What Happened to Jewish Pluralism?
Yehuda Kurtzer
Yehuda Kurtzer is President of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America and co-editor of The New Jewish Canon
The heyday during which pluralism ruled in many arenas of organized Jewish life appears now to have passed. For reasons that go beyond the sentimental or the personal, I believe this abandonment of pluralism to be a mistake.
As a high school student, I went on two teen tours to Israel, in consecutive summers. In the summer of 1992, after my 10th grade year, I traveled to Israel on an Orthodox Jewish trip under the auspices of the religious Zionist youth movement, accompanied by some two-hundred peers divided across four buses. In those heady pre-Birthright days, this kind of trip was a common experience for affiliated and engaged American Jewish teens, who tended to divide into different programs across denominational or other ideological lines. We often met up with other programs at an archaeological site or along a hiking trail. Then, in the summer of 1993, after 11th grade, I was accepted into the Bronfman Youth Fellowships, with twenty-five other peers all on one bus, united in a single, academically-oriented program across denominational and ideological lines.
This unusual experience of the two back-to-back trips offered not-quite-laboratory conditions to compare the two experiences; and what I learned from that comparison proved to be formative to me in ways that linger to this day in my Jewish choices and identity. I had expected the Orthodox trip to be the fulfillment of my ideological dreams. I proudly identified with the ideology of the movement, religious and Zionist in all the right ways; I updated a map with sticker-dots all summer as I learned from our travels about the land of Israel, mindful of the ways that our zig-zagging bus was enabling us to live up to God’s injunction to Abraham in Genesis 13: “up and travel about the land.” But the trip was socially alienating and religiously devastating. I was overwhelmed by the sex, drugs, and drinking that were not part of my blessedly sheltered Orthodox upbringing. Those of us who woke up on time for minyan or paid attention to the tour guides were objects of derision. I made a few friends but returned home bewildered. Was this my community?
The second summer, in contrast, came as a revelation. Being one of four or five Orthodox kids created its own challenges; but I found a community of peers enamored with learning, curious about one another, engaged in self-discovery, and ultimately invested in the project into which we were being inducted and coached – the building of an intentional, pluralistic community. We were guided by a faculty that featured rabbis ordained at HUC-JIR, the Reform seminary; the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College; privately by Rabbi Zalman Schacter-Shalomi; and by the Israeli Chief Rabbinate. We studied Talmud, Maimonides, Israeli poetry, and more about the land of Israel with more critical perspectives than I was comfortable with. We met Israeli intellectuals on all sides of the political spectrum – this was the summer just before the Oslo Accords! – and we argued. I most remember a debate at a Shabbat dinner about religious ritual and who would and wouldn’t be included if it was led by an Orthodox man or a non-Orthodox woman. And still, we forged a sense of community: hot, enthusiastic, passionate community – not born of affinity, but out of something that reflected a lot of what we all wanted and some measure of what we all needed.
“I still find myself far more enchanted by the possibilities and provocations offered by pluralistic community than by the comforts provided by ideological community.”
Even as I went on to formative educational experiences in extraordinary Orthodox institutions, I draw a straight line from that second summer experience to my return several years later to teach on the Bronfman program, to my growth as an educator in other pluralistic frameworks, and to my work now at the helm of the (pluralistic) Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. I have never really left or betrayed most of the religious and ideological commitments of my youth – on some matters I have evolved in my thinking or practice, on others I have watched my community drift. But I still find myself far more enchanted by the possibilities and provocations offered by pluralistic community than by the comforts provided by ideological community. I am certain that on this front I am not alone, and that this experience tracks with many more individuals than could have possibly been included in more than three decades of the selective Bronfman program.
I knew at the time that I was part of something unusual in that program which was still in its nascence (it was founded in 1987.) I did not understand at the time, however, that I was coming of age during a major ideological, political, and institutional turn in American Jewish life – a vast investment in the ideas and infrastructure of Jewish pluralism as a means for the American Jewish community to address what many perceived then as its existential challenges.
