Hi, everybody. Good evening. Thank you all so much for being here, both in the room and also online. We're so honored to be doing the third session of our Theology Talks Masterclass Series. We opened our series a few weeks ago with Rabbi Shai Held discussing the central theme of love and compassion in Jewish faith, often misrepresented as more of a Christian theological tenet than Jewish.
In our second session with Menachem Rosenstaff, We reckon with God in the aftermath of the Holocaust, lamenting, accusing, raging, but still addressing the divine through reimagined psalms. And tonight, in our closing session, we will explore the profound mystery of the hiding God, and the questions that arise when God may seem absent in our world. We are honored to welcome Dr. Arnold Eisen as our guest this evening.
Dr. Eisen is one of the world's foremost authorities on American Judaism, and is professor of Jewish thought. and Chancellor Emeritus at the Jewish Theological Seminary. During his tenure as Chancellor, Eisen oversaw curricular and programmatic innovations designed to give rabbinic, cantorial, and educational leaders the skills needed to cope with the unprecedented societal and spiritual changes confronting Jews today. Dr. Eisen has conducted frank discussions of faith, commandment, and community with hundreds of audiences at synagogues, universities, summer camps, and other venues throughout North America, and those conversations form the basis of Seeking the Hiding God, the volume we are discussing tonight.
In addition to Seeking the Hiding God, Dr. Eisen is the author of many scholarly articles and books, and his op-eds and blog posts have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, and many others. His blog series, On My Mind, has reached many thousands of readers. Thank you both so much.
Thank you, Mara. And thank you. Can everyone hear me? Okay, it is wonderful, and I think we'll speak in the mic because there are people who are watching from afar who want to...
It'll be a far more interesting dialogue with them if they can hear what's going on. What do I call you now? You're Chancellor Emeritus.
Do I call you Chancellor? Do I call you Arnie? What do I call you? You should call me Arnie, or Sir. Okay.
Arnie, thank you so much for joining us. This is a third of a three-part series. In a way, they're all interconnected, dealing with questions of Jewish theology of faith. And it's wonderful to welcome everyone here, both in person and online.
And it's also a celebration of the new volume that's just come to be published, Seeking the Hiding God, a personal theological essay. And I congratulate you, and we all congratulate you. Thank you.
So you have been a scholar of the modern Jewish experience throughout your career, and then you spent over a decade leading the Jewish Theological Seminary, the training ground for future theological voices, and now you have just published a book. book, a personal theological essay. So tell me how this book fits into the arc of your extraordinary career and what you're seeking to accomplish, why it's written the way it is. We're going to get to that in a moment.
But why did he write this book? It's not obvious, I guess. Thanks. And you've named the paradox that here I've...
I've been my entire adult life a professor of modern Judaism, which means I've been teaching other people's Jewish theologies. And then I become the head of a Jewish institution, which has the name Theological in its title. And I never forced myself to sit down and figure out what I actually believed about all these questions and all these people that I was teaching. You know, I would teach Martin Buber. I've just been reading Martin Buber.
I taught Abraham Heschel today. And I say, yeah, I agree with that, or I don't agree with that, or this strikes me as coherent, or this doesn't strike me. But I never put it all together. And I increasingly had the sense, which we sometimes have in life, that there's something I should be doing that I was avoiding, that I was avoiding doing this.
And when you're chancellor of JTS, or the rabbi of a major congregation, your calendar gets to be full, and you have every excuse in the world for not doing what it is. you should be doing and avoiding. But then when I stepped down and had a sabbatical and it was COVID, it was lockdown, and I was approaching the age of 70, and I figured it's now or never, I really want to... write something down so my kids will know.
I have two kids in their 30s and that was the the first motive. I wanted my kids to know what their father believed about God and faith and in order for my kids to know what their father believed, their father had to figure out what their father believed. And so I sat down and did this exercise and really was in fear and trembling because I was afraid that I was going to find out.
that I believed a lot less than I wanted to. And in the event, after spending, what, a year and a half, two years, reading and writing and thinking, I found out that I believed a lot more than I thought I did. And I decided I really wanted to share that with people.
But I didn't want to write an academic book about Judaism. I didn't want to tell people anymore that this is what Buber felt and this is what Judaism says. I wanted to talk about my personal...
reflections and my personal doubts, and that's why there's a lot of memoir material in the book, and that's why I called it a personal theological essay to emphasize the humility of the project, that it's just me. This is not Judaism, and I'm not telling you what you should believe, let alone what a Jew has to believe. I'm telling you what, at this point in my life, I believe.
Thank you, and it's a beautiful book. Flow of the book is different than any, you know, reading Buber or Heschel or Kaplan, you know, any sort of traditional theologian in a sense in two ways. Number one, you begin by way of a series of letters back and forth with loved ones, people you've known your whole life, asking theological questions.
hearing their questions responding. So the format is different. And then, of course, as you alluded to, there's an element of personal biography in this story, that you're not simply just stating principles of faith, but you're weaving in narratives of your own life in a way your theology recapitulating biography here.
So I was wondering if you could speak to both these elements, the letters. And then the personal dimensions. And we'll probe into that more.
