Genesis — The Eternal Nerve of the Jewish People — A Lecture by Rabbi
Harold M. Schulweis and Rabbi Ed Feinstein
The VBS College of Jewish Studies Lecture Series
Temple Valley Beth Shalom
Encino, California
February 29, 2012
(This is a transcription of an audio recording which can be found at www.schulweisinstitute.com)
Rabbi Feinstein: Tonight is the closing session of this year’s course of the College of
Jewish Studies. And it is a privilege to have all of you back again. For those of you
who are just joining us, welcome to the last session. And to those who have been with
us from the beginning of this course, this has been a remarkable exploration of Jewish
ideas and Jewish literature. We’ve been learning the book of Genesis, 15 different
readings of the book of Genesis, and tonight is our closing session.
Male Speaker 2: Over the course of the month of our learning together, I welcomed
you by saying, “If you’re a member of Valley Beth Shalom, we’re delighted you’re here.
If you’re a member of another community, we’re grateful that you’ve come and hope
that you’ll come many times to share learning and worship and celebration with us.
And if you’re not a member of a synagogue community, I've invited you to come and to
join this one.” And I want to reiterate that invitation and I want to make it much
stronger.
We live in a democracy as you probably realized from watching the news . A
democracy is not just about voting for a candidate for president or governor or senator
or congress or mayor. A democracy means that the social institutions of our
community are created by people. They are not handed down from heaven by God.
They do not grow up out of the earth like trees. They are created by people who say, “I
want to live in a community that has a symphony orchestra or an art museum or a
hospital or an agency to care for the poor and the hungry, and I want to live in a
community that has a synagogue that opens its doors to people to learn and to pray
and to confront the meaning of life and to talk about God and to talk about what life is
all about.” You make a vote by saying, “I want to live in a community with a Shiur like
this one.”
You noticed over the course of this month and those who have been with us for now
six years, we’ve never charged anybody a penny to come in this door, to sit with us, to
learn with us, to enjoy this kind of learning. We never charged anyone a penny
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because we believe the core function of this institute is to teach. It is the core function
of this community to learn together. About seven years ago we celebrated Rabbi
Schulweis’ birthday, and we setup something called The Harold M. Schulweis Institute
which is an institute devoted to Rabbi Schulweis’ teachings and to the tradition he’s
brought to this community. You will find the website somewhere around the worldwide
web. If you Google Harold M. Schulweis Institute, you’ll find it. And one of the nice
things is you’ll find recordings of all of our previous classes from the College of Jewish
Studies.
We began this conversation about the Book of Genesis with our dear friend, Rabbi
Bradley Shavit Artson, who talked to us about process theology. He began by saying,
“You don’t believe in the God that the bible tells you about.” And he began to show us
that there’s a different way to understand the God of the bible. We had a session with
Mordecai Finley about the secrets and mysteries of the Kabbalah of Creation. And
many of you called me and said, “I didn’t understand a word he said” which is exactly
how the Kabbalah intends it. Don’t you see? It’s a mystery, that’s why it’s a mystery.
We had Dr. Ziony Zevit of the AJU talked to us about how professional bible scholars
and archeologist understand the text.
We had Rabbi Kalman Topp of Beth Jacob Congregation come and talk to us about
how orthodox rabbi see the tradition, how they see the biblical tradition. We had Rabbi
Zoe Klein come and talk to us about how a reformed rabbi reads the tradition and a
feminist poet reads the tradition. Rabbi Sara Brandes brought us a feminist reading of
the Torah. We had a group of psychologist who talked to us about how mashugana
our family is, and a group of television writers that told us how interesting and deep
they are. And we arrived tonight at an opportunity to learn with Rabbi Schulweis about
the whole scope of the Book of Genesis.
A word about Rabbi Schulweis because I don’t get a chance to embarrass him enough
anymore, when he once wrote a tribute to his teacher, Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, he said
Kaplan’s great accomplishment was he gave the Jewish people back the present
tense. Jews become obsessed with their past. Jews become obsessed with tradition.
Jews become obsessed with rabbis and teachers of previous generations and ideas
and gestures that belong to previous generations. Kaplan used to make fun of that.
