Arthur Green: An Intellectual Portrait

Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers Editor-in-Chief

Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, Arizona State University Editor

Aaron W. Hughes, University of Rochester

VOLUME 16

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/lcjp

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Arthur Green Hasidism for Tomorrow Edited by

Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron W. Hughes

LEIDEN ᆕ BOSTON 2015

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Cover illustration: Courtesy of Hebrew College The series The Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers was generously supported by the Baron Foundation.

This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 2213-6010 ISBN 978-90-04-30840-4 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-30842-8 (e-book) This hardback is also published in paperback under ISBN 978-90-04-30841-1. Copyright 2015 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

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CONTENTS The Contributors  .............................................................................................

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Editors’ Introduction to the Series  ............................................................

ix

Arthur Green: An Intellectual Profile  ........................................................  Ariel Evan Mayse

1

Three Warsaw Mystics  ...................................................................................  Arthur Green

53

Jewish Theology: A New Beginning  ............................................................  Arthur Green

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Road Back to Sinai: The Post-Critical Seeker  ...........................................  Arthur Green

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A Neo-Hasidic Life: Credo and Reflections  ..............................................  Arthur Green

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Interview with Arthur Green  .......................................................................  Hava Tirosh-Samuelson

191

Select Bibliography  .........................................................................................

257

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ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE Ariel Evan Mayse Introduction Rabbi Arthur Green (b. 1941) is a theologian, professor of Jewish mysticism, and the teacher of two generations of American rabbis and scholars. Yet above all he is, by his own description, a spiritual seeker. Green has devoted over five decades to developing a vibrant new expression of Judaism that is “all about challenge and response, one that by definition has to change and grow in each generation and even in the course of single lives.”1 Green argues that without such growth Judaism will not survive the confrontation with modernity and postmodernity. Religious traditions must be reinterpreted and reframed in our day if they are to remain a compelling voice for new generations. The unique challenges facing contemporary Jews include modern science and theories of evolution, biblical criticism, the Holocaust, the reestablishment of a Jewish state, life in an open democracy, impending ecological disaster, and the morally bankrupt materialism of our society. Meeting these challenges with authenticity and integrity may at times demand that we radically reinterpret the Judaism we have inherited from very different eras, but confronting these issues also requires us to listen carefully to the wisdom and vitality embedded in our tradition. The legacy of Jewish learning must be reshaped for contemporary Jews, but tradition’s authentic voice should also challenge and inspire us. As a contemporary reinterpreter of Jewish tradition, Green freely acknowledges that he himself is constantly being shaped and challenged by the traditional texts with which he is working. Green’s theology is grounded in the Jewish mystical tradition. More specifically, he has described his approach as “neo-Hasidic.” This means that Green draws particular inspiration from Hasidic texts but rejects the strictures of living in a traditional Hasidic community, including its dismissal 1 Arthur Green, Radical Judaism: Rethinking God and Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 134.

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of Western education and the critical study of Judaism. Inspired more by the textual sources of early Hasidism than by contemporary Hasidim, he feels free to engage with those teachings somewhat selectively. He values the teachings of Kabbalah and Hasidism as holding deep insights into the human psyche and spiritual life, but does not look to them for any literal sense of metaphysical or cosmological truth. He rejects elements of the mystical tradition, such as the degradation of non-Jews or the disenfranchisement of women, which he feels conflict with his morality. Green understands that these aspects of Jewish mysticism reflect the historical contexts in which these texts were written, and insists that the modern seeker need not accept them whole cloth. This selective reading allows for the possibility of rediscovering the beauty and potential contemporary relevance of the sources. The teachings of Jewish mysticism, argues Green, give us access to some of the deepest wellsprings of human creativity and spirituality, and point toward a mysterious, elusive reality within them that we humans call by the name Y-H-W-H, or “God.” A modern renewal of Judaism can flow forth only from these. Green knows that he lives in an age of seekers. Often confronted by superficial manifestations of Judaism without any deep roots in our authentic spiritual language, many of his generation and those he teaches have turned to other religious traditions for wisdom and guidance. Many others have turned away from religion entirely. This was true in the 1960s and 1970s, and this sense of spiritual emptiness in much of what passes for liberal Judaism has remained a defining element of contemporary Jewish life into the twenty-first century. Answering this call, Green has dedicated his life to developing an authentic Jewish spirituality that is at once boldly creative and deeply grounded in tradition. Biography and Career Arthur Green was born into a secular Jewish family and raised in an ethnically diverse neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey. Green’s mother died when he was eleven, an event that he would later identify as crucial to his entire biography. His maternal grandparents, who were immigrants from Eastern Europe, lived nearby. As a link to the intensely Jewish, Yiddishspeaking cultural milieu of Europe, they were to have an important influence on him. Despite the objections of his militantly atheistic father, Green attended Hebrew school and Camp Ramah, where he developed excellent Hebrew skills and fluency in reading Jewish texts. He became attracted to religion in early adolescence and increasingly took on a strict level of ritual