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Jewish pluralism dominated the Jewish communal economy in the 1980s. A large network of educational institutions either were founded or grew enormously during this time. Think tanks and educational centers like The Shalom Hartman Institute and Pardes in Israel and CLAL in America aimed their programming towards “leaders,” and thus created an ideological ripple effect in the larger Jewish community. A vast number of “community day schools” offered a communitarian alternative to denominational schools, as well as an umbrella organization (RAVSAK) to sustain them. The Wexner Foundation’s programs for lay and professional Jewish leaders, the aforementioned Bronfman Youth Fellowships, and the Dorot Fellowship each widened the circles of those ripples. At the same time, Hillel saw major growth on college campuses, attained autonomy from B’nai Brith, and built its International Center in Washington, DC. Under the leadership of Richard Joel, an Orthodox Jew who embraced the pluralistic ethos of Hillel and partnered with Edgar Bronfman to remake the Hillel system, Hillel’s massive expansion professionalized the field of Hillel executive leaders away from the earlier model of idiosyncratic/charismatic (and usually Orthodox) rabbinic leader, in an overt effort to reach and engage as many Jewish students as possible (instead of foregoing efforts to create intense community for the highly engaged minority).1
In the decades that followed the first great pluralism push, other pluralistic institutions emerged: a pluralistic rabbinical school at Hebrew College in Boston; the non-pluralistic but decidedly post-denominational Hadar Institute, founded by alumni of many of these institutions; the expansion of the Shalom Hartman Institute in North America. With these institutions, the infrastructure for pluralistic Jewish education, formerly catering exclusively to young adults, “aged up.” The philanthropic economy driving this growth was, and continues to be, enormous—and enormously interconnected.
TWIN ARCHITECTS
In the “ideas economy” that fueled this institutional economy, two thinkers stand out as the twin, if independent, architects of the ideology of Jewish pluralism: Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg and Rabbi David Hartman. The two knew each other well but operated independently and in parallel for many years, Greenberg in America and Hartman in Israel from the time of his immigration there in the 1970s until his death in 2013. They were also personally connected to the growth of many of the aforementioned institutions, either as teachers of the individuals who would go on to found such institutions or in some cases as active leaders in them.
But as thinkers, Greenberg and Hartman approached pluralism from very different readings of Jewish history and sociology. Greenberg took the Shoah as the point of origin. Following the totalitarianism that brought about the Shoah, he argued, any commitment to “absolute truth” reflected a capitulation to totalitarian truth claims. In his essay “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire,” he famously wrote that the sight of “burning children” forced even the most pious believer to reckon with the possibility of God’s absence.2 In his essay "Theology after the Shoah: The Transformation of the Core Paradigm," he added that pluralism is therefore “the living together of absolute truths/faiths/systems that have come to know and accept their own limitations, thus making room for the dignity and truth of the other.”3 Greenberg’s pluralism then might be encapsulated as a kind of awareness of brokenness as an essential element of the human condition, and the building of relationships with other human beings in order to pursue truth in the world. We can discern a theological – and characteristically American postwar – pragmatism in this theology.
David Hartman, in contrast, expressed skepticism throughout his career toward an overreliance on the Shoah as an anchor for Jewish theology. He feared that a victim-consciousness would undercut personal responsibility, especially for the State of Israel, and therefore advocated instead a covenantal consciousness to guide the Jewish people in its theology and politics – contrasting the paradigm of “Sinai” to that of “Auschwitz.” But he too argued for pluralism, grounded in the promise of Zionism and the opportunity offered by a sovereign Jewish state with a Jewish public square. Hartman believed that Zionism made an empirical claim on Jewish religious conviction: religious Jews who benefited from the building of the Jewish state owed a debt to secular Jews and secularism, who – thanks to the gifts of secularity and enlightenment – were able to build a nation-state in ways that religious Jews alone could not. Hartman also recognized the sheer possibility of continuity in a secular Jewish state as a radical new truth of Jewish existence. In the Diaspora, he noted, a religious Jew might scoff at a secular Jew because the former had a better chance of generationally outliving the latter. Not so in the State of Israel. Secularity, in other words, forced the religious Jew in Israel to engage, however reluctantly, a worldview that competed with his own.4
This alone might have led to modest pluralism. But the State of Israel also represented for Hartman an unprecedented opportunity to create a genuine marketplace of ideas for the Jewish people, a vibrant, pluralistic society that could represent the Jewish people’s highest aspirations for itself. Thus Jewish peoplehood, for all its messiness, anchored a far more serious and engaging doctrine of pluralism. If Greenberg implicitly relied on Isaiah Berlin’s fear of totalitarianism to make the case for his pluralism, Hartman looked to J.S. Mill and William James in designing his own.
“Yitz Greenberg and David Hartman each denied that by being pluralists they were relativists.”
Even as they pursued pluralistic pathways, both Hartman and Greenberg lived and identified as Orthodox Jews. Unsurprisingly, both were accused by their co-denominationalists of advocating a pluralism that betrayed Orthodox doctrines. Though Greenberg and Hartman each denied that by being pluralists they were relativists, both were concerned about the insinuation. Greenberg responded by distinguishing between believing in the possibilities for truth that one doesn’t yet possess and living without conviction. In his hawkish politics on Israel, he demonstrated (and continues to argue) that even if you remain suspicious of absolute truth claims you can still think you are right – even if not 100% right – and hold passionately to your convictions. Hartman, meanwhile, argued that one of the advantages of a commitment to pluralism is that it provides the believer with opportunity to convince others that you are right!