He called it “Quotational Judaism” which means you’re not anybody unless you quote
somebody who has been dead for 300 years. Kaplan gave us the present tense, and
Rabbi Schulweis has continued in that tradition because there are many thinkers who
can tell you what ideas were before but there are very few thinkers who can think in the
present tense, who can offer us ideas for this moment. And Harold Schulweis has
been one of those very, very, very rare intellectuals and thinkers who can teach us in
the present tense. Please welcome our teacher, Rabbi Harold Schulweis.
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Rabbi Schulweis: Is that the end of the introduction?
Rabbi Feinstein: That’s the end of the introduction and also the end of the lecture. So
thank you for being here. We’ve actually spent a wonderful time together learning the
Book of Genesis. And I want to begin with the most broad of questions so that you
have a chance to help us understand it. Why is this book important? Why should this
book be read? This is after our literature that is some 3,000 years old. It doesn’t know
anything of our science or technology. It doesn’t know anything of our medicine. It
doesn’t know anything of the cultural gestures of the world we live in, and yet there’s
something compelling enough about this book that 300 people come out on a frigid
Wednesday night and give up an opportunity to watch another Republican candidate’s
debate to study this book. Why is this literature important, Harold?
Rabbi Schulweis: I want to commend you for your freedom and wisdom in seeing to it
that the evaluation of the lecture is given tonight before I spoke . Very, very good. And
I also want to say how clever it is of you to make a pitch for membership of Shiur
before I spoke .
This is a very important question that you asked, and I've given it a great deal of
thought, not that question but in general. Of all the favored Chasidim in my repertoire,
there is none that's more attractive than Menachem Mendel of Kotzk. Menachem
Mendel of Kotzk lived in 19th Century, Hungarian. He was considered to be a
maverick, contradictory with a piercing passion for truth. And it so happens that our
teacher, Abraham Joshua Heschel, spent the last years of his life writing a two-volume
book in Yiddish called Kotzk. And it’s worthwhile really studying Yiddish just to read
those two books because, well, Heschel wrote in many languages and very fluidly,
none better than in Yiddish. In Yiddish he was quoted by a saying that, (Yiddish). I
don’t have to translate for this group.
You can imitate everything except the truth. He also said something that will be
pertinent to my response, namely “Beware Jews that a mitzvah can also become an
idol. And if you don’t know what the mitzvah is about, you can turn it into an icon.” He
was a maverick, as I indicated. Not that he didn’t Daven often very well but never on
time, sort of a principle, it nothing on Jewish established in time. He daven early, he
daven late. He was a very innovative individual. And one day, one of his disciples
said to him, “Menachem Mendel, let me ask you one thing.
Why can't you be like your sainted father? Why can’t you follow in his footsteps? Why
don’t you listen to him?” And Menachem Mendel protested and said, “I do. My father
didn’t listen to his father and I don’t listen to mine.” I thought it was a jointed response
but Menachem Mendel of Kotzk was very remarkable, philosophical intellect. And he
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meant by it something else. What makes you think that the mark of authenticity is
antiquity? What makes you think that if I follow, it is more authentic than if I lead?
What makes you think that Judaism never changes, never changed and never will
change? In fact that touched on a very important question not only in Genesis but the
bible in general.
I put it to you and I will argue. And while you mentioned all the other speakers from the
seminaries and yeshivas who have spoken about what they learned in yeshiva, what
they learned in the seminary, I’m going to tell you what I didn’t learn. And what I didn’t
learn is something very important, and I wanted to ask “Why didn’t we learn?” For
example, I begin -- when I was a kid, the things that excited me most was this
remarkable section in -- when Abraham hears from God that God is going to commit
genocide, again, Sodom and Gomorrah. But the line that preceded it is a critical line.
It’s the line in which God says, “I have got to tell Abraham what my motivation is. He
has got to know.” “Am I going to hide from Abraham that which I intend to do?” That’s
a remarkable notion.