Yeah, so let me start with the letters. So I needed to find a voice. And after a life of scholarship, I didn't have that voice ready to hand. Like, how do you write a book like this? I'd never done it before.
A friend of mine said to me, you know, you really should write a novel. And I said, if I could write a novel, I'd write a novel. But I don't have the skill to write a novel.
But I wanted to find a different voice than one has in scholarship. More personal, less authoritative. And I found my voice by imagining that I was writing letters to my friends.
And so I decided, okay, I'm going to write some letters to my friends. But because I wanted a variety of voices in my book, I'll stop there. The Siddur has many voices in it.
The Torah has many voices in it. Deuteronomy is not Leviticus. The Bible has many voices in it.
The Song of Songs is not Job. It's not Ecclesiastes. And so I wanted my book to have many voices in it. So I... I hit upon this experiment, and I think it worked, of writing letters to some good friends of mine whom I knew believed different things than I did.
Some of them think the whole project of theology is a waste of time, and I wanted that voice in the book, but I wrote letters back to myself from them in their voices. They're good friends. I've had endless conversations with them. I know what they think about these things.
I know the way they express themselves. So I found their voices, and I wanted the voices in our heads that challenge faith. Like I wanted Freud in the book, because Freud's in my head.
I happen to be teaching him this week. Freud's out of this whole wish fulfillment, it's all nonsense, it's all illusion, you know. I wanted that voice of doubt and challenge in the book because he's in our heads.
And so all of us walk around with a variety of voices, and I wanted you all, my readers, to find yourself, as it were, in the book. Even if you don't agree with me. I'm hoping you'll agree with one of the friends that I have whose voice enters into the book. So that explains why I have the diversity of voices.
I wanted the book to be personal because I came to the conclusion that really all theology is personal, whether it admits it or not. And the more I started looking into it, I found out that some of our greatest theologians have highly personal theologies. I mean, Rabbi Cosgrove and I share. A friendship with a man who just passed away, Paul Mendesfloor, who wrote a biography of Martin Buber.
Paul Mendesfloor starts his biography of Martin Buber with a story that Martin Buber was abandoned by his mother. at the age of three. So the author of I and Thou is scarred for life and shaped for life by the fact that his mother abandoned him at a young age and he saw her once again for his entire life.
And if you read Jewish theology, you find there's a personal element all over the place. So I realized, and you should all be thinking about this for yourselves as I speak, if you were to ask yourself, what in my personal experience led me to have the kind of faith, or not to have faith, that I do. What in my biography was formative, I thought that I should share some of those things with you so you can understand how I got to where I am.
So I start... predictably, with my parents, right? With these deep emotional bonds. Before there's anything cognitive or intellectual, there's a deep emotional bond. So my mother lighting candles every Friday night and doing, you know, with her hands, et cetera.
And my father putting his hands on my head and giving me the priestly benediction and crying every single time, crying. These are powerful memories. And so they stay with you throughout.
All your years, as you study more about Judaism and go through periods of more faith or less faith, you've always got, if you grew up like this, that deep emotional bond. And then there are other experiences in my life that I talk about in the book, which are less typical, perhaps. The interview, the hour and three quarters that I got to spend with Abraham Joshua Heschel, it changed my life. Or, you know, the experience I had at the Western Wall, where I actually had a prayer. that was answered in a very tangible way.
I can tell you about that if you like. But other things, I'm talking in the book about a whole set of experiences that made me the Jew that I am. And I think that we often undervalue these experiences.
I'll just say one more thing about this, that people have asked me, what do you think is the origin? What is the baseline? What is the strongest foundation of your relationship to Judaism?
And honestly, I believe it's this, that my father, who was born in 1911, was a victim of the encephalitis epidemic that took over America in the 1920s. He was in a coma for two weeks. He was not expected to live.
And he lived, and he and his mother made a kind of vow of thanksgiving to God. And every single day for the rest of his life, my father thanked God for being alive. And I am the witness and heir to that. Pattern of my father thanking God for life, and that is the basis of my Judaism, gratitude for life, right there. There's an incident.
I want to actually skip to a later question based on where you just went, that you spoke with the famed Jewish theologian Richard Rubinstein, who... I'm going to read, it says, years later, this is from the book, during a break from an academic conference in New England, the Jewish theologian Richard Rubinstein, the death of God, we'll talk about that in a minute, suggested to me that those childhood experiences were what enabled my faith, unlike his, to survive confrontation with the Holocaust. So, in other words, that it is these... These formative experiences in your youth, that whereas for some a confrontation with unspeakable evil might break faith, that because you had implanted within you personally, but it also is a fascinating inquiry into when Jewish theology gets baked into the system, right? That childhood experiences...
A parent saying Shema to their child when they're tucked into bed, a parent blessing a child at a Shabbat table, candles being lit, these become encoded in our DNA for the rest of our lives. And I don't want to say that this is the only way, that people have many various paths in and out of faith, and there's no... One way to get there. There are many ways.
