Art Green vs. Everett Gendler on Jewish Universalism

Full disclosure:  I have had the privilege of counting Rabbi Everett Gendler as a friend and mentor for more than fifty years.  I have always thought of him as one of my rebbes, and in recent years he has returned the compliment.  We have in common a lifelong search for a Judaism of the heart, a love of God as expressed in a love of God’s creatures, human and otherwise, throughout the world, and deep appreciation for Midrash in the broadest sense, embracing all sorts of creative re-readings of our beloved ancient  tradition.  Everett and I share an attraction to what some see as the most “pagan” elements within Judaism, ranging from Kiddush Levanah (greeting the rising moon) rituals to studying the Zohar to the singing of An’im Zemirot, a hymn to the lovely locks of the invisible divine head.

It is hard to make a list of what I learned from Everett Gendler.  He was the first vegetarian I met, the first poetic naturalist, the first ecologist, the first pacifist, the first male feminist – and the list could go on from there.  He was also the first committed Jew who was a non-Zionist.  More on that below.  But Gendler turned out to be a uniquely prescient figure on several fronts, presenting in the 1960’s a religious appreciation for preserving the natural world that most forward-looking people caught up with only a full jubilee of years later.  He saved me from dying on the vine in rabbinical school by feeding me a diet of Rilke, D. H Lawrence, Tagore, and Whitman.  He and I together came to know how they echoed truths I was also finding in the pages of the Zohar, the Ba’al Shem Tov, and Rabbi Nahman.

A man of great literary sensitivity and appreciation, Gendler published rather sparingly over his many years as congregational rabbi, school chaplain, and part-time organic farmer.  Most of his articles were occasional and sometimes even quirky pieces, such as his great celebration of the first solar-powered Ner Tamid (“Eternal Light”) in his synagogue in Lowell MA, or his linking of Lag be-Omer and May Day.  (Not the Workers’ Festival, mind you, but the original dance around the Maypole.)  Now he has finally brought some fifty of these little gems together in his first published volume, out with a couple of years to spare before we gather to celebrate his 90^th birthday.

Much of the volume presents Gendler’s vision of a Judaism in love with nature and seeking harmony with, as well as responsibility for, the natural world.  Some of the essays are theological, dealing with the theme of Creation and how to re-invent it in our post-Darwinian universe.  Others are liturgically based, using Sukkot, Pesah, Hanukkah, and Tu bi-Shevat, among other occasions, to stir the spirit of the nature-loving Jew.  Often he seeks to re-define the meaning of ancient Jewish practices, or to ferret out their original, perhaps even pre-Israelite, meanings.  Gendler is a great appreciator of comparative mythology and the relationship between biblical and prior religious teachings.  Such classical students of religion as Bachofen, Pedersen, Goodenough, and Erich Neumann are much quoted in the course of this volume, showing the era in which Gendler received his most formative influences.  Sometimes he turns toward creating new Jewish or semi-Jewish rituals for the American setting.  His fall festival of jack-o-lanterns in the synagogue may not suit the taste of all his readers – but at least he presents it with a somewhat light touch.

The volume then goes on to deal with issues of war and peace, Israel and the diaspora.  Gendler has been a committed pacifist throughout his adult life.  The longest single essay in the volume is on “War and the Jewish Tradition,” published during the Vietnam era, when Gendler was a leading figure in the Jewish Peace Fellowship, encouraging selective conscientious objection.  He sees himself as a disciple of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and the Dalai Lama.  Indeed, he and his wife Mary have been engaged for quite a few years in a program of teaching techniques of non-violence to the Tibetan exile community in India, where they visit each year.  He is also the major discoverer and translator of the writings of Aaron Shmuel Tamarat, a Russian rabbi of the early twentieth century who opposed the first world war as he demurred from the growing nationalist self-definition emerging among Jews in Eastern Europe.

