Blessed Are Our Differences
SCHULWEIS, HAROLD
BLESSED ARE OUR DIFFERENCES In the current climate of divisiveness, we owe it to ourselves and our children to listen to—and learn from—one another HAROLD SCHULWEIS We Jews have benedictions for...
...Consider, for example, the dialogue recorded in the Mishnah AvodahZarah (4:7): The Sages, while in Rome, were asked why, if God opposes idolatry, the objects idolaters worship were not destroyed...
...adarabaW—"to the contrary...
...Is it not written, "when you lie down...
...But Israel's Supreme Court rejected his claim on the secular grounds that conversion to another religion placed him beyond the arc of inclusion...
...Menachem Mendel of Kotzk added his caution: Even a mitzvah can become idol worship "if it becomes a principle of principles...
...Because the pendulum swings from one pole to another it is, on its return, altered...
...Do pluralists go about like Will Rogers, insisting that they never met a theology or ideology they never liked...
...They are good and necessary for the world...
...I know myself to be a person of many moods and dispositions...
...For sectarianism is a perilous danger and an idolatrous blasphemy in the lives of our people...
...There is no contradiction in the disagreement of authorities...
...The m'zzuzah is a stationary image of the dynamic pendulum of Judaism...
...Is not such openness to ideologies a tacit admission of polytheism...
...The deeper challenge of pluralism is not external...
...The arc of the pendulum does not describe the pagan circle of eternal recurrence...
...We may, ironically, be more successful in keeping Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jewish youngsters from marrying each other than we are in putting a halt to mixed marriages...
...on the other side appeared a sentence from Sanhedrin: "A scholar should be meek, humble and forgiving...
...The intention was that "all these possibilities of interpretation should be entrusted to the Sages of Israel of each generation, that the decision be in accordance with their resolution...
...In time to come your children might speak unto our children saying, 'What have ye to do with the Lord God of Israel...
...I believe there are limiting cases, which are sensed by the collective intuition of a people more than they are formulated by dogmatic proscription...
...Do they ever say no...
...We need retreats so that Jews from different institutional backgrounds and schools of thought may celebrate their Jewishness together, learn to pray, study, argue together...
...The two columns of apparently contradictory statements were endless...
...BLESSED ARE OUR DIFFERENCES In the current climate of divisiveness, we owe it to ourselves and our children to listen to—and learn from—one another HAROLD SCHULWEIS We Jews have benedictions for all occasions—on seeing the ocean, a rainbow, the blossoming of trees, an electrical storm...
...A benediction over pluralism is easier said than lived: It is one thing to acknowledge the pluralism among us, it is another to acknowledge it as a blessing...
...There is no guarantee that it will of itself swing freely forward and backward...
...Impenetrable mechitzot (partitions) increasingly divide us...
...it is not how to maintain housekeeping in an ark filled with lions and lambs, hawks and doves, orthodox and non-orthodox, religious and secular...
...For reasons change in the wake of even only small changes in the situation...
...One must be open to the pendulum...
...There is no way of knowing a priori," Scholem wrote, "what beliefs are possible or impossible within the framework of Judaism...
...I am moved by J.B...
...The differentiation points to distinctiveness, not to opposition...
...The threat of schism and the internal segregation of our young people is real...
...Such fixation is idolatrous in its arrest of the part as if it described the whole...
...He resolved to live his life following the counsel of both columns, to hold both sides in one loving embrace...
...Who better than Scholem himself could testify to the attempts to stop the pendulum, to dismiss Kabbalah, Chassidism, Jewish mysticism as aberrations of normative Judaism...
...The Zo-har warns, "Woe to the man who identifies God with any attributes...
...What more stunning image of pluralism in our tradition than that portrayed in the Pesikta deRav Kahana: How could six hundred thousand Jews at the foot of Sinai each claim to individually hear "I am the Lord thy God...
...on the other side from Hulin: "A man of Torah must have more regard for his family than for himself...
...In the Havdalah ceremony, the wisdom of Judaism differentiates between Sabbath and weekday, the holy and the neutral, light and darkness, Israel and other peoples...
...Absolute antithesis is alien to the Hebraic mind...
...When Moses ascended to receive the Torah, he was shown in every case 49 possibilities to "forbid" and 49 possibilities to "permit...
...me'idach gisa"—"on the other hand...
...The House of Hillel argued, debated and disagreed with the House of Shammai, but it held on to its religious modesty...
...People look about and see older horizons erased, absolute values shrunken, the "earth loosened from the sun...
...Pluralism calls forth an ethic of openness, a disposition towards inclusiveness...
...Shall God destroy His world because of fools...
...No two swings of the pendulum are identical...
...To teach the generations that come after that none should persist in his opinion, for lo, 'the fathers of the world' did not persist in their opinion" (Mishnah Eduyot 1:4...
...I am alternately optimistic and pessimistic, liberal and conservative, hawkish and dovish...
...God speaks to each one, and each hears according to his capacity...
...Cited by Eliezer Berkovits in his Not in Heaven...
