My Search for God At Harvard

GOLDMAN, ARI L.

My Search for God at Harvard A Jew at the Div School Four went down to the orchard. Ont' fell gravely ill and died, one became a heretic, one went mad and one. Rabbi Akiba, emerged whole. I...

...Judaism is meant to be challenged...
...Newspapers were my primary concern in college, but I also absorbed a good deal of the Yeshiva University philosophy of Orthodox Judaism...
...In the 1970s Riskin began to talk from the pulpit about Jewish family life...
...Muhammad's illiteracy has tremendous theological significance...
...Put in those terms, it is not all that different from the ancient paschal sacrifice...
...Are we really so much more elevated...
...Or is it possible that none of the holy books are God-given...
...tile studied the Huer people's beliefs and values in a course called "Introduction to African Religions...
...Instead, it invented an explanation for the inconsistency in language: "Remember and observe were uttered in one sound...
...Despite my diligent schoolwork, I was only halfway toward a Masters of Theological Studies degree by the end of the school year, 1 was well aware that it was a two-year program when I enrolled in the fall so I knew I would not graduate...
...There, at Weaver High School, [ had my first educational experience outside a stricdy Orthodox environment...
...After the deadline Thursday night, I would hop on a Trailways bus for the trip back to Manhattan, where I would spend Friday night with my bachelor friends...
...Can't it be flexible...
...I am a Sabbath observer...
...He said that I probably would not have to write anything...
...I believe there is virtue in the lifestyle, in the tradition...
...We discussed writing...
...And so did Christianity with its message of love in an era when rabbinic Judaism was being set into law with the Mishnah, the legal code that often emphasized Judaism's rules over its compassion...
...I know about the men who take their tefillin [phylacteries for the morning prayers] with them when they go out Saturday nights," he said in one sermon...
...That is where it gets its life...
...those who made a killing on Wall Street—and still remained observant...
...All of this is not to imply that I was brought up with an anti-intellectual approach to Judaism...
...He is the vehicle for the Koran, a work revealed to him through prophecy over a 23-year period...
...But I emerged with greater confidence, both as a religion writer and as a Jew...
...One survivor...
...At first, I continued to carry my small reporter's notebook wherever I went at the Div School, ostensibly to record the experience, but more important to try to retain the aura of a detached observer so well honed in a decade of reporting...
...In Islam, the Koran is more than just another record of revelation itself...
...We were also taught to shun Reform and Conservative Jews, Real knowledge was the knowledge of the Torah...
...Each religion is unique...
...A. J. Carter sauntered by...
...But you have to start getting serious about your lives and about your Judaism and about the women you are dating...
...Or worse, would I go mad or simply expire...
...The dialogue continued every day in the classroom and in the words of the New Testament, the Koran, the Upanishads and in a fellowship at my own Sabbath table, around which I assembled people of various faiths...
...At Harvard I found another approach when I met Louis Jacobs, a British rabbi and scholar who was a visiting professor at the Div .School, Jacobs was the first pious Jew I met who really wanted answers...
...I was confident that my sexual exploits with women were healthier and more positive than the homosexual experiences of the frustrated boys I had gone to yeshivah with...
...Just be discreet...
...Why can't the law grow up...
...Four adventurers going off like so many early-day versions of Indiana Jones, their black fedoras cocked at rakish angles, heading for the orchard...and trouble...
...But I just said, "No thanks...
...My parents had divorced...
...He bent down and picked up an acorn and rolled it in his fingers...
...But what did happen was an extraordinary dialogue, one that went on between the religious ideas that I encountered and the Jewish ideas within myself...
...I put down the notebook and let myself experience Buddhist meditation, Cchristian hymns, Muslim poetry...
...1 can still get you a part in the I..C.A...
...We saw little inconsistent with spending the night with a girlfriend and then rushing off to synagogue for the morning prayers...
...Teiku essentially means have faith, some day the messiah will come and answer the unanswerable...
...As a reporter for the New York Times on a variety of subjects, 1 had encountered the secular world, taking in its pleasures with mixed emotions...
...Just as Jesus was conceived without human interference, so the Koran was revealed through Muhammad without human intervention...
...Can't the law be reasonable...
...On the first day of classes, the professor, Diana Eck, looked out at the sea of faces and declared: "If you know one religion, you don't know any...
...Don't be afraid of commitment...
...After several days at school, I put the notebook down and allowed myself to enter the worlds 1 had so feared...
...It's hard to explain," I told him...
...The Orthodox Judaism I grew up with was warm and embracing...
...I happily volunteered and ended up working in Albany from Sunday to Thursday...
...Well, I thought you were a Sabbath observer," he said...
...it has long been my shield against getting involved...