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observance. This often put him into conflict at home, leading to considerable anxiety. At the age of sixteen Green left for Brandeis University, where he was free to live the rigorous Jewish practice he had adopted. By the second year of his undergraduate education, however, he had largely abandoned it. Green felt that his strict religiosity had been a form of compulsive behavior, an attempt to replace his tragic loss rather than an honest quest for God. The façade of observance was also challenged when he began studying religion in an academic setting and reading the classics of modern philosophy, especially the existentialists, as well as psychology and literature. In these years he was particularly influenced by the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Erich Fromm, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hermann Hesse, and Nikos Kazantzakis, all of whom had an impact on his later theology. Nietzsche’s description of the collapse of traditional religious authority resonated with the breakdown in Green’s own attachment to orthodoxy, the liberation from which he experienced as itself a religious event, one worthy of celebration. The challenge of finding a source of truth and moral authority in the post-Nietzschean world took him to the existentialists, particularly Sartre and Camus. In their writings, a world without God led, after that first moment of liberating exultation, to a confrontation with emptiness and absurdity, the landscape he also came to know so well also in the pages of Kafka, in whose work he became quite immersed. But Camus in particular, reinforced by Kazantzakis, called for the seeker to seize the day and actively create a meaning beyond absurdity within the realm of human action. Only this could redeem from the bleakness of a world without the God who had once provided that meaning. Understanding that his quest was still a religious one, and continuing to think within a Jewish context, Green took this as a challenge to redraw the face of God in a place where all the old images had failed him, and ultimately to rebuild human community around that new approach to Judaism. But in doing so, he came to understand that he was inevitably—and rather happily—drawing on the wellsprings of the past, ultimately becoming more reinterpreter than revolutionary. Here Brandeis scholar Simon Rawidowicz’s article on Jewish hermeneutics played a crucial role in Green’s development, because it described the ongoing strength of Judaism as lying in its power to constantly and freely reinterpret ancient text and tradition.2 Rawidowicz believed that the Jewish 2 Simon Rawidowicz, “On Interpretation,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 26 (1957): 83–126.

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interpretive project had essentially ended with Spinoza and his insistence on a rational and scientific reading of the Bible. But over the next several decades, Green became increasingly aware of the fact that he was living in a time of great spiritual and intellectual rebirth. He saw this renewal and rediscovery of meaning as a regeneration of the midrashic paradigm, and a continuation of what the Hasidic masters had done for themselves at the end of the eighteenth century. If Spinoza and Mendelssohn had been the founders of Jewish modernity, Green would seek in Hasidic teachings the foundations of a Jewish postmodernity. Brandeis was home to a number of remarkable middle European scholars cast out by the Nazis in the years preceding the Holocaust, including Nahum Glatzer and Alexander Altmann. Glatzer, a close disciple of Franz Rosenzweig, introduced Green to both Rosenzweig and Martin Buber. Rosenzweig’s “new thinking” and the intellectual atmosphere of the Frankfurt Lehrhaus, in which Glatzer had played a central role, were formative for Green. These scholars gave Green an excellent education in the humanities, especially literature and religion, in addition to his training in Judaic studies. Their new ideas challenged the depth of his adolescent conceptions of religion. Under Altmann’s tutelage, he began reading academic studies in religion, including works by Carl Gustav Jung, Erich Neumann, Rudolph Otto, and Mircea Eliade. In these years Green also drank deeply of the counter-cultural ethos of the 1960s: the exhilarating quest for personal inner freedom and new awareness of the need for deep societal transformation. Already the product of a liberal upbringing, Green’s social and political views became somewhat more radicalized in the era of Civil Rights and the Vietnam War. But thanks to Professor Altmann, at Brandeis University Green also encountered the study of Jewish mysticism in a serious way. He began reading the Hasidic masters and the Zohar, and he quickly fell in love with this literature. An essay by the Polish-Jewish writer Hillel Zeitlin, a prewar neo-Hasidic thinker of great profundity, had a decisive influence on Green’s decision to devote his life to these teachings.3 In these years he also met Zalman Schachter, a charismatic young Chabad Hasid who would later become the founder of the Jewish Renewal movement and Green’s lifelong friend and mentor. By the end of college Green had recommitted himself 3 Some fifty years later Green published an English collection of Zeitlin’s essays; see Arthur Green, ed. and trans., Hasidic Spirituality for a New Era: The Religious Writings of Hillel Zeitlin, prayers intr. and trans. Joel Rosenberg (New York and Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2012).

