Rethinking God and Ethics (2014)

Eugene B.
Borowitz
Library of Contemporary
Jewish Philosophers
Editor-in-Chief
Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, Arizona State University
Editor
Aaron W. Hughes, University of Rochester
Volume 4
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/lcjp

Eugene B. Borowitz
Rethinking God and Ethics
Edited by
Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron W. Hughes
Leiden • boston
2014
Cover illustration: Courtesy of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.
The series Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers was generously supported by the
Baron Foundation.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Eugene B. Borowitz : rethinking God and ethics / edited by Hava Tirosh-Samuelson

and Aaron W. Hughes.
pages cm. — (Library of contemporary Jewish philosophers, ISSN 2213-6010 ; volume 4)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-90-04-26756-5 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-26998-9
(pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-26999-6 (e-book) 1. Borowitz, Eugene B.—Philosophy.
2. Judaism—21st century. 3. Judaism—Doctrines. 4. God (Judaism) 5. Jewish ethics.
6. Reform Judaism—United States. I. Tirosh-Samuelson, Hava, 1950– editor of compilation.
II. Hughes, Aaron W., 1968– editor of compilation.
BM755.B624E94 2014
296.3092—dc23
2013050815
This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters
covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the
humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface.
ISSN 2213-6010
ISBN 978-90-04-26756-5 (hardback)
ISBN 978-90-04-26999-6 (e-book)
This hardback is also published in paperback under ISBN 978-90-04-26998-9.
Copyright 2014 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Global Oriental, and Hotei
Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.
Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV
provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center,
222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA.
Fees are subject to change.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Contents
Editors’ Introduction to Series ..................................................................... vii
Eugene B. Borowitz: An Intellectual Portrait .......................................... 1

Michael L. Morgan
Why I Am a Theologian Rather Than a Philosopher ........................... 37
The Jewish Need for Theology ..................................................................... 41
Through the Shadowed Valley ..................................................................... 51
The Autonomous Jewish Self ....................................................................... 71
‘Im ba’et, eyma—Since You Object, Let Me Put It This Way ............. 91
Editors’ Interview with Eugene B. Borowitz ............................................ 115

Select Bibliography .......................................................................................... 139

Editors’ Introduction to Series
It is customary to begin studies devoted to the topic of Jewish philosophy

defining what exactly this term, concept, or even discipline is. We tend not
to speak of Jewish mathematics, Jewish physics, or Jewish sociology, so why
refer to something as “Jewish philosophy”? Indeed, this is the great para-
dox of Jewish philosophy. On the one hand it presumably names something
that has to do with thinking, on the other it implies some sort of national,
ethnic, or religious identity of those who engage in such activity. Is not phi-
losophy just philosophy, regardless of who philosophizes? Why the need to
append various racial, national, or religious adjectives to it?1
Jewish philosophy is indeed rooted in a paradox since it refers to philo-
sophical activity carried out by those who call themselves Jews. As philoso-
phy, this activity makes claims of universal validity, but as an activity by a
well-defined group of people it is inherently particularistic. The question
“What is Jewish philosophy?” therefore is inescapable, although over the
centuries Jewish philosophers have given very different answers to it. For
some, Jewish philosophy represents the relentless quest for truth. Although
this truth itself may not be particularized, for such individuals, the use of
the adjective “Jewish”—as a way to get at this truth—most decidedly is.2
The Bible, the Mishnah, the Talmud, and related Jewish texts and genres
are seen to provide particular insights into the more universal claims pro-
vided by the universal and totalizing gaze of philosophy. The problem is
that these texts are not philosophical on the surface; they must, on the con-
trary, be interpreted to bring their philosophical insights to light. Within
this context exegesis risks becoming eisegesis. Yet others eschew the term
“philosophy” and instead envisage themselves as working in a decidedly
Jewish key in order to articulate or clarify particular issues that have direct
1 Alexander Altmann once remarked:

“It would be futile to attempt a presentation of Judaism as a philosophical system, or
to speak of Jewish philosophy in the same sense as one speaks of American, English,
French, or German philosophy. Judaism is a religion, and the truths it teaches are reli-
gious truths. They spring from the source of religious experience, not from pure reason.”
See Alexander Altmann, “Judaism and World Philosophy,” in The Jews: Their History, Cul-
ture, and Religion, ed. Louis Finkelstein (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of Amer-
ica, 1949), vol. 2, 954.
2 In this regard, see Norbert M. Samuelson, Jewish Faith and Modern Science: On the
Death and Rebirth of Jewish Philosophy (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), e.g., 10–12.
viii editors’ introduction to series
bearing on Jewish life and existence.3 Between these two perspectives or

orientations, there exist several other related approaches to the topic of
Jewish philosophy, which can and have included ethics,4 gender studies,5
multiculturalism,6 and postmodernism.7
Despite their differences in theory and method, what these approaches
have in common is that they all represent the complex intersection of
Judaism, variously defined, and a set of non-Jewish grids or lenses used
to interpret this rich tradition. Framed somewhat differently, Jewish
philosophy—whatever it is, however it is defined, or whether it is even
possible—represents the collision of particularistic demands and univer-
sal concerns. The universal or that which is, in theory, open and accessible
to all regardless of race, color, creed, or gender confronts the particular or
that which represents the sole concern of a specific group that, by nature or
definition, is insular and specific-minded.
Because it is concerned with a particular people, the Jews, and how to
frame their traditions in a universal and universalizing light that is believed
to conform to the dictates of reason, Jewish philosophy can never be about
pure thinking, if indeed there ever can be such a phenomenon. Rather
Jewish philosophy—from antiquity to the present—always seems to have
had and, for the most part continues to have, rather specific and perhaps
even practical concerns in mind. This usually translates into the notion that
3 See, e.g., Strauss’s claim about Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, perhaps one of the
most important and successful works of something called Jewish philosophy ever written.
He claims that one “begins to understand the Guide once one sees that it is not a philo-
sophic book—a book written by a philosopher for philosophers—but a Jewish book: a
book written by a Jew for Jews.” See Leo Strauss, “How to Begin to Study The Guide of the
Perplexed,” in The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines, 2 vols. (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1963), vol. 1, xiv.
Modern iterations of this may be found, for example, in J. David Bleich, Bioethical Dilem-
mas: A Jewish Perspective, 2 vols. (vol. 1, New York: Ktav, 1998; vol. 2, New York: Targum Press,
2006).
4 See, e.g., David Novak, Natural Law in Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998); Elliot Dorff, Love Your Neighbor and Yourself: A Jewish Approach to Modern
Personal Ethics (New York: Jewish Publication Society of America, 2006).
5 E.g., the collection of essays in Women and Gender in Jewish Philosophy, ed. Hava
Tirosh-Samuelson (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004).
6 E.g., Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid a Clash of Civilizations
(London: Continuum, 2003); Jonathan Sacks, To Heal a Fractured World: The Ethics of
Responsibility (New York: Schocken, 2007).
7 E.g., Elliot R. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic
Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004); Elliot R. Wolfson, Open Secret:
Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menahem Mendel Schneerson (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Elliot R. Wolfson, A Dream Interpreted within a
Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination (New York: Zone Books, 2011).
editors’ introduction to series ix
Judaism—at least the Judaism that Jewish philosophy seeks to articulate—

is comprehensible to non-Jews and, framed in our contemporary context,
that Judaism has a seat at the table, as it were, when it comes to pressing
concerns in the realms of ethics and bioethics.
Jewish philosophy, as should already be apparent, is not a disinterested
subject matter. It is, on the contrary, heavily invested in matters of Jewish
peoplehood and in articulating its aims and objectives. Because of this
interest in concrete issues (e.g., ethics, bioethics, medical ethics, feminism)
Jewish philosophy—especially contemporary Jewish philosophy—is often
constructive as opposed to being simply reflective. Because of this, it would
seem to resemble what is customarily called “theology” more than it does
philosophy. If philosophy represents the critical and systematic approach
to ascertain the truth of a proposition based on rational argumentation,
theology is the systematic and rational study of religion and the articula-
tion of the nature of religious truths. The difference between theology and
philosophy resides in their object of study. If the latter has “truth,” however
we may define this term, as its primary object of focus, the former is con-
cerned with ascertaining religious dogma and belief. They would seem to
be, in other words, mutually exclusive endeavors.
What we are accustomed to call “Jewish philosophy,” then, is a paradox
since it does not—indeed, cannot—engage in truth independent of reli-
gious claims. As such, it is unwilling to undo the major claims of Judaism
(e.g., covenant, chosenness, revelation), even if it may occasionally rede-
fine such claims.8 So although medieval Jewish thinkers may well gravitate
toward the systematic thought of Aristotle and his Arab interpreters and
although modern Jewish thinkers may be attracted to the thought of Kant
and Heidegger, the ideas of such non-Jewish thinkers are always applied
to Jewish ideas and values. Indeed, if they were not, those who engaged in
such activities would largely cease to be Jewish philosophers and would
instead become philosophers who just happened to be Jewish (e.g., Henri
Bergson, Edmund Husserl, and Karl Popper).
Whether in its medieval or modern guise, Jewish philosophy has a ten-
dency to be less philosophical simply for the sake of rational analysis and
more constructive. Many of the volumes that appear in the Library of
Contemporary Jewish Philosophers will bear this out. The truths of Judaism
8 A good example of what we have in mind here is the thought of Maimonides.

Although he might well redefine the notion of prophecy, he never abnegates the concept.
On Maimonides on prophecy, see Howard Kreisel, Prophecy: The History of an Idea in Medi-
eval Jewish Philosophy (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001), 148–56.
x editors’ introduction to series
are upheld, albeit in often new and original ways. Although Jewish philoso-
phy may well use non-Jewish ideas to articulate its claims, it never produces
a vision that ends in the wholesale abandonment of Judaism.9 Even though
critics of Jewish philosophy may well argue that philosophy introduces
“foreign” wisdom into the heart of Judaism, those we call Jewish philoso-
phers do not perceive themselves to be tainting Judaism, but perfecting it
or teasing out its originary meaning.10
The result is that Jewish philosophy is an attempt to produce a particular
type of Judaism—one that is in tune with certain principles of rationalism.
This rationalism, from the vantage point of the nineteenth century and up
to the present, is believed to show Judaism in its best light, as the synthesis
or nexus between a Greek-inflected universalism and the particularism of
the Jewish tradition.
What is the status of philosophy among Jews in the modern period?
Since their emancipation in the nineteenth century, Jews have gradually
integrated into Western society and culture, including the academy. Ever
since the academic study of Judaism began in the 1820s in Germany, Jewish
philosophy has grown to become a distinctive academic discourse prac-
ticed by philosophers who now often hold positions in non-Jewish institu-
tions of higher learning. The professionalization of Jewish philosophy has
not been unproblematic, and Jewish philosophy has had to (and still has
to) justify its legitimacy and validity. And even when Jewish philosophy is
taught in Jewish institutions (for example, rabbinic seminaries or universi-
ties in Israel), it has to defend itself against those Jews who regard philoso-
phy as alien to Judaism, or minimally, as secondary in importance to the
inherently Jewish disciplines such as jurisprudence or exegesis. Jewish phi-
losophy, in other words, must still confront the charge that it is not authen-
tically Jewish.
The institutional setting for the practice of Jewish philosophy has shaped
Jewish philosophy as an academic discourse. But regardless of the setting,
Jewish philosophy as an academic discourse is quite distinct from Jewish
9 This despite the claims of Yitzhak Baer who believed that philosophy had a negative
influence on medieval Spanish Jews that made them more likely to convert to Christianity.
See Israel Jacob Yuval, “Yitzhak Baer and the Search for Authentic Judaism,” in The Jewish
Past Revisited: Reflections on Modern Jewish Historians, ed. David N. Myers and David B.
Ruderman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 77–87.
10 Indeed, Jewish philosophers in the medieval period did not even see themselves as
introducing foreign ideas into Judaism. Instead they saw philosophical activity as a recla-
mation of their birthright since the Jews originally developed philosophy before the Greeks
and others stole it from them.
editors’ introduction to series xi
philosophy as constructive theology, even though the two may often be

produced by the same person.
Despite the lack of unanimity about the scope and methodology of
Jewish philosophy, the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers insists
that Jewish philosophy has thrived in the past half century in ways that
will probably seem surprising to most readers. When asked who are the
Jewish philosophers of the twentieth century, most would certainly men-
tion the obvious: Franz Rosenzweig (d. 1929), Martin Buber (d. 1965), and
Emmanuel Levinas (d. 1995). Some would also be able to name Abraham
Joshua Heschel (d. 1972), Mordecai Kaplan (d. 1983), Joseph Soloveitchik
(d. 1993), and Hans Jonas (d. 1993). There is no doubt that these thinkers
have either reshaped the discourse of Western thought for Jews and non-
Jews or have inspired profound rethinking of modern Judaism. However, it
is misleading to identify contemporary Jewish philosophy solely with these
names, all of whom are now deceased.
In recent years it has been customary for Jews to think that Jewish phi-
losophy has lost its creative edge or that Jewish philosophy is somehow
profoundly irrelevant to Jewish life. Several reasons have given rise to this
perception, not the least of which is, ironically enough, the very success
of Jewish Studies as an academic discipline. Especially after 1967, Jewish
Studies has blossomed in secular universities especially in the North
American Diaspora, and Jewish philosophers have expressed their ideas in
academic venues that have remained largely inaccessible to the public at
large. Moreover, the fact that Jewish philosophers have used technical lan-
guage and a certain way of argumentation has made their thought increas-
ingly incomprehensible and therefore irrelevant to the public at large. At
the same time that the Jewish public has had little interest in professional
philosophy, the practitioners of philosophy (especially in Anglo-American
departments of philosophy) have denied the philosophical merits of Jewish
philosophy as too religious or too particularistic and excluded it entirely.
The result is that Jewish philosophy is now largely generated by scholars
who teach in departments/programs of Jewish Studies, in departments of
Religious Studies, or in Jewish denominational seminaries.11
The purpose of the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers is
not only to dispel misperceptions about Jewish philosophy but also to
11 See the comments in Aaron W. Hughes and Elliot R. Wolfson, “Introduction: Charting
an Alternative Course for the Study of Jewish Philosophy,” in New Directions in Jewish Phi-
losophy, ed. Aaron W. Hughes and Elliot R. Wolfson (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press, 2010), 1–16.
xii editors’ introduction to series
help nudge the practice of Jewish philosophy out of the ethereal heights
of academe to the more practical concerns of living Jewish communities.
To the public at large this project documents the diversity, creativity, and
richness of Jewish philosophical and intellectual activity during the sec-
ond half of the twentieth century and early twenty-first century, showing
how Jewish thinkers have engaged new topics, themes, and methodologies
and raised new philosophical questions. Indeed, Jewish philosophers have
been intimately engaged in trying to understand and interpret the momen-
tous changes of the twentieth century for Jews. These have included the
Holocaust, the renewal of Jewish political sovereignty, secularism, post-
modernism, feminism, and environmentalism. As a result, the Library of
Contemporary Jewish Philosophy intentionally defines the scope of Jewish
philosophy very broadly so as to engage and include theology, political
theory, literary theory, intellectual history, ethics, and feminist theory,
among other discourses. We believe that the overly stringent definition of
“philosophy” has impoverished the practice of Jewish philosophy, obscur-
ing the creativity and breadth of contemporary Jewish reflections. An accu-
rate and forward looking view of Jewish philosophy must be inclusive.
To practitioners of Jewish philosophy this project claims that Jewish
philosophical activity cannot and should not remain limited to profes-
sional academic pursuits. Rather, Jewish philosophy must be engaged in
life as lived in the present by both Jews and non-Jews. Jews are no longer a
people apart, instead they are part of the world and they live in this world
through conversation with other civilizations and cultures. Jewish philoso-
phy speaks to Jews and to non-Jews, encouraging them to reflect on prob-
lems and take a stand on a myriad of issues of grave importance. Jewish
philosophy, in other words, is not only alive and well today, it is also of the
utmost relevance to Jews and non-Jews.
The Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers is simultaneously
a documentary and an educational project. As a documentary project, it
intends to shape the legacy of outstanding thinkers for posterity, identifying
their major philosophical ideas and making available their seminal essays,
many of which are not easily accessible. A crucial aspect of this is the inter-
view with the philosophers that functions, in many ways, as an oral his-
tory. The interview provides very personal comments by each philosopher
as he or she reflects about a range of issues that have engaged them over
the years. In this regard the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers
simultaneously records Jewish philosophical activity and demonstrates its
creativity both as a constructive discourse as well as an academic field.
editors’ introduction to series xiii
As an educational project, the Library of Contemporary Jewish

Philosophers is intended to stimulate discussion, reflection, and debate
about the meaning of Jewish existence at the dawn of the twenty-first cen-
tury. The individual volumes and the entire set are intended to be used in
a variety of educational settings: college-level courses, programs for adult
Jewish learning, rabbinic training, and interreligious dialogues. By engag-
ing or confronting the ideas of these philosophers, we hope that Jews and
non-Jews alike will be encouraged to ponder the past, present, and future of
Jewish philosophy, reflect on the challenges to and complexities of Jewish
existence, and articulate Jewish philosophical responses to these chal-
lenges. We hope that, taken as individual volumes and as a collection, the
Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers will inspire readers to ask
philosophical, theological, ethical, and scientific questions that will enrich
Jewish intellectual life for the remainder of the twenty-first century.
All of the volumes in the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers
have the same structure: an intellectual profile of the thinker, several semi-
nal essays by the featured philosopher, an interview with him or her, and a
select bibliography of 120 items, listing books, articles, book chapters, book
reviews, and public addresses. As editors of the series we hope that the
structure will encourage the reader to engage the volume through reflec-
tion, discussion, debate, and dialogue. As the love of wisdom, philosophy is
inherently Jewish. Philosophy invites questions, cherishes debate and con-
troversy, and ponders the meaning of life, especially Jewish life. We hope
that the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers will stimulate think-
ing and debate because it is our hope that the more Jews philosophize, the
more they will make Judaism deeper, durable, and long-lasting. Finally, we
invite readers to engage the thinkers featured in these volumes, to chal-
lenge and dispute them, so that Judaism will become ever stronger for
future generations.
Eugene B. Borowitz: An Intellectual Portrait
Michael L. Morgan
For over sixty years, Eugene B. Borowitz has been engaged in the project
of understanding modern Jewish existence. This is the task of Jewish the-
ology, and for Borowitz it has been his lifelong task to develop a Jewish
theology for the non-Orthodox Jew in the world of late-twentieth-century
Jewish life. Borowitz explicitly denies being a philosopher, although his
work exhibits an extensive familiarity with the tradition of Western philos-
ophy, nor is he a sociologist or historian, although his writings abound with
sociological observations and historical knowledge of modernity and espe-
cially of Judaism in its encounter with modernity. He is a rabbi, a teacher
of rabbis, an educator, and a theologian, and for much of his career he has
been a spokesperson for Reform Judaism in particular and for what he calls
“non-Orthodox” Judaism in general.1 In over twenty books and hundreds
of essays and articles, he has sought to speak to this audience about its pri-
mary responsibilities and to frame for it a portrait of self-understanding
which would serve to provoke it to revitalization and renewal.
Borowitz’s writing is marked by candor, directness, and accessibility. He
avoids jargon, and always has in mind his audience, his readers, and the
world in which they live. His style, to my ear, is almost conversational; for
Borowitz, writing is less presentation than it is dialogue. This dialogical tone,
moreover, is no accident. Probably Borowitz’s deepest intellectual debt is to
Martin Buber, and while his thinking exhibits a selective appropriation of
Buber’s complex and varied legacy, Borowitz has learned many lessons from
Buber, and one concerns the fact that writing, like speaking, is an interper-
sonal encounter. When he speaks, Borowitz speaks to the reader, and in
addition he speaks in a way that is relatively unadorned and accessible.
1 In a response to Elliot Dorff, Borowitz vigorously denies that he is a “Reform ideo-

logue.” His audience, he argues, is much broader: “For over three decades I have addressed
myself to and written about that overwhelming mass of modernized Jews who, regardless
of labels, exercise the right to make up their own minds about what they will believe and
do as Jews.” See “Five Letters to Readers of Renewing the Covenant,” in Eugene B. Borowitz,
Judaism after Modernity (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1999), 182–83. See also
“’Im ba’et, eyma—Since You Object, Let Me Put It This Way,” in Reviewing the Covenant, ed.
Peter Ochs (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000), 148, and republished in this volume.
2 eugene b. borowitz: an intellectual portrait
No thinker who has written about Jewish life and ideas is any more direct,
organized, and uninflated than Borowitz and for good reason. Borowitz is
a teacher and an educator. He thinks not only about what he is saying but
also, preeminently, about to whom he is saying it and why. By and large,
he is speaking to nonprofessionals, nonacademics, lay people, everyday
congregants—educated ones, to be sure—and people who have read and
who are interested in Jewish life and today’s world. And his purpose in writ-
ing or in talking to and for them is largely persuasive. Borowitz has worked
out for himself and for them a portrait of what non-Orthodox Jewish life
ought to be, and he wants them to understand his portrait, accept it, and
then join him in enacting the imperatives, the directives that occur within
it. For Borowitz, then, teaching rabbis and Jews is about exploring what
Judaism means for those of us who live in contemporary North America, in
the Diaspora, and to motivate them to take that understanding seriously, to
act on it. Against the background of this conception of his theological goals
and his educational purposes, Borowitz tailors his writing and his speech.
Much of the time, that writing and that speech will seem clear and unam-
biguous, although I am not sure that it is always without its nuance and
complexity, but all of the time it has the qualities listed above—it is direct
and accessible and uncomplicated by jargon or overindulgence.
Borowitz began his career in the years following World War II and the
destruction of European Jewry that was part of it. As he came to believe,
the Jew in modern, postwar America was engulfed in a world in which
moral foundations had been undermined and in which religious convic-
tion was deteriorating. He sought intellectual, moral, and religious security,
and the Judaism around him, to which he was committed, seemed to pro-
vide none of these. In many essays in his early years, this sense of despair
and frustration expresses itself. To him, Judaism needed a real God for Jews
to engage with, and it could not rely on science, rationality, and intellec-
tual accomplishments to understand that God or make a case for the Jew’s
engagement with the divine. Nor could Jews do without such a real God,
if morality and moral ideals and purposes were to have a secure, uncondi-
tional foundation and not be subject to changing circumstances or power
relations or differences of point of view. And after the Holocaust, the hor-
rific events so vividly exposed after the war ended, how could one go on
without such a sense of moral confidence? And hence how could Judaism
go on without a vivid and compelling understanding of how a real God pro-
vided that confidence?
Borowitz’s years at the Hebrew Union College in the late 1940s involved
an ongoing conversation with his two closest friends: Arnold Wolf, who like
eugene b. borowitz: an intellectual portrait 3
Borowitz was an American kid trying to figure out what Jewish life was all
about, and Steven Schwarzschild, the German-born refugee whose roots
were deep in European Jewish life and in its turmoils as well as in European
philosophy. With these friends, Borowitz talked, argued, and matured, and
from that dialogical crucible, rather than from his teachers, he became
committed to a new language and to a new direction.2 The new direction
was provided in particular by Martin Buber and the new language by the
European existentialism that was then, in the postwar years, finding its way
into North American culture.
These twin influences, Buber and European existentialism, provided the
young Borowitz with several insights and themes that became central for
his understanding of Jewish life in the modern world. One is the impor-
tance of a real God for Jewish existence. Another is the way in which liv-
ing with God should be conceived as a relationship, what traditionally is
referred to as a b’rit (covenant). A third insight is that any serious account
of human existence must be grounded in and enriched by the particularity
of how the individual lives; such an account should begin with the par-
ticularity or distinctiveness of Jewish life and only touch on the universal
when it arises from that very particularized setting. And finally, central to
any understanding of Jewish life is the self or person, and since that self or
person is a Jew, one will have to understand what it means to be a Jewish
self or a Jewish person. Who is such a person? What does she think? How
does she act? What is or should be important to her? What makes her the
person that she is, a modern Jew?
At the early stages of his thinking, Borowitz followed the dominant ten-
dency of postwar intellectual culture; he focused on the individual and
on the individual’s self-determination or, as he called it, her autonomy.
Typically, when referring to this autonomy, Borowitz explained that what
2 Wolf would go on to become one of the most engaged, thoughtful, and impressive
congregational rabbis of his generation. He served congregations in Chicago and was for
many years the Hillel director at Yale University. For a sample of his writings, see Jonathan
S. Wolf, ed., Unfinished Rabbi: Selected Writings of Arnold Jacob Wolf (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee,
1998), with a forward by Eugene B. Borowitz; Wolf also edited the important collection of
essays by the new theologians in Rediscovering Judaism (Chicago: Quadrangle Press, 1965).
Schwarzschild served several pulpits and then in 1965 took a position teaching philosophy
and Judaic Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. He published widely in philoso-
phy and Jewish philosophy and became his generation’s foremost student of Hermann
Cohen. He also, from 1961 to 1969, served as editor of the journal Judaism, an influential
Jewish intellectual journal founded in the 1950s. For a selection of his writings, see Men-
achem Kellner, ed., The Pursuit of the Ideal: Jewish Writings of Steven Schwarzschild (Albany:
SUNY Press, 1990).
he had in mind was the ability to think and decide for oneself. In Jewish life,
this meant for him that the serious non-Orthodox or liberal Jew is some-
one who thinks for him- or herself and who decides what to do in their
Jewish lives for him- or herself. This feature of the liberal Jewish self was
central to what made such a person liberal and non-Orthodox. Traditional
views about the authority of Jewish law (halakha) could not be imported
into Borowitz’s conception of non-Orthodox Jewish life. Exactly why and
exactly what this means is something we will consider shortly. That it is a
central feature of his early view of the Jewish self is undeniable.
Existentialism in postwar America was not a simple or clearly defined
intellectual or cultural trend. In 1960, when I was a high school senior, a col-
lege friend gave me Walter Kaufmann’s Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to
Sartre with the advice that by reading and studying its contents I would be
introduced to the most exciting intellectual thinking of the day. And when,
as a college freshman, I chose a philosophy course that began with Søren
Kierkegaard and Edmund Husserl and moved on to Martin Heidegger and
Jean-Paul Sartre, I felt that I was becoming initiated into the most impor-
tant intellectual developments at the most serious level. But existentialism
was a complicated, multifaceted phenomenon. It involved focusing on the
individual’s particular existence and on the whole person, on that person’s
freedom, and on the centrality of decision and deed. It also involved an
awareness of what followed from the centrality of such decision for the
individual, how much depended upon it, the responsibility that came with
it, and the anxiety or dread that cast its shadow over human existence in
all its finitude. In postwar America, one learned about this cultural trend
by reading Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, and Samuel Beckett as much as by
studying Heidegger and Sartre.
Furthermore, its tense, desperate, and pessimistic tone raised the issue
of existentialism’s relation to religious life. The historical development from
Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky, both of whom had powerful religious sensi-
bilities, to Heidegger and Sartre, who were avowedly atheist, might have
seemed a natural and beneficial one. That is, many might have seen mature
existentialism as radically torn from transcendence. For Borowitz, this was
not so. He always believed that the deepest and most advantageous strands
of existential thinking could be found among those for whom religion
and religious life were central—from Kierkegaard to Karl Barth, Rudolph
Bultmann, and Paul Tillich, including importantly two of his central Jewish
forbearers, Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig.
I would characterize Borowitz not as a scholar of religious existential-
ism, even though he did write an introduction to it for lay persons; rather
he was a consumer, an appropriator, and a fellow traveler. Religious exis-

tentialism was not a subject matter for Borowitz; it provided him with a
vocabulary, an orientation, and several crucial themes. He did not so much
examine existentialist works as read them selectively and learn from them,
and one of the things that he learned, especially from Buber, is the fun-
damental importance of relationship to the individual’s life. This insight
is not about how having relationships is important to living a rich and
flourishing life. It is about how human existence itself is relational. When
Borowitz turns to Buber, especially in those early years of the 1950s and
1960s, he regularly comments that Buber teaches us that we are related
to one another in two ways, as things and as whole persons.3 The tone
of such a statement suggests that what Borowitz is pointing to is the idea
that our relationships with others can be either superficial, manipulative,
and instrumental, on the one hand, or deep and rich, on the other. And I do
not want to deny that there is an element of such evaluation or discrimina-
tion in Borowitz’s claim. But more deeply he shows that he has accepted
what is fundamental to Buber and not to him alone, that as selves or per-
sons we are not fundamentally isolated atoms or encased egos, waiting to
be related to worldly objects and other selves. Rather we are primordially
and originally related to the items in our world and especially to the per-
sons with whom we live in it. We are fundamentally relational as the human
beings that we are.
Because this is so, because as human beings we are fundamentally rela-
tional beings, Borowitz believes that Buber’s claim about how we “know”
God in our lives, that is, as a distinctive kind of I-Thou, in powerfully inti-
mate moments of relationship, comes as a natural development. There is
no question that if God is real in the lives of Jews, that presence must be
understood as a mode of relationship. And from Buber, Borowitz learns not
only that this mode of relationship is deep and powerful, affecting, a “pres-
ence as strength,” but he also learns that this relationship is noncognitive.
Borowitz takes existentialism in general and Buber in particular to belie
the narrowness of too great a reliance upon human rationality, especially
when it comes to understanding what it is to live a human life. And what
existentialism teaches about the fullness and emotional richness of human
existence in general, Buber teaches about our personal human relation-
ships and also about our very special relationship with God. This is part
3 See, for example, Eugene B. Borowitz, “The Idea of God” (1957), in Studies in the Mean-
ing of Judaism (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2002), 43–44.
of what Borowitz means, I think, when he says that what the modern Jew
needs is a “real” God. She needs a god that is more than the object of think-
ing, more than a subject for rational identification and analysis. The God of
the tradition of Western philosophy simply will not do, if we are to make
sense of modern Jewish life. If it is to mean something, to support a life of
prayer and Jewish conduct, the Jew’s relationship with God cannot be an
exclusively rational one.
The relationship with God is like the deep and rich relationships we
sometimes have with other persons, ones like a very serious friendship or
most of all like that we have with someone we love. Borowitz finds that in
order to communicate Buber’s technical themes to a nonacademic audi-
ence, it is helpful to use these everyday cases and to exploit them. They are
pedagogically very useful, but he also believes, I think, that they are more
than just useful. They convey the core of Buber’s insight, that the events of
divine-human encounter that Buber speaks of are akin to moments that
initiate or punctuate these deep human relationships. If Jewish life has
weight or normative force, and if its practices are to be responses to some-
thing and to some authority, it is because this force and this authority arises
within a determinative divine-human relationship, just as lovers act toward
one another in ways that their love calls upon them to act.
Moreover, in Judaism, there is a vocabulary for the ongoing relationship
with God that can be glossed by characterizing it, to some degree, as one of
friendship or love, and that of course is the idea of the Covenant. This legal
or quasi-legal expression, originally political and legal in meaning, can now,
in a world in which our attention to the individual and to self-determina-
tion is central, be reconceived as a relationship of interpersonal love and its
ongoing formalization—say as marriage or something akin to it.
If the modern Jewish life of non-Orthodox Jews is marked by a significant
degree of self-determination and hence self-responsibility, and if at the
same time that life is one involved with God and hence is Covenantal, there
are certainly questions that arise regarding what contribution the individ-
ual Jew makes and what contribution God makes to the deliberations, the
decisions, and the actions that make up Jewish life. Borowitz frequently
points out that any plausible account will appreciate how much human
initiative and human determination must be involved in any clarification
of modern Jewish life and what “duties” provide its normative structure.
God must play some role, but so must the autonomous individual. Without
God, there is no confidence and unconditional security about what Jewish
life is and how it fits into some picture of human history; without individual
autonomy, there is no reason to think that the modern Jew will regularly
find any particular “duty” compelling or even worthwhile.
In a famous paper of 1961, “Crisis Theology and the Jewish Community,”
Borowitz identified the theological movement in Judaism that dated from
about 1950 and involved the appropriation of existentialism for the devel-
opment of Jewish theology, and he called it “Covenant Theology.” As he
saw it, this was a wholly nonparochial intellectual development drawing
its members from many diverse Jewish backgrounds and dispositions.
Moreover, from his point of view, it was the most exciting new develop-
ment in Jewish theology of the postwar period. It is not inaccurate, I think,
to say that Borowitz became, if he was not already, one of its premier advo-
cates. Moreover, I think that the centrality of the Covenantal vocabulary
to his conception of modern Jewish life was undisturbed and unchanged,
even when, in the 1980s and through the 1990s, his thinking underwent sig-
nificant developments. Details aside, at least for the moment, we can best
understand these developments as refinements in his conception of the
modern Jewish self or the modern Jewish person, and it was just such a
self that participated in the Covenant. In particular, he comes to a richer
appreciation of the relational character of that self and especially the
particularity of it, the way in which the Jewish self is situated essentially
in a particular community, the people of Israel. There are times when he
expresses the complexity of this nexus by writing of the Jewish self as “I (in
Israel with God),” and this way of putting it does make utterly perspicuous
the self’s features. It is a form of agency that must be viewed from the first
person; it involves thinking and acting by an ego whose identity is already
shaped by its embeddedness in a particular historical tradition, the people
of Israel, and by its relatedness to that people’s God. Whatever the genu-
ine Jewish modern non-Orthodox self does, it does as one fundamentally
engaged with God in an intimate and determinative relationship and as
part of a people whose character is expressed in a long historical tradition
which is constituted within that relationship.
With a conception of this communally and historically embedded Jewish
self and of a self Covenantally related to God, Borowitz goes on, in these
later writings especially, to formulate what he calls a conception of Jewish
duty. This is Torah for the non-Orthodox Jew. It is a sketch of what the ideal
Jewish life might look like for the contemporary liberal Jew. Borowitz, in
various books and essays, discusses how such a Jew might think for herself
and arrive at an understanding of what being Jewish requires of her, and he
clarifies some of the values and issues that would constitute such a liberal,
contemporary Jewish life.
Biography and Career
Eugene B. Borowitz was born in 1924 and raised in Columbus, Ohio. In 1940
he matriculated at The Ohio State University, where he studied philoso-
phy and the social sciences. He frequently recalls in later life that a turn-
ing point occurred for him when he came to think that the debates about
skepticism in an epistemology seminar were fruitless and that in the end
reason could not provide compelling reasons against knowledge nor could
it provide a satisfactory theory about how knowledge was possible. After
his graduation, he entered the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. There
he quickly became disenchanted with the rationalist approach to Judaism
that was prominent among the faculty, and he became fast friends with
Arnold Wolf and Steven Schwarzschild, who became lifelong conversation
partners. He married his wife, Estelle, in 1947, and following his ordination
in 1948, he applied to do doctoral work. His application was rejected, and he
took a congregational position as an assistant rabbi in St. Louis. When the
Korean War broke out, he became a Navy chaplain, stationed in Maryland,
and after his service was completed, he was accepted into the doctoral
program at the Hebrew Union College, where he received a Doctorate of
Hebrew Letters in rabbinic literature, with distinction, in 1952. Borowitz
then moved to Port Washington, New York, where he helped to found
the Community Synagogue. In 1957, he took the position of Director of
Education at the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, succeeding the
pioneering Jewish educator Emanuel Gamoran. While in Port Washington,
he had begun a doctoral program in religion at Columbia University and
the Union Theological Seminary. When hired by the Union, Borowitz was
ABD but changed degree programs, a condition of his employment, and
in 1958 received an Ed.D. from Columbia Teacher’s College with a concen-
tration in the philosophy of education. For some years after his move to
Port Washington, Borowitz taught part-time at the Hebrew Union College
in New York City, first in its education program and then in the rabbinical
school. In 1962 he was hired to teach midrash and modern Jewish thought
in the Rabbinical School of the Hebrew Union College, where he continues
to teach as the Sigmund L. Falk Distinguished Professor of Education and
Jewish Religious Thought. In 1994 he was given the added distinction of
being named the College’s only Distinguished University Professor.
During the years he directed the educational programs for the Reform
Movement, Borowitz was instrumental in developing a serious theologi-
cal foundation for Reform Jewish education, and he wrote often on issues
concerning Jewish education. This he has continued to do throughout his
career. His first book, A Layman’s Introduction to Religious Existentialism,
published in 1965, was based on a series of lectures that he gave at the 92nd
Street Y in New York, as part of their extensive adult educational program,
and many of his essays originated as lectures or talks, frequently to audi-
ences regarding Jewish education, interfaith issues, and contemporary
Jewish affairs.
From early in his career, Borowitz has had a serious interest in ethical
issues. That interest is reflected in his work on the role of ethics in Jewish
life and also in numerous essays and books that deal with practical issues in
Jewish ethics. In the turbulent and tense years of the 1960s, for example, he
was invited by Alfred Jospe of the National Hillel Foundations to write a book
for college students dealing with sexuality, love, and marriage. Choosing a
Sex Ethic: A Jewish Inquiry was published by Schocken Books in 1969 in the
Hillel Library series sponsored by the B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundations. In it
Borowitz deals with the ethical problems raised by the changing attitudes
toward sexuality, proposes and debates several models for understanding
the ethical dimensions of sexual relationships, and discusses how sexuality
is related to love and marriage. As he deals with this set of issues, so salient
in the sixties, Borowitz also turns a careful and critical eye to the rabbinic
literature on these issues and evaluates the relevance of halakhic discus-
sion to contemporary decision-making. As he would later say, the method
of reflection that he employs in the book is one that he would later refine
but not reject, even if new perspective and changes in attitude might mean
that the substance of his account is no longer as directly applicable today
as it was in the late 1960s. Today, sexuality cannot and ought not to be dis-
cussed wholly within the context of procreation, traditional heterosexual
marriage, and such. Borowitz’s more recent writings, when they touch
upon homosexuality, the character of marriage, the family, and much else,
are deeply sensitive to contemporary concerns and recent literature. The
situation differed in 1969, and while his book may no longer be directly rel-
evant, it is an exemplary monograph in how a non-Orthodox Jew might
take seriously the halakhic tradition as part of a contemporary reflection
on a set of moral issues of immediate concern.
Borowitz admits to not having a disposition toward political activ-
ism, but his commitment to ethical issues expressed itself in more than
one way in the course of his life. He often recalls that in the 1960s, at a
critical moment, he joined fifteen of his rabbinic colleagues in an act of

political and moral solidarity with Martin Luther King and his associates
in the struggle for civil rights. In 1964, King sent a telegram to the rabbis
at the Central Conference of American Rabbis meeting in Atlantic City to
come and join the crusade against segregation in St. Augustine, Florida.4
That night Borowitz was among a group jailed for their participation, and
as a result he became the principal drafter of a statement made by the six-
teen members of their group, “Why We Went: A Joint Letter from the Rabbis
Arrested in St. Augustine,” dated June 19, 1964. The letter is reprinted in the
volume Studies in the Meaning of Judaism, the volume on Borowitz in the
Jewish Publication Society Scholar of Distinction Series.5
But this onetime act only foreshadows what is surely Borowitz’s most
influential act of moral advocacy. In 1970, frustrated with the way in which
“people regularly prated of the relevance of Judaism to contemporary
affairs” and yet rarely “tried to demonstrate what that might mean in our
roiling social situation,” Borowitz sought a solution. At the time, he realized
that what was needed was a publication which offered a venue for wide-
ranging, open Jewish discussion of the most urgent issues of the day and
the relevance of serious Jewish thinking for deliberating about them. And
so in 1970, he founded Sh’ma, A Journal of Jewish Responsibility, which he
edited for twenty-three years and which still remains a unique, pluralistic
expression of moral and social conscience within the Jewish world. In 2000
Borowitz wrote about Sh’ma in “A Life of Jewish Learning: In Search of a
Theology of Judaism,” in these terms:
The upheaval of the 1960s drove me into another project whose length of
endurance and breadth of consequence I could not envision when I began
it: the founding of Sh’ma, A Journal of Jewish Responsibility . . . As in the
Talmud, “the Jewish view” would now have to emerge more from the dia-
lectic, thoughtful, informed Jewish opinions, expressed side by side, than
from merely stating one point of view . . . This private, “underground” little
magazine—published without institutional support or “angel,” except for
the help in its first three years of a generous printer-friend—soon created a
kind of idealized community of Jewish interest among its customary 5,500
subscribers . . . Sh’ma was [a] channel for my continuing interest in Jewish
4 Borowitz refers to these events in “My Pursuit of Prayerfulness,” in Jewish Spiritual