...Go for it," Rabbi Akiba whispers in my ear, "Go into the orchard...
...As any real yeshivah boy can tell you, a cubit is a biblical measurement equal to the distance from the tip of the middle finger to the elbow...
...Exodus records one utterance and Deuteronomy the other...
...I remain an unabashed traditional Jew...
...tint thai ihci also kept the spirit of the law in being moral and ethical human beings...
...One was stressing memory...
...Just because you know how it began doesn't mean you cannot enjoy the tree...
...In our civilized society, we kill to eat...
...What is its binding force...
...If a man could not banish sexual thoughts from his mind, he should put on dark clothes, go to another town, find a woman and satisfy his urge, the Talmud advises...
...Muslims respect the Old and New Testaments, but believe that the Koran supersedes the teachings of Moses and Jesus...
...In my Late 20s, still unmarried, I shared a modern two-bedroom apartment on West End Avenue with mv brother Dov...
...Muhammad, an illiterate camel driver, was neither a deity (like Jesus) nor a teacher (like Moses...
...While the L.C.A...
...Maybe they simply represent human itv's mi ivin« 10 understand and ultimately to reach the divine...
...dinner, the governor, the Democrats in the assembly and the Republicans in the senate were deadlocked on some spending bills...
...I relaxed in its shade and gave it all some thought Was the Torah divine...
...But I planned to leave Albany on the night before, just as I did every Thursday night, and be at home for Shabbat dinner on Friday night...
...Why can't I grow up...
...I felt good that I avoided my conflict by writing in pencil, knowing full well that Rabbi Siegel and others would certainly ohject to my interpretation...
...My reverie over, I looked up at the clock...
...in the hospital, it said I wasn't sick...
...The story of the rabbis and the orchard had thrilled me ever since I first heard it as a youngster...
...And, on the first day of classes at the Div School, I learned that my basic assumption had been wrong, I had always believed that if you knew one religion you knew them The class was called "World Religions: Dialogue and Diversity" and it was a survey of the five great faiths—Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam...
...Mv shield seemed to work fine for the reporter on llir street, but it was wrong for the student of religion...
...I had two passions—Judaism and jour* nalism—and I was going to hold on to them both...
...in the police station, it said I wasn't in trouble...
...lemplcs and other, more private, forms of religious expression...
...My final justification for succumbing to my sexual drive came right from the pages of the Talmud...
...One word was spoken hut two were heard...
...Is the Koran...
...One dead...
...I learned quickly that it was filled with inconsistencies and contradictions but I followed the lead of the Talmud, which either fashioned fanciful explanations or fell back on faith...
...Rabbi Siegel, but you've given me a way out...
...Being a believer in experience over knowledge—deed over creed—my major interest has been to live Judaism and not necessarily to understand it...
...To my mind, 1 made it through the weekend following the letter of the law, if not the spirit of the day...
...In ancient Israel and among the Nuer, they kill for forgiveness—and then they eat...
...I was going for a year to study comparative religion—and all 1 could see were forbidden fruits...
...the rest was only a concession to a world in which we would have to go out someday and make a living...
...He was unafraid to open himself up to the Christian and Greek cultures of his time...
...At the right wing Orthodox high school I attended, there was no acknowledgment that anyone but us, sitting there poring over the Talmud, had any religious validity...
...I thought of this talmudic story often when, at the age of 35, I moved to Massachusetts with my wife and our infant son to enroll as a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School...
...What trouble were the rahbis courting!' And why the ominous three-to-one odds...
...My first crisis was whether to continue to wear a yarmulke...
...He began with wisecracks about the aging bachelors in the congregation, like myself, and then got serious...
...Orthodox Jews pray daily for the restoration of animal sacrifice in die Temple that will be rebuilt when the messiah is revealed...
...As a result of these encounters, I learned how others experience their faith...
...Therefore, the Talmud asserts, there is no contradiction between the different texts...
...What is writing," he asked us in his singsong pedagogical manner and then went on to sing the answer himself: "You have violated the prohibition of writing on Shabbos if you write two letters— two letters—that cannot be erased...
...asked A. J. Carter, a reporter from Newsday who went to Columbia University Journalism School with me and had a starring role in the show...
...Is it the magic of those candles...
...In the ritual, the animal is killed, the blood is poured, a portion is given to the priest and then the family that brought the offering sits down for a festive meal...
...I learned of a wonderful ceremony that takes place when a l>oy reaches the age of four years, four months and four days...
...One Muslim scholar, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, compares it with Mary's virginity...
...Why do I persist in my faith...
...But even something as basic as the Ten Commandments changes from its first appearance in Exodus and its reiteration in Deuteronomy...
...Wearing a yarmulke would be looking for trouble in a school that was then 60 percent black, he counseled...
