Rabbi Prof.
David Hartman, 1931-2013
If you
walked into his class, you were probably going to get yelled at. The most
boring thing you could say to him was “I agree with you.” His sharpness – and
fallibility – managed to revive the Talmudic Beit Midrash, bringing students,
intellectuals and politicians to his door.
Our teacher David
Hartman, who passed away this week at age 81, was more Socrates than Plato. He
challenged young and old alike on their sacred presuppositions. Yet he sought
not to condemn self-righteously, but to engage in dialogue. The educational
process he nurtured was based not on Shammai’s disdain of fools but on Hillel’s
acceptance of his students at their own starting point without predetermining
the outcome of that process. While he was with Hillel in seeking a big tent of
social peace, he was with Shammai in never compromising his truth-telling. He was a fiery personality whose thirst for
questioning his tradition – Jewish and Western – was never quenched. He
challenged his people - and all people - to reimagine themselves, through a
true encounter with text, people, and reality. While we will no longer get to
encounter him inspiring humanity, we have only begun to play out his ideas and
questions.
In his
honor, we offer five of his most influential ideas enshrined by the provocative
catch-phrases he often used to describe them.
“Sinai
or Auschwitz?” – In the 1970’s, the Holocaust
came to dominate the strategies for enhancing Jewish identity in Israel and
America. Hartman was sharply critical of what he saw as a “Holocaustization” of
Judaism. Without detracting from the calamities of the Shoah, the center of
Jewish experience must be Sinai, not Auschwitz, he claimed. Sinai is the blue
print for a living community which seeks to embody in practice a world of
justice, solidarity and service. Dwelling on the indignities of the past will not
renew our passion for a just life – rather the creation of a vibrant
future-oriented discourse must be the basis of our identity. Hartman loved
teaching a passage in Maimonides which addresses a seemingly ritualistic
question: The Candle of Hanukkah and the Candle of Shabbat, which candle takes
preference? In Hartman’s keen reading, this was a question of philosophy, not
blind ritual: What takes precedence - commemorating heroic wars and the defense
of God and the Jewish people, or conserving shalom bayit and the
intimacy of a candle-lit Shabbat dinner? Maimonides resoundingly subordinates Hanukkah
to Shabbat, which to Hartman was a call to subordinate historical memory and messianic
dreams for the joy of a Shabbat meal and the vibrancy of family life. As his
teacher Rabbi Joseph Dov Soloveitchik said: “The Jewish people were not put in
this world simply to fight Anti-Semitism.”
“From
Sinai to Zion”, from Children to Adults
–Hartman’s book A Living Covenant was translated into Hebrew as From
Sinai to Zion. For many Jews, Sinai represents the moment that God forced
Israel to accede to his commandments, a God of paternal authority who threatens
to destroy those who do not obey him. Instead, David Hartman’s theology emphasized
God as a loving parent who gradually steps back. A wise parent creates room for
his child to grow into an adult and make his own mistakes. Loyalty to God’s is
tested by constantly reinterpreting God’s living covenant: If in the Bible the
Jewish people are children in the desert who need God to miraculously intervene
in everything, they grow into a self-defending and self-governing people when
they enter the Land of Israel under Joshua and later David. The Rabbinic project
continues God’s ceding of responsibility to a preponderance of human wisdom in
the partnership of God and Israel. Hartman made Rabbi Joshua’s cry – “it is not
in Heaven” into the canonized text of all liberal minded Jews. God’s
self-ironizing response: “My sons have out-argued me!" is the supreme
expression of Hartman’s notion that Torah education is a millennial process of
making Jewish children take on the adult responsibilities of shaping the Divine
law in human hands. Zionism was the final stage in this movement, where the
Jewish people took on not only law, but also history.
But where
others saw messianic redemption in the State of Israel as the achievement of
Judaism’s vision on earth, Hartman saw it as only the expansion of a challenge
that puts our Jewish adulthood to the supreme test. The Jewish state in Zion
with its empowerment over all aspects of society is the laboratory to test the Jews
capability of fulfilling the desert vision of Sinai in a real world without miracles.
But it is also a test-tube for Judaism to see if it has matured enough to
provide not just idealistic sermons in the synagogues of the Diaspora, but to
guide a modern democratic Torah-inspired state with a concern both for human
rights and for security, for democracy and for Jewish identity. Hartman had a
profound faith that Judaism can offer constructive wisdom for the modern world and
that if Rabbinic visions compete in the marketplace their ideas could prove
relevant and realistic. Yet he was equally fearful that Rabbinic Judaism as
developed so far in the era of the long exile was not yet ready for that
challenge. He created the Hartman Institute’s Advanced Studies Center to meet
that challenge by identifying insightful strengths and terrifying weaknesses in
Talmudic texts and medieval Jewish philosophers. He knew as he passed away that
the outcome on the grand experiment in an adult Judaism with political and
military power in the State of Israel was still in doubt.
“There is
just as much a Jewish morality as there is a Jewish science!” – Hartman had
no patience for the self-congratulatory discourse of an essentialist “Jewish
ethics”, and enjoyed counting the reasons why: First, he recalled that historically
Jews in all generations held a myriad of opinions and that the gap between even
their best moral maxims and the actual communal behavior was often appalling.