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to religious life, but he did so from a very different perspective than in his adolescence. Green had begun his quest to find an authentically Jewish language in which to express his religious yearnings and experiences, without readopting strict ritual observance or dualistic conceptions of a personified (and, in his experience, ultimately punishing) God. Green’s encounter with Jewish mysticism inspired him to pursue a doctorate in Kabbalah and Hasidism. This career would allow him to spend his life immersed in these texts, examining them from both historical and phenomenological perspectives. Green spent a year in Jerusalem, where he honed his philological-historical skills by studying Jewish mysticism with Gershom Scholem and Rivka Schatz-Uffenheimer. In 1962 he decided to attend the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) in New York in order to gain the further text skills necessary for his scholarly project. The intellectual environment was intense, and Green shared many important discussions with fellow students at JTS. However, his experience there was largely unhappy. He found himself confronted by a Jewish discourse in which Talmud and Jewish law were vaunted above any personal spiritual quest, and where scholarly cynicism had, for many, replaced any real search for faith. Green recalls that he metaphorically walked the halls of JTS with a copy of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” in one pocket, and Kedushat Levi (an important early Hasidic book) in the other—both of which were equally unwelcome at the Seminary. Seeing Green’s unhappiness, the administration arranged for him to have a private course of study with Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972), who became his mentor for the next four years. Green had read Heschel’s works of theology in his adolescence and had been deeply moved, but in his college years he had dismissed Heschel as somewhat naïve and overly pietistic. Now he had a new appreciation of the profundity of Heschel’s reading of Judaism. Green came to see Heschel’s project of “Depth Theology” as an approach that allowed for multiple levels of truth, appealing to the mythic sense (a term Heschel eschewed) and the imagination more than the rational mind.4 Their relationship was never simple, and Green later reflected that he refused to become Heschel’s hasid—his unwavering disciple.5 But in these 4 This anticipates Green’s interest in R. Nahman of Bratslav, whose theology and especially his tales demonstrate that his mind could penetrate into the fertile realm in which myths are created. 5 “A Conversation with Arthur Green,” interview by William Novak, Kerem: Creative Explorations in Judaism (Spring 1995): 40.