But Rubenstein told me that he had acquired faith in God intellectually, almost rationally at a certain point. I think it was college. And then he confronted the Holocaust and it washed away.
Well, let me say that when I was a teenager, I lived in a row house in Philadelphia and the walls between our house and the house next door were very thin. And I had a friend who lived next door whose bedroom was across the wall from mine. And we could play music and hear each other at night. We could knock on the wall and talk to each other at night.
And he was killed. He was murdered by someone at work when I was a teenager and he was about 18 years old. And I remember I did not expect God to protect him.
I wasn't angry at God for not protecting him. It was just not in my conception of God that God was going to protect him. And then I had a cousin who died in a drowning accident.
And the same thing. I wasn't, I was shocked, I was sad, but I didn't blame God for this. It wasn't in my consciousness to expect God to save my next-door neighbor or my cousin. And so, when I first encountered the Holocaust, I didn't have the theological crisis that some people do from the Holocaust, because I didn't have that notion of God in the first place. I knew enough history, I knew enough biography.
There were so many tragedies in the world and so much suffering, and I didn't think that that was part of what God did. And so unlike some of our great Jewish theologians, Rubenstein being one and Yitzgrinberg being another one, I didn't go through a period of doubt and disillusionment because of the Holocaust. I don't know why.
I'm not saying this is the right way to be. I'm just saying this is the way I am. So say Shema when you tuck your kids to bed at night.
Absolutely, and bless them, and if you can, cry. So you speak, I have like 8,000 questions here. The chapter on Passover and the work of redemption, it raises a question of how Jews do theology. It's almost that we do it in community with brisket in front of us. We establish our sense of self, our sense of God, our sense of God intervening.
We don't just sit in a library and open up a book, but there's something about how we do theological discourse that's... better done in community. I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about that.
Yeah, and so when I started writing the book, I often got the reaction, I thought Jews don't do theology. That's something Christians do. Jews don't do theology.
And the more I read, the more I realized it's not just me. The great Jewish philosopher, theologian, David Novak, writes an essay about Jewish theology and says that people have said to him, why are you doing Jewish theology? Jews don't do theology. I kept encountering this. And the answer is, as the rabbi just said, we don't do it in a systematic, creedal way.
way. We don't call conferences to decide what Jews are supposed to believe and then kick people out who don't believe it and fight wars over these little theological points. That's not what we do.
We don't do it in a vacuum or in a library. We do it largely in rituals and observances and in in Tfilah. The Siddur is a theological text and I already told you it has millions of images of God in it.
It doesn't have one credo belief in God. So we sit around this Passover table and hopefully have a wonderful discussion about why we're there and what it all means. And how could it be that God waited 400 years and finally decides to take the Israelites out of Egypt and then all these Egyptians get killed in the process? And so we raise all these incredible questions surrounded by friends and family and four cups of wine and a really good meal. It's wonderful.
It's brilliant. And I think that is much more typical. of the way Jews do theology, and the key is, you're right, we do it together.
And we don't have an entrance test before we sit down at the Passover Seder saying, well, you've got to believe this, this, and this, or you can't sit here. And we don't give a test at the end saying, oh, now that you've been through this, do you believe X, Y, and Z? We don't do that.
That's not who we are. It's much better than that. Yeah. Right.
You write here, I underline this passage, faith is not a yes, no matter, belief or non-belief. God or atheism, truth or heresy, tradition or modernity, religion or science. So it's not so much either a catechism or be a specific destination.
It sounds like where we are today could be different than where we are tomorrow and that we're able to house a plurality of voices. You might open up a siddur thinking one thing. I might open up a siddur as long as we sing off-key together.
Exactly right. It has to reach both of us. And the other thing I love about the Passover Seder, which I think is, you know, I say very Jewish, but it's key to my Judaism, is even before you begin, even before you begin, the rabbis front-load the message, lest you miss it, that... Let all who are hungry come and eat.
You know, you should sit around this Passover Seder and have your good meal and your four cups of wine, and you can debate for hours and hours on end why God did or did not redeem the Israelites from Egypt. Make sure the hungry people get fed. Make sure the hungry people get fed.
That's bottom line. Don't leave here without vowing that you're going to do more for redemption than you were doing before you started. make sure the hungry get fed. And that to me is, there are some creedal, there are some things, there's things, Judaism cares about the world, right? You can't be a Jew and not care what happens to other people.
You cannot, it's not possible, right? That's not what the tradition wants. So I want to turn to a few scenes of the book that I was personally very moved by, and there are several, we might not get to all of them.
But you described the moment shortly before you were to leave Oxford for doctoral work in Jerusalem. You went to synagogue and you lifted the Torah after the chanting that day. I held the scroll on my... Do you want to read this?
I can... I'll read it. But you can describe the scene of holding the Torah as the Haftorah was read. You had it for about 15 minutes, as many of us have done, and you felt at that...
interval a strong sense of connection to the Torah I was holding and through the Torah to God. And that seemed to be a moment of emunah or faith that you developed this relationship. And that's why I wrote a book called Taking Hold of Torah out of that momentary experience. And I would say it was more about the Torah than it's about God. And that's true for many Jews.