Journeys: 20 Essays Written to Honor the Occasion of the 70th Birthday of Eugene B. Borow-
itz, ed. Lawrence A. Hoffman and Arnold J. Wolf (West Orange, NJ: Behrman House, Inc.,
1997), 187.
5 Borowitz, Studies in the Meaning of Judaism, 89–93.
ethics, which had by now become the main area of Jewish practice in which
I sought to apply my maturing theological ideas.6
Indeed, Borowitz’s “little magazine” may be and may continue to be his
most lasting contribution to moral and political activism within Jewish life,
but it marks only one further stage in his growing interest in the practice
of Jewish moral thinking and the teaching of it. To Choosing a Sex Ethic of
1969 must be added several later volumes, Exploring Jewish Ethics (Wayne
State, 1990), Reform Jewish Ethics and the Halakhah (Behrman House,
1994), and The Jewish Moral Virtues (Jewish Publication Society, 1999), with
Francis W. Schwartz.
Borowitz’s practical concern—moral, social, and political—is a deep and
abiding one. It is, however, rooted in his larger, theological project, which is
to frame an understanding of modern Jewish existence. This project, initi-
ated in the 1940s, reached its first serious crystallization in the late 1960s
and early 1970s with the publication of three books. The first, A New Jewish
Theology in the Making (Westminster Press, 1968), is the most systematic of
the three. It sets out the problem of survival for modern Judaism, identifies
those elements of secularism and Christian neo-Orthodoxy which a viable
Judaism must confront, describes four theological options which can be
fruitfully engaged but which in the end prove unsatisfactory—options that
he associates with Leo Baeck, Mordecai Kaplan, Martin Buber, Abraham
Joshua Heschel, and Joseph Soloveitchik—and in conclusion articulates
and defends a new existential Jewish stance. The second book, How Can
a Jew Speak of Faith Today? (Westminster, 1969), is a collection of essays
on themes such as the idea of God in contemporary Judaism, the idea of
revelation, Judaism and the secular state, Judaism and Christianity, and the
secular situation that Judaism faces. The third book from this early period
is an assessment of contemporary Jewish life in North America, its secular-
ity, its self-delusions, and its social and political character. This book, The
Masks Jews Wear: The Self-Deceptions of American Jewry (Simon & Schuster,
1973) is a lively and engaging defense of the role Judaism might play in
what Borowitz calls “creative alienation,” a posture which “implies suffi-
cient withdrawal from our society to judge it critically, but also the will and
flexibility to keep finding and trying ways of correcting it.”7 In the book,
6 Eugene B. Borowitz, “A Life of Jewish Learning,” reprinted in Studies in the Meaning of

Judaism, 399–400. Originally published in 2000 by the Hunter College Jewish Social Studies
Program, based on the Anne Bass Schneider Lecture in Jewish Studies.
7 Eugene B. Borowitz, The Masks Jews Wear: The Self-Deceptions of American Jewry (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1973), 209.
Borowitz advocates for a new type of Jew, unlike his parents and grand-
parents, one who can engage critically and actively with his own flawed
position and develop a “movement of Jewish self-determination” aimed at
bringing Jewish “ethical commitments and social values” from the periph-
ery to the center of Jewish life. It is a defense, that is, for a kind of Jewish
wholeness or integrity, a kind of “Jewish health . . . [that] is founded on the
rejection of any inner split between self and Jew. It bases itself on our effort
to be, at our very roots, Jew and person all at once. We now want to build
our existence in such a way that there is regularly no place in the growing
integrity of our being where we are not Jews.”8
At the end of The Masks Jews Wear, Borowitz adds “some personal words”
that tell us how he had arrived at this point in his career. In these com-
ments, Borowitz points out that from 1950, when he had begun to think
seriously about Jewish theology, he had taken his task not to be apologetic,
seeking “to validate Judaism to skeptics,” but rather that of “clarify[ing]
what Judaism meant to those who still believed in it.” He took his work to
be a “series of methodological searches” the outcome of which would be a
“systematic exposition of Jewish faith.” However, his project was delayed,
he claimed, by the “social upheaval in America” and the challenges that
Jews faced when called upon to put their Judaism and especially their com-
mitment to Jewish values into practice. In those turbulent years, “there was
no simple, single road from Jewish belief to Jewish social responsibility.”
This led him to found Sh’ma. A second delay came about when discussions
with his friend Jacob Behrman led to his writing a diagnosis of the contem-
porary social and political crisis through which American Jews were pass-
ing. This resulted in the book The Masks Jews Wear. Moreover, he claims,
this book and its analysis are based on an account of the people of Israel as
the “people of God’s Covenant,” and this account is “focused on the ground
of [Jewish] commitment to value and duty.” To arrive at it, he has “utilized
an existentialist analysis of commitments to personal and social values to
open up the individual to the transcendent foundation on which he almost
certainly grounds them.”9 In short, the book about American Jews and the
contemporary moral and social crisis attempts to clarify the problems Jews
must face, the values that Judaism provides for dealing with those prob-
lems, and the way in which such values are grounded in the Jewish people’s
8 Ibid., 210–14.
9 Ibid., 219–21.
Covenantal existence. For a preliminary defense of such a theological view

of the Jewish people, one should turn to Borowitz’s earlier two books.
This was in 1973. For the next two decades, Borowitz would deepen and
modify that theological account of Judaism and the Jewish people, and the
result is a book that may fairly be called his magnum opus, Renewing the
Covenant: A Theology for the Postmodern Jew (Jewish Publication Society,
1991). There is every reason to treat this work as the culmination of all of
Borowitz’s forty years of theological work; it is also the foundation for all
that follows it. In its preface he tells us that the book is intended for the
liberal or non-Orthodox Jew, and its purpose is to clarify for that reader the
Covenantal relationship between God and the Jewish people. Moreover,
Borowitz points to a crucial methodological commitment, that his theol-
ogy would be from the inside out, and this came to mean for him that it
would involve “a resolute confrontation between the culture’s truth [the
truth of the surrounding Western culture] and as faithful an understand-
ing of classic Jewish faith as learning, belief, and practice can provide.” For
him, the central theme or motif of that classic Jewish faith is the Covenant,
and the central affirmation of modern Western culture that would lead to a
modification of the Jewish tradition is the “root belief that personal dignity
means having substantial self-determination.”10 In short, the book attempts
to clarify theologically the nature of the modern Jewish self and the duties
or obligations that bear upon it, its experience of modern society and of the
Jewish past, and its situation as a member of a Covenantal people.
Renewing the Covenant was widely reviewed and discussed. In 1999,
Borowitz published a collection of papers, Judaism after Modernity
(University Press of America), many of which reflect upon that work,
develop its themes, and respond to readers and critics. In 2000, a volume
appeared with academic responses to the book and Borowitz’s replies:
Reviewing the Covenant: Eugene B. Borowitz and the Postmodern Renewal of
Jewish Theology (SUNY Press) was edited by Peter Ochs.
At 89, Borowitz continues to teach at the Hebrew Union College. He
has been the recipient of several honorary degrees—from Lafayette
College (1982), Colgate University (1988), Gratz College (1991), and The
Jewish Theological Seminary (2009)—and has visited at various universi-
ties including Columbia, Princeton, City College of New York, Temple, and
Harvard. He is a past-President of the American Theological Society, was
10 See Eugene B. Borowitz, Renewing the Covenant: A Theology for the Postmodern Jew
(Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1991), ix–x.
the recipient of a National Jewish Book Award, and is the author, coauthor,
or editor of over 20 books and 350 articles, essays, and book chapters.
Covenantal Theology: Form and Method
The core of Borowitz’s theological understanding of Judaism employs a few

central notions, which he appropriates from Jewish and Western cultural
sources and employs in his own distinctive ways. These notions include
Covenant, God, the self, self-determination, the Jewish people (the people
of Israel), duty, and value. This is not a complete list of ideas that are impor-
tant to him, nor are these terms uncommon or rare. But they do form a
core, and we can learn a good deal about Borowitz’s thinking by focusing
on them. However, we must be cautious. Since these terms are well-known
and their sources are often widely acknowledged, we must be careful not
to ascribe meanings to Borowitz’s use of them that are inappropriate or
mistaken. There are times when the straightforwardness and apparent
transparency of his writing can be seductive, and we might be tempted into
errors and failures.
From early in his career, Borowitz has been deeply concerned about the
methodological problem, from what starting point does a responsible theo-
logical account begin? Jewish theology has the goal of giving an account
that clarifies what Jewish faith is. Where does it begin? There is a time when
Borowitz takes this question to mean, Does such an account begin within
Judaism or does it begin from some assumptions or views that are found
external to Judaism, in the surrounding culture—the intellectual and espe-
cially philosophical culture that is outside of Judaism but by which Jews,
Jewish beliefs, and Jewish practices are surrounded? More specifically, I
think, Borowitz worries that Jewish beliefs and commitments are made
subject to truths found in the surrounding culture, so that Judaism is being
determined and judged by standards external to itself. The case he most
often has in mind concerns reason or rationality. Reason is the source of
truth in the Western philosophical tradition and in the domains of sci-
entific investigation and in many other cultural domains in the Western
tradition. Should Jewish theology begin with a commitment to the preemi-
nence and reliability of reason and then turn to Judaism, identifying what
is valuable and acceptable by judging whether it is itself rationally true and
acceptable or is compatible with rational convictions or principles, etc.? Or
does this threaten in some way the integrity of Judaism and Jewish belief?
This problem or set of problems appears to be another version of the tra-
ditional problem of faith and reason, and in a sense it is. But for Borowitz
it is primarily a problem raised by and during the Enlightenment of the
eighteenth century and bequeathed to all Jewish theology ever since—and
to much Christian theology as well.
In his early writings, Borowitz treats this problem or set of problems as
if starting with rational standards or starting within the domain of truths
of faith are exclusive and exhaustive alternatives. Indeed, to do the for-
mer is to lapse into apologetics, and to hold firm to the latter is to main-
tain a sense of integrity and dignity for Judaism: these are the outcomes
of which Borowitz seems to be persuaded. Because he treats the alterna-
tives as exhaustive and exclusive, moreover, he opposes all forms of ratio-
nalism or naturalism in Jewish theology and affirms those accounts that
start with Jewish life and Jewish faith. At any rate, these and similar claims
are what he defends in an important paper from his early period, “Faith
and Method in Modern Jewish Theology” (1963).11 It is a view that Borowitz
holds throughout his early essays. What might we say about this orientation
of his? First, we might worry that Borowitz is too simplistic about mod-
ern Western culture; even during the Enlightenment and certainly thereaf-
ter, not all Western culture is predominantly rationalist and/or naturalist.
Second, we might worry that he has not clearly articulated what rationality
is and how reasoning works; there may be formal features of reason that
are unavoidable and desirable in any serious theology, and there may be
substantive outcomes of reasoning that are avoidable and can be charged
with a kind of bias against Judaism and Jewish faith. But I suggest that we
set these worries aside. Borowitz’s point is neither a strictly historical one
nor a logical or conceptual one. Borowitz wants us to consider the point of
view from which a responsible Jewish theology ought to be developed and
its true audience. His point, I think, is that Jewish theology should be an
attempt to clarify for Jews what their Judaism ought to be, what Jewish life
ought to mean for them. For this reason, Jewish theology ought to articu-
late a Jewish perspective on Jewish life, and it ought to do so for Jews—and
for Borowitz, since the Jews he has in mind also are immersed, embedded,
situated in modern Western culture, these Jews are going to be what he
early on calls “liberal” and what he later calls “non-Orthodox,” by which he
means non-Haredi Orthodox. Such Jewish readers are complex, nuanced,
and conflicted persons who take both Judaism and modernity seriously.
11 Eugene B. Borowitz, “Faith and Method in Modern Jewish Theology,” CCAR Yearbook
73 (1963): 215–28; reprinted in Studies in the Meaning of Judaism, 69–84.
For them, to arrive at a serious and acceptable Judaism, one must not sim-
ply use universal or external standards to “regulate” or “determine” what
Judaism ought to be like. One must start from within Judaism, but that
Judaism must be one that can speak to the Jew who is not only Jewish but
also is grounded in modernity.
What this means, it seems to me, is that eventually, by the time that he
writes Renewing the Covenant, if not before, Borowitz no longer takes this
methodological issue to be about faith and reason, or inside and outside, in
this simple way. Rather he realizes that any responsible theological account
of Jewish life must, by beginning within Judaism and Jewish life, take both
the Jewish tradition seriously and also those aspects of modernity which
are undeniable ingredients of the modern Jew’s identity, and in particu-
lar he takes this to mean a commitment to some significant degree of self-
determination. Self-determination, of course, is associated specifically with
the notion of autonomy; indeed, it is one possible translation of that term’s
Greek origins. And therefore it does have a provenance, the Kantian notion
of moral autonomy and its foundation in metaphysical freedom. For the
moment, let us set aside the issue of what Borowitz means by self-determi-
nation and simply notice that for him no responsible theological account
of modern Judaism, as he sees it, can dispense with the ways in which self-
determination influences the beliefs and responsibilities of modern Jews.
In other words, no account of what modern Judaism means can be accept-
able if it simply ignores self-determination or systematically minimizes it.
There may be no global or wholly general way to figure it into an account of
Judaism, but it must play a role, both in the basic character of what it is to
be a Jewish person or self and in the particular duties that are binding for
such a person.
This, then, is what Borowitz means when he says that methodology is
crucial to how one does Jewish theology and what is acceptable for an
account of modern Jewish life. It is a matter of rejecting two features of
the approaches that he finds wanting, that they typically begin with ratio-
nalism or naturalism and use that view to shape their account of Jewish
life and that they begin with universal principles and truths and simply
assimilate Judaism to them.12 In A New Jewish Theology in the Making and in
many essays, among them “Form and Method in Modern Jewish Theology,”
Borowitz’s comments on figures as diverse as Abraham Geiger, Kaufman
12 These two features are clearly identified in “Five Letters,” 170–71.

Kohler, Hermann Cohen, Leo Baeck, Mordecai Kaplan, Roland Gittelsohn,

and a host of others are not meant to be scholarly reviews or general critical
analyses; they are focused on what role rationality, science, and such play
in their thinking and ultimately on their point of view and what it is to take
up such a point of view. Later, moreover, in Renewing the Covenant and in
many essays in Judaism after Modernity, it is clear that he comes to appre-
ciate the variegated and pluralistic nature of the modern Jewish point of
view. In “The Way to a Postmodern Jewish Theology,” for example, he uses
the word “university” to signify the rational-naturalist orientation of the
surrounding culture and makes his point this way: “I cannot, as my teach-
ers did, allow the university to define how modern Jews should understand
and live their faith.” At the same time, however, Borowitz appreciates the
way in which the university does provide various vocabularies and modes
of discourse that facilitate the theologian’s formulation of such an under-
standing. “Nonetheless, respecting greatly what the university might still
teach us, I, like many others, seek the fresh understanding that might come
from articulating my faith in a university refined language.” Once that was
an “existentialist” vocabulary; now, he claims, it is “the dialect . . . that makes
up the postmodern conversation.”13
In terms of orientation, then, and what might be called method, by the
time Borowitz writes Renewing the Covenant, his views have become refined.
Genuine Jewish theology must originate within the particular situation of
the modern Jewish self, and it must take into consideration and respond to
the many features of that situation that characterize modern Jewish life—
that do and ought to. There are Jewish features and modern ones—or, as
he comes to call them—postmodern ones. For various reasons, he leaves
behind existentialism—as our culture and intellectual discussion has done
in general—and appropriates various themes that he takes to be features
of the “postmodern conversation.” Like most of us, he is no doctrinaire
postmodernist; he identifies features of the modern Jewish situation that
echo within postmodern reflections as he understands them. These features
include an emphasis on particularity; an appreciation for the constructed
nature of selfhood or subjectivity; the communal embeddedness of per-
sons; the primacy of texts, language, and the multivalence of interpretation;
a rejection of metaphysics; the interrelatedness of God and persons; and a
13 Eugene B. Borowitz, “The Way to a Postmodern Jewish Theology,” in Judaism after

Modernity, 127; also 125–53.
revised notion of autonomy and self-determination.14 He treats this cluster

of themes, interests, and commitments as a “postmodern” articulation of
what modern Jewish faith is; he uses a terminology that he believes is part of
the “postmodern conversation” and interprets it in his own way.
Covenantal Theology: God and the Covenant
At the heart of Borowitz’s theology is the notion of the Covenant between

God and the Jewish people.15 To formulate a Jewish theology that is rooted
in Jewish life is, for Borowitz, to formulate a Covenantal theology, and this
means to frame Jewish life as a life lived within the framework of an ongo-
ing relationship between God and the Jewish people. The word “Covenant”
signifies this relationship. There is no more central notion for Borowitz’s
thinking than this notion of Covenant. But it is an old term and one with
many resonances. As always, one needs to ask what exactly Covenant
means to him.
The first thing to be said about the notion of Covenant is steeped in
ancient legal and political history, where it regularly was applied to the
relationship between a king or ruler and specific subjects. It denoted an
arrangement in which the two parties played roles with regard to one
another that were described in the covenantal document or charter; it was
a legal relationship. Semitologists and other specialists have identified vari-
ous types of such covenantal arrangements between contracting parties.
Borowitz knows about this history and about the later history of the termi-
nology and the types of relationships that the term was used to designate.
He is fully aware that his use of the term, while it has affinities with how the
14 Eugene B. Borowitz, “Postmodernity and the Quintessential Modern Jewish Religious

Movement,” in Judaism after Modernity, 155–68; “The Way to a Postmodern Jewish Theol-
ogy,” 146–53.
15 Famously, in his essay “Crisis Theology and the Jewish Community,” published
in Commentary in July 1961, Borowitz “introduced the term ‘Covenantal Theology’ to
characterize an emerging paradigm shift in non-Orthodox Jewish thought.” This is the way
Borowitz himself describes it in the preface to Renewing the Covenant in 1991. See “Crisis
Theology and the Jewish Community,” Commentary 32 (July 1961): 36–42, reprinted in Stud-
ies in the Meaning of Judaism, 59–68, esp. 64. The term refers to the theological work of
Emil Fackenheim, Lou Silberman, Steven Schwarzschild, Jacob Petuchowski, and others, all
indebted, he says, in some way to Buber and Rosenzweig, and all interested in the role of
human limitations and “authoritative guidance for Jewish living.” To varying degrees and
in different ways, all employ existential terms or respond to their use. I follow Borowitz
in capitalizing the word “Covenant” when it refers to the particular relationship between
God and the Jewish people.
term b’rit has been used in Jewish life, liturgy, and other texts, is distinctive
and limited. While it was once such a term, he does not take it to be a legal
or political term. Nor is it a category of interparty relationship. He knows
that there are many kinds of covenants into which people have entered and
can enter. But to him the term “Covenant” is not a general term. It refers to
a very particular relationship, that between the people of Israel (the Jewish
people) and the God who freed the Hebrews from Egyptian slavery, led
them into the desert, gave them the law at Sinai, and brought them into the
land of the Canaanites and Philistines and others in order for them to settle
there and become a society, a community, founded on a sense of allegiance
to and respect for Him. First, then, the Covenant is a relationship, a social
bond, which brings with it expectations, obligations, authority, capabili-
ties, and responsibilities that each party has toward the other. Second, the
Covenant is a special relationship, because its parties are God and a specific
social group or people, the people of Israel.
Borowitz and his colleagues in the postwar period, the new theologians,
do not, I think, appreciate the centrality of the term or the idea of Covenant
and then develop an interpretation of what it means and implies. Rather,
he has reasons to prefer a Judaism in which God has been and is really
present to Jews and at times to the Jewish people. Life with such a God
of history, a God who is real and present, is best conceived, he believes, in
terms that Buber has made famous, the terms of encounter and dialogue,
of meeting and the between. Borowitz, as I have said, much prefers not to
analyze Buber’s writings in technical terms but rather to expound its cen-
tral themes in everyday terms and by using the analogies that Buber himself
suggests, those of friendship and love.16 And this brings Borowitz to the tra-
ditional texts of Judaism with a desire to find there an expression that refers
to the relationship between God and the Jewish people and has enough
affinity with friendship and love to allow him to take it to be the object of
a Buberian reading. In short, Borowitz believes that the best way, the most
compelling and acceptable way, for the modern Jew to understand the way
16 There are several good examples of Borowitz’s discussions of Buber that show how
selective his treatments are. See, for example, Borowitz, “A Life of Jewish Learning: In
Search of a Theology of Judaism,” 391–95; “Existentialism’s Meaning for Judaism: A Con-
temporary Midrash” (1959), in Studies in the Meaning of Judaism, 55–57; “The Idea of God”
(1957), in Studies in the Meaning of Judaism, 43–45; “The Autonomous Jewish Self” (1984),
in Studies in the Meaning of Judaism, 220–21; A New Jewish Theology in the Making (Phila-
delphia: Westminster Press, 1968), chap. 6, 123–46; “The Way to a Postmodern Jewish The-
ology,” 137–46. See also Eugene B. Borowitz, Choices in Modern Jewish Thought: A Partisan
Guide, 2nd ed. (New York: Behrman House, Inc., 1995) (orig. 1983), 143–65.
in which God is real in Jewish life is to understand himself as a member of a

Covenantal community. From an attempt to understand the divine-human
relationship and with the help of Buber, Borowitz comes to the classical
expression, the “Covenant.”
The most compelling and believable and fruitful way to understand
God’s presence for the modern Jew is for him to treat the relationship with
God not as a purely or even primarily cognitive or rational one. Rather that
relationship is analogous to the way two persons who are in love live with
one another or how two friends live their friendship. Such ongoing rela-
tionships are founded on moments of intense, determinative encounter,
when two persons become deeply attached to one another, and their con-
tinuing relationships are then punctuated by moments that confirm their
sense of solidarity and interpersonal commitment and then occasionally
suffer moments when that sense of solidarity is strained or challenged.
Faith, Borowitz thinks, is like this experience. It is an ongoing relationship
between the Jew and her God, and it is that because the Jew is a member
of a people who has that kind of relationship with God, a Covenantal exis-
tence. The Covenant is a very particular historical relationship. The Jewish
tradition, for all its complexity and variegated nature, is a very particular
history of how the Jewish people has thought and acted as part of that
relationship. And the individual modern Jew, if she is committed, is a very
particular life lived within the flow of this history and this tradition. In a
succinct statement of what he thinks about covenant, Borowitz provides a
nice capsule of this account: “By taking some liberties, we may say that our
modern thinkers have interpreted berit [covenant] less as contract than as
what moderns call ‘a personal relationship.’ ”17 Later in the same essay, he
says that such an account “asks us to envision the Covenant as the Jewish
people’s long-lasting love affair with God, one that has survived and been
strengthened by its many fights and reconciliations, its intimacies and its
duties, its inspiration and its unfathomability” and that “as in every deep
human relationship, it is sometimes overwhelmingly certain and other
times troublingly shaky.”18
The critical point of this account is that for Borowitz the link between the
divine and the human is a relationship. All human existence is relational,
and thus the link between the experiencing subject or self and that which
is transcendent, God, must also primordially be relational. Knowing, believ-
ing, inquiring, analyzing, aspiring to understand—these too are relations,
17 Eugene B. Borowitz, “Covenant,” in Judaism after Modernity, 198.

18 Ibid., 203.
of course, but they are not ones in which the whole person is invested; they
are not direct, total investments of oneself. They all involve distant, detach-
ment, classification, and analysis. They are not cases of the self giving wholly
of itself to the other. Buber helps us to understand that when we are related
to other persons, there are moments like this, and then there are ongoing
relationships that draw on that depth of reciprocal investment, that shim-
mer with them, resonate with them, and live both with them and because
of them. The relationship with God is like this. Moreover, because this is so,
this conception of what it is for individual Jews as members of the Jewish
people to be related to God has implications for what the Jew contributes to
that ongoing relationship and what it means for the Jew to play her role in
maintaining it. In order to say something about this, we need to turn first to
Borowitz’s treatment of autonomy or self-determination and his conception
of the Jewish self, and then to his account of what he calls Jewish duty.
Autonomy and the Jewish Self
If there is one set of ideas and themes that underwent significant devel-
opment for Borowitz, it is this set. His conception of the Jewish self and
the role that self-determination plays in it began as a highly individualis-
tic one and eventually became more richly social and embedded in com-
munity. The shift is crucial to Borowitz’s mature theological conception of
Covenant and to his abandoning existentialist discourse and his appropri-
ation of what he calls the terms of the postmodern conversation. It also
involves a development of his commitment to the fundamental role that
relationships play in understanding the normative force and the detailed
content of Jewish duty, as he calls it.
As I have indicated, the early Borowitz took autonomy to be the abil-
ity to think for oneself and makes one’s own decisions. In the first chapter
of Choosing a Sex Ethic, Borowitz describes autonomy as “the indepen-
dent value of each man’s conscience,” and he elaborates what this means
this way: “No one has the right to tell someone else what is right and thus
imply that he should not think about it for himself. Ethical procedure
requires one person to encourage another to make up his own mind in as
informed, thoughtful, and sensitive a way as he can. Each person’s ethical
autonomy is to be respected and encouraged to seek mature and respon-
sible expression.”19 In this book Borowitz is dealing with ethical autonomy,
19 Eugene B. Borowitz, Choosing a Sex Ethic: A Jewish Inquiry (New York: Schocken
Books, 1969), 3–4.
self-reliance on one’s own thinking through what is right and wrong regard-
ing ethical or moral matters. In this kind of case, as he goes on to elaborate,
autonomy is a goal. It may be beyond the grasp of many people. It involves
facing up to authorities and others, taking responsibility for thinking care-
fully, in an informed way, and thoroughly about various matters, and estab-
lishing one’s own standard of conduct. Later in the book Borowitz explains
that he admires those who resist both the forces of traditional authorities
and the temptations of our contemporary “vulgarizing society” and who
think for themselves about what is right and wrong. Moreover, since the
issues regarding sexual morality are complicated, he realizes that in the
end our thinking may not bring us to certitude or complete confidence.
“Our decisions are not absolute but the best we have been able to come up
with.”20 That is, when we consider what is right or wrong to do, we might
not be able to arrive at certain and firm conclusions, but there is value in
the fact that we took the task upon ourselves to think about the matter and
to make a decision for ourselves. That makes us what Borowitz calls auton-
omous or self-determining, self-reliant, and mature, and it contributes to
our becoming a whole person and entering into interpersonal relations as
a whole person.
This understanding of autonomy is indebted to Kant and to Buber,
among others, but it is clearly an appropriation and modification of their
views and not simply a repetition of one or the other.21 Here it is applied
to moral matters, but it does not seem to be restricted to them. The value
of autonomy for the enrichment of one’s selfhood extends to many areas of
one’s life, where one is more mature and more fully human the more one
thinks matters through for oneself, takes responsibility for arriving at
standards for what is right and what is wrong to do, and then makes deci-
sions about what to do based on those standards and on one’s delibera-
tions. Borowitz suggests—he never provides a thematic account, I do not
believe—that what makes autonomy valuable to the self is that its ele-
ments of control over one’s dispositions and commitments, of self-reliance
on its own thinking through and arriving at conclusions, and of indepen-
dence all contribute to its very fullness and character as the self that it is.
Indeed, it is for each self what makes that self mine. It is as if Borowitz were
20 Ibid., 103.
21 Borowitz gives a sketch of the modern notion of autonomy and the self from Des-
cartes, Rousseau, and Kant to Sartre and Habermas in “The Autonomous Self and the
Commanding Community,” Theological Studies 45 (1984): 34–44; see also Renewing the
Covenant, 170–78.
to ask: How much of what we are and what we do is guided and directed
by ourselves and how much by other forces—family, tradition, society, and
so forth? How many of our commitments are really ones that we arrived
at after careful and thoughtful reflection and how many are ones that we
simply adopted unthinkingly? And so forth. Selfhood is tied to identity, and
identity is grounded in internal rather than external determination, so to
speak. And his answer is, in the spirit of existentialism as he saw it, that the
more autonomy we express, the fuller a self we are. And this holds for the
Jewish self as much as for any self. Kant did not say exactly this, of course,
although his views on morality and autonomy can be understood to under-
lie this kind of view, and neither did Sartre or Buber say exactly this. But
something like this is what Borowitz appropriates from existentialism and
what he finds also valued in Jewish sources. Such autonomy or thinking for
oneself is at the heart of the respect and dignity that Judaism associates
with human life, he believes. Judaism respects human life and all human
life because human beings are capable of expressing such self-determina-
tion and hence of becoming richly autonomous selves.
In A New Jewish Theology in the Making Borowitz calls this self-determi-
nation “freedom of individual conscience,” and he associates with it “each
man’s right to spiritual self-determination.” If Judaism is about beliefs and
practices, then the self that believes and chooses what to do must be free
to think through for itself what to believe and what to do. There must be
“respect for [the individual’s] freedom,” and the “right of dissent [must be]
inalienable.”22 Of course, Borowitz realizes that there is a difficulty. If this
cluster of values concerning freedom, autonomy, and dissent is absolute,
then it will always be a prior condition which any appropriation of tradi-
tion must satisfy. It must always come first, so to speak. But if the tradi-
tion is primary, then the respect for the individual’s autonomy, for thinking
for himself and deciding for himself, is not without restrictions, without
limits. But Borowitz wants both and thinks that liberal Judaism turns on
having both the unquestioning assent to Judaism and the absolute right to
think for oneself. He wants the liberal Jew to rekindle a Jewish faith that will
involve “the conscious, personal assent to the unique meaningfulness and
significance of the Jewish religious tradition for our lives.” And since this
faith is based on individual assent, he says, “it likewise guarantees the right
to dissent without thereby raising the self to the status of a prior principle.”23
22 Borowitz, A New Jewish Theology in the Making, 191.

23 Ibid., 192.
But how can this be assent and yet be unquestioning and still autonomous
or free?
In short, how is this possible? What does this mean? Borowitz sets out
a fourfold process which he believes will clarify this puzzling proposal.
First, the tradition is not an object of study; it presents itself to the Jew as
texts, practices, and values that “make a claim” upon the Jew, as he puts it,
that “confront [him] in authority and challenge.” Second, nothing of that
tradition is excluded ab initio; it presents itself in all its complexity, both
what seems relevant and what seems irrelevant. The goal is for it to be
“self-regulating,” where the decisions to exclude or dissent are made from
within and not without. Third, I may dissent, but when I do, I must justify
to myself why I am dissenting, why some aspect of what Judaism bequeaths
to me no longer applies or should no longer apply. And finally, “from this
dynamic process of confronting the claims of the tradition in its fullness,
and working out concurrence and dissent, the individual comes to know
himself fully.” Borowitz calls this process one of “finding oneself.” It involves
taking “Judaism as accepted guide and as rejected standard” both, and the
outcome will be a “mixture of person and tradition that should mark the
modern Jew.”24
One may doubt that this account solves the problem facing Borowitz and
his commitment to self-determination as well as to Jewish faith. And there
is reason to believe that he was aware of its limitations. What he sought was
a way to make what he called the “assent” to tradition, to the resources of
Jewish faith” both freely appropriated and in some way normative or com-
pelling, and once that normativity was in place, to confirm the continued
role of self-determination. But what the elaboration of this fourfold scheme
does is to restate the problem rather than to clarify its structure or seek to
clarify how the coordination of authority and autonomy is possible. After
all, to say that the tradition makes a claim upon the contemporary Jew is
neither to explore what that in fact means, nor is it to show that it does not
overwhelm autonomy rather than complement it. The account Borowitz
gives simply does not say enough to leave the reader satisfied.
But one might think—as I believe Borowitz himself came to appreciate—
that the foundation of the problem was already present at the outset, the con-
ception of the Jew as an initially isolated, atomized individual, separate from
the Jewish people and its past, and yet capable of taking her place within that
people. In short, his conception of the self was insufficiently relational; he
24 Borowitz, A New Jewish Theology in the Making, 192–94; cf. 207.

did not yet fully appreciate how embedded the self always is in the world
and in various communities and traditions within it. To put it starkly, the
modern self does not start from nowhere, and this caveat applies to the
Jewish self as much as to any other.25 To be sure, Borowitz is addressing
those Jews who might be persuaded to return to a Judaism that they could
take seriously, that is substantive and yet not dominating; their commit-
ment to Judaism may as yet not be whole-hearted or rich or full. But it is
still true that they are Jews, and their embeddedness in Judaism, the Jewish
people, and the predicament of contemporary Jewish life should not be
ignored. What that embeddedness means becomes increasingly vivid
to Borowitz.
Already in 1970 Borowitz acknowledged this change in his view of the
self by pointing out that while Buber had taken him into the domain of
relationship, he had been insufficiently attentive to the particularity of
the Jewish experience. Borowitz sought, he claimed, to go beyond Buber.26
More precisely, his concern was expressed as a methodological one. Buber
was correct when he gave a relational account of human existence and also
when he understood the divine-human encounter as similar and akin to
the interpersonal I-Thou encounter. But his account is too universalistic; it
derives an account of Judaism from a general philosophical anthropology,
and this strategy fails to appreciate that since all selves are embedded in
particular situations, any theology of Jewish existence must take the dis-
tinctive and historically particular Jewish situation of the Jew into account.
Buber’s methodology lends itself to apologetics, but “as a simple matter of
self-respect, there ought to be Jewish theology for Jews whose Jewishness
is neither incidental nor accidental but a very part of their existence.” The
Jew, like everyone, lives a particular existence; no one “can live outside the
finitudes of history.”27 Hence, any account of the Jewish self cannot start
out at an utterly general or universal level; it must, from the outset, take the
Jew as embedded within Jewish life.
The Jewish self is embedded in history and in Jewish life, but this
requires, as Borowitz later makes very clear, that the Jewish self must
25 See Borowitz, “B’rit, Mitzvah, and Halakha: In Search of a Common Vocabulary,”

in Judaism after Modernity, 120: “No one is completely autonomous. All of us are part of
families and communities, cultures and histories, and all of us come with specific genetic,
emotional, and physical capabilities.”
26 He already made this point in 1970 in “The Problem of the Form of a Jewish Theol-
ogy,” in Studies in the Meaning of Judaism, 126–27; the essay was originally published in the
Hebrew Union College Annual 40–41 (1969–1970): 391–408.
27 Borowitz, “The Problem of the Form of a Jewish Theology,” 126.
be embedded in the community, in the Jewish people. “The universal—

Buber’s individual—does not precede any particularity but is rather an
outcome of them.”28
The crucial essay that exposes this shift and marks the transition from
Borowitz’s early writings on freedom and selfhood to his later thinking is
the essay “The Autonomous Jewish Self” (1981), republished below.29 In
a sense, Borowitz moves from a highly individualistic notion of selfhood
to a deeply situational and communitarian notion.30 His original concep-
tion of the self is marked by its universal features and its detachment; the
conception he comes to develop is more robust and includes all the spe-
cial relationships and features that are particular to it. As we have seen, a
proper understanding of autonomy already points to this particularity of
each self as a subject, but that particularity involves appreciating how the
self always has more than rational features and features it shares with every
other self; it has features that make it the distinctive, particular self that it
is, and these arise out of its distinctive embeddedness in history and com-
munity. This is the general orientation of the change for Borowitz; it will be
helpful to note some of the details.
What does Borowitz say in “The Autonomous Jewish Self ” and its com-
panion piece “The Autonomous Self and the Commanding Community”?
After surveying the tradition from Descartes to Sartre, as it were, Borowitz
turns to Buber, who, he says, already “knows no utterly discrete Descartesian
[sic] ego but only a self which is always engaged with another,” at times
worldly items and at times other persons. In short, Buber already conceives
of the self relationally, as always embedded situationally.31 Moreover, there
is a mode of that relational character that is “qualitatively more significant
than our more precise customary engagement with others as objects.”32
This of course is the I-Thou encounter and the relationship grounded in it.
And what lies behind all of these “qualitatively more significant” relation-
28 Borowitz, “The Way to a Postmodern Jewish Theology,” 146. For a very important
discussion of how Buber had influenced him and yet how he saw himself as going beyond
Buber, see 137–46.
29 Borowitz refers to this essay, which was written in 1981 but only published in Modern
Judaism in 1984, as a companion piece to “The Autonomous Self and the Commanding
Community,” Theological Studies 45 (1984): 34–56.
30 Looked at in this way, Borowitz seems to be leaving a kind of Rawlsian self behind
and adopting a notion of selfhood more like the Hegelian one that Michael Sandel
describes of the encumbered self in his famous critique of Rawls in Liberalism and the
Limits of Justice, first published in 1982.
31 Borowitz, “The Autonomous Jewish Self,” 220.
32 Borowitz, “The Autonomous Self and the Commanding Community,” 45.
ships is the relationship with God, because of which we know ourselves,

