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7 Sainthood, Selfhood, and the Ba’al teshuva: ArtScroll’s American Hero and Jewish renewal’s Functional Saint This chapter explores a social dimension of Jewish renewal in the form of spiritual leadership. Thus far I have not directly engaged American Orthodoxy, an important branch of American Judaism that has experienced a revival in the postwar years continuing into the period under discussion.1 I have also not explored the sharp differences between Israeli Judaism and American Judaism in this transitional period. While political allegiances may bind many American Jews to Israel, the stark disparity between the postethnic social and cultural contexts in which American Jews live and the ethnocentric world of Israeli society produces significant disparities that often go unnoticed under the banner of Jewish solidarity in the form of pro-Israel politics.2 even given American Jews’ proud and sometimes sentimental attachment to Israel, the Judaism they live, the challenges they face, and the identities they construct are vastly different from their Israeli cousins in large part because the ethnic anchor of “peoplehood ” that is a given in Israel is far more complicated in America. In the ensuing discussion of the Jewish saint, hero, rabbi, and rebbe, I compare and contrast the Israeli haredi world with its American counterpart in the ArtScroll biography series and Schachter-Shalomi’s functional theory of “rebbetude .” While different in many ways, ArtScroll and renewal share more than each is willing to admit in that both embody an American spirit of selfhood and individualism in their understanding of sainthood that is largely absent in the Israeli construction of the saint. In Israel, the confluence of haredism with Maghreb and Levantine perspectives on the saint, rebbe, hakham, mystic, and miracle worker, yields a very different understanding of spiritual leadership than an America where ralph Waldo emerson’s notion of selfhood undergirds its civil religion. In different ways and for very different audiences, ArtScroll and renewal offer their constituencies the model of an “American” spiritual leader that breaks with their european antecedents and is markedly distinct from what transpires in Israel in significant ways. While renewal’s transvaluative break with the past is much starker and more overt than ArtScroll’s more nuanced attempt to mold the Jewish saint into an exemplar of torah values, both project 158 American Post-Judaism a model of a Jewish leader that coheres with contemporary attitudes in the society in which they live. The construction of spiritual leadership serves as an important tool to decipher the trajectory of any religious community.3 In Judaism, models of leadership from Moses to the prophets to the sages, holy men, and martyrs of the rabbinic period to the Gaonim and mystical leadership of the Middle Ages, to the hasidic zaddik, Sephardic hakham, and the european and American congregational rabbi all point to the ways in which Jewish societies situate themselves as communities of belief, worship, and practice. Questions of authority are deeply embedded in the type of leadership a community adopts and supports. While sainthood exists as a form of leadership throughout much of Jewish history, in American Judaism the saint all but disappears and is replaced by a notion of selfhood (or self-realization) more in concert with an American religious ethos.4 My comparison of Israel and America here is purely a heuristic tool to articulate a vision of one side of the equation, that of American Judaism. American Jewry and Judaism has absorbed the ethos of America so deeply that even when it turns to its religious sources, in this case, models of Jewish leadership, it frames them in ways that are more aligned with the contours of American religion than the Judaism that flourished and continues to flourish in other parts of the diaspora and Israel. Thus while both civilizations share a common core tradition—Judaism—each refracts that tradition in ways so different as to make them minimally distinct, maximally incompatible. The postwar phenomenon of ba’alei teshuva (newly religious) plays a significant role in these new Israeli and diasporic identities, specifically in terms of models of leadership. While much has been written about ba’alei teshuva as a social phenomenon, there has been little work done on the impact the ba’al teshuva movement has had on Jewish Orthodox society in America and Israel.5 I explore some of the ways the values ba’alei teshuva bring to American and Israeli religious communities deeply affect the ways these societies construct new models of leadership—in this...

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