This is the place where I find myself most deeply at odds with this dear friend and mentor.  Gendler seems remarkably little moved by or interested in the particular sufferings of Jews in the very period of his own religious and intellectual formation.  This, I suppose, is part of what “Universalist” in the title means.  Everett Gendler is a citizen of the world.  Although he is the son of a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant, the very American soil of rural Iowa in which he was raised seems to have placed him at a great distance from what happened to those cousins and neighbors his parents had left behind.  Neither the agony of the Holocaust nor the great challenge it poses to pacifism, namely the importance and value of fighting the Nazis and their ilk, seems particularly disturbing to him.  He reads like an American clergyman of the Jewish persuasion, deeply and equally moved by injustice everywhere, but not transformed in any decisive way by the fact that a third of the world’s Jews, surely including parts of his own family, were butchered during his lifetime.  Nor does the desperate struggle faced by the survivors of those events to establish and defend a Jewish homeland seems to play any positive role in the Judaism he has taught and advocated over so many years.  As a long-committed left-wing Zionist, I too find a great deal to criticize in the Israeli enterprise, especially since the occupation of 1967.  But to disdain it altogether?  Just what was the Jewish people supposed to do in 1939, 1945, 1948, or 1967?  Move to Iowa?  We might recall how unwelcome Jews were in America when they most needed a home.  The announcement in this volume that Gendler has visited Israel only twice, and not since 1988, amid a life of extensive international travel, leaves me deeply disquieted.

The dismissal of Israel and the reasons for its existence raises a broader point as well.  It is not just political views regarding the Israel/Palestinian conflict that keep him from taking an interest in Israel.  I do not get the sense that the survival of the Jewish people as such has a significant place in Gendler’s hierarchy of values.  He loves Jewish text and Jewish ritual insofar as they reflect certain attitudes toward nature, time, and holiness.  But the ethnic component of Jewish life seems to mean rather little to him.  He seems quite content with the ongoing process of assimilation among American Jews, sometimes even seeming to celebrate it, as he celebrates life in remarkably American ways.

I conclude with a personal memory and a statement of gratitude.  Toward the end of my first year of rabbinical school (1962), I was unhappy enough that I thought of leaving.  It all seemed so narrow and small-minded!  I considered going to work for the United Nations, or maybe volunteering to join in the just emerging civil rights movement.  I took a ride to Princeton to consult with Everett Gendler, the paragon of universalist values in my life, even then.  He urged me to stay in seminary, reminding me that we all come to universal humanity from within the contexts of particularism, and that sometimes the most important work we need to do is right there in our own communities.  Universal humanity, he reminded me, is made up of distinctive human communities, including our own.  I took the lesson to heart and stayed in rabbinical school.  I somehow wish I felt more of this insight of my rebbe’s in his own life as presented in Judaism for Universalists. 

Rabbi Art Green is one of America’s most respected Jewish theologians. He is a founder and Rector of the Boston Hebrew College’s Rabbinic Program, formerly president of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, a scholar of Hasidism and Jewish mysticism and among his many books are:

• Radical Judaism: Rethinking God & Tradition. Yale University Press, 2010.^[4]
• A Guide to the Zohar. Stanford University Press, 2003.
• Ehyeh: A Kabbalah for Tomorrow. Jewish Lights Publishing, 2003.
• Seek My Face: A Jewish Mystical Theology. Jewish Lights Publishing, 2003.

***Rabbi Everett Gendler responds to Art Green’s review of Gendler’s book Judaism for Universalists

I very much appreciate Michael Lerner’s sensitivity and consideration in inviting me to respond to some of Art Greene’s critical reactions to Judaism for Universalists.  Art poses questions important to all of us who are active in and care for the future of Judaism and the Jewish community; he does so in openly critical fashion, yet respectfully.  I hope that I can respond in comparable fashion to the three central issues that he raises: pacifism, Israel, and Jewish survival.  If truly in a spirit of l’shem shamayim, for the sake of clarification (literally, “for the sake of heaven”), then all of us should benefit from this airing of important issues.