It is new in world religion. What do you mean that God is compelled to consult with a
finite, fallible, errant individual like Abraham? And the answer to that is very important;
because God needs to have believers who think, who could be critical. And he said,
“God does” in the minds of whoever wrote this section of the bible. “I have not chosen
Abraham, except that he is to be my teacher. He is to be the teacher of his prodigy, of
his children, and of his great children. And because I, God, tzedakah u'mishpat, I live
by righteousness and by justice.”
As soon as that remark was made by God, the whole world begins, the whole Jewish
world begins. As soon as Abraham hears what the nature of God is, God of justice,
and a God of righteousness, he confronts God with this remarkable chutzpadik phrase
which echoes throughout history. And I will argue, you will not understand Judaism
unless you understand the audacity, the chutzpah k'lapei shemaya, the creative moral
audacity against the heavens, Hashofet col haaretz lo ya'aseh mishpat, shall the judge
of the whole world not too justly, far be it from you, God, that you should wipe away the
innocent together with the guilty, and then again, far be it from you, that you will act in
this indiscriminate fashion. What’s going on here?
This is the first time we’ve had a dialogue between God and a Jewish hero, in this case
the founder of Judaism, the first Jew-by-choice in all of history. What is important here
is that is obligatory upon the Jew who believes to question, to challenge, to probe, and
not to be totally subservient to the text. Is now, from that moment on, and we will hear
this echoed in Moses, in Jacob, in Isaac, in Jacob, also in David, all throughout history
that Jews are very aware of the threat that religion can place upon human beings, the
set of absolutism, the set of excessive dogmatism. Jews are a religion, Judaism is a
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religion that is not to be defined merely by what is the same, but by what is different, by
what can be changed. And I offered to you -- and it is something that I never heard of
in Hebrew school. I went to two yeshivas. I was thrown out by some of the finest
yeshivas in America , Israel, Sri Lanka, the Bronx, I opened up -- it was then quietly
that I learned things that I was never was taught. One of them was Gomorrah, and all
of the citations or most of them come from the Talmud. And I want you to understand
that I’m talking about not modern rabbis, not Mordecai Kaplan or Heschel or Leo Baeck
or Norman Cohen, none of these. I’m talking about rabbis in the first 500-600 years of
the Common Era. And here, there is a remarkable -- you don’t have bibles, right?
Rabbi Feinstein: Yes, I do.
Rabbi Harold Schulweis: You do have a bible?
Rabbi Feinstein: Yes.
Rabbi Schulweis: Get it . I will quote it and you will never know whether it’s the right
quote not. Just believe. In this remarkable section, in which the Jewish people begin
to worship the golden calf, there was a remarkable wine. God is infuriated at these
people who have betrayed him. And he cries out in that section of Exodus, “Let me
alone, leave me be.” And the Talmud goes on to say, “With that, Moses rose, grabbed
hold of God’s garments and said, “I will not let you go, God, until you forgive and
pardon.” And he pushes God. And God says, “Okay. But I’m in a terrible dilemma,
Moses. I am God. I said in my oath I will destroy all these people. How can I go back
on my word?”
And Moses responds, “You taught us, God, that if a person should make a vow which
he regrets, let him come to a wise person and ask to have his oath nullified. Come to
me, God, come to me.” This is in Talmud. I’ll give you all the citations. I know the kind
of people who comes, and you all come with opportunities to get the rabbi, I have them
all there . Moses then sits -- this is in the Talmud, the Talmud Brachot -- and God
stands before him. And Moses said to him, “Are you sorry? Do you regret what you
wanted to do to the Jewish people?” And God said, “Yes, I regret it. I’m full of
remorse.” And Moses said, “ Okay. There is no oath here. There is no vow, none
whatsoever. And you are forgiven.”
What kind of story is that? What does it tell you about the minds of the rabbis who are
willing to allow Moses to absolve God? And what kind of God is it that will find
absolution from a human being just like Moses? This touches a category which I think
never was taught to me and was called chutzpah k'lapei shemaya or Heitichah d’varim
lemala.
