The Core Values of Conservative Judaism
by Ismar Schorsch
If dogmas or doctrines are the propositional language of a theological
system, core values are the felt commitments of lived religion,
the refraction of what people practice and profess. To identify
them calls for keen observation as well as theoretical analysis.
Conservative Judaism is best understood as a sacred cluster of
core values. No single propositional statement comes close to
identifying its center of gravity. Nor does Conservative Judaism
occupy the center of the contemporary religious spectrum because
it is an arbitrary and facile composite of what may be found on
the left or the right. On the contrary, its location flows from
an organic and coherent world view best captured in terms of core
values of relatively equal worth.
There are seven such core values, to my mind, that imprint Conservative
Judaism with a principled receptivity to modernity balanced by
a deep reverence for tradition. Whereas other movements in modern
Judaism rest on a single tenet, such as the autonomy of the individual
or the inclusiveness of God's revelation at Sinai (Torah miSinai),
Conservative Judaism manifests a kaleidoscopic cluster of discrete
and unprioritized core values. Conceptually they fall into two
sets-three national and three religious-which are grounded and
joined to each other by the overarching presence of God, who represents
the seventh and ultimate core value. The dual nature of Judaism
as polity and piety, a world religion that never transcended its
national origins, is unified by God. In sum, a total of seven
core values corresponding to the most basic number in Judaism's
construction of reality.
The Centrality of Modern Israel
Hebrew: The Irreplaceable Language of Jewish Expression
Devotion to the Ideal of Klal Yisrael
The Defining Role of Torah in the Reshaping of Judaism
The Study of Torah
The Governance of Jewish Life by Halakha
Belief in God
The Centrality of Modern Israel
The centrality of modern Israel heads our list of core values.
For Conservative Jews, as for their ancestors, Israel is not only
the birthplace of the Jewish people, but also its final destiny.
Sacred texts, historical experience and liturgical memory have
conspired to make it for them, in the words of Ezekiel, "the
most desirable of all lands (20:6)." Its welfare is never
out of mind. Conservative Jews are the backbone of Federation
leadership in North America and the major source of its annual
campaign. They visit Israel, send their children over a summer
or for a year and support financially every one of its worthy
institutions.(1) Israeli accomplishments on the battlefield and
in the laboratory, in literature and politics, fill them with
pride. Their life is a dialectic between homeland and exile. No
matter how prosperous or assimilated, they betray an existential
angst about antiSemitism that denies them a complete sense
of athomeness anywhere in the diaspora.
And their behavior reflects the dominant thrust of Conservative
Judaism not to denationalize Judaism. Even in the era of emancipation,
Zion remained the goal, as it was for the Torah, an arena in which
to translate monotheism into social justice. A world governed
by realpolitik needed a polity of a different order. The liturgy
of the Conservative synagogue preserved the full text of the daily amida (the silent devotion) with its frequent pleas for
the restoration of Zion. Heinrich Graetz, who taught at the movement's
rabbinical seminary in Breslau and authored the most nationalistic
history of the Jews ever written, inspired Moses Hess to pen one
of the earliest Zionist tracts in 1862 and would not write of
the biblical period until he had personally visited Palestine
in early 1872. During the last two decades, well over 100 Conservative
rabbis have made aliyah, often at the cost of professional
satisfaction, attesting not only to movement ideology, but personal
courage.
This is not to say that Conservative Judaism divests the diaspora
of all spiritual value or demands of all Jews to settle in Israel.
Ironically, the state of Judaism is far healthier outside the
Jewish state, where Judaism is indispensable for a resilient Jewish
identity. Most Israelis have sadly been severed from any meaningful
contact with Judaism by the absence of religious alternatives
and by the erosion of sacred Jewish content in the secular school
system where 75% of Israel's Jewish children are educated. And
yet, the miracle and mystery of Israel's restoration after two
millennia out of the ashes of the Holocaust continues to overwhelm
Conservative Jews with radical amazement and deep joy.
Hebrew: The Irreplaceable Language of Jewish Expression
Hebrew as the irreplaceable language of Jewish expression is the
second core value of Conservative Judaism. Its existence is coterminous
with that of the Jewish people and the many layers of the language
mirror the cultures in which Jews perpetuated Judaism. It was
never merely a vehicle of communication, but part of the fabric
and texture of Judaism. Words vibrate with religious meaning,
moral values and literary associations. Torah and Hebrew are inseparable
and Jewish education was always predicated on mastering Hebrew.