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years he deepened his knowledge of Hasidic texts and Kabbalah, learning from one of the foremost experts in the field. Heschel also became Green’s role model of a scholar who was an academic, but also a public intellectual, communal activist, and a deeply religious person engaged reading the classical sources to create a Jewish theology for the twentieth century. During his years at JTS, he already became a mentor to a group of fellow rabbinical students, teaching a class in Hasidic sources in the Seminary chapel. In 1967 Green returned to Boston to begin a doctorate at Brandeis under the tutelage of Alexander Altmann. In 1968 he married fellow-seeker Kathy Held, to whom he had been introduced by Zalman Schachter. They lived first in Cambridge, then in Somerville, where Green became the founder of Ḥavurat Shalom. The ḥavurah was a new type of Jewish intentional community and institute for learning and prayer. Green was not alone in feeling alienated by the hyper-institutionalization and formality of American synagogue life that reached its peak in the 1950s. The seekers who joined in forming the ḥavurah in its early years, many of whom later became wellknown Jewish scholars and communal leaders, longed to create a new and participatory style of Jewish experience that would be meaningful for the individual in the context of an intense sense of fellowship. Green sometimes characterized it as “a shtibl (an informal prayer-room) for non-Orthodox Jews,” where they might find the same sort of intimacy and authentic community as was present in the world of Hasidism, at least as seen through the eyes of their well-thumbed copies of works by Martin Buber. They were deeply committed to Torah study and willing to experiment with forms of Jewish practice, but always with a personal spiritual focus and an eye toward societal change. Ḥavurat Shalom inspired many other such efforts across the United States.6 Something needs to be said here about both the intellectual and the devotional/spiritual world of Ḥavurat Shalom in its early years. The five years Green spent in the ḥavurah, as its founder and sometime leader (problematically so in a self-defined democratic and egalitarian community) were transformative for him, setting the tone for much of his ensuing life and career.

6 Riv-Ellen Prell, Prayer and Community: The Ḥavurah in American Judaism (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989); Chava Weissler, “Worship in the Havura Movement,” in The Life of Judaism, ed. Harvey E. Goldberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001): 79–91; Joseph Reimer, “The ‘Ḥavurah’ as a Context for Adult Jewish Education,” in The Uses of Tradition, ed. Jack Wertheimer (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1992), 393–410.

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Because Ḥavurat Shalom originally defined itself as both alternative Jewish community and seminary (the fact that it offered “divinity student” draft deferments in the Vietnam War era was not incidental to its initial success in recruiting members), an intensive course of study was central from the beginning. Green taught alongside his fellow Brandeis graduate student Michael Fishbane, rabbis Everett Gendler and Joseph Lukinsky, Reb Zalman, who visited during that first year, and several other friends who had recently been ordained at JTS. Although all but Zalman had been trained in institutions that viewed Jewish texts through a historical-critical lens, they shared a critique of that view and were collectively in search of an alternative way of reading and teaching the sources. The two models toward which they naturally turned were those of Hasidism and religious existentialism. Green, teaching courses primarily on kabbalistic and Hasidic sources, saw the creative midrash that was alive in the Hasidic imagination as a model for a contemporary revival of the ability to “hear” the divine voice from within the text. He insisted, to be sure, that his students retain the ability to distinguish between peshat and derash in reading both the mystical sources and the biblical passages on which they were expounding. In this he remained loyal to the academic training he had received from Altmann and others. But he understood that the living kernel of religious life was to be found in a reopening of the derash process. This was evident within the range of what was considered permissible in the ḥavurah classroom, but was even more present in Shabbat morning “Torah discussions,” replacing the sermon slot in the group’s main weekly service and sometimes lasting nearly an hour. The “existential” aspect of this approach was derived partly from Martin Buber, especially through his rereading of Hasidism, but mostly from the memory of Franz Rosenzweig’s “new thinking” and his Freies Juedisches Lehrhaus in Frankfurt, conveyed to Green but especially to Fishbane by their teacher Nahum Glatzer.7 Already in the 1920s, Rosenzweig had sensed the spiritual dryness of the historical/critical approach to the Hebrew Bible and had insisted in a different approach in the Lehrhaus classroom. This fed directly into the rediscovery of the old/new sacred voice that he and Buber were to seek in their German/Jewish translation of the Bible, beginning in those same years (later rendered into English by ḥavurah member and Fishbane student Everett Fox). Schachter, Gendler, Edward Feld, and other

7 See the enlightening discussion of this same chain of tradition in Sam Berrin Shonkoff’s introduction to the volume on Michael Fishbane in this series.

