LM: Is that universalism to be found within Judaism and to what extent? I wanted to ask you about the way in which Judaism in non-Orthodox circles is represented today. And really for the last, at least the last 20, probably the last 40 or 50 years, emphasizes the universal values of Judaism in a way we could say that front and center articulation became prominent with the birth of the Reform movement but is kind of a trans-denominational value today.

You hear a lot of people citing Tikkun Olam -- the repair of the world as a central Jewish value. You hear presidential candidates when speaking to Jewish audiences citing that. Are we misrepresenting how prominent the universal is in Jewish texts? Are we playing up part of the equation but not the whole equation? Have we eliminated a kind of inherent tension that exists between the particular and the universal?

NG: I do not think we have eliminated. I think it goes back and forth. This is attention. Look, you want to quote texts? Genesis 1, right, it did not say that God created Jews in the image of God.

God created the human person and the famous rabbinic dictum to the fact that God created one person, one human being and out of that one human being the entire world. So, nobody can say my father is better than your father, right? Or it is the whole parable of the coins that God makes, there is one mold and out of one mold we get one coin, but every human being is different than every other human being.

The tension is even very explicit in the mishnaic text when the Sanhedrin warns witnesses in a capital case and there is this incredible statement in the Mishnah of son Hedrin in which it says that there are two texts.

One version of the text is that everybody who saves one human person, it is as if you have saved the entire world. And then the alternate text is “one Jew,” it is as if he saved his soul. And we have these two versions, two manuscript versions I guess, there is, the tension is right there. The entire prophetic tradition is Universalist.

LM: “You are like Ethiopians to me.” (Amos 9:7)

NG: Yeah well not only that, you know, what made it possible for the late Abraham Heschel to be such a spokesperson to the non-Jewish world, to the Christian world, on the racial issue, was the fact that he drew his inspiration from prophetic tradition.

Now, Heschel was hardly a non particularist Jew. He was an observant Jew and his concerns, his Jewish concerns were equally powerful, but his first major work was on prophesy, and he later remarked that it was his return to the prophets that changed his life, that made it possible for him to suddenly get involved with race, with the Vietnam War, the political social issues that eventually he devoted his entire life to and which effectively I think were responsible for his relatively early death.

So do we have authentic classical sources? Sure. We have much of the book of Genesis. We have Psalms which are not Jewish, right, they are human. Prophets do not speak only to Jews. They speak to issues of justice, morality, that are universal. I think that to a significant extent the much more particularist emphasis was a defensive maneuver.

It was a response to persecution. You hate us. Therefore, we are going to affirm our separateness. “Not only are we separate but we are better” and that is, I think, a very natural psychological human reaction to oppression, to persecution, and to the hatred that was thrown at us. But our roots, our biblical roots, are certainly universalist and I think that is what the reform movement did originally.

But what is happening in the past 25 years in Reform? Some re-appropriation of a particularist theme in its return to Zionism, to Hebrew, to ritual. Look, this is an incredibly rich tradition that we have and everybody is going to make appropriations.

We are going to take pieces of it and drop other pieces of it, and I take my piece. I drop other pieces. You make your own appropriations. We gradually associate with mini-communities that more or less share our thinking, not completely but more or less, and we reserve the right to choose our community. I choose my minyan.

Fortunately I live in Manhattan where I have a choice. If I lived in the middle of, I do not know, the Midwest, I would not have that choice. If I lived in the town that I grew up in, in Quebec City, there was only one synagogue. We did not have a choice.

And I knew my mother and father had friends who were totally strong, secular Zionists, totally uninterested in religion, in Judaism, and the synagogue, but they were a part of this little community of 135 families and they sort of got along. They were not in shul very Shabbos, but they got along.

But each of us makes his appropriation; each of us joins the mini-community. The mini-communities met coalitions and we live in a state of tension and we balance things out and we do the best we can.

LM: You mentioned that in many cases in history, when we were persecuted or excluded, it gave rise to an overemphasis of the particular, and yet I want to ask you about the issue of chosenness because that is there even without the persecution, and it is there before the sociology comes into play. It derives from the Torah itself. How do we make sense of chosenness?

NG: Who wrote the book? Go back to Kaplan. Who put chosenness into the package? I am sorry. I do not believe it was God, so I do not believe our chosenness was dictated by God. The texts were texts written by our ancestors. The decisions about canonization were decisions made by our ancestors.

They decided what books got in, what books got out. I have often said that I would love to see what was on the cutting room floor. We will never see those books. Some of them made it into the Apocrypha. Some of them made it into the Dead Sea Scrolls. There were recent headlines about a tablet with three days between death and resurrection.

LM: Gabriel’s vision.

NG: Gabriel’s vision. It was fascinating. But you know who wrote the books? Now chosenness is our ancestors’ self perception. Why? I am not sure but probably because they felt that they had to account for an extraordinary historical experience. They did believe in the patriarchal narratives. They did believe in the historical basis of an exodus from Egypt.