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There are heroes in Jewish life which are not like any heroes in any other religion who
hurl words against the heavens and prevail. There are dozens and dozens of such
stories. I want to just give you one. What’s the point behind it? What the point behind
is we are not bibliolaters. Jews do not believe that the bible is God. Heschel would
say, quoting from the Kabbalah, only he made sense, actually, out of it, he said, “In all
of the biblical literature, you will never find fear of Torah.
You will find fear of sin, you will find fear of heaven, fear of Elohim, but never fear of
Torah.” Because when you begin to worship Torah, as if it is God, you will not be able
to touch it. This will become divine and you will only do nothing but, what the
theologians called “Ipse dixit.” Ipse dixit is Latin. It’s only Latin that I know but I use it
as frequently as possible to humiliate anybody who is in my presence. Ipse dixit
means “but he has already said it.” There’s no argument. There is no argument. It
had been said, it’s in the scripture, all you do know is to cite but nothing else. What is
the importance of this? Would I remember your question? And I have low memory.
What do Jews do when they come across a passage in the bible which to their
conscience is considered egregious, deleterious, bad? What do most religions do if
they find in the scripture something that is morally offensive? They say, “Ipse dixit. It
has been said and I can do nothing about it.” Jews always was able to do something
about it, and I was never taught that. For example, it does say, “An eye for an eye,
and a tooth for a tooth, and a hand for a hand, and a bruise for a bruise, and a burn for
a burn,” but there never was a rabbi in the history of recorded history who ever judged
according to that literal, specific, physical interpretation.
Contrary to what you read in the Merchant of Venice, you never had this notion of a
pound for pound. On the contrary, the rabbis were offended by that verse in the bible
but it’s clear, it’s there. But what did they say? They said, “What it means is the
following; it has to mean something else. It has to mean. It has to mean you have to
pay for the injury. You have to pay for the medical cure. You have to pay
unemployment. You have to pay for embarrassment, humiliation.” Amazing. The
reason that I mentioned that is I am on that pulpit and I see people come in and they
read that. And what do you think they say? An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,
that’s it. I got to have you see it because you don’t believe it. And that’s why it’s
become…
Page 462, you’re in the shul, your friends have come because you had a bar mitzvah
or a bat mitzvah, and it’s open. And this is what they take to me, what Judaism is
about. And that is why it is used so often up until today, in editorials, in all kinds of
essays. But if the damage is infused, the penalty shall be life for life, eye for eye, tooth
for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.
The ability of the rabbis to say, “I know this is divine we revealed but I’m going to read
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it out of its literal meaning because morality stands in its way. And if it’s not moral, the
important thing is not that it’s old, it means that it is subject to criticism.” In what
religion will you find, in general, Jesus challenging the Father or Mohamed challenging
Allah? As you find, and as we will see over and over again, cases upon cases in which
the rabbis said, “This cannot be.” And that came from that early wonderful, primordial
experience in which Abraham said, “God forbid that you should act in this ungodly
fashion.”
What do you do, for example, with a ben sorer umoreh? Depending on where it is.
But it's fantastic. Jews are coming to the Shiur. They're coming to ben sorer umoreh.
I think it's page 1113. Let’s try that. Page 1113, it’s a wonderful reading especially
when there’s a bar mitzvah up there . It says, Verse 18, “If a man has a wayward and
defiant son, who does not heed his father or mother, and does not obey them even
after they disciplined him, his father or mother shall take hold of him and bring him out
to the elders of his town, at the public place of community, and they shall say to the
elderly of the town “This son of ours is disloyal and defiant, he is a gluttonous, he is
bibulous, he is a drunk,” there upon, the men of his town shall stone him to death, thus
you will sweep out evil from your midst: all Isral will hear and be afraid.” What do the
rabbis do with this? They were preaching, they were talking, they did something, only
you won’t know about it because you won’t be taught this.
But what they said was the following, and he is going to look it up only in one folio, in
the Talmud Sanhedrin, 71-A, “The rabbis got up and said, “Lo haya velo atid l'hiyot.