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teachers were very sympathetic to this sense of post-critical reading that was emerging in the ḥavurah. So too were some of the more intellectually sophisticated and self-aware students in the group (including Barry Holtz, Joseph Reimer, Michael Brooks, James Kugel, David Roskies, Lawrence Fine, George Savran, and others). The prayer life of the ḥavurah was marked by a combination of creativity and spiritual intensity that paralleled this approach to study. Friday evening and Shabbat morning services included long, drawn-out singing of soulful wordless niggunim, interjected semi-spontaneous interpretations of the traditional Hebrew liturgy (recited in the Sephardic version, a statement of the group’s neo-Hasidic leaning), chanted davening in English, learned from Zalman, and a variety of inserted poetic readings and listenings to both classical and contemporary music. Zalman modeled to the group a passionate yet sometimes playful mode of prayer leadership, one well learned and integrated by several of the younger haverim. Green found himself deeply moved by prayer in this context, and especially by the frequent shared silences that were a part of the group’s spiritual rhythms. In 1969, he and several others ḥavurah members, including Kathy, began to experiment with a daily morning meditation period in the Ḥavurat Shalom prayer room. This was Green’s first regular exposure to meditation, another aspect of spiritual life that remained important to him. In general, the sense of religion as expressing both the rich inner life of the individual and the power of intimate community was an essential legacy of the ḥavurah years to Green’s future development, carried forth especially into his work in training and teaching rabbis. Green left Boston when he was offered a position at the University of Pennsylvania in 1973, where he taught in the Department of Religious Studies for the next eleven years. Green enjoyed the opportunity to train his first group of graduate students, but he had a decidedly mixed experience at the university. Most of the undergraduates he taught were in preprofessional tracks of study, and this large professionally oriented school was a shock after his rich education in the humanities at Brandeis, his studies with Heschel at JTS, and the intense devotional community of Ḥavurat Shalom. Green felt that the Department of Religious Studies in which he was located saw little value in his theological writings or communal activism, interests which were actively disparaged by some of the senior faculty. But he gained from exposure to the methodology of comparative religion and teachings of other traditions, engaging also in various interfaith symposia and conversations.

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One of Green’s neighbors in Philadelphia came to be friend and mentor Zalman Schachter, who had also been in Boston for the first year of the ḥavurah and now became professor at Temple University. Schachter embarked on founding a new Jewish religious community called B’nai Or (“Children of Light”), which was deeply influenced by the spirit of the “Age of Aquarius” and New Age religion.8 While earlier iterations of Schachter’s vision—more influenced by a combination of Hasidism and Christian monasticism—had once attracted both Green and his wife, they did not join Schachter in this new project. Green felt that it was too casually syncretistic, incorporating language and practices from other faith traditions, and too little demanding of Jewish depth and knowledge. The trajectories of Schachter and Green’s lives had them at different places. Schachter was in the heady days of escaping the confines of Chabad’s disciplined and restrictive framework. Green was in the mode of reexamining and (gradually) re-embracing tradition, for the second time coming at it from the outside. While both had been influenced by countercultural spirituality, and especially by an encounter with psychedelic drugs, Schachter’s embrace of Aquarian religion and its vaunted New Age optimism remained a point of difference between them. Green left the University of Pennsylvania in 1984 to join the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (RRC), serving first as dean and then as president. Green had never previously seen himself as a Reconstructionist, although his theology shares a number of important ideas in common the thought of founder Mordecai M. Kaplan. These include his understanding of Judaism as a full civilization, the embrace of religious humanism, commitment to renewal, a theology that moved beyond a personal God, and a deep respect for tradition without feeling bound to it. Indeed, Green’s was a voice for tradition at the RRC, and there was some conflict both with more classical Reconstructionists and with female students who declared themselves neo-pagans. Though Green continued to publish scholarly works, being outside of a strictly academic setting encouraged him to devote more time to writing about Jewish spirituality. At RRC Green came into his own as a theologian, and during these years he published a series of influential articles in The Reconstructionist and elsewhere. These efforts culminated 8 See Zalman Schachter, “Toward an Order of Bnai Or,” Judaism 13, no. 2 (1964): 185–97. See also Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Fragments of a Future Scroll: Hassidism for the Aquarian Age, ed. Philip Mandelkorn and Stephen Gerstman (Germantown, PA: Leaves of Grass Press, 1975); and Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Paradigm Shift: From the Jewish Renewal Teachings of Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1993).

