Rabbi Leon Morris: So I’m sitting here again with Rabbi Dr. Neil Gillman, professor of Jewish thought at the Jewish Theological Seminary and our scholar-in- residence this year at the Skirball Center for Adult Jewish Learning. Neil, it’s great to have an opportunity to speak with you again about issues of theology.

Professor Neil Gillman: Good to be back. Thank you.

LM: We spoke in the previous podcast about God, and this podcast is devoted to the issue of Torah and revelation. Our third and final podcast interview, forthcoming, will be on Israel, the people of Israel.

So in thinking about Torah and revelation, I wanted to ask you what makes it so difficult for contemporary Jews to believe that revelation is possible.

NG: That’s probably because most of us inherit what my friend and colleague at the seminary here, Professor Steven Brown, calls the default position, which is that revelation means that at a certain point in history on a certain day, "God" came down on Mount Sinai and spoke to Moses, or to the children of Israel, and "revealed" a Torah, a body of teaching, which is essentially the book that we have in front of us when we enter the synagogue on a Shabbat morning and we pick up either the Hirsch Chumash or Eitz Hayim or Plaut [ph 00:01:58], and that’s what revelation means. And if that’s what revelation means, then there are so many problems with that whole idea that I can’t believe that that really happened.

Now, it’s very much like something I believe I said when we talked about God, that somebody should ask you, "Do you believe in God?" The only proper response to that is, "Tell me what you mean by God and I’ll tell you if I believe in God or not. If you mean an old man with a white beard and a tallis sitting up in a chair up in the heavens, no."

So, same thing here. If by revelation you mean that the account given in the book of Exodus, chapter 19, if that’s what you mean by revelation, no. But that’s not what I mean by God and that’s not what I mean by revelation. There is a whole range of possible interpretations of revelation, some even contained in Tanakh itself, that are not at all what the book of Exodus says.

I just have to say again that the Torah and certainly I mean, even the Chumash itself, the Pentateuch, the five books itself, this is not a book. It’s an anthology. It’s a library. It’s a collection of different traditions, and it’s not one coherent statement, one coherent document, one coherent book. There are many different traditions inside that book. And so revelation can mean many different things. And that’s not even going beyond what is in that book. That’s not even going beyond into what modern Jewish theologians have suggested or have understood revelation to mean.

I give you a specific example. In the book of Kings, there’s a story about Elijah. I believe it’s First Kings. I believe it’s chapter 18. I think so. Where Elijah is running away from the King and the Queen, Ahab and Jezebel, who want to kill him. And he runs into a mountain. And then he has a revelation. God appears to Elijah. And the Bible is very specific. There is a thunder, but God was not in the thunder. Right?

There was an earthquake and God is not in the earthquake. There was a fire and God is not in the fire. And then there is this "Kol Dimama," which is usually translated as "a still small voice", but borrowing from contemporary, my student’s music, I translate as "the sound of silence", because "kol" means sound and "dmama" means silence, and still small voice, or the sound of silence.

So here you have almost a parody of Sinai, because Sinai the revelation was with clouds and thunders and lightning and fire and all of this stuff, and the voice of God, and here Elijah experiences none of that, but he experiences silence, and God is in the silence. So it depends what you mean by revelation. Long answer to your question: It depends what you mean by revelation.

LM: I’m thinking of often when people are exposed to non-Orthodox theology and non-Orthodox theologians, like yourself, I think folks from a more traditional standpoint sometimes make the mistake of thinking that you’re convincing otherwise believing Jews, or let’s say Jews who believe in what you called the default position, you’re convincing them otherwise. You’re convincing them that Exodus 19 is not the way that it happened.

But in reality, I would guess that your thinking and your writing is really chiefly intended to be a response for the person who at their core could never believe a literal understanding of revelation at Sinai, and you’re providing a language and a way of thinking again about what we mean by revelation that is a symbolic and non-literal understanding of revelation. I wondered if you could just say—

NG: Yes, you see, what I feel I need to do is to provide an understanding of revelation that coheres with other bodies of knowledge that I bring to my theology. For example, I take seriously the work of modern Bible scholars.

