non-Derridean postmodern community of reflective communication. A number of the colleagues gathered here thinks it does and, emboldened by their agreement, I stand by my original self-identification and respectfully reject Edith’s reproof. Not long after Renewing the Covenant was published, I learned to specify what I thought entitled me to speak of myself as a (non-Derridean) postmodern. In two critical respects, I reject and radically revise modernist “doctrine.” Modernists from Kant on made the individual human the independent basis for truth and thus, to validate religion, they had to seek ways of moving from their human certainties to God’s possible reality and nature. But religious postmoderns like me know persons to be inseparable from God, their ground, and truth as what emerges between God and people (The fundamentalists say it comes almost entirely from God to humans, while the non-Orthodox say, in various balances, it is more two-sided than that). Modernists also knew that truth was necessarily universal and thus, if they wished to give some validity to a particular group, they had to demonstrate to what extent this particular group reflected universal truth. But postmoderns like me know that all truth begins in particularity and any universal one might affirm derives from that particular base. (Heretically enough, I also insisted that one premise of modernity was too true to be denied a place in the foundations of my—our—postmodernity: the close identification of human dignity with the exercise of a significant measure of self-determination. See below.)5 I must, however, confess that the issue of philosophic label is not very important to me. As Susan says, the critical term for us is “Jew” and we will use whatever intellectual language now least inadequately describes what we “know” that to be. So I was once a boy rationalist, evolved into a religious existentialist and, seeing its inadequacies, began to identify myself as a postmodern thinker. Let a more satisfactory way of talking about Jewish 5 This Torah self-understanding appeared about the same time in two publications in slightly different form: Choices in Modern Jewish Thought, 2nd ed. (W. Orange, N.J.: Behr­ man House, 1995), pp. 288ff. and The Human Condition, the Alexander Schindler Festschrift, ed. Aaron Hirt-Mannheimer (New York: UAHC, 1995) as of my paper, “Reform: Modern Movement in a Postmodern Era?”

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truth appear in our culture and I shall, I hope, have the intellectual courage to embrace it, temporarily, to be sure. For me then, as for David and Susan, Torah truth, as best we understand it, is primary and it is the criterion for the apologetic language we will ­utilize—another radical break with the modernists. So again risking terminological static, I call myself a Jewish “theologian” in an effort to signal to my readers that my thinking is governed by my Jewish faith. Philosophy in recent decades has insisted that it alone was the rightful arbiter of truth. It therefore as good as dictated to modernist Jewish thinkers what might now properly be included in their Judaism, generally with radically reductionist results, pace Norbert, but I shall return to this theme again. I can understand how Jews of a critically philosophic bent might well become Derridean postmoderns and then see what Jewish sense that made possible, like Edith’s stunningly creative use of Lyotard. But the image of Israel as silent victim straining for language to challenge its Accuser is one that says more about the hermeneur than about any significant reality I discern in the people Israel today. We are, however, still at the beginning of the Derridean evocation of Jewish meaning and, though my Jewish faith precludes my joining that interpretive enterprise, I look forward to the spiritual stimulation that the emerging Derridean description of Jewish faith and duty will provide. Several of the non-Derrideans, who include me in the postmodern camp, wonder if I am not more residually modern than I realize. Two things must be said in that regard. First, I do not mean by the “post” in postmodern that everything modern must be put behind us. I, and the people Israel, continue to owe modernity too much to do such a thing. The process of modernization gave Jews freedom from the ghetto, equality of opportunity, and unparalleled security for our community. It taught us the extraordinary value of pluralism, the preciousness of individual rights, and the sacred dignity of substantial self-determination. Indeed, I proudly proclaim that the third premise in my kind of postmodernist thinking about Judaism is (a radically recontextualized understanding of) “autonomy.” I do not seek to hide from my residual modernism but openly question whether postmodernity should really qualify as an independent, sixth stage in the long history of Jewish spiritual development (p. 4, pp. 49f. and the references cited in note 5). Nonetheless, my hybridized thinking is so fundamentally other-than-modern, that I think the term “postmodern” will usefully call to the attention of other “chastened moderns” the deep change of perspective and attitude now arising among us.

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It seems to me that the appearance of a strong modern color to my thought is magnified because I am engaged in apologetics, a task which requires one to communicate with “suffering” moderns in the only language that still makes sense to them, despite their cognitive dissonance with it. This problem first forced itself upon me in 1967 when I was writing my book on Jewish sex ethics for college students. I could not hope to address them in my nascent language of Covenant faith and hope they would long continue reading, so I tried to find an idiom congenial to them that would also engage them in full seriousness. But I finally couldn’t stand the selfrepression and concluded the work by addressing them in the accents of Jewish faith.6 I did not have the systemic sophistication in 1967 to realize that the problem of standing at the boundary explained the curious logical break in the “argument” of God in Search of Man by Abraham Heschel.7 Most of the first third of the book, on God, speaks the language of human experience with such eloquence that four decades plus later people find it speaks to their innermost being. But once Heschel draws his readers into the presence of the living God, he moves to the other side of the theological table and begins a continuing polemic against relying on human experience, rather than on the revelation of God he has led them to. That reversal, so crucial to his faith and his purpose in writing, regularly shocks readers who, snug in their modernity, anticipate that like other Jewish teachers he will indicate how radical amazement fits into their modernity and congenially modifies Jewish tradition. But he doesn’t do so and that is why, though many quote Heschel’s sentences, few Jews have adopted his theology as a whole. In much of Renewing the Covenant, I speak to searching still-modernist Jews in their terms: those of “self,” “autonomy” and “universalism.” However, I do not concede the primacy of universalism and then try to validate particularity. I see no way one can do that and arrive at the primacy of particularity, which I take to be the Jewish and postmodern truth. My strategy is to undermine the three foundations of the universalizing modernist faith. I do this by arguing against the goodness of human nature, the discrete individuality of persons and the identification of truth with universals (chapters 11, 12, and 13 respectively). This allows me to ease them into my revision 6 See Eugene B. Borowitz, Choosing a Sex Ethic, a Jewish Inquiry (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), pp. 116–20. 7 Abraham Heschel, God in Search of Man (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1956).

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of “the self” as “the Jewish self.” Perhaps I stay with my apologetic language too long, but I am hopeful that the cumulative transformation of my language will set the context of my getting there rather than vice versa, as often seems to me the experience of the reviewers in this book. Norbert suggests that I should not equate modernity with a rationalism that Yudit nicely calls “linear.” He speculates that I am really involved in an ongoing polemic against the thought of my late, lamented friend Steven S. Schwarzschild but have, in fact, misunderstood him. He then sketches in a picture of a Kantian probabilism which would yield a rationalism far more humane than the categorical one I so disdain. Passing quickly over the rational certainty of Kantian regulative ideals and emphasizing the imprecise judgments which necessarily ensue when the ideals are applied to real cases in the contingent world, Norbert argues that rationalism only claims that it is the best way of reaching our inevitably limited practical decisions. The Steven I knew would have quickly gone into one of his consciously self-indulgent tirades at the idea that he was a Kantian for essentially pragmatic reasons, namely, as Norbert puts it, that since no thinking can give us certainty then “nothing is more likely to lead us to correct judgments (in science and ethics) than [Kantian] reasoning.” Steven, like the creator of “pure” reason, and so forth, hated any hint of pragmatism. For him reason required or commanded us, and even in the realm of historical decisions, he, like most of my Germanic teachers, felt that a good measure of the “categorical imperative” passed over into his practical judgments. If there was a Cohenian neo-Kantian probabilist around in the heyday of modernism, I never ran into one. And if a biographical note is permitted, once Steven’s brief, student-days’ flirtation with Rosenzweig passed over, we never discussed the foundational clash between his rationalism and my non-rationalism, though an occasional loving barb on that divide did fly between us. To have done so would have destroyed our friendship since Steven insisted on being taken on his own terms, a position which he would have been happy to defend as rationally required, although he would have done so with a mischievous smile. I shall return to Norbert’s explication of what I take to be a “chastened” rationalism when I respond to the questions about my discussion of Israel. That Troublesome Term, “The Self ” David and Susan are only more emphatic than Yudit and Peter in charging that I give the individual too much freedom in relation to God. A good

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deal of their unease arises from my frequent references to “autonomy,” a term their philosophical sophistication necessarily connects with Kant and its meaning in his thought. For Kantians “autonomy” indicates that the self alone gives the (moral) law, not God or anyone else, though Cohenian neo-Kantianism rushes in to show how God, as the most foundational idea in the rational worldview, undergirds the moral law and is closely identified with it. My postmodern thinking asserts something quite different. I claim that people are, on their own, incompetent to legislate the basic laws by which they ought to live. They are similarly ill-equipped to bring the Messiah by their own action, as the Kantian liberal Jews grandly professed. I speak of a God who is real in His / Her own right and is not merely the grandest of my rational ideas. I further insist this God commands people, albeit nonverbally, and, as best we can put it, has input into our lives by coming into relationship with us. How, then, as David warned me years ago, can I use the term “autonomy” to describe an aspect of my God-humans relationship and not expect to be taken as a neo-Kantian semi-secularist masquerading as something else? Perhaps my difficulty in this respect is that I suffer from a failure of imagination. I have not been able to find another term which succinctly points to the truth which almost all modernized Jews take to be the core of their existence: that their humanity demands that, in some significant measure, they think for themselves. They have learned this from modern social life, and its telling symbol for them is the right to vote. Most of these Jews have never seriously heard of Kant, and they will glaze over if you try discussing heteronomy and autonomy, suggesting theonomy as the way to resolve the ethical dilemma this contrast poses. And, having heard of religious frauds, who in the name of God have gotten people to do terrible things, they reserve the right to judge for themselves any religious claim to having the truth to which they should accede. In short, they believe God gave them freedom to think, and wants them to use it in determining their Jewish duty in a more proactive way than traditional Judaism allowed / allows. Against Buber’s championing of the “I” in determining the law, Susan calls on us to follow Rosenzweig’s recommended response to God, “Hineni,” “Here I am.” Rosenzweig declares that the Law as a whole is binding upon us. The semi-believers I am addressing, Susan, may be able to join Rosenzweig in acknowledging God’s “authority,” but they will cherish that Rosenzweig who also taught, as you know, that the self retains some rights even in its acquiescence to God. For he gave sufficient credence to the nomos-making dignity of the self that he found it necessary to validate the Law by tailing on us to turn what came to us as Gesetz, an objective statement of law, into Gebot,

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a command addressed to each of us personally. And he famously, if cryptically, indicated that one need not do what, at the most serious level, one was not “able” to do. Even the modestly “liberal” Rosenzweig, I suggest, grants too much to the Law and too little to us for most of us to follow him. If the law the sages are teaching is entirely binding upon us in principle, then, to give a telling example, God does not want women to be full members of a minyan. An increasing majority of modernized Jews know, by their own judgment, that such discriminatory rulings are better charged to human invention than to God’s revelation via the sages. It is this authority of the self—which I limit by the recontextualization Covenant selfhood lays upon it—for which I need a term (I shall later return to the topic of the law in my comments on Torah). My apologetic problem, then, is finding a word for the significant, but not exclusive, enfranchisement of persons in determining their/our Jewish duty.8 Yes, the Kantian associations of “autonomy” give too much power to the “autos,” the single self, but I can think of no better word to protect the self’s legitimate role in law-making. It would be tedious to regularly put quotation marks around it, “autonomy,” and eccentric to write it ?auto?nomy, or with dashes through the “auto,” autonomy, though this might qualify as a visual postmodern doubling. So I risked retaining the term, hoping that people would see how differently it functions when Covenantalized. I consider the reinterpretation of selfhood—which still has a measure of legislative authority for us—as Jewish selfhood in which individuality cannot be separated from its relation to God as one of the people of Israel’s Covenant relationship with God—to be the most creative and important thing I accomplished in Renewing the Covenant. That is to say, I do not see how we can have a Jewishly satisfactory “Theology of Postliberal Duty” with the old “autonomy,” yet we need to make some place in such a new understanding for our sense of the sacredness of our ability to think / choose for ourselves. So I crafted a system which did that. Let me be specific by pointing again to my epitome of my theory of how non-Orthodox Jews today ought to determine their Jewish obligations. I 8 The issue cannot be that individuality has no place at all in traditional Judaism. Even Heschel, the defender of the accuracy and empathic passivity of the prophets, acknowledges that they express God’s truth in terms of their individual personalities and styles. Halakhic decisors are regularly described as having shitot, individualized systems of reading the tradition. I discussed how this functions in Conservative Judaism in my response to Elliot Dorff, “Autonomy vs. Community, the ongoing Reform/Conservative difference.” Conservative Jusaism, pp. 64–65.