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One element of this Orthodox criticism was an omen of things to come: Hartman and Greenberg were briefly joined in the pluralism camp by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Britain's chief rabbi, who would in many ways supplant the two American-born thinkers as the chief public Jewish intellectual of his time, but who soon distanced himself from this commitment to pluralism. Sacks originally made a full-throated case for Jewish pluralism; under criticism, he shifted towards an attenuated “inclusivism.”5
Even as the Shoah and the State of Israel were essential drivers of Greenberg and Hartman’s commitments to pluralism, neither thinker entirely derived their ideas from these historic events. In fact, both tried to locate pluralism as a critical feature of the classical rabbinic tradition. In articulating Jewish pluralism, they were bringing to the surface a feature of the rabbinic tradition that they saw as essential to its very identity and that was newly relevant for the modern age. This entailed elevating a particular canon of rabbinic texts – those that emphasized the essential quality of debate “for the sake of heaven” in the rabbinic academies, that envisioned heavenly voices declaring that two competing views could both be “words of the living God,” and which valorized democratic norms as the means of establishing both truth and peace. This selective use of Jewish texts to emphasize a particular set of ideas represented a form of ideological advocacy using the tradition as well as on behalf of the tradition. Emphasizing these voices in the rabbinic canon also generated a widespread belief that rabbinic ideas of pluralism were emblematic of that canon.
We can draw a straight line from this hermeneutical strategy to the widespread use of the Talmud in non-orthodox, non-normative Jewish educational settings: the emphasis on its ideological heterogeneity, the culture of debate, and the idea of the legitimacy of multiple viewpoints are all Talmudic ideas, but they are extrapolated to make a larger cultural argument about the Talmud. In turn, studying Talmud – and these selections of Talmud in particular – connects the (presumably) pluralistic ideas of the learner with the very activity in which they are engaged.
It is no coincidence that a similar conversation about rabbinic pluralism was at the same time just getting underway in academic scholarship. The late 1970s and 1980s saw massive growth in rabbinics scholarship in American Jewish studies, especially at the Mishnaic stratum, driven in no small part by the prolific output of Jacob Neusner and his training and placement of his students in university positions. (A Google ngram search shows a massive spike in the use of the word “Mishnah” between 1980-1990.) In "The Significance of Yavneh: Pharisees, Rabbis, and the End of Jewish Sectarianism," an influential article about Yavneh and the formation of the rabbinic project, Shaye Cohen (then at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and now at Harvard) wrote that “the major contribution of Yavneh to Jewish history” was “the creation of a society which tolerates disputes without producing sects.” For the first time, Jews “agreed to disagree.”6 Other scholars contested Cohen’s chronology, but one thing is clear: this characteristic of rabbinic culture was being interrogated in the academy at the same time that an industry was growing around it in the Jewish community.
Neither Greenberg nor Hartman advanced Jewish pluralism in some sort of ideological vacuum. I listed above Berlin, Mill, and James as influences on Greenberg and Hartman. But pluralism as an idea – as a characteristic of post-war American democracy, as an instrument for the advancement of civil rights, as an essential vehicle for rethinking interfaith acrimony – was rising in the public conversation as well. Hannah Arendt’s Human Condition (1958) had stipulated “plurality” as a driver and a constraint of human action; Michael Walzer (a frequent interlocutor of Hartman) made the case for liberal pluralism in his 1983 book Spheres of Justice; Diana Eck founded the Pluralism Project at Harvard in 1991. In fact, much of the previous story about Hartman and Greenberg’s commitments to pluralism could be written without reference at all to the particulars of the Jewish condition: pluralism, if not always under that moniker, described a way of thinking about what worked in America in the second half of the twentieth century – a regulative constraint on democracy, an instrument for productive heterogeneity, a hearkening back to Horace Kallen and Louis Brandeis as a vision for how particular communities could both embrace the American project and be embraced by it. The horrors of the Second World War had stimulated a great deal of interfaith curiosity – both Greenberg and Hartman were active in these circles – and “religious pluralism” entered into this discursive space as well. We might well see Hartman and Greenberg’s “Jewish pluralism” as a particularization into Jewish theology of a dominant postwar idea and its application both as a tool to excavate the rabbinic tradition, and as a means of reshaping Jewish communal priorities.
Two recognitions, however, drove Jewish pluralism from a fringe ideology into the mainstream, and from a theoretical discourse into the fabric of Jewish communal life. First, the denominations in America were flailing in their efforts to keep American Jews as institutionally organized as the leaders of those denominations wanted them to be. Second, American Jews sensed a new and urgent need for an organizing system that would be both ideologically and practically committed to the idea of inclusion. The 1990 National Jewish Population Survey alarmed American Jews with its findings that the known trends towards intermarriage and “assimilation” were weakening attachment to community and to continuity, and that no intervention had succeeded at turning the tide. The resulting panic generated two opposite trends. On the one hand, a resurgent Orthodoxy, bucking the demographic trends, would now be boosted by data towards a triumphalism vis-a-vis the other denominations that persists until now and that spurred the creation of the “outreach” movement. On the other hand, a rising commitment to Jewish pluralism would construct larger tents for Jewish communal life, fortified by a theology and ideology that turned inclusion from capitulation to difference into an embrace thereof. If American Jews were drifting away from liberal denominations, pluralism (replacing narrow belonging with capacious belonging) was envisioned as an antidote. At this pivotal moment, when Jewish philanthropic dollars were turning towards “Jewish identity,” pluralism provided a non-Orthodox solution to the identity crisis.