This law never was, this law never will be.” On what grounds? It’s very clear, what it
says, and in the Gomorrah where it discusses exactly this issue. In Sanhedrin they
say, “But it’s written that way.” And the answer is, okay, it’s written that way for you to
study. It becomes a theoretical issue but you cannot use this, it cannot be actionable,
you don’t do that. And in that very same Talmud, 71-A, it says, “If there’s a city that is
idolatrous, a city full of idolatry, it shall be destroyed.” What did the rabbis do? They
said, “Lo haya velo atid l'hiyot. It never was and it will never will be.”
And what did the rabbis do when it says that if you have a house that becomes
leprous, you are to destroy it. And they said, “Lo haya velo atid l'hiyot.” This is
courage, this is conscience, this is Jewish heroism, this is the elevation of a human
being who is now considered by God, a collaborator in the conduct of the world. That's
who we are. We've lost that.
I must tell you, I had really very difficult night -- it’s not difficult for me anyhow but
particularly difficult night because what I see in New York Times. I see splashed all
over it, a terrible rising misogyny, a hatred of women which is now called hadarat
nashim, expelling women. They are not to be heard. Their voices are to be shut.
They're not to be seen. They're not to ride in the buses. They're not to walk in the
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pavements. This cannot be. What happened to us? Why doesn’t somebody say,
“Hey, lo haya velo atid l'hiyot.” Nobody -- because there was a time when rabbis were
rabbis. And they were able to live on the grounds -- that moral sensibility is
indispensable for Jewish wife. What do you mean? When I came here, that was
during the 1970 -- no, 1950. When I came here in 1970, do you know what you people
davan, all of you? All of you, you prayed to God, “Shelo asani isha, who has not made
me a woman.” You prayed to God.
When I came here in 1970, by 1972, yet, none of you could be counted in the minion.
When I came here in 1970, there could be no woman who would be accepted as a
candidate to be a rabbi. When I came here, there could be no woman who would be a
candidate to be a cantor. What happened? What happened was Jewish life begun to
count. And people like us, you and I, were concerned just about the matters.
Let me go back to what I was saying. I'm not saying it well enough. Because it is so
dear to me, because I really felt in Judaism because of its uniqueness, this is a unique
and distinctive, unparalleled religion. What did the rabbi say when you have, time and
time again, penalty of capital punishment, capital punishment for idolatry, capital
punishment for adultery, capital punishment for working on the Shabbat in public?
What did they do? What did the rabbis -- should they do? Well, ipse dixit. I don’t
know if they use ipse dixit but they say what can we do? It is written. What did the
rabbis, your rabbis do, the rabbis of tradition? And I don’t want you to be fooled by any
other interpretation that simply dismisses their remarkable capacity. The rabbis were
known. All you had to do is to look it up in most of the books in the Talmud in which
the rabbis said, “We don’t like capital punishment. It's cruel.” We said it in 300 in the
Common Era, in 400 in the Common Era. So what do we do? They got together
“Okay. You can have capital punishment but I will make it so difficult for that capital
punishment to be activated that de facto, you will erase it from your law.”
Number one, we don’t accept circumstantial evidence. Number two, you have to have
two witnesses to give halakhah, to foreworn the potential criminal. And he have to
acknowledge that he understands the consequences of his crime. And if all of the
judges in the Sanhedrin say that somebody is guilty, he goes free because there was
nobody there to find some extenuating circumstance. I think that the future of our
people is at stake because if you find, as you will begin to read the Jewish
newspapers, the increase of coordination and the increase of chamoorization.
Chamoorization is the more and more stringent, the harder, the more difficult, the more
preposterous, the more authentic.
My Zadeh was a very, very good Jew. Never did he ever hear about Glatt Kosher.
Unecessary, he would never do that. And I want you to follow me into the study for a
moment. I know if you find it in Rabbi Feinstein study 2. This woman came to me. I
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had converted her to Judaism. She was a Jew by choice. She went to mitzvah. She
did brilliantly with the Dezdin. And then she comes and asks me will I marry her to Mr.
Katz. Katz is a Cohen! He is a Jewish priest and you are a Keyoret, you're procelyte,
or you are a grushah, you are a widow. You cannot, by virtue of the biblical law, marry
her. This happened to me. I don’t know what is the reason. I looked it up in the
Gomorrah. And it says basically the presumption is that there must have been
something unsavory, something sexually suspect for her to become a widow or for her
to become a Jew by choice. And I looked her in the eye and talked to her that way.