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prefaced these on page 288 with a general statement of why the modernist, Kantian, or Buberian ideal of a universalized self needed to be replaced by the ideal of a “Jewish self.” Because of its Jewishness, that self was not an isolate, but was necessarily involved as one of five, co-functioning factors involved in the “law”-making process. Of these, the real God I had previously delineated, was the first and dominant participant (p. 289). Fully three of the five factors were devoted to the people of Israel’s significance in the process: as contemporary reference community; as bearer of a vast repository of prior Covenant-duty deliberations; and as a people pointing toward the Messiah. Only then, fifth, do I speak of the continuing place of the self. “Fifth, yet despite the others with whom it is so intimately intertwined—God and the Jewish people, past present and future—it is as a single soul in its full individuality that the Jewish self exists in Covenant” (p. 293, italicized in the original). When I said “a single soul in its full individuality,” I was thinking not just of the remnant of ?auto?nomy we still rightly insist upon, but of the precious individuality of all those historical Jewish “characters” whose very idiosyncrasy Jews have long cherished. It did not occur to me after all I had written about the Jewish self and what that very sentence says about the soul “intimately intertwined” with God and the Jewish people, that readers could still think I meant by it something like that notorious caricature of a Reform Jew, a person who did what they personally pleased. And how any philosopher reading these words could find this a heavily Kantian “autonomy” is a tribute to the way the past impedes the creative present.9 Again, let me note my surprise that my early statements (in the chapters on God) seeking to clarify what remained of individual human power in the presence of the transcendent God determined what some readers thought I was doing in my later transformation of selfhood into Jewish selfhood. The people I was addressing would have been uncomprehending had 9 The most egregious misreading of that sentence was Ellen Umansky’s. Because I spoke of the self in its full individuality, she accused me of not having progressed beyond classic Reform Judaism. Her astonishing misreading was compounded by her gerrymandering of my statement. She omitted its first word, “Fifth,” the one which indicated how I had recontextualized selfhood to give it a properly postmodern, Jewish relational situation and made it the Jewish Covenant self. My appreciation of her ideas was not enhanced by her suggestion that we now ought to move on to a theology where selves and religion were thought of relationally, a matter central to my writing for some decades. “Zionism and Reform Judaism: A Theological Reassessment,” Journal of Reform Zionism, vol. 1, no. 1 (March 1993): 44–50. My response appeared as a lengthy endnote, no. 4, in my own contribution to these discussions, “What Is Reform Religious Zionism?” Journal of Reform Zionism, vol. II (March 1995): 24–30.

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I tried from the first to talk to them about the Jewish self, and I would have lost them. I needed first to develop my argument for particularity, and then clarify what I meant by Israel before I could begin trying to wean them away from a central idea of contemporary culture, that there is a general selfhood. I thought that my crowning, final statement of my theology would put the prior pieces transformingly into place. I am now chastened by the fact that my strategy has not worked out well with a good number of these sophisticated readers. Such are the perils of apologetics. The selfhood issue particularly troubles Tom. He feels that despite my devoting a chapter to “The Social Side of Selfhood” (chapter 12), and my giving the community three places of the five in my calculus of decisionmaking, that I do not seem to appreciate how socially determined the self is. “The central point is that I cannot simply opt out of the formative bonds that figure in my moral identity and still hold onto my moral autonomy. I can exercise my free conscience in opposition to the teachings of my formative community only by means of resources also supplied by that community. . . . When I become alienated from the community that formed me, my moral autonomy is itself at risk. . . . In fact, my alienation from my primary community of reference is, more than likely, a reflection of the fact that other attachments . . . have already gained preeminent importance in my life.” So he believes that I ought to spend more time on “the critical retrieval and mediation of the normative traditions that constitute Jewish particularity.” To a considerable extent I agree with Tom, and clarifying this will also allow me to highlight our differences. I agree that in the usual case one’s morality is substantially formed by one’s “primary” community, and that one cannot “simply” leave it and still easily hold on to one’s moral self. Yet that, as I read Jewish history, is just about what the mass of modernizing Jews did when they left their essentially inner-oriented ghetto or shtetl identities and opted for the world of urban, educated, secularized Western culture as their primary “moralizing” community. Of course this involved a good deal of boundary-crossing pain, but this was not undertaken and endured on the basis of anything previously visible in the pre-modern Jewish community, but because something deep in their human nature indicated its value. Something vaguely similar occurred when they gave up their formative national environments and immigrated to countries with a rather different ethos, and then when they gladly gave up the formative powers of the lower class for the middle class and beyond. Anyone who has tried to work in the Jewish community in recent generations knows that, until recently, the only hope of promoting Jewish life was to show how

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Judaism fit in with its primary values—those of a humanizing slice of secular Western society. I derive two lessons from this applicable to Tom’s critique. First, that for all the sociality of selves, they also have an inner power to transcend their group—a rather phenomenal one in the rare cases of prophets and saints. In the more common case, they can radically shift groups and transform their “selves.” Let me call attention to a term in Tom’s tradition which points to a special case of this, “conversion,” that human/divine power which makes it possible for pagans to find a radically “new being” by becoming Christians. Something human vaguely similar to that happened when Jews, utterly uncoerced, opted to transform their lives in societies with radically different value concerns against what their traditional communities taught them, and their communal leaders advised. I should add that I am unacquainted with Tom’s theology of conversion, and look forward to learning how it relates to this discussion. Second, the primary value-forming community of the Jews whom I am addressing is neither that of traditional Judaism nor that of one of its modern reinterpretations. The non-Orthodox communities—and to a considerable extent people who affiliate with “centrist” Orthodox communities—almost always keep their Jewishness secondary to the larger social worlds to which their parents adapted. So when I am speaking to the Jewish public in terms of “self” and “autonomy,” I am doing so in the accents of their primary moral community, “chastened” though they have been by their affiliation with humanizing American secularity. Nor do I see this secondariness of Jewishness in the free countries soon disappearing. No new “hot” intellectual or spiritual movement breaks out in America these days without our soon hearing of the large number of Jews who have become its devotees. So my modest “attention to the critical retrieval and mediation of the normative traditions that constitute Jewish particularity” is, as I understand it, in keeping with Tom’s sense of the power of the social in individual life. However, Tom’s positive project intrigues me sufficiently that I should like to take a lightning stab at it. To begin with, I think this task of the retrieval of “normative traditions” would be rather easier for Christians than for Jews, since the church has a tradition of creeds and of classic doctrinal statements to draw on. Jews have nothing truly similar. But let me hazard an informed guess about our “normative traditions of particularity.” Positively, they are God’s choosing us from among all peoples to receive God’s Torah and the resulting halakhic structure which expressed its mandates in Jewish life. But to these shaping beliefs we must add the ongoing,

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negative experience of anti-Semitism, the social experience which long made and kept Jews Jewish. None of these “traditions” is highly effective among us today. Most modernized Jews do not believe in Jewish chosenness, and they do not observe Jewish law as law, but only as a resource from which they select those practices they think will enhance their American lives. Fortunately, anti-Semitism continues to decline in the Western world, though only a dreamer would suggest that it no longer exists. But Jew-hatred is less a threat to our continuity these days than is the general acceptance of Jews which makes intermarriage and its assimilation so rife. Renewing the Covenant is faithful to its title. It seeks to reinstate God’s reality (chapters 3–10), to substitute Covenant for chosenness (so after the preparation of chapters 11–13 the delineations of chapters 14–16), and thence create a structure of duty-making that can replace the abandoned legal system (chapters 17–20). It hopes to so establish the cogency of these beliefs that a growing, eventually critical minority of Jews will want to live by them because of their truth, and not because some enemy will not let them be anything else. Some Words about the Ineffable One My terminological teshuvah, repentance, must now proceed to my calling God an / the Absolute, albeit a Weak Absolute. My philosophic colleagues are aghast at my oxymoron and would like me to provide some conceptual clarity of the description of God as Absolute. Alas, I was being midrashic/ heuristic, not spinning out tightly cognitive claims. I had argued in the experiential section that revulsion against the immorality of our times had sparked a new search for the Ground of our values. I wanted a term that, as an old aggadah put the need to penetrate the usual complacency, would “smash into the ear” of the hearer. If relativism is the evil to be opposed, then we needed to find its opposite, or at least the ground of non-relativism, what is termed in common parlance an “absolute.” Used figuratively, “absolute” usefully marks the rather desperate search of people these days to find something stable to hold on to: to hold on to, no matter how bizarre it may be and no matter how costly (in dollars and cents, too). Jews, those fervent modernizers, show the same phenomenon. By calling God an absolute I only meant to call attention to the importance of the anchoring function of God in our lives. Any postmodern Jewish view of God, in my view, would have to provide for God’s effectively exercising this role. However, to connect God with a reasonably stable commandingness opens God to the modernist fear that God’s grounding greatness will as

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good as wipe out persons. To refute this, I sought to call attention to biblical and rabbinic Judaism’s unselfconscious paradoxical insistence that the One Ruler-God of all the universes nonetheless created a real world, and in it gave people the astonishing freedom to obey or to defy God. So borrowing a philosophic usage, I added “weak,” in the sense of “don’t push the substantive term too far,” to the term “Absolute.” That makes good Jewish theological sense and seemed to me sufficiently evocative that it might “shatter the ear” of my readers, but for philosophers it makes no sense. It is, I believe, a good instance of the translation problem we have when we seek to move between these related but disparate disciplines. A somewhat similar problem arose in relation to my suggestion that God’s redemptive power is sometimes seen in historical events in our time. Yudit and Edith particularly are troubled by this (as I think many in the Jewish community are). They want to know how I can say that God is involved with particularly beneficent events, and then not also involve God in the terrible things that happen in history. Classically, Judaism has said that God is involved in both, and that creates the problem: the incompatibility of the good God and horrible evils. The Bible already knew that justice was a limited answer indeed, and the rabbis taught that the life of the world to come would compensate for the lack of justice in this world. But, overwhelmingly, believing Jews were able to accept the fact that there are some things that we just cannot understand, probably because they were grateful for all the goodness they did in fact receive, beginning with life. The pious live, not always easily, with God’s inscrutability. Philosophers care too much about rationality to accept that “answer.” And they cannot easily accommodate the insight of believers old and current suggestion that, if the clumsy locution is permitted, history is “lumpy” and God’s saving acts are sporadic. In several places in Renewing the Covenant, I have tried to explain why, after considerable reflection, I take this stand.10 Now the gap between what philosophers consider intelligible speech and what religionists know must truthfully be said, widens to the point where discussion is difficult indeed. This necessarily brings us to a discussion of the place of the Holocaust in contemporary Jewish theology. A number of my critics believe that since those terrible days we must operate with “a displaced and decentered faith.” This phrase and its equivalents are frequently repeated by thinkers today, and they convey the understanding that since the Holocaust, we cannot 10 See Borowitz, Renewing the Covenant, pp. 123–25, 128, and 131 on the limited God; and pp. 148–50 on retribution.