Borowitz says, “to be endowed with ultimate worth.”33
Borowitz then explains how autonomy is still present in this account
but, as he puts it, in a “transformed fashion.” I think that what Borowitz has
in mind here is that the inherited notion of autonomy was about identity
and individuality, what makes me the particular person I am and how my
character is grounded in what I make my own. Similarly for Buber, even
in the I-Thou encounter, the I and the other person maintain their indi-
vidualities, but with this modification, that who each is cannot be under-
stood without appreciating what each means to the other. He puts it this
way: “The autos which now seeks the worthy act must always do so as an
encounter partner.”34
This dialogical and yet autonomous conception has “social conse-
quences.” Everyday social life is filled with I-It relations with other people;
what we aspire to is “a social existence in which people reach out to one
another in dialogic concern,” and Buber calls such social existence a “com-
munity” (Gemeinschaft). In the final years of the nineteenth century, Buber
had been involved in a movement called the “New Communitarians” and
from that time he had argued, in terms inherited from Ferdinand Tönnies
and indebted to his friend and mentor Gustav Landauer, that the goal of
our social existence is to transform society (Gesellschaft) into community
(Gemeinschaft). With his theory of I-Thou of the early 1920s, he is able to
articulate this aspiration in a theoretical framework. Borowitz sees this very
clearly, and he sees too that there are moments when a particular group—
national or ethnic or religious—comes to realize this goal as its national
aspiration: “In great historic moments [the experience of such an encoun-
ter] happens to a folk and establishes its national character.”35 Buber under-
stands how this functions generally, and how law and practice come into
existence and remain in force as long as they are taken to express and rein-
force such a national aspiration. He also understands how this h appened to
33 Ibid., 45.
34 Ibid., 45; see also 45–46. See “The Autonomous Jewish Self,” 220–21. “Despite all that
you and I now mean to one another, neither of us must now surrender to the other our
power of self-determination. Yet because you are here with me, my self, formerly so poten-
tially anarchic, now has a sense of what it must choose and do—and it knows God stands
behind this ‘mission.’ ” Ibid., 220.
35 Borowitz, “The Autonomous Self and the Commanding Community,” 46. He goes on
to say: “The Hebrews shared such an experience in the events we call Exodus and Sinai—
but did so with the unparalleled recognition that they were entering a covenant with God
as well as with their newly born nation.” He notes that Buber elaborates this momentous
event in his book Moses (Oxford: East and West, 1947), 110ff.
the ancient Hebrews and continues to operate as the dialectic infusing the
life of the Jewish people.
Borowitz makes a keen observation: at the turn of the century, when
Buber was engaged with communitarian thinking, he “stressed the group
rather than the individual” but after the writing of I and Thou in the early
1920s his thinking shifted, and he came to focus on the “struggle against the
collective.” Borowitz takes us to the brink of the moment where he believes
we must go beyond Buber. Today, he says, we should also be wary of the col-
lective, especially when it threatens our autonomy and all that might mean
socially and politically. But we must also, Borowitz proposes, “reemphasize
the sociality of the self . . .We need to oppose unrestrained individualism
and specify the sources of authority that should limit it . . . To me, then,
autonomy is more God-oriented than our secular teachers admit and more
social than the older Buber was willing to concede.”36 For the liberal or non-
Orthodox Jew, this means that the self thinks and acts as a member of the
Covenanted people of God and also as a participant in the contemporary
historical situation.
Borowitz describes this conception of contemporary liberal Jewish self-
hood succinctly:
A Jewish self is characterized not only by a grounding personal relation-
ship with God but relates to God as part of the people of Israel’s historic
Covenant with God. Being a Jew, then, may begin with the individual, but
Jewish personhood is structured by an utterly elemental participation in the
Jewish historical experience of God. Jewish existence is not merely personal
but communal and even public. In the healthy Jewish self one detects no
place, no matter how deeply one searches, where one can find the old lib-
eral schizoid split between the self and the Jew. One is a Jew existentially.37
In order to be a self at all, the Jewish self must be self-constituting; there
must be ownership over who I am and the outcome of that ownership is
that I am the particular self I am. At the same time, I do not create myself
out of whole cloth. Since my very existence is relational and interpersonal
and since that embeddedness is historically particular, as a Jew I am embed-
ded in the “people of Israel’s historic Covenant with God.” The content of
my particular appropriation of that historical legacy or identity, of course,
is dependent upon many factors. But the fact that it is a significant dimen-
36 Borowitz, “The Autonomous Self and the Commanding Community,” 48; see also
Renewing the Covenant, 178–81.
37 Borowitz, “The Autonomous Jewish Self,” 221.
sion of what is bequeathed to the self is fixed by its fundamental situated-

ness as a human agent.38
The relation within the Jewish self of her autonomy and her inheritance
Borowitz calls the “dialectic of freedom and constraint in the liberal Jewish
self.”39 That is, the ways in which the Jew takes ownership of who she is,
what she believes, and how she acts are complexly related to the resources
given to her upon which her thinking and reflection work. The interplay is
dialectical and involves selection and construction, on the one hand, and
influence and limitation, on the other. Just as we are born into a particular
family, with a background of customs, styles, and practices, and yet respond
to and appropriate what we are given in distinctive ways as we grow and
are socialized into it, so the Jewish self receives, is shaped by, and draws on
the Jewish community into which she was born. With regard to Judaism,
“Covenant” is the term Buber—and after him Borowitz—uses to name “this
kind of open, unsettled, but mutually dignifying relationship.”40
Borowitz’s account of the Covenant, autonomy, and Jewish selfhood is
the foundation for framing the enterprise of living a liberal or non-Ortho-
dox Jewish life. Borowitz uses many expressions for this final step in his
project, as we shall see, but the broadest and most nontechnical one is the
traditional expression. It is the articulation of a life of Torah.
Ethics and Jewish Duty
The outcome of Borowitz’s thinking about Covenant, autonomy, and Jewish

selfhood is the framing of a modern Jewish life for the non-Orthodox Jew.
Ultimately, this account concerns how such a Jew and the community of
which he is a part think about and make decisions regarding what is right
for a Jew to believe and do and what is wrong. Broadly this is about how
such a Jew comes to shape Jewish conduct, broadly with regarding all sorts
of areas of life and more narrowly regarding those areas that involve moral
matters. This goal has been in Borowitz’s mind since the very beginnings of
38 See Borowitz, “The Autonomous Self and the Commanding Community,” 49: “The
Descartesian [sic] discrete self is a methodological fiction . . . In truth, we are all very much
more the children of our time, place, and community than of our pure thought or free
choice.” There is a great deal of valuable discussion of this conception of what he called
the hermeneutical self or historically situated agency; Gadamer is one source, and another
excellent discussion can be found in the works of Charles Taylor.
39 Borowitz, “The Autonomous Jewish Self,” 221. Cf. Renewing the Covenant, 213–17.
40 Borowitz, “The Autonomous Self and the Commanding Community,” 51; see Renew-
ing the Covenant, chap. 16.
his theological career in the late 1940s, and it remains central to his project
to this day. What, in short, should a Jew do? How should a Jew act? What is
the regimen of a Jewish life?41
Borowitz’s original thinking about such issues was focused on moral
questions and the moral crisis that he identified in contemporary society.
Even then, however, it also had a wider scope, the full range of Jewish con-
duct. In “The Idea of God” (1957) he called this goal a “criterion of adequacy”
for an acceptable idea of God for the modern Jew; it must “make possible
for [the modern Jew] the life of Torah.” He elaborates: “A fully adequate
Jewish idea of God would move the Jew to fulfill the Torah by showing him
the cosmic authority from which it stems and the deep significance of the
acts it requires.”42 We might now put it somewhat differently: an accept-
able idea of God must show how the relation with God both justifies and
motivates Jewish conduct, the life of Torah, and this means, as we have seen,
that the idea of God must represent a God who has a Covenantal relation-
ship with individual Jews and with the Jewish people. Why? Because for
Borowitz only such a relational view of God and the Jewish people and God
and individual Jews can explain how Jews are moved to act out of solidarity
with God and how the right Jewish action is defined by what role it plays in
maintaining that relationship. This lesson is part of what he learned from
Buber and Rosenzweig, that “interpersonal presence” is “the best metaphor”
for the divine-human relationship and in particular for God’s relationship
with the Jewish people. “In friendship and love it is the other’s presence
that, even without words, commands us. Such relationships send us into
the world to tasks we must define for ourselves, whether as individuals or
as communities.”43 Four years later, in 1961, Borowitz would say that there
had grown up in postwar Jewish America a desire for just such a theological
program, what he called a “theology of mitzvah, a rationale for the Jewish
way of life and belief.”44
41 In one of his earliest papers, his report on the Institute on Reform Jewish Theology,
held at the Hebrew Union College on March 20–22, 1950, Borowitz already identifies this
problem, whether there is any source of authority in Reform Judaism and what criteria
there might be in Reform Judaism to select from the tradition; see “Theological Confer-
ence Cincinnati, 1950: Reform Judaism’s Fresh Awareness of Religious Problems,” reprinted
in Studies in the Meaning of Judaism, 9. The essay originally appeared in Commentary 19
(1950): 567–72.
42 Borowitz, “The Idea of God,” in Studies in the Meaning of Judaism, 37; the essay was
originally published in 1957. For a clear statement of his broader interest in Jewish duty
including but not exclusively moral duty, see Borowitz, “Five Letters,” 175–76.
43 Borowitz, “A Life of Jewish Learning,” 393.
44 Borowitz, “Crisis Theology and the Jewish Community,” 62.
While Borowitz’s personal interests led him to think extensively about

Jewish ethics and moral issues, eventually, in Renewing the Covenant and
the writings of this later period of his life, he frames the problem in the
broadest terms as “the problem of a theology of halakhah” and “a theol-
ogy of non-Orthodox Jewish duty”—“a compelling theology of ethical-and-
more-than-ethical Jewish duty.”45 What, then, does he think that such a
theology looks like?
Human beings “seek an ultimate and solid ground of values,” and “a sig-
nificant minority of people in our civilization have turned from the uni-
versity to religion to help them understand what they intuitively know to
be true, that not everything is relative and that humanhood is intimately
bound up with acts we do not do and some others we are bound to try
to do.”46 There are Jews who feel compelled to meet this challenge—of
relativism, historicism, or even skepticism—and who seek this ground of
value in their Judaism and in particular in the Jewish people’s Covenantal
relationship with God. A significant reason for this challenge and this
task, Borowitz suggests, is the Holocaust and the very specific way that
its horrors and atrocities challenged contemporary Jews. Many have not
abandoned Judaism or religion but rather have sought refuge in increased
religiosity and even in mysticism. “They needed a new ground of value,” for
“the moral chasm between the death camp Nazis and their Jewish victims
cannot be relativized but points to a standard of absolute value.” Once this
could no longer be found “in a secular assertion about universal human
rationality,” what is left is to find it in Judaism and, for Borowitz, this means
in a way of understanding how the Jewish people’s relationship with God
grounds a conception of moral obligation and Jewish duty in general.47
45 Borowitz, “A Life of Jewish Learning,” 395–96.

46 Borowitz, “The Way to a Postmodern Jewish Theology,” 146–47. See also “‘Im ba’et,
eyma—Since You Object, Let Me Put It This Way,” 158–59.
47 Borowitz, “The Way to a Postmodern Jewish Theology,” 150. See also Borowitz, “A
Life of Jewish Learning,” 408–9: “As the seventies became the eighties, it became increas-
ingly clear to me that the death-of-God thinkers had radically misread our social drift.
Instead of God fading from the scene and humanism triumphing, a substantial turn to
religion was evident throughout Western civilization and, as part of that development, in
the Jewish community as well . . . This communal experience cried out for interpretation.”
The interpretation Borowitz gives concerns the ultimate failure of rationality to give us
any confidence about moral value, a failure exposed by the death camps and Nazism, and
the collapse of any optimism about human beings. But, he then asks, “If reason no longer
demanded we be ethical, what did?” This general crisis about what grounds the normative
force of moral value was only confirmed for Borowitz by his sense that we all felt betrayed
by modernity and the “social malaise” we find ourselves immersed in. “The meta-ethical
questions refuse to give us peace; where do our values come from? What still commands
This is the task that the “theology of halakhah” for non-Orthodox or liberal
Jews—what Borowitz comes to call a postmodern Jewish theology—must
ultimately accomplish.
In Borowitz’s later writings, at least from “The Autonomous Jewish Self”
and “The Autonomous Self and the Commanding Community” through
Renewing the Covenant and beyond, Borowitz employs the account of
Covenant that we have described, together with his mature conception
of Jewish selfhood and its relation both to God and the Jewish people, in
order to discuss how deliberations and decisions about how to live a Jewish
life ought to be carried out. In addition, he himself engages in serious sub-
stantive thinking along these lines. Together with colleagues and students,
especially concerning moral issues, he explores what a contemporary non-
Orthodox Jew might think about various issues and how she might choose
to act. One can find the results of much of this work in books like Exploring
Jewish Ethics (Wayne State University Press, 1990), The Jewish Moral
Virtues (Jewish Publication Society, 1999), and Reform Jewish Ethics and
the Halakhah: an Experiment in Decision Making (Behrman House, 1994).
In the following pages, I will focus on the strategy Borowitz sets out for
such decision-making and also on the question about the relation between
Jewish duty as he sees it and Jewish law, the halakha itself.
We are now in the arena of a classic problem, but we have arrived at it
in a circuitous way, through the modification or shift in Borowitz’s think-
ing about selfhood and autonomy, which leads to the reformulation of
the problem. The classic problem has an old lineage but is best known in
its Kantian formulation. It pivots on the claim that law is heteronomous
while ethics is autonomous, so that the role of autonomy in legal thinking
is fraught. Of course, in the actual process of legal interpretation, say by
judges, there is some degree of autonomy, even if it is taken to be hedged
around by standards it is thought to aim at, such as the intention of the
framers of the constitution or founding document or some ideal concep-
human decency and is the criterion of our human worth?” Borowitz arrived at a conclu-
sion: “In the sobering reappraisal of human nature required by the Holocaust, to assert
that God was dead really meant that what had really died for us in the Holocaust was not
Judaism’s God but our exalted modern view of ourselves and our capabilities . . . Worst of
all, our confident proclamation that we alone would bring the Messianic Age is ludicrous.”
All this made possible what Borowitz called a “human tzimtzum, a self-contraction that has
made some room for God in our lives.” “I believe that we come to God these days primarily
as the ground of our values and, in a non-Orthodox but nonetheless compelling fashion,
as the ‘commander’ of our way of life. Something similar could be now also be said of the
value of Jewish tradition and practice to us.” See also Borowitz, “Five Letters,” 176.
tion of the principles of such a document. But in the end, on the tradi-
tional view, subjects or practitioners are meant to follow the law and not
to reinterpret it, and certainly it is not up to the subjects of a legal system
to select which laws are in force and which are not. Moreover, if a subject
chooses to disobey the law, he or she must suffer the penalties. In terms of
the classic problem, as I have called it, the subject has virtually no authority
regarding the law and no autonomy or self-determination. For Borowitz,
however, the autonomous Jewish self, situated in a community and in an
historical tradition with a substantial legal component, is not simply a sub-
ject. The legal tradition permeates her identity but not as law, so to speak;
rather she receives the legal tradition as an inherited reservoir of thinking
about belief and conduct that manifests certain values and ways of think-
ing about human beings and history. Every Jew—liberal Jew—faces par-
ticular situations where reflection, deliberation, and decision are called for,
and the new problem she faces is what to do with this legal inheritance.48
What role does it or should it play in her thinking? What normative force
or weight does it carry for her? What are her obligations and duties? What
parts of it carry meaning for her and what do not? What norms should she
affirm, and from which ones should she dissent?49
Here we return to a notion that I have already noticed, the idea that for
the liberal Jewish self the Jewish tradition makes a claim upon her. Part of
what it means for the Jewish self to be embedded in the Jewish people is for
it to be taken seriously in deliberation and decision about how one ought to
act. Borowitz calls this “authentically living in Covenant.” Jewish law would
48 In “The Autonomous Jewish Self,” Borowitz says that authentic Jews should “want
their lives substantially to be structured by a continuing involvement with the prescrip-
tions of Jewish law” (224). Of course, the whole question is what the word “involvement”
means. He then says “But as autonomous Jewish persons, the provisions of the law would
ultimately be tested by appeal to their conscientious individual Jewish understanding.”
But if “involvement” means that they remain prescriptions only once they pass the “test”
of individual conscience, this seems to beg all the important questions. Borowitz of course
knows this and does not stop with these general and imprecise formulations. There may
however be no recipes for how this dialectical engagement of traditional law and personal
reflection and adjudication works.
49 Borowitz discusses these issues in Renewing the Covenant, chaps. 16–20. There are
earlier discussions in various essays, such as “The Autonomous Jewish Self” and “The
Autonomous Self and the Commanding Community,” and also later ones, such as “A Life of
Jewish Learning” and in his responses to Elliot Dorff. See Judaism after Modernity, 181–86.
In “American Jewish Modernity Comes to Self-consciousness,” in Judaism after Modernity,
Borowitz describes this as the problem of “how to blend the objectivity of the tradition
with modernity’s esteem for autonomy” (117) and calls it “a major theoretical problem.” He
also calls this “the Jewish domestication of personal freedom.” “B’rit, Mitzvah, and Halakha:
In Search of a Common Vocabulary,” 119.
not then be law, but everything that one did would be Jewish, Borowitz
points out. I would put this somewhat differently: the halakhic tradition
as law—in traditional Judaism—enters into one’s thinking as imperatives
or obligations, to act in a certain way or not to conduct oneself in a certain
way; it enters into Jewish selfhood from the inside and not from the outside.
But for the liberal Jew that tradition enters into one’s deliberations without
that normative force. They are considerations to be taken seriously because
they make a compelling case or express a particular value that is compel-
ling or for any number of reasons. In short, Jewish law becomes materials
for deliberation and not a replacement for it. And once that happens, then
every act would be Jewish, regardless of whether it follows the prescrip-
tions of the halakha or dissents from them.
Ideally, Borowitz goes on, “I also look forward to the day when enough
Jewish selves autonomously choose to live in ways sufficiently similar that
they can create common patterns among us.”50 Here Borowitz wants to
forestall the objection that his account simply lapses into a kind of indi-
vidualism and never realizes communal practice. His answer is that if a suf-
ficient number of liberal Jews come to share patterns of decision-making
and of action, the result would be a distinctive “Jewish style or way [that]
would be the autonomous Jewish self’s equivalent of ‘halakhah.’ ” The out-
come would be a kind of communal practice that exhibits pluralism but
one that does not risk anarchy. As Borowitz admits, there might be some
risk in this hope, but in order to be honest about both the contemporary
Jew’s individuality and her integrity and the claims made by the Jewish past
and its legal tradition, one cannot expect more.51
The decisions the Jewish self makes about what is right to do, what she
ought to do, come with a normative force, and that normative force is asso-
ciated with or derived from the fact that the self is related to God as well as
involved with other persons. But if the decision is what the self arrives at
after deliberation, what grounds that normative force?52 Borowitz admits
50 Borowitz, “The Autonomous Jewish Self,” 224–25.

51 For an argument that this does not lead to an amorphous kind of identity, see “The
Autonomous Jewish Self,” 225–28. Borowitz calls for a solution that for the self avoids
anarchy on the one hand and total passivity on the other; with respect to the group as
a whole, he wants to avoid law and chaos. What he calls for is the growth and emer-
gence of various patterns of social practice. See also Borowitz, “B’rit, Mitzvah, and Halakha:
In Search of a Common Vocabulary,” 122–23; “The Way to a Postmodern Jewish Theology,”
153; and Renewing the Covenant, 221–23.
52 Borowitz sets out this problem and rejects the option that it is the community that
grounds this obligation or duty in Renewing the Covenant, chap. 18.
that this is hard to put into words.53 As he characterizes it, this force arises
out of the self’s relationship with God. In that relationship, “the primary
mood is of privilege, awe, openness, occasionally love . . . so my departing
sense of urgency about doing something because of our meeting is rightly
described as ‘commanding’ and to the extent that I (in Israel with God)
have legitimately given content to the sending, I know I have violated some-
thing precious when I fail to live it.”54 Relationships like love and friendship
incorporate mutual commitment and concern and claims made by one
upon another. Or we might say that if the relationship is real, then each
party has rightful expectations of the other. Something like this is what
makes certain behavior expressive of the relationship and other behavior in
conflict with it, irresponsible and disruptive. Normative force, then, arises
out of the relationship with this particular other, and in all such cases there
is a relationship with God, too, and that carries the weight that makes all
claims worthy and serious. Something like this, I think, is what Borowitz
has in mind when he says that we rightly describe these expectations and
claims as “commands” and when we take any failure to comply to be a “sin.”
Jewish duties are not laws, but neither are they mere recommendations.55
They are standards or norms that are constitutive of what it is to be a liberal
Jewish self.56
From this point, Borowitz’s understanding of Jewish duty leads in two
directions. One would be to a consideration of exactly how interpersonal
relationships, together with the “overarching” or “determinative” divine-
human relationship, provide reasons for choices and actions. That is, what
would advance Borowitz’s conception of Jewish responsibilities and the
constitution of Jewish life for the contemporary non-Orthodox Jew would
be a philosophical account of how normativity, and specifically moral nor-
mativity, is tied to relationships. This is still a desideratum. Second would
be concrete examples of how the individual Jew, situated in the Covenant
as an historical and cultural reality and related to God as a member of
that Covenanted community, arrives at decisions and norms of practice.
Borowitz has spent a great deal of time in doing the latter, both in his own
thinking and in his teaching. As I have mentioned, one can find some results
53 See “‘Im ba’et, eyma—Since You Object, Let Me Put It This Way,” 163–64.
54 Borowitz, “Five Letters,” 180.
55 Borowitz, “‘Im ba’et, eyma—Since You Object, Let Me Put It This Way,” 164: “Relation-
ship commands, but it is too personalistic to yield what we normally think of as law.”
56 Borowitz’s fullest account of how the normative force of Jewish duty is grounded
in the relationship with God can be found in Renewing the Covenant, chaps. 19–20, esp.
289–95.
in his early book Choosing a Sex Ethic, in various of the essays in Exploring
Jewish Ethics, and then in the books Reform Jewish Ethics and Halakhah and
The Jewish Moral Virtues.
The Essays That Follow
In addition to an interview with Eugene Borowitz and a select bibli-

ography, this volume contains five essays. The first two essays, “Why I
Am a Theologian Rather Than a Philosopher” and “The Jewish Need for
Theology,” deal with the theological character of Borowitz’s project. Here
he clarifies why and how he is a theologian and not a philosopher, empha-
sizing the universality of the latter and the particularity of the former and
the increasingly important role of Jewish particularity for his conception of
the Jewish self. He also defends, in an early essay, the significance of theol-
ogy for Judaism. The third selection, “Through the Shadowed Valley,” is a
chapter from Renewing the Covenant in which Borowitz critically reflects
on post-Holocaust Jewish thought and its implications for understand-
ing what the Holocaust has meant for Jewish thought and Jewish life. This
leads Borowitz to clarify various features of post-Holocaust Jewish life
and to introduce his intriguing interpretation of the kabbalistic notion of
tzimtzum as the mechanism whereby human beings, at a time when our
once inflated optimism about human accomplishments is now seriously
compromised, ought to “contract” and make room for the presence of God
in Jewish experience. The fourth essay reprinted here, “The Autonomous
Jewish Self,” is the important treatment of the Jewishly embedded self,
which was discussed above. The final selection, “’Im ba’et, eyma—Since You
Object, Let Me Put It This Way,” is Borowitz’s response to a series of aca-
demic comments on Renewing the Covenant, which originally appeared in
Reviewing the Covenant: Eugene B. Borowitz and the Postmodern Renewal of
Jewish Theology. In it Borowitz clarifies the sense in which he has appro-
priated the vocabulary of postmodernism and addresses a number of the
themes discussed above. It is one of a several essays that Borowitz wrote
after the publication of his great work that illuminate the trajectory of his
thinking and his latest articulation of it.
Why I Am a Theologian Rather than a Philosopher*
Enough people have been puzzled by my calling myself a theologian rather

than a philosopher, the more common Jewish term for a religious thinker,
that a few words about that seem warranted. (Mentally I add the question,
“And does that make any real difference to people who read or listen to
me?”) I guess things are so terminologically loose these days that bother-
ing about what anyone calls my kind of thinking seems pretty pedantic.
But something useful can be learned about Jewish belief by exploring the
difference between these overlapping but diverse ways of looking at reality.
Some brief explanations should clarify things. Theologians start their
thinking from their belief in a given faith; how extensive that initial com-
mitment is will vary with the faith and the thinker involved. By contrast,
ever since René Descartes (1596–1650; “I think, therefore I am”), philoso-
phers have used methodical doubt to clear their minds of everything but
the logic of thinking and its consequences. This being the root difference
between Jewish philosophers and Jewish theologians, it wasn’t uncommon
a few decades back for philosophers to attack theologians as having closed
minds, while philosophers celebrated their own open-mindedness, hardly
the kind of judgment you’d expect from a truly open-minded person!
As Jews emerged into the modern world during the nineteenth century
and their approaches to knowledge were shaped by the university, they
quickly gave up their old textual forms of reasoning for the then-current
philosophical ways of thinking. Two major factors impelled this develop-
ment. First, the greatest universities of that time were located in Germany,
and philosophy was considered their chief glory. So even the majority of
Jews who did not specialize in philosophy began to speak in the styles of
the philosophers Immanuel Kant or Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel or one
of their numerous German successors. Second, modernizing Jews were des-
perately eager to prove that they were just like everyone else, and philoso-
phy focused on the truths that all rational minds should share, producing
an invigorating climate for those seeking to shed their old Jewish baggage.
A famous squabble later broke out between some Jews who were so
eager to be considered modern Germans that they spurned their ethnicity,
* For the complete references for this essay please refer to A Touch of the Sacred (Jewish
Lights, 2007), where this essay was originally published.
38 why i am a theologian rather than a philosopher
becoming enthusiastic devotees of philosophy’s openness, and some east-

ern-European Jewish nationalists who conceived of Judaism as an indepen-
dent source of value and truth, thus thinking in terms of Jewish philosophy.
It was a futile hope for the latter group. This was made clear by the title of
Hermann Cohen’s 1919 book, Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism,
which once and for all established the academic validity of philosophizing
about Judaism. Cohen’s philosophy, neo-Kantianism (a revision of Kant’s
thought that restored its academic legitimacy), first establishes what any
rational mind should arrive at: religion of reason. Then, if we look at the
many religions created over the centuries, we will find from the “sources of
Judaism” that the Jewish religion, as Cohen interprets it, exemplifies reli-
gion of reason uniquely well. Though the boundaries have loosened since
Cohen wrote, his thesis pretty much describes what the many fine aca-
demic philosophers who now write about Judaism try to do: first provide a
philosophic truth and then give this concept its Jewish identity. Ironically,
today we have relaxed enough to call this enterprise Jewish philosophy.
In the 1970s, when American colleges were becoming hospitable to the
notion of academic Jewish studies, the old argument over parochialism
was reborn. While it may sound self-defeating, it was the Jewish professors
who fought the introduction of such courses on many campuses. Some had
come to university life to escape their Jewish origins and devote themselves
to universal culture. They vigorously opposed programs that might remind
people of Jewish particularity. Other professors who were fervent Jewish
secularists did support courses in Jewish culture but opposed those that
might teach about the Jewish religious tradition. They argued that because
religion rests on belief and often seeks converts, it has no place in an aca-
demic life that exalts open-mindedness. While these professors are now the
exceptions, there are still a few American universities where Jewish studies
departments exclude courses based on Judaism as a religion.
My chief encounter with this problem came in 1962, when my article
in Commentary magazine on the need for Jewish theology was severely
criticized as seeking to introduce dogma into Judaism. The criticism ended
when I countered that while practice was traditionally required in Judaism,
belief was largely a realm of personal judgment. What modern Jewry
needed, I contended, was to pay more attention to what we believe and
why we held those beliefs. My challenger illustrated the problems that phi-
losophy increasingly came upon as the twentieth century moved forward.
His own brilliant skepticism kept him from ever making a major positive
statement about the values a rational person should hold.
why i am a theologian rather than a philosopher 39
I could not have imagined then that succeeding decades would validate
my youthful insight: Thoughtfully examined belief, i.e. “theology,” would
become an important ingredient in the spiritual life of American Jewry.
That happened because with the passage of time, it became increasingly
apparent that the vaunted objectivity of modern philosophy was actually
founded on some fairly subjective assumptions—cultural, political, racial,
and sexist. Moreover, Jewish philosophers learned the impossibility of
thinking without specific content in mind. One must have a sense of some-
thing in order to begin to think. With philosophy itself transformed, it did
not seem unreasonable to suggest that religious belief might also involve
quite deep thinking, though not always in the forms pioneered for us by the
great Greek philosophers.
As I see it, contemporary Jewish theology often centers on clarifying the
balance in our faith between belief and reasoning; those of us who refer
to ourselves as Jewish theologians will emphasize one or another as we
believe Jewish truth requires. Only future generations of Jewish believers
will be able to judge which statements best explained what Torah meant
in our times.
The Jewish Need for Theology*
The Christian, particularly the Protestant, often thinks of religion as the

ability to affirm a creed, a given content of belief, as well as the life, individ-
ual and communal, which flows from this faith. But for the Jew religion can-
not be so easily identified with the affirmation of a creed, and consequently
the distinction between the “secular” and the “religious”—which is so basic
to Christian thought—has never been strictly applicable to Judaism. The
Jews were a people in the simple ethnic sense of that term before they met
their God at Sinai, and the maintenance of that peoplehood has been criti-
cal to them in all the centuries that have followed. If Mordecai Kaplan has
performed any lasting service in Jewish theology, it is his emphasis on this
ethnic component as the inescapable base of all Jewish religiosity, and his
insistence that a Judaism which knows only God, but not Israel, His people,
is no authentic link in the tradition. Indeed Kaplan’s therapy for the ills of
contemporary Jewish religious life is a thoroughgoing revival of the sense
of Jewish peoplehood and its expression in every cultural dimension. The
natural result of a healthy Jewishness, he feels, would be a rebirth of Jewish
piety in appropriately modern terms.
In one form or another, Kaplan’s diagnosis has become an accepted
axiom in responsible American Jewish theology. To proclaim one’s faith
in God may—so most Jewish thinkers today would agree—yield a general
religiosity, but Judaism is reached only when one is equally ready to affirm
the special relation of the Jewish people to Him.
The Kaplan thesis, however, has had an interesting “underground” history
which is only now beginning to bear fruit. From the very start, the emphasis
on the concept of peoplehood has served the needs of those who wanted to
be Jewish but could not think of themselves as religious—either because
they did not believe in God, or (more frequently) because they were anxious
to be rid of the discipline of traditional Jewish observance and its European
or immigrant overtones. With the help of Kaplan’s theory or some varia-
tion of it, such non-believing or non-observant Jews (lay and rabbinic alike)
could nevertheless devote themselves in all good conscience to Jewish life
in its new American style, and they could feel themselves to be making a
contribution to the maintenance and growth of Jewish culture without any
* Originally published in Commentary (August 1962).

42 the jewish need for theology
commitment to theology or commandments. These would eventually come

of themselves, or not. In either case, the present had its rationale.
Now, whatever else may be said of this position, it most certainly involved
a distortion of Kaplan’s view. Kaplan has never divided Jewish existence
into two seperate realms, that of the folk and that of the faith. He has never
sought to introduce the categories “secular” and “religious” into Judaism in
a way that would cut the one aspect off from the other. What he has done
is to develop a theory of Jewish existence according to which the people,
the social reality, has always had priority over its theology, and he has built
a program for the people’s future on the basis of this order of priorities. At
the same time he has always insisted that a people’s most significant cul-
tural achievement is its religion and that true fulfillment can only come to
a people as its religion suffuses its culture. Kaplan has not been unmindful
of the dangers posed by those who would use him to set up a fundamental
distinction between Jewishness and Jewish religiosity. Thus, while he began
by speaking of Judaism as a civilization, the years since have seen him regu-
larly speaking of it is a religious civilization.
While the secularity of the average synagogue member in America cannot

be understood without reference to this ideological background, he himself
is unaware of the sources of his attitudes. He comes, in increasing num-
bers, to join the synagogue because there are few if any socially accept-
able alternatives to synagogue affiliation for one who wants to maintain
his Jewish identity and wants his children to be Jewish, in some sense, after
him. Though this is not the only motive or level of concern to be found
within the synagogue today,1 the Jew who does not rise above such folk-
feeling unquestionably and increasingly represents the synagogue’s major-
ity mood. More than that, however, it must be said that he also represents
the synagogue’s greatest threat. The damaging effect he has already had on
the synagogue requires little new description. His new-found affluence and
his need for status within the community have made the big building with
the small sanctuary, the lavish wedding with the short ceremony, and the
fabulous Bar Mitzvah celebration with the minimal religious significance,
well-established patterns among American Jewish folkways. What other
1 For the positive side of this movement and for a glimpse of the creative minority who
are searching from within, see my article “Crisis Theology and the Jewish Community,”
COMMENTARY, July 1961.
the jewish need for theology 43
religious group in America can boast of men who are zealously committed
to interfaith activities, but who have no faith of their own, who worship in
no church with any degree of regularity, and who observe no command-
ments but those that their organizational participation requires or com-
mon American decency decrees? What does it say of Jewish life in America
when Reform Judaism appeals because it demands so little but confers so
much status?; when people blandly proclaim that they are non-observant
Orthodox Jews?; when Conservative Judaism makes a virtue of not defining
the center so that it may avoid alienating those disaffected on either side?
In short, the secularism which is endemic to the church is reaching into
the synagogue as well. But there is a difference, for in the synagogue it claims
to be there as of right, as a legitimate interpretation of Jewishness. The
church can protect itself from the invasions of secularism by returning to its
roots in faith, by a theological analysis of what makes it a church and who
therefore has a right to participate in it. And indeed such a refining return
to theology is today well under way in most of the major Protestant groups.
The impact of this concern with theology is only just beginning to be felt
in Protestant life, and it may well be overwhelmed by the secular tides run-
ning through the churches. Nevertheless, a significant if small leadership
has found the courage to face the issue and striven to meet it, knowing that
even if it proves impossible to divert the massive social energies of our day,
it may still be possible to prepare the church within the church that will
somehow enable the truth of the gospel to survive.
Nothing like this movement in extent or depth is yet to be found in the
synagogue. The stirrings of an interest in Jewish theology still affect only a
few individuals responding mainly to one another and to that small group
within the synagogue who have at least begun to ask the right questions.
The leadership of what is purportedly the Jewish religious community
is, as a whole, uninterested in theology and is convinced that theology has
nothing to do with truly practical questions like the goals of the commu-
nity’s activity, the methods which are appropriate to reaching them, or the
criteria by which either might be judged. If anything, rabbis and laymen
alike have a positive antipathy to Jewish theology which among the more
articulate and knowledgeable has congealed into an ideology. Judaism,
they claim, has never had a theology. Judaism is a religion of deed, not
creed. To aspire toward the development of a theology is to assimilate a
Christian concern, to impose on Judaism a perspective decidedly uncon-
genial to it—in other words, it is an attempt to translate Jewish experience
into a language appropriate only to Christianity. Moreover, there are practi-
cal risks to the theological enterprise. Let a Jewish theology arise and the
next step would be to seek conformity to it, to force it upon others and thus
destroy that productive pluralism, that creative intellectual dialectic which
has been so precious a Jewish privilege.
At the lowest level this view amounts to an elaborate defense of the
accomplishments of Jewish organizations, both lay and “religious,” over
the past decade. The varieties of Jewish officialdom may be uneasy over
the superficiality of Jewish affiliation and concerned about the meaningful
continuity of Jewish life, but not to the extent of encouraging a challenge
to the assumptions which underlie the mood of achievement that suffuses
the organizational world of American Jewry. Only that theology is welcome
which can be harnessed to organizational ends and apparatus, which is an
ally and an aid to further institutionalization. No welcome is extended to a
radical opposition—even an opposition that exists for the sake of heaven.
The most respectable rejection of Jewish theology stems from a concern
for Jewish uniqueness, for the ethnic base of Jewishness and for its survival
in some authentic fashion. Spokesmen for this view know Jewish theology
only as an effort to establish the universalism of Judaism, to indicate what
Jews have believed that all men might find true. Thus to them, theology
inevitably involves a sacrifice of the Jewish people, of its specific historic
experience and of its present separate existence. Yet whatever the motives
behind it, this position, by restraining the religious explication of what is
involved in Jewishness—another way of saying, Jewish theology—is serv-
ing as a major if unwitting instrument in the secularization of Judaism and
the synagogue. And in any case, the fear of losing the particularity of Jewish
experience is groundless, for under the influence of existentialism, con-
temporary theology (Christian as well as Jewish) has made its very starting
point the particular and concrete existence, in which alone all universals
are to be seen and find their meaning; this, indeed, is one of the things
that distinguishes it most sharply from the rationalist line of 19th-century
Jewish thought which was to some extent guilty of sacrificing the idea of
Jewish peoplehood to the dream of a “universal” Judaism.
Inconsistent is too mild a word; chutzpah alone is adequate to characterize

the assertion that theology has no place in Judaism. Because Judaism is basi-
cally ethnic, it does not follow that all else in Judaism is optional. What tra-
ditional Jewish warrant can be found for the view that Jewish peoplehood
is separable from Jewish religiosity? It is only in the last seventy-five years
that the idea of Jewishness as a species of secular existence has become so
much as conceivable. Judaism has throughout its history asserted that to

be a member of the Jewish people was to participate in the Covenant with
God and that to partake of Jewish ethnicity was simultaneously to serve
God’s purpose in history. Modern scholarship has by dint of much diligent
toil sought to describe the Jews as they were before Sinai, to picture them as
another sub-Semitic group or economic class. But the most important fact
about pre-Sinaitic Israel is its utter rejection by classical Jewish literature.
Once the secular Hebrews found themselves the people of the Covenant,
they knew their only significant origins to be the meetings with God by
Abraham and at Sinai. Once the Hebrews had found their new and altered
character as God’s people, once they had passed beyond the ethnicity of
the Hivites, the Jebusites, the Girgashites, their role as the servant-folk of
God was all that mattered. Those, then, who consciously or unconsciously
are turning the synagogue into an effectively secular institution are blas-
pheming a sacred history of millennia, indeed all the history the Jewish
people has ever cared to remember until recent years.
But if Jewishness, while ethnic, has a religious component, modern man

is entitled to know what Jewish belief means today. Perhaps in an earlier
period one could have relied on the solidarity of the Jewish community
or the continuity of Jewish practice to bring Judaism safely through the
danger of secular domination. But it is precisely the Jewish masses who
are the source of the growing secularism, while the standards of Jewish
practice have by their continual decline shown their lack of independent
foundation or authority. If kashrut were still regarded as God’s command,
the Jew might well withstand the many-layered temptations which arise to
violate it. If study were a mitzvah and not another possibility for leisure-
time recreation, then Jewish learning might be a thick hedge surrounding
the remnants of Jewish piety. But since neither the spirit nor the practice of
“catholic Israel” suffices any longer to assure meaningful Jewish continuity,
we are all the more in need of an adequate statement of Jewish faith rel-
evant to our day, for it is only this that can restore the Jewish community to
its goals and to the duties they entail. Where another generation might seek
to meet its problems by trusting naively to the onward motion of an unfold-
ing organic development, we are deprived of any such trust. History and
sociology have shown us where we have been and where we are tending—
shall we now pretend that we are blind? We have all the sophistication
which self-knowledge and self-consciousness confer—where shall we hope
to find the innocence of ignorance? Secularism is rising in religious guise,

powered by the social and economic readjustments of a post-immigration,
post-depression, and postwar America. To hide from this knowledge is
simultaneously to spurn our freedom, and by preferring illusion to real-
ity, to contemn the franchise of modernity. The question can no longer be
whether Jewishness has always had a religious content or whether we really
need discuss it. The only honest question left to ask is, how shall we speak
of Jewish faith?
True, we cannot hope to speak out of an unbroken tradition of theology
which has grown and developed with Judaism itself. For many reasons, the
philosophic explication of faith has not, in the past, seemed a necessary
part of Israel’s continuing intellectual activity. Thus, to develop a Jewish
theology today, to explain what would purport to be an authentic Judaism,
inevitably means using concepts and standards devised in a Christian con-
text for Christian purposes. Such a task of translation seems forbiddingly
formidable. Yet similar labor has been done before in Jewish Diaspora expe-
rience. Indeed, the classic expressions of Jewish theological creativity were
the products of a cross-fertilization of Judaism and some other culture. The
incursion of Hellenistic thought into Judaism, for example, made Philo
both possible and necessary. And Maimonides was compelled to write the
Guide for the Perplexed (and, one might argue, even his Code) because in
his time Judaism was challenged by an Islam confident of its own truth
and able to argue for itself in neo-Aristotelian terms. Neither Philo nor
Maimonides nor any of their colleagues had a traditionally Jewish yet “uni-
versal” theological vocabulary to draw upon. They had to fashion one out
of the general philosophic material of their day—and they succeeded in
doing so without surrendering their Judaism. They succeeded because they
did their borrowing in all Jewish self-respect, limiting their acquisitions to
what they felt were the limits set by their Jewish faith, and transforming
what they had borrowed to suit their Jewish goals. Philo’s logos is qualita-
tively distinct from that of his Hellenistic predecessors, and Maimonides,
who knows Aristotle’s thesis of the eternity of matter so well that he can on
its account break with the Moslem philosophic tradition of proving God
from creation, will not surrender completely to that thesis because it might
imperil Judaism’s insistence upon miracle and freedom. If Jewish theology
must always be an “answering” theology, then the risk of falsifying Judaism
will always have to be run. Still there is ample Jewish precedent to show
that the risks can be overcome and that Judaism can thereby acquire a new
vitality. If anything, the fact that Christianity stems from Judaism and seeks
indigenously to relate to Judaism’s God, makes it at once easier and more
necessary to find a means of saying, in language we both can share, where

we must differ and where we can agree.
Such a quest for intellectual clarity need not restrict Judaism’s traditional
freedom in the realm of thought. There is a significant difference between
dogmatic and systematic theology. The former is an effort to clarify and
explain, perhaps even to justify, what a member of a church with dogmas
must believe. The latter also seeks to clarify, explain, and justify faith, but if
the church does not insist on defining the content held necessary for mem-
bership, then the theology may, at best, come to be pervasive, accepted,
and universally relied upon. The sense of discipline or obligation need
not appear.
Judaism could hardly tolerate a dogmatic theology, for dogma, taken
strictly, is alien to its spirit and experience. Rigor and authority are known
only in the realm of Jewish practice, of halachah, but have rarely been
introduced into the realm of thought. Thus, the closest thing to a dogmatic
theology in Judaism might once have been a theology of the halachah. But
with authority in the area of Jewish practice as eroded as it has become,
such an enterprise, even were it able to surmount the almost insuperable
academic difficulties involved, would still only be as coercive as its argu-
ment was persuasive.
Inhospitality to dogmatic theology, however, still leaves ample room for
the systematic theology which would seek to set forth the content of Jewish
belief in an integrated and reasoned way. The authority of such a theology
would rest on its ability to convince, not on its special ecclesiastical status,
and its very presence in the intellectual forum would require those with
other views, or none, to meet its arguments and match its standards.
Since Jewish theology must be systematic rather than dogmatic, a
reawakening of theological concern might very well result in a variety
of views and approaches. But so far as the fight against the new religio-
secularism is concerned, this would make very little difference, and so far as
Judaism is concerned, it would be all to the good. Such disagreements could
be resolved in meaningful and constructive debate, and if not resolved, they
would at least contribute to the clarification of alternative possibilities in
Jewish faith—while showing, incidentally, how baseless is the fear that the
development of a modern Jewish theology will lead to creedal compulsion.
If more need be said on this point, we might take note of the fact that the
nature of such views as have already emerged among the younger Jewish
theologians would militate strongly against any effort to impose them upon
others. There is no absolutistic tendency apparent in the writings of Emil

