A Heart of Many Rooms

I do not know if Rabbi David Hartman ever spoke at Park Avenue Synagogue, but I do know that his Torah is taught here every day. Rabbi Hartman passed away at the age of 81 on Sunday in Jerusalem, following a long illness. By any metric – his scholarship, the institutions he shaped, the disciples he inspired – Rabbi Hartman’s impact on contemporary Jewish life is immeasurable and will assuredly only grow in the years to come. His journey took him from the Brownsville section of Brooklyn to ordination under Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik at Yeshiva University, to serving as a pulpit Rabbi in the Bronx and in Montreal, to his doctorate in Philosophy at McGill, to making aliyah in 1971, and on to establishing a research center and two high schools in Jerusalem bearing the Hartman name. Rabbi Hartman’s life represents a remarkable snapshot of Jewish history. I am personally grateful for having had the opportunity to study at the Hartman Institute as a participant in the North American Scholars Circle. Our own Rabbi Zuckerman, who participated in the 3-year intensive Rabbinic Leadership Institute, knows himself to be shaped by the thought of Rabbi Hartman. I cannot claim to have had a close relationship with Rabbi Hartman, having met him only after his condition had already begun to decline. I am grateful for his classes in which I sat and I will forever treasure the one meal we shared, during which he grilled me on my doctoral work on Rabbi Louis Jacobs. I recall sensing that Jacobs’ journey from the heart of the yeshiva, from Orthodoxy’s defender to its critic, shared an arc with Rabbi Hartman’s own story. While the two men were different in many respects, both possessed an unflinching intellectual integrity combined with passionate religious faith and love for Israel and humanity.

Rabbi Hartman’s impact on my own thinking is anchored in the first thing I read bearing his name, an essay that even decades later I recall reading with great excitement. The piece is entitled “The Third Jewish Commonwealth,” and the subject is the religious significance of the modern State of Israel. Embedded in this essay – as with so much of Hartman’s writing – there is an autobiographical element. Hartman arrived in Israel in 1971 as part of a generation of Zionists inspired by the Israeli victory in the Six Day War of 1967. That stunning victory, as much as – if not more than – the actual birth of the State in 1948, resulted in a generation of Israelis wondering aloud if the Zionist revolution was not an expression of God’s providential hand. In the messianic fervor of the day, the modern Jewish state was seen as a sign of the long awaited prophetic promise of redemption.

To a certain degree, Hartman’s legacy may be understood as an attempt to steer between the unacceptable options that Israeli society offered in response to this historic moment of which he was part. To name but a few: there were secularists who understood living in Israel to obviate any need for Jewish life and living. In other words, the whole point of Zionism was so that Jews could become “like all the nations,” a process of normalization whereby the mere act of living in the land equals if not supersedes all the other mitzvot. At the same time, there were the National Religious parties who saw a messianic dimension to the political state of Israel – a manifest destiny, if you will – that after thousands of years of Diaspora existence, Israel is the Jewish people’s triumphant reentry into history. With the Bible as our guide, the actions of the state are justifiable by recourse to the highest religious authority – God. And then there are those Jews, such as the anti-Zionist Haredim, who despite the fact that they live in the State of Israel assign it no more significance than if they were living in Florida, Wisconsin or Kathmandu. Or finally, Rabbi Hartman’s bête noir, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who similarly, albeit for entirely different reasons, refused to assign any religious significance to the State of Israel.

From that essay which I first read decades ago, through his final book in 2012, which I had the honor of reviewing, Hartman eschewed these options as unacceptable, offering an inspired alternative. To him, Israel represented “opportunity.” For thousands of years, Diaspora Jewish life took shape with neither the blessings nor the responsibilities of a sovereign state. The political conditions of the Jewish people meant that Judaism was limited to certain spheres – spheres designed to preserve and protect Jewish life in an exilic and often hostile environment, such as the laws of shabbat and kashrut. But once it was established, Israel represented an opportunity to ask and instantiate what it would look like if Jews were responsible for creating their own society. What does a Jewish health care system looks like? How do we apply the sabbatical laws of sh’mitah when Jews tend their own farms? Should buses in a Jewish state drive on the Sabbath? In Hartman’s mind, the existence of Israel demands a new Jewish agenda filled with new and often prickly questions. What does a Jewish education look like when there is no normative consensus on what Jewish life should look like? How do we treat the strangers in our midst, when we are in the driver’s seat in making that determination? What does feminism look like in a western democracy infused with Jewish values? Difficult as these questions were and continue to be, for Hartman they represented opportunities, opportunities for exploration, experimentation and implementation. As Rousseau wrote in Emile a century before Herzl, “I will never believe that I have heard what it is that the Jews have to say until they have a state of their own.” (As quoted in Daniel Gordis, The Promise of Israel). For Hartman, the State of Israel was one big challenging opportunity for the Jewish people to move beyond what had hitherto been strictly hypothetical. In Hartman’s own words “If a moral message will emanate from Jerusalem, it will result not from what we say, but what we do.” (A Living Covenant, 297) It is both the joy and the responsibility of the Jewish nation to bridge the biblical and Talmudic understanding of Jewish politics with the needs and aspirations of a modern democratic liberal society, to dream what it would look like to take that dream and make it a reality.

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.