Can you -- so what are you going to do? You say ipse dixit . That's how it is. All you
got to say to her is no. You better say to her “This is wrong.” You will know because
you had been with me for so many years. And the woman, the man, the homosexual,
the lesbian who lives a wretched painful life because the synagogue treats like a
pariah. How are we going to look her in the eye when she says,on Yom Kippur, “You
read it clearly, the whole congregation, that my son, the homosexual, the gay person,
is a tohevah, is an abomination.” You can say that's the tradition. And that's what we
are now talking about.
What do you think authenticity really is? And I'll put it to you that unless and until we
recognize that the bible is not the last word in Jewish life, we will find ourselves as a
people, as a tradition ossified and fossilized and decayed. We didn’t die with the book
of Deuteronomy because if we died with the book of Deuteronomy, then all the laws
that I've been talking about, which your rabbis, my rabbis were willing to change a
tremendous, tremendous course out of principle, that would have been our religion.
That's why we have -- that's why you can't -- you asked about Genesis, why it's
important. I'll tell you one thing; if the Torah is taught without rabbinic commentary, if
the written law is taught without the oral law, without the revolution that the rabbis
instituted which was a moral revolution, we will have -- we would be dead. As long as
there is life, there is change. And unless you change with the moral principles of that
life, we will not be a vital people.
I am so frightened when I see a congregation filled with people reading laws that are
inauthentic. And what I am saying -- inauthentic? And who is the authentic one? Is
the authentic one the one who says, “If you suspect your wife of infidelity,” and this is in
the bible, very clearly spoken, “bring her to the priest. He will make her swallow bitter
waters. He will curse her, say that if indeed she has done something that was
adulterous, her body will sag and her thigh will grow limp. And she must say amen,
amen.” What did the rabbis do about it? I mean, the rabbis of the 1st Century,
Yochanan Ben Satai said, “This is not to be because all you men who accuse your wife
out of your jealousy and inferiorities, are you living a better life, a cleaner life? Am I
going to use this against this woman?”
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So I read it in the Talmud. I never read it in class. This is in the Talmud. Such
fantastic things. Why are we not taught? I don’t understand because that’s the thing
that excites me most about Jewish life. This is just -- it’s still good not be studied
everyday. And it’s important, it would seem to me, that this remarkable institution in
this remarkable Wednesday night that you have created as College of Jewish Studies.
We must learn the Torah not for the sake of knowing what was said but for the sake of
knowing of what was done. So you have in the Gomorrah this wonderful thing.
Moses -- just imagine this, the pure, the sheer, of poetry, the ecstasy of ethics. Moses
is coming down from the mountain and he carries, on his shoulders, the ten words, and
he stops and he said, “God, it’s not fair, it’s not just.” “What do you mean?” I'm
quoting out from the Talmud. You say -- Moses say, “You say, God, that you’re going
to visit the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation.
God, where is your morality? Have you lost your sensibility?” What does God say? In
the Talmud God says, “What’s your argument. What’s wrong with saying that I’m
going to visit the iniquity of the father upon the children, the third and fourth
generation?” “My argument is this; Abraham was a great Jew. He had a father, Terah,
who is an idol worshiper. Are you going to punish Abraham because of Terah? King
Hezekiah was a noble, fine, great king. His father was Ahaz who was a wretched
wicked man. Are you going to have Hezekiah suffer because of the sin of Ahaz?
Josiah was a great king but his father was Amon who is a T’ rashah, who is wicked.
Are you going to suffer the child of the father?”
Now, the question was what is His response going to be? What’s the response is
going to be? The response is going to be in the Talmud so that you understand the
rabbinic mind, the rabbis that shaped the character, the ethics of our people. God says
when Moses gives him the argument about the unfairness of visiting the sins of the
father upon the children, I never heard this – it happens to be repeated several times.
“By your life, Moses, you have taught me. I will nullify my words and will put in the
place of my words your words which is the father shall not be put to death for the son
or the son of the father.” And one other thing -- and you’re lucky that I’m a tired old
man.