Fackenheim or Jakob Petuchowski or Steven Schwarzschild or any of the
other contemporary thinkers who have contributed to the nascent Jewish
theological enterprise of the past few years. On the contrary, for most of
them, freedom of conscience is the very foundation of thought and their
concern with theology stems in the first place from their desire to trans-
form Judaism from a social fate into a free commitment of conscience.
What Judaism needs, then, is not a theology, but theological concern, not
theological uniformity but theological informedness. Whether expressed in
a single pattern or in several patterns, this would make possible the corrected
vision we require—a sharp focus on the religious component of Jewishness.
It would, of course, be naive to suppose that mere intellectual formula-
tion and discussion could have an immediate or powerful effect on a com-
munity as ethnically rooted and as happily integrating as American Jewry.
Still, every man of intellectual self-respect would feel himself challenged,
and the new, biting quality to the quest for a meaningful Jewish identity
would influence many. Through serious theological discussion Jewish
identity would be defined, Jewish commitments and obligations outlined.
Anyone who had the willingness to do so would finally be given an oppor-
tunity to direct his Jewish interest to serious Jewish living, and those who
were still standing indecisively at the margins of the congregation would be
provided with an incentive to join the community of the faithful. Perhaps a
decisive minority could be won.
The positive hope is obvious—but there might also be a negative con-
sequence from which we need not shy away. Clarifying Jewish faith might
bring many to the conclusion that they cannot honestly participate in
Judaism and the synagogue. Jewish theology could thus become a means
of driving Jews from the synagogue. No one wishes to lose Jews for Judaism,
but the time has come when the synagogue must be saved for the religious
Jew. The time has come when we must be prepared to let some Jews opt out
so that those who remain in, or who come in, will not be diverted from their
duty to God. As the religion of a perpetual minority, Judaism must always
first be concerned with the saving remnant, and so long as the synagogue is
overwhelmed by the indifferent and the apathetic who control it for their
own non-religious purposes, that remnant will continue to be deprived
of its proper communal home. By defining the issues, clarifying the goals,
challenging the conventions, Jewish theology may help save a faithful seed
and thus round out its prophetic function in our time.
Would there, then, be no place in this community for the secular Jew?
Would he be excommunicated, cut off forever from the Jewish people?
Surely the answer must depend upon the secularist’s own Jewish concern.
Some secular Jews have no interest in the Jewish people at all. They are
Jews by birth and their secularism, they say, is purely human and universal,
neither having nor requiring any particular foundation (which prompts the
obvious comment that, remarkably, this urban, intellectual, universal type
is a Jew). The responsibility of the religious community to such Jews would
be to help them see what Judaism is and might be. But their right (and per-
haps their duty) to stop being known as Jews would be all the more avail-
able to them as a matter of free choice.
The Jew who is secular in the sense of lacking religious faith but loyal to
the Jewish community—the man who wants neither God nor command-
ments, but who likes Jews, the Jewish approach to life, or the Jewish style
of being different—is the more difficult problem, perhaps because he is
so new to the Jewish scene. What would an adequate Jewish theology say
to him? Concerned with Jewish peoplehood and Jewish history, it would
somehow have to come to terms with all the various groupings into which
this people has evolved, and with all the transitional forms in which so
many of them find themselves—though it would also have to judge the
ultimate value of these groupings and forms in terms of their relation to
God. Committed to Klal Yisroel as well as to God, the new Jewish theol-
ogy would probably take an ambivalent attitude to the committed Jewish
secularist. He has a place among his people as long as he wishes one—nev-
ertheless he does not stand within its traditional frame. He has his rights as
worker, seeker, contributor—but hardly as leader, spokesman, or examplar.
He must be called “Jew,” for there is no other useful term for him—never-
theless he is not, in his rejection of the Jewish faith, a “true,” a “real,” a “good”
Jew. So long as his Jewish loyalty is limited to the people but not to the God
it serves, he must be considered truncated and unfulfilled.
Jewish theology therefore has a special responsibility to him, both as
challenge and alternative. It must ask him the source of his values, the foun-
dations of his beliefs, in people, in ideals, in Jewishness itself. It must help
him reach the profound questions of human existence to which Judaism
has been a response. And over against his own implicit faith, it must pose
the faith of the Jewish ages, now interpreted fresh and anew. It must help
him face the need to believe, which is basic to any life of ideals, and it must
then help him build a personal foundation in faith that can reach up to all
men and the whole of human history. Within this context it must set before
him in cogent fashion the riches, the depth, the maturity in value which
centuries of experience in many different worlds of culture have brought

to Judaism. How many intellectuals there are who know everything there
is to know about minor novelists and poets and painters, but—witness the
COMMENTARY symposium of last year—dismiss as insignificant a Judaism
they stopped studying at the age of thirteen! Such Jews too should feel
free—perhaps they should even be encouraged—to leave a Jewish people
they discover irrevocably wed to God. But the Jewish theologian affirms his
vocation as an affirmation of Judaism, in the faith that Judaism can only
benefit from exposition and scrutiny. He trusts that he may communicate
not concepts alone, but faith, and that he may arouse not understanding
alone, but commitment.
Through the Shadowed Valley*
Our Jewish turn from messianic modernism has pivoted on the Holocaust
and our response to it. I seek to probe its spiritual footings afresh by analyz-
ing the many anomalies of our religious discussion of the Holocaust.
To begin with, why did it take us until the mid-1960s to initiate a wide-
spread discussion of its “meaning”? Why did almost all our thinkers then
reject what Richard Rubenstein claimed was its critical theological chal-
lenge? Why did our years of theological discussion yield no ideas not well
known before Hitler? Why did our largely agnostic community keep talking
about the nature of a God it did not affirm? Why didn’t liberated human-
ism, associated with the “death of God,” conquer the Jewish community,
which instead became more interested in Jewish spirituality and mysti-
cism? Why did Orthodoxy, allegedly invalidated by the Holocaust, become
newly attractive to modernized Jews yet remain a minority? Why did the
State of Israel, our great answer to the Holocaust, lose its salvific signifi-
cance? Why have the non-Orthodox Judaisms, all tarred by modernity’s
failures, retained the spiritual allegiance of most modernized Jews? And
how does the religious experience underlying these developments set our
Jewish theological agenda?
Breaking the Barriers to Debating the Holocaust
I begin with the historical background: Emancipation, modernization,

secularization. Already in the late 19th century, believing Jewish think-
ers created non-Orthodox—that is, liberal—theologies of Judaism while
more skeptical types broke with religion and created secular theories of
Judaism. This demythologized religion was the accepted ethos of modern-
ized Jews everywhere well before Hitler. This meant that those modem
Jews who still spoke about God did so in the terms created by the Jewish
rationalists, utilizing Cohenian terms like “God-idea” or “concept of God,”
which reduced God to the founding premise of rational ethics, or, in the
Kaplanian v ersion, to those natural forces that further the development of
our human potential.
* For the complete references for this essay please refer to Renewing the Covenant (The
Jewish Publication Society, 1991), where this essay was originally published.
52 through the shadowed valley
After World War II, the new democratization of American society inten-
sified our community’s uncomfortable inner tension. Our growing accep-
tance depended on our being one of America’s “three great religions,” and
our suburbanization largely limited our self-identification as Jews to the
synagogue. Only this conflicted with the reality that most modern Jews
were agnostics—the prewar atheistic certainties having faded—who toler-
ated worship with difficulty and contented themselves with supporting the
synagogue for its familial and communal uses.
Socially and theologically, Jews could not easily discuss the theological
implications of the Holocaust, even had they been so inclined. To raise a cry
against the God who tolerated such an enormity would expose the full extent
of Jewish unbelief to Christian America, thereby undermining Judaism’s sta-
tus as one of America’s equivalent faiths. This changed only in the mid-1960s
when the Protestant death-of-God movement captured the popular imagina-
tion and created a new cultural circumstance. The spiritual convulsion that
rolled through much of American Christianity can most easily be explained
as a consequence of its long overdue secularization. Consider two of its piv-
otal books: Paul Van Buren’s The Secular Meaning of the Gospels, which argued
that the Christ needed to be understood in fully human terms, and Harvey
Cox’s The Secular City, which argued for the church’s becoming more worldly
and political. With Jesus de-trinitized and social responsibility via politics the
major focus of Christian living, God had become superfluous, a philosophical
and cultural embarrassment. But if America could tolerate such a humanistic
Christianity, it might equally do so for a long-secularized Judaism.
When Jews began to join this discussion they did so in a distinctively
Jewish way. It had not occurred to any of the seminal Christian death-of-
God thinkers—Paul Van Buren, William Hamilton, Gabriel Vahanian, or
Thomas J. J. Altizer—to discuss the Holocaust. Their arguments grew from
developments in philosophy, culture, or personal religious experience, not
from what recent history might imply about the absence of God. Their
abstractness clashed sharply with the traditional Jewish concern about
God’s involvement with people in history, which now suddenly became
an argument against God. That critical difference noted, American Jewry
quickly joined in the death-of-God discussions as an acceptable American
context in which they might finally express their old/new religious doubts.
Rubenstein’s Death-of-God Challenge
The form that our ensuing theological debates took shows them to be a
continuation of our ongoing arguments about how best to modernize
through the shadowed valley 53
J udaism. Richard Rubenstein’s collection of articles entitled After Auschwitz

defined much of the discussion. He contended that the Holocaust had
made it impossible for a responsible person any longer to believe in the
God of the Covenant, the One he said Judaism considered “the ultimate,
omnipotent actor in history.” The sages of biblical-rabbinic Judaism had
intimately identified the Covenant with God’s justice. When Jews do the
good, God blesses them abundantly; when they sin, God punishes them, a
theme so significant that the second paragraph of the full shema consists
of a passage expounding it (Deut. 11:13–21). This led to the further biblical
teaching that God employs the enemies of the Jews to punish them, hoping
through their suffering to return them to faithfulness. From the prophets
until recent times, at least that of the Chmielnicki pogroms (1648), Jewish
calamity evoked from Jewish thinkers the Covenantal judgment: Because of
our sins God has properly brought this evil upon us.
If so, Rubenstein pointed out, we should in all piety say that God used
Hitler to punish and reform us, a view that would give him some vindica-
tion, a doctrine Rubenstein considered utterly obscene. It seemed far more
blasphemous than inferring from the terrifying reality of the Holocaust
that an empty neutrality pervaded the universe and that, at least in our
time, God, the God of the Covenant, was dead.
The critique stung and aroused much response. But to whom was it
directed? Rubenstein’s demand that Jews give up their retributive God, the
One who tightly scrutinized actions and responded to them with immedi-
ately palpable justice, was addressed to modernized, non-Orthodox Jews.
Yet such a God had long had no place in the worldview of those who fled
the ghetto. For them, science, not theology, explained what happened in
nature, and political commentators, not the prophets, did the same for his-
tory. As the 19th century moved on, Jewish thinkers like Hermann Cohen
and their rabbinic popularizers had reworked the Jewish view of God to
emphasize human agency—ethics—and so saw secular causation ade-
quately explaining specific events.
Rejecting God’s Management of History
We can gauge what had already happened to the Jewish view of history
from our people’s response to the 1903 pogrom in Kishinev. To the world’s
outrage, the Russian police stood by idly and perhaps encouragingly as
forty-seven Jews were killed and ninety-two others were severely wounded
by mobs. The reaction of Jews to this tragedy—most particularly of those
who lived in Russia—reveals how fully God’s retribution had given way
to a secularistic commitment to human responsibility. Perhaps some few

pietists could still suggest that Russian mobs and their governmental pro-
tectors had been God’s agents; had any modern Jews suggested the notion
they would have been thought ridiculous. And one would have to search
hard to find a lament that Jewish sin had brought this evil upon the com-
munity. Instead, Russian Zionists called for Jewish self-defense units and
Hebrew writers derided the passivity of Jews in simply accepting the
slaughter. World Jewry also responded by organizing itself for political
action, emergency aid, and rescue, not for fasting and prayer. No modern
Jewish writer distressfully inquired where God was during the pogrom;
moderns knew that human freedom, not God’s retributive pedagogy, lay
behind these events.
Every major Jewish philosopher of the 20th century reinforced this more
reticent view of God’s role in history; surely rationalism permitted little else.
In its finest European variety, the neo-Kantianism of Hermann Cohen, God
grounds and spurs ethics but a free humanity determines what will happen
in history for good or ill. In its favorite American form, Mordecai Kaplan’s
naturalism, God was carefully redefined to have only limited power. Kaplan
considered the notion of God intervening in human affairs to be the kind of
carry-over supernaturalism that made moderns reject Jewish belief. Even in
Leo Baeck’s reach beyond reason to religious consciousness, God remains
the mystery we sense behind our ethics, not an independent agent domi-
nating history.
The existentialism of Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber did not yield
a stronger view of retribution. The former denied that the Jewish people
truly lives in history while the latter relegated academic, that is, secularistic,
history to the realm of I–it relationships, where God, the Eternal Thou, can-
not be encountered. In some ways Abraham Heschel’s thought most tell-
ingly instances this distancing of God from events because he alone of our
master philosophers wrote his major works after the Holocaust. Though
an exalted God dominates his theology, all but a few sentences of his rare
comments about the Holocaust refer to human failure, not God’s ineffable
wisdom and inscrutable justice.
For many years before the Holocaust most rabbis, when they actually
referred to God, used the humanized concepts of these master teach-
ers, not a tight reading of Isaiah that might yield the idea that our God is
Rubenstein’s “ultimate, omnipotent actor in history.” The God that Richard
Rubenstein discovered as a result of the Holocaust had died, had long
since been reinterpreted in other fashion by modem Jews. Consequently,
when Jewish thinkers began addressing the religious issues posed by the
Holocaust, they did not consider themselves obligated to defend a strong,

Deuteronomic view of God’s justice. Instead, they explored the implica-
.
tions of this awesome evildoing in the context of their modern understand-

ing of God and human nature.
Denying the Qualitative Uniqueness of the Holocaust
Another assertion by a thinker central to the debate over the Holocaust has
also been widely rejected, in this case after acknowledging its pertinence.
Emil Fackenheim deems the Holocaust a qualitatively unique instance
of evil and stipulates that its uniqueness not be trivialized by reducing
it to the singleness of every other event in history. Rather, the Nazi effort
to kill all Jews merely because of their Jewishness exposed humankind to
an utterly new dimension of evil. As a result, no previous philosophic or
Jewish religious response to the problem of evil can be remotely adequate
to a discussion of the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel goes further still: the stupefy-
ing uniqueness of the Holocaust negates any possibility of our even for-
mulating apt questions about it and, therefore, certainly precludes the
possibility of our finding answers. Fackenheim and others, conscious that
philosophizing might be a blasphemous mitigation of the horror, nonethe-
less believe that we must attempt to elucidate its implications for contem-
porary Jewish belief.
Fackenheim argues that the Nazis’ unparalleled depravity arose more
from their intention than from their acts. They carried out this evil fully con-
scious of its perversity; worse, they did it for the sheer willfulness of doing
so monstrous an evil. He supports this view by citing numerous examples
of the Nazis self-destructively pursuing their demonic goal, as in diverting
railroad equipment desperately needed to repel the Allied invasion so they
could continue transporting Jews to the death camps. Fackenheim’s inter-
pretation of Nazi intentions is ultimately unconvincing because it finds so
little direct support in the vast historic evidence about the Holocaust. To
the contrary, the more we study the records of the Third Reich the more
we see how concretely goal-directed and therefore routinized was the pro-
gression from discrimination to degradation and then to murder. Far from
consciously seeking to do evil for evil’s sake they applied their fabled eth-
nic discipline to achieving what their demented logic had identified as a
supreme “ethical” good: ridding Europe and the world of a racial strain that
would otherwise destroy true human value. Most Jewish thinkers consider
the Holocaust a most egregious human evil—if one may use comparative
terminology when referring to events of awesome inhumanity—but one

that needs to be considered on the continuum of other human evils, not in
a realm of its own.
In somewhat the same spirit, there has been a general rejection of the
corollary claim by Wiesel, Rubenstein, Fackenheim, and others that the
Holocaust must now become a second Sinai, the determining reality of
contemporary Jewish existence. If by this they only mean that Jews should
reject any interpretation of Judaism that has not been centrally shaped
by the Holocaust, few would disagree. But since they have proposed that
we should now view all of existence, human and Jewish, in terms of the
Holocaust, their position has been rejected as disproportionate. Genocidal
destruction has not been the common theme of many terrifying ills of late
20th-century history, which mostly have arisen from a doleful continuation
of the human failings so often seen in history: inaction, ignorance, mind-
lessness, venality, perversity, and mendaciousness. Little seems new except
the scale of our malefaction, the education and efficiency we bring to it,
and the immediacy with which the world gets to know about it. Moreover,
a Holocaust-centered view of life might easily obscure how much goodness
people do day by day. Our people is a case in point for, despite our troubles,
we do not spend our days desperately fending off extinction. While the
Holocaust must fundamentally figure in our view of Jewish identity, it does
not faithfully teach us the reality of Jewish existence.
Our Good God, Limited or Inscrutable?
When the thinkers turned directly to the issue of theodicy, they mostly
followed two lines of interpretation. Jews who above all sought clarity in
their beliefs and wanted good reasons for believing, argued that rather than
being omnipotent, God has but limited power. God may be as powerful as
anything can be and supremely good; God does all the good that God can
do. Occasionally that will not be sufficient to counteract an eruption of the
evil latent in nature or caused by human freedom. This very human free-
dom to do good or evil, and thus to affirm or defy our most intimate knowl-
edge of God’s will, decisively proves God’s finitude and rationally explains
why evil, slight or gruesome, can occur.
This theodicy was not the esoteric possession of a Jewish elite but had
been widely disseminated among American Jews by the many disciples of a
number of influential teachers. Thus, Mordecai Kaplan, echoing the thought
of American religious liberals like William James, taught his students at the
Jewish Theological Seminary the concept of such a finite God already in

the 1930s and then wrote a book elucidating it. Henry Slonimsky, the inspi-
ration and spiritual guide of two generations of rabbis trained at Stephen
Wise’s Jewish Institute of Religion, taught a similar doctrine in the same
period. Utilizing European philosophical trends, he intriguingly suggested
that the limited God “grows” as does everything else alive, in God’s case
through human partnership in completing creation.
The more philosophical rationalists and their followers took an oblique
approach to limiting God, developing their theodicy in terms of reason’s
proper power rather than by speculation on God’s nature. They generally
followed Hermann Cohen’s neo-Kantianism, which maintained that a
properly rational mind cannot logically deal with questions about ultimate
reality, i.e., metaphysics—in this case, whether God’s power is finite or
infinite. Thoughtful people should therefore base their religious belief on
what the mature mind can know with certainty, namely, one’s ethical obli-
gations. So the main stream of American non-Orthodoxy communicated
a “God-idea” whose religious function essentially was to ground its ethics.
But its concept of God had nothing to do with “explaining” the reality of
evil, a metaphysical problem that transcends the powers of reason. Instead
of worrying about meaningless because unanswerable questions, a ratio-
nal person would “answer” evil by ethics, that is, by preventive or remedial
action. This pragmatic, anti-speculative response to evil has so spoken to
the American Jewish soul that it has become a major aspect of every variety
of theodicy among us.
Theories of God’s finitude are appealing because they clarify how one
can intelligently believe in a good God without denying the reality of evil.
They also have won wide acceptance because they motivate moral respon-
sibility by their conclusion that human ethics must complete what God’s
limited power leaves undone. But they generate a sufficient number of
new religious problems, logical and spiritual, that many Jews have rejected
them. (I shall return to this issue in chapter 10.)
These more traditional believers reaffirm the view commonly considered
characteristic of rabbinic Judaism: Though we know much about God, we
also know that God far transcends what we can know about God. We do not
know why the good God permits the evils of this world but we trust God any-
way. We do so out of gratitude and awe. Each day, rising up and lying down,
if we can say the hundred blessings required of a Jew, we are reminded of
God’s continual gifts. Our observance teaches a piety of the ordinary, a hal-
lowing of the many gifts we might otherwise arrogantly consider ours by
right. This daily thanksgiving sets the context for facing the evils beyond
our control or understanding; it enables many people to accept the unex-

plainable. For few of us are Job and most of us would acknowledge that God
gives us very much more than we deserve or could claim. Of course, the
Jobian exceptions are real and they deeply disrupt everyone’s relationship
with God. In the hideous evil of the Holocaust, the exceptional threatened
to become the norm. No wonder many people spoke of the death of God,
and no wonder limited-God theologies gained great currency. Yet large
numbers of Jews also took the classic path of Jewish faith: they affirmed
God even though they did not understand God. They may have done so
with trembling, but as in their experience of human love, they knew that
some mysteries require us to give the heart priority over the mind.
Both these post-Holocaust positions regarding God and evil had been
widely known in the Jewish community before Hitler. Astonishingly, for
all that the death-of-God debates centered on theodicy, they produced no
new theory or doctrine of God but only some linguistic variations of the
old ones. Let me compensate for this sweeping generalization by imme-
diately indicating how our sense of God’s unfathomable absence during
the Holocaust did intensify our two pre-Holocaust theodicies. Few thinkers
had imagined before Hitler that God was so limited or so utterly inscru-
table. No one had ever considered before that God could be so withdrawn.
And this awesome sense of God’s potential unavailability gave a terrifying
new reality to the best defense that can be offered for God’s tolerance of
evil: that goodness is so central to God that God never violates humankind’s
freedom to do good or evil—not even in the face of enormities as great as
those of the Nazis.
The Latent Content of the Holocaust Debates
Yet even after noting this radicalization of theological tone, the enigma per-
sists. If our community had not seriously believed in the God whose demise
had been announced, if our years of intellectual debate left us with largely
the same understandings of God and evil known before the Holocaust, why
did these religious debates so trouble our spirits?
For one thing, some Jews had never become as modern in their thought
as in their life-style and their beliefs never progressed beyond the literalistic
notions acquired as children. For another, the trauma of the Nazi barbar-
ity made some Jews regress to their childhood notions of God as the all-
nurturing Mama-Papa. All such images of God would be under severe stress
as a result of the Holocaust debates. But these suppositions hardly explain
why the spiritual dislocation we experienced in those days was so widely

and deeply felt. We must seek our understanding elsewhere and we will
find it by following up an observation of Elie Wiesel that the death camps,
rather than shattering the faith of the traditionalists, most fully undid the
worldview of the intellectuals and liberals.
This explanation, I am convinced, derives as much from our general
cultural situation as it does from our frightful particular experience. With
the inner life of modern Jews dominated more by Western civilization
than by a distinctive Judaism, the general retreat from messianic modern-
ism could not but deeply affect Jews. To explain how this manifested itself
in our community, let me proceed by means of a theory of the mid-19th-
century German theologian Ludwig Feuerbach. Seeking to reestablish reli-
gion’s relevance to sophisticates giddy over the advances in human thought
and technology, he suggested that, at its core, religion grows from human
aspiration, not God’s revelation. In creating our various concepts of God,
we are, he argued, really specifying our highest, most ideal human values.
Under cover of our God-talk we are celebrating the human potential, pro-
jecting the self we desire to be to a transcendent level and, by calling it
“God,” investing it with commanding power (a theological notion Freud
later adopted and gave rich psychological content).
While I do not accept Feuerbach’s insight as anything like the whole
truth about our views of God, I believe what he taught us about projec-
tion powerfully explains a major part of our response to the Holocaust.
If God-talk mostly discloses our human ideals, then our post-Holocaust
theological distress was a classic instance of Freudian displacement, of
substituting a less emotional topic for a highly disturbing one. Not having
believed much in God, we modern Jews could not be deeply troubled by
God’s death. But if God-talk projects beliefs about humanity, “the death of
God” shielded us from the tragic loss of the one “god” in whom we mod-
erns had avidly trusted—ourselves, humankind. We had expected no other
to save us from all our human ills. Our operative faith had been “the per-
fectibility of man [sic]” which culminated, through our ethical action, in
“the Messianic Age.” In high statistical disproportion, Jews had served as
the prophets of this humanism and taught the secular salvation of politics,
intellect, and high culture.
Then we saw Germany Nazified and our people become Nazi Germany’s
special victims. This “transvaluation of all values” turned out to be more
seismic than any imagined by Nietzsche, who late in the 19th century pro-
claimed the death of religion’s God and became the darling of optimistic
Jewish secularizers. The Holocaust refuted everything we had identified
with modernity, so much so that, before the evidence of what had occurred
become incontrovertible, it was not deemed possible. Trusting human
progress as we did, we could give as little credence to the early reports of the
mass murder as the hindsight historians now can give to our blindness then.
A corollary psychic denial of Western culture’s spiritual bankruptcy
operated for years after World War II as American Jews basked in unprec-
edented social acceptance and economic success. Only America’s own self-
doubt brought on by racial conflict and the Vietnam War made it possible
for Jews, like others, to begin to face the clash between their experience and
their functional optimism. Even then, our psyches could not stand so direct
an attack on the faith on which we had staked our lives. Instead of facing up
to the loss of our messianic self-image, we found it easier to agonize about
the death of the traditional God we had not really believed in.
Human Tzimtzum Makes a Place for God
Not the least irony in this ongoing development has been its eventual
reversal of course. The Jewish death-of-God movement heralded itself as
the triumph of modernity. By ending our dependency on a revealing, sav-
ing God it liberated us for maturely independent responsibility. The result,
however, has not been the proliferation of socially concerned ethical activ-
ists but a radical loss of sure values that has sapped the moral energy of our
society and thereby discredited modernity. Even more unanticipated was
the unwitting role of the death-of-God debates in bringing our community,
or a critical portion of it, back to God. The Holocaust discussions began
with many people denying God’s existence out of simple moral indigna-
tion. Some, asserting their credo as moderns, believed that human rational-
ity itself mandated ethics. Others claimed human nature was intrinsically
good so that once we made society less malignant human evil would disap-
pear. In either case, why should rational people mourn the passing of the
God of synagogue and church?
But where else shall we gain such secular moral certainty after the
Holocaust? Surely not from the old assumptions about human rational-
ity and goodness. German culture and intellectuality abetted more than it
challenged the Nazi madness and the democratic, liberal ethos of the Allies
did not motivate them to disrupt the Nazi murder. With this dismal record
before us, with our continuing exposure to the evil done everywhere by
people in places high and low, only a minority of Jews can still unhesitat-
ingly assert that human beings are primarily rational or inherently good.
Contemporary philosophy does nothing to refute these practical conclu-

sions. Academics once made what appeared to be a convincing case for
considering ethics an essential component of human reason; today’s think-
ers regularly restrict rationality to logical reasoning, relegating the motive
and content of ethics to less compelling aspects of our being or social life.
Thus, the commanding sense of rational moral law, which we once took
so for granted that it justified our denying God’s value and reality, has
been repudiated by history, experience, and intellect. We Jews have not
been exceptions to Western civilization’s disillusionment with modernity.
If anything, our experience has been a major factor in bringing it to its
postmodern turn.
For decent human beings, the loss of a sure ground of human values
must be traumatic. For Jews, it is utterly intolerable, for it blurs the quali-
tative difference between the Nazis and their victims. Regardless of what
the world knows or cares, anything that mitigates the categorical distinction
between the S. S. death camp operators and their Jewish victims violates our
most fundamental contemporary experience and contravenes a central man-
date of our tradition. One need not be a philosopher or intellectual to know
this truth; one only needs still to be human. Against all our modem expec-
tations, the Holocaust showed us evil, real and unrelieved, and taught us
that, against all our yearning to be tolerant and pluralistic, utter evil must
be opposed absolutely. And that mandate makes sense only if we can still
honestly affirm the reality of unqualified good.
The experience of primal evil, confronting us with its thoroughgoing
negativity, has forced us to affirm an equally elemental good. But pure
secularity no longer knows so categorical, so definitive a good and our
moral indignation therefore forces us to move in an opposite direction. If
we insist that our intuition of a commanding goodness is not an illusion,
then, as thinking people, we must search for its ground—and this has led
the Jewish community, as so much of the rest of Western civilization, to a
postsecular spiritual search. If we have even a dim, troubled, barely verbal-
izable acknowledgment of an unshakable demand for value at the heart of
the universe, one that we must, to remain human, answer and exemplify,
then we have found our personal way to what our tradition in various ways
called “God.” It is this postmodern recovery of spirituality that lies behind
our community’s general rejection of the death-of-God movement and a
significant minority’s involvement in Orthodoxy, ḥavurot, mysticism, and
other forms of religious search.
This experience of the absoluteness of the good has been critical to the
spiritual change that has come over Western civilization and has, even more
profoundly, affected the Jews. For the grisly evil of the Holocaust epitomizes
all the vileness that, out of revulsion, has been the dominant motive bring-
ing individuals and groups to search for a postmodern, realistic spirituality.
The Corollary Ethnic Turn of the Postmodern Sensibility
There is an important concomitant to postmodern spirituality: ethnic root-

edness. Emil Fackenheim identified this post-Holocaust reality famously in
postulating what he termed our 614th commandment: “The authentic Jew
of today is not permitted to hand Hitler yet another, posthumous victory.”
A commanding if unidentifiable Voice from Auschwitz demanded that
Jews do what they could to promote the survival and welfare of the people
of Israel, and much of the positive tone of Jewish life in recent decades
has been due to Jewish acceptance of this responsibility. I focus on two
major aspects of this resurgent ethnicity, artificially separating them from
one another: The more obvious renewal centered on the State of Israel;
its companion development involved Diaspora Jewry in a more explicitly
ethnicized—that is, particularistically Jewish—manner of observance
and belief.
The State of Israel became a central concern of most of world Jewry
only as a result of the Six Day War of 1967. Before then only ideological
Zionists—a tiny minority among us—found the reality of their Jewish
lives substantially altered by the establishment of the State of Israel or its
early accomplishments. Few Jews immigrated there who did not have to;
few learned Hebrew or involved themselves in political action on its behalf.
Only in rhetoric did it serve as world Jewry’s “spiritual center.”
The circumstances of the Six Day War and its consequences radically
raised our Jewish consciousness toward the State of Israel. The prior
public discussion of the Holocaust had made us apprehensive that God
would again be absent, and television pictures of demonstrators in vari-
ous Arab capitals calling for the destruction of the State of Israel made
the threat personal. The great Christian churches were silent, the leaders
of the democracies noncommittal. The three-day news blackout after the
war began was a time of hideous imagination, of deep soul-searching, of
religious hope and consternation, and produced an overwhelming, volun-
tary outpouring of help, most notably from Jews who had never previously
included themselves in the community. Then news came of the staggering
Israeli victory. World Jewry experienced an elation that transcended relief
from dread or rejoicing at Israeli prowess; the Bible calls it deliverance. Jews
everywhere found themselves uncomprehendingly overwhelmed by the

sight of soldiers converging on the Temple Mount’s Western Wall; atheists,
agnostics, and believers alike found themselves moved to prayer. I believed
then and believe now that we had personally experienced God’s saving
power, something I can explain as little as I can God’s absence during the
Holocaust—but an experience I remain certain was not illusion, one real
enough that it moved a critical mass of our people to rededicate themselves
to Jewish existence.
Subsequently, the effect of this revelatory moment diminished, but it
still powerfully shaped the ensuing ethnic-political struggle, particularly
when the 1973 war with Egypt showed how vulnerable the State of Israel
remained. Now proudly particularistic, Diaspora Jews demanded that their
leaders unabashedly lobby their governments on the State of Israel’s behalf
so that this generation would never be accused of repeating the sins of
the Holocaust.
World Jewry also had positive grounds for its new sense of identifica-
tion of Jews with the State of Israel. Again and again Jews who visited there
returned deeply affected by what they saw Jews achieving as a Jewish society.
In what Koestler called “our political ice-age,” the State of Israel appeared a
model of moral politics; it also became the shining symbol of our people’s
transpolitical, instinctive, life-affirming answer to Hitler’s nihilism, giving
it a numinosity, a sacred aura that even a secularized generation could not
ignore. Theologically put, it made evident what the Holocaust had made us
doubt: that the Covenant between God and the people of Israel continues
in full force. With this resurgence of particularity, self-deprecating univer-
salism gave way to the postmodern query, “Is this good for the Jews?”
Does God Still Have a Role in Jewish Particularity?
I believe the roots of our intensified Jewishness go far deeper than national
solidarity or group pride. In these years of danger and self-esteem, many
of us partisans of human equality, who had eschewed making special
claims for the Jewish people, found that we also believed an absoluteness
attached to Jewish survival and flourishing. We had finally become con-
scious that for us the demise of the Jewish people would mean not merely
a social trauma or broken emotional ties, but an irreparable human loss.
Whether in response to danger or a result of love for this folk or both, many
of us discovered that we believed the Jewish people to be indispensable,
not merely to ourselves but to the universe and its scheme of things. We
now knew there was something transcendent about Jewish continuity. I

will dare the overstatement: We believe God “needs” Jews—or, if you pre-
fer, God “wants” Jews to be Jews and not simply Noahides with a Hebraic
ethnic coloration.
The unconventional Orthodox writer and community leader Irving
(“Yitz”) Greenberg has reached the opposite conclusion. His vision of post-
Holocaust Jewishness rejects any more-than-human mandate for Jewish
survival. He contends that the Holocaust teaches us not that God is dead
but that God no longer has any right to command Israel, i.e., the Holocaust
proclaims the death of mitzvah. Only the Jewish will to continue Jewish
existence now keeps the Covenant and Jewish obligation alive.
I hear in this radicalism the anguished outcry of a traditional Jew who,
for love of Jews and all human beings, cannot bear what the God of classic
Jewish practice allowed to happen in the Holocaust. But denying any tran-
scendent significance to Jewish duty raises the issue of how much impor-
tance we should attach to it and, more critically, what sacrifices we would
make for it. Of course, as long as we find Jewish experience rewarding and
have a Jewish memory rich with emotion and knowledge, Jewish life will
continue. And as long as Western culture remains spiritually barren, the
varied resources of Jewish culture will commend themselves. However, if
Jewish living is only a matter of choice, why should we take on its special
burdens in the State of Israel or the Diaspora when we can do as much or
more for ourselves and others through less troublesome social forms?
Greenberg apparently believes that we can count on the endurance of
postmodern Jewish ethnicity and he seeks to insure this by educating for
Jewish literacy and values. Where he and others believe we can separate
the ethnic from the spiritual drives in the postmodern ethos, I believe this
exclusively humanistic view of ethnicity returns us to the faulty premise of
Jewish modernity, the humanization of Jewish obligation. And as we move
toward the 21st century I see considerable evidence in the State of Israel
that an increasing number of Jews who feel the extent of their Jewishness
is essentially a matter of personal choice are giving it a considerably lower
priority than it once generally had. If, on the other hand, we primarily
know that Jewish discipline deserves more concern than this, that it has
a certain commanding power to it, then we need a more adequate theory
of Jewish duty than this. The conflict between these two interpretations of
post-Holocaust Jewish particularity will have a considerable influence on
the vitality of Jewish life in the generation or so ahead. I return to this issue
frequently in the later chapters of this book.
The Postmodern Integrity of Folk and Faith
To some extent, the Jewish turn to religious particularity began as part of

the late-1960s search for ethnic roots. Diaspora Jews frequently said they
wanted to be “more Jewish,” by which they generally meant more visibly
and identifiably part of their folk. Despite their identification with the State
of Israel, this led only a few to become dedicated nationalists or Hebraists,
a development paralleled in the State of Israel where Zionism as an ideol-
ogy motivating personal sacrifice evaporated. Significantly, Zionist ideal-
ism remained strong mainly when linked to religious belief, and the initial
activities of the Orthodox Gush Emunim movement in the 1980s evoked
the admiration of secular Israelis because of its adherents’ uncommon will-
ingness to sacrifice for the national good.
In the Diaspora, where Jews faced greater obstacles in asserting their
Jewish particularity, the drive to be “more Jewish” mainly resulted in peo-
ple adopting more traditional forms of Jewish observance. For the first
time in modernity, a sizable number of young American Jews insisted on
being more visibly Jewish than their parents were. Reform Jews became
more Hebraic, Zionistic, and ritualistic while Conservative Jews stressed
the halakhic aspects of their movement. Responding to the lack of Jewish
seriousness and the impersonality of the established institutions, ḥavurot
and minyanim burgeoned. Some modern Jews became visibly observant,
frum, and many others adorned their life-styles with identifying practices
selected from the neotraditionalistic Jewish Catalog—all of this a shock to
the comfortably universalized.
The most unanticipated surge took place in Orthodoxy. In the decades
after World War II, the most visible segment of the movement combined
faithful halakhic observance with such cultural pursuits as the halakhah
found acceptable and called itself “Modern Orthodoxy.” Ironically, as this
modernization reached maturity, fundamentalisms generally became
appealing because their God-ordained particularity distanced their adher-
ents from a failing modernity. By the late 1970s, Orthodoxy, once thought a
doomed relic of the Middle Ages, began attracting many sophisticated Jews
disenchanted with modernity. As the society’s social conservatism grew;
separatistic Orthodoxy took on a new self-confidence and challenged the
non-Orthodox about the depth of their Jewishness and the grounds of their
universalistic ethics.
In this shift to the right, Modern Orthodoxy found itself accused of being
“too modern.” Ultra-Orthodoxy, the Jewish equivalent of our civilization’s
fundamentalist movements, now demanded a Jewish life more absolute
in tone and less “goyish” in demeanor. They argued that the Holocaust
gave Jews every reason to put as much distance between themselves and
the gentile world as was compatible with community security. Not seeing
the broader context, most community observers were startled by the num-
ber of modernized Jews attracted to just those Orthodox communities that
appeared to have compromised the least with modernity. Perhaps the most
dramatic manifestation of this Jewish rejection of modernity may be seen
in those baalei teshuvah who seek out yeshivot of such premodern piety
that their leaders, right-wing adherents of Agudat Yisrael or various Hasidic
sects, decry the State of Israel itself as un-Jewish.
A larger and more politically effective group united their ethnicity and
religiosity in an activist Orthodox Zionism, esteeming the State of Israel
for enabling Jews to live the fullest form of Torah-centered Judaism. Their
Diaspora cohorts, unlike most secular Jews, found aliyah, immigration to
the Holy Land, a compelling Jewish obligation while their Israeli com-
peers took action to fulfill God’s injunction to take possession and settle
the whole biblical land of Israel, most notably by settlements in Judea and
Samaria. They believe that the laws of the Torah alone define the proper
status of Palestinians in the Jewish land; and if this stance or their activism
arouses an adverse world response, that is a gentile problem, an assertion
of religio-ethnic self-respect that clearly exemplifies one form of the post-
modern consciousness.
As We Move to a New Secular Millennium
Social conservatism and spiritual orthodoxies dominated the ethos of the