And that's how come We can spend our lives seeking the hiding God and not necessarily finding the hiding God, but being faithful Jews. Because you hold on to the Torah and somehow God's in that Torah. And what I wrote there, I couldn't have said it at the time, but here's what I knew. I knew that as long as I had the Torah with me, I would not be lost and I would not lose myself.
That somehow came to me at that moment. And then I go to Israel. and of all these powerful experiences in three years when I'm doing my PhD at the Hebrew University and those experiences turn out to be very formative.
So you don't plan these things at the time. This is how life takes off. But I get to Oxford exactly when the 1973 war breaks out.
So I encounter indifference and anti-Semitism for the very first time. Very powerful. And then my second year at Oxford is 74-75 and a whole bunch of Israelis who have fought in the war, are coming to Oxford once they get released from the army for R&R.
Two of them become really close friends of mine. And then when I go to Israel, I've had this experience of exile, but I had the Torah. And I come to Israel to do my PhD in Jerusalem at the Hebrew University when Israel is still recovering from the war and have a whole set of other powerful experiences which take me closer to God. You want me to talk about those?
Please. So there's one, okay, here's one story. I went to the Western Wall regularly when I got to Israel to do the PhD. Those of you who've been there in the 70s, it was perfectly safe to wander around the old city.
So I would go to the old city, and I would stand by the Western Wall, and I would feel nothing. I kept disappointing myself, like, why don't I feel something? Like you were talking to a wall. Yeah.
And all these people around me seem to be like flying and they're having fervent prayer conversations with God. So I did something I've never done before. I prayed for a prayer. I prayed for a prayer.
And a little piece of paper comes flying through the breeze and lands in my hands. It's a page torn out of a siddur. And it's not just any page, it's ashray.
And the significance of it being ashray is... The prayer I got when I prayed for a prayer was a prayer I knew by heart all along. So I tell this story and I say, what am I going to do with this?
Does this prove that God always answers prayer? I don't think so. But when you have an experience like this, you know that you just had an amazing experience.
I have that piece of paper in a drawer in my bureau. As long as I live, I will never throw it away. It's precious to me.
It's evidence of this experience. And I'm doing what I think I'm supposed to do with it, which is I'm sharing it with you. And maybe you're recalling experiences of this sort that you've had in your life that have confirmed. your path. There are many more such experiences in Israel.
I studied the Gospel of John with a Catholic priest visiting from America who participated in an interfaith group, and one day after we got to be good friends, and he thought he could tell me the truth, he said, you know, Arnie, you Jews will never understand the Holocaust until you realize that that's your lot in life, to be on the cross. That's what you're here for, always. And I thanked him very much for his honesty. And that's not Judaism. I'm never going to believe that that's the lot of Jews.
I'm never going to believe that that's the fate of Judaism. That experience, though, that was a moment that left me with something that scarred me in a certain way. It gave me resolution. I'm not going to do this. Judaism is about life.
It's not about being on the cross. So there are others. Can I ask you about one specific one?
Yeah, please. It was, you were walking through Emek Rafaim on Rachel Imenu Street in 75 or 76, and I believe it was Yom Kippur. It was around the time of Yom Kippur. It wasn't Yom Kippur itself. And you say you were approaching the corner of Kofshei Katamon, a bus stop on the left.
I recall no tug on my sleeve, no voice in my ear. Certainly no apparition of the angel of death, just a sudden, powerful awareness that I had never had before, despite years of reading books in which the subject of death featured prominently. And I'm just trying to get to...
But nonetheless, a new awareness came to me forcibly that evening. I myself was going to die one day. And you say very...
emotionally i screamed no at the top of my lungs and quickly looked around to see if anyone had seen or heard me no one had thankfully the streets were deserted shutters on nearby apartments were closed i was alone and walked faster in a sweat shaking my head at the knowledge i now carried so i'm just wondering if you could reflect on that uh what what do you think happened that day i have no idea i have no idea i think that I mean, intellectually, we all know we're going to die. But intellectually, we all know we're going to die. And as I said, I had lost my next-door neighbor as a teenager who had been murdered, and I lost my cousin to a drowning accident.
And lots of people in my experience had died. And I lived with my grandfather, and he passed away when I was eight. And I knew all of this. And I read countless books about religion.
But there's something that I had been repressing. And I had this experience. Again, I'm... I'm reporting it.
And I think that to be honest about one's theology, one has to report such experiences. To be honest with yourself and with those you're speaking to, in this case, who'll be my kids, I wanted them to know that this changed me. And as I write here, Yom Kippur was never the same again. Judaism was never the same again. But certainly, Yom Kippur is designed to bring us face to face with the fact of our mortality.
And Many of us, even on Yom Kippur, manage to avoid that. The music is great, the liturgy is long, and we stand up and we sit down. And if we want to knock in front of it, we can manage to knock in front of it. To me, I don't need this on Yom Kippur.
I've got this every day. So I'm just saying that when you think about this, religion is much more an immediate, personal issue. than a theoretical one.
