Studies in the Meaning of Judaism (JPS Scholar of Distinction Series)

19 / The Ideal Jew

19 / The Ideal Jew In this lecture I should like to pay tribute to the memories of two scholars who, in different ways, contributed to my intellectual growth. The one was Fritz Bamberger, Assistant to the President of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, who, while teaching modern Jewish thought at our school, exemplified much of the best of preHitlerian German Jewry. The other was Gershom Scholem, surely one of the model Jewish scholars of this century. May their memories continue to be for widespread blessing. Their paths and mine crossed one memorable evening. Fritz and his wife, Maria, invited my wife, Estelle, and me to dinner at their apartment with Gershom Scholem prior to his public lecture at our school. I do not know which aspect of that experience made the greatest impression upon me: the gracious hospitality of the Bambergers; the old, easy friendship of the two ex-Berliners; the openness of the world-famous savant to his young American admirers; the civilized range of the witty, erudite conversation; or the drama of the great scholar returning to the auditorium where, as a young man, he delivered the lectures that were originally published by the then Jewish Institute of Religion as Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. I Whatever the case, I still clearly recall the extraordinary impact his lecture made upon me. He spoke that night about classic Judaism’s model human beings and said “I do not think there can be any doubt as to what these types of the ideal Jew are.”1 Years later, his judgment still seems correct. He identified these ideals as the talmid hakham, the tzaddik and 255 1986 the hasid—terms too rich for easy translation but ones that may be rendered , the sage, the righteous and the pietist. I should now like to extend Scholem’s analysis in two directions: first, to add some nuances to his discussion of the past and, more important, to extend his thought into the present by speculating about the contemporary Jewish human ideal. Scholem’s premise was that “The basic tension in the religious society of Judaism is that between rational and emotional factors, rational and irrational forces. The ideal types formed by this society will necessarily reflect such tension.” I see in this statement a reflection of Scholem’s personal agenda, one powerfully formed by his response to German Jewish life. I, being part of the next generation and a product of American Jewry, see things differently. In part due to the acceptance of his work, in part because of historic events, the rational and irrational forces in Judaism, as in all humanity, seem to me more to co-exist than to be in radical tension . And, against his view, I find that to be true of the classic sources of Judaism, which he denominated the “talmudic and rabbinical forms to which Jewish philosophy or, for that matter, Jewish mysticism has added other dimensions without basically changing its substance.”2 In that light, let me modify somewhat what Scholem said about the three ideal Jewish figures, particularly in terms of their depiction in talmudic and midrashic literature. The first model he discusses is the talmid hakham, “the rabbinic scholar, or, as the extremely modest term would have to be translated literally : ‘the pupil of a sage.’” He sees in this term “above all, an intellectual value and a value of a life of contemplation [as contrasted to activity]. What is asked of the scholar? A rational effort of the mind and its concentration .”3 After filling out his portrait of the sage, he sums up, “the decisive quality expected of him is his sobriety and rationality by which he is able to expound the values that have come down and been upheld by tradition, and his clarity of mind which makes him an educator, handing down those values to the next generation.”4 This figure, I suggest, logically emerges from a distinctive characteristic of the Jewish religion, that God has given written as well as oral— as the rabbis insist—Torah, instructions, to the people of Israel. Since these include the possibility of their further elaboration, the person who knows the traditions and who can reliably interpret and apply them acquires high religious status. Scholem emphasizes the academic character of the talmid hakham so heavily in order to dramatize his contrast with the hasid, whom 256 A Way Scholem...