1980s, everywhere scoring impressive victories over liberalism. In so doing
they also demonstrated the excesses to which they can lead and thereby
caused many moderns, and certainly most Jews, to see the limits of their
revisionism. I am not saying that the power of the right has so ebbed that
it will have few future political victories and the old liberalism will regain
dominance. Should antimodernity regain its messianic fervor and social
sway, the Jewish spirituality I see arising may well die aborning—but I do
not expect that to happen. Rather, in a manner more Hegelian than I am
usually comfortable with, the modernist thesis having been succeeded by a
conservative antithesis, what appears to be emerging is a spiritual synthe-
sis that learns from yet transcends them both. My own Jewish theological
program speaks to this new spiritual sensibility.
My analysis of the postconservative mood begins with noting how much
those who fought modernity quietly coopted many of its concerns. We see
this epitomized in the phenomenal burgeoning of right-wing Orthodox

publishing, which has made available an extraordinary range of classic
Jewish texts with commentary, halakhic literature, how-to books, and gen-
eral spiritual inspiration. The characteristics of this literature are telling.
For one thing, the authors typically keep the reader’s personal interests
before them rather than merely communicate their understanding of the
tradition, as earlier Orthodox authors did. Moreover, the concerns they
often seek to respond to turn out to be quite modern, like ethics, respect for
people, and person-to-person relationships. Most important, these books
are in English and fully Western in their idiom, making this the first genera-
tion of rabbinic Jews that has so substantially sought to communicate its
message in what our tradition called laaz, a “foreign” language.
Orthodox Zionism furnishes another example. The Jews most reso-
lutely opposed to Western culture became anti-Zionist, deeming political
Zionism, as did much of European Orthodoxy, a heretical secularization
of Judaism learned from gentiles. Orthodox Zionism itself results from a
certain modernization. One sees this even more clearly in the contrast
between the politically passive piety of the old Diaspora religious tradi-
tion and the contemporary activism of Gush Emunim and its offshoots.
In this Orthodoxy, modern political activism has become’ a companion
to the mitzvot.
Simply put, though many Jews now seek some distance between
themselves and the culture, few of us indeed want to re-ghettoize.
Overwhelmingly, world Jewry has rejected the two outstanding forms of
intensified ethnicity and religiosity, living in the State of Israel and becom-
ing Orthodox. Many have done so out of inertia, self-serving, or a bland
refusal to take Jewish identity seriously. Yet assuming most Jews are not
simply venal, we have a right to ask about the metaethic that makes them
want to stay Jewish but not through such ethnic and religious transforma-
tion. In chapters 17 and 18 I argue that though Orthodoxy and the State of
Israel have powerfully molded the postmodern Jewish consciousness, each
has also given Jews reason to deny it Jewish primacy or ultimacy. Here I
want only to indicate my conviction that the limits to our particularization
come from our belief that much of the universal ethical message of modern
Judaism remains true even in a postmodern era.
The Modern in the Postmodern
World Jewry’s great pride in the State of Israel had largely been connected
with its moral accomplishment. Few Jews expected that one could run a
state and remain saintly, and for years whenever certain Israeli actions
seemed morally questionable they overlooked them. But in the 1980s, with
many Jews believing ethics to be central to Judaism and Jewish morality
the key to Jewish continuity, the situation changed. The realization that
much of Israel’s citizenry and its leaders had a radically different view of
Jewish obligation finally brought many of them and even some of their
organizations to the point of public dissent and private dissociation from
the State of Israel. From this experience I infer that, for all our intensified
ethnicity, we so strongly retain a commitment to modern ethics that it can
occasionally take precedence over the unique focus of our ethnic pride, the
State of Israel.
Not the least evidence leading to this conclusion has been the parallel
development in the State of Israel itself. The incursion into Lebanon and
the response to the Intifada caused many Israelis such unsettling ethical
distress that it has led to an unprecedented division over national purpose
and character. In their exposed and dangerous situation, Israelis have very
much more at stake in whatever decisions are made than anyone else.
Nonetheless, they face the same conflict of values that confronts Diaspora
Jews: To what extent should the universalistic ethics of Judaism espoused
by us in our modernity influence our postmodern Jewish commitment to
ethnic self-respect? This same return of our repressed modernity emerges
in our renewed spirituality. The attractive assets of contemporary ortho-
doxies, their certain standards and their close-knit communities, appeal
greatly by contrast to liberalism’s moral flabbiness and personal uncertainty.
Yet these very strengths contain such potential dangers that they prevent
most Jews from accepting our Orthodoxy. Those who truly know what God
specifically wants of us can tolerate only quite limited dissent. Seeking or
achieving political power, orthodoxies can channel their absoluteness into
what most Jews would call extremism, zealotry, and fanatacism—we have
seen too many examples of this phenomenon both in our community and
without not to be disenchanted with claims to absolute truth. It seems far
more reasonable to most Jews to affirm another motif of modem Judaism:
that all human beings necessarily have a limited knowledge of God’s will.
Though we passionately stake our lives on such knowledge of God as we do
possess, we think our limited understanding requires us to live in peace-
ful mutual regard with those whose faith radically disagrees with ours; our
postmodern religiosity must foster pluralism and practice the spirituality
of democracy.
The continuing modernity of our postmodern spirituality has been epit-
omized by the anomalous invocation of the concept of tikkun olam as a
Jewish call to ethical action. This represents a remarkable transformation

of the term, which was first used in the Talmud to provide a pragmatic justi-
fication for certain compromises the rabbis made between clashing values
in the law. Thus, its earliest Jewish meaning was something like “good social
policy.” In the 16th century, the Lurianic kabbalah utilized the phrase to des-
ignate a human mystical task. Luna’s cosmogony taught that God’s act of
creation resulted in a shattered material world, which the Jewish people
was brought into being to “mend” (tikkun), thus, eventually, bringing the
Messiah. We were to do this by meticulously observing the commandments,
accompanying each deed by a mystical intention to restore the channels of
grace between the upper and the lower worlds that were specific to this
act. In particular, this system stressed the value of kavvanot, the mystic
commentary-intentions that the adepts created for each required prayer.
Today’s tikkun olam has little or nothing to do with halakhic adjustments
or mystical intentions. Rather, it summons us to Jewish ethical duty, most
often of a universal cast—but in keeping with our intensified postmodern
particularity, it legitimates this remnant of modernity by cloaking it in a
classic Jewish term.
In sum, this dialectical postmodern evolution has brought much of
world Jewry to a paradoxical spiritual situation. We are too realistic about
humankind to return to the messianic modernism that once animated us.
Instead we sense we derive our deepest understanding of what a person
ought to be and humankind ought to become from participating in the
Covenant, our people’s historic relationship with God. But not exclusively.
The Emancipation was not altogether a lie. It taught us something true
about the dignity of each person and this must be carried over into our
postmodern Judaism. These affirmations—corporate Covenant and self-
determination—can easily come into conflict, yet we propose to live our
lives affirming both of them. I understand it to be the task of Jewish theol-
ogy today to give a faithful, thoughtful explication of this paradox.
The Particular Self That Undertakes This Effort
I cannot bring this section to a close without an additional personal/profes-

sional observation. I do not mean by this Jewish historical/spiritual analy-
sis to convey the impression that had these developments not occurred I
would not have come to the theological position I detail in what follows.
My concern with these issues and the earliest work drawn on for this book
preceded most of the history I have been discussing.
My theology has evolved primarily from my ongoing personal effort to

understand my Judaism. What began as a childhood interest in the ideas
behind Jewish living took on intellectual form at the university and led
me to my anomalous concern with Jewish theology at rabbinical school.
This interest of mine seemed so odd to most other Jews I knew that I was
delighted at two discoveries I made there and later. For one, I found a few
friends who also wanted to delineate the intellectual system undergird-
ing a richly particular yet universal modern Jewish belief; we were, I can
now say, proto-postmodern. We instructed each other by argument and
proposal, and perhaps more lastingly by calling attention to the contem-
porary resources each of us discovered that might be of help to us. The
second happy revelation was that, though no one ever mentioned it in
class, there had been a century-long though limited tradition of modern
Jewish theology/philosophy. I found my place in American Jewry as a mem-
ber of the small subcommunity of abstract thinkers still carrying on this
activity. I discovered my compelling problem and appropriate method by
comparison and contrast with their ideas, past and present. Dialogue with
them, as the following pages testify, remains central to my thought.
In the initial stages of groping with my problem and seeking a way of
responding to it, I did not anticipate that much of our community would
be moved by historic events to the religious situation I was strugging to
understand and articulate. I rather thought that were I able to bring my
thinking to systematic form—an effort that, in the writing, has taken
more than three decades—I would be speaking only to that small minor-
ity of Jews interested in thinking about their religion. It came as a special
joy to me then when, as postsecularity made its effect felt, the number of
people interested in Jewish theology increased. But I never imagined that
my thought would speak to the more general experience of less abstractly
inclined Jews, as I now think it does. In this experience of being able to
comprehend the spiritual depth of what our people has been going through
in recent decades, I have found both confirmation of my basic position and
much that caused me to refine and amplify it. I still believe it indepen-
dently persuasive because of its intellectual merits, yet I now dare hope
that, by the insight it gives into what we have been living through, my the-
ology may commend itself to many Jews as a reasonable version of their
hitherto unarticulated faith.
The Autonomous Jewish Self*
Questioners commonly challenge me with a Jewish version of the fallacy

of misplaced confidence. For generations now, liberal Jews have made
Western culture their surrogate for Torah—with disastrous results. While
one might have accepted some Jewish sacrifice as the necessary accompa-
niment of a seismic shift to living in a new and better world, thinking in
such other-directed terms in our situation seems ridiculous. Western civili-
zation itself ails desperately. It not only does not merit being our religion, it
seems likely to escape paganization only by the rebirth of the sort of moral
devotion which faith in a commanding God can alone provide. Why then
do liberal Jews not stop asking first what our society demands from them
and attend instead to the claims that Judaism makes of all who wish to be
authentic Jews?
Socially put, why are liberal Jews so half-hearted about their well-adver-
tised return to traditional practices? Do we not know, no matter to what
depth of conscious pride or embarrassment have caused us to repress it,
that genuine Jewish piety means living by traditional Jewish law? If we are
not ready to accept the whole law, then for the sake of the unity of all Israel,
can we not now immediately move in one limited but critical area: to follow
Orthodox Jewish law, in all its diversity, as our basis for Jewish marriages
and divorces?
On rare occasions these challenges sound a metaphysical tone.
Questioners cannot understand why Jews who acknowledge that religious
duties are largely of human origin cannot simply accommodate those who
know their standards are not their own but God’s. How can liberal Jews
utter an occasional absolute “no” when they proudly boast that all authority
is substantially human and therefore open to revision?
My sort of liberal Jews will want to begin a response, I think, by carefully
distinguishing between the failures of Western civilization and its lacking
any value whatsoever. Many of the vital and creative aspects of contempo-
rary Jewish life arose as a result of our emancipation. Jewish esthetics has
moved beyond ritual silver, manuscript illumination and synagogue music
to embrace arts and styles that greatly enrich our Jewish lives. Jewish schol-
arship is not only fecund beyond our fondest expectations of but twenty
* Originally published in Modern Judaism 4, no. 1 (February 1984).

72 the autonomous jewish self
years ago, it excites us intellectually through its use of a Western herme-

neutic applied chronologically to texts examined critically. American Jewry
exhibits an activism unique in the Diaspora Jewish experience. Zionism
was the first great fruit of the fusion of the Western notion of social respon-
sibility and the Jewish commitment to life. By now we consider it a premise
of Jewish duty that we should help determine the course of our society and
take political action for the State of Israel or Jews in peril. And—limiting
this list to four examples—by adapting ourselves to America we have cre-
ated a Jewish style which shows signs of being a worthy successor to other
great amalgams of Jewish life and a host culture, such as Spanish and Polish
Jewish life.
These and many other smaller triumphs exist because many Jews, against
the advice of their leaders, believed that the spiritual survival of the Jewish
community would never be assured by seeking to preserve Jewish life as
isolated as possible from the newly opened up Western world. Rather, they
knew that Jewish well-being depended on accepting the risks of entering
the general society and actively seeking to benefit Jewish life from it. In
the mid-19th century—and even now in some quarters—this commitment
to energetic involvement with Western civilization was seen as the death
knell of Judaism. Today, a century or so later, the overwhelming majority of
Jews, including a very substantial number of Orthodox Jews, is determined
that they and their children shall have the best of both heritages. Liberal
Jews like myself see in this historic transformation of Jewish community
values a validation of our general sense of commitment to modern civiliza-
tion and some of its central values.
The very most significant idea the Emancipation taught us, I venture to
say, is the notion of the autonomous self. As we emerged from the ghetto,
shtetl and mellah, we encountered a view of human nature that radically
extended ideas which we had occasionally seen mentioned in our tradi-
tional texts. The Western world gave these old Jewish notions an empha-
sis and power the admittedly high Jewish sense of self had not come to.
For the Enlightenment thinkers taught that human beings ought to make
their own minds and consciences the ultimate basis of their decisions and
actions. When they ceded to some external reality—tradition, convention,
custom, class, society or even the church—the final right to tell them what
they ought to do, they gave away the greatest human capacity: the ability
to think for oneself. Instead of utterly depending on others, people need to
educate themselves and develop their moral and esthetic faculities, so that
they might then responsibly join with other people to freely determine the
course of their common existence. Human dignity became identified with
the autonomous jewish self 73
rational self-actualization rather than with faithful obedience. Liberals

today have lost the optimism connected with that 18th century notion but
we are far from ready to give up its high estimate of the human value of
self-determination. If anything, our experience with the moral failure of
every kind of institution and collective has forced us back on the self as the
proper, ultimate touchstone of righteous existence.
The importation of the notion of the self into Jewish thought has pre-
ceded under many guises and still remains incomplete. But, in practice, the
masses of American Jews have made it the foundation of their relation-
ship to Judaism. Our “non-observant Orthodox” affiliate with institutions
pledged to the halakhah but, after listening respectfully to what the law
requires, do “what is right in their own eyes.” The new young traditionalists
of whom we are so proud, pick and choose their Jewish law from a three
volume catalog. Only the liberal Jews proclaim the autonomy of the self (in
their transformed sense of that term, as we shall see) to be a fundamental
principle for living Judaism today. When they perceive how much of the
Jewish community, regardless of ideology, lives by the autonomous self,
they feel confirmed in explicit championing of this Western notion.
Emancipated Jewry also enthusiastically adopted the Enlightenment
assertion that ethical responsibility has a primary place in the function-
ing of the autonomous self. In matters concerning inter-human obliga-
tion an unparalleled imperative quality enters the life of the liberal Jew.
Liberal Jewish duty extends far beyond ethics (in its several explications)
but nothing else one must do manifests its supremely commanding power.
It confronts us as a transcendent demand and lays an ultimate claim upon
us. Not to grasp the compelling power of the ethical upon devout liberal
Jews dooms one to misunderstand them. To be sure, Enlightenment think-
ers spoke largely in terms of secular ethics (as in Kantian autonomy) and
liberal Jews, in adopting their ideas, turned them into religious ones (thus
substantially changing the Kantian autonomy). This, rather than mitigating
the power of the ethical, only made it stronger.
Liberal Judaism proclaimed that a properly autonomous self exists
essentially in response to the commanding power of ethics. The point
needs emphasis. I wish to provide it by reminding you of the unanimous
agreement of the great exemplars of modern Jewish thought in this matter.
Our one great philosophic mind, Hermann Cohen, continued Kant’s view
that we hear the ethical command as a categorical imperative. The other
path-breaking rationalist, Mordecai Kaplan, provides even stronger testi-
mony to the sovereign power of the ethical claim. In Kaplan’s naturalistic
understanding of reason, the social group creates all significant human
value—with one exception (not explained by the common canons of natu-

ralism): moral law. A folk has the right to do anything with its culture that it
deems proper (Kaplan’s liberalism) except to contravene ethical standards.
They remain so powerful that they constrain the otherwise omnipotent
Kaplanian group. In both thinkers the self finds the ground and guarantee
of ethics in its idea of God.
The non-rationalists also uphold this view of ethics, though one must
understand them in their personalistic sense and not insist that because
they are not Kantians they have no ethics at all. Martin Buber rejects the
concept of a binding rational ethical law (and Kant’s notion of auton-
omy) but he has a Buberian equivalent for it, the command which arises
from genuine encounter. Whenever two persons truly meet, God is pres-
ent as the third, enabling partner of their relationship. And every direct
I-thou with God itself provides a mission on which we are sent. Because
dialogue brings persons most fully into contact, it also most directly
issues forth in a sense of duty to other human beings. The ethical imper-
ative we carry with us as we leave our meeting is, then, our response to
God, It comes with such imperative quality that even a received law
should not be allowed to stand in its way if they differ. They may be anti-
nomian but it clearly manifests a sense of ultimate religio-ethical claim.
Abraham Heschel’s treatment of this theme—and certainly the fashion
in which he lived—similarly relates the personal experience of the reality
of God to the need for an ethical life. In Heschel’s treatment of revelation,
the ethical occupies a powerful place and in what little he wrote about the
Holocaust, most of his remarks are addressed to our perverse use of our
powers to do the good.
On no other single theme I can think of, not God, or the people of Israel,
or revelation, or messianism, or law, or how we should think about these
issues, do these thinkers so completely agree. For the liberal Jew then, eth-
ics binds the self, regardless of the intellectual form in which one describes
it. And, I hasten to add, it has a priority in Jewish duty over all other cat-
egories of Jewish responsibility, as necessary to a rounded Jewish life as
they are. Despite the current disparagement of the old notion of Prophetic
Judaism, the hierarchy of Jewish values proclaimed by many of the proph-
ets still speaks to the religious perceptions of many liberal Jews.
Please note that for all these thinkers the old Enlightenment terms have
significantly changed their meaning by being organically fixed in a religious
context. For them, as for thoughtful liberal Jews of less intellectual distinc-
tion, the self is no longer fully understandable independent of God and the
autonomy of the self, primarily seen in ethical responsiveness, makes sense
only in terms of the self’s actualization of God’s will since God is the source
and standard of its own being.
I have not placed such stress upon the virtual identification of selfhood
with religiously autonomous ethics so as to defend the old liberalism and
its equation of Jewish duty with universal human ethics. That doctrine now
appears to be less a timeless truth about Judaism than a response to the his-
toric situation of liberal Jews in another day. If Judaism was to survive the
Emancipation, acculturation was a spiritual duty. In that time one could
well take the Jewishness of most Jews for granted. Hence the immediate
task of liberal theologians was to clarify the ways in which Jews were not
only permitted to be active participants in general culture but should see
this as a new Jewish duty.
Living in a vastly different time, we have almost the diametrically oppo-
site liberal Jewish theological agenda. Our universalism is largely secure,
as our continuity at the university, in large cities and our subsequent secu-
larization attests. Our new Jewish excitement comes from our turn to our
particular roots. Liberal theologians now hear themselves summoned to
recapture a compelling particularism without sacrificing the gains of the
universalization of Judaism. Or, to translate that into my personalist lan-
guage, we need to transform the older liberal general human self with its
accretion of Jewish coloration into what I call the undivided Jewish self.
Specifically, I wish to clarify some aspects of the Jewish self’s “autonomy.”
In putting the question this way, I have departed from Mordecai Kaplan’s
ingenious effort to make a Jewish rationalism commandingly particular.
While I admire Kaplan’s rounded sense of Jewish ethnicity, I believe that
his sort of religious humanism cannot satisfactorily resolve the critical
contemporary human problem, the need of a ground of value. I agree with
those many thinkers who deny that any immanentism, even those called
a “transnaturalism,” can legitimately call us to prefer one aspect of nature
over another and devote ourselves to it to the point of substantial self-sac-
rifice. Kaplan illogically attempts to use sociology prescriptively and con-
tradicts much of our recent experience when he insists that collectives can
properly command autonomous selves. Custom does have power but not to
the point of empowering long range imperatives. For several decades now
we have continually been disillusioned by groups and institutions to the
point where we greet their calls to sacrifice with considerable suspicion.
The over-arching symbol of this development is the American involvement
in the Viet Nam War. I must therefore leave it to others to clarify how the
Kaplanian option can meet our ethical and spiritual needs and what limits
it sets for community cooperation in the process.
For me, Buber took the important first step toward a new theology when
he characterized the self as fundamentally relational. To put it starkly,
Buber contends that one cannot be a proper self without a relationship to
God, whether reached by a direct or an indirect I-thou encounter. The dar-
ing of this assertion may most easily be grasped by the contrast to Jean Paul
Sartre for whom individuality remains utterly unrelievable. Buber’s self is
not only essentially social but involved with God. Thus, while retaining the
experiential base of all liberalism, Buber radically breaks with humanism
by pointing to God’s role in every I-thou meeting.
The Buberian shift from liberal religion as ideas to religion as relation-
ship further transforms the notion of autonomy. Because every relationship
manifests distance as well as communion, the self retains its full identity
even in its most intimate involvement with the other. Specifically, I-thou
involvement creates command without heteronomy. Despite all that you
and I now mean to one another, neither of us must now surrender to the
other our power of self-determination. Yet because you are here with
me, my self, formerly so potentially anarchic, now has a sense of what it
must choose and do—and it knows God stands behind this “mission.” For
Buber, then, the “autonomy” of the self is fulfilled in relation to the other
and God. This interpretation of religious experience is too individualis-
tic for any orthodoxy and too other-involved for anarchy. Because Buber
preserves autonomy while guiding it in terms of a social-Divine involve-
ment, his thought has been highly prized by many contemporary liberal
religious thinkers.
Buber was an enthusiastic particularist, in fact a cultural Zionist, for
almost two decades before writing I and Thou. He believed all nations were
addressed by God, though the Hebrews had uniquely responded to their
summons. He served the Jewish people devotedly, not the least by recalling
it to its responsibilities to God, particularly that of bringing reconciliation
into Israeli-Arab relations. Yet Buber never clarified how he made his intel-
lectual way from individual “command” to national duty. When pressed on
this issue, he insisted on an uncompromising individualism with all its uni-
versalistic overtones.
To meet our particularist needs we must find a way to reshape Buber’s
relationally autonomous self so that it has a direct, primary, ethnic form.
I suggest, prompted by some hints in Rosenzweig, that my sort of liberal
Jew is constituted by existence in the Covenant. (The capital “C” usage dis-
tinguishes between the universal Noachide covenant and the particular
Israelitic one.) A Jewish self is characterized not only by a grounding per-
sonal relationship with God but relates to God as part of the people of Israel’s
historic Covenant with God. Being a Jew then, may begin with the individual
but Jewish personhood is structured by an utterly elemental participation in
the Jewish historical experience of God. Jewish existence is not merely per-
sonal but communal and even public. In the healthy Jewish self one detects
no place, no matter how deeply one searches, where one can find the old
liberal schizoid split between the self and the Jew. One is a Jew, existentially.
In responding to God out of the Covenant situation, the relationally
autonomous Jewish self acknowledges its essential historicity and social-
ity. One did not begin the Covenant and one is its conduit only as part of
the people of Israel. In the Hebrew Covenant, tradition and community
round out what the self of the Noachide covenant already recognizes as
God’s behest and the universal solidarity of humankind. With heritage and
folk compelling values, with the Jewish services of God directed to historic
continuity lasting until messianic days, the Covenanted self acknowledges
the need for structure to Jewish existence. Yet this does not rise to the point
of validating law in the traditional sense, for personal autonomy remains
the cornerstone of this piety.
This matter is so important and generally so poorly understood that I
would like to devote some space here to analyzing in some detail the dia-
lectic of freedom and constraint in the liberal Jewish self.
The relational interpretation of the structure of Jewish selfhood I am
suggesting here radically departs from the usual Jewish understandings.
Traditionally, the Jewish self is firmly held within the halakhah, Jewish law.
With modernity, liberals began to think of the Jewish legal process in terms
of its social context. The folk, through its institutions, customs and folk-
ways, could be seen as providing the forms for Jewish self-actualization,
including a developing law. These two ways of interpreting the structure of
Jewish existence have the advantage of furnishing us with common, pub-
lic, objective standards of what it is to be a Jew. They do not “command”
my sort of liberal Jew precisely because of their external, heteronomous
nature. That is, I and many Jews like me can accept Jewish tradition as guid-
ing us, indeed as an incomparably valuable resource, but not as overriding
“conscience.” Identifying our dignity as human beings with our autonomy,
we are determined to think for ourselves. However, we are not general
selves but Jewish selves. Thinking personalistically about our Jewishness,
we identity our Jewish variety of self-structure in relational terms, a rather
new way of envisioning authentic Jewish existence. Specifically, the Jewish
self gives patterned continuity to its existence by a continual orientation to
God as part of the people of Israel’s historic Covenant. Four aspects of this
situation deserve comment.
First, as noted above, the Jewish self is personally and primarily involved
with God. Jewishness is lived out of a relationship with God which precedes,
undergirds, and interfuses all the other relationships of the Jewish self.
Where the Biblical-rabbinic Jew had essentially a theo-centric existence,
the modern Jewish self may better be described as theo-related in ultimate
depth. That being the case, the highest priority must today be given to the
fight to overcome the pervasive agnosticism which resulted from the mod-
ernization of Jewry. Without a personal sense of involvement with God,
this relational, Covenantal Jewish existence cannot be properly attained.
Second, and inextricably bound with the first, though subsidiary to it,
is the Jewish self’s participation in the Jewish people as part of its ongo-
ing relation to God. All forms of radical individualism on the human level
are negated by this stance. The Jewish self lives out the Covenant not only
as a self in relation to God but as part of a living ethnic community. This
people then seeks to transform its social relations as well as its individual
lives in terms of its continuing close involvement with God. Jewish “auton-
omy” need not be sacrificed to what other Jews are now doing or think
right, but the Jewish self will be seriously concerned with the community
which is so great a part of its selfhood. Naturally, this individual autonomy
will often be channeled and fulfilled through what the Jewish people has
always done or now values. For the sake of community unity, the Jewish
self will often undoubtedly sacrifice the exercise of personal standards.
That most easily takes place when the demands are obviously necessary for
community action—e.g., a folk not a personal Jewish calendar—or when
the demands are not seen as onerous—e.g., Kiddush over wine and not the
whisky or marijuana one might prefer. We shall deal with more significant
clashes later.
Third, the Jewish self, through the Covenant is historically rooted as well
as Divinely and communally oriented. Modern Jews not only did not initi-
ate the Covenant, they are not the first to live it. While social conditions and
self-perceptions have greatly changed over the centuries, the basic relation-
ship and the partners involved in it have remained the same. Human nature,
personally and socially, has not appreciably altered since Bible times (as we
so often note reading ancient Jewish texts). Hence much of what Jews once
did is likely to commend itself to us as what we ought to do. More, since
their sense of the Covenant was comparatively fresh, strong and steadfast,
where ours is often uncertain, weak and faltering, we will substantially rely
on their guidance in determining our Jewish duty. But not to the point of
dependency or passivity of will. Not only is our situation in many respects
radically different from theirs but our identification of maturity with the
proper exercise of agency (in Covenantal context for a Jew) requires us on

occasion to dissent from what our tradition has taught or enjoined.
Fourth, the Jewish self, because of its intimate connections with God, folk
and tradition, is sensitized to more than the present and its call to decision.
All persons, as I see it, but certainly Jews, should put the immediate exer-
cise of autonomy into the framework of attaining personal integrity. For a
person lives in time and the self persists as well as chooses. The soul which
lives only in the present with little connection to previous experience and
minimal thought to the future denies not only the chronological character
of creatureliness but the most creative of human acts, to give wholeness to
an entire life. Form, habit, institution and structure have a necessary role
to play in such fulfillment of the self—as long as they continue to express
what the individual, at some level of choice, still wills to do. And almost
all of us, out of frailty or indecision, will often depend on previously cho-
sen patterns to carry us through life, particularly its trials. But in the clash
between a pressing, immediate insight and an old, once-valuable but now
empty practice, we will know ourselves authorized to break with the past
and do acts which more appropriately express our deepest commitments.
With these theoretical matters clarified, let me now turn to the Jewish
self’s attitude to Jewish law. Since the Covenant must be lived, not just
believed in or thought about, Jewish law has been the primary means of
being an authentic Jewish self until modern times. As the effects of the
Emancipation were increasingly internalized, the overwhelming majority
of Jews insisted upon an autonomous relation to Jewish law, thereby utterly
changing its character for them. But I am arguing that if they could relate
to Jewish tradition as liberal Jewish selves and not merely as autonomous
persons-in-general, they would find in Jewish law the single best source of
guidance as to how they ought to live. That is, wanting to be true to them-
selves as persons—understood now immediately and not secondarily as
Jewish persons and thus intimately involved in faithfulness to God, people
and historic devotion—they would want their lives substantially to be struc-
tured by a continuing involvement with the prescription of Jewish law. But
as autonomous Jewish persons, the provisions of the law would ultimately
be tested by appeal to their conscientious individual Jewish understanding.
Over a decade ago, in Choosing a Sex Ethic1 I gave an extended example
of the way in which a Jew might candidly engage the choices confronting
a mature, autonomous self in dialectical involvement with society and the
1 New York, 1969.

variegated guidance provided by historic Jewish law. While some details of

the judgements I made then seem to me now in need of revision, the funda-
mental delineation of the modern Jewish liberal decision-making process I
provided there still seems to me fundamentally correct. Autonomy should
not be subservient to the halakhah in sexual matters but at the same time,
the law, in all its details, does not hesitate to make its claim on the commit-
ted autonomous Jewish self.
I suggest that, from a relational perspective, the Jewishness of the Jewish
self should now be seen less in its obedient observance than in its authen-
tically living in Covenant. Its Jewish acts result from their expressing that
relationship. And, I would add, again following Rosenzweig, that everything
one then did and not merely some delimited activities, would be Jewish.
Against Rosenzweig, I do not see how, even in principle, Jewish law can
be imposed on such a Jewish self. Rather, with autonomy essential to self-
hood, I avidly espouse a pluralism of thought and action stemming from
Jewish commitment. I also look forward to the day when enough Jewish
selves autonomously choose to live in ways sufficiently similar that they can
create common patterns among us. A richly personal yet Jewishly grounded
and communally created Jewish style or way would be the autonomous
Jewish self’s equivalent of “halakhah.” It would give us universalism with-
out assimilation and a commanding particularism which has full respect
for the dignity of the individual.
This multiplication of simultaneous responsibilities—to self, to God, to
the Jewish past, present and future, and to humankind as a whole (through
the Noachide covenant of which Jews remain a part)—obviously creates
special problems for decision makers. Facing any choice, one must take
account of many commitments. And not infrequently there will be conflict
among them. This constitutes a further reason for acknowledging the legit-
imacy, indeed the desirability of pluralistic Jewish practice and thought.
More, we must remain continually open to the possibility that new and
unanticipated forms may arise to express genuinely the imperatives which
flow from existence in Covenant.
Does not this reassertion of liberalism’s call for community openness
make the character of the Covenant folk so shapeless that it hardly has dis-
tinct identity? Has not autonomy again manifested its anarchic and there-
fore ultimately un-Jewish character?
I cannot deny the risks involved in the path I am suggesting. Before say-
ing they are too great to bear I want to direct our attention to one highly
esteemed Western value I omitted from my previous list, namely, democ-
racy. Liberal Jews passionately embrace what the Western world has taught
us about the way in which people ought to conduct their societal life. The
universalization of power by the enfranchisement of every citizen remains
for all its faults and abuses, the least humanly destructive form of govern-
ment. Democracy calls for pluralism and tolerance of others’ radically dif-
fering views, a concept which has produced social harmony unprecedented
in human history. By contrast, wherever absolutisms have attained politi-
cal power, human degradation has shortly followed, not infrequently in the
name of the highest moral ends.
Liberalism’s insistence on individualism will surely yield only a flabby
sort of structure. But it will have no difficulty directly and organically
authorizing and commending democracy. I do not see that the same is true
of the orthodoxies I know or have read about. When one possesses the one
absolute truth, how can one be expected to turn any significant power over
to those who deny or oppose it?
The problem of an orthodox doctrine of democracy can only tem-
porarily be settled pragmatically, that is, by arguing that because of the
large number of unbelievers or the need to reach out to as many people
as possible, one may expect that the true believers will practice democ-
racy. Once the usefulness of the democracy ends, the absolutism will then
naturally express itself. It will also not do to discuss how this or that tradi-
tion contains resources by means of which one might validate democracy.
The hypothetical revisionism must yet make its way against the tradition’s
absolutistic beliefs, its history, established tradition, practice and ethos.
Consider the situation in the Jewish community were the religious par-
ties to come to full power in the State of Israel. Once their rule was con-
solidated, what would be the status of Noachides who refused to accept
the Noachian laws as revealed by the Torah? What rights would Christians
have? Or, a less questionable case of ovde avodah zarah, bakhti Hindus and
imagistic Buddhists? Though I have tried to be aware of contemporary
Orthodox Jewish theoretical authentifications of democracy as desirable
for a Jewish polity, particularly a Jewish state, only one is known to me,
Michael Wyschogrod’s paper on “Judaism and Conscience” which appeared
in the Msr. John M. Oesterreicher Festschrift, Standing before God.2 Let me
summarize its argument.
Wyschogrod contends, convincingly to me, that despite some hints of
a similar notion, a fully self-conscious concept of conscience does not
appear in classic Jewish tradition. This follows consistently from the Jewish
2 New York, 1981.

emphasis upon the affirmation of God’s highly contentful revelation to the

people of Israel. Judaism must certainly reject the autonomous conscience
in its common, humanistic form for, as Heidegger is used to show, it radi-
cally destroys obedience to anything other than ourselves. And I would add,
precisely this separation of conscience from its transcendent source has
been the intellectual cause of our gradual loss of a social consensus about
the standards and nature of moral value.
Wyschogrod then carefully delineates a notion of conscience which
might be acceptable to Judaism. Here the individual’s sense of right is
understood to be a faculty given humans by God so that they might discern
and respond to God’s will. Wyschogrod thus follows the philosophical path
by which personal autonomy is fulfilled in theonomy, thereby avoiding the
problem of a religious ethic being heteronomous.
He then sets about assimilating this notion to contemporary traditional
Judaism. This he accomplishes by calling attention to the way in which the
determination to remain Orthodox today must necessarily be made against
the crowd. One can say, he suggests, that a significant measure of autonomy
is involved in the continuing will to be a believing, practicing Jew. To be
sure, in any possible conflict between the halakhah and the will, one sacri-
fices one’s self-determination, our personal version of the binding of Isaac.
And in the very sense that this can occasionally take place, one phenom-
enologically detects the role of autonomy within Orthodoxy.
Of particular interest, certainly in connection with the theme of this
paper, are the motives Wyschogrod manifests for undertaking this unique
intellectual enterprise. He acknowledges that the concept of autonomy
has correctly pointed our attention to a critical locus of human dignity.
Without some such self-actualization, we would be less the creatures that
God formed us to be. Hence Orthodox Judaism needs to make room for the
idea and function of conscience.
A practical consideration is also at work, one not explicitly stated but
one suggested by the context in which this paper appears and by the con-
sequences which follow from the argument. Consider the following breath-
taking issue Wyschogrod carefully develops. If conscience may legitimately
command one, may it still do so when we judge the person utilizing it to
be acting in error? That is, if we adhere to an orthodoxy we have an objec-
tive notion of God’s true will. Shall we still grant conscience its rights when
someone uses it against what we know is true and good? One cannot help
but hear in such thinking the overtones of the old Catholic teaching that
error has no rights.
But Wyschogrod strongly argues the opposite, that the individual con-
science must be granted rights even when to us it appears to be acting in
error. Not to do so would negate the very concept of conscience for a heter-
onomous revelation would have effectively usurped our God-given right to
think and judge for ourselves.
Wyschogrod’s purpose in all this, I believe, is to try to make a theological
place in Orthodox Judaism for Christians to be allowed to be Christians.
He does not sacrifice the absoluteness of God’s revelation but carefully
provides room for individual conscience within it. Then those who cannot
read its message plainly may still claim the right to go their deviant way. If
I remember correctly, John Courtney Murray mounted an argument of this
sort for many years within the Roman Catholic church to help it attain a
positive attitude toward domocracy and pluralism. His position was sub-
stantially adopted by Vatican Council II and now constitutes the church’s
official teaching. Perhaps the thought occurred to me because the central
citation of Wyschogrod’s argument about the right of the erring conscience
is taken from Thomas Aquinas.
Wyschogrod makes only one stipulation about the employment of con-
science other than genuineness. He requires serious, reverential study of
God’s revelation, the sacred texts of Judaism.
I shall be most interested to see what sort of reception Wyschogrod’s argu-
ment receives in the Orthodox Jewish community. If accepted, it could pro-
vide a theoretical basis not only for inter-faith but intra-faith understanding.
Specifically, I believe the autonomous Jewish self I have described more than
meets Wyschogrod’s conditions for a conscience which Orthodoxy should
respect even when it errs. The ethical sense of such liberal Jews is founded on
theonomy, not humanism, and, because the Covenant sets the field of its per-
ceptions, they are spiritually guided by classic Jewish texts. By Wyschogrod’s
standards, Orthodoxy should acknowledge the legitimacy of authentic
Jewish liberalism despite its sinfulness. More, my Jewish Covenantalists can
lay claim to even greater Jewish legitimacy. The Covenant clearly links them
to the Jewish people and they are mandated to realize their Jewish selves in
community. That goes far beyond Wyschogrod’s demands—a further indi-
cation that his paper speaks to the question of Christian legitimacy. Of Jews
who follow their conscience, it would seem reasonable to demand, certainly
in a post-Holocaust time, not only reverence for God and study of texts but
passionate loyalty to the Covenant people.
One further point about Wyschogrod’s paper—this rare effort to validate
tolerance and democracy within Orthodoxy does so by arguing, against
precedent, for a broad acceptance of the autonomy of the individual.