And so when I read the book of Leviticus, let's say, which we're going to come to in a few weeks, and we read about all of these sacrifices, right? You know, I learned this from the Jewish philosopher Michael Wischigrad, who has a great book you may not know about called The Body of Faith, but he writes about this quite beautifully. So you can imagine what it was like as an Israelite.
to bring the sacrifice to the altar and keep his hands, because it was men doing this, on that animal as the animal dies and hearing it scream and smelling its blood and knowing that the animal is a mammal and that you're a mammal too. And then you read of this and you realize, hey, I'm a mammal too, and I'm reading this. But this is not just abstract and theoretical.
So your relationship to that portion of the Torah changes. when you carry this consciousness into it. And I think you can't carry this consciousness around with you every second of every day because you don't want to be morbid and you want to be celebrating life, etc., etc.
But I'm confessing here that my relationship to Judaism changed that day. So, let's keep going from death to life. Life. Baby, baby, I hear a symphony from the Supremes. This is what you...
sang and danced around the room as your, I believe, oldest child, your daughter was born. Our first child was born. So that was also a moment that over and over, dozens of times, uncontrollably, thank God, thank God.
So speak to that moment. Yeah, so. If you were to ask me what was the religious high point of your life, undoubtedly the religious high point of my life was watching my daughter be born. And so I thought I should tell the story.
The rabbi has just, they wash her off and they hand her to me, and I do two things. Nothing had been planned. I didn't know what I was going to do when my daughter was born. But you didn't say a bracha.
You started singing the Supremes. I started singing, baby, baby, I hear a symphony, because I love to sing and I love to sing Motown. And so I started singing the Supremes.
And then I didn't say a bracha, but I said dozens of times, maybe hundreds of times, thank God, thank God, thank God, as I was dancing around the room. Now, this is where... Being a scholar of modern Judaism impacts the way that you have religious experiences. So I knew that Martin Buber has an interpretation of miracle in his great book, Moses, which I recommend to all of you. There's a chapter called The Wonder at the Sea.
And Buber says two things about miracle. It's not a suspension of natural events. Nature does not get, the laws of nature do not get broken. But rather...
The laws of cause and effect are in place, but you see through them. He says the sole cause, S-O-L-E, cause, behind the nexus of cause and effect becomes transparent to you. The sole power is revealed.
And I say here, I had reviewed my high school biology text in advance of this birth, so I knew something about human reproduction again, and my wife and I had done Lamaze together. So I knew something about the laws of cause and effect. And yet, when that moment happened, you could not convince me that we did it ourselves.
That God was, in some sense, in that room. And then my friend said, well, you were excited. Of course you said thank God, you were really grateful.
But you don't really think that God had something to do with that. For Buber, the second aspect of miracle is, he says, you abide in the astonishment of that moment. You have that moment of astonishment, and you don't think it away. You abide in it forever after. And to me, that makes sense to me because of this.
You still can't convince me that we did it ourselves, my wife and I. Now, how did God help? I have no idea. And this is, I think, important for theologians to say, but certainly I, to be honest, My resolution in this book was, I'm not going to say anything that I can't stand behind, but I'm also not going to say less than I believe. I'm not going to say more than I believe, but I'm also not going to say less than I believe.
And so I believe that somehow God is involved in this. This is part of God's role as creator. But what it means, I don't know. I make comments about what it means to love God and spread God's love around later in the book. Maybe you're going to ask me about that.
But I say also... I believe these things. I don't know what they mean, but I firmly believe them. And I think that's true of a lot of us.
And we shouldn't worry about the fact that we can't fully explain it to ourselves. We can't justify it. We should allow ourselves to go with it.
And that's part of what I'm hoping we'll do, because for some people, God is only too present. The extremists, the fanatics, they're sure God's telling them to go out there and do suicide bombings and kill as many people as they can. And on the other side...
There are all sorts of people telling us why we can't possibly believe in God as self-respecting 21st century modern human beings. And most of us are in the middle. And I'm saying, let's sit there. Let's be okay with that.
Let's not let them talk us into more than we can believe or talk us out of what we can believe. That's my message to myself and others in the book. So how does one love a God that one can never know?
You have a beautiful interlude here of Moses seeking to see God's face. I mean, the title of the book is Seeking the Hiding God. God will be forever elusive. We run away from fundamentalists who believe they have certainty about God, and yet we're also commanded... You shall love the Lord your God.
I can love my wife. I can love my kids. I can love my neighbor. I can, you know, but how do you love that which you can't know?
Yeah, and if God were only elusive, if God were totally hidden, I don't think it would be possible. And that has not been my experience. And that's what I want to talk about, that there's a seeking, but there's also a glimpsing. There's getting a signal.
The great sociologist Peter Berger has a lovely title, The Rumor of Angels. I love that. The Rumor of Angels. And in my experience of Judaism, the moments that mean the most to me are when the words and the music convey seeking.
I think the Friday night service is that. The Kabbalah Shabbat service is that. And particularly Yiddish is all about seeking the soulmate God. And to me, the hymn that many of us recite at the end of Saturday morning services, Shirakavod, this thousand-year-old hymn to God, says, I seek you, right?