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believe in God as we once did. I demur from this position. I do not believe God is the central problem of post-Holocaust theology—a radical revisionism which I sought to justify in chapter 3 of Renewing the Covenant. None of my critics represented here have found this interpretation worthy of comment or refutation. Nonetheless, the matter is so important to assessing how the Holocaust should influence our religious thinking, I think it important to restate my case, even briefly. Belief in God cannot die for people who don’t really believe in God’s existence to begin with, and who had already given up the idea of God’s retribution as far back as the Kishniev pogroms of 1903 and 1905. By mid-century, the overwhelming majority of modernized Jews were agnostic if not atheist. What they believed in, what functioned as their “god,” was not Adonai but humankind and its capacities. They built their lives on education, politics, business and culture—not the God of the 613 commandments. As the century drew toward an end they began to realize, in a subterranean, postmodern way, that their secular “god” had failed them and that a messianic faith in humankind is ludicrous. “What was “displaced and decentered” in our effective faith was not God, but human power, that is, the ethos of modernity—and out of that recognition, the widespread religious search and postmodern spiritual longings of our time emerged. That is why I do not make the Holocaust, or the problem of theodicy, central to my thinking about God, though it is fundamental to my teaching about human nature and our need for God’s help. I urge anyone reading these lines to make their own judgment of the case I have presented in chapter 3 of my book. I could have as good as written the previous paragraph nearly a decade ago, when I was completing the manuscript of Renewing the Covenant. The intervening years have only confirmed my view. The Holocaust, once at the forefront of Jewish writing, is rarely a living theological issue today. As the second edition of some of the old radical books appear, their authors now share their second thoughts about what they once proclaimed and that, if nothing else, should give us pause in our continuing to mouth the old slogans about the Holocaust.11 It is not that we are forgetting the Holocaust, but simply that we have begun to do what Jews have always done with a great historic event: we have begun to ritualize it. And I include in that ritualization the rhetoric we still use when we do discuss it. Old phrases and images 11 Most notable is Richard L. Rubenstein’s preface to the second edition of After Auschwitz, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), pp. xi–xiii; see also the quite different tone of the preface to the second edition of Emil Fackenheim’s To Mend the World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. xi–xxv.

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reappear, old emotions are evoked and relived, the past and present are momentarily joined, and, having heeded the command “to remember,” we go back to what are now the living questions of our existence. And among caring Jews of diverse temperaments and labels, that live agenda often centers on building a personal relationship with God, as incredible as that would have sounded in the heyday of the death-of-God movement. The People Israel Yudit asks why I do not give more attention to the State of Israel and its ongoing place in covenanted lives. Since I am a religious rather than a secular Zionist, I devote myself to the primary task: determining what Jewish faith is in our times. Only with that in place can one hope to know what our relationship might be to the Land of Israel, to the State of Israel, and to the community living upon it. This not being a book in which I move very far from theoretical issues to practical ones, I limited myself to one paragraph on the State of Israel which I hope readers will find as rich in meaning as I do (p. 290). Some time after the book appeared I was asked to give my views on “What is Reform Religious Zionism?” And that paper connects my theology with our immediate obligations theoretical and practical.12 Yudit also wondered why I do not explain why exactly a general self, who happens to be Jewish, should strive to become a Jewish self. Once one grants the premises of Enlightenment rationality—the individualistic self and truth as universals—I do not see how it is ever possible to make a case for the value of the particular that does not relegate it to second best. Why detour through an old, self-serving particular, when one can find groups that try to move as directly as they can to the universal goal? And why then also take on the oddity and disability of Jewishness in Western culture? Those assimilationist questions have bedeviled Jewish thinkers in this century who have accepted the supremacy of modernity, and attempted to build a robust Judaism from the foundations of universal human reason or experience. That is why I framed my case first as an attack on the universalist counter faith (chapters 11–13), and only then tried to show the admirable character of the Jewish people in relationship to God, each other and humankind (chapters 14–16).

12 Eugene B. Borowitz, Journal of Reform Zionism, vol. II (March 1995): 24–30.

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Norbert suggests that there is now a rationalism that no longer atomizes individuals, but sees them relationally. It therefore gives rational credence to collectivities, and not merely to individuals. That certainly would provide us with an argument for the validity of particular groups, such as the people Israel. But, in typical philosophic fashion, it would do this for all groups universally. So the particular Jewish group would again be only another possibility for satisfying that rational need. Any other collective that satisfied the rational standards for relationality would, in that sense, be similarly commended. We are left again, though on a new level, with the problem of getting from philosophy’s universalism to the unique significance of Jewishness. This matter is critical to my determination not to be a philosopher in the present philosophic climate. In some bedrock, primal fashion, I and others like me know that the existence of the Jewish people in Covenant with God is a matter of unique cosmic significance. Any way of thinking that doesn’t readily allow me to express and validate that truth cannot be the medium by which I will explain Judaism to others. Until someone creates a rationalism that can give particularity a primacy Jewishness has in my life, I cannot be a first-level rationalist. (But as my writing makes clear, I am a devoted second-level rationalizer, trying to think as hard and as clearly as I can about my first-level experience. Philosophers, of course, deny there can be “experience” without its already containing some mental structuring that can make something into my “experience.” In effect, then, everything must begin with philosophy. For my rejoinder, see chapter 19 of Renewing.) Let me only briefly add to this that most rationalism is resolutely secular and so constructed that the Covenanting God of Israel is as good as ruled out ab initio. I also cannot accept a system of thought which will devalue, if not rule out, what I and others like me know to be the ultimate ground of our existence. So I practice theology but, in the present intellectual situation, not philosophical theology. Torah, God’s Instruction If Judaism values praxis, what we do, more than it values doxis, what we say about what we believe, then the questions David, Yudit, and others have raised about relationship’s ability to command and, in addition, to generate law, are central ones for my enterprise. The topics are closely related but it will be necessary for me to focus on them somewhat separately. Anyone who has long been in a relationship with another—neighboring, friendship, work—will surely have realized that involvement generates

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responsibility and that the more intimate and long-standing the relationship, the more it commands me. The paradigm case is marriage. The spouse commands simply by being spouse rather than stranger, and does so more compellingly than does a neighbor, friend or coworker with whom I have a relationship. When the demand is put into words, its specificity and the fact of its being spoken to me gives it great urgency. But even when no word is spoken, one knows that there are things one must, and others one must not do. In that situation, you may be uncertain what exactly you ought to do or how best to go about it—the advantages of the verbal—but you know that you must respond to the unverbalized command. Often, we discover, such unarticulated demands have a greater power than the spoken ones, for there is something particularly reproachful about the spouse’s cries, “You should have known what to do,” or, “If I had to tell you it wouldn’t be the same thing,” or “If you really loved me, you would have known.” This telling experience furnishes us with a metaphor for what happens between us and God in the Covenant. No wonder Rosenzweig spoke of revelation as love. When through the religious life one builds an intense and long-lasting intimacy with God, one knows one “must” not stain the relationship by one’s behavior, but one “must” rather dedicate oneself to acting as the loved One would want us to. (That is the general case—but we should not forget, as Yehudah Hanasi once wailed, “Some people win the life of the world to come in an instant while others must spend their whole lives striving to attain it and never know whether they have.”) I suppose that is another reason that I am a theologian. I want to clear away the intellectual rubbish that so often keeps us from allowing a budding relationship with God to mature. And I want to provide as fine an understanding of the Covenant as a relationship as I can so that people will not only be attracted to it in theory, but enter into it as a bond which directs their lives. Ideas are not the only, or often even the best way of carrying on this “dating service” but, without them, I think a community as educated and critical as ours is will not be willing to “commit.” Relationship commands, but it is too personalistic to yield what we normally think of as law, the enduring-evolving, clearly specified norms of what we must regularly do or else carry a burden of guilt and/or punishment. What is at stake between the two views is not merely the vagueness of relationship and the specificity and objectivity of law, but the intensity of the urgency to act connected with each kind of command. In fact, can relationship get people to act as well as law can? We cannot answer that question by dismissing the former as too easy to subvert, for no system is people proof and the law, too, is regularly subverted by literalists, ­positivists, and

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other less elegant sinners. We will, I believe, get a better picture of what each viewpoint can and cannot do by leaving off comparisons of who fails in each, and turning to a case to illuminate this difference of approach. Assume, that after a reasonably energetic effort, a tenth man is not forthcoming to complete a minyan and people will start to leave if we delay any further. What shall we do about the person who came to say kaddish? The Law is clear. For all our concern for the mourner, he cannot say the mourner’s kaddish as part of the service. That is what Susan and Soloveitchik mean when they refer to “sacrifice” as an ingredient of Jewish duty. There are things which have long been difficult to understand in Jewish Law, but God’s behests have such an urgency to them that we set aside our qualms and do them. Thus, while I do not know how Susan feels about sitting behind the mehitzah, which divides the sexes in her centrist Orthodox shul, when she comes to the synagogue that is where she will sit; it is the Law. Thus, too, the mourner will understand why he could not say kaddish in this unfortunate circumstance, but he and the rest of the people there will know they have fulfilled the centuries-old ruling and acted with a Jewish authenticity any observant Jew will admire. In a society as shifting and unstable as ours, these are virtues to cherish. Yet if I recall David’s position of some years ago correctly, there are rare occasions when he, who like Susan gladly wears the “yoke of the Kingdom of Heaven,” might break with the Law. Say that, as in cases of mamzerut, halakhic illegitimacy, the Law is blatantly unethical, punishing the innocent offspring for the sin of the parents, and no classic halakhic device avails to declare that there really is no case. In such an extreme case, David, most reluctantly to be sure, would not follow the classic halakhah. But he would be most stringent in limiting what qualified as a case of “blatantly unethical” Jewish law. It does not include allowing a gathering of nine men to carry on a service with the mourner’s kaddish. I raise this matter only to indicate that so redoubtable a champion of Jewish law as David, once acknowledged that in quite exceptional circumstances it might be necessary to exercise extra-halakhic moral authority. For a large and, in my view, increasing majority of modernized Jews, feminism is the issue that mandates the need to revise or even break with the Law as it is understood by the sages of that community of Jews who are most devoted to its study and practice. To these Jews who insist on thinking about the Law’s purposes, it seems plain that, in the case given above, should a woman be available to join the prayers she should be counted in the minyan so that kaddish could be said. Indeed, women should be counted in minyanim regularly, and be as required to say kaddish as men

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now are. All such changes would act to strengthen the living Covenant relationship. Many believe that they can use the term “halakhah” for these revisionist rulings; others believe that co-opting a traditional title obscures the contemporary relational authority behind them, and does violence to what the term “halakhah” traditionally meant. In any case, to ask all women to accept the lesser status that traditional law effectively assigns to women, is to demand more of a “sacrifice” than seems compatible with Covenant as the relationship between God and the entire Jewish people. I find that Peter’s suggestion that we think of our duties in terms of Kadushin’s “value concepts” pushes us too far to the permissive pole of the duty spectrum. Kadushin, after all, was working with aggadah, lore, rather than halakhah, law, and, while aggadic statements do have certain limited authority for believing Jews, they do not come with anything like the rigor associated with the notion of command. Moreover, thinking of praxis in terms of value concepts is made more troubling by Kadushin’s insistence that their meaning is always indeterminate. I may be reading too little into Peter’s suggestion, but I am sensitive to this issue because of our spare of writers who, in their eagerness to co-opt the term halakhah for their non-Orthodoxy, regularly so empty it of legal forcefulness that their “halakhah” effectively retains only aggadic authority, despite its more stringent sounding label. Were I the rabbi of the nine person [sic] non-minyan, and the mourner asked if we could have the service anyway so she/he could recite the mourner’s kaddish, I would think of the Law in order to see if it reasonably clarified the present Covenantal imperative. Clearly tradition would prohibit it, but a great many caring Jews in our community today would think it a shame that a mourner who came to synagogue to say kaddish was denied that possibility because of what they would call “a technicality.” They, like me personally, could not imagine God frowning on us because of our untraditional effort to have nine people, not ten, symbolize the Jewish community seeking liturgically to renew its ancient Covenant, as well as allow our neighbor to fulfill her/his special responsibility in that regard. But if the group present, understanding the situation, was willing to go ahead, I would lead that service. Someone else utilizing the same Covenantal calculus might rule differently, but that is the pluralism that this kind of goaloriented reasoning encourages. If keva, the regularity, of Jewish law is critical to us, I do not see how we can ever achieve that without a firm belief that God stands behind just these words, this ruling and the dialectical system which gave birth to it—ten