They did believe in a constitutional convention at the foot of Sinai. They did believe all of this. How do you account for the fact that we are here and this is our history? And my sense is the only way they could account for this was by saying that we have a special place in the economy of God’s redemptive work for the world and that came out as chosenness. But you know again as we know language here is tricky. Bachar doesn’t only mean to choose.

The Hebrew bachar, even though it does sometimes, I think about Max Kiddushin, alav ha’ Shalom [may he rest in peace], my former teacher, says one place that in the blessing before the haftarah we recite the words that God asher bachar b’nvi’im tovim -- that God chose -- bachar, the Torah, and Moses and Israel. God did not choose the Torah over the Bagavita and the New Testament and the Book of Mormon.

It is not as if he chose one over the others. Bachar there does not mean choose. It means love. It means to have a relationship with. The same way as the Hebrew word yodeah, which we translate “to know” but when God says in Genesis 18 that God l’maan y’dativ in relationship to Abraham, it does not mean that God says, ‘I know Abraham.’

This is not an intellectual thing. It is a reference to a relationship. So God has a relationship. It is a relationship with Israel, a relationship with Moses. God did not choose the Torah but it is much more emotional, and things like that, so it is, I think our ancestors’ self perception designed to account for their historical experience.

There was no other way. They could not see the fact that after all of this they were still here, except for saying that somehow God wants it to be this way, and that God is self expressed as what we today call chosenness.

LM: Kaplan could not say the word right?

NG: No.

LM: He removed the references from his Siddur [prayer book].

NG: He absolutely did. But you know you have to remember he was writing in the ‘30s and ‘40s and there were situations there where the whole notion of racial superiority was around and he needed desperately to distance Judaism from all of that stuff and that is why.

It is interesting because I have read two novels by Philip Roth recently where I am not a big— I do not read popular American fiction. I do not know whether Roth is popular but one was The Plot Against America where Roth writes about, it is a fictionalization of an election where Charles Lindbergh becomes president of the United States, and it is terrifying. It is so real that I read it in a state of absolute panic because it could so easily have been.

But he also wrote a novel called The Counter Life which I found incredibly brilliant. I do not know very much about where he was personally, Philip Roth, but in The Counter Life he has, it is a novel where effectively there is this dealing with the tension between the universal and the particular, between a Meir Kahane-type of Israeli who is a rabid nationalist, rabid anti-Palestinian, lives in a kibbutz and is prepared to obliterate all Palestinians, get them out of Israel, and an American Jew who is intermarried and who is very much the American open universalist, you know, humanist.

And he pulls these two people together in different parts of the novel and he makes the case for each of the two and I think it was fascinating because at the very, very end of the novel this universalist Jew who was intermarried discovers the incipient anti-Semitism in his wife’s family.

It is a British family, sort of a nasty sub-rosa anti-Semitism which begins to emerge, even in his wife after their marriage, and it comes to an issue where she is pregnant and the issue becomes is this child of theirs going to have a Baptism or a circumcision?

And it suddenly forces this open, assimilated, intermarried American novelist which is one side of Philip Roth, I guess, the side, who am I, where am I, and the final two pages of the novel is a ringing powerful paean to circumcision because he says that is where we decide who is in, and who is out, who is ours, and who is theirs.

And he suddenly decides that is where he wants to be, and that is where he wants his son to be, and it is a very, very powerful novel. And again, it brought back my own feelings about circumcision which is where my particularism gets self-affirmed, but that is the 45 minutes in which I am at the circumcision ritual. Then I go back and then I have to deal with the rest of my life, and then I find, you know, all of the other side of me, and the tension is very real.

LM: And speaking of tension and also picking up on a strand from that you mentioned with regard to The Counter Life, what is the theological significance of the state of Israel, of the existence of the state of Israel and of the land of Israel? We do not have time today to really delve into particular issues and particular political challenges, and the particular challenges of this current Israeli government, but in a general sense?

NG: This comes— my focus on this is in the prayer for the state of Israel which begins with the words identification, Avinu she’bashamayim-- our Father in heaven, Tzur Yisrael v’Goalo -- Rock of Israel and its Redeemer, barech et Medinat Yisrael-- bless the state of Israel, reishit tzmichat ge’ulateinu -- which I translate literally as reishit, the beginning of the growth of our redemption, the beginning of a flowering of our redemption.

Now, that is a fascinating, I think I have read the question as to who wrote this tefillah [prayer]. I think it was written by the chief rabbinate of Israel or sponsored, written some people say by S.Y. Agnon… I do not know how, but in any case, it has certainly become standard and in every birkat hamazon, grace after meals, we say haRahcham hu yivarech et Medinat Yisrael [May the Merciful One bless the State of Israel] and almost robot-like reishit tzmichat ge’ulateinu [the beginning of the flowering of our redemption] and for an awfully long time I could not say it.

LM: Could not say it.

NG: I could not say it because this affirmed a messianic dimension to the creation of a very secular state. I have accumulated a humongous amount of data about this. The conservative prayer book, Sim Shalom, which includes this prayer, fudges the translation and translates it not as “the beginning of the flowering of our redemption,” but as “the state of Israel with its promise of redemption.” Now, “promise of redemption,” meaning it is not now, but it may be coming. And it is a dishonest translation of the Hebrew.