I will sing praises to you because my soul delights in you, or my soul is hungry for you. I experience a lot of this as seeking and yearning, but... there are moments of experience. There are moments of encounter, and they're fleeting, but they're not existent, and so one holds on to them, and they're very precious.
And if you believe they can't happen, then they won't happen. And if you believe that it has to be lightning and a thunderbolt, then it may not happen. But if it's watching your daughter born in a delivery room at Adasa Hospital on Mount Scopus, and feeling what I felt, then you might be able to be there. Then there's a... There's something else that I conclude in this chapter, and these were the hardest pages in the book to write.
First of all, because I had to write about love, and what am I going to say about love that's not a pop tune or not a cliche? After 42 years of marriage and 30-some years of parenting and 50 years of being a friend to my close friends, what am I going to say about love? And I had to find the words to write about love.
and then apply them to God. And one of the things that I conclude, and since you mentioned it, I will say this. I decided, let's say I realized about six or seven years ago that the V'ahavta does not have to be translated the way we normally translate the V'ahavta, which is you shall love the Lord your God, where that word et, V'ahavta et, Hashem, comes before a direct object in Hebrew. But this word et, this little word et, also means with. And the book of Deuteronomy, all sorts of places, right before the Via Hafta, actually uses the word et to mean with.
So suppose we were to start reading the Via Hafta as, You shall love with the Lord your God. To me, that makes all the difference in the world. And it confirms my intuition that the love that we... have and share with one another is ultimately divine love.
Now that is an example of a sentence that I truly believe, but I don't know what it means because I don't know what any of this is like from God's side. I can't possibly understand that. So in a sense, I'm expressing love for a God I do not know. But one of the ways you love your friends is you take care of their kids.
And one of the ways you love your friends is you do things in the world which you know they would want you to do. And that's one of the ways you show love for your parents, is by following in the path that they would want you to walk on, that they would want to have walked on if they could, but didn't always live up to. So there are various things we know about love. We know that love is episodic. Honestly, when we speak about it, we know that love is not constant.
It comes and goes. And so... all of these things inform my notion of what it might be to love God.
And that's what I try to talk about in those pages. I don't know whether I succeeded or not. My readers will have to tell me whether it means anything to them.
But I find this something that we need to talk about more. And it's funny that Shai Held and I arrived at the same conclusion that we all have to talk about love a lot more. He says this in his book. You had him here, that sometimes Jews think that to talk about love is goyish, that Jews don't talk about love, Christians talk about love. Nonsense!
It's just that we have not done a good job lately of talking about love as much as we should. It's making a comeback. I'm hoping. All right, so I'm going to ask one more question, then we're going to open it up to everyone.
The conversation from love to the conversation about mitzvah. Yeah. And I laughed out loud in one paragraph where you talked about the two ways Jews use the word, some pronounce it mitzvah, like open the door for the person, and mitzvah. which is actually a commandment.
And I think I got that right. So are the mitzvot, in the sense of the commandments, the means by which Jews express love for God? Those are some of the ways, the traditional ways, that Jews express love for God, but there are all sorts of other ways that we could do it, yeah.
I wanted to... The same way that Shai does, and forgive me if you all heard him say these kinds of things, but he tells a story very similar to the story that I tell, because these stories keep happening to us, that I'm sitting with two Presbyterians on a boat in the inner passage of Alaska, and after three days of eating lunch together, they say to me, we've always wanted to ask our Jewish friends this question, but I've never dared. Do you mind if we ask you? And of course, the question is, why would you want to worship a God of wrath and judgment?
instead of the God of love that we worship. And I had to then explain that my God is not one of wrath and judgment, and there's a lot of love in this God, in this tradition, but this love is expressed in commandments, in mitzvot. And I had to write the chapter, the middle chapter, which kind of combines Exodus and Leviticus together.
It's like Sinai and you shall love your neighbor as yourself. I wanted to show that, yeah, one of the main ways we love each other and love the world and love God is by living this life and doing good things in the world. I said it's not the only way.
There's a debate among Jews themselves, among Jewish authorities, about whether there's a kind of good thing that Jews should do, which is not specified in the law. The law itself wants to make room for human beings. to express love that goes beyond the law.
So halakha is not all comprehensive. There can be things we do that are good things that are not specified in halakha or in mitzvah. But to me, I can't imagine Judaism without a concept of mitzvah, without doing things in the world.
And to me, the essential concept of Judaism, as the rabbi said, is covenant. God wants partners. Heschel said God not only wants partners, God needs partners.
I am not Heschel. I can't go to those theological heights and say what God needs. But apparently, because we have covenant, we have a divine desire that human beings do things in the world that need doing, that for whatever reason, God wants human beings to do.
And one of the main ways God does things in the world is by us doing them. How God does things in the world that we don't do, I don't know. That's a mystery. That's beyond me.
Can't speak about that. But the good that God does via human beings, that we can talk about. And that's what I try to do there. All right. We have time for some.
I have 1,800 more questions, but I'm going to open it up. Zachary, do you have a question for the chancellor? What happens to people after death? So what happens to people after death?