Hebrew literacy is the key to Judaism, to joining the unending
dialectic between sacred texts, between Jews of different ages,
between God and Israel. To know Judaism only in translation is,
to quote Bialik, akin to kissing the bride through the veil.
These are some of the sentiments which prompted Zacharias Frankel,
the founder of Conservative Judaism in central Europe, to break
with Reform over the issue of Hebrew at the Frankfurt Rabbinical
Conference in 1845. Despite the leniency of Jewish law, he was
not prepared to endorse a resolution which would acknowledge that
synagogue services could theoretically dispense with Hebrew. Given
the rapid shrinkage of Judaism with the advent of emancipation,
the fostering of Hebrew for Frankel became a symbol of historical
continuity and national unity. Much of his scholarly oeuvre was
intentionally written in Hebrew. And the language has remained
at the heart of the Conservative agenda ever since.
Hebrew became the language of instruction of the Seminary's Teachers
Institute not too long after its opening in 1909, as well as the
language of daily conversation in the Ramah summer camps which
it launched in the late 1940s. The Conservative synagogue never
expunged Hebrew from the liturgy, and its supplementary Hebrew
school, despite the constraints of a very pareddown curriculum,
never gave up the struggle to teach a modicum of Hebrew literacy
to the young. If anything, the Solomon Schechter day schools of
the movement, an achievement of the past two decades, excel in
the teaching of Hebrew language.
The revival of Hebrew in the last centuryandahalf,
that is Hebrew Reborn as Sholom Spiegel put it in the title of
his celebratory book of 1930, is as singular a feat as the creation
of the Jewish state. Hebrew has been wholly transformed from an
unwieldy classical medium of liturgy and learning into a modern
Western language fit for the sciences and sensibilities of secular
society. Diaspora Jews can little afford to remain deaf to the
sounds of Hebrew as they can ignore the fate of the Jewish state.
In a Jewish world of sundry and proliferating divisions, Hebrew
must emerge as the common and unifying language of the Jewish
people, and nothing would advance that vision more effectively
than to redefine Zionism today solely in terms of the ability
to speak Hebrew. To restructure the World Zionist Organization
by earmarking all of its budget to the intensive teaching of Hebrew
to diaspora Jews would create many more Zionists (that is, Jews
who appreciate the centrality of Israel) than all the atavistic
politics of the current Zionist establishment. The natural bonds
of language and culture bind more firmly than those of abstruse
ideological constructs.
I offer as example the young Mordecai Kaplan, then dean of the
Teachers Institute, struggling to perfect his command of Hebrew
to the point where he could preside over its faculty meetings
and public events in Hebrew. In the 1920s he made the following
poignant entry in his diary:
"Here is another failure I have to register against myself.
Due to the lack of energy necessary to train myself to speak and
write Hebrew with ease, I am afraid to venture on those occasions
to give an address in Hebrew."(2)
Of such failures, the fabric of Jewish unity is sewn!
Devotion to the Ideal of Klal Yisrael
The third core value is an undiminished devotion to the ideal
of klal yisrael, the unfractured totality of Jewish existence
and the ultimate significance of every single Jew. In the consciousness
of Conservative Jews, there yet resonates the affirmation of haverim
kol yisrael (all Israel is still joined in fellowship) - despite
all the dispersion, dichotomies and politicization that history
has visited upon us, Jews remain united in a tenacious pilgrimage
of universal import.(3) It is that residue of Jewish solidarity
that makes Conservative Jews the least sectarian or parochial
members of the community, that renders them the ideal donor of
Federation campaigns and brings them to support unstintingly every
worthy cause in Jewish life. Often communal needs will prompt
them to compromise the needs of the movement.
Such admirable commitment to the welfare of the whole does not
spring from any special measure of ethnicity, as is so often ascribed
to Conservative Jews. Rather, I would argue that it is nurtured
by the acute historical sense cultivated by their leadership.
In opposition to exclusively rational, moral or halachic criteria for change, Conservative Judaism embraced a historical
romanticism that rooted tradition in the normative power of a
heroic past. To be sure, history infused an awareness of the richness
and diversity of the Jewish experience. But it also presumed to
identify a normative Judaism and invest it with the sanctity of
antiquity. It is that mixture of critical breadth and romantic
reverence that imbued men like Frankel, Graetz, Schechter, Kaplan
and Louis Finkelstein with the love of klal yisrael. And,
fortunately, they all commanded the literary gifts to disseminate
and popularize their views.