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men, not nine, or not nine and a woman. Without that dogmatic faith, other rationales for the Law will produce only tepid results. Most Jews are too critical and questioning to accept classic Jewish law as binding because they are told it is, if not God’s revelation, the established historic structure of Jewish living. This position and its corollaries have thus far failed to produce communities who live by even a modernized Jewish law, as Conservative Jewish leaders regularly ruefully acknowledge. In my opinion, the theological root of the difficulty for the non-dogmatic theories is the depth of our commitment to the religious validity of the self’s rightful part in any rule-making. Only a living relationship with God, I insist, can hope to demand that we work out our individuality as part of the Jewish people’s Covenant with God. The great contribution of Covenantalized decision-making will not be keva, but its emphasis on kavannah, intention. What transpires between us—God-Israel-me—is here a matter of consciousness as well as of act. When our doing grows out of a consciousness of self-in-relation, that inwardness will shape our persons as well as be a commanding power in our doing. At the moment, Covenant relatedness is largely a matter individual Jews feel privately. Yet I would hope that we will soon see the day when there are communities of Jews who share enough of this Covenantal sensibility that they will want to move beyond the isolation that many Jewish selves feel in our time, to the f­ormulation of communal norms for Covenanted Jewish living (p. 294). I do not think that will ever likely become “law” but it would flesh out the communal aspect of Covenantal existence, and add another layer of urgency to being a praxis Jew. Renewing this Conversation Several of the colleagues have commented on my book’s failure to show the Jewish textual basis on which my thought rests, while others wish I had ­indicated more clearly what sort of practice this theology entails and how Covenantal reasoning leads to it. As to the missing texts, I am unable to resolve the methodological problem which besets us all with regard to texts and contempotary thought. No matter how many citations one adduces, they can merely illustrate a possible relation of some aspects of our tradition to the new thinking. That is because we have no way of determining what they all say, or how to give a representative sample of them or indicate their essence. None of these possibilities carries much credence, so all textual citation remains a thinkers

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selection of what she/he finds relevant in the tradition, and testify more to the thinker’s hermeneutic than to “the normative” ideas in the tradition (whose existence is another hotly debated notion among us). In this situation I have thought it wiser to clarify my hermeneutic than to gather texts to demonstrate its putative Jewishness. I also hoped that various of my briefer writings would indicate my roots in rabbinic literature, and my way of learning from it. In the winter of 1999, the Jewish Publication Society will publish my and Francie Schwartz’s book, The Jewish Moral Virtues, which, in typical musar fashion, is highly textual and ranges across the entire Jewish tradition. That will give my readers some greater indication of my relationship to the Jewish sources. And as I indicate in the preface to Renewing the Covenant (pp. x–xi), I hope that one day my decades long study of aggadic discourse will see the light. As my theological work was coming to systematic fruition, I began testing out various of its notions in one area of praxis, Jewish ethics. A collection of many of my papers in this area was published in 1990 by Wayne State University Press under the title, Exploring Jewish Ethics. A better indication of how my mature theology relates to decision-making may be found in the results of a seminar I conducted for a number of years, in which students rendered a decision on a current ethical issue of concern to them, based on the five point schema I had outlined in the last chapter of Renewing the Covenant. Fourteen publishable student studies resulted from that course, and these were published by Behrman House in 1994 as Reform Jewish Ethics and the Halakhah, An Experiment in Decision Making. While these are my students’ papers, not my own, the approach to reading halakhic (mostly) texts is strongly guided, occasionally in dissent, by my viewpoint. Thus, this volume may be said to open a window on how my theology would work in practice. God, rain blessing on Peter Ochs for his dedication to furthering Jewish thought in our time, and for his imaginative effort here to push postmodern thinking about Judaism another step ahead. And to You, dear God, I say “Blessed are You” for all you have done to sustain me to this day.

Editors’ Interview with Eugene B. Borowitz July 22, 2012 Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron W. Hughes Professor Borowitz, thank you for taking time to interview with us. We will begin by exploring your intellectual biography. How do you identify yourself intellectually? Well, I think it probably would be helpful to go back a bit and tell you about my upbringing. I grew up in Columbus, Ohio, and attended Ohio State University. Neither of those two places is noted as a center of great intellectual concern or activity. My parents were immigrants: my father, a Litvak, my mother was from Hungary. Despite their different backgrounds, they somehow managed to put this relationship together and both loved each other greatly, and they were very good to me. Having settled as East European immigrants in the greater New York area, having moved out to the suburb called Brooklyn into a section called Bensonhurst, there’s no reason to think that they had any specific organizational or intellectual relationship to Judaism. They were just Jews and there were enough Jews around them and there was enough Jewish activity around them that they carried it out. But when they got to Columbus, Ohio, they discovered that in fact in a city of 300,000 people, there were about 8,000 Jews, all located in the east end of the city. My parents wanted to maintain contacts with Jews and participate in the style of East European immigrants to the United States. My father, for example, received by mail the Yiddish daily newspaper, the Forverts. And while he did look at the Columbus Dispatch, he much preferred the Forverts and what it told him. Incidentally, I still get the English Forward, although I don’t think terribly much of it, but I feel I have to have it. So, my parents did something I doubt that they would have ever done if they had remained in Brooklyn: namely, they joined the synagogue. If you needed a place where you could talk to people and discuss questions of interest to yourself, you had to do something like belong to a synagogue. So, my parents joined the synagogue. The Orthodox synagogue was too demanding for them: Even though it was largely English-speaking, its general tone and style was too much concerned with performance and ritual. So they, therefore, went to the Conservative congregation. They didn’t go to

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the Reform congregation because the Reform congregation in Columbus was strongly modeled after the Methodist congregation, which was about four or six blocks down the rather significant street on which it was located. So I grew up as a child in a Conservative congregation. My parents went to the synagogue regularly, if for no other reason than to talk to people; but they did participate in religious life. I was sent to the Hebrew school, or Sunday school, call it what you will, and it was there that my first intellectual activity came out. I somehow seemed to find it necessary and desirable to ask questions of my teachers. They were generally inept in answering them and somehow or another even as a young pre–bar mitzvah child, I seemed to think about what they said and asked questions and eventually got thrown out of class and sent to the rabbi’s office. Then the rabbi and I would have a very nice conversation and I would go back to class and try to keep quiet, which was difficult for me. And that went on until I was a bar mitzvah, and then a second unusual thing occurred. When I was done with all the bar mitzvah training and the like, and had satisfactorily performed the rituals, I was ready to go on and study more. No boy of my age in that Hebrew school ever came back after his bar mitzvah, but I did. So the rabbi proceeded to give me a copy of a Hebrew-English translation of Genesis and put me in a room by myself because there was nobody else for me to be with. The other kids were still learning the preliminary stuff. Can you tell us more about your years at Ohio State University in Columbus? Well, we have to start back there because of the way in which it was determinative of my going into the rabbinate. I mean, no intelligent, able, promising, young man of the Jewish community in those years, the 1940s, when I graduated high school, wanted to be a rabbi or a Jewish thinker, for that matter. My father one day said to me, “I know you, if I leave you alone, you will go to university and take courses for the rest of your life. So I will happily subsidize you if you will tell me by the end of the year what it is that you want to be.” I loved my father. He was obviously a very nice man. And he was serious. So, I set out on a program of trying to find out what I could be. And I tried then to see, could I be a doctor? But that didn’t work—I could not temperamentally see myself as a doctor. Here is a little detail that will shed light on

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this point. I went to summer school where the courses were condensed to accelerate learning. I took the first two courses in zoology, simultaneously. And the people with whom I was sitting at the laboratory table didn’t want to dissect the frog, so I dissected the frog. I was complimented by the person who oversaw that and I went over to the window and I stood at the window and I said to myself, “You’re going to spend your life dissecting frogs? Don’t be an idiot.” So, that was the end of being a doctor. In a similar fashion it was also the end of being a lawyer, and the end of being an accountant. I went from one group to another and tried to determine whether its activities suited me. Finally, there was only one thing left that I had not tried, and that was philosophy. So, I was, as an undergraduate, invited into a graduate seminar with a visiting professor from the Johns Hopkins University who taught epistemology. I recall to this day the critical moment in which I was walking back to get my car in order to drive home and thinking to myself: “You could be a philosopher and spend the rest of your life trying to figure out is the real out there or is the real somehow inside us? Well, that’s a dumb thing to spend your life on.” So instead of graduating in philosophy, I went back to an idea that I had had when I graduated from high school. I wrote the Hebrew Union College and said, “Hey, how about considering taking me in?” Remember, I was from Columbus, Ohio, and Hebrew Union College is in Cincinnati, Ohio. And they said, “Sorry, we can’t admit you because you need to have at least one year of college.” So I finished the one year of college and I wrote to them again. Once more I was rejected when they told me “Sorry, we have changed our admissions criteria. We are now only taking people who have a college degree.” But then the world changed because World War II broke out and with it came the draft. Hebrew Union College again changed its mind and agreed to admit me with one year of college education. And so I was admitted to the rabbinical school, but my Hebrew was terrible. In addition to my initial introduction to Hebrew as a child, I took Hebrew for one summer at Ohio State but I barely passed the entrance exam. I was admitted as a special student who had to learn Hebrew better than other students; by the end of the year I was an honor’s student. So, that settled how I got into the rabbinate. I studied at Hebrew Union College for six years, and during those formative years I repeatedly had the impression that Judaism must be smarter than what I experienced at the seminary. I found most of the courses, the professors, and the studies so dumb, boring, and uninteresting, and I had to work hard not to get thrown out of class, which I mostly succeeded in doing.

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To bring the biographical story to an end, let me say that when I was able to finally graduate and apply for a job, I applied to get a doctoral fellowship at the Hebrew Union College, so I could go on and maybe finally learn something. To my surprise, the faculty did something they almost never did, not that they had a lot of opportunity: They said, “No.” They wouldn’t let me do that. Two years later, after I had been an Assistant Rabbi and, by all accounts, had done a wonderful job, my Senior Rabbi fired me because he wanted someone older and more placid. I then went back to Hebrew Union College and asked them if they would let me come and study for a doctorate. Surprisingly, they said, “Yes, you may come.” They gave me various sorrows and troubles in order to come back, but I came back. Immediately thereafter, the Korean War broke out and since I had not served in World War II, I was invited to volunteer for the chaplaincy, which I did. I spent two years in the United States Navy during which time I succeeded in finishing my dissertation and got my Doctorate of Hebrew Letters degree. When I came out, I hoped Hebrew Union College would hire me as a teacher, but they were not interested. As it turned out, after a long and complicated story that took a number of years I finally did get the right job but for all the wrong reasons In the meantime, I was still asking my theological questions and trying to write, but I was not getting much help. But now, in the late 1950s, there were in the liberal Jewish community a dozen, maybe even as many as fifteen other people who were interested in these more theoretical broad scale and fundamental questions. Occasionally, we began to write about these issues, thinking that existentialism would be a way to approach the challenges of Jewish existence. Well, it didn’t work out that way, but we moved through existentialism, losing people left and right and very few people staying with it. But that’s why my early writings go back as far as they do, because those questions were still of interest to me. Finally, Hebrew Union College gave me a job, indeed a full-time job. Although I was hired to teach courses on education—education is a field in which I had a second doctorate—the Dean promised me that I would be allowed to teach Jewish thought. Not the history of Jewish thought, but Jewish thinking in our time. The Dean at the time was Rabbi Paul Steinberg, and I will be forever grateful to him. As a teacher of Jewish thought, I had first to find my own way. So that’s how I got into being a Jewish thinker.