I am sure political considerations were involved in, apart from the whole notion that English does not capture the Hebrew which we can talk about in some other discussion on liturgy, but in any case some of my colleagues change the Hebrew in order to match the English and add she’tehay reishit tzmichat ge’ulateinu --may it become the beginning of the flowering of the redemption, which is not what the original Hebrew, which is not in the text, but the whole question is, is the secular state redemptive? Now, in my own institution the chancellors of the seminary, the school, were not strongly Zionist.

In fact, Schechter, the first major figure, chancellor of the Seminary who wrote one article on Zionism which he calls a bulwark against anti-Semitism and he says very clearly, I am not writing as chancellor of the Seminary, I am writing as a private citizen, because the seminary’s board was largely made up on Reform Jews in those days who were not very favorable toward the Zionist movement.

His successor, Cyrus Adler, was a rabid non-Zionist. He was very scared about duel loyalties issue and his successor who was Finkelstein who was a passivist. Basically, a notable anecdote is in 1948 when the first Seminary commencement took place shortly after the establishment of the state of Israel in May 1948.

And the rabbinical school graduates, those who were becoming rabbis, many of whom were going to leave the evening after graduation to fly to Israel to fight in the war of independence, they asked permission to sing Hatikvah at commencement and Finkelstein said no, that would be offensive to members of our board.

So they climbed up the building and they hung the flag of Israel over the window, over the building, so that people coming to the commencement would see the flag of Israel. And when Finkelstein saw that he called the NYPD, had it torn down.

LM: [Laughs]

NG: And said he would not proceed with the commencement if the flag was up there. So that is the history of the— so there was a lot of questions about whether this state has redemptive value and, you know, I, in general, was uncomfortable saying it.

Finkelstein’s notion was why should we pray for a secular state, as the fulfillment of the Zionist dream? And why should, you know, if he is a passivist, why should Jews die in defense of a totally secular state? Well that was then. That was in the 1940’s, 1950’s.

So my own sense was discomfort with the formulation because it assumed that the simple creation of a secular state, that a political act has redemptive, religious redemptive, therefore theological significance.

I have changed my mind completely about that, and I have changed my mind because this goes back to what I said at the very beginning of our conversation, if I really believe that the creation of Jewish religion was an act, was a function of the impulses deeply buried within the Jewish people, then the Jewish people has religious significance in and of itself.

And therefore the activities, the functions of the Jewish people have religious theological significance if the state, I am going back to the debate between Herzl and Ahad HaAm: is Zionism a solution to the problem of the Jewish people or the problem of Judaism? Right. And Ahad HaAm said Judaism. Herzl says the Jewish people. We’re much closer to what Ahad HaAm said.

I think the great contribution of the state of Israel has been to Jewish culture, and much more an enrichment of Judaism than the life of the Jewish people. Most of the Jewish people are not there. We are here, but it seems to me that if there is a state which contributes to the security of the Jewish people, to the sense of pride and dignity of the Jewish people, that by definition has religious theological significance.

Is it redemptive? A very, very small step, but nevertheless since I do not believe that redemption will occur apocalyptically with a sudden descent of the messiah from heaven and a sudden, you know, Armageddon type activity, but in a much more naturalist, deliberate, slow, progressive kind of way, yes I think potentially the creation of a secular state can have redemptive value.

The tension for me, then, is the significance to which the state of Israel embodies the central classical values of the Jewish religion. There was a piece written recently with which I find myself in absolute total disagreement that said that if there is a tension between Jewish values and the survival of the state, Jewish values have to yield.

LM: I read that. It was by Yechezkel Dror in The Forward.

NG: Yeah. That got all kinds of e-mails to me by my universalist friends, “write a letter, write a letter.” I just do not have time to write letters about everything that troubles me now, but I felt strong disagreement on that because I think that if the state of Israel does not embody the values of Judaism, then I do not understand how we can say that it has redemptive significance.

I think it has redemptive significance, and one of the great things, and David Hartman taught me this, that the state of Israel means that Israel has to struggle with a whole set of issues, moral issues, that Jews never had to struggle with because we never had a state of our own.

Now we have to struggle with the issue of what is the moral dimension to foreign policy? What is the moral dimension to militarism? What are the moral issues involved? To what extent do Jewish values speak to issues of foreign relations, militarism, you know…

LM: The mundane, garbage collection…

NG: The mundane, garbage collection, police, police activities, the press, free press, freedom of speech, torture, well you know, I do not think there are any clear black and white answers to that but those have to figure and I think the Jewish values have to have a voice in all of these decisions to the extent that it does happen. I think yes, the beginning of the flowering of our redemption but just the beginning.

LM: Neil, thank you very much. It is always a pleasure to sit and to speak to you as I am sure it is a pleasure for our listeners of this podcast to be a part of this conversation as well.

NG: Thanks for having me.