THE TRAPS AND TRAPPINGS OF PLURALISM
Let’s fast forward a generation to the present. Many of the institutions founded and fueled by the Jewish community’s late twentieth-century embrace of Jewish pluralism are still thriving (the Shalom Hartman Institute included). On the institutional side, there has not (yet) been a significant free-fall. But I believe that the ideological foundations of Jewish pluralism are teetering, and that this imminent collapse portends far more pressing challenges for the American Jewish community and its future.
Before I sketch out some examples, we need to consider critiques of the Hartman/Greenberg doctrine of pluralism. The first critique maintains that pluralism offers an insufficient response to moral injustice. Pluralists will claim that a commitment to community is itself a moral commitment, especially in times of polarization. But even so, severe injustice sometimes requires the kind of moral clarity which forces the severing of community, regardless of how carefully that community is constituted across difference. Abraham Joshua Heschel, for instance, was committed to the ideal of religious pluralism as an anchor for interfaith dialogue and as an epistemological commitment. But at the same time, Heschel coined the term – and the idea – of “no time for neutrality” to describe the kinds of political processes in pursuit of justice that might jeopardize or alienate one’s fellow travelers in pluralistic community.7 We see this tension on display in the rise of certain forms of political organizing in the Jewish community – especially on the Jewish left – that regard forms of consensus-based Jewish politics as a capitulation to complicity on issues that they argue require a more full-throated expression of moral clarity. Whatever the reasons for this rise of the discourse of moral clarity, a commitment to pluralism – the acknowledging of multiple truths, or even the effort to construct community across difference – is increasingly viewed as either a luxury item, or an avoidance strategy from the real work of moral responsibility.
This is especially the case in a political and ideological climate in which the very idea of truth comes under attack. There are more factors driving this assault on truth than we can name, including the “siloization” of news and information through social media algorithms, the manipulation of information by political opportunists, and the ideological polarization in the media industry, to name a few. But precisely because people do not trust one another to be telling the truth, the moral stakes of the imperative to pursue truth are higher than ever. And this in turn lowers the passions that people may feel for ideas like pluralism. Until and unless pluralism remains committed to the pursuit of truth, its commitment to epistemological humility looks like a restraint on truth at the very time when truth must be defended.
This brings us to a second critique: Rebecca Traister and others maintain that calls for pluralism tend to favor those who are already powerful and entrench the status quo. Communities that originate as heterogenous and pluralistic often homogenize across difference over time. A dynamic community of difference becomes tamer; we know each other’s viewpoints, and we may have either adjusted our own in response or learned to avoid difference. Over time, pluralistic communities figure out how to eat/pray/work/love with one another. Once reified and handed down to the next generation, pluralism can itself become a hegemonic doctrine. Those who dissent from hegemonic norms are forced to rebel against the very pluralistic infrastructure that had been designed to accommodate such dissent. Indeed, the rabbinic tradition itself domesticated conflict into pluralism only until such a time as it became the hegemonic tradition in Judaism. Multi-generational pluralistic communities wither beneath the tendency for pluralism to preserve its own status quo. We see this on display in the Jewish community’s inevitable resistance to “new” forms of difference that demand recognition. In the recent past, the Jewish community attempted to respond with pluralism to the denominational conflicts of the 1980s, for instance, as documented in Samuel Freedman’s Jew vs Jew. This attempt has not been imitated in response to today’s political conflicts – especially around Israel.
This in turn connects to a third critique. Linda Zerilli, a feminist scholar at the University of Chicago, argues that civility and pluralism are often motivated by twin objectives: suppressing fundamentalism (Greenberg’s argument) and building communities of difference (based on an argument in Arendt). The first goal, she argues, almost always prevails.8 Put in simpler terms: pluralism can cool debate, or heat things up. As in the laws of thermodynamics, hot pluralism must give way over time to cold pluralism. Yes, pluralism was meant to restrain fundamentalisms, but if it does not replace the passion underlying the fundamentalism with an alternative vision for a society, it becomes regressive.
