Gerson Cohen

...And one current myth with no foundations is that Judaism is always preserved by the most fanatical elements in the community...

...That was his dream...

...The German Jews never used the word "ostjude" about East European Jews...

...That's abysmal...

...We are an ancient people, committed to ancient ideals, at the heart of which stands the Torah—Revelation—the doctrine of election and the cardinal tenets of Jewish faith...

...And we've gotten them to give it a hearing because we've been able to overcome the zelbsthaas, the self-hate, which 19th century secularism and "higher anti-Semitism," as Solomon Schechter used to call it, had infused into the Jewish community...

...I have enough trouble with my trifocals looking straight ahead, and I want to boast that for the last ten years, this administration has been trying to look straight ahead...

...Is Heschel read in Israel...

...But if we seize the Orthodox rationale, or version, of Jewish history, that would be a form of near idolatry...

...I have instituted egalitarian services of a kind—not all my faculty approve...

...We have recovered lost periods of Jewish history, we are also uncovering, from known periods of Jewish history, aspects of Jewish society that we never knew...

...I make a profession of studying the past, not of predicting the future...

...But if the past is any indicator, if Orthodoxy were so strong, the Jewish community would never have gone secular in the 19th century...

...patience he could fight it through the local level to the Ministry of Religions, and then even to the Supreme Court...

...That, I think, is an affront to the Jewish people and a violation of the whole spirit of the Talmud...

...One of our scholars here, Jack Wertheimer, has a book coming out shortly in which he has shown that for all the resentment of German Jews towards East European Jews, the German Jews fought for keeping the doors of Germany open to East European immigration...

...But their children, I'm afraid, are going to encounter the same processes of attraction that Orthodoxy found and encountered 50 and 100 years ago...

...The Orthodox are giving finality to one perception of Jewish law or to a limited number of such perceptions...

...acculturation, accommoda-ion, and response to contemporaneity in any age is really the force that kept us alive...

...What is the argument against the American system, which simply severs governmental involvement entirely...

...You are going to sell the authority for the administration of Jewish law in return for political support...

...This was going to be a departure...

...There is a great world out there, and our Orthodox children are simply unequipped and unprepared to cope with modernity...

...GERSON COHEN When the Aguda demanded a change in the Law of Return, you took a very quick and sharp position...

...I have two observations on that...

...I hope sincerely that Israeli Conservative Judaism will not be simply in the American style, that it will be Israeli...

...I am affronted that Orthodox religious leaders are speaking openly, shamelessly, about the need to capture the reins of power within the Jewish community and within the federations...

...But I expect that however it develops, when I visit Israel, I will feel more at home there, simply because it is open to the past and to the present, and therefore, gives more options for the future than Orthodoxy in any form does...

...that's post hoc, but it is also, unfortunately, self-fulfilling...

...That's an interesting view in light of the frequent criticism of the Seminary that it spends much of its time looking over its right shoulder to see how the Orthodox will react, that the Orthodox reaction is still normative for the Seminary...

...The Jewish community of Israel was built out of a revolt against religion...

...It was going to institutionalize this violation by giving a religious minority the right to define who is a Jew...

...One of my earliest memories is my father's promise to me that some day we would have the opportunity to live in a country in which we would speak Hebrew all day long...

...Our ability to legitimize and accept prayer and the study of Scripture in every language has been one of the forces for the preservation of Hebrew— because Hebrew assumed an aristocratic force, while Hebrew concepts are transmittable through other vehicles...

...That's a verbatim quote—and it's true...

...And though American Jews resented East European Jews, they fought against immigration restrictions...

...I no longer believe that the Almighty reveals Himself only to the Jewish people and certainly not only to one party within the Jewish people...

...I do not look to the Reform, and I want to say very strongly that I have not looked to Orthodoxy...

...I think that's a rationalization...

...We were willing to translate our Scriptures into Greek, into Aramaic, and to say that a man prays in any language that he understands...

...They are listening to us theologically, they are asking what Martin Buber has to say, what Heschel has to say, what Herberg has to say, they've been interested in Rabbi Kook and Eliezer Berkovitz...

...we have to aspire ever higher...

...Religion is a form of magic, and they want it vicariously fulfilled by their shamans...

...They are at least eager to hear what the rabbis have to say...

...And this departure was fraught with terrible dangers to the solidarity of the Jewish people and to the meaning of Zionism as a whole, at least as I have understood Zionism for the last 53 Vi years...