In this way, he was a student of the Biblical prophets who have pointed this
out in every generation. Second, the strength of Jewish thought is not in
celebrating a common core but in revisiting the grand debates of Judaism. His books
engaged in a series of living dialogues: the Bible versus the Rabbis, Maimonides
versus Nachmanides and HaLevi, Rabbi Kook versus Yeshayahu Leibowitz and Rav
Soloveitchik. Judaism is not a monolithic tradition, but a series of grand
debates and fiery revolutions. Third, “the God of Sinai is still the God of
Creation,” and any other claim is a desecration of God’s name. Jewish ethics is
first a universal ethics based on the creation of all human beings in the image
of God. Human dignity is not divisible and the chosen people cannot preach their
own intrinsic superiority, discriminating against others in the name of
becoming a holy people. Hartman loved to cite the story of a Talmudic rabbi who
was urged to use a legal loophole to justify cheating a nonJew in the purchase
of his donkey. The Rabbi retorts: “What, shall I become a Babrbarian?!”. That
Jewish law, like other systems, cannot prevent one from being a barbarian, was
one of his most profound lessons. Hartman’s most uncompromising diatribes
against venerable Jewish wisdom were his angry dismissals of the racist
presuppositions he found in Kabbalah, Chabad or Rav Kook…
“Out of the Bathtub of the Shulkhan Arukh!” – Hartman sought to hold two poles – the ghettoized
and the cosmopolitan. On one hand there was Torah study as an all-encompassing passionate
practice, such as he experienced in the Lakewood yeshiva among the great scholars of Lithuania who
escaped the Holocaust. In Lakewood, just as since the destruction of the Temple
all God has is the four ells of halacha, thus today all a Jew needs is the four
walls of the Beit Midrash. IN many ways, Hartman never left that Beit Midrash. On the other hand Torah is meant to be a torat
hayim – a guide for life in all aspects of human endeavor. He loved to quote
Maimonides who cited Aristotle’s Ethics to illuminate Pirkei Avot:
“Accept truth from whomever has spoken it”. For Hartman this meant that Jewish
scholars must come out of their intellectual ghettos to seek a critical
dialogue with Western thinkers and with other religions. Hartman could be sharply critical of liberal
Judaism for neglecting deep Jewish learning in quality and quantity, even
though he honored their commitment to adapting Judaism creatively. On the other
hand Hartman, whose parents and siblings would today be called Haredi, would often
lash out at the Orthodox community for what he saw as a turning of the “Talmudic
Sea of Halakha” into the sordid “Bathtub of the Shulkhan Arukh”. Halakhic
Judaism had become obsessively concerned with libido – kosher eating, kosher
sex and kosher dress. The Shulkhan Aruch avoided pursuing the Talmudic
discussion of capital punishment, the ethics of war or statecraft. Following in
the footsteps of his “patron saint” Maimonides, Hartman sought to revisit and
renew a Jewish discourse of political thought. Statehood was the opportunity to
return Judaism to the cosmopolitan sea of conversation, bringing Jewish texts
back into a true engagement with the street and the marketplace, not just the
synagogue and the kitchen.
“What can I say? I love my people…” - David, whose name means lover, loved both
the Torah and the Jewish people. He abhorred those who used Halakha to degrade
the ordinary Jew’s failure to reach its ideals. Yet he never promoted a facile,
apologetic Judaism to pander to Jews seeking a self-congratulatory religion. He
loved the Jewish people with a passion, but wanted them to be a sea of raging
intellectuals, a yeshiva where all Jews and indeed all seekers of truth could
sit, study, and argue. He loved Rabbinic Judaism precisely because it
preserves and engenders perennial ongoing debates about conflicting values. His
heart was made of many rooms, but these were not neatly distanced conference rooms
for polite toleration of difference, rather it was one big Beit Midrash with
many dueling study hevrutas. Rather than a return to the pristine days of old,
Hartman celebrated the living covenant of Sinai, where each generation applies
a constant reinterpretation to the ancient texts. In this way Judaism is not a
community of shared beliefs or values, but rather a community of interpretation
– where different readings of shared texts create the boundaries of the
community.
Rabbi Nachman of Bresov, who David Hartman had very little patience for,
once taught that since the essence of a person is his or her da’at,
their unique wisdom or attainment, therefor “a person should leave after
themselves a blessing – a child or a students – so that their da'at [wisdom,
attainment, uniqueness] will remain down here even when they have risen from
this world… For when a person's da'at remains through children and students, it
is considered as if that person itself is still in this world.” (Likutei
Moharan II:8).
David Hartman’s da’at was unique and powerful. He is no longer
around, but his da’at will continue to do his work for many years to
come.
Noam Zion
has been a member of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem almost since its
founding. Rabbi Mishael Zion studied and taught at the Hartman Institute in
Israel and North America and is now the co-Director of the Bronfman
Fellowships. Together they are the authors of “A Night to
Remember: The Haggadah of Contemporary Voices” and the Hebrew Halaila
Hazeh haggadah, which are sequels to Noam Zion’s bestselling “A Different
Night: The Family Participation Haggadah”, popularly known as “The Hartman
Haggadah”. www.haggadahsrus.com
If it contributes ought to the aggravation of the indictment, no stranger nor personal enemy, but his own self. By what snares? Those of his error. By what weapon? The offence done to God. By how many blows? As many as are his idolatries.
It is by knowing what idolatry is that we know what Judaism is, what a relationship with God is. It is by knowing what the act of “slaying one’s own self” as Tertullian describes it, that one knows what it is to live a meaningful life. Which leads me to the question I’ll be pondering this Shabbat: What are today’s idolatries? What is it that we would identify today as “the principal crime of the human race, the highest guilt charged upon the world”? What is our golden calf?