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in his first book of Jewish theology, published in 1992, based on a series of lectures first delivered at a Reconstructionist congregation in New York.9 Green returned to Brandeis in 1994 when offered the Philip W. Lown Chair in Jewish Studies, once held by his teacher Alexander Altmann. He continued to train graduate students and published a number of important studies of Jewish mysticism, devoting time to writing theology as well. But Green left this position after a decade. He was still seeking something that could not be afforded by a purely academic environment, and in 2004 he founded a post-denominational rabbinical school at Hebrew College in Boston. There he has been a professor, dean, and now rector, over the past dozen years. Green has maintained his commitment to Jewish scholarship as well as theological writing, and has continued to publish books and articles. At the age of 74 he is still teaching full time, engaged in administrative duties, and working on a number of significant publications. He is also an actively engaged caregiver for his wife, who is afflicted with a chronic illness. His daughter, son-in-law, and two grandchildren live nearby. Literary Works Arthur Green’s written works may be roughly divided into three categories: academic studies, contemporary theology, and communal affairs. While Green’s greatest originality lies in the realm of theology, he has made significant contributions in all of these areas. Furthermore, one must examine all of Green’s writings in order to understand the totality of his project. The boundaries between them are less than rigid, and Green’s works sometimes deliberately blend scholarship and theology. Their intended audience includes both the scholarly and broader intellectual community. He often presents his work as intended to form a bridge between these. Academic Studies Green was trained in the classical methods of intellectual history, and his studies of Jewish mysticism draw heavily upon historical context and the complex inner textual and interpretive trajectories of terms and ideas that constitute the fabric of Judaic sources. Jewish tradition is a multilayered one, and the Hasidic writings in which Green has specialized reflect both

9 Arthur Green, Seek My Face, Speak My Name: A Contemporary Jewish Theology (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1992).

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deep knowledge and a spirit of highly free and sometimes playful reinterpretation of sacred texts. His academic work is best characterized as the history of language and ideas, and several of his important diachronic studies trace the ways in which kabbalistic ideas and symbols have evolved from the rabbinic time onward.10 Green is well aware that vectors of historical influence often move across cultural borders, and he has demonstrated how different religious communities have influenced one another in both subtle and explicit ways. Despite his commitment to intellectual history, Green is also wary of an exclusively reductionist approach that fragments texts into footnotes and excessive references to earlier sources.11 His studies of Jewish mysticism also employ the tools of phenomenology, including the critical and crosscultural subjective religious experience.12 This allows him to explore the conceptual and theological similarities between texts written in different times and places, while recognizing the uniqueness of each text and thinker, including those writing “late” in the history of Judaism’s highly developed literary tradition. Throughout his career Green has reiterated his belief that the texts as we have them reflect embodied mystical experiences.13 Jewish mystics rarely write in a self-revelatory or confessional manner, and they have produced relatively few autobiographical testimonies. But Green insists that when the writings of mystical illuminati are read carefully, a subtle experiential element begins to emerge from their words; this is true of both complicated theosophical tracts and the relatively accessible Hasidic texts. The “reality” of these experiences may indeed be that of fantasy or imagination, but they need to be treated as legitimate creations of the religious mind. Evaluation of mystical literature reveals that no clean lines may be drawn between fantasy, revelation, and religious experience.

10 See, for example, Arthur Green, Keter: The Crown of God in Early Jewish Mysticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Arthur Green, “Shekhinah, the Virgin Mary, and the Song of Songs: Reflections on a Kabbalistic Symbol in its Historical Context,” AJS Review 26, no. 1 (2002): 1–52. 11 Regarding this approach to the study of Hasidism, Green writes: “In Hebrew I have a term for such reductionism: yesh-kevar-etsel-ism, a rush to find early parallels as a substitute for interpretation.” Arthur Green, “Early Hasidism: Some Old/New Questions,” in Hasidism Reappraised, ed. Ada Rapoport-Albert (London and Portland, OR: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1997), 444. 12 Keter: The Crown of God is another example of a study that combines philology, history, and phenomenology. 13 See the opening remarks to Arthur Green, “Hillel Zeitlin and neo-Hasidic Readings of the Zohar,” Kabbalah 22 (2010): 59–78.