The Defining Role of Torah in the Reshaping of Judaism
The fourth core value is the defining role of Torah in the reshaping
of Judaism after the loss of political sovereignty in 63 B.C.E.
and the Second Temple in 70 C.E. to the Romans. In their stead,
the Rabbis fashioned the Torah into a portable homeland, the synagogue
into a national theater for religious drama and study into a form
of worship. Conservative Judaism never repudiated any of these
remarkable transformations. Chanting the Torah each Shabbat is
still the centerpiece of the Conservative service, even if all
too often it is lamentably done according to the triennial cycle
and then without liturgical aplomb. Though historically defensible,
the cycle makes a sham of Simhat Torah, even as it suggests the
decline of Torah in our lives.
More substantively, the cycle misses a precious chance to reinvigorate
Shabbat. As the rhythm of the Jewish week is to be set by Shabbat,
so should the content of individual home study be informed by
the weekly Torah portion. Conservative Jews increasingly evince
a hunger for access to holy texts. To restore the reading of the
entire parasha each Shabbat, to train a cadre of congregants,
both young and old, to become proficient Torah readers and to
help congregants in studying the parasha prior to Shabbat would
create a kahal kadosh, a holy community, joined by a sacred
calendar and text. Jews would then come to the synagogue on Shabbat
morning prepared and primed to listen to the Torah reading, to
recapture a touch of the numinous of the Sinai experience which,
at best, it is designed to reenact.
For Conservative Jews, the Torah is no less sacred, if less central,
than it was for their premodern ancestors. I use the word
"sacred" advisedly. The Torah is the foundation text
of Judaism, the apex of an inverted pyramid of infinite commentary,
not because it is divine, but because it is sacred, that is, adopted
by the Jewish people as its spiritual font. The term skirts the
divisive and futile question of origins, the fetid swamp of heresy.
The sense of individual obligation, of being commanded, does not
derive from divine authorship, but communal consent. The Written
Torah, no less than the Oral Torah, reverberates with the divinehuman
encounter, with "a minimum of revelation and a maximum of
interpretation."(4) It is no longer possible to separate
the tinder from the spark. What history can attest is that the
community of Israel has always huddled in the warmth of the flame.
The Study of Torah
Accordingly, the study of Torah, in both the narrow and extended
sense, is the fifth core value of Conservative Judaism. As a canon
without closure, the Hebrew Bible became the unfailing stimulus
for midrash, the medium of an IThou relationship with the
text and with God. Each generation and every community appropriated
the Torah afresh through their own interpretive activity, creating
a vast exegetical dialogue in which differences of opinion were
valid and preserved. The undogmatic preeminence of Torah spawned
a textuallybased culture that prized individual creativity
and legitimate conflict.
What Conservative Judaism brings to this ancient and unfinished
dialectic are the tools and perspectives of modern scholarship
blended with traditional learning and empathy. The full meaning
of sacred texts will always elude those who restrict the range
of acceptable questions, fear to read contextually and who engage
in willful ignorance. It is precisely the sacredness of these
texts that requires of serious students to employ every piece
of scholarly equipment to unpack their contents. Their power is
crippled by inflicting upon them readings that no longer carry
any intellectual cogency. Modern Jews deserve the right to study
Torah in consonance with their mental world and not solely through
the eyes of their ancestors. Judaism does not seek to limit our
thinking, only our actions.
This is not to say that earlier generations got it all wrong.
Nothing could be further from the truth. To witness their deep
engagement with Torah and Talmud is to tap into inexhaustible
wellsprings of mental acuity and spiritual power. It is to discover
the multiple and ingenious ways-critical, midrashic, kabalistic
and philosophical-in which they explicated these texts. Like them,
Conservative scholars take their place in an unbroken chain of
exegetes, but with their own arsenal of questions, resources,
and methodologies. No matter how differently done, the study of
Torah remains at the heart of the Conservative spiritual enterprise.
Moreover, it is pursued with the conviction that critical scholarship
will yield new religious meaning for the inner life of contemporary
Jews. It is not the tools of the trade that make philology or
history or anthropology or feminist studies threatening, but the
spirit in which they are applied. Rigorous yet engaged and empathetic
research often rises above the pedestrian to bristle with relevance.