...Reporters spent two months before the show rehearsing skits and songs for the dinner...
...Be fair...
...But if you know many, the questions multiply and chase each other in a wild circle...
...Would I emerge whole, like Rabbi Akiba, or suffer the fate of Elisha Ben Avuya, the brilliant young Jewish scholar who emerged as the heretic...
...After class, I walked Jacobs home and told him whai troubled me...
...On Friday nights, we would eat together, gathering around our Sabbath table a regular club of Orthodox aging bachelors...
...1 had to come to terms with the fact that the incessant scribbling was a way of hearing but not feeling...
...In church, it assured me I was not a Christian...
...The text is to Muslims what Jesus is to (Ihristians—Clod's revelation on earth...
...1 didn't wear a cap and gown on Thursday, June 5, 1986...
...It is unfair and unwise to try to understand one religion by the yardstick of another...
...The notebook has also served another purpose...
...the other observance...
...It said, in effect, that Orthodox Judaism is not made for the ghetto, but for the world...
...There was makeup and costumes and rehearsals virtually every night as the show date drew near...
...Am I doing the right thing, sitting in the assembly chamber at the age of 29...
...As Cod had once told Adam and Eve, the talmudic story had an implicit warning about these templing fruits: "Don't touch...
...he asked...
...My Orthodox friends, even the worldly ones, thought 1 was nuts to believe I could have both...
...This obviously was no simple orchard of dates and apples...
...I insisted, however, on wearing my yarmulkr when I ate and so the principal gave me special permission to go home for lunch...
...Because of his faith, Judaism emerged alive and well and even fortified...
...I was enrolling at Harvard as the result of an unusual leave-of-absence from my job at the New York Time...
...Our tight bachelor group lived a dual life of sexual liberation and Orthodox tradition...
...There was a collision in my head when I saw the two hands of the clock brush against each other...
...No," I told him...
...Is the New Testament divine...
...For the theologian, this is a sleight of hand unworthy of serious consideration...
...To my mind, Judaism is diminished if painted too narrowly...
...But more important, I developed a richer and fuller understanding of myself and my Judaism...
...Rather than dwell on the failure of the three rabbis who ventured and were lost, I prefer to focus on the success of Rabbi Akiba...
...It created a wall between me and the experience...
...I did not subject my Jewish learning to an unbridled intellectual inquiry...
...6:32...
...I was also watching the big marble clock over the assembly door, knowing that Shabbat would start at 6:32...
...they arc merely recording different aspects of the same event...
...But, when the commandments are repeated in Deuteronomy 5:12, it says, "Observe the Sabbath day and keep it holy," Biblical scholars attribute the change—in the account of the same event on Mount Sinai—to different concerns of different authors writing at different limes...
...The more I read about this primitive tribe and their beliefs and values, the more I saw of myself...
...In some ways, it was the perfect job for me because one member of the bureau had to work Sundays...
...But I didn't realize how disappointed I would be and how instantly nostalgic I would feel about the Div School...
...Judaism is not sustained by a single lifestyle...
...Can't I? And then I thought of a way out, an obscure teaching of my rebbe, Rabbi Siegel, came back to me in a flash...
...Since my year at Harvard Divinity School, I now see the story of the rabbis and the orchard in a whole new light...
...Do such insights destroy my faith or give it new depth and understanding...
...That is, God, in God's own supernatural way, uttered the rwo words as one...
...Do you know how that tree began...
...There were so many parallels—good parallels, parallels lli.il [ am proud ol—ih.it I decided to do my final paper on Judaism and the Nuer...
...in yeshivah we had been taught not to walk four cubits without covering our heads...
...One madman...
...The most striking similarity, perhaps, was the concept of animal sacrifice, something that I had never been totally comfortable with in Judaism, After all...
...One of my early assignments on the Times was in Albany...
...One heretic...
...An example: Torah mi'simii is the belief that God gave the law word-for-word to the Jewish people on Mount Sinai, 1 believe it as a doctrine or faith even though it goes against rational thinking and historical fact...
...at the gay rights parade, it said I was straight...
...You're not in the L.C.A, show...
...The verse is written in honey on a slate and, after the boy masters it, the honey is dissolved in water...
...An affirmative answer is easy if you know one religion...
...For the Nuer, sacrifice is a way of substituting one life for another—the life of the animal for the life of a person who is in danger of death because of illness or mortal sin...
...And, once you separate out the blood and slaughter, is it really all that different from the modern Passover seder or, for that matter, from Thanksgiving...
...I judged it on its own terms...
...It was, after all, 1966, just a few vears after violent race riots ripped through New York, Newark, Los Angeles and Chicago...
...That is writing...