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As you know, the term “Jewish thought” is rather ambiguous since it pertains to both philosophy and theology. How do you understand the relationship or difference between Jewish philosophy and Jewish theology? In some of your writings you expressed some disappointment or maybe even frustration with rationalist philosophy. What is the source of your displeasure or critique of Jewish rationalism? Most Jewish philosophers wanted to be rationalists. If they couldn’t think it, then it couldn’t be ultimately true. That’s an overstatement but it’s in effect what was going on. I’ll never forget the one day while I was teaching at Harvard when I went to listen to a professor from NYU who argued that the human mind can gain correct and intelligent access to what is outside the mind. Why did he say that to begin with? It was perfectly clear. He had to announce his—forgive my language—his philosophic faith to differentiate himself from other people in the room who held, as was customary at the time among the Harvard faculty, that you had to construct from the mind everything that exists. In other words, there were no givens. Well, once he announced that he was of a different philosophical point of view, then the discussion could begin. I didn’t join the discussion. After all I was merely a visiting professor, but the debate seemed to me utterly unreasonable. Whether or not the mind really knows the reality outside the mind or whether the mind constructs that reality never got settled and it will never get settled. This debate seemed to me very arbitrary because I wanted to try to live and understand what it meant to be a person. I was looking to find another philosopher, someone who thinks differently and who concerns himself with different issues that preoccupied philosophers at the time. But who could this philosopher be? That’s why existentialism even in its ultimate failure was useful for me, because existentialism said that to be a person, to face personhood, as Rosenzweig put it, is perhaps the most significant thing in thinking philosophically about the fact that death was a possibility. If death was a possibility, and such a tremendous possibility, then why not recognize that life and what makes it be a real life was somehow bigger than our ideas. That it was a given of a certain kind. This existentialist insight started people thinking in a different direction than the dominant strand in analytic philosophy. Of course, the existentialist insight fell apart once one became familiar with the philosophy of Jean Paul Sartre, who attempted to make some sense out of the self and the projects of the self in trying to understand the world. At any rate, ­existentialism

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clearly shaped my early thinking as I reflected on the relationship of existentialism to Judaism. After a few years I realized that I had to give this intellectual project up because it didn’t work. In contrast to “Jewish philosophy,” how do you understand or define “Jewish theology”? I’ll put it simply. Philosophers, in theory, begin with nothing except confidence that they are going to be able to think their way out of the ­nothing. And there are other people who find that they believe something. And it’s that believing something that makes the difference between the two, namely, between philosophers and theologians. The projects of philosophy and theology follow from that initial difference and the effort of the thinker to keep it responsible. As far as I am concerned, with certain limits to what he said, Martin Buber came closest to making sense out of that. I remain greatly indebted to Buber even though he forces you into a schizoid self, of sorts, because of his binary dichotomy between the two orientations to the world: the I-Thou and the I-It. There is no way out of that dualism; one simply has to live with and deal with that. What I appreciated about Buber’s philosophy was not only the fact that he recognized the complexity of the self, but also the fact that he acknowledged the reality outside the self. There is the I, namely, the self, and the Thou, namely, the non-Self or Other. Buber’s emphasis on relationality seemed right to me, although he was wrong in how he applied that insight to Judaism. Buber’s philosophy was right but incomplete, leaving me something to do as a Jewish philosopher. So far you mentioned two Jewish philosophers: Buber and Rosenzweig. Who else would you add to the canon of Jewish philosophy? Indeed, is there such a canon? Does Jewish philosophy consist of a well-defined body of texts or does it consist of a certain way of thinking that emerged from the fact that one belongs to or stands within the Jewish tradition? You may not like what I am going to say, but I don’t care whether there’s Jewish philosophy or not. Philosophy is not a big word for me, and the concept, or activity of philosophizing, is not very strong for me. What there is in Judaism is a complex of belief, responsibility, deed, community, and action. Now, I don’t know whether there is one word that could capture

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all of these, but I don’t know if “philosophy” is very helpful in dealing with such complexity. For example, for this volume you asked me to select 120 items of my long bibliography. As I went through the list of over 350 things I have written (books, essays, articles, and reviews), I experienced great difficulty choosing the 120 items to feature in the volume. As I went through my own list of writings, I realized how deep my concern for Jewish education truly was. One could ask: “What in the world is a thinker doing with educating?” I am not sure I have a simple answer, but I think it’s very important to try to figure out how to teach people. Education is not merely an attempt to live through the Buberian I-Thou relationship. Over the years of teaching at Hebrew Union College, I met many young people who go through rabbinical school or our education program saying that they want to love everybody and they want to be nice to everybody. They think everything can be done and accomplished by loving one another. Well, that can be done but that is not how people get educated. I put my ideas into writing in a small essay [“Education is Not I-Thou”] in which I reflected about the meaning of education. The project of education entails an encounter with a person who is already involved in all kinds of problems and projects and activities. If so, what does the educator think he is doing? What am I doing writing about education? In truth, I must say that most people do not think seriously about the meaning of education. But as an educator, I kept writing about education and trying to practice what I was preaching. To my surprise, the ideas of that article were picked up by many people, even though they knew little about me. The language of that essay appealed to many readers and it was taken from Jewish mysticism, or more precisely from Lurianic Kabbalah. The Lurianic insight was that in order to create the world God first withdrew into Himself. This act of withdrawal is called in Hebrew tzimtzum and it is most applicable to what happens in the educational situation. In education and in leadership more generally, in order to reach out, you must first withdraw. I can give you various examples to illustrate the point, but the insight is quite straightforward. And I suddenly realized, “You don’t always accomplish what you need to accomplish by reaching out but rather by pulling back.” Thus the insight of Lurianic Kabbalah, which was quite different from my own way of thinking as a Reform theologian, became most relevant to my thinking as a Jewish educator. Years after I published that essay people would tell how useful the notion of tzimtzum was in their personal life.

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Let us explore further your attitude to the tradition of Jewish philosophy, since you have been quite critical of it. Let me be clear: I studied Jewish philosophy and I think it’s very nice and very interesting. But as far as I am concerned, philosophy is not how people ought to try to approach the ultimate questions in our time, at least the way I see it. Can you elaborate and be more specific? For example, in your writings you normally refer to the Bible and to rabbinic texts, but you are conspicuously silent about medieval Jewish philosophy. Do you consider the Bible or the prayer book as philosophical texts? I don’t see them as philosophical texts at all. If you mean, are they instructive, do they somehow reach down to the fundamentals of reality, and in the way in which people ought to live, and particularly the problems of individuals in society and such, that’s a different matter. I felt as a young person coming up and through not knowing into certain stages of knowing, that the philosophers were of secondary interest. That is to say, why is it that after the three or four hundred years of people writing philosophy, they stopped writing philosophy to amount to anything? And why is it that coming into the modern world, Jews suddenly discovered not only the university but at the university a faculty called philosophy, which would enable them to be part of the modern world in the modern style and to be sure to get over certain kinds of difficulties and problems that the Jewish community created as it tried to think its way through the situations in which it was in. That was not fundamental. In truth, a Jew does not have to know very much about anybody but Maimonides. I may be more inclusive and add Judah Halevi as well, even though scholars still debate whether Halevi is a philosopher’s philosopher or whether he’s got this marvelous passion for something else, namely, religious revelation. But that is a different question that we do not need to discuss now. There are more important matters in the history of Jewish philosophy that we need to concern ourselves with. For example, I confess that I don’t like the idea that in the thirteenth century Jews (including leading rabbis) contributed to the burning of Maimonides’ books. The Maimonidean Controversy tells us a lot about the complex status of philosophy within traditional Jewish society, but we tend to forget it.

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The influence of Maimonides on traditional Judaism is very subtle. For example, Maimonides articulated the Thirteen Principles of Faith, which were put into poem in the fourteenth century. The poem (Yigdal) entered into Jewish liturgy, reflecting a brilliant decision on the part of the Jewish community. Keep in mind that other materials that Maimonides wrote never made it into the regular service. Yet his thirteen dogmas were made not only into a poem but into a poem to which a melody was composed so that Jews could sing it during the regular religious service. Now, I love the song and enjoy singing it, but it’s one thing to sing it and it’s another thing to take it seriously, namely, philosophically. Only a person who went to ­university could tease out the philosophical meaning of this liturgy, but I am very doubtful that Jews who prayed regularly actually asked philosophical questions or subjected what they were singing to philosophical analysis. Rationalism raises many important questions, but I am not sure that the rationalist pattern of thought is the most appropriate to human existence. In one of your writings you also note that most Jews are not interested in Jewish theology as well. Correct. Why is this so? Definitely Jews today do not lack university training, and yet theology remains marginal in Jewish self-understanding. Why? If theology is marginal, and it is, philosophy is certainly marginal. That is to say, most people don’t feel that kind of discipline is helpful in the living of their lives. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that there were philosophers who have actually tried to help us all with the basic problem of the human condition, either facing immediate reality, let alone ultimate reality. In this regard, philosophy is not nearly as useful as science, or even as psychiatry, with all its limitations. Philosophy simply does not help most of us very much. What about “religious thought”? After all, at Hebrew Union College you have been a Professor of Religious Thought? Correct.

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To what extent does your critique of philosophy depend on the fact that you were teaching in a rabbinical seminary, namely, in a religious institution? Could you have been the same kind of thinker had you been associated with a different institution? No, I don’t think I could do the same thing anywhere else. Most of my rabbinical students were not interested ultimately in the broad-scale intellectual questions, even though we have a required course in medieval Jewish philosophy. I try to acquaint them not just with my point of view, but with the major varieties of thinking that Jews do about ultimate problems, but I cannot say that these issues have been central to rabbinic training in Hebrew Union College. The lack of interest in philosophy is not limited just to rabbinic students but is characteristic of the American Jewish community as a whole. After fifty years of dealing with these questions, I think I can now produce a list of thirty-nine people whom I believe think interestingly about Jewish thought. The list includes people from Norbert Samuelson, who is one of the most significant of the scientifically styled Jewish rationalists, to quasi-mystical thinking that today goes under the category of “spirituality.” In fact, Hebrew Union College received a grant a year ago from somebody who thought we should introduce our students to spirituality. We established a framework for it, teaching our students how to do meditation and various similar activities, but very few students were able to attend these sessions at 8:00 in the morning. Perhaps it had to do with the fact that they had to drive to school from three different states (i.e., New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut), and it is difficult to arrive for a meditation session early in the morning, But in all candor, I can see the same difficulty in terms of attending daily prayer services. In other words, the problem is not lack of “spirituality” but the ability to adhere to or have commitment to a certain discipline. The most important thing I have probably done for my students is to teach by example: I never miss prayer services on Thursday. I have my seat in the synagogue at HUC and unlike other members of the faculty, I am regularly there. To my chagrin, many rabbinical students do not attend the service on a regular basis, and many come in just before the sermon, because they want to hear what their buddies, namely, their fellow students, have to say. This suggests a certain lack of understanding about the nature of religious life and the importance of regular practice.

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How do you understand the interest of students at Hebrew Union College in spirituality? It is not the case that they are interested in spirituality per se. Rather, they are interested in how to do a better job as a rabbinic leader. But most Jews in America today define themselves in secular terms, rather than in religious or spiritual terms. What is the role of spirituality in the secular world? It is true that most Jews live in the realm of the secular; we religious types are a minority. I think that’s fairly clear. And there is a decline in the ­number of people who are affiliated with religious institutions. For one reason, it costs so much money to run a proper synagogue and a lot of people don’t want to put out that money. However, I have to qualify this by saying that the relationship between secular and religious identities of American Jews today is quite difficult to ascertain. Here is a an example to illustrate the point: Reform Judaism magazine reported the following story: In some congregation, a rabbi on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day, decided to open the doors of the ark where the Torah scroll is kept and tell people if they wanted to, they could come up and spend a few moments personally and then return to their seats. Amazingly, so many people stood in the line to get up to the ark that the rabbi and the congregation wondered how they are going to complete the service in time; so many people wanted to pray privately in front of the ark. A similar experience took place at the Reform congregation here in Stamford, Connecticut, which is a rather traditional congregation, making its way into the modern world. Here too, many people lined up to pray in front of an open ark. I mention this anecdote just to illustrate a point: Perhaps it is a mistake to think that Jews are “secular.” Clearly the fact that they get up from their seats, go and stand in a line, eventually walk up to this most sacred place in the synagogue and do whatever they do there in front of so many people, and then return to their seats suggests they have a deep religious or spiritual need. Would you like to generalize about secular Jewish existence? Who are the secular Jews? What does it mean to be a secular Jew today? There are a lot of Jews who don’t care very much about anything. On the other hand, I’ll give you a second example of what is astonishing in our