Witness the tribute paid by Moshe Greenberg, professor of biblical
studies at the Hebrew University and a graduate of the Seminary,
to Yehezkel Kaufmann, who a generation earlier pioneered a Jewish
approach to the critical study of the Hebrew Bible.
Yehezkel Kaufmann embodied a passionate commitment to grand ideas,
combining the philosopher's power of analysis and generalization
with the attention to detail of the philological exegete. His
lifework is a demonstration that the study of ancient texts does
not necessitate losing contact with the vital currents of the
spirit and the intellect.(5)
The Governance of Jewish Life by Halakha
The sixth core value is the governance of Jewish life by halakha,
which expresses the fundamental thrust of Judaism to concretize
ethics and theology into daily practice. The native language of
Judaism has always been the medium of deeds. Conservative Jews
are rabbinic and not biblical Jews. They avow the sanctity of
the Oral Torah erected by Rabbinic Judaism alongside the Written
Torah as complementary and vital to deepen, enrich and transform
it. Even if in their individual lives they may often fall short
on observance, they generally do not ask of their rabbinic leadership
to dismantle wholesale the entire halakhic system in order
to translate personal behavior into public policy. Imbued with
devotion to klal yisrael and a pervasive respect for tradition,
they are more inclined to sacrifice personal autonomy for a reasonable
degree of consensus and uniformity in communal life.
Collectively, the injunctions of Jewish law articulate Judaism's
deepseated sense of covenant, a partnership with the divine
to finish the task of creation. Individually, the mitzvot accomplish different ends. Some serve to harness and focus human
energy by forging a regimen made up of boundaries, standards and
rituals. To indulge in everything we are able to do, does not
necessarily enhance human happiness or wellbeing. Some mitzvot
provide the definitions and norms for the formation of community,
while others still generate respites of holiness in which the
feeling of God's nearness pervades and overwhelms.
The institution of Shabbat, perhaps the greatest legacy of the
Jewish religious imagination, realizes all three. The weekly rest
it imposes both humbles and elevates. By desisting from all productive
work for an entire day, Jews acknowledge God's sovereignty over
the world and the status of human beings as mere tenants and stewards.
But the repose also conveys an echo of Eden, for Shabbat is the
one fragment left over from the lost perfection of creation. Shabbat
seeds the tortuous course of human history with moments of eternity,
linking beginning to end while softening the massive suffering
in between. Stopping the clock and diminishing the self allow
others to reenter our lives. We are transposed to another dimension
of reality.
Shabbat is an exquisite work of religious art created out of whole
cloth by the meticulous performance of countless mitzvot. We join
with family, friends and community in a symphony of ritual-clothing,
candles, tablesetting, prayer, food, song and study-to turn
Shabbat into the Jewish equivalent of a country home. To gain
renewal, we give up a measure of dominion. The hallowed tranquility
that ensues helps us reach beyond ourselves. Like the halakha
as a whole, Shabbat at its best invests the ordinary with eternity
and life with ultimate meaning. Submission to God sets us free.
Never has this heroic effort to generate pockets of holiness in
our personal lives been more important than today. Emancipation
has thrust Jews irreversibly into the mainstream of contemporary
civilization, with incalculable benefit to both. We are determined
to live in two worlds and have won the right to be different,
individually and collectively, without impairing our integration.
The question is whether our Judaism will survive intact. Our sensibilities
as Jews have been transformed and the discrepancies between the
two worlds beg for accommodation.
The challenge, however, has not induced Conservative Judaism to
assert blithely that the halakha is immutable. Its historical
sense is simply too keen. The halakhic system, historically
considered, evinces a constant pattern of responsiveness, change
and variety. Conservative Judaism did not read that record as
carte blanche for a radical revision or even rejection of the
system, but rather as warrant for valid adjustment where absolutely
necessary. The result is a body of Conservative law sensitive
to human need, halakhic integrity and the worldwide character
of the Jewish community. Due deliberation generally avoided the
adoption of positions which turned out to be illadvised
and unacceptable.
Nevertheless, what is critical for the present crisis is the reaffirmation
of halakha as a bulwark against syncretism, the overwhelming
of Judaism by American society, not by coercion but seduction.
Judaism is not a quilt of random patches onto which anything might
be sewn. Its extraordinary individuality is marked by integrity
and coherence. The supreme function of halakha (and Hebrew,
for that matter) is to replace external barriers with internal
ones, to create the private space in which Jews can cultivate
their separate identities while participating in the open society
that engulfs them.