Finally, a fourth critique asks of us to look not at how pluralism does or doesn’t sustain its own momentum over time, but at political and economic shifts during this same period. Take for instance communal politics on Israel in the years during which we watched the rise and fall of a plausible two-state solution. It is not surprising that a meaningful number of Jews who are falling out with the Jewish community and its leadership on the politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will fall out with larger ideological commitments, including the commitment to pluralism. All the more so if they perceive that commitment to pluralism as a restraint on advocating for peace and justice, or as an ironic cudgel used against anyone who dissented from those politics.
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All of these critiques accurately render what is happening to Jewish pluralism in America. When intentional communities are viewed as alternatives to overtly political spaces, they sometimes embody regressive politics, and they sometimes have regressive political identities imputed to them. What was once a practical and epistemological effort by the Jewish community to reckon with its history and prepare for its future has morphed into a bourgeois discourse of sustaining the status quo and suppressing, rather than celebrating, deep difference. Pluralism’s two characteristics – building broad-based community and suppressing fanaticism – start to become not complementary but oppositional to one another.
“How can certain ideas be admitted into a complex community without rupturing it?”
A few examples: Some years ago, I was invited to join a “pluralism advisory board” of a community Jewish day school. The school was deliberating whether and how to teach prayer: although students came from diverse religious backgrounds, the school rightly saw some value in each class being able to do some amount of praying together. One of the school’s founding lay leaders said: “When we started this school, we wanted our children to graduate feeling equally comfortable in a Reform service or sitting behind a mehitza.” Astonished, I said: “Are you trying to make your children anthropologists of their own religion?” After all, any child who would feel equally comfortable in such opposite environments could not possibly be passionate about either. My wife and I are educating our own children to be able to sit politely and knowledgeably in prayer services that follow practices that are not our own. They should be able to attend friends’ and relatives’ bnei mitzvah celebrations, politely. But they should care about the principles that animate our choices, and they should be passionate about their own.
This is the first pluralism trap: the flattening of passions, the belief that the collective project of community across difference mitigates the need for passionate personal identity. I don’t know how the Bronfman Fellowships operates today, but I remember as a teenager that it annoyed our faculty when we – teenagers! – proved not quite as passionate for our own denominations and backgrounds on the program itself as we had been in our interviews. The faculty were right that without the courage of competing convictions the pluralism of our cohort would suffer.
Along similar lines, a few years ago I received a call from a rabbi who said that something a speaker had said at a Hartman Institute program had offended his sensibilities. Because the speaker identified with the same denomination as this rabbi, my caller was upset that his view on this issue was now rendered “questionable” by the speaker on the Hartman stage. He felt that this jeopardized the “safe space” he felt the Hartman Institute had always offered him. Again, I was surprised. I gently replied that the safety guaranteed by our Beit Midrash was that intellectual rigorous views would be considered and respected, even when they were at odds with each other. Over the years, Hartman had never been a “safe space” for him – he had simply always agreed with the speakers!
The first trap kicks in when pluralistic community takes the edge off of serious commitments, either because people feel – connected to the broader climate of trigger warnings and safe spaces – that they cannot candidly express their views in the presence of others, or because over time the intensity of strongly felt convictions in the presence of others is too much to bear. Or, perhaps, because we domesticate our serious disagreements with one another by the sheer experience of being in a relationship over time. For whatever reasons, pluralist spaces come to embody a kind of flat neutrality.
A second and perhaps more contentious example: for over a decade, Hillel chapters around the country have been roiled by controversy relating to Israel policy, including which speakers can be licensed to speak in Hillels, which student groups can partner with Hillel groups, and coded expectations – by institutions, boards, and students – about how Israel is to be celebrated or criticized. At the heart of this issue is the “Standards of Partnership” clause in the Hillel Israel Guidelines, which shifts the tone of the guidelines from “positive” (what Hillel supports) to “negative” (speakers or ideas Hillel prohibits.) It is not altogether surprising that this document elicits the kinds of reactions it does and serves as such a flashpoint in political debates on campus. In my observation, the first invariable outcome of any stipulation of ideological guidelines is the proclivity of people to test those guidelines. This is especially so when the guidelines attempt to define the parameters of an issue in an organization that describes itself as committed to ideological pluralism. After all, why police and regulate views on this issue and not that one? Unless you make a stronger case for why these guidelines exist, pluralistic institutions will face accusations of hypocrisy: aren’t there a vast number of activities and ideas – theological, halakhic, etc. – that some Jewish students affirm and that others would find offensive?
In turn, those who defend the guidelines turn the tables: they will argue that it was not the institutions that changed, but the students and the political climate themselves. This view from Jewish institutional leadership blames the acceleration of anti-Israel hostilities on campus for triggering the fight against Israel’s legitimacy, and sees the guidelines as a defense of the delicate communal balance. The pluralism conversation on this topic dances around several questions: How big must a community be to tolerate widely disparate views? How can certain ideas be admitted into a complex community without rupturing it? And anyway: who changed more on Israel – the Jewish students on the left or the organized Jewish community on the right?