If the well-known liberal move to the right could be met by this kind of
Orthodox theoretical opening to the left, we might have another instance
of the mutual redefinition of positions which often in the past has made
possible greater human unity. In any event, we liberals will, at the least,
see Wyschogrod’s noble effort as further proof of our old contention that
a vital contemporary Judaism must make greater place for the concept of
personal autonomy than did our tradition in the past (though it requires
reworking from its rigorous Enlightenment individualism to become the
new autonomy of a Jewish self).
Experience further indicates that we are less likely to run into difficulty
seeking communal agreement in practice rather than in theology. Different
beliefs often lead to similar acts, as our joint work for the State of Israel,
Soviet Jewry and tzedakah demonstrates. Liberal Jews enthusiastically par-
ticipate in such communal activities for they happily unite autonomy and
Covenant responsibility. They become quite troubled, however, when their
autonomous sense of their Covenant obligations conflicts with other views
of Jewish duty. With regard to marriage and divorce practices, that means
the halakhah as interpreted by the sages of contemporary Orthodoxy.
I think it will best serve my purpose of getting others to understand lib-
eral Judaism better if, before turning to the contentious area of marriage
law, I deal with one likely to arouse less emotion. This case should give us
greater insight into the way a liberal as against a traditional posek might
balance the conflicting claims of Jewish commitment.
J. David Bleich, in one of his summaries of recent halakhic literature3
discussed the issue of dwarfism and the problems its treatment raises. The
condition, troublesome to those who have it and often a heavy burden for
their relatives, does not constitute a genuine threat to life which would
then merit the exceptional activities of pikuah nefesh. Jewish law, it should
also be noted, imposes no special disabilities upon dwarfs. Some urgency
for the treatment of dwarfism arises from the greater than usual difficulty
dwarfs have in conceiving children. They therefore not only merit help for
general humanitarian and Jewish medical reasons but so as to enable the
males more likely to fulfill their Jewish duty of procreation. However, the
accepted therapy, growth hormone, must be collected from human corpses.
Poskim (rabbinic decisors) must then seek to reconcile the laws of kibud
hamet (honor for the dead) with the desirability of curing a distressing
3 Tradition, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Winter, 1980).

but non-life-threatening condition. Disturbed by the need to cut into the

corpse, they give considerable attention as to how this must be done so as
to create the least disfigurement. Ruling permissively they are able to find
ways to maintain the law and its values while meeting a human need.
The autonomous Jewish self would face the situation somewhat differ-
ently. A corpse is surely entitled to respectful treatment. Indeed, in our day
of lessening concern for the dead—fewer people appear to be saying kad-
dish and visiting graves—some special effort ought to be made to remind
Jews that we cannot envision a self as utterly distinct from its body. While a
corpse is surely far from a person, our psycho-somatic sense of personhood
requires us to give dead bodies reverential treatment.
However, when one thinks primarily in terms of selfhood, there cannot
be any value comparison between, much less subordination of, the needs of
a living person to a dead body. While the corpse exercises claims upon us,
its proper honor must yield to the vastly more significant needs of the liv-
ing. One can surely be a self and a dwarf, yet the selfsame psycho-somatic
view of the self which authorizes honoring corpses requires us to recog-
nize that dwarfism imposes very severe personal handicaps on its victims.
Liberal Jews would then likely argue that the human suffering of the dwarf,
not respect for the corpse, ought in this case be our primary consideration
in determining our personal responsibility under the Covenant.
Fortunately, where dwarfism is involved there will be little difference in
practice between traditionalists and liberals. But were rigorous poskim to
impose such stringent conditions that the collection of pituitary glands
was seriously impeded, liberal Jews would demur. We would not believe
God would have us act so today to fulfill the Covenant. We might be in error
but we could not follow the halakhah then if we were to fulfill what we
know to be our Jewish duty.
Jewish marriage and divorce laws raise more directly ethical issues, as
the two classic conflict cases agunah (“abandoned wife”) and mamzerut
(the category of “bastard”), indicate. Traditional Jews do not need liberals
to tell them what agony these issues create. However, traditionalists are
willing to sacrifice whatever stirrings of autonomous rebellion they may
feel in such cases so that they may follow God’s law. Liberal Jews, for whom
autonomy tends to be ultimate, cannot easily take that course. They are
far more likely to react in ethical indignation. In the name of proper legal
procedure a woman can be debarred from remarrying and establishing a
fully ramified Jewish home. Or, in compensation for a parental sin, a child
is prevented from ever contracting a normal Jewish marriage. These ethi-
cal considerations already carry heavy Covenantal weight. They become
o verwhelming when we think of the Holocaust. Does much in Jewish life

now take priority as an obligatory response to the Holocaust over contract-
ing a Jewish marriage and creating a Jewish family? Yet also in the name of
the Holocaust, liberal Jews are asked to accept traditional Jewish marriage
and divorce law. While that will create more uniform practice in the Jewish
community, it will necessarily also involve us in preventing some Jews from
founding Jewish families!
To the autonomous Jewish self, the ethical and Covenantal damage done
by the laws of agunah and mamzerut cannot be explained away by any form
of mitigating defense. Our overwhelming sense of duty cannot be stilled by
hearing that the decisors may be relied on to minimize drastically the num-
bers of agunot and mamzerim, or that we should consider the few unre-
solved cases a small price to pay for effecting the familial unity of the Jewish
people. The fact is that, with all the compassion and legal creativity con-
temporary poskim display, there are agunot and mamzerim. And the legal
disabilities are enforced on them whenever they come under Orthodox
jurisdiction. For liberal Jews to adopt the contemporary Orthodox hal-
akhah with regard to marriage and divorce means retroactively to validate
the decisions already made and to put themselves in principle behind the
possible creation of new agunot and mamzerim. As we understand our obli-
gation to God under the Covenant, I do not see that we can do that. As I
read our community, we believe God does not want Jews to relate to other
Jews by categorizing and treating them as agunot and mamzerim. We can-
not fulfill our Jewish responsibilities through a system which does so.
I am not suggesting that for the sake of community unity traditional
Jews give up their understanding of God’s law and the manner of its cor-
rect implementation. That would be a quite inconsistent application of the
pluralism I have espoused. I do know that there are other Jewish laws which
remain in full force but are, in practice, inoperable—an eye for an eye being
the example we regularly cite to Christians. I have sufficient confidence in
the resources of the halakhah and the creativity of contemporary poskim to
believe that even the thorny problems of agunah and mamzerut could be
solved once there is sufficient will to do so.
We face a far more difficult and complex issue when we deal with the
question of women’s rights in traditional Jewish marriage and divorce law.
Because most liberal Jews perceive the equality of women as one of the
great ethical issues of our time, we remain unpersuaded by all efforts to
demonstrate the relative humanity of the halakhah in this area. That Jewish
law has treated women better than many other legal systems have, that it
has often made special provision to protect women from potential abuses
of its male-oriented statutes, should inform Jewish pride about the inher-
ent moral thrust in our heritage. To the autonomous Jewish self, all such
apologetics do not validate continuing a system which badly discriminates
against women. The feminist movement in Western culture has made us
aware how blind we Jews have been to our own ethical failings with regard
to women. Acknowledging that, we would be untrue to our fundamental
commitments were we to agree to operate by a law in which women are not
fully equal legal agents with men.
I cannot take this issue further. I do not know what traditional authori-
ties might do in this area and I am in no position to say what sorts of prac-
tices liberal Jews might accept for the sake of uniform communal practice.
Liberal Jewish women will speak for themselves and, considering how they
have suffered at the hands of men, I do not expect them to be in a mood
to compromise.
As a final contribution to this analysis of Covenantal decision-making
I should like to make some generalizations concerning it. Should our vari-
ous Covenant obligations appear to conflict, the duty to God—most com-
pellingly, ethics—must take priority over our responsibilities to the Jewish
people or the dictates of Jewish tradition. I acknowledge only one regular
exception to that rule, cases when the survival of the Jewish people is clearly
at stake. Obviously, without the Jews there can be no continuing Covenant
relationship and Covenant, not universal ethics, provides the framework for
my Jewish existence.
What should a Jew do when confronted by a conflict between a divinely
imposed ethical responsibility and a duty upon which the survival of the
Jewish people seems to rest? I cannot say. A true crisis of the soul occurs
when two values we cherish ultimately can no longer be maintained simul-
taneously. And we call it a tragedy when, no matter what we decide, we
must substantially sacrifice a value which has shaped our lives. May God
spare us such choices. Or, failing that, may God then give us the wisdom
and courage to face crisis with honest choice and stand by us when we
have, as best we could, tried to do so.
My liberal subjectivity has now been exponentially amplified by this
problem of a multiplicity of basic values. Nonetheless, I believe I can help-
fully illustrate how the autonomous Jewish self might function in this situ-
ation by quickly sketching in my response to three diverse cases.
Many years ago, when I was breaking out of the old liberal identification
of Judaism with universal ethics, it occured to me that the Jewish duty to
procreate can be objected to ethically. To bring a child into the world bear-
ing the name Jew inevitably subjects that human being to special p otential
danger. All the joys and advantages of being a Jew cannot compensate
for this ineradicable disability. Yet the Covenant absolutely depends on
Jewish biologic-historic continuity until the messianic days come. For all
its ethical difficulty then, I have no choice but to proclaim the Jewish duty
to have children.
Why then do I resist establishing one community standard for Jewish
marriages and divorces? Many in our community would say that the per-
sonal status of Jews will critically effect the survival of the Jewish people.
But I read our situation differently. In my thought, the exceptional survival-
category must be used as restrictively as halakhah uses pikuah nefesh. I
am not convinced that the Jewish people will not survive at all without
a uniform marriage and divorce law. Though the overwhelming majority
of Jews worldwide have given up the authority of the halakhah, they still
manifest a will to Jewish continuity. I agree that the Jewish people without
one standard of practice in family matters will not continue as it did when
it had such consensus—but even without it, the folk as such will survive. In
this instance, I cannot therefore invoke the survival clause to overcome my
sense of ethical obligation.
Then why will I not perform intermarriages? After all, in the contem-
porary situation, more than half the families formed by an intermarriage
apparently try to live as Jews. Accepting their will to be Jewish as a means
of Jewish survival would allow me to fulfill an ethical responsibility—
that is, to serve two people who might seem humanly well-suited to one
another despite their having different religions. I confess that I am moved
by such arguments and know that my answer to this disturbing question
may appear even more subjective than usual. In positive response to such
people’s Jewish concerns, I reach out to intermarried couples with warmth
and gladly accept their children as Jews when through education and par-
ticipation they manifest Covenant loyalty. I cannot go so far as to officiate
at their wedding. To do this would give a false indication to them and to
the community of my understanding of Covenant obligation. The relation
between God and the Jewish people is mirrored, articulated and continued
largely through family Judaism. As I see it, we must therefore necessarily
prefer a family which fully espouses the Covenant to one which does so
with inherent ambiguity. Moreover, I understand myself as a rabbi autho-
rized to function only within the Covenant and on behalf of the Covenant.
My Reform Jewish colleagues who differ with me on this issue do so
because they read the balance between ethics and Jewish survival differ-
ently than I do. They believe, erroneously in my opinion, that performing
intermarriages will help win and bind these families to the Jewish people.
Because I may well be wrong in this matter and because I respect their
reading of their Covenant responsibility, I associate myself with them in
full collegiality. My sense of liberal Jewish pluralism clearly encompasses
this troubling disagreement.
Having devoted so much of this paper to my liberal certainties, I wanted
to close it with an instance of my more characteristic tentativeness. We will
not understand liberalism, at least not the sort which surfaces in my kind
of liberal Judaism, without understanding the dialectic of confidence and
hesitation which informs it. Perhaps with such insight we can find a way
to move beyond community fragmentation to greater unity amid diversity.
‘Im ba’et, eyma—Since You Object, Let Me Put
It This Way*
All authors hope someone reads them and finds their work engaging. And
they dream of having insightful, accomplished people so taken with their
effort that they will then want to write about it. Having learned and ben-
efited for years from the work of the friends whose response to Renewing
the Covenant is presented here, I am deeply touched by their kindness
to me personally and by their searching responses to my ideas. May the
Shekhinah long rest upon us all as we carry on this effort at contemporary
Torah. Thank you, colleagues; thank you, God.
It will help me to respond to the specific issues raised by my colleagues
if I first briefly indicate what I think I was doing in my book, for that is
the conceptual context of what I now have to say. Some facts about me
personally also have a bearing on my approach to these matters, so I will
begin there.
I am a rabbi, a seminary professor, and my primary reference group is
not the secular academy, but the believing, practicing community of non-
Orthodox Jews, no matter which label they apply to themselves. That will
help to explain why Renewing the Covenant is a work of apologetic theol-
ogy. That is, it seeks to mediate between believers like myself and those
who are inquirers, perhaps semi- or occasional-believers. Norbert—
following Susan’s lead, I cannot, comfortably call a friend of nearly forty
years “Samuelson” merely because a stuffy old academic convention
thinks that’s dignified—Norbert correctly indicates that I also seek to cre-
ate a bridge between academic thinking about belief and the minority of
believing non-Orthodox Jews who seriously want to think about their faith,
a sub-community critical to the ethos of every group.1 Apologetics seem
inevitably to disappoint people in each of the communities addressed.
Some outsiders always complain that you haven’t properly accepted their
* For the complete references for this essay please refer to Reviewing the Covenant
(SUNY, 2000), where this essay was originally published. Reprinted by permission from
Reviewing the Covenant: Eugene B. Borowitz and the Postmodern Renewal of Jewish Theol-
ogy, edited by Peter Ochs, the State University of New York Press © 2000 State University
of New York. All rights reserved.
1 On the notion of a Liberal Jewish elite, see the chapter on “Jews Who Do; Jews Who
Don’t” in my Liberal Judaism (New York: UAHC, 1984), pp. 459–67.
92 ‘im ba’et, eyma
truth. Some insiders feel you haven’t been true enough to the faith (David
and Susan) while others feel you might have used a more effective way of
accomplishing the apologetic task (Edith, Tom and Norbert, with Yudit in
both groups, and Peter trying to show what makes us all an intellectual
family). Essentially, what we are debating in this book is what might consti-
tute the most effective apologetic language for our time.
The apologetic argument of Renewing the Covenant proceeds in two
unequal steps. The first describes the experiential basis for contemporary
belief, chapters 1–3. In these pages, I do not analyze personal religious
experience as has been the typical academic and prior non-Orthodox
Jewish theological procedure. Rather, in keeping with my understanding
of Judaism as the Covenant between God and the people Israel, I seek to
lay bare the communal spiritual path of the Jewish people in the second
half of the twentieth century, underground though most of it has been. In
sum, the Jews, as part of Western civilizations turn from messianic modern-
ism but particularly because of the Holocaust, came to a new openness to
God (the contemporary search for “spirituality”) and acknowledgment of
the importance of Jewish peoplehood. These two pillars of renewed Jewish
faith, God, and Israel (the people), derive from a root intuition: “Regardless
of what the world knows or cares, anything that mitigates the categorical
distinction between the S. S. death camp operators and their Jewish victims
violates our most fundamental contemporary experience and contravenes a
central mandate of our tradition” (The italics are in the original, one of only
six sentences so distinguished in Renewing the Covenant (p. 43); all page
references given in the body of this paper are to this book). This affirmation
of a value inherent in the universe is the foundation of Jewish life today.
Derridean postmodernism denies such a faith credence; that is the major
reason I am not a Derridean postmodern.
The second, longer part of the apologetic case consists of an analysis and
synthesis of the beliefs uncovered in our recent experience, God, chapters
4–10 and the people Israel, chapters 11–16. This consideration of God and
Israel allows me to enunciate my radical recontextualization of the general
self as the Jewish self. These foundations being set, I can move on to the
classic task of a Jewish theology, creating a theory of sacred obligation, a
meta-halakhah, in my case the delineation of what the contents page (vii)
announces as “A Postliberal Theology of Jewish Duty.” This is described
in the section on Torah, chapters 17–20, with the last of these bringing
all these strands together in a rare, systematic analysis of non-Orthodox
Jewish decision-making. Its five integrated principles are presented in ini-
tial, italicized statements:
‘im ba’et, eyma 93
First, the Jewish self lives personally and primarily in involvement with the one
God of the universe (p. 289). . . . Second, a Jewish relationship with God inextrica-
bly binds selfhood and ethnicity, with its multiple ties of land language, history,
traditions, fate, and faith (pp. 289–90). . . . Third, against the common self’s con-
centration on immediacy, the Covenant renders the Jewish self radically histori-
cal (p. 291). . . . Fourth, though the Jewish self lives the present out of the past, it
necessarily orients itself to the future (p. 292). . . . Fifth, yet despite the others
with whom it is so intimately intertwined—God and the Jewish people, present,
past, and future—it is as a single self in its full individuality that the Jewish self
exists in Covenant (p. 293).
Keeping this plan in mind will, I believe, lend greater coherence to my com-
ments on the specific issues raised by my readers.
In Response to my Colleagues
Four words have proved troublesome in my communicating my meaning.

The least disruptive of these may be “Absolute,” which I use in one of my
discussions of God. Far more contentious has been my applying the label
“postmodern” to my thinking. Neither of them, however, has worked as
much mischief as have the related terms “self” and “autonomy.” “Would that
when I wrote this book I had known Peirce’s logical category of “vagueness,”
so tellingly outlined for us by Peter, for I might have mitigated these dif-
ficulties by announcing that it guided me.2 Despite the difficulties these
terms have engendered I continue to find a certain justification for hav-
ing employed them. What it means to be a “postmodern” and certain side-
issues connected with the term are so significant for the rest of what I have
to say that I shall begin with this broad-ranging topic.
What Label Should I Sport?
The best justification for a taxonomy of thinkers in our time may be that phi-
losophers who work by different methods (who are of different “schools”)
2 Not long after the publication of Renewing the Covenant, when giving some lectures at
the University of San Francisco, I gave as one reason for my finding postmodernism conge-
nial: “I am grateful to postmodern discourse for authorizing those who admit they cannot
give reasonably unambiguous voice to the logos to speak their truth, sloppy in structure as
it may seem to some. This structural untidiness, is abetted by my writing with conscious
imprecision, a choice designed to warm my reader that my theology does not allow for geo-
metric clarity.” Our Way to a Postmodern Judaism: Three Lectures (San Francisco: University
of San Francisco, Swig Dept. of Jewish Studies, 1992), p. 38.
cannot easily talk to one another about fundamental matters without first
indicating their philosophic “faith.” That people are often seriously misled
by these classificatory names has not made labeling obsolete because the
information/opinion glut makes these shortcuts to understanding all the
more useful. I begin, then, with the thinker’s standard disclaimer: I am not
my label(s); I am, of course, me, and so notorious a defender of thinking for
oneself should surely be allowed even more than the usual distance from
the reductionism of classification [sic].
I begin with a marginal matter, whether I am “a Reform Jewish” thinker.
This comes to mind particularly because of a recent exchange of articles
with Elliot Dorff whose recent review of Renewing the Covenant insisted
that its true meaning could be discovered only in terms of the ideology
of the Reform movement.3 Since the (invidious) stereotyping of Reform
Jews may lurk in the background of others’ interpretation of what I wrote,
I want to begin my response to my critics by citing a bit of what I said to
Elliot: “I do not know how I can persuade you that ‘I am not now and never
have been a card-carrying Reform ideologue.’ . . . I have always tried to
think academically about Jewish belief and its consequences. None of my
models—Cohen, Baeck, Kaplan, Buber, Rosenzweig and Heschel—ever
did their thinking as part of a movement, or in the context of its ideology.
They simply tried to think through the truth of Judaism in their day as best
they could understand it, and I have spent my life trying to emulate them.
I attempted to nail down my meaning in Renewing the Covenant by mostly
speaking about ‘non-Orthodox’ Jews. When I mean Reform Jews there or
anywhere, I say so.”4
As to whether I am a “postmodern,” a topic of considerable comment
and difference of opinion among these readers, it depends, of course, on
your taxonomic standards. Tom suggests that I’m probably better off think-
ing of myself as a “chastened modern,” which description of me is certainly
true. It was that cognitive and, in my case, Jewish “suffering” (to use Peter’s
term), that pushed me to go beyond modernity. Edith makes a strong case
that my use of the term is intellectually inappropriate and will mislead
3 Elliot insisted that, regardless of what I said in Renewing the Covenant, it must be
understood as a statement of Reform Jewish ideology. Note his subtitle: “Autonomy vs.
Community, The Ongoing Reform/Conservative Difference,” Conservative Judaism, Vol.
XLVIII, No. 2 (Winter 1996): 64–68. My response and Elliot’s rejoinder appeared as “The
Reform Judaism of Renewing the Covenant” and “Matters of Degree and Kind” in Conserva-
tive Judaism, Vol. L, No. 1 (Fall 1997). (The issues were dated to maintain the consecutive
publication of the journal but they actually appeared at a considerably later date.)
4 Ibid., p. 62.
thoughtful people as to my kind of thinking. She has such stature as thinker

and leader in this area that she may well be right. Was it an unconscious
ambivalence about this title that caused me not to utilize “postmodern” to
refer to myself or my thought in my book’s title but to refer in its subtitle to
the cultural situation of my readers? The critical issue, of course, is whether
it makes any sense to speak of a non-Derridean postmodern community
of reflective communication. A number of the colleagues gathered here
thinks it does and, emboldened by their agreement, I stand by my original
self-identification and respectfully reject Edith’s reproof.
Not long after Renewing the Covenant was published, I learned to spec-
ify what I thought entitled me to speak of myself as a (non-Derridean)
postmodern. In two critical respects, I reject and radically revise modern-
ist “doctrine.” Modernists from Kant on made the individual human the
independent basis for truth and thus, to validate religion, they had to seek
ways of moving from their human certainties to God’s possible reality and
nature. But religious postmoderns like me know persons to be inseparable
from God, their ground, and truth as what emerges between God and peo-
ple (The fundamentalists say it comes almost entirely from God to humans,
while the non-Orthodox say, in various balances, it is more two-sided than
that). Modernists also knew that truth was necessarily universal and thus,
if they wished to give some validity to a particular group, they had to dem-
onstrate to what extent this particular group reflected universal truth. But
postmoderns like me know that all truth begins in particularity and any
universal one might affirm derives from that particular base. (Heretically
enough, I also insisted that one premise of modernity was too true to be
denied a place in the foundations of my—our—postmodernity: the close
identification of human dignity with the exercise of a significant measure
of self-determination. See below.)5
I must, however, confess that the issue of philosophic label is not very
important to me. As Susan says, the critical term for us is “Jew” and we will
use whatever intellectual language now least inadequately describes what
we “know” that to be. So I was once a boy rationalist, evolved into a reli-
gious existentialist and, seeing its inadequacies, began to identify myself as
a postmodern thinker. Let a more satisfactory way of talking about Jewish
5 This Torah self-understanding appeared about the same time in two publications in
slightly different form: Choices in Modern Jewish Thought, 2nd ed. (W. Orange, N.J.: Behr
man House, 1995), pp. 288ff. and The Human Condition, the Alexander Schindler Festschrift,
ed. Aaron Hirt-Mannheimer (New York: UAHC, 1995) as of my paper, “Reform: Modern
Movement in a Postmodern Era?”
truth appear in our culture and I shall, I hope, have the intellectual courage
to embrace it, temporarily, to be sure.
For me then, as for David and Susan, Torah truth, as best we understand
it, is primary and it is the criterion for the apologetic language we will
utilize—another radical break with the modernists. So again risking ter-
minological static, I call myself a Jewish “theologian” in an effort to signal
to my readers that my thinking is governed by my Jewish faith. Philosophy
in recent decades has insisted that it alone was the rightful arbiter of truth.
It therefore as good as dictated to modernist Jewish thinkers what might
now properly be included in their Judaism, generally with radically reduc-
tionist results, pace Norbert, but I shall return to this theme again. I can
understand how Jews of a critically philosophic bent might well become
Derridean postmoderns and then see what Jewish sense that made pos-
sible, like Edith’s stunningly creative use of Lyotard. But the image of Israel
as silent victim straining for language to challenge its Accuser is one that
says more about the hermeneur than about any significant reality I discern
in the people Israel today. We are, however, still at the beginning of the
Derridean evocation of Jewish meaning and, though my Jewish faith pre-
cludes my joining that interpretive enterprise, I look forward to the spiri-
tual stimulation that the emerging Derridean description of Jewish faith
and duty will provide.
Several of the non-Derrideans, who include me in the postmodern camp,
wonder if I am not more residually modern than I realize. Two things must
be said in that regard. First, I do not mean by the “post” in postmodern
that everything modern must be put behind us. I, and the people Israel,
continue to owe modernity too much to do such a thing. The process of
modernization gave Jews freedom from the ghetto, equality of opportunity,
and unparalleled security for our community. It taught us the extraordinary
value of pluralism, the preciousness of individual rights, and the sacred
dignity of substantial self-determination. Indeed, I proudly proclaim that
the third premise in my kind of postmodernist thinking about Judaism is
(a radically recontextualized understanding of) “autonomy.” I do not seek
to hide from my residual modernism but openly question whether post-
modernity should really qualify as an independent, sixth stage in the long
history of Jewish spiritual development (p. 4, pp. 49f. and the references
cited in note 5). Nonetheless, my hybridized thinking is so fundamentally
other-than-modern, that I think the term “postmodern” will usefully call to
the attention of other “chastened moderns” the deep change of perspective
and attitude now arising among us.
It seems to me that the appearance of a strong modern color to my

thought is magnified because I am engaged in apologetics, a task which
requires one to communicate with “suffering” moderns in the only language
that still makes sense to them, despite their cognitive dissonance with it.
This problem first forced itself upon me in 1967 when I was writing my
book on Jewish sex ethics for college students. I could not hope to address
them in my nascent language of Covenant faith and hope they would long
continue reading, so I tried to find an idiom congenial to them that would
also engage them in full seriousness. But I finally couldn’t stand the self-
repression and concluded the work by addressing them in the accents of
Jewish faith.6
I did not have the systemic sophistication in 1967 to realize that the prob-
lem of standing at the boundary explained the curious logical break in the
“argument” of God in Search of Man by Abraham Heschel.7 Most of the first
third of the book, on God, speaks the language of human experience with
such eloquence that four decades plus later people find it speaks to their
innermost being. But once Heschel draws his readers into the presence
of the living God, he moves to the other side of the theological table and
begins a continuing polemic against relying on human experience, rather
than on the revelation of God he has led them to. That reversal, so crucial
to his faith and his purpose in writing, regularly shocks readers who, snug in
their modernity, anticipate that like other Jewish teachers he will indicate
how radical amazement fits into their modernity and congenially modifies
Jewish tradition. But he doesn’t do so and that is why, though many quote
Heschel’s sentences, few Jews have adopted his theology as a whole.
In much of Renewing the Covenant, I speak to searching still-modernist
Jews in their terms: those of “self,” “autonomy” and “universalism.” However,
I do not concede the primacy of universalism and then try to validate par-
ticularity. I see no way one can do that and arrive at the primacy of particu-
larity, which I take to be the Jewish and postmodern truth. My strategy is
to undermine the three foundations of the universalizing modernist faith. I
do this by arguing against the goodness of human nature, the discrete indi-
viduality of persons and the identification of truth with universals (chap-
ters 11, 12, and 13 respectively). This allows me to ease them into my revision
6 See Eugene B. Borowitz, Choosing a Sex Ethic, a Jewish Inquiry (New York: Schocken
Books, 1968), pp. 116–20.
7 Abraham Heschel, God in Search of Man (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society,
1956).
of “the self” as “the Jewish self.” Perhaps I stay with my apologetic language
too long, but I am hopeful that the cumulative transformation of my lan-
guage will set the context of my getting there rather than vice versa, as often
seems to me the experience of the reviewers in this book.
Norbert suggests that I should not equate modernity with a rationalism
that Yudit nicely calls “linear.” He speculates that I am really involved in an
ongoing polemic against the thought of my late, lamented friend Steven S.
Schwarzschild but have, in fact, misunderstood him. He then sketches in a
picture of a Kantian probabilism which would yield a rationalism far more
humane than the categorical one I so disdain. Passing quickly over the
rational certainty of Kantian regulative ideals and emphasizing the impre-
cise judgments which necessarily ensue when the ideals are applied to real
cases in the contingent world, Norbert argues that rationalism only claims
that it is the best way of reaching our inevitably limited practical decisions.
The Steven I knew would have quickly gone into one of his consciously
self-indulgent tirades at the idea that he was a Kantian for essentially prag-
matic reasons, namely, as Norbert puts it, that since no thinking can give
us certainty then “nothing is more likely to lead us to correct judgments (in
science and ethics) than [Kantian] reasoning.” Steven, like the creator of
“pure” reason, and so forth, hated any hint of pragmatism. For him reason
required or commanded us, and even in the realm of historical decisions,
he, like most of my Germanic teachers, felt that a good measure of the “cat-
egorical imperative” passed over into his practical judgments. If there was
a Cohenian neo-Kantian probabilist around in the heyday of modernism,
I never ran into one. And if a biographical note is permitted, once Steven’s
brief, student-days’ flirtation with Rosenzweig passed over, we never dis-
cussed the foundational clash between his rationalism and my non-ratio-
nalism, though an occasional loving barb on that divide did fly between us.
To have done so would have destroyed our friendship since Steven insisted
on being taken on his own terms, a position which he would have been
happy to defend as rationally required, although he would have done so
with a mischievous smile. I shall return to Norbert’s explication of what I
take to be a “chastened” rationalism when I respond to the questions about
my discussion of Israel.
That Troublesome Term, “The Self ”
David and Susan are only more emphatic than Yudit and Peter in charg-
ing that I give the individual too much freedom in relation to God. A good
deal of their unease arises from my frequent references to “autonomy,” a

term their philosophical sophistication necessarily connects with Kant
and its meaning in his thought. For Kantians “autonomy” indicates that the
self alone gives the (moral) law, not God or anyone else, though Cohenian
neo-Kantianism rushes in to show how God, as the most foundational idea
in the rational worldview, undergirds the moral law and is closely identi-
fied with it. My postmodern thinking asserts something quite different. I
claim that people are, on their own, incompetent to legislate the basic laws
by which they ought to live. They are similarly ill-equipped to bring the
Messiah by their own action, as the Kantian liberal Jews grandly professed.
I speak of a God who is real in His / Her own right and is not merely the
grandest of my rational ideas. I further insist this God commands people,
albeit nonverbally, and, as best we can put it, has input into our lives by
coming into relationship with us. How, then, as David warned me years ago,
can I use the term “autonomy” to describe an aspect of my God-humans
relationship and not expect to be taken as a neo-Kantian semi-secularist
masquerading as something else?
Perhaps my difficulty in this respect is that I suffer from a failure of imag-
ination. I have not been able to find another term which succinctly points
to the truth which almost all modernized Jews take to be the core of their
existence: that their humanity demands that, in some significant measure,
they think for themselves. They have learned this from modern social life,
and its telling symbol for them is the right to vote. Most of these Jews have
never seriously heard of Kant, and they will glaze over if you try discuss-
ing heteronomy and autonomy, suggesting theonomy as the way to resolve
the ethical dilemma this contrast poses. And, having heard of religious
frauds, who in the name of God have gotten people to do terrible things,
they reserve the right to judge for themselves any religious claim to having
the truth to which they should accede. In short, they believe God gave them
freedom to think, and wants them to use it in determining their Jewish duty
in a more proactive way than traditional Judaism allowed / allows.
Against Buber’s championing of the “I” in determining the law, Susan calls
on us to follow Rosenzweig’s recommended response to God, “Hineni,” “Here
I am.” Rosenzweig declares that the Law as a whole is binding upon us. The
semi-believers I am addressing, Susan, may be able to join Rosenzweig in
acknowledging God’s “authority,” but they will cherish that Rosenzweig who
also taught, as you know, that the self retains some rights even in its acquies-
cence to God. For he gave sufficient credence to the nomos-making dignity
of the self that he found it necessary to validate the Law by tailing on us to
turn what came to us as Gesetz, an objective statement of law, into Gebot,
a command addressed to each of us personally. And he famously, if crypti-

cally, indicated that one need not do what, at the most serious level, one was
not “able” to do.
Even the modestly “liberal” Rosenzweig, I suggest, grants too much to
the Law and too little to us for most of us to follow him. If the law the sages
are teaching is entirely binding upon us in principle, then, to give a telling
example, God does not want women to be full members of a minyan. An
increasing majority of modernized Jews know, by their own judgment, that
such discriminatory rulings are better charged to human invention than
to God’s revelation via the sages. It is this authority of the self—which I
limit by the recontextualization Covenant selfhood lays upon it—for which
I need a term (I shall later return to the topic of the law in my comments
on Torah).
My apologetic problem, then, is finding a word for the significant, but
not exclusive, enfranchisement of persons in determining their/our Jewish
duty.8 Yes, the Kantian associations of “autonomy” give too much power to
the “autos,” the single self, but I can think of no better word to protect the
self’s legitimate role in law-making. It would be tedious to regularly put quo-
tation marks around it, “autonomy,” and eccentric to write it ?auto?nomy,
or with dashes through the “auto,” autonomy, though this might qualify as
a visual postmodern doubling. So I risked retaining the term, hoping that
people would see how differently it functions when Covenantalized. I con-
sider the reinterpretation of selfhood—which still has a measure of legisla-
tive authority for us—as Jewish selfhood in which individuality cannot be
separated from its relation to God as one of the people of Israel’s Covenant
relationship with God—to be the most creative and important thing I
accomplished in Renewing the Covenant. That is to say, I do not see how we
can have a Jewishly satisfactory “Theology of Postliberal Duty” with the old
“autonomy,” yet we need to make some place in such a new understanding
for our sense of the sacredness of our ability to think / choose for ourselves.
So I crafted a system which did that.
Let me be specific by pointing again to my epitome of my theory of how
non-Orthodox Jews today ought to determine their Jewish obligations. I
8 The issue cannot be that individuality has no place at all in traditional Judaism. Even
Heschel, the defender of the accuracy and empathic passivity of the prophets, acknowl-
edges that they express God’s truth in terms of their individual personalities and styles.
Halakhic decisors are regularly described as having shitot, individualized systems of read-
ing the tradition. I discussed how this functions in Conservative Judaism in my response
to Elliot Dorff, “Autonomy vs. Community, the ongoing Reform/Conservative difference.”
Conservative Jusaism, pp. 64–65.
prefaced these on page 288 with a general statement of why the modernist,
Kantian, or Buberian ideal of a universalized self needed to be replaced
by the ideal of a “Jewish self.” Because of its Jewishness, that self was not
an isolate, but was necessarily involved as one of five, co-functioning fac-
tors involved in the “law”-making process. Of these, the real God I had pre-
viously delineated, was the first and dominant participant (p. 289). Fully
three of the five factors were devoted to the people of Israel’s significance
in the process: as contemporary reference community; as bearer of a vast
repository of prior Covenant-duty deliberations; and as a people pointing
toward the Messiah. Only then, fifth, do I speak of the continuing place of
the self. “Fifth, yet despite the others with whom it is so intimately inter-
twined—God and the Jewish people, past present and future—it is as a
single soul in its full individuality that the Jewish self exists in Covenant”
(p. 293, italicized in the original). When I said “a single soul in its full indi-
viduality,” I was thinking not just of the remnant of ?auto?nomy we still
rightly insist upon, but of the precious individuality of all those historical
Jewish “characters” whose very idiosyncrasy Jews have long cherished. It
did not occur to me after all I had written about the Jewish self and what
that very sentence says about the soul “intimately intertwined” with God
and the Jewish people, that readers could still think I meant by it some-
thing like that notorious caricature of a Reform Jew, a person who did what
they personally pleased. And how any philosopher reading these words
could find this a heavily Kantian “autonomy” is a tribute to the way the past
impedes the creative present.9
Again, let me note my surprise that my early statements (in the chap-
ters on God) seeking to clarify what remained of individual human power
in the presence of the transcendent God determined what some readers
thought I was doing in my later transformation of selfhood into Jewish self-
hood. The people I was addressing would have been uncomprehending had
9 The most egregious misreading of that sentence was Ellen Umansky’s. Because I spoke
of the self in its full individuality, she accused me of not having progressed beyond classic
Reform Judaism. Her astonishing misreading was compounded by her gerrymandering of
my statement. She omitted its first word, “Fifth,” the one which indicated how I had recon-
textualized selfhood to give it a properly postmodern, Jewish relational situation and made
it the Jewish Covenant self. My appreciation of her ideas was not enhanced by her sugges-
tion that we now ought to move on to a theology where selves and religion were thought
of relationally, a matter central to my writing for some decades. “Zionism and Reform
Judaism: A Theological Reassessment,” Journal of Reform Zionism, vol. 1, no. 1 (March 1993):
44–50. My response appeared as a lengthy endnote, no. 4, in my own contribution to these
discussions, “What Is Reform Religious Zionism?” Journal of Reform Zionism, vol. II (March
1995): 24–30.
I tried from the first to talk to them about the Jewish self, and I would have
lost them. I needed first to develop my argument for particularity, and then
clarify what I meant by Israel before I could begin trying to wean them away
from a central idea of contemporary culture, that there is a general self-
hood. I thought that my crowning, final statement of my theology would
put the prior pieces transformingly into place. I am now chastened by the
fact that my strategy has not worked out well with a good number of these
sophisticated readers. Such are the perils of apologetics.
The selfhood issue particularly troubles Tom. He feels that despite my
devoting a chapter to “The Social Side of Selfhood” (chapter 12), and my
giving the community three places of the five in my calculus of decision-
making, that I do not seem to appreciate how socially determined the self
is. “The central point is that I cannot simply opt out of the formative bonds
that figure in my moral identity and still hold onto my moral autonomy.
I can exercise my free conscience in opposition to the teachings of my
formative community only by means of resources also supplied by that
community. . . . When I become alienated from the community that formed
me, my moral autonomy is itself at risk. . . . In fact, my alienation from my
primary community of reference is, more than likely, a reflection of the fact
that other attachments . . . have already gained preeminent importance in
my life.” So he believes that I ought to spend more time on “the critical
retrieval and mediation of the normative traditions that constitute Jewish
particularity.”
To a considerable extent I agree with Tom, and clarifying this will also
allow me to highlight our differences. I agree that in the usual case one’s
morality is substantially formed by one’s “primary” community, and that
one cannot “simply” leave it and still easily hold on to one’s moral self. Yet
that, as I read Jewish history, is just about what the mass of modernizing
Jews did when they left their essentially inner-oriented ghetto or shtetl
identities and opted for the world of urban, educated, secularized Western
culture as their primary “moralizing” community. Of course this involved
a good deal of boundary-crossing pain, but this was not undertaken and
endured on the basis of anything previously visible in the pre-modern
Jewish community, but because something deep in their human nature
indicated its value. Something vaguely similar occurred when they gave up
their formative national environments and immigrated to countries with
a rather different ethos, and then when they gladly gave up the formative
powers of the lower class for the middle class and beyond. Anyone who
has tried to work in the Jewish community in recent generations knows
that, until recently, the only hope of promoting Jewish life was to show how
Judaism fit in with its primary values—those of a humanizing slice of secu-

lar Western society.
I derive two lessons from this applicable to Tom’s critique. First, that for
all the sociality of selves, they also have an inner power to transcend their
group—a rather phenomenal one in the rare cases of prophets and saints.
In the more common case, they can radically shift groups and transform
their “selves.” Let me call attention to a term in Tom’s tradition which points
to a special case of this, “conversion,” that human/divine power which
makes it possible for pagans to find a radically “new being” by becoming
Christians. Something human vaguely similar to that happened when Jews,
utterly uncoerced, opted to transform their lives in societies with radically
different value concerns against what their traditional communities taught
them, and their communal leaders advised. I should add that I am unac-
quainted with Tom’s theology of conversion, and look forward to learning
how it relates to this discussion.
Second, the primary value-forming community of the Jews whom I
am addressing is neither that of traditional Judaism nor that of one of its
modern reinterpretations. The non-Orthodox communities—and to a con-
siderable extent people who affiliate with “centrist” Orthodox communi-
ties—almost always keep their Jewishness secondary to the larger social
worlds to which their parents adapted. So when I am speaking to the Jewish
public in terms of “self” and “autonomy,” I am doing so in the accents of
their primary moral community, “chastened” though they have been by
their affiliation with humanizing American secularity. Nor do I see this sec-
ondariness of Jewishness in the free countries soon disappearing. No new
“hot” intellectual or spiritual movement breaks out in America these days
without our soon hearing of the large number of Jews who have become
its devotees. So my modest “attention to the critical retrieval and media-
tion of the normative traditions that constitute Jewish particularity” is, as
I understand it, in keeping with Tom’s sense of the power of the social in
individual life.
However, Tom’s positive project intrigues me sufficiently that I should
like to take a lightning stab at it. To begin with, I think this task of the
retrieval of “normative traditions” would be rather easier for Christians
than for Jews, since the church has a tradition of creeds and of classic doc-
trinal statements to draw on. Jews have nothing truly similar. But let me
hazard an informed guess about our “normative traditions of particularity.”
Positively, they are God’s choosing us from among all peoples to receive
God’s Torah and the resulting halakhic structure which expressed its man-
dates in Jewish life. But to these shaping beliefs we must add the ongoing,
negative experience of anti-Semitism, the social experience which long

made and kept Jews Jewish. None of these “traditions” is highly effective
among us today. Most modernized Jews do not believe in Jewish chosen-
ness, and they do not observe Jewish law as law, but only as a resource from
which they select those practices they think will enhance their American
lives. Fortunately, anti-Semitism continues to decline in the Western world,
though only a dreamer would suggest that it no longer exists. But Jew-hatred
is less a threat to our continuity these days than is the general acceptance
of Jews which makes intermarriage and its assimilation so rife.
Renewing the Covenant is faithful to its title. It seeks to reinstate God’s
reality (chapters 3–10), to substitute Covenant for chosenness (so after
the preparation of chapters 11–13 the delineations of chapters 14–16), and
thence create a structure of duty-making that can replace the abandoned
legal system (chapters 17–20). It hopes to so establish the cogency of these
beliefs that a growing, eventually critical minority of Jews will want to live
by them because of their truth, and not because some enemy will not let
them be anything else.
Some Words about the Ineffable One
My terminological teshuvah, repentance, must now proceed to my calling

God an / the Absolute, albeit a Weak Absolute. My philosophic colleagues
are aghast at my oxymoron and would like me to provide some conceptual
clarity of the description of God as Absolute. Alas, I was being midrashic/
heuristic, not spinning out tightly cognitive claims. I had argued in the
experiential section that revulsion against the immorality of our times had
sparked a new search for the Ground of our values. I wanted a term that,
as an old aggadah put the need to penetrate the usual complacency, would
“smash into the ear” of the hearer. If relativism is the evil to be opposed,
then we needed to find its opposite, or at least the ground of non-relativ-
ism, what is termed in common parlance an “absolute.” Used figuratively,
“absolute” usefully marks the rather desperate search of people these days
to find something stable to hold on to: to hold on to, no matter how bizarre
it may be and no matter how costly (in dollars and cents, too). Jews, those
fervent modernizers, show the same phenomenon. By calling God an abso-
lute I only meant to call attention to the importance of the anchoring func-
tion of God in our lives. Any postmodern Jewish view of God, in my view,
would have to provide for God’s effectively exercising this role.
However, to connect God with a reasonably stable commandingness
opens God to the modernist fear that God’s grounding greatness will as
good as wipe out persons. To refute this, I sought to call attention to biblical
and rabbinic Judaism’s unselfconscious paradoxical insistence that the One
Ruler-God of all the universes nonetheless created a real world, and in it
gave people the astonishing freedom to obey or to defy God. So borrowing a
philosophic usage, I added “weak,” in the sense of “don’t push the substan-
tive term too far,” to the term “Absolute.” That makes good Jewish theologi-
cal sense and seemed to me sufficiently evocative that it might “shatter the
ear” of my readers, but for philosophers it makes no sense. It is, I believe, a
good instance of the translation problem we have when we seek to move
between these related but disparate disciplines.
A somewhat similar problem arose in relation to my suggestion that
God’s redemptive power is sometimes seen in historical events in our
time. Yudit and Edith particularly are troubled by this (as I think many in
the Jewish community are). They want to know how I can say that God
is involved with particularly beneficent events, and then not also involve
God in the terrible things that happen in history. Classically, Judaism has
said that God is involved in both, and that creates the problem: the incom-
patibility of the good God and horrible evils. The Bible already knew that
justice was a limited answer indeed, and the rabbis taught that the life of
the world to come would compensate for the lack of justice in this world.
But, overwhelmingly, believing Jews were able to accept the fact that there
are some things that we just cannot understand, probably because they
were grateful for all the goodness they did in fact receive, beginning with
life. The pious live, not always easily, with God’s inscrutability. Philosophers
care too much about rationality to accept that “answer.” And they cannot
easily accommodate the insight of believers old and current suggestion
that, if the clumsy locution is permitted, history is “lumpy” and God’s saving
acts are sporadic. In several places in Renewing the Covenant, I have tried to
explain why, after considerable reflection, I take this stand.10 Now the gap
between what philosophers consider intelligible speech and what religion-
ists know must truthfully be said, widens to the point where discussion is
difficult indeed.
This necessarily brings us to a discussion of the place of the Holocaust
in contemporary Jewish theology. A number of my critics believe that since
those terrible days we must operate with “a displaced and decentered faith.”
This phrase and its equivalents are frequently repeated by thinkers today,
and they convey the understanding that since the Holocaust, we cannot
10 See Borowitz, Renewing the Covenant, pp. 123–25, 128, and 131 on the limited God; and
pp. 148–50 on retribution.
believe in God as we once did. I demur from this position. I do not believe
God is the central problem of post-Holocaust theology—a radical revision-
ism which I sought to justify in chapter 3 of Renewing the Covenant. None of
my critics represented here have found this interpretation worthy of com-
ment or refutation. Nonetheless, the matter is so important to assessing
how the Holocaust should influence our religious thinking, I think it impor-
tant to restate my case, even briefly.
Belief in God cannot die for people who don’t really believe in God’s exis-
tence to begin with, and who had already given up the idea of God’s retribu-
tion as far back as the Kishniev pogroms of 1903 and 1905. By mid-century,
the overwhelming majority of modernized Jews were agnostic if not athe-
ist. What they believed in, what functioned as their “god,” was not Adonai
but humankind and its capacities. They built their lives on education, poli-
tics, business and culture—not the God of the 613 commandments. As the
century drew toward an end they began to realize, in a subterranean, post-
modern way, that their secular “god” had failed them and that a messianic
faith in humankind is ludicrous. “What was “displaced and decentered”
in our effective faith was not God, but human power, that is, the ethos of
modernity—and out of that recognition, the widespread religious search
and postmodern spiritual longings of our time emerged. That is why I do
not make the Holocaust, or the problem of theodicy, central to my thinking
about God, though it is fundamental to my teaching about human nature
and our need for God’s help. I urge anyone reading these lines to make their
own judgment of the case I have presented in chapter 3 of my book.
I could have as good as written the previous paragraph nearly a decade
ago, when I was completing the manuscript of Renewing the Covenant. The
intervening years have only confirmed my view. The Holocaust, once at
the forefront of Jewish writing, is rarely a living theological issue today. As
the second edition of some of the old radical books appear, their authors
now share their second thoughts about what they once proclaimed and that,
if nothing else, should give us pause in our continuing to mouth the old slo-
gans about the Holocaust.11 It is not that we are forgetting the Holocaust, but
simply that we have begun to do what Jews have always done with a great
historic event: we have begun to ritualize it. And I include in that ritualiza-
tion the rhetoric we still use when we do discuss it. Old phrases and images
11 Most notable is Richard L. Rubenstein’s preface to the second edition of After Aus-
chwitz, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), pp. xi–xiii; see also the
quite different tone of the preface to the second edition of Emil Fackenheim’s To Mend the
World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. xi–xxv.
reappear, old emotions are evoked and relived, the past and present are
momentarily joined, and, having heeded the command “to remember,” we
go back to what are now the living questions of our existence. And among
caring Jews of diverse temperaments and labels, that live agenda often
centers on building a personal relationship with God, as incredible as that
would have sounded in the heyday of the death-of-God movement.
The People Israel
Yudit asks why I do not give more attention to the State of Israel and its on-
going place in covenanted lives. Since I am a religious rather than a secular
Zionist, I devote myself to the primary task: determining what Jewish faith
is in our times. Only with that in place can one hope to know what our
relationship might be to the Land of Israel, to the State of Israel, and to the
community living upon it. This not being a book in which I move very far
from theoretical issues to practical ones, I limited myself to one paragraph
on the State of Israel which I hope readers will find as rich in meaning as I
do (p. 290). Some time after the book appeared I was asked to give my views
on “What is Reform Religious Zionism?” And that paper connects my theol-
ogy with our immediate obligations theoretical and practical.12
Yudit also wondered why I do not explain why exactly a general self,
who happens to be Jewish, should strive to become a Jewish self. Once one
grants the premises of Enlightenment rationality—the individualistic self
and truth as universals—I do not see how it is ever possible to make a case
for the value of the particular that does not relegate it to second best. Why
detour through an old, self-serving particular, when one can find groups
that try to move as directly as they can to the universal goal? And why
then also take on the oddity and disability of Jewishness in Western cul-
ture? Those assimilationist questions have bedeviled Jewish thinkers in this
century who have accepted the supremacy of modernity, and attempted to
build a robust Judaism from the foundations of universal human reason or
experience. That is why I framed my case first as an attack on the univer-
salist counter faith (chapters 11–13), and only then tried to show the admi-
rable character of the Jewish people in relationship to God, each other and
humankind (chapters 14–16).
12 Eugene B. Borowitz, Journal of Reform Zionism, vol. II (March 1995): 24–30.

