Elusive Common Ground
BLANCHARD, TSVI
Elusive Common Ground One People, Two Worlds—A Reform Rabbi and an OrOmdox Rabbi Explore the issues That Divide Them Rabbis Ammiel Hirsch and Yosef Reinman New York: Schocken, 2002. 352 pp.,...
...While I am personally closer to Reinman in belief and practice, I can see what Hirsch means...
...Reinman is stunned...
...What if they had given up asking, "Where do we agree and differ...
...The subtitle tells us that they are in search of common ground...
...Maybe, he suggests, it is simply that Hirsch does not like having his views so effectively rebutted...
...In sum, while Reinman and Hirsch both use words like "truth," "revelation," "scholarship," "intuition," and "Israel," they often do not really mean the same things...
...In reality, their interaction is, by' their own admission, more a debate— replete with arguments and counterarguments— than a collaborative effort...
...He tells Hirsch that he has mistaken "provocative questions" for "statements of position" but doesn't see any point in "correcting your mistakes...
...In such a conversation, their differences would be powerful assets for them both...
...He has made a serious good faith effort...
...Similarly, Hirsch often does not seem to respond directly to Reinman's ideological critique of Hirsch's brand of Reform Judaism—especially Reform's notion of autonomy and its way of interpreting rabbinic sources...
...In turn, in Hirsch's world, "Orthodox" is defined as almost fundamentalist-literal...
...Reinman's read of Hirsch is often different from what I took him to be saying...
...psychologist, is director of organizational development at CLAL—The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership...
...352 pp., S26 REVIEWED BY TSVI BLANCHARD In One People, Two Worlds, a Reform Rabbi, Ammiel Hirsch, and an Orthodox Rabbi, Yosef Reinman, revisit the classic issues that divide Reform and Orthodoxy...
...Since Hirsch seems to lack a category for "inventive and original Orthodox Jewish text interpretation," he simply cannot take it in...
...Why can't two intelligent and apparently well-meaning rabbis either fully understand each other or at least understand that they aren't always able to "get" what the other is driving at...
...Reinman's conceptual world does not seem to have a category for religiously Jewish but not Orthodox...
...Near the end of the book, Hirsch tells Reinman once again that Reinman repeatedly mischaracterizes his views...
...Reinman tells him that he does anything but read sacred texts literally...
...Imagine what this book might have looked like if Reinman and Hirsch had really learned to speak enough of each other's languages so they could genuinely share a conversation...
...No matter how often Hirsch explains that Reform Jews are not secular, Reinman continues to treat them for all intents and purposes as "secular brothers and sisters...
...I think not...
...One People, Two Worlds, does not show, as Hirsch thinks it does, that it is possible for Jews to reason together...
...and began asking, "What can I learn from—and more important—with you that takes us both further along our spiritual paths...
...Imagine that they had then moved from debate to collaboration, each genuinely including the other in his Jewish journey...
...Instead, it shows that Jews from "different worlds" are more likely to reason at each other...
...As a result, when Reinman reads "Reform Judaism," he can't easily categorize it as "religiously Jewish" and thus shifts to "secular...
...My own intuition is that Reinman and Hirsch often talk past each other because they inhabit different conceptual worlds...
...They mosdy respect and appreciate their mutual willingness to engage in this debate, but sadly, they cannot avoid significandy misunderstanding— and sometimes even patronizing—each other...
...Rabbi Tsvi Blanchard, a Ph.D...
...Reinman too does not feel fully understood...
...He persists in seeing Reinman and Orthodoxy as literalist even though Reinman explicitly tries to show that this is mistaken...
...But they never really find it...
...Does it have to be like this...
Vol. 27 • August 2002 • No. 4
