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September 6, 2002
An Orthodox visionary
CYNTHIA RAMSAY SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH BULLETIN
Essential Essays on Judaism
By Eliezer Berkovits. Edited by David Hazony.
Jerusalem, Shalem Press, 2002. 393 pages. $22.95 US
Shalem Press has just released Essential Essays on Judaism
by rabbi and theologian Eliezer Berkovits. During his life, Berkovits
wrote 19 books and numerous articles and essays on Jewish theology
and philosophy. He was an Orthodox Jew who firmly believed that
"The Torah is all-inclusive. It embraces the entire life of
the Jewish people." However, instead of focusing on the incontrovertible
nature of the Torah, with the approbation that our adherence to
its tenets must be absolute, Berkovits argues for an approach to
Torah and halachah (Jewish law) that encompasses common sense,
a recognition of what is feasible and the priority of the ethical.
Born in Romania in 1908, Berkovits received his rabbinical and philosophical
training in the 1930s at the Hildesheimer Rabbinical Seminary and
at the University of Berlin. After escaping Germany in the late
1930s, he served as a rabbi in Leeds, Sydney and Boston before assuming
the chair of the philosophy department at the Hebrew Theological
College in Chicago in 1958. In 1975, he moved to Jerusalem where
he lived until he died in 1992.
Editor David Hazony has collected 13 of Berkovits's essays for Essential
Essays on Judaism. They are divided into the broad categories
of Jewish morality and law, Jewish nationhood and Jewish theology,
and cover such diverse topics as sexual ethics, the idea of justice
in the Bible, conversion laws in Israel, the need for renewed rabbinic
leadership, the spiritual crisis in Israel, the concept of holiness
and faith after the Holocaust.
Hazony summarizes what he feels are Berkovits's three main conclusions
about Jewish morality: "(i) That the halachah as presented
in the Bible and Talmud is primarily about moral values rather than
rules, and that any attempt to reduce it to a fixed set of rules
violates its essence; (ii) that Jewish morality, as expressed by
the prophets and as impressed upon the halachah, is concerned fundamentally
with the consequences of one's actions rather than the quality of
one's reasoning or intention; and (iii) that Judaism understands
morality not only as a discipline of man's intellect or spirit,
but no less as an effort which must be incorporated into the habits
of his physical being, through the vehicle of law, if it is to achieve
its goal of advancing mankind in history."
This latter principle offers a rationale for those of us in these
"modern" times who question the need for repetitive rituals.
Berkovits writes, in "Law and Morality in Jewish Tradition,"
(1959) that the law attempts to educate the human body (not just
the mind) for the ethical deed:
"The body is not accessible to logical reasoning. One can only
teach it by making it do things. One does not learn how to swim
by reading books on swimming technique, nor does one become a painter
by merely contemplating the styles of different schools. One learns
to swim by swimming, to paint by painting, to act by acting. One
learns how to do anything by doing it. This applies nowhere more
strictly than in the realm of ethical action."
Berkovits believed in the Jewish mission to create a moral, ethical
world, but felt there needed to be a Jewish national entity for
Judaism to progress. In a 1943 essay, he writes, "Only by the
creation of such a Jewish environment can we give back to Torah
the great partnership of life which alone is capable of freeing
Judaism from its present exilic rigidity, and create circumstances
in which evolution will again be possible."
In "The Spiritual Crisis in Israel," (1979) Berkovits
reiterates the necessity for a Jewish state, but laments the widespread
secularism in Israel as well as the rejection of secular studies
by Israeli yeshivot: "Alienation from Judaism is the source
of the existential vacuum among the secularists. Alienation from
the new reality of Israel's statehood calls into question the authenticity
of the image of Judaism that has been transferred from exile by
the religious establishment.
"And yet, this is the land and this is the people. It is here,
in the land of Israel, that the destiny of all Israel will be decided
for all generations to come. Thus, the problems of this land become
the problems of the Jewish people the world over. Their solution
is the responsibility of all of us."
Essential Essays is the first major publication of the recently
established Eliezer Berkovits Institute for Jewish Thought at the
Shalem Centre. It is distributed by Urim Publications, c/o Lambda,
3709 13th Ave., Brooklyn, N.Y., 11218; 718-972-5449, mh@ejudaica.com.
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