More troubling still is the extrapolation from this particular set of cases on campus to the question of whether such conflicts are the inevitable outcome of efforts at constructing inclusive, “big tent” communities. Absent borders or boundaries, communities can at best be considered ephemeral aggregations. But when does—and when should—boundary-drawing take place? If it happens too soon, or too aggressively, then we generate the strange paradox that is so common in contemporary Jewish life: “pluralism” and “peoplehood” – capacious, expansive discourses of difference – become cudgels in the hands of those who wish to attack community members considered insufficiently loyal to these ideals. Pluralistic community is always going to be tested by boundary questions, and some of its most passionate defenders will weaponize that passion against those who would threaten its vitality. Weirdly, violence in defense of peoplehood is deemed no vice.
THE PLURALISTIC IMAGINATION
I wonder whether this call to pluralism – meant to address the diminishment of loyalties to the American Jewish denominational infrastructure – is threatened now precisely by a new “denominationalism,” a realignment into communities of meaning that feel constrained when they are squeezed into pluralistic community as the exclusive instrument in which they are meant to operate. Hillels set as their ambitious and laudable goal in the 1980s to serve and engage as many Jews as possible. But what happens then when you engage Jews across a vast, fast-moving, increasingly tense ideological spectrum in which everyone expects to be served, to articulate their commitments as they are, and to have those commitments valued? After all, isn’t the flourishing biodiversity of Jewish life the very raison d’etre of the pluralistic undertaking? It was never really going to be Shabbat that tore apart students on campus; there are enough rooms in the Hillel building for different students who can build a quorum to have the services they need. I remember some squabbling as an undergraduate over who could lead the shared Havdalah services (and more pointedly, who couldn’t). But even then we knew that the candle and the spices and the wine would be there afterwards for anyone to use if they didn’t like the denominational choices of whomever was leading on behalf of the community. When communities of difference are not given incentive to compromise, they rarely will.
Yet the whole point of pluralism is that it should only start to matter when the temperature rises. In retrospect, a radical theology intended to cultivate epistemological humility about commitments with such magnitude as God’s place in the world after the Holocaust should never have capitulated so quickly to political partisanship, even if one side of that debate – as related to Israel policy – believed its position to be rooted in existential security. A pluralism that can tolerate deep differences about God while lacking a capacity to negotiate human needs shows itself to be idolatrous.
Here I am reminded of one of the “greatest hits” of Talmudic pluralism, the text in which a heavenly voice comes forth to resolve the generational dispute between the Houses of Hillel and Shammai with the declaration: “These and these are the living words of God! But the law follows the House of Hillel” (B. Eruvin 13b). The passage goes on to claim that the reason the position of Hillel prevailed was not because the House of Hillel was “more right.” On the contrary: it was because they acted with decency towards the position of their interlocutors. Pluralistic communities can still come to consensus on public policies by some expression of majority rule that tolerates the losing minority. That’s how pluralism weds itself to democracy. Those who believe in the prevailing public policy are allowed to believe they are in the right. But they must also understand that they betray their core commitments when they seek to silence and suppress their opponents.
This leads to a third manifestation of the problem: Pluralism in the Jewish community has lost the momentum to advocate for its own moral claims. Why? In part because it is easier to advocate for a competing worldview against a status quo worldview than it is to advocate for pluralism against a coherent ideology. The Religious Action Center of the Reform Movement, for instance, is still the strongest counter-voice in Israel against the hegemony of the Israeli rabbinate, more than the collective efforts of Jewish organizations united under an appeal to pluralism. More to the point, pluralism can act as a world-building worldview, laced with passion to achieve what individuals cannot build on their own. Alternatively, pluralism can govern a diverse community and manage individuals across difference. If the former, pluralism is hard work that has to be nurtured; if the latter, it risks becoming vulnerable in the ways that any operating system becomes over time.
The formative narrative of Jewish pluralism was rooted in semi-radical theology; over time, our institutions settled into pluralism as a means for sustaining community across difference and reducing conflict. When Michael Walzer argues in “Citizenship, Pluralism and Political Action” that pluralism and democracy are essentially interlaced ideas that define the American project, he references Rousseau’s idea of a vibrant pluralistic democracy in which citizens “rush to the assemblies.” The rabbinic house of study of antiquity housed a passionate post-Temple ideal world to replace what had been lost. Rabbinic pluralism is supposed to teach the refinement of society through a proliferation of competing ideas that can be Godly so that God dwells in our midst. In the current culture wars, some adherents of liberalism use the language of pluralism to argue that it requires of us to give equal publi airtime to all ideas. This is pluralism “all lives matter”-ing itself into moral irrelevance.