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time. Certainly twenty years ago, maybe even fifteen years ago, ten years ago, Jews who intermarried generally left the Jewish community. Today, 40 percent of Jews, so the sociologists tell us, 40 percent of Jews who marry out, they and their spouse come into the synagogue, Reform synagogues generally, and raise those children as Jews. How can we explain that phenomenon? One could object and say that the decision to remain Jewish or raise children as Jews does not necessarily indicate a high level of religiosity or that their level of religious performance is very limited or minimal. But I would say in return that this decision is a significant commitment and that one has to start somewhere. If this trend continues we may actually begin to gain new Jews, or we may equal out the number of Jews who define themselves in secular terms. We don’t know what the future will bring in terms of religious self-identification. Is it possible to say, along with Jürgen Habermas, that we now live in a post-secular society? Are we now experiencing the growth of postsecular Judaism? It’s entirely possible, but I don’t want to push it. As a Jew I cannot be too hopeful, although I should be hopeful enough. Your reluctance to be too optimistic brings to mind one important hopeful ideology in the twentieth century. I refer, of course, to Zionism. In your writings you characterize yourself as a religious Zionist. Yes. What does Zionism mean to you? How is your religious Zionism different from Orthodox religious Zionism, the ideology behind the settlement movement? On the whole, I don’t care whether it’s a big O, Orthodox, or a small o, orthodox. I mean I find it astonishing that all these political types who talk very strongly about Zionism never learn Hebrew, don’t make aliyah to the State of Israel (i.e., don’t immigrate). That’s not what classical Zionism was about. In all candor, I have not found in myself the ability to spend more time in the State of Israel than the paltry few visits I made years ago. In fact, I

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haven’t been to Israel for fifteen to twenty years, and that is very, very bad, even terrible. But I think I do care very strongly about Israel. Israel means a great deal to me and I honor and respect my students and colleagues who have gone and done what I should have done. I have not been able to activate my deep concern for the State of Israel in the ways that I have been able to do it with regard to my concern for the relationship with God as a member of the covenant people. As a Zionist who is informed about Jewish life in Israel, how do you assess the relationship between the Orthodox and the non-Orthodox (Liberal or Progressive) community in Israel? I honor and I have regularly sent money to try to make it possible for Liberal Judaism in the State of Israel to grow and spread and eventually reach out and teach the rest of us. It may be a painful question for you, but why is Liberal Judaism not doing well in Israel? I don’t know. My impression was that it was making very slow, but steady strides forward. I mean, considering all the other things that the State of Israel has to confront, I can understand why the everyday realities tend to overwhelm these questions of spirit and sensibility and the like. I don’t think I can say much more than that. Religious diversity in Israel and its internal divisions and debates bring to mind an important aspect of your work. The subtitle of your book Renewing the Covenant is Jewish Theology for the Postmodern Jew. Indeed diversity is one of the main features of the most modern age, but I would like to explore the meaning of the term “postmodern” for you. What does it mean to be a postmodern Jew? What does the postmodern condition mean for Jews? Is there a postmodern Judaism? To make sense of this title, I have to go back a few decades and be very candid with you. In past decades, people really took advertising seriously. That is to say, they wanted to be with it, they wanted to exemplify it. There really was a time in America during which there was a kind of sense of being a

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modern American person who was expected to behave in a certain way and do things that all right and intelligent Americans did. This social expectation really drove people’s lives and they still do, although to a much lesser extent. In the 1940s and 1950s fads had a much stronger hold on people, much more than today. The postmodern sensibility has with it a sense that a great deal of what the world is about is fake. I guess, by the word “fake”, you refer to what Derrida would call “simulacrum” or “dissimulation.” Social reality is always about selfconstruction and self-representation, and this is indeed inherently related to advertising. So, were Jews in the 1960s and 1970s primarily busy with self-construction? I think so. And what is happening now? Has the postmodern sensibility exhausted itself? Are Jews today seeking something else? I do need to note an interesting fact. The term “postmodern” doesn’t occur in the book but appears only in the title. Somehow or another, when I was actually deciding the title of the book, I was looking for an adjective for the word “Jew.” I wanted to indicate that somehow or another we weren’t the way we used to be when we were in our glorious late 1950s and early 1960s. And the word “postmodern” seemed right, and over the years it has seemed smarter than I am. In other words, I don’t know where I got that term from. Sometimes a word simply comes out, or emerges as a kind of gift to me. If so, when you employed the term “postmodern” in the subtitle of your book, did you not have in mind postmodern philosophers such as François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, or Emmanuel Levinas? I’m indebted to all of them, obviously; I was influenced by them, but honestly, I don’t take any of them terribly seriously. Nonetheless, to some extent I respond to them as well as to a lot of other thinkers, and perhaps even to a certain sensibility inside myself which came out in, or was expressed by, that word. And I think it was right.

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As I reread your book in preparation for this interview it struck me as a critique of modernist rationalism, especially in its German variant of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Is it fair to say that this kind of German rationalism you no longer found intellectually viable in the late 1980s and early 1990s? In my view Kant’s system failed once in the nineteenth century, and attempts to restate it by Neo-Kantians such as Hermann Cohen, a very caring Jew, did not succeed. A good number of Jews were taken with Cohen’s Neo-Kantianism, but the philosophic world as a whole found it, like most sweeping philosophies, unconvincing, and therefore dropped it. By the time I got to HUC in 1942, only very few faculty members ever mentioned Hermann Cohen and even fewer thought he was still relevant. But the few Jews who had a philosophic bent always hoped for a Cohenian, better yet, Kantian revival, but it was not to be. In truth the Kantian worldview collapsed in World War I. In America the great Jewish Kantian thinker was Steven Schwarzschild, who was a close personal friend of mine. After all his writings on Kantianism, Schwarzschild, in the final analysis, has left us without any philosophical foundation upon which to ground Judaism. Even Schwarzschild found no way to validate the truth of what the m ­ aster, namely, Kant, has taught. It is no surprise that in the twentieth century very few Americans and a few Jews have taken Kantian philosophy very seriously. In other words, I was critical not only of the old German rationalism but also of American rationalism. To understand the complexity of American life in the twentieth century, especially for Jews, we have to keep in mind the Great Depression and the changes after World War II. After the War, life was opening up in certain ways. It was so much better. We didn’t have to live in and not just be from the Lower East Side to the Bronx or Brooklyn. Now you could go out even further into the suburbs or the far suburbs and have a house of your own. The suburbanization of America meant that you could own a house of your own and that all of a sudden you were living in a community which was not what it used to be in large metropolitan areas where Jews settled in the turn of the twentieth century. As Americans, and Jews among them, moved to the suburbs and re-created themselves anew, there was a lot of fakery; and a lot of people were trying to become something else, something new. All of us are trying to be and to find out who the new person ought to be. America was changing radically and so were the Jews, and the term “postmodern” intended to convey that change.

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The “postmodern condition” was indeed a critique of the Enlightenment Project, whose major champion was Kant, but it was also a response to the breakdown of Western civilization in the Holocaust. Do you see yourself as a post-Holocaust thinker? What was distinctive about your approach to the Holocaust? In the 1960s when the discussion of the Holocaust was at a peak, I largely limited myself to oral discussions about it and about the so-called Death of God theology that was so rampant at the time among Christian thinkers, such as Thomas J. J. Altizer. Christian thinkers were likely to be talking about what one might still believe in God rather than about the total rejection of God, which was what occupied most Jewish thinkers in the decades after the Holocaust. Since then I have retained a strong, if occasionally troubled, faith in God, and therefore, I could not easily join the Jewish discussion at that time, which was dominated by Richard Rubinstein’s After Auschwitz. Thus I could find it easier to discuss the Holocaust with Christian theologians such as Harvey Cox than with Jewish theologians who followed the lead of Rubinstein and left no room for a thinking believer in God’s reality. At the end of the 1960s I realized that if I wanted my thinking to be taken seriously, I had to find a way to put it into writing. That led me to write two books which were published by Westminster Press: A New Jewish Theology in the Making and How Can a Jew Can Speak of Faith Today?. Whereas in the first book I only hint at my own theological commitments, in the second book I speak to Jews of what they might still believe. But as a believing Jew despite the Holocaust, I had a few people with whom I could speak comfortably about these topics. The second book helped me find other Jews who shared my views and even learn from them. The book helped me find a few other serious intellectuals who remained religious believers after the Holocaust and despite of it. Reflecting on the possibility of faith after the Holocaust thus enabled me to move on in a new Jewish direction. My views have been well summarized in the entry, “Holocaust, Religious Responses during the,” in the Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion, edited by R. Z. Werblowsky and Geoffrey Wigoder (1997). This entry correctly states my view of the Holocaust as “the Sinai event of our time.” The Holocaust did not change the terms of the Covenant, since God still acts in history! In retrospect, it seems to me that my reaffirmation of faith in God despite the Holocaust has led Richard Rubenstein to issue a substantially revised version of his original shocking rejection of his classic Judaism, After Auschwitz, and has led Alvin Rosenfeld, the great author on perceptions

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and constructions of the Holocaust, to issue his The End of the Holocaust. Thus, in our time, what was once unthinkable (that is, that the Holocaust did not negate Jewish faith and continuity) has become quite believable. And considering the fact that a large number of Jews has turned to various forms of mysticism and spirituality, facing the Holocaust with belief no longer seems as unacceptable as it did some thirty or forty years ago. Responses to the Holocaust was one major concern of Jews in the second half of the twentieth century. During that time American culture underwent radical changes brought about by the counterrevolution of the 1960s. American Jews have been very much part of that revolution and in many cases even led it. One of the major aspects of change was sexuality. You were one of the very first Jewish educators, social thinkers, and theologians, who reflected on the sexual revolution of the 1960s. You really took a stand on sexual ethics for Jews, a topic that few other thinkers dared to touch. Yes, I opened my mouth on this very controversial and largely taboo topic. I am fully aware that I was quite different from other educators in my generation. For example, Alfred Jospe was the Director of the Hillel Foundation at the time. As a Jewish educator he was trying to inculcate in Jewish ­college students some sort of a Jewish spirituality, or some kind of Yiddishkeit (namely, Jewish self-awareness and sensibility). But in the late 1960s and 1970s during the sexual revolution, Jewish college students and young adults were having sex outside marriage and traditional Jewish sexual mores no longer applied. So I said to Alfred Jospe, “Why don’t you just stop talking about all this Jewish stuff and do something practical? Tell them what they should or shouldn’t do about having intercourse.” And he did a terrible thing. He said to me, “Fine, write it.” So that is how I got to write my book on Jewish sexual ethics; it was a response to an actual social change. In truth, this was not an easy task. It took three different starts for me to finally figure out how to do that book. I remember throwing away the first and second drafts of it, which is not a very pleasant experience. When I finally sat down to write the third draft it started to go faster, but when I reached the end of the book I said to myself: “This is all wrong. You left out something. You left out what, if you were a believing Jew, you would do about the sexual revolution.” Although I doubted that anyone would listen to me, I still felt compelled to state my position in unambiguous terms. So the last four or six pages at the end of that little book spell out how a Jew should act in terms of sexual ethics.

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Are you talking about homosexuality? No, no, no. I’m talking about plain old heterosexual conduct or heterosexual intercourse. Should you have intercourse or should you not have intercourse? That was the question at that time. It took a long time until we got to ­homosexuality as a burning social issue for Jews. It is well known that over the years I have changed my mind about homosexuality. Could you elaborate? Oh, yes, I have changed my mind about the ordination of gay rabbis. As you know, the symbol of rabbinic ordination is the signing of the semikah (writ of ordination). To be more specific, I had not signed semikah for about six or seven years, perhaps more, as my views on homosexuality became controversial and students took issue with me. But as I changed my mind in the course of the last couple of years and became more accepting of gay rabbis, a student came to me and asked me to sign his semikah. I publically accepted his invitation to sign his ordination and that event signaled the end of the alienation between me and the more progressive rabbinic students at HUC. Was this rabbinic student gay? I have no idea, but it is irrelevant. The rabbinical students who protested against my view on homosexuality were heterosexual and they would not ask me to sign their semikah. The request of the student to sign his semikah did not mean that he accepted my rejection of homosexuality, but rather his awareness that there has been a shift in my position. Could you explain exactly how have your views changed? I wish I could explain it with some clarity. What is at stake here is the attitude toward the homosexual person. I can tell you that after I signed the semikah of that student, another rabbi, who previously avoided me on account of my views on homosexuality, saw me in a Shabbat service and kissed me on the cheek, as a way of thanking me. The key issue for me was the ability of a gay man or a lesbian woman to procreate. With the availability of new technologies (e.g., in-vitro fertilization), surrogate motherhood, adoption are all ways to overcome the problem. Once gay persons could procreate, I was compelled to soften my opposition to homosexuality.