Belief in God
I come, at last, to the seventh and most basic core value of Conservative
Judaism: its belief in God. It is this value which plants the
religious nationalism and national religion that are inseparable
from Judaism in the universal soil of monotheism. Remove God,
the object of Israel's millennial quest, and the rest will soon
unravel. But this is precisely what Conservative Judaism refused
to do, even after the Holocaust. Abraham Joshua Heschel, who came
to the United States in March, 1940, to emerge after the war as
the most significant Jewish theologian of the modern period, placed
God squarely at the center of his rich exposition of the totality
of the Jewish religious experience.
To speak of God is akin to speaking about the undetected matter
of the universe. Beyond the reach of our instruments, it constitutes
at least 90 per cent of the mass in the universe. Its existence
is inferred solely from its effects: the gravitational force,
otherwise unaccounted for, that it exerts on specific galactic
shapes and rotational patterns and that it contributes in general
to holding the universe together.
Similarly, Heschel was wont to stress the partial and restricted
nature of biblical revelation.
"With amazing consistency the Bible records that the theophanies
witnessed by Moses occurred in a cloud. Again and again we hear
that the Lord `called to Moses out of the midst of the cloud'
(Exodus 24:16)...
We must neither willfully ignore nor abuse by allegorization these
important terms. Whatever specific fact it may denote, it unequivocally
conveys to the mind the fundamental truth that God was concealed
even when He revealed, that even while His voice became manifest,
His essence remained hidden."(6)
For Judaism, then, God is a felt presence rather than a visible
form, a voice rather than a vision. Revelation tends to be an
auditory and not a visual experience. The grandeur of God is rarely
compromised by the hunger to see or by the need to capture God
in human language. And yet, God's nearness and compassion are
sensually asserted. The austerity of the one and the intimacy
of the other are the difference between what we know and what
we feel. God is both remote and nearby, transcendent and immanent.
To do justice to our head and heart, that is, to the whole person,
Judaism has never vitiated the polarity that lies in the midst
of its monotheistic faith.
I know of no finer example of this theological view than the berakhah which introduces the psalms (pesukei dezimra) of
the morning service. Its function is to praise God before we make
our petitions. But, in essence, it is really a meditation on the
nature of the deity we are about to address. Before we pray, we
take a moment to orient ourselves. My quite literal translation
of the text encompasses the first few lines, which are all I wish
to comment on.
Praised be the one who spoke and the world sprang into being.
Praised be that one.
Praised be the maker of the beginning.
Praised be the one who spoke and acted.
Praised be the one who ordered and executed.
Praised be the one who has compassion for all the earth.
Praised be the one who has compassion for all of nature's creatures.
Praised be the one who rewards those who fear God.
Praised be the one who lives forever and endures till eternity.
Praised be the one who redeems and rescues.
Praised be God's name.
What I find striking and altogether typical of Judaism in this
ancient paean is the crescendo of appellations for God through
a preference for circuitous verb forms. Despite a fervent desire
to encounter and behold God, there is a palpable reluctance to
depict or render God concrete, to traduce the mystery. The author
takes refuge in verbs rather than nouns.
The very first appellation alludes to the strategy: "Praised
be the one who spoke and the world sprang into being"-an
awkward name for God that quickly brings to mind the majestic
and imageless description of creation in the opening chapter of
Genesis. Not a word is wasted there on what God looks like, on
what God's sex might be, on what God did before creation. The
Torah simply implies that there is but a single God who is absolutely
transcendent and chose at some point to call forth the cosmos.
And that creation is effected with effortless elegance through
ten verbal commands. No consultations, no warfare, no labor!
It is wholly in the spirit of that supreme expression of biblical
monotheism that our rabbinic author works. The act of creation
becomes the name by which God is known. Theology compels us to
turn verbs into nouns. We know God not through appearance, but
effect. Only the experience of divine action falls within our
ken. Our author even forms an adverb "bereshit"
(in the beginning) into a noun and God rises before us as "the
maker of the beginning."
