Of all the virtues to be drawn from the Genesis story of creation, perhaps the most obvious and most overlooked came to me by way of one of the final articles shared with me by my doctoral advisor Paul Mendes-Flohr, z”l, who died in Jerusalem this past week at the age of 83.
For those of you who don’t know, after rabbinical school I studied at the University of Chicago, eventually earning a PhD from its Divinity School. In German, one’s thesis advisor is called Doktorvater, literally, the father of your doctorate, a title that signals the well-nigh paternal role a faculty supervisor plays in bringing a student’s thesis to life. Paul Mendes-Flohr was mine. While I was not his first, final, or finest student, Paul’s personal, intellectual, and spiritual mentorship shaped me into the rabbi, erstwhile aspiring scholar, and person that I am today. Paul’s stamp of approval is on my thesis, but he provided much more than that. He left his imprimatur on my very being, teaching me how to think, write, and most of all, believe in myself.
In the weeks, months, and years to come, I am sure there will be no shortage of tributes, symposia and festschrifts in Paul’s honor. In light of his passing, I have decided to dedicate my Tuesday morning post-minyan class to his memory, devoting the year to exploring Paul’s writing and thought. The class begins this week; you are all invited, in person or online.
Paul was his generation’s most preeminent scholar of Modern Jewish Thought – an authority on Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem, Leo Strauss, and so many others. His writing probed the disorienting perplexities of the modern Jewish condition. He asked the big questions: how to balance our secular and religious identities, our particular and universal commitments, Zionism and diaspora Jewish identity; the ongoing challenges of the Enlightenment and Emancipation; the condition of Jewish belief in the shadow of the Holocaust; the dream of Jewish sovereignty and the Palestinian aspiration for the same; and so, so, much more. Paul spent most of his career on the faculty of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and then had an appointment at the University of Chicago, where I studied with him. His essays, books, and anthologies are, quite literally, required reading in any course in Modern Jewish Thought, and his students occupy positions of academic leadership in Jewish Studies departments across the globe.
For me, it is a badge of honor to be known as one of Paul’s students, and I did my best to keep the relationship going long after I finished up in Chicago. Whenever I visited Jerusalem, as I did this past summer, I made a point to see Paul, catch up on family, and most of all, speak of our shared love and concern for the Jewish people. He would tell me what he was working on, and by the time I arrived back at my computer, he had already emailed me copies of his most recent lectures, essays, and outlines. One of the final documents Paul sent to me – and here we return to this morning’s Torah reading – was notes from a recent lecture he presented to a Danish academic conference on the subject of the critically important and oft overlooked virtue of hospitality.
Beginning with an epigraph from the Austrian-Jewish novelist Joseph Roth stating, “Hospitality is among the noblest proofs of humanity,” Paul’s lecture takes its cue from the biblical scene of the patriarch Abraham sitting in the heat of the day at the entrance of his tent. (Genesis 18:1–8). As God appeared to Abraham, three travelers approached and Abraham jumped to his feet to greet them, washed their tired feet, and together with Sarah, fed them. Noting Abraham’s exemplary behavior, the rabbis of old conclude that the act of welcoming the stranger – hospitality, called hakhnassat orhim in Hebrew – is a deed akin to, if not greater than, welcoming the divine presence itself. Paul’s lecture, which reads as much as a spiritual meditation as it does an academic paper, surveys the rituals, liturgies, and literatures of various traditions on the importance of welcoming the stranger. As Jews, for instance, we begin our Passover seder, with ha lachma anya, welcoming all those in need of a place. Polish nobility, not unlike Jews, received guests with bread and salt, literally “breaking bread,” as do Russians, an act of hospitality that takes it cue from the Christian textual tradition. The Koine Greek term for hospitality is philoxenia, denoting affection (philos) for the stranger (xenos). Paul sets out a hierarchy of hospitality, the highest rung being the hospitality extended not just to family and friends – those with whom we share ethnicity, ideology, faith, and station in life – but to those with whom we do not. As the philosopher Kant stipulated, hospitality to the stranger is the essential condition for the attainment of universal fraternity and “eternal peace.” In Paul’s words, “Abraham’s solicitous hospitality to the stranger exemplified agapeic love, a hospitality of the heart that supersedes the constraints of one’s symbolic culture and the borders that divide the human family.”
It is all pretty heady stuff, and yes, being Paul’s student meant that one always kept a thesaurus nearby, his felicitous prose serving to raise up both his ideas and his reader. But on this Shabbat morning of B’reishit, we know that Paul’s reflections on the importance of hospitality are rooted in the opening chapters of the Genesis story. The creation story can be read in so many different ways: a tale of cosmic beginnings, a comment on the infinite dignity of a humanity created in the divine image, or a meditation on human agency and moral conduct. The creation story is all those things, but at its essence, it is a story of welcoming, of hakhnassat orhim. In six days, God created the heavens and the earth. The story could have ended there, and in some ancient Near Eastern creation stories, it does. But that is not what happens in the Torah. The final act of creation describes God inviting humanity to fill the earth, and then, as Genesis chapter two explains, to till and tend that earth. The Garden of Eden itself is a symbol of divine hospitality: sustenance, abundance, and most of all, welcoming. There are responsibilities and rules – this story, we know, will have its ups and downs – but at its simplest and sacred core, the story of Genesis is a tale of hospitality, of a celestial host who chooses to open up the divine abode to those seeking shelter. By a certain telling, the unfolding story of humanity to this very day tracks our behavior as guests on this earth and the degree to which we ourselves extend that model of divine hospitality towards others.