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So, you have been thinking a lot about homosexuality and Judaism, and then it was this symbolic act that signaled the change in your position. Did I understand you correctly? Yes, the issue of homosexuality became crucial for the Reform rabbinate (as well as the Conservative rabbinate) because it goes to the heart of the matter about the authority of the halakhic tradition for progressive or liberal modern Jews. When the Central Conference of American Rabbis tried to come to a decision on the issue, I asked various people to write about it and they all implored me to put my views in writing. The result was a very long essay which is about to appear in a book published by the CCAR, The Sacred Encounter: Jewish Perspectives on Sexuality. My change of mind on the issue of homosexuality was not a trivial matter, precisely because it pertains to the place of halakha in the life of progressive or liberal Jews. Homosexuality is part of a larger and rather complex issue of gender in Judaism. There is no doubt that the status of women has changed radically in the last three, four decades. I agree and have no problem with that whatsoever. How do you see the contribution of women to Reform Judaism in terms of the rabbinate or leadership more generally? Have women made a difference since they were allowed to become rabbis in 1972? The admission of women to the rabbinate made a major difference on several levels, but who knows yet what it is likely to do. Women in the rabbinate have been doing all kinds of wonderful things but I do not think that Reform women rabbis have been able to write about their experience or generate significant thought out of their experience. The major Jewish feminist theologian, Judith Plaskow, began to theorize about feminism and Judaism at the Hebrew Union College at my invitation. At that point in her career she still had to learn a lot about Judaism. The experience of teaching at HUC and talking to students finally resulted in the splendid book Standing Again at Sinai. Interestingly, there has been no follow-up to that book. Her second book of collected essays has only one essay that cuts any new ground. I know that she has been invited to teach another course at HUC and perhaps that will generate another important book, because I am really interested in hearing what women have to say.

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Gender issues are clearly central to contemporary Jewish identity. But if we go beyond gender, what would you say are the most pressing problems for contemporary Jewish existence? Which issues require us to rethink the meaning of Jewish existence? What are the most salient challenges for Jews today? If I knew what the answer to that question was, I would be writing about it. But kidding aside, there are lots of small issues that concern Jewish existence, but I do not think there is one paramount issue. What do you think are major issues today? For me, the challenge of science and technology will be high on the list of issues that require a rethinking of Judaism. I agree. Technology does raise a lot of questions that require a Jewish response. Pluralism within Judaism is yet another main challenge for contemporary Judaism, given the fact that the Jewish community in the Diaspora and in the state of Israel has become much more polarized and fragmented. Yes, I agree that contemporary Judaism has become both polarized and fragmented. The entire cluster of issue that revolves around gender equality and inclusion is expected to concern Jews in the twenty-first century, at least for the foreseeable future. I agree with you that this issue will preoccupy Jews, but I am looking for a totally new topic that will engage Jews for the rest of the twenty-first century. The three issues you mentioned so far are not new, whereas I am looking to identify a new, fresh problem, and so far we have not identified such a problem. How about the ecological crisis? Don’t you think that it requires a new interpretation of Judaism? Well, haven’t we been talking about the ecological crisis for quite a while?

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Not really. The ecological crisis did generate Jewish responses but only a very small group of people has been engaged in the reinterpretation of Judaism in light of the ecological crisis. I, for one, believe that the ecological crisis requires the rethinking of Judaism and that it could inspire the growth of Judaism in the following decades. Well, I am willing to trust you and other Jewish environmentalists to keep us aware of what that is as there are groups who keep us aware of this or that, but I don’t know if that it is somehow fundamental or major to Jewish existence as such. The thing that is far more, in my opinion, crucial to the continued existence of Judaism is the intermarriage of Jews. Are the grandchildren of intermarried Jews who are raised as Jews going to raise their kids as Jews? Now, that is a problem. What matters here is the question of Jewish continuity and the perpetuation of a kind of sensibility that will be positive. Today we have many Jews who want to stay Jews, and there are others who are willing to become quasi-Jews or near-Jews. How we perpetuate a positive Jewish identity, especially in intermarried families, is an extraordinary problem. What about globalization? Does it pose a special challenge for the continuity of Jews? No, I do not think so. Well, there are Jewish philosophers, for example, Eliezer Schweid, who considers globalization a major challenge to Jewish existence. If we want to identify future challenges to Judaism, we need first to identify the group of people who experience that problem. But if we are seeking to identify a problem that is somehow fundamental to all of Jewish existence, we cannot limit it to this or that specific group. From what you have said so far it sounds that intermarriage is the only one that is really fundamental to the future of Jewish existence. Is that correct? No, not intermarriage per se, since it might turn out to be the savior of Jewish life in the future. If you could get more than 50 percent of the Jews who intermarry to raise their kids as Jews, you might suddenly give the

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Jewish people an infusion of Jewishness that we don’t get the other way. I would not say intermarriage itself is the problem but rather continuity. How to ensure Jewish continuity seems to me to be the most fundamental challenge for the twenty-first century. Would education be the response to the challenge or is Jewish education today actually the cause of the problem of continuity? In truth, I don’t think anybody knows how to ensure Jewish continuity and what is the best Jewish education. One of the problems today is the end of ideology. In a postmodern world, there are no big “isms” and no compelling ideologies. The dominant ideologies of the twentieth century (e.g., Liberalism, Socialism, Communism, Zionism, etc.) have lost their power to motivate Jews and no longer galvanize Jewish existence. Does that seem a problem to you? I do not think we should approach Jewish existence in light of various secular ideologies. Rather, I think the challenge is inherently theological. We have no one like Reinhold Niebuhr, who somehow takes religious truth and turns it into a fundamental way of rethinking our situation. There are some people in the Christian world who have tried to make a fresh approach to ethical responsibility. I don’t think either of them has been very effective, at least as far as Jewish understanding is concerned. The guiding question of ethics is “What am I to do?” Yes, but that question does not necessarily lead to someone talking about it or speaking about it in a way that illuminates where we ought to go in ways that we don’t now see. Let me put it to you somewhat more bluntly: Are you optimistic about the future of the Jewish people? I guess, even though it sounds a little too easy to say, yes, I think God is smarter than I am.

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What does that mean? Are you saying that the future is strictly in God’s hands? I did not say it was all in God’s hands, but I think it is in God’s hands. The question is what will the Jewish people do to ensure that their future will be collectively rich and worthy of the covenant? With the framework of covenantal theology, what does the covenant demand from us for the foreseeable future? Where do we stand in the covenantal relationship with God? I’m not quite sure. Although I have written covenantal theology, I think the only proper answer to that question is that I’ve tried to give an example of my own life, of what I think we ought to do. I’ve been in various kinds of Jewish organizational positions, including a rabbi, a denominational officer, a teacher, and many other functions. None of these positions can generate a pamphlet on how to change the world radically. The challenge of the covenant is answered within the framework of your life and you answer it with your belief. When we talk about “Jewish ethics” we refer both to an academic discourse as well as a program that guides Jewish life in practice. Why has the academic study about Jewish ethics not made a difference in the way Jews live? Is there a way to bridge the gap between the academic discourse and what practicing Jews actually think about the way they ought to live? You really care a great deal about academic discourse and you want me to reflect about the connection between the academy and actual Jewish life. Well, I don’t know where there is anywhere in the Torah where philosophical speculation, including in the medieval philosophers, will fundamentally change the world. I mean, it’s one thing to do what you think is right, but to think that this medium, “professor talk” or “professor writing,” is going to substantially change human beings and how they behave, and particularly change how our small and incredibly complex people is going to come through the life of the world to come, no. Come through to the life of the world to come. Better yet, come to the messianic age. Sorry, but I do not believe that academic writing of any kind can move us toward the real goals of human life.

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Academic discourse, or what I call “professor talk,” is not high on my list of factors that can change human nature or social behavior. I do think the academic discourse is very useful, even very valuable, and I myself engage in it; in fact I have spent a life at it. But ethics is not something you write about but something you actually do. I think that is how I actually behave to my students, to my colleagues, to people in general, and it certainly is part of a Jewish community, is far more important than all of my writings about ethics. My long list of publications, only 120 of which will appear in the select bibliography of this volume, reflects a lifetime of intellectual activity and reflection about ethical matters. I am glad that I have devoted my life to writing and I am quite proud of what I have produced and I have enjoyed writing, but I am also aware of the limits even though sometimes it drives me crazy. But I am not sure that “professor talk” is the best way of learning how to be a better person. In all candor, I think most academics don’t really help the world very much. And, in retrospect, I don’t think that what we academics write is very important. As a reader of your publications, I can honestly say that I find your work most impressive in its clarity and fluency. I am sure that other readers too were moved by your work and possibly changed their actions in the world. To this extent, when academic writing is done well it can shape what ordinary people think and do. Thank you. We thank you, Professor Borowitz, for agreeing to participate in the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers and we know that your written legacy has contributed greatly to Jewish self-understanding, especially within Reform Judaism.

Select Bibliography Books 1. A Layman’s Introduction to Religious Existentialism. Philadelphia: West­ minster Press, 1965. 2. A New Jewish Theology in the Making. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1968. 3. Choosing a Sex Ethic. New York: Schocken, 1969. 4. How Can a Jew Speak of Faith Today? Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1969. 5. The Mask Jews Wear. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973. 6. Reform Judaism Today. New York: Behrman House, 1977–78. 7. Contemporary Christologies: A Jewish Response. New York and Ramsey, NJ: Paulist Press, 1980. 8. Choices in Modern Jewish Thought. New York: Behrman House, 1983. Second expanded edition, 1995. 9. Liberal Judaism. New York: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1984. 10. The Ideal Jew. The B. G. Rudolph Lectures in Judaic Studies. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University, 1986. 11. Exploring Jewish Ethics. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990. 12. Renewing the Covenant. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1991. 13. Our Way to a Postmodern Judaism: Three Lectures. San Francisco: University of San Francisco, 1992. 14. Please, God, Heal Her, Please. Healing and Judaism Monograph Series, edited by Kerry M. Olitzky and Nancy Weiner, no. 1. New York: National Center for Jewish Healing, 1997. 15. Judaism after Modernity: Papers from a Decade of Fruition. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1999. 16. Studies in the Meaning of Judaism. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2002. 17. The Talmud’s Theological Language-Game. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006.

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18. (With Naomi Patz) Explaining Reform Judaism. New York: Behrman House, 1985. 19. (Editor) Reform Jewish Ethics and the Halakhah: An Experiment in Decision Making. West Orange, NJ: Behrman House, 1994. 20. (Editor) Theological Terms in the Talmud: A First Book. New York: The Ilona Samek Institute at HUC–JIR, 1998. 21. (With Frances W. Schwartz) The Jewish Moral Virtues. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1999. 22. (With Beth Levine) The Temple Sinai Ark Tapestry: A Masterwork of American Jewish Folk Art. Stamford, CT: Temple Sinai, 2006. 23. (With Frances W. Schwartz) A Touch of the Sacred: A Theologian’s Informal Guide to Jewish Belief. Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2007. Articles 24. “Theological Conference: Cincinnati, 1950.” Commentary 19 (June 1950): 567–72. 25. “Creating Commitment in Our Religious Schools.” The Jewish Teacher 24, no. 3 (March 1956): 7–12. 26. “The Idea of God.” CCAR Yearbook 67 (1957): 174–86. 27. “Theology and Jewish Education.” Religious Education 53, no. 5 (September–October 1958): 418–21. 28. “Existentialism’s Meaning for Judaism.” Commentary 28 (November 1959): 414–20. 29. “Toward a Theology of Reform Jewish Practice.” CCAR Journal 8, no. 1 (April 1960): 27–33. 30. “Crisis Theology and the Jewish Community.” Commentary 32 (July 1961): 36–42. 31. “Problems Facing Jewish Educational Philosophy in the Sixties.” American Jewish Yearbook 62 (1961): 145–63. 32. Ben Hamon [pseud.], “The Reform Rabbis Debate Theology.” Judaism 12, no. 4 (Fall 1963): 479–86. 33. “Faith and Method in Modern Jewish Theology.” CCAR Yearbook 73 (1963): 215–28. 34. “Creative Worship in the Computer Age.” American Judaism 14, no. 1 (Fall 1964): 48–49. 35. “On Dealing with Doubt.” The Jewish Teacher 33, no. 2 (December 1964): 15–18.

