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

A PAUSE: TO LOOK BACK BEFORE MOVING ON

A PAUSE:TO LOOK BACK BEFORE MOVING ON 377 I have not often taken much time to think about my life and its development . My personal and intellectual life have generally been so full of activities and projects that my thinking has been mostly present- and future-oriented. Had it not been for two most flattering invitations, I should have stayed far away from autobiography, even in the restricted intellectual domain to which they summoned me. The first request came from Professor Robert M. Seltzer, director of the Jewish Social Studies Program at Hunter College of the City University of New York. He kindly invited me to deliver the second Anne Bass Schneider Lecture, in which scholars are asked to reflect on the interplay of their lives with their academic work. Though I had done an occasional, relatively informal piece on some aspect of my spiritual development , this invitation required that I do something far more searching and analytical. After my oral presentation, Dr. Seltzer, evidencing his historian ’s interests, asked me to expand my original text, and the result was published as “A Life of Jewish Learning: In Search of a Theology of Judaism (paper 26 here). After a statement of such length and detail, I thought that study would be my final foray into an alien intellectual realm. Then I had the great joy of being invited by Dr. Ellen Frankel, editor and CEO of The Jewish Publication Society (on behalf of its Editorial Committee) to publish a collection of my studies over the years as a volume in its Scholar of Distinction series. That should not normally have further involved me in autobiography, but my work over the years is a record of the development of an academic discipline—modern Jewish religious thought— as well as the evolution of a particular stance—postmodern Jewish theology—in that field. Merely to reprint my old papers without situating them in the developing intellectual situation in which they arose would be to deprive them of a major part of their significance. Hence I asked, in these pages introducing each section of this book, to be allowed to extend my remarks in my Hunter College lecture and to let the specific comments generated by the papers in this volume undergird what I had said there. 378 A Pause I freely admit that I have learned much about my intellectual development from undertaking this task and, as always, have no idea how these insights will play themselves out in my future writing. For I am, as ever, busy with new projects as well as some unfinished old ones. The twenty-first century has turned out to be a busy time of writing and publication for me, of which my investigation “‘Halakhah’ in Reform Jewish Usage: Historic Background and Current Discourse” (paper 27 here) is a warrant. For a scholar, the ongoing process of learning and teaching allows one to touch the hem of eternity. ...