And so we knew that question was coming because he asked it earlier and I said I would talk about it here. So Zachary, one of the most important lines to me in the Torah is Deuteronomy chapter 29 verse 28, where you will find that the Torah says the mysteries, the nistarot, which is the word, the same word as hiding, the mysteries belong to God. but the revealed things belong to us and to our children to do the words of this Torah forever.
I believe that that is true. In other words, there are many things we know. The Torah is one of the ways we know them. Science, using our heads, using our arts, using the experience we have in the world, we learn things a lot of ways, and so we have what we need to know in order to lead a good life in the world.
and to be able to tell Our children and our friends with a full heart, life is good. As Moses says at the end of Deuteronomy, life is good. You can have a good life. You can have blessing.
Choose life. Choose goodness. Choose blessing. And we can say that with a full heart because with all the horrible things that happen in the world, we can still say life is good. But there are these mysteries.
And Moses begs God, when Moses says to God, show me your glory. Some of the commentators believed that what Moses meant was, show me how it's all going to work out. Tell me what the end of the world is.
Tell me what happens after death. And God says, I can't. You can't know this. And I think that one of the hard parts of life is you have to confront the fact that some of the things you would most like to know, you can't know.
I want to know, every time I see an innocent person suffer, why is that person suffering? And the answer has to be, I don't know. It's so frustrating. But when you see someone suffering, what you can do is try to eliminate their suffering.
Have them suffer less. Do good things. Cure the illness.
You can do that. So that's, I think, Judaism. That's my Judaism. I'm sorry that we can't answer all the questions.
But that one... Zachary, but... Sorry, please.
No, go ahead. So I would only add to what the Chancellor said, that... I think there are things in this world that we know, like two plus two is four.
There are things that we don't know, but we also have this group in the middle, or maybe a different group, maybe it's not in the middle, of things we believe, things we believe. And what I believe is the line that we were talking about at the end of Adon Olam that says, Be'yadoh afkid ruchi be'et ishan ve'airah. right, that I place my spirit literally in the yod, in the hand of God, when I sleep, maybe every night, or when I sleep forever, when I die, and that soul, right, that existed before my body came, and it's going to exist after, that that soul is in the hand of God forever and ever and ever. And that's what I believe. Okay.
And Zachary, we're all here giving you lectures now. As you asked the question, I think it's very important that we translate this word, emunah, of ours as trust. So the rabbi just used the word believe, and we do believe these things. But to me, it's a matter of trust.
I have trust that if God is with me, there's nothing to be afraid of. Not in this world. not in anything that's going to come after it. There's nothing to be afraid of if I'm with God. And that's, when we talk about faith for Jews, it's not so much belief that as trust in, right?
You're putting yourself in God's hands. And we don't know how it works out, and we don't know what it's like, and we have no idea, but we can have some confidence. And I think it's very important that we leave the synagogue every week with a donor alum, which wants us. not to be afraid, not to be afraid. We have another question.
Yes, hold on, let's give you a microphone. Following up on what you just said about the spirit and the soul, I think that's what lives after death, because the body, as you said, before you became a body and after your body goes. And the soul, I think, lives on through the memory of those who have passed, their bodies have passed. And after their death, their physical death, I think that's what continues.
You know, people talk about the afterlife and whatever, you know, but I think that's, it lives in the memories of our children and our heirs and the people that... were affected by the mitzvot we perform during our lives. I mean, one of the things we say as Jews, one to the other, upon a loved one's passing, is may so-and-so's memory be for a blessing. And so if you were to peel away the onion of that statement, it means that the attributes, the values, the high ideals by which our loved one lived, They should continue to be a blessing from generation door-le-door, generation to generation.
Yes, sir. It would be many ontological question. My question is probably more simple. Several days ago, big group of rabbis signed the New York Times open ad about Trump plan for Gaza. Yes or no?
Would you sign this against this plan or you would support this plan? Only yes or no? Yeah, I think in a theological discussion, I appreciate the question, but I think we're going to move to another question.
Thank you. No, no, no. Thank you.
So when you were writing this book, was there anything that surprised you about yourself, or did you ever have a period of doubt? I was constantly surprised. Have you ever had this experience that you're writing things?
People who write fiction tell me this. I've never written fiction. But people who write fiction sometimes claim they don't know how it's going to turn out because they don't know what the character is going to do the next day even though they're writing the story of that character. So I was writing my theology and didn't quite know exactly where I was going to be the next day and I kept being surprised. But then I started reflecting on my experiences and these stories are not just there to...
entertain my readers. They're there to explain to me who I am and what I believe. So let me tell you one thing I learned by reflecting on what it was to be Chancellor of JTS. How did being Chancellor of JTS change my theology, right? You're wondering what I'm going to answer to this, right?
Yes. I thought a lot about leadership. I had conversations with people, a lot of public conversations about leadership. And I learned early on that leadership is not dictatorship.
You know, leadership is not giving orders and having people scurry around to obey them. You know you're a leader when the people you're working with know the general direction in which you want to move, and they want to move in that direction too, and they will take it to places that you couldn't have even thought about, but once they take it there, you know that that's where you would want them to go. That's leadership. So I started about thinking of God's leadership. We call God king.