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Green believes that mysticism begins with the overwhelming experience of something incredible, profound, and essentially ineffable, which the mystic then seeks to articulate, however inadequately, by means of words. This understanding puts him in the company of the perennialist philosophers, stemming from William James but including Aldous Huxley, Frijtof Schuon, and Wilfred Cantwell Smith, who believed that all mystical experiences share an ineffable core. But Green avoids their tendency to oversimplify and universalize, and underscores that mystical texts of diverse traditions, while reflecting parallel experiences, must be read with attention to nuances in their respective languages. The core experiences that animate Jewish mysticism have much in common with those described by devotional texts of other religious traditions, but the accounts of these experiences in mystical works (which are all the scholar has before him) are distinguished from one another in both cultural context and typology of experience. They are not all reducible to a single notion of “mysticism.”14 Green’s first major academic contribution was a biography of R. Nahman of Bratslav.15 This landmark study, based on his doctoral dissertation, was the first scholarly monograph to examine the life and teachings of an early Hasidic master in a holistic manner. Green gives special attention to psychological aspects of R. Nahman’s spiritual journey, and interprets R. Nahman’s writings as anticipating many of the lessons of modern existentialism. In the appendix “Faith, Doubt and Reason,” he explored this Hasidic master’s relationship with uncertainty. Though written purely as a work of welldocumented historical scholarship, to some degree this provocative chapter also reflects Green’s own experience in the struggle with faith and theological uncertainty.16 Since then Green has published a number of interesting 14 This places him at a carefully-poised midpoint, if you will, between the perennialists and radically anti-perennialist thinkers like Steven T. Katz. Green is attracted to Jungianinfluenced interpretations of religious phenomena, but kept within a properly conceived and distinctive historical framework. Scholem’s various contributions to the Eranos volumes were important models in his own development, though he is certainly more open to discussion of the experiences underlying the sources than was Scholem. In this respect Green’s approach has parallels to the work of Moshe Idel and his use of crosstraditional typologies. Green, as a theologian, is more attracted to and revealing of personal dimensions of his relationship to the sources than is Idel. See Arthur Green, “Judaism and Mysticism,” in Take Judaism, for Example: Studies Toward the Comparison of Religions, ed. Jacob Neusner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 67–91. On Idel’s approach to the phenomenology and study of Jewish mysticism, see the volume dedicated to his work in this series. 15 Arthur Green, Tormented Master: A Life of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1979). 16 More will be said about this below.

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and important articles exploring the typologies of Hasidic leadership and the phenomenology of Hasidic spirituality.17 He has also written studies of both Heschel and Zeitlin, in which he discusses their relationship to the Jewish mystical tradition and explores their neo-Hasidic project of reinterpreting rabbinic and mystical sources for contemporary readers.18 While at RRC Green edited a two-volume collection of studies called Jewish Spirituality (Crossroad, 1986–1987). Gathering these articles proved to be a difficult task, since some would-be contributors denied the very existence of “Jewish spirituality.” For these critics, the term “spirituality” is one that is awkwardly imported from other religions, particularly Christianity. The studies brought together in these volumes dispel that notion, offering a very different perspective of Judaism. Green gives the following reflection on his understanding of Jewish spirituality: Life in the presence of God—or the cultivation of a life in the ordinary world bearing the holiness once associated with sacred space and time, with Temple and with holy days—is perhaps as close as one can come to a definition of “spirituality” that is native to the Jewish tradition and indeed faithful to its Semitic roots.19