...We can have our sectionalism, Litvaks can dislike Galitizianers, but when the chips are down, we are one people...

...We have been making enormous inroads— quietly—into the secular community of Israel by enabling the secular kibbutzim to give the religious tradition a hearing...

...My job is to be the spokesman for and coordinator of a variety of people who are affiliated with the Conservative movement...

...I'm glad he lived to see it and to enjoy it...

...Doesn't whatever religious alternative to Orthodoxy that develops in Israel have to be indigenous to the country...

...Now if that's what religion is, alas, we are in for a theocratic struggle that I deplore...

...It is the blessing of the Jewish people that it was able to transcend the obstinacy of the Accadian priests who would worship only in Accadian...

...Now, who is a Jew is defined by Jewish law and by Jewish tradition, and the state has operated in its history by allowing for a much broader interpretation of who is a Jew...

...These were our ways of accommodation to the modern world...

...They have not been talking about leading, about persuading, about responding theologically...

...They are listening to us...

...That is untrue...

...The conventional argument is that it is the Orthodox monopoly on Jewish religious life in Israel that has so alienated the bulk of young Israelis and driven them to radical secularism...

...And the dilemma of what Jewishness means is something I think had best not be solved right now, because it can only be solved radically..By that I mean either secularly or in Orthodox fashion—both of which would mean, as far as I'm concerned, the demise of the dream of revitaliza-tion and of Zionism, which is one of the major symbols of rebirth and revitalization...

...If it were so attractive, and had such a hold on the minds of people, they would not have sold out...

...It is that method of approach to the text and to the past that is Conservatism...

...Isn't Conservatism essentially an American response to an American condition...

...He was what we would call a liberal Conservative Jew...

...It's a rationalization to say that we can't be religious because they're authoritarian...

...I have written a piece about the blessings of assimilation in Jewish history...

...The quality of vituperation in Orthodox rhetoric seems to have increased quite dramatically in the last few years...

...They have also ridden on the crest of anti-discrimination in the United States, which enabled them to get very good jobs and to attain positions of so-called power and respect in the community...

...It has never restricted the right of Halachic administration to any one group...

...I have become firmly convinced that, as one Orthodox leader put it, "no matter what you do, I will denounce you for 50 years—and then follow suit...

...I don't find every form of Conservative Judaism in America attractive to me...

...Would you expand on that...

...I hope that Conservative Judaism here has not been fixed...

...It meant a land in which Jews could walk about in dignity...

...The argument against that is the dilemma that we have to face up to and that I don't think we are ready to solve...

...They venerate only one version, whether it's the Shulchan Aruch or some other book, and they claim that that is the ultimate revelation...

...Until now we've relied on the inherent vagueness of the Law of Return to get by, and in a few cases the Supreme Court has had to deal with it—the Brother Daniel case, for example—but that vagueness was functional...

...Ultimately, that's one of my chief goals in terms of the current debate...

...I believe very firmly in the election of Israel, but I am also committed to critical scholarship, to scientific investigation, to pluralism and to redefinition in the light of conscience...

...they've been talking about where the power is...

...I take confidence from the fact that we have been producing scholarship and reproducing ourselves...

...The neo-Orthodox community now includes people who come out of Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, Yale, Berkeley, and they have with them a kind of radical chic that they can attach to their yarmulkes...

...The only way they can deal with it is by a barrage of hatred, aggressiveness and vituperation...

...I think that Israeli Conservatism will have to develop its own dialectic, its own dialect, its own form—based on the principle of continued exegesis and new mid-rash in response to particular social challenges, theological challenges and general Weltanschauung...

...Perhaps with the conviction that they are now the wave of the Jewish future, there comes a kind of arrogance...

...Today, the kibbutzim are withdrawing from the Jewish revolt...

...The most secularized Jews in America will defer to the Orthodox and praise not only their tenacity but also their authenticity...

...But the right wing is not my measure of Jewish authenticity...

...Leo Baeck was a far more observant Jew than are Reform rabbis, generally, in the United States...

...And I do see changes in Conservatism as well...

...We need to define Conservatism here, too...

...It was built despite the Orthodox, who then decided to join up, to seize upon Jewish sentiments and Jewish loyalty...

...But ultimately the state could claim, as it did, that these were local acts of local batei din, local courts, and if a person whose divorce was questioned had Rabbi Gerson Cohen is Chancellor of the Jewith Theological Seminary of America, the Conservative rabbinic seminary...