Real pluralism must internalize and stay committed to the heterodoxy of its communities and constituents. Pluralism and heterodoxy are not the same; heterodoxy is the pre-condition, the existence in the world of deep and meaningful difference, what the philosopher John Rawls called “the fact of pluralism.” Real pluralism, what we imagine as the legacy of the sages and of that lost moment in American Jewish life, sought to make sense of and entrench that heterodoxy as normative and valuable. It is not sufficient for our community to contain difference, and it is too much for pluralism to homogenize across difference. The pluralism that reorganizes the world takes seriously the value of difference, produces vibrant and vital societal debate across difference, and constructs a world in which those differences and those debates refine the moral terms of our society instead of pulling it apart. Despite the historical and material changes in Jewish life in the past few decades, it is hard for me to accept that the moral stakes on the major issues in our societies have become a lot more significant in a short time. I think the more accurate story is that we have too readily accepted the shortcut offered by polarization – access to homogenous communities of those we agree with, with whom we can politically organize – instead of the harder work of taking disagreement seriously. That makes for weak theology, and even weaker politics.
A commitment to Jewish pluralism – the pursuit of the living word of God as spread across different individuals – could imagine itself as a form of commitment to justice, an enactment of seeing humans being as created in the image of God. The heartbreak and the risk that are almost endemic to pluralism – its slippage into either relativism or conservatism, its instinct to stand in opposition to justice instead of building itself as a tool for justice – can all be found in the tragic prophesy Isaiah Berlin articulated in “A Message to the 21st Century”:
So we must weigh and measure, bargain, compromise, and prevent the crushing of one form of life by its rivals. I know only too well that this is not a flag under which idealistic and enthusiastic young men and women may wish to march—it seems too tame, too reasonable, too bourgeois, it does not engage the generous emotions. But you must believe me, one cannot have everything one wants—not only in practice, but even in theory. The denial of this, the search for a single, overarching ideal because it is the one and only true one for humanity, invariably leads to coercion. And then to destruction, blood—eggs are broken, but the omelet is not in sight, there is only an infinite number of eggs, human lives, ready for the breaking. And in the end the passionate idealists forget the omelet, and just go on breaking eggs.
Berlin’s pluralism was rightly rooted in a post-totalitarian skepticism about idealism. As such, his pluralism had neither the sharp elbows to fight against that idealism, or even to continually articulate itself as a sufficiently powerful antidote to injustice. The rabbinic tradition did not equate an embrace of pluralism with an acceptance of injustice; it saw pluralism as connected to lovingkindness in a world of divine absence, and therefore as a stronger instrument to advocate for justice than those who would still impute to themselves the characteristics of the prophets. What do we have instead – dining halls where we can eat together? Pluralism suffered under the weight of its adherents thinking that they were making demands that were too strenuous. In reality, our demands were too too tepid.
PLURALISM UNBOUND
I am neither ideologically, constitutionally, nor institutionally ready to give up on pluralism. Actually, given the cyclical way in which ideas rise and fall, it is thrilling to once again need to rearticulate a once-dominant idea that has fallen on hard times. I do not believe that the forces of polarization or partisanship that predominate today are in and of themselves destructive; these forces serve democracy by strengthening the polarities that refine the stakes of our most significant arguments. If the 2020 U.S. election is any indication, polarization and partisanship can galvanize an electorate and yield a welcome civic reengagement. I am concerned when such polarization sees itself as antithetical to the ideas of Jewish peoplehood and pluralism. When that happens, we move from the refinement of our democratic character to a zero-sum politics that undermines our collective consciousness.
A Jewish pluralism that thinks its task is to restrain the passions is doomed to fail. American Jews in the 1980s and 1990s understood very well that America could steamroll particular Jewish identity; that American Jews would never fully be persuaded by the rigidity of denominations in an open and welcoming society; that the Enlightenment had really worked in making doubt about orthodoxies an endemic feature of the Jewish condition; and that we probably needed one another, even across profound difference, if less for our basic human needs then perhaps to help correct our own idiosyncratic moral blind spots. Today’s moral urgencies are different and perhaps greater than they there were then, and the bond between Jews has become far less self-evident. But I am not convinced that the core conditions in which American Jews locate themselves have changed so radically so quickly.
In most American Jewish settings, we no longer need to convince ourselves of “practical pluralism” – eating together, sharing space. We take those for granted. But now investing in those bare minima often exhausts the kind of epistemological imagination that could instead expand our moral imagination and permit us to re-envision an American Judaism that has long since outlived denominational frameworks but is too scared of the erosion of the known to pursue new possibilities. Pluralism can and should create radical educational environments where we push beyond what we currently believe to pursue new vistas of truth. Pluralism obligates us to eradicate ideological litmus tests as barriers for entry and as obstacles to educational opportunity. If Yitz Greenberg saw pluralism as a tool to re-discover God after Auschwitz, if David Hartman saw pluralism as an instrument to imagine a sovereign and shared Jewish public space, if the Talmudic sages looked to pluralism to tease out the new norms of a post-Temple world – I dare say we have aimed far too low. Have we really already exhausted the power of the Shoah and the founding of the State of Israel as morally instructive forces shaping what we think as possible and necessary for our collective Jewish future?