It is upon leaving “Judaism and the Natural World” (perhaps still, I hope, fresh, stimulating and of some value to readers) that his distress begins.  Art raises the haunting issue of Jewish pacifism with especial reference to World War II; no easy matter.  Discussion of this profound challenge has been tainted almost from the beginning by Gandhi’s ill-informed and lamentably inadequate response to the question posed to him in 1940 concerning the genocidal intent of the Nazi assault.  Gandhi’s off-hand advice of fully willing self-sacrifice to melt the heart of the opponent—not likely to have such effect where the initiating intent is genocidal—rightly evoked sharply critical responses from Martin Buber, Judah Magnes, and Chaim Greenberg.  This classic exchange is still worth re-reading as it relates to the question of conscientious objection during World War II.

More broadly stated, this issue is that of the especially ruthless opponent; it has received some consideration in recent nonviolent writings, but nothing approaching a satisfactory response to the challenge that Art lays down.  Would I have been a conscientious objector in World War II?  I cannot answer the question now since I did not face it then; I was a bit too young.  Most of my older friends willingly were drafted, a few, mostly Quakers, were conscientious objectors. By the time I had to register, the war was over, and as I recall, I did ask for conscientious objector status.  Had the war against Hitler still been raging,  despite my profound misgivings about the massive destruction and the obliteration of numberless noncombatants, I imagine that I would have felt the necessity to bear arms, despite the moral ambiguities; an alternative was, and is, hard to imagine.

When I did face the question personally, as a graduating seminary student in 1957, the particular challenge was service in the military chaplaincy during the Korean “Police Action” (never, I believe, a declared war).  During that conflict, from which our divinity student status had exempted us from the draft, the Jewish Theological Seminary, where I was a student, and the Rabbinical Assembly asked that we serve two years as military chaplains upon ordination.  I felt unable to serve in the military itself for reasons of conscience, and the military could not sanction a civilian chaplain ministering to the soldiers.  Consequently, with Rabbinical Assembly sanction, I did two years of alternative service as rabbi to a small liberal congregation in Mexico City; my salary was equivalent to that of a military chaplain, without, alas, the perquisites of Post Exchange (PX) or lifelong veterans benefits after discharge.

I have great affection and affinity for the absolutist nonviolent position of Rabbi Aaron Samuel Tamaret, a devout, gifted rabbi who served a small Jewish community in the town of Mileichich, Poland, for many decades until his death in 1931.  His writings critical of war as such, as well as of nationalist political Zionism, were passionately re-articulated in more recent times by the late Steven Schwarzschild, and are powerful and in many ways persuasive.  Finally, however, my own more middle position is closer to the reading of Judaism as insistent on the exercise of individual conscience and the possibility of selective conscientious objection.  Art notes the length of that essay reprinted in my book; it reflects my conviction that the traditional sources cited should be freshly available to any who may face such moral dilemmas on future occasions.  (I assume that such wrestling of conscience will not by then have been outsourced to Artificial Intelligence or Robots.)

What startled me in Art’s review, however, was his continuing critical tone towards pacifism in a further series of questions concerning Israel.  I guess that, along with his severe reservations about World War II, I had expected at least some appreciation for a number of recent achievements of active nonviolent struggle.  Besides Gandhi in India, what about Martin Luther King, Jr., in our own country?  What about the bloodless overthrow of Marcos in Manila, or the combination of forces mobilized by students in OTPOR to topple “the butcher of the Balkans,” Milosevic, in Serbia?  (A gripping video, at once exciting, amusing, and enlightening about that struggle, is “Bringing Down a Dictator,” available from the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC) in Washington, DC).  Heschel movingly appreciated the religious significance of King’s struggle.  From the perspective of text elucidation,  I sometimes visualize Mary’s and my post-“retirement” strategic nonviolence educational project with the Tibetan exile community in India, now in its twentieth year, as Midrash  through praxis of Zechariah 4:6 (“Not by military might, and not by destructive violence, but by My spirit…”)  Are these merely pretty prophetic pieties, nice lyrics for a Debbie Friedman tune, lip-words of little substance, or are they, in fact, pointers towards profound power sources only now being freshly explored and applied by such agencies as the Albert Einstein Institution and the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict?  The pioneering work of Gene Sharp, Peter Ackerman, Col. (Retired) Robert Helvey, and numerous others must be mentioned in the context of this challenge, as well as practical ventures such as Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb’s brave attempt at establishing Shomrei Shalom, a covenanted community of Jews devoted to living truly nonviolent lives.