But an unchanging, soaring, bodiless deity is also beyond human
suffering. To counter that conclusion, the prayer immediately
moves from creation to love. The God of Israel remains engaged,
a soul mate as much as a prime mover. God's compassion extends
to our planet and all its creatures as well as to the chosen people,
"those who fear God." God is not an ineffable "It"
but a caring "Thou," or, as Buber once said of his own
faith in God: "If believing in God means being able to speak
of Him in the third person, then I probably do not believe in
God; or at least, I do not know if it is permissible for me to
say that I believe in God. For I know, when I speak of him in
the third person, whenever it happens, and it has to happen again
and again, there is no other way, then my tongue cleaves to the
roof of my mouth so quickly that one cannot even call it speech."(7)
As this lilting paean makes so clear, for the rabbinic mind God
was conceived in polarities, lofty yet loving, imageless yet intimate,
hidden yet revealed. Conservative Judaism is very much part of
that ancient Jewish quest for a comprehensive understanding of
God.
More broadly still, Jewish tradition continues unbroken in Conservative
Judaism, where yearning for God wells up primarily not from reason
or revelation but from the bloodsoaked, valueladen
and textually rooted historical experience of the Jewish people.
It is surely in order to ask in closing whether this unique constellation
of core values has ever coalesced into a vivifying ideal. I would
submit that in its Ramah summer camps the Seminary created an
extension of itself: a controlled environment for the formation
of a model religious community. Over the past halfcentury
Ramah has compiled an extraordinary record of touching and transforming
young Jews to become the most effective educational setting ever
generated by the movement. All the core values of Conservative
Judaism are present in spades, defining and pervading the culture.
Let me single them out. The centrality of Israel finds expression
in the large contingent of Israeli staff members brought over
each summer, who often return to Israel themselves enamored of
Conservative Judaism in the wake of experiencing Ramah. Their
presence also reinforces the use of Hebrew as the camp's official
language, while the value of klal yisrael promotes the
priority of community and the inclusive spirit of camp programming.
On the religious side of the ledger, the Torah constitutes the
lifeblood of camp life. The parasha is a basic text of
study during the week and read in full every Shabbat, giving dozens
of youngsters the chance to master the skill. A myriad of daily
classes and Shabbat study groups symbolize the devotion to learning
(in the Conservative manner), and halakha governs every
aspect of life, from daily services to human relationships to
relating to the environment. Each week culminates in the magnificent
choreography of Shabbat that puts Judaism to music by imbuing
everyone with a sense of belonging and intimacy, of uplift and
holiness. And finally, the engaged figure of a Seminary scholarinresidence
teaches and personifies the core values that animate the whole
noble experiment.
Ramah is not the conscious articulation of an ideological blueprint
but rather the natural impulse of a vibrant, authentically Jewish
religious culture, proof positive that Conservative Judaism bespeaks
an organic, distinctive and transformational reality. What Solomon
Schechter once said of Rabbinic Judaism, when he ventured to crystallize
its theological underpinnings, holds true no less for its modern
counterpart:
A great English writer has remarked that `the true health of a
man is to have a soul without being aware of it...' In a similar
way the old Rabbis seem to have thought that the true health of
a religion is to have a theology without being aware of it; and
thus they hardly ever made - nor could they make-any attempt towards
working their theology into a formal system, or giving us a full
exposition of it.(8)
Today, Conservative Judaism pulsates with many pockets of intense
religious energy. Its congregational life, national conventions,
USY pilgrimages and Schechter day schools increasingly manifest
models of religious community shaped by its core values. More
than ever, the lay leadership of these ventures consists of serious
Jews for whom Conservative Judaism is hardly "a halfway house"
(Sklare). The longstanding gap between Seminary and synagogue
has also been largely transformed into a common calling to perpetuate
rabbinic Judaism in an open society. What Conservative Judaism
offers the growing number of Jews hungry for the holy is a sacred
cluster where standards are coupled with compassion, scholarship
with spirit, piety with intellectual honesty, and parochial passion
with universalism — a prescription for salvation in this
world and the one to come.
Sources: “The Sacred Cluster: The Core
Values of Conservative Judaism,” is copyrighted
by the Jewish
Theological Seminary of America and reprinted here
with permission.
1. Ismar Schorsch, In Defense of the Common Good, New York, 1992, pp. 12.
2. Journal of the Alumni Association of the Seminary CollegeTeachers
Institute, June 1992, p. 4.
3. The traditional prayer for announcing the new month. My translation.
4. Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism, New York, 1956, p. 274.
5. Moshe Greenberg, The Anchor Bible: Ezekiel, 120, New
York, 1983, p. v.
6. Heschel, op. cit., p. 193.
7. Rivka Horwitz, Buber's Way to "I and Thou". Philadelphia, 1988, p. 105. |