None of the kings in the Old Testament is very successful. If God is the king, like Saul is the king, or David is the king, I mean, imagine God wants all your sons to rebel against you, like David's sons do? No.
So if God wants to be a leader, then God wants people with initiative and creativity and intelligence and loyalty, etc., which is covenant, which is responsibility. So actually... I started thinking about God differently by reflecting on what it is to be a leader.
I'm not saying a leader is God. No, but there is this leadership element in what God wants in the world. And I hadn't thought of it that way without this day-to-day experience of what it is to lead an institution.
And God's got a very complicated institution called humanity to lead. Now, I say that I am not thinking, I want to be clear, that... God is only to be understood in these personal terms.
But this is the way our tradition talks about God. When we address God, baruch ata, or some people, bruchat, right? Second person singular. So we think about God in personal terms.
What God is actually like, that's beyond me and beyond most Jewish theologians, actually. I think Kabbalah, if I could possibly understand it, has a lot of truth in it. That God is much more... Yes. Any other questions here?
So it seems, I'm trying to, this is just the way my mind works, a little bit Heschel, a little bit Buber, a little bit William James, that you walk through this world, Chancellor, and you... have harvested these personal experiences to craft this gorgeous theological statement. And I think one of the questions for me, right, Heschel spoke of radical amazement, but there's something delightfully democratic about it, because it means it doesn't matter if you're the chancellor or if you're Zachary, but we have each...
the ability to construct our own theology. Based out of our personal experiences. If only we open up our eyes to what was the expression?
The rumors of the... Rumors of angels. Rumors of angels.
So theology is all around, or the potential, we just have to be alert to it. And so I was wondering if you could give us a charge as we come to the final minutes of how everyone here can think of themselves as would-be... and potential theologians. So there is a paragraph here, which I'll read in a minute or two about. It's called Why I Wrote the Book.
I'll read that paragraph. But you touched on a very important part of the book. I'll approach it in two ways. Number one, we have a line in Asherah, which I knew by heart. Many of us know it by heart.
The Lord is near to all who call upon him, to all who call upon him in truth. And my experience was overwhelmingly that God was not near to me. So that means there must have been a problem with the way I was calling upon God.
I wasn't pious enough, I wasn't learned enough, I wasn't earnest enough, I wasn't meditating enough. And if I had stayed with that conception, I couldn't have written the book. And I have in my head Maimonides, who is telling me, telling all of us, unless you have mastered higher mathematics, and metaphysics, and physics, don't presume that you can think at all about God.
Leave it, but you can't say a word. Love God and fear God, and that'll be the end of it. And so I had these powerful voices telling me that you don't have the right to do this book.
Who are you? But the rest of me said, no, no, that can't be right. We can't have the command to love the Lord our God, not just the command, but the precious opportunity.
to love the Lord our God with all our heart and all our soul and all our might, if we can't open our mouths about this. So we have to be able to do this. And I have in front of me the figure of my late colleague, Neal Gilman, who many of you may know, who taught many decades at the Jewish Theological Seminary, whose mission in life was to get Jews to do their own theologies.
He wrote a book called Doing Your Own Theology. He wrote a book called Sacred Fragments, which gives you an exercise. Here's how you do it.
And so... I wanted to emphasize the fact that this is much more a democratic thing. This is not just for professors.
This is not a leader's thing. I wanted to write a book that's accessible. Most of the theology books that I read, I have trouble reading. Some of them I don't understand after reading them ten times. Part one of Franz Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption, for example.
I don't understand it. I've been trying for 40 years to understand it. I never got to part two.
I just put it down after part one. That's a shame, though, because part two is good. So I wanted to write a book that people like me, people without PhDs in Jewish thought, people like you all, people like my friends and cousins and my kids could read.
But I had to have the conviction that one can legitimately talk about God and talk about the search for God despite having that PhD. And so I wrote a book. that I believe is accessible, accessible to people in a way that most theology books are not. So let me read this one paragraph, which you pointed me to.
I am writing this book in part to urge you, myself, and my readers not to abandon our attempt at relation with the Lord of the universe, because accurate knowledge of the Creator is far beyond reach. Let's not shut down theological inquiry or prayer from the heart. because we cannot make sense of addressing God from our station on a planet that orbits one of billions of stars in the known universe. Theological muscles should not be immobilized by the fact that we cannot fathom the absence or silence of God in the face of relentless evil and incalculable suffering.
We are called to keep our side of the covenant. to keep seeking and not hiding, no matter what happens from God's side of the relationship. While difficult to comprehend, it is true that God needs us. For sure, the world needs us. A lot of hungry children need us, with God's help, to bring forth bread from the earth.
Friends, let's express our gratitude to Chancellor Eisen. Thank you. Congratulations on the book.
Thank you everyone so much for being here, for being part of this series. And everyone is cordially invited. The Chancellor will be signing copies of the book out in the lobby. Have a good evening. Thank you, Mara, for everything.
Thank you, Rabbi.