Regrettably, Art seems unable to view the present because of understandable concern about the recent traumatic past.  The destruction of a third of our people did affect all of us, myself included; at Babi Yar I wept at the sight of bones mixed in with the mud.  Some of those murdered there might, indeed, have been distant relatives; had I been living there, the bones would almost surely have included my own.  The ashes of the holocaust spared none of us, not even natives of rural Iowa. “Blue skies, smiling at me, nothing but blue skies…:” those cheerful lyrics to the old pop tune describe no  post-twentieth century horizon of anyone I know. But those ashes have not been finally determinative of my basic religious-societal outlook, even though they have affected it profoundly, especially in questions of theodicy and Divine omnipotence.  Instead, they have contributed to my excitement about and advocacy for the relevance and urgency of nonviolent activism.  Might such strategic nonviolence be  the urgently needed implement enabling the dictates of conscience to engage effectively in the realm of power political action?  In our Tibetan project, we often refer to it as morality with muscle, spirit with sinews.  As I read his dismissive comments about pacifism, I am saddened to see that none of these developments seem to affect Art’s negative perspective on non-violence.  After all, even during World War II, both the reform and conservative rabbinical associations issued statements affirming the right of Jews to be conscientious objectors on the basis of acknowledged Jewish religious teachings.  I sense little of this in Art, and regret that his final challenges and queries relate solely to the State of Israel, nothing else.  So let’s turn directly to that issue.

I sometimes characterize my position as non-Zionist, non-Israel-centric.  I explicitly affirm the value of Diaspora Jewish life, I do not regard the State of Israel as somehow my representative before the world, nor do I see the State of Israel as the center of Jewish existence on this earth, with Jews living elsewhere necessarily referring their Jewish lives to a central point called Israel.  At the same time, I also clearly affirm the right of Jews to live securely in the ancestral land of Israel alongside other inhabitants of the land.  Rather than enter into the thicket of detailing the precise meaning of each of those broad characterizations, let me sketch briefly my personal relations to Zionism over recent decades to see if Art’s perception of my “disdain” for Israel is adequate or accurate.  Although this may at first appear too narrowly personal, I think that the considerations may apply to many concerned Jews for whom Israel is not central to their Jewish lives.

It was when I entered the University of Chicago as an undergraduate, in 1946, that I first heard  of Ichud, the group advocating a bi-national state in Palestine rather than partition.  Among its leading representatives were Henrietta Szold, founder of Hadassah, Martin Buber, Judah Magnes, and Ernst Simon.  I was drawn to support for the American Friends of Ichud through conversations with Maurice Friedman and Don Peretz.  When partition was the final decision of the United Nations, I supported that position even while fully cognizant of the moral ambiguities of nation-states as we know them.  Art’s questions about 1945, 1946, 1948, and 1967 are trenchant and deserve a fuller answer than I can attempt in this context.  That the power-political nation-state is deeply ambiguous as a moral entity has long been acknowledged.  Tamaret, in his critique of World War I (most of which I’ve translated, but it has never found a publisher), goes so far as to suggest that Providence may have found it necessary to destroy the Second Temple and see our people exiled from the Holy Land because of the polluting effects of nationalism and its vestiges.  Nor was our early 20^th century shtetl rov (village rabbi) the first to voice such misgivings about “the conquest of the land”.  The French scholar, Andre Neher, in a volume dedicated to the memory of Leon Roth, Studies in Rationalism, Judaism and Universalism, edited by Rafael Loewe (imagine such a title today!), refers to one classical rabbinic tradition that characterizes Joshua as lista’a, a bandit.  Why?  For failing in his true mission, to achieve “a peaceful coexistence of Hebrew and Canaanite in the land of Canaan!”