...Frightened and confused, they become impatient with complex answers...
...The real pendulum of Judaism, unlike its ideal construct, is neither weightless nor frictionless...
...Does it not declare, "when you rise up...
...Oscar Rufeisen, a Jew converted to Catholicism, who became Brother Daniel, claimed his right as a Jew to be embraced by Israel's Law of Return...
...Beyond the development of our own particular theologies, there is a corrective theology to be practiced in order to keep the integrity of its dialectic...
...To understand the scope of Judaism and its patterns is to follow the swings of the pendulum, which touch the outer edges of its polarities: mysticism and rationalism, naturalism and supernatural ism, humanism and theism, particularism and universalism, ethnicity and religiosity...
...To stop that pendulum, to still its motion, to hold it at one point in order to capture its "essence" is to tamper with the vitality and sweep of our religious civilization...
...Because of the contact with the opposite pole, tomorrow's Jewish liberalism and universalism are not likely to be the same as yesterday's...
...On the portals of our homes is affixed a m'zzuzah containing two biblical passages from the book of Deuteronomy...
...Each glance is a partial view and therefore cannot be taken as the only, the final, the exclusive vision...
...Rashi affirmed that the proper position of the m'zzuzah on the doorpost is vertical...
...The homily that points to the name of Adonai in its most concentrated form as spelled with two yuds informs us that if the one yud stands above the other, or is too removed from the other, it does not spell the name of God...
...I confess to knowing the rabbi...
...Will the fulcrum support any position, however extreme...
...On beholding a Jewish audience, the Talmud prescribes a moving benediction: "Blessed is He who discerns secrets, for the mind of each is different from the other as is the face of each different from the other...
...Only a small minority of extremists would propose that non-Orthodox ideologies constitute "other faiths...
...Because it was humble, because it studied not only its own decisions but those of its adversaries, because it even recorded the rulings of the House of Shammai before its own, its view prevailed (Erubin 13b...
...His grandson, Rabbenu Tarn, argued that the proper position is horizontal...
...The dualities and complementary energies need each other for the sake of wholeness...
...Idolatry is not the worship of many gods nor of evil forces, but the adoration of a part as if it were the whole...
...a small Jewish world is made smaller yet by factionalism...
...But none of the ideologies and schools of thought we have in mind in this essay pledge their fidelity to alien faiths...
...But I have grown aware that I myself look into the mirror again and again, and at different stages of my life discover another view, another dimension I had not noticed before...
...The energies and causes of denominational ideologies are not evil...
...We cannot therefore hop a ride on the pendulum, confident that it will not become locked in arresting dogmas...
...The pressures opposing pluralism mount...
...Either/or sectarianism breathes the spirit of exclusivity, turns polarities into polarization, distinctions into irreconcilable antagonism...
...We owe fidelity to our own institutions, movements, ideologies...
...And who knows a priori what new traditions may be sanctified and what old traditions be recovered...
...It is a blessing in praise of God who creates diversity in our world, and which rejoices in different minds, perceptions, judgments, visages...
...I even know his wife...
...they approach the brink of sectarianism and denominationalism, they threaten to become schismatic movements...
...The laity in our synagogue communities are segregated from each other...
...To keep the pendulum free from fixation is to be faithful to the tradition of rabbinic counterpoint: "Ifchah mistobrah"—"just the opposite...
...ye have no part in the Lord'" (Joshua 22:34...
...It is one thing to love Jews because we share a common fate, it is another to love Jews of different theologies, different modes of ritual and religious practice, different politics...
...Are we enriched by the exclusion of Jewish mysticism or Yiddish secularism...
...The Jewish sages of France in the 13th century understood the variety of interpretations and rulings, sometimes conflicting, as a blessing...
...its roots lie in the soil of monotheism...
...Do not pluralists mimic the celebrated rabbi who announces to the plaintiff, "You are right," and to the defendant, "You are right"—and who when criticized by the rebbetzin who points out the contradictions of his judgments, replies, "You too are right...
...poskim who can deHarold Schulweis, a moment contributing editor, is rabbi of Valley Beth Shalom in Encino, California...
...We are daily witness to the increasing distancing of Jews...
...n bichlal ela ma sheb'fraf—"there is nothing in the general that is not in the particular...
...While Reb Naftali pondered the list, his birth was announced...
...Was Judaism enriched by the excommunication of Maimonides, Spinoza, Baal Shem Tov, Mordecai M. Kaplan...
...On halachic grounds, he did not by virtue of his conversion cease to be a Jew...
...The rabbinic resolution was to place it slanted with the upper end pointed inward...
...They seek gurus, true believers prepared with apodictic truths...
...They wonder what is wrong with those pluralists who in the fourth millenium of Jewish existence still argue about "Who is a Jew...
...We cannot know beforehand how far the pendulum will travel nor what it will include...
...Polarity," Abraham Joshua Heschel once wrote, "lies at the heart of Judaism...
...They answered that were the idolized objects not needed by the world, He would make an end of them—but that idolaters worship the sun and the moon and the stars and the planets...
