Wholeness and Brokenness

Josh Feigelson

A Response to What Happened to Jewish Pluralism? by Yehuda Kurtzer (Sources, Spring 2021)

In his thoughtful essay, “What happened to Jewish pluralism?” Yehuda Kurtzer concludes 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.”

Much as I agree with Kurtzer’s assessment, I think it doesn’t go far enough in diagnosing the problem or outlining a solution. It is one thing to stipulate that humans are created b’tzelem Elohim, in the Divine image (as Yitz Greenberg, perhaps more than anyone, taught us over the last half-century). It is quite another to embody and live out that idea. Espousing the value of pluralism is necessary but insufficient. We must ask how the capacities of human beings in human bodies using human language and human media in human communities have eroded to the point where it is easier, as Kurtzer says, to accept the shortcuts of polarization than engage in the hard work of disagreement. Our conversation about pluralism must include not only the intellectual architecture that makes pluralism both possible and healthy, but also the social-emotional and spiritual preconditions, and ongoing practice, required of both individuals and collectivities.

If we are to engage in conversation across difference, you and I, and we collectively, need some foundational skills and capacities like emotional self-regulation, self-awareness, listening, empathizing, and mindful speech. Above all, we must develop the habits of mind, heart, body, and spirit to hear views with which we disagree, or by which we even feel viscerally threatened, and not trigger a “fight or flight” reaction. That isn’t easy, but it’s also unavoidable. Pluralism is simply not possible without it.

The interdenominational and interfaith dialogues of the 1960s in which Yitz Greenberg and David Hartman participated were both an engine and product of an emerging pluralistic moment, symbolized most famously by the Second Vatican Council (also known as Vatican II). Yet those dialogues, like the Second Vatican Council itself, were largely if not exclusively the domain of (publicly straight) men with light skin and advanced educations. In the intervening half-century, through technological, normative, and epistemological changes, we have developed a much broader conception of who belongs in the room—and who’s missing if they’re not there. We’re far more aware of a vastly greater range of diversity of human identity and experience. Yet that expansion has, it seems to me, contributed to both the difficulty Kurtzer describes and the need for a more fully embodied pedagogy of pluralism.

This, I suggest, is part of what we’re talking about in the “safe space” and “trigger warning” debates in contemporary higher education. It isn’t enough to say, as some of my former colleagues at the University of Chicago have, that university classrooms are not safe spaces. As I realized while working as a higher education administrator, we can and should attempt to guarantee students’ physical safety even as we make no guarantee of their intellectual safety. But what of our commitment to their emotional safety? A foundational skill of individuals living in society is learning to regulate our emotions; concomitantly, a foundational skill of institutions in a society is creating spaces that do not cause undue pain, suffering, and anxiety. University classrooms, as elsewhere in society, have become increasingly open to people who, for good reason, expect to be accepted as they are, with a wider range of identities and expressions. Like those other sites, classrooms must inevitably negotiate the norms of living together. That is at least part of what’s happening in the safe space debate.

This leads me to a final thought in response to Kurzter’s column. In her book Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown v. Board of Education, the political philosopher Danielle Allen carefully and persuasively argues that the notion of unity, emblazoned on American currency and our seal of government, is both misguided and dangerous. As Jews know only too well, a society that aspires toward unity perceives anyone regarded as getting in the way of unity—that is, anyone marked as different—as an enemy. Allen suggests that our operating metaphor should instead be wholeness—which contains brokenness and yet remains complete (she doesn’t mention the midrash of the broken tablets, that were placed in the Ark of the Covenant along with the complete set of tablets, but her work pairs extremely well with it). With that metaphor in mind, she argues that democratic societies depend upon the equitable distribution of sacrifice whereby one group is not asked to give up its power or desires—to wait its turn—longer or more frequently than another.

I would suggest that this vision is essential for our conception of pluralism in the Jewish world and in broader society both. Our pedagogic questions must focus on how we educate, on both micro and macro levels, toward a vision of individual and communal wholeness—whole in body, mind, emotion, and spirit; able to sustain the pain and joy, injury and healing, death and rebirth that we experience at every moment. Only when we embrace such a fullness of vision will we be able to live in a world of pluralism and truth.

Rabbi Josh Feigelson is executive director of the Institute for Jewish Spirituality.