And their findings have ranged all over the place, but the core of their findings, the core of their conclusions which almost all of them accept in one way or another is that there is serious grounds for questioning the historicity of the narratives of the Bible, pretty much including the patriarchal narratives, the Exodus, Sinai, the desert experiences, the conquest of the land. And really up until the eighth century material, King Josiah from there on in, there’s serious grounds for questioning whether the Biblical account is history. That’s one thing.

Second of all, the whole documentary hypothesis, which, again scholars differ in terms of, you know, what’s in each document and the dating of the documents, but there’s pretty much general agreement that the Chumash, the Pentateuch that we have today is a composite at least four other documents that existed separately, that evolved in different parts of the community and were pulled together into one document somewhere around the time of Ezra in the middle of the fifth century B.C.E. — two.

Three, that there are borrowings from other ancient Near Eastern cultures. There are flood stories everywhere. There are covenant narratives everywhere. The flood stories, the covenant narratives, the bodies of law that we can find in Mesopotamia sources, for example, the fact that there are very clear similarities between all of these other narratives and the Biblical version of these narratives.

There are changes, and the changes are important and significant, and it’s clear that our ancestors didn't buy them wholesale but bought them and edited them and shaped them in the light of their own particular. And these came into our Scriptures. Add to all of this, I sort of bring my own personal theological position, which is how do we say anything about God? How do we talk about God? How do we talk about a reality that is so intrinsically different? And what language do we use? And can we in any way believe that speaking is something which God does- literally speaking. Does God speak to us like I am speaking to you? And if that is problematic, then what does it mean to say that God spoke to the children of Israel?

But the Bible is filled with God speaking, as it is filled with whole series of other descriptions about God. I mean, we talked about those last time. You know, God is a shepherd; God is a judge; God hears; God feels. This is human language applied to a reality that is decidedly not human.

So if you put all of this together and you want to come out with a theology of revelation that make sense and that coheres with other bodies of knowledge that we have and with a whole theological perspective on God talk, then it seems to me that you can’t buy into Exodus 19 as a literally true document. So the alternative then is to shut up or to reject the whole thing and to say that it’s a whole, it’s a fiction.

LM: Which I think we see some of the, we spoke about last time, some of the caricatures of the religious experience by, let’s say, very militant secularists—

NG: Yes, the angry—

LM: —atheists.

NG: Angry atheists. Yes, we call them.

LM: It does exactly that.

NG: Yes, the angry atheists. But not only that, I mean, many of my students say, "Well, you know, if you don't believe that then why be Jewish?" That’s the next step. Right? To which I say, you know, glibly and somewhat caustically, "Well, because it’s fun."

LM: [Laughs]

NG: And they sort of roll their eyes at that point. I say, "How do you do without Shabbos?" You know, so they roll their eyes. And so what do you want me to do? Do you want me to cross the street and become a Christian? I have problems with that too. Right? Do I accept the virgin birth as a literal truth, or the crucifixion or the resurrection?

So, you know, it’s not as if— you know, the question, they’re serious because if I don't accept the fact that the entire Torah is the word of God, explicitly delivered to my ancestors, then what happens then, and that really poses the most important question about revelation, which is that on your view of revelation rests your notion of the authority of Torah, of the entire tradition.

And if you reject literalism, then are you rejecting the authority of Torah completely? No, I say, but then you have to recast it, and then it becomes a very different kind of document with different authority, with affects everything that I do and don't do and believe and don't believe as a Jew today. Do I buy the tradition as the word of God, and if I don't, then what authority does it have and why is it authoritative and why do I buy anything? Why do I accept anything?

So it’s in a sense, the notion of revelation is the core theological problem. It affects everything else that I believe.

LM: So take us through the last 50 to 100 years of Jewish theology, al regel echat , on one foot—

NG: Alright, so—

LM: —in terms of how modern thinkers, modern Jewish thinkers have dealt with this problem.

NG: So we now know, for example, because of the work of Abraham Joshua Heschel, and the translation of his Torah min ha-Shamayim, heavenly Torah, by my colleague, Professor Gordon Tucker, that the notion that every word of Torah is explicitly the word of God is not unanimously believed in by the rabbis of the Talmud [ph 00:14:52]. I’m not even convinced that within the Torah itself it is the only view of revelation, but that’s another story.