Norbert suggests that there is now a rationalism that no longer atom-

izes individuals, but sees them relationally. It therefore gives rational cre-
dence to collectivities, and not merely to individuals. That certainly would
provide us with an argument for the validity of particular groups, such as
the people Israel. But, in typical philosophic fashion, it would do this for
all groups universally. So the particular Jewish group would again be only
another possibility for satisfying that rational need. Any other collective
that satisfied the rational standards for relationality would, in that sense,
be similarly commended. We are left again, though on a new level, with the
problem of getting from philosophy’s universalism to the unique signifi-
cance of Jewishness.
This matter is critical to my determination not to be a philosopher in the
present philosophic climate. In some bedrock, primal fashion, I and oth-
ers like me know that the existence of the Jewish people in Covenant with
God is a matter of unique cosmic significance. Any way of thinking that
doesn’t readily allow me to express and validate that truth cannot be the
medium by which I will explain Judaism to others. Until someone creates a
rationalism that can give particularity a primacy Jewishness has in my life,
I cannot be a first-level rationalist. (But as my writing makes clear, I am a
devoted second-level rationalizer, trying to think as hard and as clearly as I
can about my first-level experience. Philosophers, of course, deny there can
be “experience” without its already containing some mental structuring
that can make something into my “experience.” In effect, then, everything
must begin with philosophy. For my rejoinder, see chapter 19 of Renewing.)
Let me only briefly add to this that most rationalism is resolutely secular
and so constructed that the Covenanting God of Israel is as good as ruled
out ab initio. I also cannot accept a system of thought which will devalue, if
not rule out, what I and others like me know to be the ultimate ground of
our existence. So I practice theology but, in the present intellectual situa-
tion, not philosophical theology.
Torah, God’s Instruction
If Judaism values praxis, what we do, more than it values doxis, what we say
about what we believe, then the questions David, Yudit, and others have
raised about relationship’s ability to command and, in addition, to generate
law, are central ones for my enterprise. The topics are closely related but it
will be necessary for me to focus on them somewhat separately.
Anyone who has long been in a relationship with another—neighbor-
ing, friendship, work—will surely have realized that involvement generates
responsibility and that the more intimate and long-standing the relation-
ship, the more it commands me. The paradigm case is marriage. The spouse
commands simply by being spouse rather than stranger, and does so more
compellingly than does a neighbor, friend or coworker with whom I have
a relationship. When the demand is put into words, its specificity and the
fact of its being spoken to me gives it great urgency. But even when no word
is spoken, one knows that there are things one must, and others one must
not do. In that situation, you may be uncertain what exactly you ought to
do or how best to go about it—the advantages of the verbal—but you know
that you must respond to the unverbalized command. Often, we discover,
such unarticulated demands have a greater power than the spoken ones, for
there is something particularly reproachful about the spouse’s cries, “You
should have known what to do,” or, “If I had to tell you it wouldn’t be the
same thing,” or “If you really loved me, you would have known.”
This telling experience furnishes us with a metaphor for what happens
between us and God in the Covenant. No wonder Rosenzweig spoke of rev-
elation as love. When through the religious life one builds an intense and
long-lasting intimacy with God, one knows one “must” not stain the rela-
tionship by one’s behavior, but one “must” rather dedicate oneself to act-
ing as the loved One would want us to. (That is the general case—but we
should not forget, as Yehudah Hanasi once wailed, “Some people win the
life of the world to come in an instant while others must spend their whole
lives striving to attain it and never know whether they have.”)
I suppose that is another reason that I am a theologian. I want to clear
away the intellectual rubbish that so often keeps us from allowing a bud-
ding relationship with God to mature. And I want to provide as fine an
understanding of the Covenant as a relationship as I can so that people will
not only be attracted to it in theory, but enter into it as a bond which directs
their lives. Ideas are not the only, or often even the best way of carrying on
this “dating service” but, without them, I think a community as educated
and critical as ours is will not be willing to “commit.”
Relationship commands, but it is too personalistic to yield what we
normally think of as law, the enduring-evolving, clearly specified norms of
what we must regularly do or else carry a burden of guilt and/or punish-
ment. What is at stake between the two views is not merely the vagueness
of relationship and the specificity and objectivity of law, but the intensity of
the urgency to act connected with each kind of command. In fact, can rela-
tionship get people to act as well as law can? We cannot answer that ques-
tion by dismissing the former as too easy to subvert, for no system is people
proof and the law, too, is regularly subverted by literalists, positivists, and
other less elegant sinners. We will, I believe, get a better picture of what
each viewpoint can and cannot do by leaving off comparisons of who fails
in each, and turning to a case to illuminate this difference of approach.
Assume, that after a reasonably energetic effort, a tenth man is not forth-
coming to complete a minyan and people will start to leave if we delay any
further. What shall we do about the person who came to say kaddish? The
Law is clear. For all our concern for the mourner, he cannot say the mourn-
er’s kaddish as part of the service. That is what Susan and Soloveitchik
mean when they refer to “sacrifice” as an ingredient of Jewish duty. There
are things which have long been difficult to understand in Jewish Law, but
God’s behests have such an urgency to them that we set aside our qualms
and do them. Thus, while I do not know how Susan feels about sitting
behind the mehitzah, which divides the sexes in her centrist Orthodox shul,
when she comes to the synagogue that is where she will sit; it is the Law.
Thus, too, the mourner will understand why he could not say kaddish in
this unfortunate circumstance, but he and the rest of the people there will
know they have fulfilled the centuries-old ruling and acted with a Jewish
authenticity any observant Jew will admire. In a society as shifting and
unstable as ours, these are virtues to cherish.
Yet if I recall David’s position of some years ago correctly, there are rare
occasions when he, who like Susan gladly wears the “yoke of the Kingdom
of Heaven,” might break with the Law. Say that, as in cases of mamzerut,
halakhic illegitimacy, the Law is blatantly unethical, punishing the inno-
cent offspring for the sin of the parents, and no classic halakhic device
avails to declare that there really is no case. In such an extreme case, David,
most reluctantly to be sure, would not follow the classic halakhah. But he
would be most stringent in limiting what qualified as a case of “blatantly
unethical” Jewish law. It does not include allowing a gathering of nine men
to carry on a service with the mourner’s kaddish. I raise this matter only
to indicate that so redoubtable a champion of Jewish law as David, once
acknowledged that in quite exceptional circumstances it might be neces-
sary to exercise extra-halakhic moral authority.
For a large and, in my view, increasing majority of modernized Jews,
feminism is the issue that mandates the need to revise or even break with
the Law as it is understood by the sages of that community of Jews who are
most devoted to its study and practice. To these Jews who insist on think-
ing about the Law’s purposes, it seems plain that, in the case given above,
should a woman be available to join the prayers she should be counted
in the minyan so that kaddish could be said. Indeed, women should be
counted in minyanim regularly, and be as required to say kaddish as men
now are. All such changes would act to strengthen the living Covenant rela-
tionship. Many believe that they can use the term “halakhah” for these revi-
sionist rulings; others believe that co-opting a traditional title obscures the
contemporary relational authority behind them, and does violence to what
the term “halakhah” traditionally meant. In any case, to ask all women to
accept the lesser status that traditional law effectively assigns to women, is
to demand more of a “sacrifice” than seems compatible with Covenant as
the relationship between God and the entire Jewish people.
I find that Peter’s suggestion that we think of our duties in terms of
Kadushin’s “value concepts” pushes us too far to the permissive pole of
the duty spectrum. Kadushin, after all, was working with aggadah, lore,
rather than halakhah, law, and, while aggadic statements do have certain
limited authority for believing Jews, they do not come with anything like
the rigor associated with the notion of command. Moreover, thinking of
praxis in terms of value concepts is made more troubling by Kadushin’s
insistence that their meaning is always indeterminate. I may be reading too
little into Peter’s suggestion, but I am sensitive to this issue because of our
spare of writers who, in their eagerness to co-opt the term halakhah for
their non-Orthodoxy, regularly so empty it of legal forcefulness that their
“halakhah” effectively retains only aggadic authority, despite its more strin-
gent sounding label.
Were I the rabbi of the nine person [sic] non-minyan, and the mourner
asked if we could have the service anyway so she/he could recite the
mourner’s kaddish, I would think of the Law in order to see if it reason-
ably clarified the present Covenantal imperative. Clearly tradition would
prohibit it, but a great many caring Jews in our community today would
think it a shame that a mourner who came to synagogue to say kaddish
was denied that possibility because of what they would call “a technicality.”
They, like me personally, could not imagine God frowning on us because of
our untraditional effort to have nine people, not ten, symbolize the Jewish
community seeking liturgically to renew its ancient Covenant, as well as
allow our neighbor to fulfill her/his special responsibility in that regard. But
if the group present, understanding the situation, was willing to go ahead,
I would lead that service. Someone else utilizing the same Covenantal cal-
culus might rule differently, but that is the pluralism that this kind of goal-
oriented reasoning encourages.
If keva, the regularity, of Jewish law is critical to us, I do not see how we can
ever achieve that without a firm belief that God stands behind just these
words, this ruling and the dialectical system which gave birth to it—ten
men, not nine, or not nine and a woman. Without that dogmatic faith,
other rationales for the Law will produce only tepid results. Most Jews are
too critical and questioning to accept classic Jewish law as binding because
they are told it is, if not God’s revelation, the established historic struc-
ture of Jewish living. This position and its corollaries have thus far failed
to produce communities who live by even a modernized Jewish law, as
Conservative Jewish leaders regularly ruefully acknowledge. In my opinion,
the theological root of the difficulty for the non-dogmatic theories is the
depth of our commitment to the religious validity of the self’s rightful part
in any rule-making. Only a living relationship with God, I insist, can hope
to demand that we work out our individuality as part of the Jewish people’s
Covenant with God.
The great contribution of Covenantalized decision-making will not be
keva, but its emphasis on kavannah, intention. What transpires between
us—God-Israel-me—is here a matter of consciousness as well as of act.
When our doing grows out of a consciousness of self-in-relation, that
inwardness will shape our persons as well as be a commanding power in
our doing. At the moment, Covenant relatedness is largely a matter indi-
vidual Jews feel privately. Yet I would hope that we will soon see the day
when there are communities of Jews who share enough of this Covenantal
sensibility that they will want to move beyond the isolation that many
Jewish selves feel in our time, to the formulation of communal norms for
Covenanted Jewish living (p. 294). I do not think that will ever likely become
“law” but it would flesh out the communal aspect of Covenantal existence,
and add another layer of urgency to being a praxis Jew.
Renewing this Conversation
Several of the colleagues have commented on my book’s failure to show

the Jewish textual basis on which my thought rests, while others wish I had
indicated more clearly what sort of practice this theology entails and how
Covenantal reasoning leads to it.
As to the missing texts, I am unable to resolve the methodological prob-
lem which besets us all with regard to texts and contempotary thought. No
matter how many citations one adduces, they can merely illustrate a pos-
sible relation of some aspects of our tradition to the new thinking. That is
because we have no way of determining what they all say, or how to give a
representative sample of them or indicate their essence. None of these pos-
sibilities carries much credence, so all textual citation remains a thinkers
selection of what she/he finds relevant in the tradition, and testify more
to the thinker’s hermeneutic than to “the normative” ideas in the tradition
(whose existence is another hotly debated notion among us). In this situa-
tion I have thought it wiser to clarify my hermeneutic than to gather texts
to demonstrate its putative Jewishness. I also hoped that various of my
briefer writings would indicate my roots in rabbinic literature, and my way
of learning from it. In the winter of 1999, the Jewish Publication Society will
publish my and Francie Schwartz’s book, The Jewish Moral Virtues, which, in
typical musar fashion, is highly textual and ranges across the entire Jewish
tradition. That will give my readers some greater indication of my relation-
ship to the Jewish sources. And as I indicate in the preface to Renewing the
Covenant (pp. x–xi), I hope that one day my decades long study of aggadic
discourse will see the light.
As my theological work was coming to systematic fruition, I began test-
ing out various of its notions in one area of praxis, Jewish ethics. A collec-
tion of many of my papers in this area was published in 1990 by Wayne State
University Press under the title, Exploring Jewish Ethics. A better indication
of how my mature theology relates to decision-making may be found in the
results of a seminar I conducted for a number of years, in which students
rendered a decision on a current ethical issue of concern to them, based
on the five point schema I had outlined in the last chapter of Renewing the
Covenant. Fourteen publishable student studies resulted from that course,
and these were published by Behrman House in 1994 as Reform Jewish Ethics
and the Halakhah, An Experiment in Decision Making. While these are my
students’ papers, not my own, the approach to reading halakhic (mostly)
texts is strongly guided, occasionally in dissent, by my viewpoint. Thus, this
volume may be said to open a window on how my theology would work
in practice.
God, rain blessing on Peter Ochs for his dedication to furthering Jewish
thought in our time, and for his imaginative effort here to push postmodern
thinking about Judaism another step ahead.
And to You, dear God, I say “Blessed are You” for all you have done to
sustain me to this day.
Editors’ Interview with Eugene B. Borowitz
July 22, 2012
Professor Borowitz, thank you for taking time to interview with us. We
will begin by exploring your intellectual biography. How do you identify
yourself intellectually?
Well, I think it probably would be helpful to go back a bit and tell you
about my upbringing. I grew up in Columbus, Ohio, and attended Ohio
State University. Neither of those two places is noted as a center of great
intellectual concern or activity. My parents were immigrants: my father, a
Litvak, my mother was from Hungary. Despite their different backgrounds,
they somehow managed to put this relationship together and both loved
each other greatly, and they were very good to me. Having settled as East
European immigrants in the greater New York area, having moved out to
the suburb called Brooklyn into a section called Bensonhurst, there’s no
reason to think that they had any specific organizational or intellectual
relationship to Judaism. They were just Jews and there were enough Jews
around them and there was enough Jewish activity around them that they
carried it out. But when they got to Columbus, Ohio, they discovered that
in fact in a city of 300,000 people, there were about 8,000 Jews, all located
in the east end of the city. My parents wanted to maintain contacts with
Jews and participate in the style of East European immigrants to the United
States. My father, for example, received by mail the Yiddish daily news-
paper, the Forverts. And while he did look at the Columbus Dispatch, he
much preferred the Forverts and what it told him. Incidentally, I still get the
English Forward, although I don’t think terribly much of it, but I feel I have
to have it. So, my parents did something I doubt that they would have ever
done if they had remained in Brooklyn: namely, they joined the synagogue.
If you needed a place where you could talk to people and discuss questions
of interest to yourself, you had to do something like belong to a synagogue.
So, my parents joined the synagogue. The Orthodox synagogue was too
demanding for them: Even though it was largely English-speaking, its gen-
eral tone and style was too much concerned with performance and ritual.
So they, therefore, went to the Conservative congregation. They didn’t go to
116 editors’ interview with eugene b. borowitz
the Reform congregation because the Reform congregation in Columbus

was strongly modeled after the Methodist congregation, which was about
four or six blocks down the rather significant street on which it was located.
So I grew up as a child in a Conservative congregation. My parents went to
the synagogue regularly, if for no other reason than to talk to people; but
they did participate in religious life.
I was sent to the Hebrew school, or Sunday school, call it what you will,
and it was there that my first intellectual activity came out. I somehow
seemed to find it necessary and desirable to ask questions of my teachers.
They were generally inept in answering them and somehow or another even
as a young pre–bar mitzvah child, I seemed to think about what they said
and asked questions and eventually got thrown out of class and sent to the
rabbi’s office. Then the rabbi and I would have a very nice conversation and
I would go back to class and try to keep quiet, which was difficult for me.
And that went on until I was a bar mitzvah, and then a second unusual
thing occurred. When I was done with all the bar mitzvah training and
the like, and had satisfactorily performed the rituals, I was ready to go on
and study more. No boy of my age in that Hebrew school ever came back
after his bar mitzvah, but I did. So the rabbi proceeded to give me a copy
of a Hebrew-English translation of Genesis and put me in a room by myself
because there was nobody else for me to be with. The other kids were still
learning the preliminary stuff.
Can you tell us more about your years at Ohio State University in
Columbus?
Well, we have to start back there because of the way in which it was deter-
minative of my going into the rabbinate. I mean, no intelligent, able, prom-
ising, young man of the Jewish community in those years, the 1940s, when
I graduated high school, wanted to be a rabbi or a Jewish thinker, for that
matter. My father one day said to me, “I know you, if I leave you alone, you
will go to university and take courses for the rest of your life. So I will hap-
pily subsidize you if you will tell me by the end of the year what it is that
you want to be.” I loved my father. He was obviously a very nice man. And
he was serious.
So, I set out on a program of trying to find out what I could be. And I tried
then to see, could I be a doctor? But that didn’t work—I could not tempera-
mentally see myself as a doctor. Here is a little detail that will shed light on
editors’ interview with eugene b. borowitz 117
this point. I went to summer school where the courses were condensed to
accelerate learning. I took the first two courses in zoology, simultaneously.
And the people with whom I was sitting at the laboratory table didn’t want
to dissect the frog, so I dissected the frog. I was complimented by the person
who oversaw that and I went over to the window and I stood at the window
and I said to myself, “You’re going to spend your life dissecting frogs? Don’t
be an idiot.” So, that was the end of being a doctor. In a similar fashion it
was also the end of being a lawyer, and the end of being an accountant. I
went from one group to another and tried to determine whether its activi-
ties suited me. Finally, there was only one thing left that I had not tried, and
that was philosophy. So, I was, as an undergraduate, invited into a graduate
seminar with a visiting professor from the Johns Hopkins University who
taught epistemology.
I recall to this day the critical moment in which I was walking back to
get my car in order to drive home and thinking to myself: “You could be a
philosopher and spend the rest of your life trying to figure out is the real
out there or is the real somehow inside us? Well, that’s a dumb thing to
spend your life on.” So instead of graduating in philosophy, I went back
to an idea that I had had when I graduated from high school. I wrote the
Hebrew Union College and said, “Hey, how about considering taking me
in?” Remember, I was from Columbus, Ohio, and Hebrew Union College is
in Cincinnati, Ohio. And they said, “Sorry, we can’t admit you because you
need to have at least one year of college.” So I finished the one year of col-
lege and I wrote to them again. Once more I was rejected when they told
me “Sorry, we have changed our admissions criteria. We are now only taking
people who have a college degree.”
But then the world changed because World War II broke out and with it
came the draft. Hebrew Union College again changed its mind and agreed
to admit me with one year of college education. And so I was admitted to
the rabbinical school, but my Hebrew was terrible. In addition to my initial
introduction to Hebrew as a child, I took Hebrew for one summer at Ohio
State but I barely passed the entrance exam. I was admitted as a special stu-
dent who had to learn Hebrew better than other students; by the end of the
year I was an honor’s student. So, that settled how I got into the rabbinate.
I studied at Hebrew Union College for six years, and during those formative
years I repeatedly had the impression that Judaism must be smarter than
what I experienced at the seminary. I found most of the courses, the profes-
sors, and the studies so dumb, boring, and uninteresting, and I had to work
hard not to get thrown out of class, which I mostly succeeded in doing.
To bring the biographical story to an end, let me say that when I was
able to finally graduate and apply for a job, I applied to get a doctoral fel-
lowship at the Hebrew Union College, so I could go on and maybe finally
learn something. To my surprise, the faculty did something they almost
never did, not that they had a lot of opportunity: They said, “No.” They
wouldn’t let me do that. Two years later, after I had been an Assistant
Rabbi and, by all accounts, had done a wonderful job, my Senior Rabbi
fired me because he wanted someone older and more placid. I then went
back to Hebrew Union College and asked them if they would let me come
and study for a doctorate. Surprisingly, they said, “Yes, you may come.”
They gave me various sorrows and troubles in order to come back, but
I came back.
Immediately thereafter, the Korean War broke out and since I had not
served in World War II, I was invited to volunteer for the chaplaincy, which
I did. I spent two years in the United States Navy during which time I suc-
ceeded in finishing my dissertation and got my Doctorate of Hebrew Letters
degree. When I came out, I hoped Hebrew Union College would hire me as
a teacher, but they were not interested. As it turned out, after a long and
complicated story that took a number of years I finally did get the right job
but for all the wrong reasons
In the meantime, I was still asking my theological questions and trying to
write, but I was not getting much help. But now, in the late 1950s, there were
in the liberal Jewish community a dozen, maybe even as many as fifteen
other people who were interested in these more theoretical broad scale and
fundamental questions. Occasionally, we began to write about these issues,
thinking that existentialism would be a way to approach the challenges of
Jewish existence. Well, it didn’t work out that way, but we moved through
existentialism, losing people left and right and very few people staying with
it. But that’s why my early writings go back as far as they do, because those
questions were still of interest to me.
Finally, Hebrew Union College gave me a job, indeed a full-time job.
Although I was hired to teach courses on education—education is a field
in which I had a second doctorate—the Dean promised me that I would
be allowed to teach Jewish thought. Not the history of Jewish thought,
but Jewish thinking in our time. The Dean at the time was Rabbi Paul
Steinberg, and I will be forever grateful to him. As a teacher of Jewish
thought, I had first to find my own way. So that’s how I got into being a
Jewish thinker.
As you know, the term “Jewish thought” is rather ambiguous since it

pertains to both philosophy and theology. How do you understand
the relationship or difference between Jewish philosophy and Jewish
theology? In some of your writings you expressed some disappointment
or maybe even frustration with rationalist philosophy. What is the
source of your displeasure or critique of Jewish rationalism?
Most Jewish philosophers wanted to be rationalists. If they couldn’t think

it, then it couldn’t be ultimately true. That’s an overstatement but it’s in
effect what was going on. I’ll never forget the one day while I was teaching
at Harvard when I went to listen to a professor from NYU who argued that
the human mind can gain correct and intelligent access to what is outside
the mind. Why did he say that to begin with? It was perfectly clear. He had
to announce his—forgive my language—his philosophic faith to differenti-
ate himself from other people in the room who held, as was customary at
the time among the Harvard faculty, that you had to construct from the
mind everything that exists. In other words, there were no givens. Well,
once he announced that he was of a different philosophical point of view,
then the discussion could begin. I didn’t join the discussion. After all I was
merely a visiting professor, but the debate seemed to me utterly unreason-
able. Whether or not the mind really knows the reality outside the mind or
whether the mind constructs that reality never got settled and it will never
get settled.
This debate seemed to me very arbitrary because I wanted to try to live
and understand what it meant to be a person. I was looking to find another
philosopher, someone who thinks differently and who concerns himself
with different issues that preoccupied philosophers at the time. But who
could this philosopher be? That’s why existentialism even in its ultimate
failure was useful for me, because existentialism said that to be a person,
to face personhood, as Rosenzweig put it, is perhaps the most significant
thing in thinking philosophically about the fact that death was a possibility.
If death was a possibility, and such a tremendous possibility, then why not
recognize that life and what makes it be a real life was somehow bigger than
our ideas. That it was a given of a certain kind.
This existentialist insight started people thinking in a different direction
than the dominant strand in analytic philosophy. Of course, the existential-
ist insight fell apart once one became familiar with the philosophy of Jean
Paul Sartre, who attempted to make some sense out of the self and the proj-
ects of the self in trying to understand the world. At any rate, existentialism
clearly shaped my early thinking as I reflected on the relationship of exis-

tentialism to Judaism. After a few years I realized that I had to give this
intellectual project up because it didn’t work.
In contrast to “Jewish philosophy,” how do you understand or define

“Jewish theology”?
I’ll put it simply. Philosophers, in theory, begin with nothing except confi-
dence that they are going to be able to think their way out of the nothing.
And there are other people who find that they believe something. And
it’s that believing something that makes the difference between the two,
namely, between philosophers and theologians. The projects of philosophy
and theology follow from that initial difference and the effort of the thinker
to keep it responsible.
As far as I am concerned, with certain limits to what he said, Martin
Buber came closest to making sense out of that. I remain greatly indebted
to Buber even though he forces you into a schizoid self, of sorts, because of
his binary dichotomy between the two orientations to the world: the I-Thou
and the I-It. There is no way out of that dualism; one simply has to live with
and deal with that. What I appreciated about Buber’s philosophy was not
only the fact that he recognized the complexity of the self, but also the fact
that he acknowledged the reality outside the self. There is the I, namely,
the self, and the Thou, namely, the non-Self or Other. Buber’s emphasis on
relationality seemed right to me, although he was wrong in how he applied
that insight to Judaism. Buber’s philosophy was right but incomplete, leav-
ing me something to do as a Jewish philosopher.
So far you mentioned two Jewish philosophers: Buber and Rosenzweig.

Who else would you add to the canon of Jewish philosophy? Indeed, is
there such a canon? Does Jewish philosophy consist of a well-defined
body of texts or does it consist of a certain way of thinking that emerged
from the fact that one belongs to or stands within the Jewish tradition?
You may not like what I am going to say, but I don’t care whether there’s
Jewish philosophy or not. Philosophy is not a big word for me, and the con-
cept, or activity of philosophizing, is not very strong for me. What there
is in Judaism is a complex of belief, responsibility, deed, community, and
action. Now, I don’t know whether there is one word that could capture
all of these, but I don’t know if “philosophy” is very helpful in dealing with
such complexity.
For example, for this volume you asked me to select 120 items of my long
bibliography. As I went through the list of over 350 things I have written
(books, essays, articles, and reviews), I experienced great difficulty choos-
ing the 120 items to feature in the volume. As I went through my own list
of writings, I realized how deep my concern for Jewish education truly was.
One could ask: “What in the world is a thinker doing with educating?” I
am not sure I have a simple answer, but I think it’s very important to try
to figure out how to teach people. Education is not merely an attempt to
live through the Buberian I-Thou relationship. Over the years of teaching at
Hebrew Union College, I met many young people who go through rabbini-
cal school or our education program saying that they want to love every-
body and they want to be nice to everybody. They think everything can be
done and accomplished by loving one another. Well, that can be done but
that is not how people get educated. I put my ideas into writing in a small
essay [“Education is Not I-Thou”] in which I reflected about the meaning
of education.
The project of education entails an encounter with a person who is
already involved in all kinds of problems and projects and activities. If so,
what does the educator think he is doing? What am I doing writing about
education? In truth, I must say that most people do not think seriously
about the meaning of education. But as an educator, I kept writing about
education and trying to practice what I was preaching. To my surprise, the
ideas of that article were picked up by many people, even though they
knew little about me. The language of that essay appealed to many readers
and it was taken from Jewish mysticism, or more precisely from Lurianic
Kabbalah. The Lurianic insight was that in order to create the world God
first withdrew into Himself. This act of withdrawal is called in Hebrew tzim-
tzum and it is most applicable to what happens in the educational situa-
tion. In education and in leadership more generally, in order to reach out,
you must first withdraw.
I can give you various examples to illustrate the point, but the insight is
quite straightforward. And I suddenly realized, “You don’t always accom-
plish what you need to accomplish by reaching out but rather by pulling
back.” Thus the insight of Lurianic Kabbalah, which was quite different from
my own way of thinking as a Reform theologian, became most relevant to
my thinking as a Jewish educator. Years after I published that essay people
would tell how useful the notion of tzimtzum was in their personal life.
Let us explore further your attitude to the tradition of Jewish philosophy,

since you have been quite critical of it.
Let me be clear: I studied Jewish philosophy and I think it’s very nice and
very interesting. But as far as I am concerned, philosophy is not how people
ought to try to approach the ultimate questions in our time, at least the way
I see it.
Can you elaborate and be more specific? For example, in your writings
you normally refer to the Bible and to rabbinic texts, but you are
conspicuously silent about medieval Jewish philosophy. Do you consider
the Bible or the prayer book as philosophical texts?
I don’t see them as philosophical texts at all. If you mean, are they instruc-
tive, do they somehow reach down to the fundamentals of reality, and in
the way in which people ought to live, and particularly the problems of
individuals in society and such, that’s a different matter. I felt as a young
person coming up and through not knowing into certain stages of know-
ing, that the philosophers were of secondary interest. That is to say, why is
it that after the three or four hundred years of people writing philosophy,
they stopped writing philosophy to amount to anything?
And why is it that coming into the modern world, Jews suddenly discov-
ered not only the university but at the university a faculty called philosophy,
which would enable them to be part of the modern world in the modern
style and to be sure to get over certain kinds of difficulties and problems
that the Jewish community created as it tried to think its way through the
situations in which it was in. That was not fundamental. In truth, a Jew
does not have to know very much about anybody but Maimonides. I may
be more inclusive and add Judah Halevi as well, even though scholars still
debate whether Halevi is a philosopher’s philosopher or whether he’s got
this marvelous passion for something else, namely, religious revelation. But
that is a different question that we do not need to discuss now.
There are more important matters in the history of Jewish philosophy
that we need to concern ourselves with. For example, I confess that I don’t
like the idea that in the thirteenth century Jews (including leading rab-
bis) contributed to the burning of Maimonides’ books. The Maimonidean
Controversy tells us a lot about the complex status of philosophy within
traditional Jewish society, but we tend to forget it.
The influence of Maimonides on traditional Judaism is very subtle. For

example, Maimonides articulated the Thirteen Principles of Faith, which
were put into poem in the fourteenth century. The poem (Yigdal) entered
into Jewish liturgy, reflecting a brilliant decision on the part of the Jewish
community. Keep in mind that other materials that Maimonides wrote
never made it into the regular service. Yet his thirteen dogmas were made
not only into a poem but into a poem to which a melody was composed
so that Jews could sing it during the regular religious service. Now, I love
the song and enjoy singing it, but it’s one thing to sing it and it’s another
thing to take it seriously, namely, philosophically. Only a person who went
to university could tease out the philosophical meaning of this liturgy, but I
am very doubtful that Jews who prayed regularly actually asked philosophi-
cal questions or subjected what they were singing to philosophical analysis.
Rationalism raises many important questions, but I am not sure that the
rationalist pattern of thought is the most appropriate to human existence.
In one of your writings you also note that most Jews are not interested
in Jewish theology as well.
Correct.
Why is this so? Definitely Jews today do not lack university training,
and yet theology remains marginal in Jewish self-understanding. Why?
If theology is marginal, and it is, philosophy is certainly marginal. That is

to say, most people don’t feel that kind of discipline is helpful in the living
of their lives. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that there were philoso-
phers who have actually tried to help us all with the basic problem of the
human condition, either facing immediate reality, let alone ultimate real-
ity. In this regard, philosophy is not nearly as useful as science, or even as
psychiatry, with all its limitations. Philosophy simply does not help most of
us very much.
What about “religious thought”? After all, at Hebrew Union College you
have been a Professor of Religious Thought?
Correct.
To what extent does your critique of philosophy depend on the fact

that you were teaching in a rabbinical seminary, namely, in a religious
institution? Could you have been the same kind of thinker had you
been associated with a different institution?
No, I don’t think I could do the same thing anywhere else. Most of my rab-
binical students were not interested ultimately in the broad-scale intellec-
tual questions, even though we have a required course in medieval Jewish
philosophy. I try to acquaint them not just with my point of view, but with
the major varieties of thinking that Jews do about ultimate problems, but
I cannot say that these issues have been central to rabbinic training in
Hebrew Union College.
The lack of interest in philosophy is not limited just to rabbinic stu-
dents but is characteristic of the American Jewish community as a whole.
After fifty years of dealing with these questions, I think I can now pro-
duce a list of thirty-nine people whom I believe think interestingly about
Jewish thought. The list includes people from Norbert Samuelson, who is
one of the most significant of the scientifically styled Jewish rationalists,
to quasi-mystical thinking that today goes under the category of “spiri-
tuality.” In fact, Hebrew Union College received a grant a year ago from
somebody who thought we should introduce our students to spiritual-
ity. We established a framework for it, teaching our students how to do
meditation and various similar activities, but very few students were able
to attend these sessions at 8:00 in the morning. Perhaps it had to do with
the fact that they had to drive to school from three different states (i.e.,
New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut), and it is difficult to arrive for a
meditation session early in the morning, But in all candor, I can see the
same difficulty in terms of attending daily prayer services. In other words,
the problem is not lack of “spirituality” but the ability to adhere to or have
commitment to a certain discipline.
The most important thing I have probably done for my students is to
teach by example: I never miss prayer services on Thursday. I have my seat
in the synagogue at HUC and unlike other members of the faculty, I am reg-
ularly there. To my chagrin, many rabbinical students do not attend the ser-
vice on a regular basis, and many come in just before the sermon, because
they want to hear what their buddies, namely, their fellow students, have
to say. This suggests a certain lack of understanding about the nature of
religious life and the importance of regular practice.
How do you understand the interest of students at Hebrew Union College

in spirituality?
It is not the case that they are interested in spirituality per se. Rather, they
are interested in how to do a better job as a rabbinic leader.
But most Jews in America today define themselves in secular terms,

rather than in religious or spiritual terms. What is the role of spirituality
in the secular world?
It is true that most Jews live in the realm of the secular; we religious types
are a minority. I think that’s fairly clear. And there is a decline in the number
of people who are affiliated with religious institutions. For one reason, it
costs so much money to run a proper synagogue and a lot of people don’t
want to put out that money. However, I have to qualify this by saying that
the relationship between secular and religious identities of American Jews
today is quite difficult to ascertain. Here is a an example to illustrate the
point: Reform Judaism magazine reported the following story: In some con-
gregation, a rabbi on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day,
decided to open the doors of the ark where the Torah scroll is kept and tell
people if they wanted to, they could come up and spend a few moments
personally and then return to their seats.
Amazingly, so many people stood in the line to get up to the ark that the
rabbi and the congregation wondered how they are going to complete the
service in time; so many people wanted to pray privately in front of the ark. A
similar experience took place at the Reform congregation here in Stamford,
Connecticut, which is a rather traditional congregation, making its way into
the modern world. Here too, many people lined up to pray in front of an open
ark. I mention this anecdote just to illustrate a point: Perhaps it is a mistake
to think that Jews are “secular.” Clearly the fact that they get up from their
seats, go and stand in a line, eventually walk up to this most sacred place in
the synagogue and do whatever they do there in front of so many people, and
then return to their seats suggests they have a deep religious or spiritual need.
Would you like to generalize about secular Jewish existence? Who are
the secular Jews? What does it mean to be a secular Jew today?
There are a lot of Jews who don’t care very much about anything. On the
other hand, I’ll give you a second example of what is astonishing in our
time. Certainly twenty years ago, maybe even fifteen years ago, ten years
ago, Jews who intermarried generally left the Jewish community. Today,
40 percent of Jews, so the sociologists tell us, 40 percent of Jews who marry
out, they and their spouse come into the synagogue, Reform synagogues
generally, and raise those children as Jews. How can we explain that phe-
nomenon? One could object and say that the decision to remain Jewish or
raise children as Jews does not necessarily indicate a high level of religiosity
or that their level of religious performance is very limited or minimal. But
I would say in return that this decision is a significant commitment and
that one has to start somewhere. If this trend continues we may actually
begin to gain new Jews, or we may equal out the number of Jews who define
themselves in secular terms. We don’t know what the future will bring in
terms of religious self-identification.
Is it possible to say, along with Jürgen Habermas, that we now live in

a post-secular society? Are we now experiencing the growth of post-
secular Judaism?
It’s entirely possible, but I don’t want to push it. As a Jew I cannot be too
hopeful, although I should be hopeful enough.
Your reluctance to be too optimistic brings to mind one important

hopeful ideology in the twentieth century. I refer, of course, to Zionism.
In your writings you characterize yourself as a religious Zionist.
Yes.
What does Zionism mean to you? How is your religious Zionism different
from Orthodox religious Zionism, the ideology behind the settlement
movement?
On the whole, I don’t care whether it’s a big O, Orthodox, or a small o, ortho-
dox. I mean I find it astonishing that all these political types who talk very
strongly about Zionism never learn Hebrew, don’t make aliyah to the State
of Israel (i.e., don’t immigrate). That’s not what classical Zionism was about.
In all candor, I have not found in myself the ability to spend more time
in the State of Israel than the paltry few visits I made years ago. In fact, I
haven’t been to Israel for fifteen to twenty years, and that is very, very bad,
even terrible. But I think I do care very strongly about Israel. Israel means a
great deal to me and I honor and respect my students and colleagues who
have gone and done what I should have done. I have not been able to acti-
vate my deep concern for the State of Israel in the ways that I have been
able to do it with regard to my concern for the relationship with God as a
member of the covenant people.
As a Zionist who is informed about Jewish life in Israel, how do you

assess the relationship between the Orthodox and the non-Orthodox
(Liberal or Progressive) community in Israel?
I honor and I have regularly sent money to try to make it possible for Liberal
Judaism in the State of Israel to grow and spread and eventually reach out
and teach the rest of us.
It may be a painful question for you, but why is Liberal Judaism not
doing well in Israel?
I don’t know. My impression was that it was making very slow, but steady
strides forward. I mean, considering all the other things that the State of
Israel has to confront, I can understand why the everyday realities tend
to overwhelm these questions of spirit and sensibility and the like. I don’t
think I can say much more than that.
Religious diversity in Israel and its internal divisions and debates bring
to mind an important aspect of your work. The subtitle of your book
Renewing the Covenant is Jewish Theology for the Postmodern Jew.
Indeed diversity is one of the main features of the most modern age, but
I would like to explore the meaning of the term “postmodern” for you.
What does it mean to be a postmodern Jew? What does the postmodern
condition mean for Jews? Is there a postmodern Judaism?
To make sense of this title, I have to go back a few decades and be very can-
did with you. In past decades, people really took advertising seriously. That
is to say, they wanted to be with it, they wanted to exemplify it. There really
was a time in America during which there was a kind of sense of being a
modern American person who was expected to behave in a certain way and
do things that all right and intelligent Americans did. This social expecta-
tion really drove people’s lives and they still do, although to a much lesser
extent. In the 1940s and 1950s fads had a much stronger hold on people,
much more than today. The postmodern sensibility has with it a sense that
a great deal of what the world is about is fake.
I guess, by the word “fake”, you refer to what Derrida would call
“simulacrum” or “dissimulation.” Social reality is always about self-
construction and self-representation, and this is indeed inherently
related to advertising. So, were Jews in the 1960s and 1970s primarily
busy with self-construction?
I think so.
And what is happening now? Has the postmodern sensibility exhausted

itself? Are Jews today seeking something else?
I do need to note an interesting fact. The term “postmodern” doesn’t occur

in the book but appears only in the title. Somehow or another, when I was
actually deciding the title of the book, I was looking for an adjective for
the word “Jew.” I wanted to indicate that somehow or another we weren’t
the way we used to be when we were in our glorious late 1950s and early
1960s. And the word “postmodern” seemed right, and over the years it has
seemed smarter than I am. In other words, I don’t know where I got that
term from. Sometimes a word simply comes out, or emerges as a kind of
gift to me.
If so, when you employed the term “postmodern” in the subtitle of

your book, did you not have in mind postmodern philosophers such as
François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, or Emmanuel Levinas?
I’m indebted to all of them, obviously; I was influenced by them, but hon-
estly, I don’t take any of them terribly seriously. Nonetheless, to some extent
I respond to them as well as to a lot of other thinkers, and perhaps even to
a certain sensibility inside myself which came out in, or was expressed by,
that word. And I think it was right.
As I reread your book in preparation for this interview it struck me as

a critique of modernist rationalism, especially in its German variant of
the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Is it fair to say
that this kind of German rationalism you no longer found intellectually
viable in the late 1980s and early 1990s?
In my view Kant’s system failed once in the nineteenth century, and

attempts to restate it by Neo-Kantians such as Hermann Cohen, a very car-
ing Jew, did not succeed. A good number of Jews were taken with Cohen’s
Neo-Kantianism, but the philosophic world as a whole found it, like most
sweeping philosophies, unconvincing, and therefore dropped it. By the
time I got to HUC in 1942, only very few faculty members ever mentioned
Hermann Cohen and even fewer thought he was still relevant. But the few
Jews who had a philosophic bent always hoped for a Cohenian, better yet,
Kantian revival, but it was not to be. In truth the Kantian worldview col-
lapsed in World War I. In America the great Jewish Kantian thinker was
Steven Schwarzschild, who was a close personal friend of mine. After all
his writings on Kantianism, Schwarzschild, in the final analysis, has left
us without any philosophical foundation upon which to ground Judaism.
Even Schwarzschild found no way to validate the truth of what the m aster,
namely, Kant, has taught. It is no surprise that in the twentieth century very
few Americans and a few Jews have taken Kantian philosophy very seriously.
In other words, I was critical not only of the old German rationalism but
also of American rationalism. To understand the complexity of American
life in the twentieth century, especially for Jews, we have to keep in mind
the Great Depression and the changes after World War II. After the War, life
was opening up in certain ways. It was so much better. We didn’t have to live
in and not just be from the Lower East Side to the Bronx or Brooklyn. Now
you could go out even further into the suburbs or the far suburbs and have a
house of your own. The suburbanization of America meant that you could
own a house of your own and that all of a sudden you were living in a com-
munity which was not what it used to be in large metropolitan areas where
Jews settled in the turn of the twentieth century. As Americans, and Jews
among them, moved to the suburbs and re-created themselves anew, there
was a lot of fakery; and a lot of people were trying to become something
else, something new. All of us are trying to be and to find out who the new
person ought to be. America was changing radically and so were the Jews,
and the term “postmodern” intended to convey that change.
The “postmodern condition” was indeed a critique of the Enlightenment