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36. “Subjectivity and the Halachic Process.” Judaism 13, no. 2 (Spring 1964): 211–19. 37. “Unity and Reality in Mordecai Kaplan’s View of God.” Jewish Education 34, no. 2 (Winter 1964): 96–103. 38. “A Jewish–Catholic Colloquy.” Congress Biweekly 32, no. 5 (March 1, 1965): 7–8. 39. “The Openness of Catholic Theology.” Judaism 14, no. 2 (Spring 1965): 212–19. 40. “Christkillers No More: Jewish Education and the Second Vatican Council.” Religious Education 61, no. 5 (October 1966): 344–48. 41. “God-Is-Dead Theology.” Judaism 15, no. 1 (Winter 1966): 85–94. 42. “The Legacy of Martin Buber.” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 22, no. 1 (November 1966): 3–17. 43. “On Celebrating Sinai.” CCAR Journal 13, no. 6 (June 1966): 12–23. 44. “On the ‘Commentary’ Symposium: Alternatives in Creating a Jewish Apologetic.” Judaism 15, no. 4 (Fall 1966): 458–65. 45. “The Typological Theology of Rabbi Joseph Baer Soloveitchik.” Judaism 15, no. 2 (Spring 1966): 203–10. 46. “Autonomy Versus Tradition.” CCAR Journal 15, no. 2 (April 1968): 32–43. 47. “Judaism and the Secular State,” Journal of Religion 48, no. 1 (January 1968): 22–34. 48. “Hope Jewish and Hope Secular.” Judaism 17, no. 2 (Spring 1968): 131–47. 49. “Jewish Theology Faces the 1970’s.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 387 (January 1970): 22–29. 50. “The Postsecular Situation of Jewish Theology.” Theological Studies 31, no. 3 (September 1970): 460–75. 51. “The Problem of the Form of a Jewish Theology.” Hebrew Union College Annual 40–41 (1969–70): 391–408. 52. “The Dialectic of Jewish Particularity.” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 8, no. 3 (Summer 1971): 560–74. 53. “Education is Not I–Thou.” Religious Education 66, no. 5 (September– October 1971): 326–31. 54. “Modern Faith Versus Jewish Style.” Judaism 20, no. 3 (Summer 1971): 313–19. 55. “Abraham Joshua Heschel, Model.” Sh’ma 3, no. 46 (January 19, 1973): 41–42. 56. “Covenant Theology—Another Look.” Worldview 16, no. 3 (March 1973): 21–27. 57. “Emil Fackenheim—Beyond Existentialism?” Judaica Book News 3, no. 2 (Spring 1973): 30–31.

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58. “Abraham Joshua Heschel: An Extremist but Not a Fanatic.” JWB Circle 29, no. 3 (April–May 1974): 5, 15. 59. “The Career of Jewish Existentialism.” Jewish Book Annual 32 (1974–75): 44–49. 60. “God and Man in Judaism Today: A Reform Perspective.” Judaism 23, no. 3 (Summer 1974): 298–308. 61. “The Israelis and Us, the New Distance.” Sh’ma 5, no. 82 (November 29, 1974): 172–75. 62. “Tzimtzum—A Mystic Model for Contemporary Leadership.” Religious Education 69, no. 6 (November–December 1974): 687–700. 63. “The Chosen People Concept as it Affects Life in the Diaspora.” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 12, no. 4 (Fall 1975): 553–68. 64. “Jews as Closet Agnostics.” Moment 1, no. 3 (March 1976): 69–70. 65. “The Prospects for Jewish Denominationalism.” Conservative Judaism 30, no. 4 (Summer 1976): 64–74. 66. “For Dissent on Israeli Policy—Part 1.” Sh’ma 6, no. 116 (September 3, 1976): 123–27. 67. “For Dissent on Israeli Policy—Part 2.” Sh’ma 6, no. 117 (September 17, 1976): 129–33. 68. “The Old Woman as Meta-Question: A Religionist’s Reflections on Nozick’s View of the State.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 44, no. 3 (September 1976): 503–15. 69. “Anti-Semitism and the Christologies of Barth, Berkouwer and Pannenberg.” Dialog: A Journal of Theology 16 (Winter 1977): 38–41. 70. “Judaism in America Today.” The Christian Century 95, no. 36 (November 8, 1978): 1066–70. 71. “The Changing Forms of Jewish Spirituality.” America 140, no. 16 (April 28, 1979): 346–51. 72. “The Liberal Jews in Search of an ‘Absolute!’ ” Cross Currents 29, no. 1 (Spring 1979): 9–14. 73. “Affirming Transcendence: Beyond the Old Liberalism and the New Orthodoxies.” The Reconstructionist 46, no. 6 (October 1980): 7–17. 74. “Rethinking the Reform Jewish Theory of Social Action.” Journal of Reform Judaism 27, no. 4 (Fall 1980): 1–19. 75. “Reading the Jewish Tradition on Marital Sexuality.” Journal of Reform Judaism 29, no. 3 (Summer 1982): 1–15. 76. “The Autonomous Self and the Commanding Community.” Theological Studies 45, no. 1 (March 1984): 34–56. 77. “Between Anarchy and Fanaticism: Religious Freedom’s Challenge.” The Christian Century 104, no. 21 (July 15–22, 1987): 619–22.

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78. “Co-existing with Orthodox Jews.” Journal of Reform Judaism 34, no. 3 (Summer 1987): 53–62. 79. “Encounter and Dialogue among the World’s Religions [Judaism].” Bulletin—Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard University 13, no. 1 (Winter 1987): 3–6. 80. “Jesus the Jew in the Light of the Jewish–Christian Dialogue.” Proceedings of the Center for Jewish–Christian Learning 2 (Spring 1987): 16–18. 81. “The Challenge of Jesus the Jew for the Church.” Proceedings of the Center for Jewish–Christian Learning 2 (Spring 1987): 24–26. 82. “Psychotherapy and Religion: Appropriate Expectations.” Religious Education 83, no. 4 (Fall 1988): 562–70. 83. “Temptation in a Capitalist Context.” Sh’ma 18, no. 358 (September 30, 1988): 139–42. 84. “The Holocaust and Meaning: An Exchange” [correspondence with Frans Jozef van Beeck, S. J.]. Cross Currents 42, no. 3 (Fall 1992): 417–24. 85. “Buddhism and Judaism: Some Further Considerations” [with reply from Masao Abe]. Buddhist–Christian Studies 13 (1993): 223–31. 86. “In Tribute to Jacob Neusner.” Sh’ma 25, no. 491 (March 31, 1995): 6–8. 87. “What Is Reform Religious Zionism?” Journal of Reform Zionism 2 (March 1995/Adar II 5755): 24–30. 88. “Are We Too Soft on Apostates?” Reform Judaism 24, no. 4 (Summer 1996): 54–55. 89. “What Does the Halakhah Say about . . .? Joseph Karo’s Preface to the Beit Yosef.” CCAR Journal 43, no. 2 (Spring–Summer 1996): 51–58. 90. “The Reform Judaism of Renewing the Covenant.” Conservative Judaism 50, no. 1 (Fall 1997): 61–65. 91. “ ‘Halakhah’ in Reform Jewish Usage: Historic Background and Current Discourse.” CCAR Journal 49, no. 4 (2002): 5–26. 92. “Our Shifting/Stable Task: From ‘Choosing a Sex Ethic’ to Today.” Judaism 52, nos. 1–2 (Winter–Spring 2003): 39–50. 93. “The Pivotal Issue in a Century’s Jewish Thought.” Conservative Judaism 55, no. 4 (Summer 2003): 3–15. 94. “The Need for Interfaith Theological Dialogue.” Speech at A Celebration of the 40th Anniversary of Nostra Aetate, presented at The Catholic University of America, March 10, 2005. http://huc.edu/faculty/faculty/ pubs/borowitz3.shtml. 95. “A Nearness of Difference: Jewish–Catholic Dialogue since Vatican II.” Commonweal 133, no. 1 (January 13, 2006): 17–20. 96. “Musings on Mourning.” CCAR Journal 53, no. 3 (Summer 2006): 3–9.

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 97. “A Jewish Theology of Social Action.” CCAR Journal 55, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 5–12­.  98. “After Kaplan’s ‘Heschel,’ What Is There Left to Be Said?” Conservative Judaism 60, no. 4 (Summer 2008): 89–96. Book Chapters  99. “Jewish Faith and the Jewish Future.” In Great Jewish Ideas, edited by Abraham E. Millgram, 301–27. Washington, DC: B’nai B’rith, 1964. 100. “Individual and Community in Jewish Prayer.” In Rediscovering Judaism, edited by Arnold J. Wolf, 109–32. Chicago: Quadrangle, 1965. 101. “The Living God and the Dying Religious Style.” In When Yesterday Becomes Tomorrow, 130–46. New York: Congregation Emanu–El of the City of New York, 1971. 102. “The Lure and Limits of Universalizing our Faith.” In Christian Faith in a Religiously Plural World, edited by Donald G. Dawe and John B. Carman, 59–68. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1978. 103. (With Estelle Borowitz). “Talking with Children about Sex.” In The Jewish Family Book, edited by Kathy Green and Sharon Strassfeld, 239– 44. New York: Bantam, 1981. 104. “The Authority of the Ethical Impulse in Halakhah.” In Through the Sound of Many Voices: Writings Contributed on the Occasion of the 70th Birthday of W. Gunther Plaut, edited by Jonathan Plaut, 156–71. Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys, 1982. 105. “On the Jewish Obsession with History.” In Religious Pluralism, Boston University Studies in Philosophy and Religion 5, edited by Lee Rouner, 17–37. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984. 106. “Beyond Ethnos and Ethos: The Faith of American Jews.” In Proceedings of the Institute for Distinguished Community Leaders. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University, July 21–23, 1985. 107. “The Critical Issue in the Quest for Social Justice: A Jewish View.” In Contemporary Ethical Issues in the Jewish and Christian Traditions, edited by Frederick E. Greenspahn, 188–204. New York: Ktav, 1986. 108. “Hillul Hashem: A Universalistic Rubric in Halakhic Ethics.” In The Life of Covenant, edited by Joseph A. Edelheit, 19–31. Chicago: Spertus College of Judaica Press, 1986. 109. “Jewish Ethics.” In The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Ethics, edited by James Childress and John Macquarrie, 320–25. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1986.

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110. “Even More Than God?” Foreword to Loving the Torah More than God? by Frans Jozef van Beeck, ix–xiv. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1989. 111. “Covenant Theology.” In What Happens After I Die? edited by Rifat Sonsino and Daniel B. Syme, 107–15. New York: UAHC Press, 1990. 112. “Dynamic Sunyata and the God Whose Glory Fills the Universe.” In The Emptying God, edited by John B. Cobb, Jr. and Christopher Ives, 79–90. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1990. 113. “Autonomy and Community.” In Autonomy and Judaism, edited by Daniel H. Frank, 9–20. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992. 114. A Buddhist–Jewish Dialogue between Profs. Masao Abe and Eugene B. Borowitz. Port Washington: Sh’ma, 1992. [Includes materials by both authors from The Emptying God (#112), plus rejoinders by both men.] 115. “Abraham J. Heschel: Thinking About Our Teacher.” In What Kind of God?, edited by Betty R. Rubenstein and Michael Berenbaum, 427–31. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1995. 116. “Masao Abe’s Challenge to Modern Jewish Theology.” In Masao Abe: A Zen Life of Dialogue, edited by Donald W. Mitchell, 172­–83. New York: Charles E. Tuttle, 1998. 117. “Understanding the Rav’s Philosophy.” In Mentor of Generations, Reflections on Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveichik, edited by Zev Eleff, 238–42. Jersey City, NJ: KTAV, 2008. 118. “Intra–Aggadic Control of Theological Freedom: A Speculation.” In Continuity and Change: Festschrift in Honor of Irving Greenberg’s 75th Birthday, edited by Steven Katz and Steven Bayne, 19–30. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2010. Book Reviews 119. “Emil Fackenheim as Lurianic Philosopher.” Review of To Mend the World: Foundations of Post Holocaust Jewish Thought, by Emil Fackenheim. Sh’ma 13, no. 254 (May 13, 1983): 109–11. 120. “Mark Lilla’s Political Theology.” Review of The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West, by Mark Lilla, Tikkun 23, no. 4 (July–August 2008): 66–69. http://www.tikkun.org/article.php/ EugeneBorowitz-MarkLilla.