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New Directions in Jewish Theology in America Arthur Green Theology has not been the creative forte of the Jewish people throughout most of the last century. We have been too busily engaged in the process of surviving to have had the energy to devote to sustained religious re›ection. We have struggled to ‹nd our way as latecomers into modernity, to establish ourselves on new shores and amid unfamiliar cultural landscapes. We have survived an encounter with evil incarnate that cost us the lives of fully a third of the Jewish people, including an untold number of thinkers, teachers, and their students, Hasidic masters and disciples, many of whom in better times might have helped us to ‹gure out the puzzles of Jewish theology . For the past ‹fty years the Jewish people as a body politic has been fully and single-mindedly engaged in the task of reconstruction, in our case meaning above all building the State of Israel as a secure national home for the Jewish people and securing emigration rights for Jews who chose to go there. Besides these monumental undertakings, all else seemed to pale. Nevertheless, we have hardly been bereft of theologians and religious thinkers. In recent memory there have been two bursts of theological creativity especially worthy of note. One began in the late 1960s, when such thinkers as Emil Fackenheim, Richard Rubenstein, Arthur Cohen, and others began to integrate the lessons of the Holocaust into Jewish religious parlance . The other has taken place over the course of the past two or three decades and has more to do with both the recovery of religious language and the ways it may, must, or may not be updated in order to carry Jewry into the rather uncharted waters that lie ahead in what most seem to be207 This essay was originally presented on November 7, 1993, at the Jean and Samuel Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. lieve is a radically new era in the history of the Jewish people. Here the names of David Hartman, Irving Greenberg, Judith Plaskow, Arthur Waskow, Neil Gillman, and Eugene Borowitz all come to mind. Quite a rogues’ gallery of thinkers for a people too busy to theologize! But this latter crop of thinkers appears precisely—and hardly accidentally —at a time when I believe the Jewish people are ready for theology and, indeed, need it urgently. I breathe deeply, add a barukh ha-shem, and note that nowhere in the world are there persecuted Jews who need our help. With the possible exceptions of small communities in Syria and Iran, there is no one through whom North American Jews can live a vicarious Jewish life or for whose sake they can postpone thinking about the nature of their own Jewishness “because there are more urgent things to do.” Indeed thinking about our own Jewishness is precisely what we Jews need most to do. We need to de‹ne our goals for the continuity of Jewish life. What do we mean by a Jewish future in America? How much of Judaism , what sort of religious life, what kind of community can we imagine existing several generations into the future? How much of assimilation can we tolerate and still survive as a distinct culture? How will we believe in our Judaism, and what will be the important Jewish experiences we will share with our children? We need to create a vision of a contemporary Judaism that will attract the coming generations and articulate a meaning deep and powerful enough to help us withstand the tremendous assimilatory powers by which we are surrounded. If there is to be a future for Jewish life on this continent, I believe that the theologian will now have a great deal to do with it. The following remarks are offered from a particular theological point of view; I do not present them as an objective description of a historical phenomenon called Jewish theology. They are, if you will, a theologian’s rather than a historian’s de‹nition of the Jewish theologian’s task. I see myself as a theologian in the tradition of an East European school of Jewish mystical theology, itself the heir of the kabbalistic and Hasidic traditions. The chief ‹gures in this school (here identi‹ed as such for the ‹rst time) in the twentieth century were Judah Loeb Alter of Ger, author of the Sefat Emet; Abraham Isaac Kook, chief rabbi of Palestine during the British mandate...

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