You have this remarkable question of the infidelity, and then you have -- I must find it.
There is one thing it’ll be. Hannah, in the Book of Samuel, is a married woman, a
wretched woman. And in the Talmud it says, “She was audacious against God.” And
now they will imagine, as part of the romantic imagination of the rabbis, she says to
God in prayer, “Sovereign of the universe, among all things you’ve created in a
woman, you’ve not created one thing without a purpose. Eyes to see, ears to hear, a
nose to smell, a mouth to speak, hands to work, legs to walk with, breasts to suckle.
These breasts you have put on my heart, are they not to suckle?” And the prayer was
not answered. And what did she do? And what did the rabbis, in the most creative,
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magnificent period of Jewish life say that she did? She said to God, “You’re not
answering my prayers but I know what you’ve taught us. You said that if somebody is
suspected of infidelity and locks herself up with another man, that if it is untrue, she will
have a child. I will tell my husband, Elkanah, that I’m going to lock myself up with a
strange man, he will not touch me, and you will have to give me a child because you
have to do it by virtue of your law and by virtue of morality.”
Magnificent. I never heard it. I don’t think your kids have heard it. And the difficulty is,
because when they don’t hear it, then when they hear secular, books in which they will
quote eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, all the ugly things,. they then say, “Look,
that’s what Judaism is.” But we’ve got to be able to say, “No, that’s not what Judaism
is. We didn’t die with the bible. We first begun to interpret, to live, we grow, the
situations change, we’re all different.”
So what do I want? I want us to be taught better. I want us to be taught those things
that are not taught. Why are they not taught? Because they’re scared to teach it
because if it is the case, that there has been such remarkable change, refinement,
nullification, abrogation of law in the past by these rabbis, what is to prevent you from
doing so many things, to treat the proselyte different, to treat the women different. It
says in the Talmud, “Everybody gets to have an Aliyah except women. And why? Out
of respect for the congregation. And you would say that? And if you can’t say that,
what are you got to do?
So what I’m saying is support your rabbi . No, I mean that seriously. I think this is not
an issue for rabbis alone. This is an issue for the Jewish community. Rabbi Feinstein
spoke about the fact that this is a community, and as a community we have things that
we’ve got to do. So study and do something about it. The conservative movement is
now in a process of becoming. And I think we will make a big difference if we are
heard. We’re an important congregation and your voice has to be heard. Thank you
for your patience.
Rabbi Feinstein: All right. That was my first question. I have a whole list of questions
yet to be answered. So we have no where to go. [Ben and Jerry’s are open late.
Take another step, take another step. You need to walk.
Rabbi Harold Schulweis: I do whatever the senior rabbi says.
Rabbi Feinstein: Good. You’re the only one here but that’s good. Let me ask you to
reflect on -- I what to clarify some of things that you said because you’ve said some
very important things. But let me ask you to clarify something about the historical
moments, okay? You talked about the courage of the rabbis at the Talmud, and you
talked bleakly about the timidity of contemporary rabbis, and in some case, in terms of
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Charidim and Choomrahs, and this sort of thing, not just timidity but a retreat from the
moral sensibility. Where did that come from? What happened to us as a people that
we lost that moral courage, that chutzpah k'lapei shemaya?
Rabbi Schulweis: One way is just don’t teach it. You want to kill it, keep it muted, just
suppress it, repress it, don’t teach it, not to the yeshiva students, not to the seminary
students, to nobody, and it will die. And they’re right, so it will die. See, when I ask
somebody -- and I have lived with Jews all my life, some of my best friends . When I
ask somebody draw for me a picture of an authentic rabbi, of an authentic Jew, what
conjures up in their minds, and also orthodox Jew? Even those who don’t believe,
even those who are unaffiliated, even those who are disaffiliated, when it comes to the
question of what is authentic -- my father, the socialist, would say, “When it comes to
authenticity, I suppose it has to be an orthodox rabbi.”