Once again, as with demonic Nazism in World War II, a national refuge for Jews may have been a morally ambiguous yet irreducible human need at that terrible post-concentration camps period of human history.  (This issue actually deserves deeper investigation.)  Further, the establishment and maintenance of Jewish sovereignty in those years is hardly imaginable without force of arms.  Carl Sandburg, not at all in this context, succinctly portrayed the general issue of people laying claim to and occupying land in these lines from The People, Yes:

“Get off this estate.” / “What for?” / “Because it’s mine.” /  “Where did you get it?” / “From my father.” / “Where did he get it?” / “From his father.” / ”And where did he get it?” / “He fought for it.” /  “Well, I’ll fight you for it.”

An ethnically defined national entity for Jews in desperate need?  To the world, it appeared an undeniable necessity, as attested by the U. N. Partition Resolution.  “The first flowering of our redemption,” as the prayer for the welfare of Israel confidently (pro)claims?  Profoundly dubious theology, some of us would argue.

Notwithstanding, post-June, 1967, was a moment of redemptive opportunity.  As urged by Yeshayahu Leibovitz and a few others, the immediate evacuation of the newly occupied territories, with the implied re-affirmation of the truce lines of 1948, might well have invited a belated, contemporary fulfillment of that earlier Jewish understanding of Joshua’s true mission: “a peaceful coexistence of Hebrew and Palestinian within the land of Palestine.”  Sandburg’s dilemma might have been resolved with, “Well, let’s share it.” Who can know what positive energies and practical policies such a “nationalist politics of generosity” might have released in the Middle East?  (One formulation of the practical meaning of a “politics of generosity” can be found in Michael Lerner’s proposals for a Global Marshall Plan.)

There were a few other opportunities over the years, including initiatives of Yitzhak Rabin, along with the strangely ignored 2002 Saudi-initiated proposal, re-stated in 2008, for the recognition of Israel by every single Arab state in exchange for withdrawal from all territories occupied during the 1967 war.  Why was this not investigated?  Was it that throughout this still seemingly fluid period, the idea of redemption triumphed over the idea of refuge?  With the increase in settlement activity and the escalation of the rhetoric of occupation, we saw vividly realized, in daily news reports, Rabbi Tamaret’s decades old fears about nationalist excesses.  I often think of the settlements expansion as false messianists and redemptionists hijacking world support, Jewish and non-Jewish, for Israel as refuge for those Jews in need of rescue from persecution, and brazenly directing it towards sanction for religious imperialism.  In the face of that calamitous hijacking, how shamefully supine has been our American Jewish community, passively offering support to the endless occupation and illegal seizure of Palestinian lands through silence before self-appointed, questionably representative communal voices, while acquiescing before charitable contributions that effectively support settlements.

Against this background, what Art reads as my “disdain” for the struggle to establish Israel as a Jewish homeland might, to me more accurately, be read as “distress” or “dismay” at what has become of this flawed yet initially noble struggle.  The once heroic effort to secure the conditions for Jews to live lives of dignity in the ancestral land has increasingly become a policy of systematic oppression of fellow human beings with valid claims, also, to the land.  How morally agonizing to experience this; it is far removed from disdain.

