After forty years

Judaism, Wntr-Spring, 2004 by Arnold Jacob Wolf

ALMOST EXACTLY FORTY YEARS AGO, IVAN DEE, FOR Quadrangle, published a book I edited called "Rediscovering Judaism: Reflections on a New Theology." He not only accepted a volume that several others had rejected, he also edited it brilliantly and gave it a title that some reviewers thought was the best thing about the book. Most of us represented in RJ were around forty years old, both academic neophytes and mid-term congregational rabbis (later all of the authors assumed university posts). We had met with each other for a few years at semi-annual retreats in Wisconsin and felt ourselves to be the vanguard of a new movement in American Judaism that would transcend all denominational and geographical boundaries.

We had models for our own explorations, principally Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, early twentieth century teachers of German Jewry in its last pre-Hitler greatness. They have often been described as existentialists, post-Modernists or even, as we preferred, neo-Classical Jewish thinkers. They returned to sources (Bible, Talmud, Hasidism, medieval thought) with the eyes neither of old-fashioned devotees nor of modern "scientific" scholars, but rather of seekers and post-critical explorers. We, for our part, all considered ourselves their inheritors, even epigones, with the responsibility of translating their German thinking into American categories and presenting a "new theology" to our countrymen and women. We were to be both their followers and leaders of an intellectual future yet unknown.

We had many debates among ourselves: what was to be the place of Jewish law, which Buber and even the more observant Rosenzweig had tended to downplay? What of prayer in an age that hardly expected an answer to prayer? What could revelation mean to a generation that assumed the scripture was a human document from Genesis on to its latest interpreter. The holocaust was not a major subject of our discussions, though it later would absorb some of us as the central question of Jewish theology. The State of Israel was assumed but not interrogated until a decade later. We discussed the great issues of the nineteenth century and high modernism, though we sought to see them in a new light and to deal with them with new vision and vocabulary. Our book was the very first in a long line of volumes treating covenant theology, as some have termed our colloquium. We were friends, some as close as brothers, though time would separate us from each other with no little acrimony.

The later divisions formed around the issue of the holocaust. Under the influence primarily of Elie Wiesel, whom we met after this volume appeared, Emil Fackenhim, for example, turned all of his brilliance to the interpretation of the shoah. He propounded a 614th commandment: not to permit Hitler any posthumous victories, by which he largely meant to defend Jews and the Jewish state against any possible opposition. His politics turned rightward and his theology bent toward his politics. Others, like Steven Schwarzschild in particular, read the holocaust in left-wing fashion and concluded that Jews should be socialists and pacifists with a theology that supported or demanded a radical political stance. Eugene Borowitz called some of us to help him create "Sh'ma: A Journal of Jewish Responsibility" in 1970, and its pages continued the dialogue and debates of the RJ writers for more than thirty years, publishing a great deal of work by the authors of this volume in their later, and more famous, careers.

I shall describe briefly the later thinking of each of the authors included in Rediscovering Judaism. We all contributed to a small but decisive turn in American Judaism, a turn toward recovery of Jewish categories and texts, a return to Jewish commitment and spirituality. The outlines of this transformation are in RJ already; it was the genius of Ivan Dee to perceive its need and nourish its genesis. For that I am not the only one who should be lastingly grateful.

Eugene Borowitz

One of the two or three most famous of the contributors to Rediscovering Judaism, Borowitz has taught two generations of students at the New York school of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, as well as Harvard, Princeton, and other major universities. He has published more than a dozen fine books, ranging from haute vulgarization to incisive systematic theology. He is unquestionably the major interpreter of liberal Jewish thinking in America during the second half of the twentieth century.

Borowitz has tried with more than usual competence to reconcile human autonomy and responsibility. He insists, with classical Reform Judaism, on the inalienable right of each person to make decisions from his or her own situation and in accordance with his or her own personal conscience. Eschewing the lure of both immanence and modernity, he also posits a real God whose will for justice and obedience comes to us uniquely via our Jewish tradition. Simplistic notions of progress always commit the genetic fallacy; we cannot evaluate Judaism; it reevaluates us. Moving toward what he understands as post-modernism, Borowitz emphasizes the ever shifting position of our intellectual worlds, their pluralism and their inevitable limitations, but he reaches back to recover from our textual and historical antecedents sources of light and truth.