But the rabbis of the Talmud have many different positions on revelation, and God bless Heschel; he collected them all. The book is very difficult to plow through, but if you go through it and if you pay attention to Dr. Tucker’s notes, there are at least three positions there. We call it maximalist, minimalist, and intermediate. Maximalist is that every word is God. Minimalist is that maybe some chapter headings and general principals are God. And intermediate is something in between the two. Alright?

So that’s already in the Tombit. But you asked specifically about the past hundred years. I believe that it is the father of Modern Orthodoxy,. Samson Raphael Hirsch was the one who really perceived the challenge of the emerging Reform and what came to be called Conservative Judaism in Germany in the middle of the nineteenth century. And he was the one that erected that barrier and that fence and said that every single word of Torah is God’s word, which God spoke, as I am speaking to you. That’s literally what he said.

And that became the beacon or the catchword for what came to be known as Modern Orthodoxy and Orthodoxy. That was a defense mechanism. He became, you know, excuse the expression, more Catholic than the Pope. He took the most extreme position, the maximalist position. It’s all from God, and therefore nothing can be changed.

And my sense is that to this day, to the extent that Modern Orthodox Jews think theologically about revelation, if pushed against the wall, that’s what they would come out with. Certainly, you know, that’s what Rabbi Norman Lamm, that’s a position which he articulated in anthology, which Commentary Magazine published many years ago in the 60s, 1960s. It says that he believed the Torah was revealed in discrete, what he calls discrete words and letters.

So that’s the will of God in discrete, in words and letters, that God revealed words and letters. And that I think is become, that’s what I call the default position. That’s what I think most Jews, most, I think Modern Orthodox believe, and other Jews believe that they’re supposed to believe, and that’s what I think Jews bring with them as a sort of the conventional belief.

Moving from right to left, there is what I would call a softer traditionalist position, which talks about propositional revelation. God revealed the ideas; the words are Moses’. I’m not sure, I think that solves the problem of anthropomorphism in the sense that God does not speak words, but it preserves the idea that the content of Torah at least is divine.

LM: Does that reflect the position of Heschel and—?

NG: No, no. Well, it could. Probably with Heschel—

LM: I’m thinking of the Torah as a midrash.

NG: Yes, the problem is that Heschel, you know, is not always clear and not always consistent. The position is articulated best in that same anthology by Rabbi Emanuel Rackman, for example, who is commonly identified with modern orthodoxy, but whom I think is what I would call sort of a softer traditionalism.

And if you read the paragraphs in The Condition of Jewish Belief, where Rackman writes about this, which is where the same anthology that contains Norman Lamm’s position, you find that it’s a shade more liberal. And I think he makes a distinction between the content of Torah and the words, that the words may be human but the content is divine.

Heschel, moving to the left, Heschel’s famous statement, one of the many statements that he made that sort of deserve immortality, is in God in Search of Man, it’s, "As a report about revelation, the Bible itself is a midrash." That’s a stunning statement because we think of midrash as interpretations of the Biblical text. You were saying here that the Biblical text itself is a midrash.

I think Heschel arrived at that position because I think, for a number of reasons. I think he was offended by the crude anthropomorphism that is God’s speaking. I think he wanted to preserve a much more openness to the Biblical text. He was a mystic and a hasid [ph 00:20:29]. Mystics like to have the text open to multiple interpretations. You know, the Pardes notion that there are secret—

LM: Four levels.

NG: —four levels of interpretation. Right. And one of which is the mystical interpretation, which is not at all explicit, and so he wants to keep the text open to much more fluid interpretations. And also he suggests also in another place that two things occurred at Sinai: God gave the Torah, and we accepted, Israel accepted. So matan Torah, kabbalat Torah. The kabbalah is an aggressive act of appropriation.

Certainly if you believe, as I think certainly is conventionally believed by post-modern thinkers, that every act of reading is an interpretation, that every act of seeing the world is interpretation, that we don't see the world, we organize our perception of the world. So even this involves an aggressive human appropriation of the text.