Once named, this thread of hospitality can be seen woven everywhere into the biblical narrative – in its fulfillment and its breach. There is, as noted, the hospitality of Abraham and Sarah. There is the hospitality extended by Abraham’s nephew to the angels in the wicked city of Sodom. There is Rebecca who generously offers to water the camels of Abraham’s servant at the well. There is Jethro who provides hospitality to his future son-in-law Moses, who has fled from the house of Pharoah. Show me a biblical hero, and I’ll show you an act of hakhnassat orhim – of hospitality. Show me a biblical antihero, and I’ll show you the opposite, be it the wicked residents of Sodom, Laban’s change of heart toward his son-in-law Jacob, Jacob’s sons selling their brother Joseph into slavery, or Pharaoh’s inability to countenance the children of Israel in Egypt. From the Garden to Noah onboarding animals into the ark two-by-two to Rahab offering shelter to the Israelite spies, the virtue of hospitality is the litmus test for biblical nobility.
And hospitality is a mitzvah, a commandment, that is not just about physical welcoming – offering a person a meal or a place to sleep – but spiritual welcome. In our own psychological, social, and spiritual spheres, to be hospitable means to make room for people different than us, with ideas unlike our own and needs and priorities that may not be ours. Abraham was able to welcome the stranger – a bar to which we should all aspire – but we also need to welcome the strange, the different, and the dissimilar. A spiritual posture capable of expressing sympathy and empathy for another human being. A willingness to let the membrane of our spiritual shell be sufficiently porous or capacious to include the concerns of another, even, and especially, when that person’s needs differ from our own. A hospitality of the heart – the highest expression of spiritual grandeur.
Perhaps more than any subject about which he wrote, Paul was drawn to the towering figure of Martin Buber, a scholarly devotion that undoubtedly said as much about Paul as it did about Buber. I still remember where I was when Paul shared the story of how Buber became Buber. It was the summer of 1914, when a young man sought Buber out, as did many, for his counsel. A kind man, Buber greeted the youth, entertained his questions, and ended the meeting without incident. In the following weeks, Buber learned that the young man’s visit had been anything but casual. He had visited, in Buber’s words, “not for a chat, but for a decision.” Buber discovered that soon after their meeting, the young man had taken his own life. Shaken to his core, Buber chastised himself for not having seen the young man’s loneliness, for having failed to make room for the anxious soul before him and provide welcome. Buber underwent what he would later call a “conversion.” No longer was religious experience to be defined by extraction, exaltation, and ecstasy. Buber understood that the greatest religious deed one can perform is to open oneself to another in true dialogue. Buber went on to write “I and Thou,” one of the greatest theological meditations of all time, in which he contends, amongst other things, that “all real living is meeting.”
And it is this spirit of hospitality, from the Garden of Eden through the Bible, into rabbinic literature, and through Buber, by which Paul’s passions and priorities can be understood. In more essays and conversations than I can count, Paul quoted the Robert Frost poem “Mending Wall,” a poem which you may remember from high school, that begins with the speaker exclaiming, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” Walls used to wall things in, walls used to wall things out, be it animals across a property line, a carton of eggs shared between roommates, or people or ideas seeking to coexist in a world disinclined to make room for others. It was a theme woven into Paul’s scholarship, the stories he told, the poems he quoted and most of all, the manner by which he lived. Devoted Zionist that Paul was, he held a lifelong commitment for shared Arab-Jewish coexistence, a belief that if we could somehow spend less time putting up walls and more time making space for each other, listening to each other’s claims and counterclaims with a spirit of respectful dialogue, then maybe we can find a way to share this world.
Finally, I would be remiss if I failed to point out that this spirit of welcoming characterized not just Paul’s scholarship and politics, but how he lived in the rough-edged and often inhospitable world of academia. In a tough moment of my own scholarly development, when more doors were closing than opening, Paul offered me a warm refuge, took a chance on me, and welcomed me as a student to supervise – an act of hakhnassat orchim, for which I am ever indebted and seek to pay forward every day of my life.
I met with Paul this past summer as our schedules permitted; however, the last time I saw him – forever, as it turns out – was unplanned. I was walking through the streets of Jerusalem enroute to my summer fellowship when I came across Paul sitting on a bench on the corner of HaZefira and Klein. He was waiting for his ride to take him to a doctor’s appointment. Ever a sheyner yid, he shimmied over, making room for me on the bench, invited me to sit next to him, and proceeded to ask me about Debbie, the kids, and how my writing was going. We sat together on that bench that day, kibbitzing – minutes with the feel of eternity – until his ride arrived. I helped him into the car, and we waved goodbye.
I grieve for the loss of my teacher, mentor, and friend. But if I had to pick a parting image to comfort me, I could not pick a better one. We all need to learn to shimmy over physically and spiritually, making room for each other. There is always space to welcome another and be in dialogue. It is the divine bar to which we aspire, arguably since the beginning – the very, very beginning. A hospitality of the heart that will contribute toward bridging the divisions of our time and bring healing to our broken world, and in so doing, ensure that the life and legacy of my teacher, Professor Paul Mendes-Flohr, will be for an eternal blessing.