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My favorite rabbinic text about pluralism is an underused midrash that I have made my mission in the world to circulate. Most of Jewish pluralism’s canonical texts take place at Yavneh, the late first-century post-Temple settlement imagined as the birthplace of rabbinic Judaism. But that era was characterized more by political turbulence than any real sense of continuity, and the rabbinic project didn’t really get off the ground in earnest until it migrated to the Galilee. I prefer to locate the ancestral home of the pluralist tradition in Usha. The Midrash in Song of Songs Rabbah describes the cosmogonic myth of the rabbinic tradition as follows:
At the end of the persecution our rabbis entered to Usha, and these were they: Rabbi Yehuda and Rabbi Nehemia, Rabbi Meir, and Rabbi Yossi, and Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai, and Rabbi Eliezer, sons of Yossi HaGalili, and Rabbi Eliezer ben Yaakov. They sent to the house of the Elders of the Galilee and said, “All who have already studied, let them come and study, and all who have not yet studied, let them come and study.” They entered and learned and met all their needs (Song of Songs Rabbah 2:5:3).
Anxious post-conflict moments are radical educational environments where knowledge proliferates and human needs are taken care of by all those who show up and are willing to participate. The act of showing up and participating in community is in and of itself a moral act. Teachers come in as teachers, learners come in as learners, but in a real pluralistic environment – unbounded and unboundaried – everyone who enters becomes a learner. Pluralism invites a discourse of interdependency; in the absence of alternatives, it anchors community.
And, more: the rabbinic stories in Tractate Avot D’Rabbi Nathan capture what Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai was really doing in constructing the radical post-destruction rabbinic academy at Yavneh. Those stories imagine much more than the building of pluralistic community or the domesticating of difference. That pluralistic house of study was defined by the religious fervor involved in replacing Temple sacrifice with acts of lovingkindness. To these rabbis, the antidote to the unjustness that left their world destroyed was neither a fixation with strict justice nor a nihilistic capitulation to lawless relativism: it was grounded in a commitment to radical interpersonal seeing of the other, and to pluralism as an instrument to building religious community premised on lovingkindness.
Those many summers ago, when I was drawn to the allure of pluralism, it was to this fire that burned at its core. It was dangerous; I changed in immeasurable ways as a result of the encounter with the Other, and I think I changed others as well. I kindled to the knowledge that the Jewish people extended beyond my known circles to real people, and not just to usable metaphors. I was asked to reimagine the world of Jews to whom I was responsible and accountable, and given opportunities to love them. Yes, some of my own fundamentalisms were probably restrained – let’s say singed – and I was also probably enchanted by the ways in which that encounter forced others to defend their uninterrogated loyalties. Most of all, it was a world, and a means of building a world.
Pluralism teeters today because it seeks to protect a flame that having once illuminated the center of Jewish communal life has since flickered out. Imagine an American Jewish community more aware than ever of the vulnerable in its midst, of the need for compelling stories of Jewish peoplehood out of which to imagine its future. Lighting a fire, building a study hall, taking care of all its needs.
This article appears in Sources, Spring 2021
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Notes
1. For more on the transformation of Hillel, see Mark I. Rosen and Amy Sales, “The Remaking of Hillel: A Case Study on Leadership and Organizational Transformation,” Fisher-Bernstein Institute for Jewish Philanthropy and Leadership Maurice and Marilyn Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies, Brandeis University, January 2006.
2. Irving Greenberg, “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire,” CLAL, 1977.
3. Irving Greenberg, “Theology after the Shoah: The Transformation of the Core Paradigm,” Modern Judaism 26, no. 3 (2006): 213-39.
4. David Hartman, “Auschwitz or Sinai?,” Jerusalem Post, December 12, 1982 and David Hartman, “Judaism in a Secular Society,” in Orthodoxy Confronts Modernity, ed. Jonathan Sacks (Hoboken: Ktav, 1991).
5. On the controversy incited by Sacks’ first use of pluralism expansively and his retreat, see Richard Allen Greene, “British chief rabbi revises controversial book,” JTA, March 16, 2003.
6. Shaye J.D. Cohen, “The Significance of Yavneh: Pharisees, Rabbis, and the End of Jewish Sectarianism,” Hebrew Union College Annual 55 (1984): 27-53.
7. See Abraham Joshua Heschel, “No Time for Neutrality,” in Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, ed. Susannah Heschel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996).
8. Linda M. G. Zerilli, “Against Civility: A Feminist Perspective,” in Civility, Legality, and Justice in America, ed. Austin Sarat (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).