36
AcAdemic SympoSium:
B
efore we approach the text, let us
acknowledge the joyful context
for our learning together today:
the Inauguration of my
havruta,
my
study partner, and my dear friend
for fifteen years, Rabbi Aaron Pank-
en, as the 12th President of Hebrew
Union College-Jewish Institute of
Religion. The texts we will consider
honor the form and content of our
years of Talmud study together. They
are dialogical, dialectical, at times
prayerful, and often playful. They
represent ancient, medieval, and con-
temporary Jewish and general sources.
Above all, they raise questions more
than they provide answers, for Jewish
learning is a delightfully, maddeningly
never-ending search for truth.
This session is entitled “Jewish Life Is
in the Balance.” Jewish learning is not
only a Jewish occupation; it is a Jewish
preoccupation. We need to realize what
is at stake when we uncover the signif-
icance of Jewish learning – nothing
more and nothing less than the future
of the Jewish people.
Learning is the reason there
is a Jewish people.
Our mission is to keep learning and our
vision is a world in which people will live
the teaching, that is, the Torah.
The Talmud models Jewish learning.
The Talmud is written in blocks of text,
and there are ongoing dialogues that
take place within the text, between the
text, and between those people who
are studying it. Indeed, in some ways,
the Talmud anticipates and functions,
in some respect, as the original “home
page” of the Jewish people, because the
conversation is taking place between
people who never met each other, peo-
ple who lived in different times, and
who cared deeply about the same ideas,
which they found to be both timely
and timeless.
I hope that we are going to continue
that conversation. I have prepared texts
that I hope you find to be “agitational,”
that will challenge the status quo with
respect to Jewish learning generally and
in the Reform Movement in particular.
I hope that they will create a bit of dis-
sonance, a bit of dis-equilibrium, and a
measure of discomfort. Jewish learning,
to paraphrase Abraham Joshua Hes-
chel, is responsible for comforting the
afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.
And in the United States, Jews are
comfortable, too comfortable.
Jewish learning and its translation
into Jewish living require a delicate
and perpetual balancing act.
We live in a culture that is increasingly
binary, resulting in a division between
haves and have-nots. Such a polarization
exists with respect to Jewish learning.
This asymmetry threatens the quantity
and the quality of the Jewish future.
Although the appellation ‘people of
the Book’ was a Muslim gift to the
Jews, we have accepted it with a sense
of honor. We may not all be Jewishly
learned, but all of us can and should
be Jewishly learning. With the free-
dom we enjoy and the proliferation of
accessible translations and commentar-
ies on ancient, medieval, and modern
Jewish texts, we have an unprecedented
opportunity to be Jewish learners. In
order to achieve this worthy goal, we
need to embrace our counter-cultural
status. “Jews are ‘both/ands’ in an
‘
either/or’ world.”
Jewish learning is both
particular and universal.
We have the responsibility to draw
from the deep reservoir of Jewish
learning throughout time and from the
wellspring of contemporary educa-
J
eWisH
L
ife
i
s
in
tHe
b
aLanCe
Rabbi Jan D. Katzew ’83
,
Ph.D.
Director of Service Learning, HUC-JIR/Cincinnati