A Heart of Many Rooms
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Despite his idealism and love of Israel, right up to his final writings Rabbi Hartman believed Israel to have fallen short of realizing the fullness of this historic opportunity. Both within its own borders and to Jews around the world, not only had Israel failed to provide an expansive and inclusive Jewish home, but had in many cases come to do just the opposite. With great sadness, Hartman described in his final book the case of an immigrant to Israel, who after enlisting in the IDF made the ultimate sacrifice, giving his life as a member of the Tank Corps. The Israeli rabbinate denied him burial in a Jewish cemetery, having discovered that although he lived Jewishly, one of his grandmothers back in the Ukraine had not been Jewish. An ultra-Orthodox rabbinate populated by non-Zionist rabbis who openly reject the reality of Israel within Jewish law publicly denied this soldier’s identity.
Is it any wonder Hartman asks, in an Israel providing this sort of religious leadership, that so many Israelis reject Jewishness altogether? The behavior of secular Israelis living in North America is emblematic, Hartman wrote. They live largely as alienated outsiders to the Jewish community, “eating falafel and reading Hebrew language newspapers.” With religious education and expression given over to the ultra-Orthodox, is it surprising that a viable religious center has struggled to emerge?
Most recently and most painfully, the matter of conversion is now playing out in Israel and across the Jewish world. Israel’s Ministry of the Interior, in the hands of the chief rabbinate, has made the galling decision to question the status of all conversions taking place outside of Israel – not Reform, not Conservative, but all conversions – effectively disenfranchising all of Diaspora Jewry. Hartman was an advisor to prime ministers, but he never shied away from speaking truth to power. “You must realize,” he once said to a prime minister,” that as prime minister you have two constituencies, one that relates to you politically – that votes in the elections … and another that relates to you out of spiritual need and concern …” Hartman was an Orthodox Jew, but he understood that when Israel delegitimizes Conservative and Reform Jews, it betrays a total lack of understanding of the important meaning of Israel in our lives. In his own words “If you believe I am treif in Jerusalem, how can you believe I am kosher in New York or Chicago?” What is going on in Israel is far bigger than just the Women at the Wall. Israel is not only the site of the ingathering of exiles, but the spiritual center of a wide and diverse Jewish people. Israel represents the opportunity to give voice to thousands of years of Jewish yearning, and maybe more importantly, to give expression to the aspirations of millions of Jews today.
Despite his lifetime focus on the nature of religious Zionism, Hartman’s ability to shape Israeli discourse was far more limited than you may think; like many iconoclasts, in some respects he is a towering figure without a shadow. In a discourse better suited for sound bites, that puts party politics over subtlety, the complexities of Hartman’s positions did not always find a ready home. His writings on Israel are undoubtedly better known to an English-speaking audience than to a Hebrew-speaking one. Nevertheless, as his student Micah Goodman generously stated this past week, it may simply be the case that Hartman’s only fault was not of his doing – namely, that he was a man ahead of his time. While decades ago Hartman’s middle ground Judaism may not have fit in with the prevailing mood, the times may be changing. Goodman suggests that Hartman’s passionate and inclusive Torah of exacting intellectual integrity may yet find reception among secular Israelis open to Jewish exploration as well as among religious Jews not threatened by engagement with the outside world. Certainly here in this room, when it comes to Hartman we can all yearn for the day when the heresies of yesterday become the Orthodoxy (literally) of tomorrow.
Rabbi Hartman was fond of citing a Tosefta in Sotah, of which the punchline is the title of one of his books. The Tosefta describes the house of Hillel and the house of Shammai sharply disagreeing on matters of Jewish law, and the text asks: if the Torah is given by a single God, provided by a single Shepherd, how is it the case that there exist such differing interpretations? And the text answers, “Make yourself a heart of many rooms and bring into it the words of the house of Shammai and the words of the house of Hillel.” In other words, Hartman explained, a Jew must strive to be a “person in whom different opinions can reside together…who can feel religious conviction and passion with the need for simplicity and absolute certainty.” (A Heart of Many Rooms, 21)
Haval al d'avdin v’la mishtak·hin, “Alas for those who are gone, and are no longer to be found." (B.T. Sanhedrin 111a) With the passing of Rabbi Hartman, the Jewish world has lost a unique figure, and we know that his life work remains incomplete and yet it is also the case that the example of his Torah can and must transcend the limit of his years. Not just each of our hearts, but the heart of the people and state of Israel, like the Mishkan itself, must be configured with “many rooms,” the singular divine presence accommodating a multiplicity of views. May it be God’s will that the Torah of Hartman will continue to be found in all of them and continue to blossom for generations to come.