...Their shaman can be a rebbe, or can be a priest, or can even be a Conservative or Reform rabbi, or sometimes a UJA leader...

...Judaism, as far back as the Maccabees, was preserved by those who were willing to acculturate...

...Frequently, they have also been successful in going through doctoral programs in mathematics and the sciences, totally insulated from the humanities and from the requirement of any form of critical thought...

...But here is an attempt to simply institutionalize a "deal," in the crassest sense of the term...

...I'm certainly not worried about what other people are going to say about it...

...Now there is an irony here, in that a country in which the Jews found refuge and haven from persecution of all kinds is going to be the only Western democracy that imposes religious restrictions on Jews and on the administration of the Jewish religion...

...I certainly see changes in Reform, as I have been noticing changes in Orthodoxy...

...I would rather stay with the dilemma, which is this: We worked, all of us, for the establishment of a Jewish state...

...me that's bibliolatry, which is awfully close to idolatry...

...What do you think accounts for this...

...I am not concerned with the sides...

...Now let's face it: to most people, that's not what religion is...

...I was defeated on the question of the ordination of women for the rabbinate...

...I think they come predisposed to secularism as a result of the Diaspora revolt, as a result of the schools, and there's a polarization in Israel that one encounters everywhere...

...But each form of Conservatism is dialectically different...

...Now, German Conservatism was closer to what we would call left-wing Orthodoxy, neo-Ortho-doxy...

...And that is why we have been able to cross borders...

...His Torah Min Hashamayim—his two volumes on revelation—have had a wide readership there...

...I have been willing to sustain defeat—not gladly, by the way...

...It is simply not true that fanaticism has kept Judaism alive...

...That has discharged a wave of hate that they have been harboring within themselves for I don't,know how long...

...Conservatism has been a powerful force in every country in which there is a sizable population of Jews...

...There are several factors...

...Sometimes our gittin were actually torn up in the face of the people who brought them to Israeli courts...

...The polarization antedates that...

...Even when I look straight ahead, I find many different groups in my plane of vision—but not over my right shoulder...

...I'll tell you why they think they're the wave of the future—it's because they now have homes in Fieldston, and Shaker Heights, and in the better suburbs...

...For years we Conservative Jews have been harassed in the performance and in the validation of the divorces, the gitten that our people were issued...

...The hate reflects a bankruptcy in their capacity to deal with the genuine challenge of modernity...

...First, affluence...

...But that meant a lot more to him than simply speaking Hebrew...

...Because this was the first time that the state, as a state, had taken an act that was in violation of the spirit of Jewish law and to a considerable degree in violation of Jewish law itself...

...Yes, as a matter of fact...

...As soon as you get a group that is going to say, "none of your conversions, none of your divorces, none of yours, only ours," you're going to drive them right back into secularism, and it may be with that as the alternative, that secularism is a far more religious position than that of the Agudah...

...Yet there is a widespread disposition on the part of Jews to impute authenticity on a kind of vertical scale, whereby the Reform are least authentic, the Conservative next, and only the Orthodox are genuinely authentic...

...They've not studied comparative culture or religion or philosophy...

...And all of this is being blended afresh...

...If we abandon religious idealism, there is no raison d'etre for being Jewish...

...Is it not, as well, that the Orthodox have defied the predictions of just a few decades back that time was against them, that they would simply peter out...

...Now, all of a sudden, we find that there is a kind of "we are the wave of the future...

...First, a majority of Jews, including the Jews of Israel, know very little Jewish history, particularly Jewish religious history...

...Now, this has meant to me, as it has meant to many Jews, a state in which the majority would be Jews, and a state governed by overriding Jewish principles, at the heart of which would be a concern for democracy, freedom, and social justice as well as the revitalization of cornerstones of our historic culture...

...Judaism was kept alive in the 19th century precisely by Reform, Conservatism, arid Neo-Orthodoxy—which is a form of Reform...

...There is a great miracle that I enjoy, living in America: for the first time Jewish theology is on the agenda of every respectable theological institution in the United States, Jewish and non-Jewish...

...I'm not by any means satisfied by the amount of scholarship or the level of theological thought...

...Fanaticism has kept ghettoization alive, has kept certain fossils alive, but I don't believe that Judaism has been kept alive that way...

...Conservatism is not an American phenomenon...

...That is one of the great pluses of America...

...To give finality to any one version is to deify it—and to...

...German Liberal Judaism was far closer to Conservatism than it was to Reform...