Project, whose major champion was Kant, but it was also a response to the
breakdown of Western civilization in the Holocaust. Do you see yourself
as a post-Holocaust thinker? What was distinctive about your approach
to the Holocaust?
In the 1960s when the discussion of the Holocaust was at a peak, I largely
limited myself to oral discussions about it and about the so-called Death
of God theology that was so rampant at the time among Christian think-
ers, such as Thomas J. J. Altizer. Christian thinkers were likely to be talking
about what one might still believe in God rather than about the total rejec-
tion of God, which was what occupied most Jewish thinkers in the decades
after the Holocaust. Since then I have retained a strong, if occasionally
troubled, faith in God, and therefore, I could not easily join the Jewish
discussion at that time, which was dominated by Richard Rubinstein’s
After Auschwitz. Thus I could find it easier to discuss the Holocaust with
Christian theologians such as Harvey Cox than with Jewish theologians
who followed the lead of Rubinstein and left no room for a thinking
believer in God’s reality.
At the end of the 1960s I realized that if I wanted my thinking to be taken
seriously, I had to find a way to put it into writing. That led me to write two
books which were published by Westminster Press: A New Jewish Theology
in the Making and How Can a Jew Can Speak of Faith Today?. Whereas in the
first book I only hint at my own theological commitments, in the second
book I speak to Jews of what they might still believe. But as a believing
Jew despite the Holocaust, I had a few people with whom I could speak
comfortably about these topics. The second book helped me find other
Jews who shared my views and even learn from them. The book helped me
find a few other serious intellectuals who remained religious believers after
the Holocaust and despite of it. Reflecting on the possibility of faith after the
Holocaust thus enabled me to move on in a new Jewish direction.
My views have been well summarized in the entry, “Holocaust, Religious
Responses during the,” in the Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion,
edited by R. Z. Werblowsky and Geoffrey Wigoder (1997). This entry cor-
rectly states my view of the Holocaust as “the Sinai event of our time.” The
Holocaust did not change the terms of the Covenant, since God still acts in
history! In retrospect, it seems to me that my reaffirmation of faith in God
despite the Holocaust has led Richard Rubenstein to issue a substantially
revised version of his original shocking rejection of his classic Judaism, After
Auschwitz, and has led Alvin Rosenfeld, the great author on perceptions
and constructions of the Holocaust, to issue his The End of the Holocaust.
Thus, in our time, what was once unthinkable (that is, that the Holocaust
did not negate Jewish faith and continuity) has become quite believable.
And considering the fact that a large number of Jews has turned to various
forms of mysticism and spirituality, facing the Holocaust with belief no lon-
ger seems as unacceptable as it did some thirty or forty years ago.
Responses to the Holocaust was one major concern of Jews in the

second half of the twentieth century. During that time American culture
underwent radical changes brought about by the counterrevolution of
the 1960s. American Jews have been very much part of that revolution
and in many cases even led it. One of the major aspects of change
was sexuality. You were one of the very first Jewish educators, social
thinkers, and theologians, who reflected on the sexual revolution of the
1960s. You really took a stand on sexual ethics for Jews, a topic that few
other thinkers dared to touch.
Yes, I opened my mouth on this very controversial and largely taboo topic. I
am fully aware that I was quite different from other educators in my genera-
tion. For example, Alfred Jospe was the Director of the Hillel Foundation at
the time. As a Jewish educator he was trying to inculcate in Jewish college
students some sort of a Jewish spirituality, or some kind of Yiddishkeit
(namely, Jewish self-awareness and sensibility). But in the late 1960s and
1970s during the sexual revolution, Jewish college students and young
adults were having sex outside marriage and traditional Jewish sexual
mores no longer applied. So I said to Alfred Jospe, “Why don’t you just stop
talking about all this Jewish stuff and do something practical? Tell them
what they should or shouldn’t do about having intercourse.” And he did a
terrible thing. He said to me, “Fine, write it.” So that is how I got to write my
book on Jewish sexual ethics; it was a response to an actual social change.
In truth, this was not an easy task. It took three different starts for me
to finally figure out how to do that book. I remember throwing away the
first and second drafts of it, which is not a very pleasant experience. When
I finally sat down to write the third draft it started to go faster, but when I
reached the end of the book I said to myself: “This is all wrong. You left out
something. You left out what, if you were a believing Jew, you would do
about the sexual revolution.” Although I doubted that anyone would listen
to me, I still felt compelled to state my position in unambiguous terms. So
the last four or six pages at the end of that little book spell out how a Jew
should act in terms of sexual ethics.
Are you talking about homosexuality?
No, no, no. I’m talking about plain old heterosexual conduct or heterosex-
ual intercourse. Should you have intercourse or should you not have inter-
course? That was the question at that time. It took a long time until we got
to homosexuality as a burning social issue for Jews. It is well known that
over the years I have changed my mind about homosexuality.
Could you elaborate?
Oh, yes, I have changed my mind about the ordination of gay rabbis. As you
know, the symbol of rabbinic ordination is the signing of the semikah (writ
of ordination). To be more specific, I had not signed semikah for about six
or seven years, perhaps more, as my views on homosexuality became con-
troversial and students took issue with me. But as I changed my mind in the
course of the last couple of years and became more accepting of gay rabbis, a
student came to me and asked me to sign his semikah. I publically accepted
his invitation to sign his ordination and that event signaled the end of the
alienation between me and the more progressive rabbinic students at HUC.
Was this rabbinic student gay?
I have no idea, but it is irrelevant. The rabbinical students who protested

against my view on homosexuality were heterosexual and they would not
ask me to sign their semikah. The request of the student to sign his semikah
did not mean that he accepted my rejection of homosexuality, but rather
his awareness that there has been a shift in my position.
Could you explain exactly how have your views changed?
I wish I could explain it with some clarity. What is at stake here is the atti-
tude toward the homosexual person. I can tell you that after I signed the
semikah of that student, another rabbi, who previously avoided me on
account of my views on homosexuality, saw me in a Shabbat service and
kissed me on the cheek, as a way of thanking me. The key issue for me was
the ability of a gay man or a lesbian woman to procreate. With the availabil-
ity of new technologies (e.g., in-vitro fertilization), surrogate motherhood,
adoption are all ways to overcome the problem. Once gay persons could
procreate, I was compelled to soften my opposition to homosexuality.
So, you have been thinking a lot about homosexuality and Judaism, and
then it was this symbolic act that signaled the change in your position.
Did I understand you correctly?
Yes, the issue of homosexuality became crucial for the Reform rabbinate
(as well as the Conservative rabbinate) because it goes to the heart of the
matter about the authority of the halakhic tradition for progressive or lib-
eral modern Jews. When the Central Conference of American Rabbis tried
to come to a decision on the issue, I asked various people to write about
it and they all implored me to put my views in writing. The result was a
very long essay which is about to appear in a book published by the CCAR,
The Sacred Encounter: Jewish Perspectives on Sexuality.
My change of mind on the issue of homosexuality was not a trivial mat-
ter, precisely because it pertains to the place of halakha in the life of pro-
gressive or liberal Jews.
Homosexuality is part of a larger and rather complex issue of gender

in Judaism. There is no doubt that the status of women has changed
radically in the last three, four decades.
I agree and have no problem with that whatsoever.
How do you see the contribution of women to Reform Judaism in terms

of the rabbinate or leadership more generally? Have women made a
difference since they were allowed to become rabbis in 1972?
The admission of women to the rabbinate made a major difference on sev-

eral levels, but who knows yet what it is likely to do. Women in the rab-
binate have been doing all kinds of wonderful things but I do not think
that Reform women rabbis have been able to write about their experience
or generate significant thought out of their experience. The major Jewish
feminist theologian, Judith Plaskow, began to theorize about feminism and
Judaism at the Hebrew Union College at my invitation. At that point in her
career she still had to learn a lot about Judaism. The experience of teach-
ing at HUC and talking to students finally resulted in the splendid book
Standing Again at Sinai. Interestingly, there has been no follow-up to that
book. Her second book of collected essays has only one essay that cuts any
new ground. I know that she has been invited to teach another course at
HUC and perhaps that will generate another important book, because I am
really interested in hearing what women have to say.
Gender issues are clearly central to contemporary Jewish identity. But

if we go beyond gender, what would you say are the most pressing
problems for contemporary Jewish existence? Which issues require us
to rethink the meaning of Jewish existence? What are the most salient
challenges for Jews today?
If I knew what the answer to that question was, I would be writing about
it. But kidding aside, there are lots of small issues that concern Jewish exis-
tence, but I do not think there is one paramount issue. What do you think
are major issues today?
For me, the challenge of science and technology will be high on the list
of issues that require a rethinking of Judaism.
I agree. Technology does raise a lot of questions that require a Jewish

response.
Pluralism within Judaism is yet another main challenge for contemporary

Judaism, given the fact that the Jewish community in the Diaspora and
in the state of Israel has become much more polarized and fragmented.
Yes, I agree that contemporary Judaism has become both polarized and
fragmented.
The entire cluster of issue that revolves around gender equality and
inclusion is expected to concern Jews in the twenty-first century, at
least for the foreseeable future.
I agree with you that this issue will preoccupy Jews, but I am looking for a
totally new topic that will engage Jews for the rest of the twenty-first cen-
tury. The three issues you mentioned so far are not new, whereas I am look-
ing to identify a new, fresh problem, and so far we have not identified such
a problem.
How about the ecological crisis? Don’t you think that it requires a new
interpretation of Judaism?
Well, haven’t we been talking about the ecological crisis for quite a while?
Not really. The ecological crisis did generate Jewish responses but only
a very small group of people has been engaged in the reinterpretation
of Judaism in light of the ecological crisis. I, for one, believe that the
ecological crisis requires the rethinking of Judaism and that it could
inspire the growth of Judaism in the following decades.
Well, I am willing to trust you and other Jewish environmentalists to keep

us aware of what that is as there are groups who keep us aware of this or
that, but I don’t know if that it is somehow fundamental or major to Jewish
existence as such. The thing that is far more, in my opinion, crucial to the
continued existence of Judaism is the intermarriage of Jews. Are the grand-
children of intermarried Jews who are raised as Jews going to raise their
kids as Jews? Now, that is a problem. What matters here is the question of
Jewish continuity and the perpetuation of a kind of sensibility that will be
positive. Today we have many Jews who want to stay Jews, and there are
others who are willing to become quasi-Jews or near-Jews. How we per-
petuate a positive Jewish identity, especially in intermarried families, is an
extraordinary problem.
What about globalization? Does it pose a special challenge for the

continuity of Jews?
No, I do not think so.
Well, there are Jewish philosophers, for example, Eliezer Schweid, who
considers globalization a major challenge to Jewish existence.
If we want to identify future challenges to Judaism, we need first to identify

the group of people who experience that problem. But if we are seeking to
identify a problem that is somehow fundamental to all of Jewish existence,
we cannot limit it to this or that specific group.
From what you have said so far it sounds that intermarriage is the only one
that is really fundamental to the future of Jewish existence. Is that correct?
No, not intermarriage per se, since it might turn out to be the savior of
Jewish life in the future. If you could get more than 50 percent of the Jews
who intermarry to raise their kids as Jews, you might suddenly give the
Jewish people an infusion of Jewishness that we don’t get the other way.
I would not say intermarriage itself is the problem but rather continuity.
How to ensure Jewish continuity seems to me to be the most fundamental
challenge for the twenty-first century.
Would education be the response to the challenge or is Jewish education

today actually the cause of the problem of continuity?
In truth, I don’t think anybody knows how to ensure Jewish continuity and
what is the best Jewish education.
One of the problems today is the end of ideology. In a postmodern world,

there are no big “isms” and no compelling ideologies. The dominant
ideologies of the twentieth century (e.g., Liberalism, Socialism,
Communism, Zionism, etc.) have lost their power to motivate Jews and
no longer galvanize Jewish existence. Does that seem a problem to you?
I do not think we should approach Jewish existence in light of various secu-

lar ideologies. Rather, I think the challenge is inherently theological. We
have no one like Reinhold Niebuhr, who somehow takes religious truth and
turns it into a fundamental way of rethinking our situation. There are some
people in the Christian world who have tried to make a fresh approach to
ethical responsibility. I don’t think either of them has been very effective, at
least as far as Jewish understanding is concerned.
The guiding question of ethics is “What am I to do?”
Yes, but that question does not necessarily lead to someone talking about it
or speaking about it in a way that illuminates where we ought to go in ways
that we don’t now see.
Let me put it to you somewhat more bluntly: Are you optimistic about
the future of the Jewish people?
I guess, even though it sounds a little too easy to say, yes, I think God is
smarter than I am.
What does that mean? Are you saying that the future is strictly in God’s
hands?
I did not say it was all in God’s hands, but I think it is in God’s hands.
The question is what will the Jewish people do to ensure that their future
will be collectively rich and worthy of the covenant? With the framework
of covenantal theology, what does the covenant demand from us for the
foreseeable future? Where do we stand in the covenantal relationship
with God?
I’m not quite sure. Although I have written covenantal theology, I think the
only proper answer to that question is that I’ve tried to give an example of
my own life, of what I think we ought to do.
I’ve been in various kinds of Jewish organizational positions, including a
rabbi, a denominational officer, a teacher, and many other functions. None
of these positions can generate a pamphlet on how to change the world
radically. The challenge of the covenant is answered within the framework
of your life and you answer it with your belief.
When we talk about “Jewish ethics” we refer both to an academic

discourse as well as a program that guides Jewish life in practice. Why
has the academic study about Jewish ethics not made a difference in the
way Jews live? Is there a way to bridge the gap between the academic
discourse and what practicing Jews actually think about the way they
ought to live?
You really care a great deal about academic discourse and you want me
to reflect about the connection between the academy and actual Jewish
life. Well, I don’t know where there is anywhere in the Torah where philo-
sophical speculation, including in the medieval philosophers, will funda-
mentally change the world. I mean, it’s one thing to do what you think is
right, but to think that this medium, “professor talk” or “professor writing,”
is going to substantially change human beings and how they behave, and
particularly change how our small and incredibly complex people is going
to come through the life of the world to come, no. Come through to the life
of the world to come. Better yet, come to the messianic age. Sorry, but I do
not believe that academic writing of any kind can move us toward the real
goals of human life.
Academic discourse, or what I call “professor talk,” is not high on my list

of factors that can change human nature or social behavior. I do think the
academic discourse is very useful, even very valuable, and I myself engage
in it; in fact I have spent a life at it. But ethics is not something you write
about but something you actually do. I think that is how I actually behave
to my students, to my colleagues, to people in general, and it certainly is
part of a Jewish community, is far more important than all of my writings
about ethics. My long list of publications, only 120 of which will appear
in the select bibliography of this volume, reflects a lifetime of intellectual
activity and reflection about ethical matters. I am glad that I have devoted
my life to writing and I am quite proud of what I have produced and I have
enjoyed writing, but I am also aware of the limits even though sometimes
it drives me crazy. But I am not sure that “professor talk” is the best way of
learning how to be a better person.
In all candor, I think most academics don’t really help the world very
much. And, in retrospect, I don’t think that what we academics write is very
important.
As a reader of your publications, I can honestly say that I find your work
most impressive in its clarity and fluency. I am sure that other readers
too were moved by your work and possibly changed their actions in the
world. To this extent, when academic writing is done well it can shape
what ordinary people think and do.
Thank you.
We thank you, Professor Borowitz, for agreeing to participate in the

Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers and we know that your
written legacy has contributed greatly to Jewish self-understanding,
especially within Reform Judaism.
Select Bibliography
Books
1. A Layman’s Introduction to Religious Existentialism. Philadelphia: West

minster Press, 1965.
2. A New Jewish Theology in the Making. Philadelphia: Westminster Press,
1968.
3. Choosing a Sex Ethic. New York: Schocken, 1969.
4. How Can a Jew Speak of Faith Today? Philadelphia: Westminster Press,
1969.
5. The Mask Jews Wear. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973.
6. Reform Judaism Today. New York: Behrman House, 1977–78.
7. Contemporary Christologies: A Jewish Response. New York and Ramsey,
NJ: Paulist Press, 1980.
8. Choices in Modern Jewish Thought. New York: Behrman House, 1983.
Second expanded edition, 1995.
9. Liberal Judaism. New York: Union of American Hebrew Congregations,
1984.
10. The Ideal Jew. The B. G. Rudolph Lectures in Judaic Studies. Syracuse,
NY: Syracuse University, 1986.
11. Exploring Jewish Ethics. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990.
12. Renewing the Covenant. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1991.
13. Our Way to a Postmodern Judaism: Three Lectures. San Francisco:
University of San Francisco, 1992.
14. Please, God, Heal Her, Please. Healing and Judaism Monograph Series,
edited by Kerry M. Olitzky and Nancy Weiner, no. 1. New York: National
Center for Jewish Healing, 1997.
15. Judaism after Modernity: Papers from a Decade of Fruition. Lanham,
MD: University Press of America, 1999.
16. Studies in the Meaning of Judaism. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication
Society, 2002.
17. The Talmud’s Theological Language-Game. Albany: State University of
New York Press, 2006.
140 select bibliography
Books with Other Authors
18. (With Naomi Patz) Explaining Reform Judaism. New York: Behrman
House, 1985.
19. (Editor) Reform Jewish Ethics and the Halakhah: An Experiment in
Decision Making. West Orange, NJ: Behrman House, 1994.
20. (Editor) Theological Terms in the Talmud: A First Book. New York: The
Ilona Samek Institute at HUC–JIR, 1998.
21. (With Frances W. Schwartz) The Jewish Moral Virtues. Philadelphia:
Jewish Publication Society, 1999.
22. (With Beth Levine) The Temple Sinai Ark Tapestry: A Masterwork of
American Jewish Folk Art. Stamford, CT: Temple Sinai, 2006.
23. (With Frances W. Schwartz) A Touch of the Sacred: A Theologian’s
Informal Guide to Jewish Belief. Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2007.
Articles
24. “Theological Conference: Cincinnati, 1950.” Commentary 19 (June 1950):

567–72.
25. “Creating Commitment in Our Religious Schools.” The Jewish Teacher
24, no. 3 (March 1956): 7–12.
26. “The Idea of God.” CCAR Yearbook 67 (1957): 174–86.
27. “Theology and Jewish Education.” Religious Education 53, no. 5
(September–October 1958): 418–21.
28. “Existentialism’s Meaning for Judaism.” Commentary 28 (November
1959): 414–20.
29. “Toward a Theology of Reform Jewish Practice.” CCAR Journal 8, no. 1
(April 1960): 27–33.
30. “Crisis Theology and the Jewish Community.” Commentary 32 (July
1961): 36–42.
31. “Problems Facing Jewish Educational Philosophy in the Sixties.”
American Jewish Yearbook 62 (1961): 145–63.
32. Ben Hamon [pseud.], “The Reform Rabbis Debate Theology.” Judaism
12, no. 4 (Fall 1963): 479–86.
33. “Faith and Method in Modern Jewish Theology.” CCAR Yearbook 73
(1963): 215–28.
34. “Creative Worship in the Computer Age.” American Judaism 14, no. 1
(Fall 1964): 48–49.
35. “On Dealing with Doubt.” The Jewish Teacher 33, no. 2 (December 1964):
15–18.
select bibliography 141
36. “Subjectivity and the Halachic Process.” Judaism 13, no. 2 (Spring 1964):
211–19.
37. “Unity and Reality in Mordecai Kaplan’s View of God.” Jewish Education
34, no. 2 (Winter 1964): 96–103.
38. “A Jewish–Catholic Colloquy.” Congress Biweekly 32, no. 5 (March 1,
1965): 7–8.
39. “The Openness of Catholic Theology.” Judaism 14, no. 2 (Spring 1965):
212–19.
40. “Christkillers No More: Jewish Education and the Second Vatican
Council.” Religious Education 61, no. 5 (October 1966): 344–48.
41. “God-Is-Dead Theology.” Judaism 15, no. 1 (Winter 1966): 85–94.
42. “The Legacy of Martin Buber.” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 22, no.
1 (November 1966): 3–17.
43. “On Celebrating Sinai.” CCAR Journal 13, no. 6 (June 1966): 12–23.
44. “On the ‘Commentary’ Symposium: Alternatives in Creating a Jewish
Apologetic.” Judaism 15, no. 4 (Fall 1966): 458–65.
45. “The Typological Theology of Rabbi Joseph Baer Soloveitchik.” Judaism
15, no. 2 (Spring 1966): 203–10.
46. “Autonomy Versus Tradition.” CCAR Journal 15, no. 2 (April 1968): 32–43.
47. “Judaism and the Secular State,” Journal of Religion 48, no. 1 (January
1968): 22–34.
48. “Hope Jewish and Hope Secular.” Judaism 17, no. 2 (Spring 1968): 131–47.
49. “Jewish Theology Faces the 1970’s.” The Annals of the American Academy
of Political and Social Science 387 (January 1970): 22–29.
50. “The Postsecular Situation of Jewish Theology.” Theological Studies 31,
no. 3 (September 1970): 460–75.
51. “The Problem of the Form of a Jewish Theology.” Hebrew Union College
Annual 40–41 (1969–70): 391–408.
52. “The Dialectic of Jewish Particularity.” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 8,
no. 3 (Summer 1971): 560–74.
53. “Education is Not I–Thou.” Religious Education 66, no. 5 (September–
October 1971): 326–31.
54. “Modern Faith Versus Jewish Style.” Judaism 20, no. 3 (Summer 1971):
313–19.
55. “Abraham Joshua Heschel, Model.” Sh’ma 3, no. 46 (January 19, 1973):
41–42.
56. “Covenant Theology—Another Look.” Worldview 16, no. 3 (March 1973):
21–27.
57. “Emil Fackenheim—Beyond Existentialism?” Judaica Book News 3,
no. 2 (Spring 1973): 30–31.
58. “Abraham Joshua Heschel: An Extremist but Not a Fanatic.” JWB Circle
29, no. 3 (April–May 1974): 5, 15.
59. “The Career of Jewish Existentialism.” Jewish Book Annual 32 (1974–75):
44–49.
60. “God and Man in Judaism Today: A Reform Perspective.” Judaism 23,
no. 3 (Summer 1974): 298–308.
61. “The Israelis and Us, the New Distance.” Sh’ma 5, no. 82 (November 29,
1974): 172–75.
62. “Tzimtzum—A Mystic Model for Contemporary Leadership.” Religious
Education 69, no. 6 (November–December 1974): 687–700.
63. “The Chosen People Concept as it Affects Life in the Diaspora.” Journal
of Ecumenical Studies 12, no. 4 (Fall 1975): 553–68.
64. “Jews as Closet Agnostics.” Moment 1, no. 3 (March 1976): 69–70.
65. “The Prospects for Jewish Denominationalism.” Conservative Judaism
30, no. 4 (Summer 1976): 64–74.
66. “For Dissent on Israeli Policy—Part 1.” Sh’ma 6, no. 116 (September 3,
1976): 123–27.
67. “For Dissent on Israeli Policy—Part 2.” Sh’ma 6, no. 117 (September 17,
1976): 129–33.
68. “The Old Woman as Meta-Question: A Religionist’s Reflections on
Nozick’s View of the State.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion
44, no. 3 (September 1976): 503–15.
69. “Anti-Semitism and the Christologies of Barth, Berkouwer and
Pannenberg.” Dialog: A Journal of Theology 16 (Winter 1977): 38–41.
70. “Judaism in America Today.” The Christian Century 95, no. 36 (November
8, 1978): 1066–70.
71. “The Changing Forms of Jewish Spirituality.” America 140, no. 16 (April 28,
1979): 346–51.
72. “The Liberal Jews in Search of an ‘Absolute!’ ” Cross Currents 29, no. 1
(Spring 1979): 9–14.
73. “Affirming Transcendence: Beyond the Old Liberalism and the New
Orthodoxies.” The Reconstructionist 46, no. 6 (October 1980): 7–17.
74. “Rethinking the Reform Jewish Theory of Social Action.” Journal of
Reform Judaism 27, no. 4 (Fall 1980): 1–19.
75. “Reading the Jewish Tradition on Marital Sexuality.” Journal of Reform
Judaism 29, no. 3 (Summer 1982): 1–15.
76. “The Autonomous Self and the Commanding Community.” Theological
Studies 45, no. 1 (March 1984): 34–56.
77. “Between Anarchy and Fanaticism: Religious Freedom’s Challenge.”
The Christian Century 104, no. 21 (July 15–22, 1987): 619–22.
78. “Co-existing with Orthodox Jews.” Journal of Reform Judaism 34, no. 3
(Summer 1987): 53–62.
79. “Encounter and Dialogue among the World’s Religions [Judaism].”
Bulletin—Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard University 13,
no. 1 (Winter 1987): 3–6.
80. “Jesus the Jew in the Light of the Jewish–Christian Dialogue.”
Proceedings of the Center for Jewish–Christian Learning 2 (Spring 1987):
16–18.
81. “The Challenge of Jesus the Jew for the Church.” Proceedings of the
Center for Jewish–Christian Learning 2 (Spring 1987): 24–26.
82. “Psychotherapy and Religion: Appropriate Expectations.” Religious
Education 83, no. 4 (Fall 1988): 562–70.
83. “Temptation in a Capitalist Context.” Sh’ma 18, no. 358 (September 30,
1988): 139–42.
84. “The Holocaust and Meaning: An Exchange” [correspondence with
Frans Jozef van Beeck, S. J.]. Cross Currents 42, no. 3 (Fall 1992): 417–24.
85. “Buddhism and Judaism: Some Further Considerations” [with reply
from Masao Abe]. Buddhist–Christian Studies 13 (1993): 223–31.
86. “In Tribute to Jacob Neusner.” Sh’ma 25, no. 491 (March 31, 1995): 6–8.
87. “What Is Reform Religious Zionism?” Journal of Reform Zionism 2
(March 1995/Adar II 5755): 24–30.
88. “Are We Too Soft on Apostates?” Reform Judaism 24, no. 4 (Summer
1996): 54–55.
89. “What Does the Halakhah Say about . . .? Joseph Karo’s Preface to the
Beit Yosef.” CCAR Journal 43, no. 2 (Spring–Summer 1996): 51–58.
90. “The Reform Judaism of Renewing the Covenant.” Conservative Judaism
50, no. 1 (Fall 1997): 61–65.
91. “ ‘Halakhah’ in Reform Jewish Usage: Historic Background and Current
Discourse.” CCAR Journal 49, no. 4 (2002): 5–26.
92. “Our Shifting/Stable Task: From ‘Choosing a Sex Ethic’ to Today.”
Judaism 52, nos. 1–2 (Winter–Spring 2003): 39–50.
93. “The Pivotal Issue in a Century’s Jewish Thought.” Conservative Judaism
55, no. 4 (Summer 2003): 3–15.
94. “The Need for Interfaith Theological Dialogue.” Speech at A Celebration
of the 40th Anniversary of Nostra Aetate, presented at The Catholic
University of America, March 10, 2005. http://huc.edu/faculty/faculty/
pubs/borowitz3.shtml.
95. “A Nearness of Difference: Jewish–Catholic Dialogue since Vatican II.”
Commonweal 133, no. 1 (January 13, 2006): 17–20.
96. “Musings on Mourning.” CCAR Journal 53, no. 3 (Summer 2006): 3–9.
97. “A Jewish Theology of Social Action.” CCAR Journal 55, no. 2 (Spring
2008): 5–12.
98. “After Kaplan’s ‘Heschel,’ What Is There Left to Be Said?” Conservative
Judaism 60, no. 4 (Summer 2008): 89–96.
Book Chapters
99. “Jewish Faith and the Jewish Future.” In Great Jewish Ideas, edited by
Abraham E. Millgram, 301–27. Washington, DC: B’nai B’rith, 1964.
100. “Individual and Community in Jewish Prayer.” In Rediscovering
Judaism, edited by Arnold J. Wolf, 109–32. Chicago: Quadrangle, 1965.
101. “The Living God and the Dying Religious Style.” In When Yesterday
Becomes Tomorrow, 130–46. New York: Congregation Emanu–El of the
City of New York, 1971.
102. “The Lure and Limits of Universalizing our Faith.” In Christian Faith
in a Religiously Plural World, edited by Donald G. Dawe and John B.
Carman, 59–68. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1978.
103. (With Estelle Borowitz). “Talking with Children about Sex.” In The
Jewish Family Book, edited by Kathy Green and Sharon Strassfeld, 239–
44. New York: Bantam, 1981.
104. “The Authority of the Ethical Impulse in Halakhah.” In Through the
Sound of Many Voices: Writings Contributed on the Occasion of the 70th
Birthday of W. Gunther Plaut, edited by Jonathan Plaut, 156–71. Toronto:
Lester and Orpen Dennys, 1982.
105. “On the Jewish Obsession with History.” In Religious Pluralism, Boston
University Studies in Philosophy and Religion 5, edited by Lee Rouner,
17–37. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984.
106. “Beyond Ethnos and Ethos: The Faith of American Jews.” In Proceed-
ings of the Institute for Distinguished Community Leaders. Waltham,
MA: Brandeis University, July 21–23, 1985.
107. “The Critical Issue in the Quest for Social Justice: A Jewish View.” In
Contemporary Ethical Issues in the Jewish and Christian Traditions,
edited by Frederick E. Greenspahn, 188–204. New York: Ktav, 1986.
108. “Hillul Hashem: A Universalistic Rubric in Halakhic Ethics.” In The
Life of Covenant, edited by Joseph A. Edelheit, 19–31. Chicago: Spertus
College of Judaica Press, 1986.
109. “Jewish Ethics.” In The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Ethics,
edited by James Childress and John Macquarrie, 320–25. Philadelphia:
Westminster Press, 1986.
110. “Even More Than God?” Foreword to Loving the Torah More than God?
by Frans Jozef van Beeck, ix–xiv. Chicago: Loyola University Press,
1989.
111. “Covenant Theology.” In What Happens After I Die? edited by Rifat
Sonsino and Daniel B. Syme, 107–15. New York: UAHC Press, 1990.
112. “Dynamic Sunyata and the God Whose Glory Fills the Universe.” In
The Emptying God, edited by John B. Cobb, Jr. and Christopher Ives,
79–90. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1990.
113. “Autonomy and Community.” In Autonomy and Judaism, edited by
Daniel H. Frank, 9–20. Albany: State University of New York Press,
1992.
114. A Buddhist–Jewish Dialogue between Profs. Masao Abe and Eugene B.
Borowitz. Port Washington: Sh’ma, 1992. [Includes materials by both
authors from The Emptying God (#112), plus rejoinders by both men.]
115. “Abraham J. Heschel: Thinking About Our Teacher.” In What Kind of
God?, edited by Betty R. Rubenstein and Michael Berenbaum, 427–31.
Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1995.
116. “Masao Abe’s Challenge to Modern Jewish Theology.” In Masao Abe: A
Zen Life of Dialogue, edited by Donald W. Mitchell, 172–83. New York:
Charles E. Tuttle, 1998.
117. “Understanding the Rav’s Philosophy.” In Mentor of Generations,
Reflections on Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveichik, edited by Zev Eleff, 238–42.
Jersey City, NJ: KTAV, 2008.
118. “Intra–Aggadic Control of Theological Freedom: A Speculation.” In
Continuity and Change: Festschrift in Honor of Irving Greenberg’s 75th
Birthday, edited by Steven Katz and Steven Bayne, 19–30. Lanham,
MD: University Press of America, 2010.
Book Reviews
119. “Emil Fackenheim as Lurianic Philosopher.” Review of To Mend

the World: Foundations of Post Holocaust Jewish Thought, by Emil
Fackenheim. Sh’ma 13, no. 254 (May 13, 1983): 109–11.
120. “Mark Lilla’s Political Theology.” Review of The Stillborn God:
Religion, Politics, and the Modern West, by Mark Lilla, Tikkun 23,
no. 4 (July–August 2008): 66–69. http://www.tikkun.org/article.php/
EugeneBorowitz-MarkLilla.

Rethinking God and Ethics (2014)

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Rethinking God and Ethics (2014)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Eugene B.

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/lcjp

Rethinking God and Ethics

Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron W. Hughes

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Eugene B. Borowitz : rethinking God and ethics / edited by Hava Tirosh-Samuelson

This hardback is also published in paperback under ISBN 978-90-04-26998-9.

Copyright 2014 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Editors’ Introduction to Series ..................................................................... vii

Eugene B. Borowitz: An Intellectual Portrait .......................................... 1

Why I Am a Theologian Rather Than a Philosopher ........................... 37

The Jewish Need for Theology ..................................................................... 41

Through the Shadowed Valley ..................................................................... 51

The Autonomous Jewish Self ....................................................................... 71

Editors’ Interview with Eugene B. Borowitz ............................................ 115

Select Bibliography .......................................................................................... 139

It is customary to begin studies devoted to the topic of Jewish philosophy

1 Alexander Altmann once remarked:

bearing on Jewish life and existence.3 Between these two perspectives or

Judaism—at least the Judaism that Jewish philosophy seeks to articulate—

8 A good example of what we have in mind here is the thought of Maimonides.

philosophy as constructive theology, even though the two may often be

As an educational project, the Library of Contemporary Jewish

1 In a response to Elliot Dorff, Borowitz vigorously denies that he is a “Reform ideo-

he was a consumer, an appropriator, and a fellow traveler. Religious exis-

Biography and Career

critical moment, he joined fifteen of his rabbinic colleagues in an act of

4 Borowitz refers to these events in “My Pursuit of Prayerfulness,” in Jewish Spiritual

6 Eugene B. Borowitz, “A Life of Jewish Learning,” reprinted in Studies in the Meaning of

Covenantal existence. For a preliminary defense of such a theological view

Covenantal Theology: Form and Method

The core of Borowitz’s theological understanding of Judaism employs a few

12 These two features are clearly identified in “Five Letters,” 170–71.

Kohler, Hermann Cohen, Leo Baeck, Mordecai Kaplan, Roland Gittelsohn,

13 Eugene B. Borowitz, “The Way to a Postmodern Jewish Theology,” in Judaism after

revised notion of autonomy and self-determination.14 He treats this cluster

Covenantal Theology: God and the Covenant

At the heart of Borowitz’s theology is the notion of the Covenant between

14 Eugene B. Borowitz, “Postmodernity and the Quintessential Modern Jewish Religious

in which God is real in Jewish life is to understand himself as a member of a

17 Eugene B. Borowitz, “Covenant,” in Judaism after Modernity, 198.

Autonomy and the Jewish Self

22 Borowitz, A New Jewish Theology in the Making, 191.

24 Borowitz, A New Jewish Theology in the Making, 192–94; cf. 207.

25 See Borowitz, “B’rit, Mitzvah, and Halakha: In Search of a Common Vocabulary,”

be embedded in the community, in the Jewish people. “The universal—

ships is the relationship with God, because of which we know ourselves,

sion of what is bequeathed to the self is fixed by its fundamental situated-

Ethics and Jewish Duty

The outcome of Borowitz’s thinking about Covenant, autonomy, and Jewish

While Borowitz’s personal interests led him to think extensively about

45 Borowitz, “A Life of Jewish Learning,” 395–96.

50 Borowitz, “The Autonomous Jewish Self,” 224–25.

The Essays That Follow

In addition to an interview with Eugene Borowitz and a select bibli-

Enough people have been puzzled by my calling myself a theologian rather

becoming enthusiastic devotees of philosophy’s openness, and some east-

The Christian, particularly the Protestant, often thinks of religion as the

* Originally published in Commentary (August 1962).

commitment to theology or commandments. These would eventually come

While the secularity of the average synagogue member in America cannot

Inconsistent is too mild a word; chutzpah alone is adequate to characterize

J udaism. Richard Rubenstein’s collection of articles entitled After Auschwitz

to a secularistic commitment to human responsibility. Perhaps some few

o verwhelming when we think of the Holocaust. Does much in Jewish life