...Between" is not "against...
...In the name of survival and the preservation of authenticity, a new triumphalism announces a peculiar credo: "Divided we stand, united we fall...
...It is rude to point, and in Jewish theology it is downright blasphemous...
...When theologies think to seize hold of God's collar and pronounce, "This is God," they point not to God but to their own conceit...
...On one side of the column a declaration from Erubin: "A man cannot know Torah without sacrificing his concern for his family...
...It is as if God were a mirror...
...I am mindful not only that others look at the mirror, each seeing a reflection different from my own...
...The challenge is internal, within the pluralistic self...
...On one side there appeared a statement from Taanit: "A scholar should live like a flaming fire of wrath...
...But at the mention of the name of God, all pointing ceases, the palm is held motionless...
...How is it possible that what one sage permits another sage prohibits...
...Mutatis mutandis for yesterday and tomorrow's Jewish conservatism and particularism...
...The contradiction of conversion to another faith unhinged the link of the pendulum...
...Were Oscar Rufeisen an atheist Jew, he would unarguably have been accepted...
...If, therefore, I can attain unity within my own internal diversity, that may move me towards appreciation of the blessing of pluralism without...
...This is a blessing over Jewish pluralism...
...But are there no boundaries to the swing of the pendulum...
...The troubling signs of incivility abound...
...As an ideal construct, the pendulum is defined as a material particle suspended by a weightless cord, vibrating without friction...
...And beyond its ethic of respectful tolerance, it holds a pragmatic wisdom...
...We owe a higher fidelity to the One who embraces the multiplicity of views of our people...
...They are intolerant of qualifications, conditional truths, the scholarly cautions of historians, philosophers, educators who know the subtle twists and turns of a people and who know as well that its ideologies defy simple definitions...
...I think of Reb Naftali of Ropschitz who described how, before his birth, the angels presented him with a double column of counsel...
...Against the denominational image of Judaism as a single stone cast down from above of which each claims solitary possession, I propose another image for the pluralistic outlook, that of Judaism as a swinging pendulum whose arc describes its breadth and rhythm...
...On one side the admonition to be satisfied with a minimum, and from the same tractate, Taanit, on the other side: "He who pledges himself not to drink wine and afflicts the body is called sinner...
...But when their partial insights are deified, when they are held as the one and exclusive interpretation of God's will, they are seduced into idolatry...
...His most recent article in these pages, "Anger, History and Love," appeared in June 1982...
...We are doubly covenanted...
...cide our lives and relieve us from the vertigo of multiple choices and the wrestling with what is right or wise or good...
...These days, religious and ethnic groups in our midst are becoming parties...
...Blessed is He who discerns secrets, for the mind of each is different from the other as is the face of each different from the other...
...It is the challenge of the pluralistic self to choose the dialectic tension of both/and over the hard disjunctive of either/or...
...their lives are already complex enough...
...Pluralism is not the surrender of debate or the bleaching of passionate conviction...
...Situations change and what once was permitted may now be prohibited, what was once proscribed may later be allowed...
...During the seder na'anuim of the Sukkot festival the lulav is directed above and below, north, east, west and south...
...Are not pluralists open to all in general because they are committed to none in particular...
...Both/and inclusiveness calls for wisdom and courage...
...Here is no ceremony celebrating the primordial wars of manichean dualism, but an organic unity that rejects both uniformity and anarchy...
...Soloveitchik and Mordechai M. Kaplan, by Hermann Cohen and Martin Buber...
...Why was it necessary to record the opinions of Shammai and Hillel in cases where they do not prevail...
...Our minimal task is to provide vehicles to keep the pendulum swinging, to keep the polarities from polarization, to keep opposite views in contact with each other...
...It is not so simple to call this or that "un-Jewish...
...We need each other's trope and dialect, for they enrich and refine our own...
...Hebrew schools, religious schools, day schools, youth groups, summer camps—sponsored by Jewish religious movements—practice denominational apartheid...
...In my delight in contrariety, I enjoy a distinguished company...
...We need networks of lay and professional Jewish statesmen to seek out and deepen the commonalities between us...
...Moreover, I admit to finding no small joy and strength in holding on with both hands to the multiple strands that pull against each other...
...A thousand people look into it and each one declares, "The divine word addresses me...
...They demand the definite articles of faith: the truth, the essence, the authentic...
...They call for orthodox (with a small o) definitions which exclude the "un-Jewish" and "inauthentic...
...Students in rabbinic, cantonal, Jewish educational schools have no contact with the faculties of others schools of thought...
...Rashi, commenting on the rabbinic judgment concerning the controversies between the Houses of Shammai and Hillel— "Both speak the words of the living God"—explains that there are times when one reason is valid and other times when another reason is valid...
...The genius of monotheism lies in its avoidance of both monistic and polytheistic idolatries...
...This is a resolution typical of the Jewish genius for respecting and incorporating conflicting judgments...
Vol. 8 • September 1983 • No. 8