Quite apart from this, those of us who deny the claim that the State of Israel is rightly the central focus of world Jewish life see dangerous consequences in an over-dependency of Jewish identity on any power-political entity, including the State of Israel.  Perhaps our maintaining a distance from Israel at this time is more a quiet testimony of rejection of this claim than disdain for this undeniably remarkable Jewish communal endeavor in so many respects.  Whatever the inner sentiments of those of us whose passports do not show frequent Israeli entries, I question this criterion— is it a latter day successor to tzi-tzis inspections?—as a valid measure of our Jewish dedication or concern.

A brief word of explanation is in order about the reference to “tzi-tzis inspections.”  At one time, the very Orthodox would regularly check the “fringes on the corners of the garments,” worn by students as undershirts, to make sure that they had been correctly tied and were being properly maintained.

For a fuller, nuanced sense of my position on some of the larger issues, the essay on “MLK Jr. in the Holy Land: the Tragedy of His Absence” brings into active interplay nonviolent interventions with issues of conflicting claims, human rights, and ways to work towards justice and reconciliation nonviolently.

One other pained question that Art raises deserves at least a brief reaction in this already too-long response: concern for Jewish survival.  The complexity of the question is obvious, but for brevity I’d like to focus on just two points, one a proposition, one a sobriquet from Art’s review.

1) The  proposition
Concern for Jewish survival cannot be measured by explicit self-reference to Jewish survival.  In other words, Jewish survival, somewhat analogous to happiness, may rather be a concomitant, an accompaniment to the pursuit of an intrinsically worthy goal; aimed at directly, it eludes ones grasp.  It’s a sort of benign version of collateral damage; shall we call it collateral reward?  This insight first occurred to me some years ago when reading a survival task force report from some agency, followed immediately by reading a report from Richard Siegel, at that time the effective, creative director of the National Foundation for Jewish Culture.  As I read the exciting reports of many artistic achievements, I suddenly realized that we, communally, had focused upon the wrong ten letter word.  Not    c-o-n-t-i-n-u-i-t-y but rather c-r-e-a-t-i-v-i-t-y was the key. Your goal is continuity?  Aim for creativity and continuity will follow.  Aim for continuity as such, setting aside what Blake calls “the Poetic or Prophetic character,” the truly creative, and you’re unlikely “to do other than repeat the same dull round over again.” (—“There Is No Natural Religion”). 
Am I concerned for Jewish survival?  Although I do not focus directly on the question, more than 35 years spent serving congregations and as the Jewish chaplain at a private boarding school might suggest some sort of answer.  Excessive focus on Jewish survival may, in fact, have the opposite of the desired effect.  Isn’t added esteem for Judaism, with consequent positive effects on Jewish survival, a natural outcome of such initiatives as Tikkun’s Network for Spiritual Progressives?  The survival may assume a novel form, but forms fluctuate in this dynamic world of becoming, they are not eternally fixed.  Of course pay attention to, and strengthen, the generating matrix, the rock from which we were hewn, the womb from which we emerged.  But excessive Judaic self-reference can compromise the finest of endeavors.  By analogy, I am reminded of the comment about the cantor at a service to which I recently took someone observing a yarhzeit:  “He was quite aware of his own voice.”

One goal that Art and I share demands initiatives, stemming from Jewish sources, that address the broader needs of our world.  This, I am convinced, contributes to Jewish survival even as it more immediately aims at other goals.  May I cite one personal example that has taught me a lot and affirmed my sense of this imperative?  For my 85^th birthday, some former students from Phillips Academy including our two daughters, along with two nieces and three dear friends involved in the Jewish community, established the Gendler Grapevine, a five year project to conclude on my 90^th birthday (may God grant such length of years!) dedicated to “supporting lasting initiatives within the Jewish community that promote environmental sustainability and social justice.”  (If interested, check the impressive website.)  Annual solicitations for grant proposals from summer camps, temples, seminaries, and religious schools have yielded an amazing array of proposals, many quite creative, and the small grants have enabled many of them to be implemented, at times with community-wide transformative effects.  This simple but astute intervention, admirably administered and executed by the group, is not aimed at “Jewish survival;” yet can anyone doubt its collateral contribution to that result, along with some really valuable environmental and social justice accomplishments?