I think that’s a mistake, I think it’s a tremendous mistake. And what’s more, now is our
opportunity, yours especially, to bring together a model in orthodox rabbis, a model in
orthodox Jews, and to be able to discuss these things because we don’t know. Fellow
Jews, we’re ignorant, we’re ignorant, and we don’t realize that which is unique. Where
would you find in any tradition this notion of the elevation of the human being, not as
somebody who is a sinner, but someone who is a sinner, who has been made but little
lower than God. We’re great, it’s a great tradition, and I’m pained to see it smeared.
And I know that there will be a distance growing greater and greater because you
cannot live without the capacity, the sensitivity, and the heroism of adapting to life
itself.
Rabbi Feinstein: Within the story, especially the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, and
the Midrashim that you cited about Moshe. So this is a unique God, this is a unique
picture of God. You would imagine, for example, we looked at the story together, the
Sodom and Gomorra story.
Rabbi Schulweis: Yes.
Rabbi Feinstein: And we I taught it -- we talked about the Book of Job. In the Book of
Job the answer to the question is, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I’m going to do.” In
the Book of Job, yes, God said, “Shut up. Don’t ask me the question.” And the sad
thing at the end of the Book of Job is that Job shuts up. But in the Abraham story, not
only does God not tell him to shut up, God lets him win the argument, God accepts -what kind of God is this?
Rabbi Schulweis: That’s a wonderful question. I know that you may be thinking
because I know where you came from. You came from same school that I did. Does
God change? Does the Torah change? Does the law change? And the answer is no.
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God doesn’t change and the law didn’t change but you changed, but we changed, but
the people changed and they conceive of a new conception of God. That’s why, to
mention again, Menachem Mendel said at this famous -- why do you say in your
prayers, Elohei Avraham, Elohei Yitzchak, Elohei Yakov? Why do you say repeating it
each time to have you understand that Abraham did not have the same conception of
God, that Isaac had or that Jacob had.
Kaplan summed it up in one quotation that, I think, is very important, and it relates to
the introduction of me. He said, “The past has a vote but no vito,” very important. We
are living in a time in which the past has not only vote but veto, and that’s the death of
our people. So it was Kook who said when he wanted to bless the Jewish people,
“Hayashan yit-hadesh vehahadash yitkadesh, may the old be renewed and may the
new be sanctified.” I think that’s our task, it’s a big task, but if it’s going to happen, our
problems is not going to be around. Our problem is going to be political. Our problem
is internal. And we have to know. And to know is to love. I don’t need to go out and to
fight.
Somewhere in a book I think I have mentioned a metaphor that I liked, and I’ll quote it
because nobody else will . Judaism is like a sliding window. If the window is shut
tight, it suffocate. If the window remains open tight, you become so cold from the
blistering winds that comes from outside and you’ll freeze. Judaism has to be a sliding
window. You have to understand how great we are, and that when we are less than
great -- because times change, because people change. When we have that sliding
door, we’ve lived, and our children will love us.
Rabbi Feinstein: How have you changed?
Rabbi Schulweis: Ho, ho, ho . You want to hear the dialogue between myself and the
doctor?
Rabbi Feinstein: No. I want to hear the dialogue between yourself and yourself.
Rabbi Harold Schulweis: I think that I’m a little more mellow than I was when I was
younger, that I understand the pendulum of Judaism which swings to the liberal, to the
conservative. But I think in the last analysis is what brought me to Judaism in the first
place. What am I if my tradition does not encourage in me initiative and strength and
heroism? Whom do I, in fact, idealize, but can those people able to standup against
prince, against principality, against kings, against priest, and even against what
someone said that is what God said? That’s who I am. That’s what I like in myself.
And I want you to know that when I don’t do it, and there are a lot times that I don’t do
it because we’re all human beings, it saddens me, I mourn. You can’t ask your
children, your sons and daughters to be so Jewish and teach them so little, and teach
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them not -- kids are brave, adults are brave, all people are brave. We want to have
something to stand for. I found that in Judaism. And that’s the only thing that makes
sense for me.
Rabbi Feinstein: Thank you.
Rabbi Harold Schulweis: A pleasure.
[AUDIO ENDS] [VBS-College-of-Jewish-Studies-Feinstein-Schulweis-Genesis.mp3]
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