...sounds like the name of a Japanese restaurant, but it is the talmudic formula for questions that had no answers...
...And in seeking them, some of the old shibboleths fell, but to my amazement they did not break...
...I make no apologies for the way I have melded Jewish practice with the other aspects of my life, be they at the Times or at the Div School...
...mania was building up, so was the legislative session...
...In a more cosmic sense, I believe that there is a Supreme Being who delights in my efforts to live as a traditional jew...
...The principal of my new school advised me against it...
...Tuck you," I wanted to say...
...Then came the plans for the Legislative Correspondents Association Dinner...
...Is it my mother's kiss on my cheek...
...And then, later, as a religion writer for the Times, I was plunged into New York's diversity of churches, synagogues, mtiMlues...
...he just wanted somebody sitting in on the debate in the assembly chamber...
...But for the religious person, it is the perfect escape from the horns of a dilemma...
...Shabbat was coming in two minutes and here I was sitting in the legislature with a pen in my hand...
...Jacobs listened to me patiently and then pointed to a stately oak on the Divinity School lawn abla/.e with fall colors...
...Just then, I heard a legislator on the floor say something quotable...
...Participation in the dinner separated those on the inside from those on the outside...
...Remember the Sabhath day and keep it holy," is the account given in Exodus 1>0:8...
...Teikv...
...No, I did not convert...
...The Nuer helped me understand...
...I did not step over the line because I felt that to do so would be to endanger my personal faith and ultimately to destroy it...
...Once you show that the To-rah is flawed, that it is not really God-given, what happens to yoin laith- Winn compels you to lead a religious life...
...not everything had to have an answer...
...By learning about their sacrificial rites, I was better able to understand sacrifice in the Jewish tradition...
...Enrolling at Harvard Divinity School was \i-t .iinpihri sit|) in llit- soinctiiiu's reluctant worldly education of an Orthodox yeshivah boy who was not always sure it was worthwhile to be worldly...
...Rich Meislin, my bureau chief, told me he would need me in town for the weekend...
...Even the Talmud acknowledges that sometimes the male sex drive was overwhelming...
...those who argued cases before the Supreme Court—and still remained observant...
...Through it all, 1 remained the outsider, knowledgeable enough about my subject to write about it, but detached enough not to feel it...
...By the time I went to Haruard, I was ready to go down to the orchard, but scared...
...A few weeks before the L.C.A...
...Be responsible...
...On this day, the boy is dressed up like a little bridegroom and sent to school to recite his first verse <it the Koran...
...Christianity was unmentionable...
...And observance didn't only mean that thev kept the letter of the law, abstaining from /nr:/(non-kosher) and from work (in Saturdav...
...We were gathered around his desk in the yeshivah and he was teaching us the 39 categories of work that were prohibited on Shabbat...
...Legislators, lobbyists and lawyers, legislative pages and clerks, reporters and newspaper publishers, everybody was going to the L.C.A., as the dinner came to be known...
...he replied gloating...
...Later, during my last year of high school, I lived in Hartford with my father...
...There was only one Orthodox rabbi who was willing to acknowledge this new sexual ethic and, in so doing, challenge it...
...The explanation that has always made the most sense to me was that the adventurers were embarking on a perilous inter-faith journey- Rome beckoned with its philosophy, art, science and letters...
...Shlomo Riskin was the driving force behind a remarkable institution on the West Side of Manhattan called Lincoln Square Synagogue...
...From my life, 1 believe that traditional Judaism is large enough, compassionate enough, forgiving enough and tolerant enough to encompass the world...
...Another faith I studied at the Div School that shed light on my own was Islam...
...The persons most esteemed were those who were at the cutting edge of medical research—and still remained observant...
...The boy drinks the sweet holy words as a spiritual and physical nourishment...
...But I wasn't prepared for the reaction of my colleagues...
...As an enlightened, modern person, I sometimes had to ask myself if 1 really wanted to see animal sacrifice restored...
...I put away my pen and took out a pencil and captured the quote in my notebook...
...I sat that Friday afternoon listening to the debate, occasionally writing down pithy quotes in my reporter's notebook...
...You're not going to like this...
...I could live with a few teikus in my life...
...And yet, he remained steadfast in his Jewish convictions...
...Both houses were called into emergency session and were going to work through the weekend to hammer out their differences...
...The Talmud, holding fast to the idea that the Bible was dictated by God to Moses, could not entertain the idea of different authors...
...It was one of those lean spiral books that fit neatly in one hand, just right for jotting down the sounds and sights of a train wreck...
...And if they are, what about the Torah...
...And if I accept this argument can I still be an observant Jew...
...My deeply nurtured Jewish identity never serioush came under siege...

Vol. 16 • August 1991 • No. 4


 
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