2)The sobriquet
“an American clergyman of the Jewish persuasion:” what an interesting, intriguing characterization of my position.  Is it lish’vach or lig’nai, in praise or in condemnation?  A bit of both as I read it.  Yet how profoundly appropriate to our unprecedented situation as American Jews.  All of us are daily aware of the remarkable freedoms and opportunities that we enjoy in these United States; we also daily benefit from and struggle with the tensions/creative possibilities of caring deeply about being Jews while also being fully participating citizens of this remarkable society.

Gary Zola, rabbi, professor, Director of the American Jewish archives, has pointed out, in vividly engaging lectures, two features of Jewish life in the United States that distinguish it from Jewish life in any other country at any other time.  a)  Jews were physically present at the time of the founding of these United States; b) there was no state establishment of religion.  What might be the implications of these unique features to American Jewish life?  Who could foretell?  Who can foretell?  Who fully comprehends?  What do the mandates of our birth-charter as a people, “be thou a blessing,” “in thee shall all the peoples of the earth be blessed,” mean in this new context?  Is the gorgeous Great American Songbook, so much of which is penned by Jewish composers, an expression of that mandate?  The disproportionate numbers of Jewish Nobel laureates and academics, both teaching and administrative?  The numbers of Jews in the healing professions, the arts?  What about the liturgical creativity and the wave of new music, at once distinctly American yet rooted in our traditional prayers?  I can only imagine that God’s ears tingle with joy at these fresh expressions of appreciation for the gift of life on this planet.   And on and on.  In this unprecedented context, might rabbis benefit from this self-definition as “American clergymen/women of Jewish persuasion?”  Colleagues, try it on for size.  Does it fit?  How does it feel?  Is it, perhaps, another variation of the traditional designation, mara d’atra, for the local rabbi, the resident rabbinic presence?

Ours is, indeed, a brave new world, threatened by unprecedented possibilities of mass destruction, be they nuclear or environmental, along with quite unprecedented possibilities of great human advances through fresh scientific discoveries and deeper understanding of the great web of life; ours is truly both a brave but also a cowering new world.  Through what new forms will life continue its grand unfolding? What is our function in it?  Our task as a people?  Our assignments as individuals?    I confess that I kvell (take great pleasure with just a hint of appropriate pride) at the phenomenon of a golus (Diaspora) Jewish kid from New Jersey standing at the pinnacle of world scholarship in Jewish mystical studies.  How improbable.  I am saddened that my dear friend and beloved colleague is not able to experience admittedly lesser, but perhaps somewhat comparable satisfaction from the improbable phenomenon of a small town Iowa Jewish kid contributing possibly marginal, but perhaps anticipatory glimpses, of what lies ahead for ever-in-transformation Judaism.  Daily I am grateful for the sense of assignment that I have received from the improbable combination of Chariton, Iowa, birth and Sinaitic inheritance.  I can only hope that these comments on Art’s critique may help him join me in gratitude that our tradition emphasizes not so much a Pandora’s Box of Daily Woes but rather God’s Ark of Daily  Novel Possibilities (“introducing novelty daily as the work of Creation continues,” in the words of a daily morning prayer).  How else account for the improbability of an Art Green and an Everett Gendler, antagonists yet allies, sharing in the shaping of yet another chapter in the remarkable Redemptive Adventures of the Jewish People?

—
Rabbi Everett Gendler is one of the towering figures of Jewish progressive activism in the U.S., a pioneer of Jewish non-violence, environmentalism, vegetarianism, the Havurah movement, and involving Jewish leaders (including A.J. Heschel) in going to the South to protest segregation in the Civil Rights movement.