So what may have come out from God is a Torah, which only God knows. God has that content. What we have is a human version of that content. So it’s a step, I think, to the left of what Lamm and Rachman might have suggested.

Buber and Rosenzweig, I think, are more radical. They speak of God having revealed God’s self. And Torah is the response. Rosenzweig writes famously, "God came down on Mount Sinai. That concludes the revelation." God spoke is interpretation and certainly what God said. So—

LM: Meaning what exactly? What was revealed for Rosenzweig?

NG: I think God entering into a relationship with Israel. My somewhat crude analogy which works for undergraduates, it’s like the encounter at Sinai is like the first date. Torah is after the date you go home and you write your friend halfway across the continent, "This is what happened and this is what we decided. This is what we talked about. This is the nature of our commitment. This is what we’re committed to." And you know.

But Torah is the response to the encounter. Both Buber and Rosenzweig would say revelation is not legislation. That’s clear. And Rosenzweig at least makes the distinction between law and command. The relationship has a commanding quality, but how you fulfill that command, what you feel commanded to do is what you bring to that. God does not legislate, but God commands.

The relationship has a commanding, has an obligating quality to it. Buber is even uncomfortable with that because Buber feels that the I-thou relationship has to be much more open and much more fluid and not so binding. But I—

LM: And what about Kaplan?

NG: Kaplan begins with an entirely different notion of God. I mean, God is not an external reality but an internal. God is a power within me. And revelation is discovery. My discovery of values are people’s discovery. It's a much more communal thing.

The Torah represents our ancestor’s discovery of what for Kaplan is the ultimate religious ideal goal, which is salvation, which is redemption, which is the evermore perfect community, the evermore perfect world, the evermore perfect person, human being. And that vision and the impetus to achieve that vision is revelation, and that’s God, and that’s within; not necessarily outside, but within.

But, of course, Kaplan then says, "Whatever is within me is outside of me as well, and the world is so situated so as to make all of this possible." But if you begin that with the traditionalists, it’s all God. With Kaplan it’s pretty much all human. And then the others play around with various amounts of God and various amounts of human. And—

LM: And where would you put yourself, your view of revelation?

NG: Yes, well, depends on the day of the week.

LM: [Chuckles]

NG: I think I’m probably methodologically closest to Kaplan. I’m a naturalist in the sense that I believe that, well, you see, I begin with a different view of God because my sense is that all of our views of God are constructs. We create images of God. We discovered God and create images of God. So—

LM: God is a reality, but we have no access to—

NG: God is a reality, but we have no access to what God is in God’s self. So, and revelation then, revelation is, if I had to use a synonym, I would again fall back on Kaplan’s synonym, which is our discovery of God and of God’s will for us. So I too would give an enormous amount of authority to the human community.

I’m much more communal than Buber and Rosenzweig. I believe that revelation emerges out of a community and it is the role of the community to try to understand what it is that God demands of us and how to fulfill it in order to become, to establish our identity as a distinctive religious community and to create an evermore perfect social structure and an evermore perfect human community out of all of this.

LM: I assume that it’s this community aspect that’s one of the elements that makes your theology, if we have to attach denominational labels to it, a conservative theology, that this is not about the individual on his or her own, constructing this—

NG: Yes, yes, it’s true, but with one caveat: We choose our communities. So I need a minyan. I need a minyan because, in my view, I want to hear the Torah read liturgically. Now, in feeling obligated to have that, I have accepted a very traditional Jewish sense of obligation. Right?

This goes all the way back to Ezra, that the Torah is read publicly to a community, and that, to me, is the heart of what the synagogue service should be like, and this is why I go to shul, and this is why I need a minyan.

Now, yes, does that mean that I couldn’t read the Torah to myself in my living room on a Shavuot morning? Of course I could, but here I choose my mitzvot, and this is a mitzvah, an obligation which I choose and which I feel is intrinsic to my sense of what it means to be Jewish. It’s to worship within a community, and a community needs a minyan.

But I also can choose my minyan. I can choose my community. Now, that’s easier on the Upper West Side than it is in Kansas, I assume, but, you know, that’s part of the reality. That’s why, I think, we flock toward communities.

LM: And what, given this view of revelation, this view of Torah, given the large role of human creativity and human discovery in this for you, what makes the text sacred?

NG: We do. We do. What [speaking foreign language. You know, if you read the account of Ezra’s bringing a Torah to the community in mid fifth century Persia, this is contained in the Nehemiah 9, and he stands on a bima, and he reads from the Torah aloud to a community, and the community says at that point, you know, identifies that this is the book that God gave to Moses at Sinai, right? Torat Moshe. This is Moses’ Torah, and that’s how.

Now, where did he get this book? He got it in Babylonia. Right? He brought it with him from Babylonia. I asked a colleague of mine, a professor of Bible at the seminary last year, who was the authority behind the Torah, and he answered with a wry grin, "The Persian emperor." Because it was the Persian emperor that said to Ezra, "I want the community in Judea to have a constitution, and this is the constitution."

So he established the authority of Torah by delegating Ezra and Nehemiah to read the Torah to the community, but the community accepted it as sacred. We sanctify the Torah, and we establish it as sacred by committing ourselves to it. It’s our canonical document; it’s our constitution. And we sanctify it. Now, does this have implications for the authority of Torah? My God, of course it does. Enormous implications.

But it’s this distinction that makes it possible for me to work with this tradition and to say that if abinitio [ph 00:31:26], it was a community that sanctified it, then in every succeeding generation it is the right and responsibility of succeeding communities to revisit that document, to revisit that constitution and to say what in all of this remains binding on us today, given the world that we live in today.

LM: It demands a great deal of responsibility for us to have that kind of latitude, to have that kind of—

NG: It demands fear and trembling, as Rosenzweig said. Rosenzweig used a German term, Heutig — the todayness of revelation. And it refers to the first verse in Exodus 19, when the Torah tells us that the Jews arrived at Sinai, and the third month, "b’chodesh hashlishi", the first day of the month, "b’yom hazeh", on this day. Now, everybody notices that the Torah should have says, "On that day," but it doesn’t say this. It says, "On this day." And the rabbinic interpretation of that is that every day is Sinai, every day is this day.

And Rosenzweig uses it in German, the heutig, H-E-U-T-I-G, which means today, the todayness of revelation, that we reencounter revelation, we reencounter Sinai, that every place on earth is Sinai and every day is Sinai, and we reencounter that revelation, which is why I put such great stock on the public reading of the Torah in the synagogue, on Shabbat and festivals, which is, for me, the heart of the worship service.

You know, I guarantee you that Rabbi Akiba, some 2,000 years ago, did not spend three hours in the synagogue on Shabbat morning. When you think of the service as it evolved, you know, the core of the service we do in five minutes.

LM: Maybe 15 minutes.

NG: Fifteen minutes. Depends on the chazan [ph 00:33:47], I guess.

LM: [Laughs]

NG: But that service has evolved from this core to what is now, in most synagogues, a three hour service, and in [speaking foreign language] a five hour is really very, very commentary on the evolution of the whole liturgical experience. But what happens after that is we take the Torah out and we read it in public.

Now, I have to tell you that, you know, this is I guess what I would call [speaking foreign language] or [speaking foreign language], but for me the experience of sitting in the congregation and having a master Torah reader open up the scroll and begin to read, that’s Sinai all over again. I have that experience, and this, to me; this is why I go to Shul.

The worshiping stuff, the prayers and all of that, I can do anyplace, but the experience of having a great— the one thing I miss about the fact that I never had a really serious great Jewish education from my childhood is I miss the fact that I cannot read, that if I do read the Torah, I have to prepare. It takes me hours.

But there are people, students of mine, colleagues of mine, who can just open it up and read any parsha at sight almost, and impeccably with every Hebrew, with every dot and tittle, with every [speaking foreign language] and every [speaking foreign language], you know, and every [speaking foreign language] and everything like that, everything impeccably. That is an incredibly great religious experience to me.

LM: What do we do with the most difficult parts of the Torah? In terms of framing it, it’s a sacred text, albeit a sacred text whose words are human words, and yet some of those human words are very problematic to the contemporary reader — the role of women, the existence of slavery, a host of things that make the person sitting in the synagogue on a Shabbat morning, or reading this on their own, very uncomfortable.

NG: Yes. We grit our teeth I guess, at least I grit my teeth. I have to tell you, you know when I really encountered this? When my Christian friends come to me and talk to be about the Good Friday, the reading of the passion on Good Friday, which is from the book of John, which is the perfidious Jews and all of that stuff, and which in the middle ages, on Good Friday, Christians walked out of church and began to assassinate Jews because of the terrible- and so my Christian friends who in a sense are tied to a Torah reading of their own.

And it’s only beginning to loosen up and in more liberal Christian circles, where they are not compelled to read the John— passion according to John, but they can read other versions of it, and they tell me, they ask me, "How do we frame this for our own people?" And, you know, and Christians have evolved a whole series of strategies. One of which is the obvious one, which is to frame it in its historical context, and to say this is a human document written by our ancestors in response to political conditions that existed in the third century, the second century.

And we have to understand it that way. And it’s not the word of God, and, you know, we don't read it as the word of God. There are a whole variety of strategies. The one strategy which I at least cannot accept is we don't erase it from the Torah.

There are communities of Jews today who will deliberately, for example, the haftarah, the Torah reading and the specific Torah reading haftarah for Shabbat Zachor, which is a Shabbat immediately before Purim, where we add in the Torah reading this implication, this thing about Amalekite, that we’re supposed to wipe Amalek out, and then there is the Torah, then there’s the haftarah where we read from the book of Samuel where Saul did not kill all of the Amalekites, and Samuel the prophet is furious, and—

LM: And he allowed Agog to live.

NG: Right, and he allowed Agog to live, and he stripped Saul of the kingship because he didn't kill them all. And there are many congregations that just simply do not use this has a haftarah on that Shabbat, and that’s sort of a that makes me very uncomfortable because that means that we, you know, that for 2,000 years Jews have been reading this haftarah on the Shabbat before Purim. I am not prepared on my own to say that we should stop reading it.

So I would much rather read it and frame it historically. And I recall an exchange. You know, my two teachers, Mordecai Kaplan and Abraham Joshua Heschel, rarely spoke to each other, but they spoke to each other through the students. And Kaplan, who was much more radical, would say that there are passages in the Bible where God commands, obliterate enemies of the Jews. Get rid of them. Kaplan said I can’t say these, and if I don't believe it, I can’t say it, and if I don't say it, I erase it from the prayer book. And—

LM: From the prayer book.

NG: From the prayer book. Right. And I assume that in his synagogue he did not read these passages. Specifically, it refers to the passage in the Passover Haggadah, where we pray, we open the door and Elijah comes in, and we say, yes, "Pour out your wrath on the nations, etcetera; wipe them out and exterminate them from the face of the earth."

There are three versus there from Lamentations, from Eicha [ph 00:40:44] and so of course the Heschelians ran to Heschel and told Heschel, "You should have heard what Kaplan said in class." [Mumbling] And Heschel listened very soberly and said, "Kaplan’s personal experience and my personal experience are very different."

You know, Kaplan was raised in America; Heschel came out of Poland, escaped right before the war, lost his entire family, and says, "I have no problem saying these verses." And he says, "You know, read the verses carefully; it doesn’t say ‘exterminate them.’ All it say is exterminate those people who don't recognize you, who oppress the Jews, who have hated us, and who have tried to exterminate us."

LM: Right. It's also asking God to do it.

NG: It’s also God to do it. Right. So Heschel said, "I have no problem with that." I’ll give you another anecdote about this. Right after the Torah reading, before we put the Torah back in the Shabbat morning, there are two Aramaic passages where we pray to God to protect the Babylonian academies, you know, those—

LM: Yakum purkan.

NG: Yakum purkan right. We pray to God, and, you know, this is the first thing that everybody wants to eliminate because why are we praying for the Babylonian academies. But I remember when I used to worship in the seminary synagogue, and a colleague, Professor David Weiss Halivni, who really, you know, who went through the camps and who escaped miraculously, came to America. In America got married and has children.

And there is a little passage in there where we say that God should give them the teachers and the students of those academies [speaking foreign language]. Zara is seed, children; chaya living and flourishing. And whenever we got to those passages, Halivni, I noticed it, would scream them at the top of his voice. [Speaking foreign language] in his Ashkenazic accent.

And it struck me that every time he came to these three words, Halivni must have felt, "This is not something that we can take for granted, to have children, that I have children. I, who barely survived, now find myself in the position where I have — I came, I married, I have children, I have grandchildren, and they’re living, and they’re well, and they’re flourishing."

And in fact his children are flourishing, and his grandchildren. And it seemed to me that at that point I began to reflect, but the fact that there are most Conservative and all Reform synagogues don't say this prayer, and we still have it in the prayer book — in our Conservative prayer books. My feeling was we never know when a prayer may come back and become relevant again. So instead of getting—

LM: That’s true of the prayer book, all the more so for—

NG: All the more so scripture. So don't get rid of them. Leave them there. You don't have to say them. You can omit them. You can grit your teeth. But don't erase them because we never know when historical conditions might make them relevant again.

LM: What are your own reflections of this very nuanced view of revelation for your students and the generation that they represent? You’re very much attuned to all of the societal changes happening and changes in religious life, spiritual life in America, and so when you think about this nuanced sophisticated anti-fundamentalist view of revelation, and you think about it in light of our age, is there hope for the flourishing of such—

NG: It induces in me— this is what I wake up at four in the morning in a state of absolute panic about, and say, you know, I just recall I was lecturing on this topic to a group of college students, and a young man in the back of the room got up and put up his hand and says, "Congratulations, Rabbi Gillman, you have succeeded in doing what pharaoh, Haman, Ahashaverosh [ph 00:45:36], and Hitler failed to do — exterminate Judaism."

And I was in a state of absolute rage. And I closed my books and I said, "I didn't come all the way here to lecture to you to be told that I’m coming to exterminate Judaism. I believe that I’m saving Judaism for those who cannot believe as you do, but since you feel that’s what I am," I closed my books and I said, "the lectures is ended; I’m going home."

I went home, picked up the phone, called my daughter, and I said, "You’ll never know what this kid said to me, and I’m terribly upset." And she said, she burst out laughing, and she says, "Oh, come on, Abba, don't be so grandiose. We survived them. We’ll survive you too." [Laughter] If I believed, look, if I believed that my view is ultimately destroying Judaism, I think that I would simply just, you know, get into bed, pull the covers over my head, and shut up.

I can only believe that what I am doing is making it possible for Jews who would otherwise reject the whole package to find some sense and some meaning in the tradition and to be able to live with a degree of integrity as a Jew. I concede that the position demands a level of sophistication, a level of first of all, you have to want to sit down at the table to play the game; you have to want to think about these issues; and you have to be able to live with ambiguity.

Bottom line, that’s what it is, I think. What this position does, it does not tolerate absolutes. And, you know, and certain people demand absolutes of religion. They want yes or no, black or white, you know, kosher or trayf. And this position is not for them. I think that it’s a position which puts a premium on the ability to live with tension, to live with ambiguity, to live with grays, and my entire work rests on the assumption that there are a significant number of Jews out there for whom this ability, that they have this ability.

And for them at least, I have presented an understanding of Judaism that makes it possible for them to live and to worship and to think with a measure of integrity as a Jew. That’s the people I speak to. There are plenty of people, there are plenty of students in my own school who will avoid my classes and will never read my books, and I understand that, and that’s fine.

There are a significant number of other students for whom I have made it possible for them to, you know, to function as a Jew, and that’s the only reward I have. So yes, I am in a state of panic about this. I understand that some people view this position as destructive. I view it as a way of making it, of preserving Judaism for those who cannot accept the other way. That’s enough for me. That’s fine.

LM: I know what a profound impact you’re having on your students here at the Skirball Center, and I’m grateful for the opportunity of these podcast interviews to allow your thought to impact hundreds of others who aren’t able to take a class with you here in New York. So I want to thank you very much, and I look forward to the next conversation.

NG: Thank you for making all of this possible.