Spirituality, as Green understands it, includes but is not limited to the type of religious life and experience called “mysticism.” It embraces the life of piety of the prophet, the philosopher, and the halakhist as well as the mystic. It is the innate desire of the human heart to live in the divine presence, whether in the sacred or the mundane realm. The studies assembled in these two volumes demonstrate that spirituality thus defined has been an integral part of Jewish theology and religious life since biblical Antiquity and into contemporary times. There is place within the realm of Jewish spirituality for the Reform prophet-inspired social activist alongside the modern Orthodox devotee of Joseph B. Soleveitchik’s Halakhic Man, together with Zeitlin, Heschel, and the Hasidic masters themselves. All of 17 Arthur Green, “The Zaddiq as Axis Mundi in Later Judaism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 45, no. 3 (1977): 327–47; Arthur Green, “Typologies of Leadership in Early Hasidism, in Jewish Spirituality, Vol. II: From the Sixteenth-Century Revival to the Present, ed. Arthur Green (New York: Crossroad Books, 1987), 127–56; Arthur Green, “Around the Maggid’s Table: Tsaddik, Leadership and Popularization in the Circle of Dov Baer of Miedzyrzec.” Zion 88, no. 1 (2013): 73–106 (Hebrew); and the English version in Arthur Green, The Heart of the Matter: Studies in Jewish Mysticism and Theology (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2015), 119–66. 18 Arthur Green, “Abraham Joshua Heschel: Recasting Hasidism for Moderns,” Modern Judaism 29, no. 1 (2009): 62–79; Arthur Green, “Hillel Zeitlin and Neo-Hasidic Readings of the Zohar,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 22 (2010): 59–78. 19 Arthur Green, ed., Jewish Spirituality, vol. 1 (New York: Crossroad, 1986), xiii.

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them are seeking a Judaism devoted to the cultivation and embodiment of divine presence in the human heart as a force for the transformation of the outer world. Through this and other more popular writings, Green has had a major role in legitimizing both the word “spirituality” and the complex of notions and attitudes embraced by it within the Jewish community.20 In the introduction to Jewish Spirituality Green also first undertakes his ongoing project of describing and understanding the symbolic language of Kabbalah. One element that has united Jewish mystics across the centuries is a shared commitment to the rich matrix of associations and symbols inspired by biblical verses and rabbinic teachings, expanded and reinterpreted over the centuries. The sefirot (sing., sefirah), a series of ten emanations that bridges between the abstract, unknowable Deity and the immanent presence in this world, are the heart of this language. But when seen functionally rather than metaphysically, they have also become the anchors to which the vast array of symbols adheres. Green understands this symbolic language to be one of the defining elements of Jewish mysticism, and it is a subject treated with great subtlety in his studies.21 Green authored a major study of the evolution of the symbols associated with the first of the ten sefirot in his Keter: The Crown of God in Early Judaism, where he traced the motif of divine coronation back to its early sources.22 Another study, “Shekhinah, the Virgin Mary, and the Song of Songs” deals with the tenth sefirah, malkhut or shekhinah, and the feminine symbols associated with it, emerging in the setting of medieval Christendom.23 Green has also published several volumes of Hasidic texts in English translation. The first of these was a small compendium of teachings on the art of prayer, translated together with his friend Barry Holtz.24 This was followed some years later by selected translations from two of the great classics of Hasidic literature: R. Menahem Nahum of Chernobyl’s Me’or 20 For example, see Arthur Green, “Restoring the Aleph: Judaism for the Contemporary Seeker,” CIJE Lecture Series (New York: Council for Initiatives in Jewish Education, 1996). 21 See Arthur Green, A Guide to the Zohar (Stanford University Press, 2004). This understanding of the sefirot was first developed in his “The Zohar: Jewish Mysticism in Medieval Spain,” in An Introduction to the Medieval Mystics of Europe, ed. Paul Szarmach (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), 97–134; and a popularized version of this is found in Arthur Green, Ehyeh: A Kabbalah for Tomorrow (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2003), 39–60. A comparison of Green’s description of the sefirot in A Guide to the Zohar and Ehyeh will offer an interesting window on the relationship between his scholarly and theological writings. 22 Green, Keter: The Crown of God. 23 Green, “Shekhinah, the Virgin Mary, and the Song of Songs.” 24 Arthur Green and Barry W. Holtz, Your Word Is Fire: The Hasidic Masters on Contemplative Prayer (New York: Schocken Books, 1977).

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‘Eynayim,25 and R. Judah Leib Alter’s Sefat Emet.26 Most recently he edited a two-volume collection of early Hasidic texts entitled Speaking Torah: Spiritual Teachings from around the Maggid’s Table (Jewish Lights, 2013), together with three of his closest students. Green’s efforts as a translator reflect his larger project to make the sources of the mystical tradition accessible and relevant to the modern English readership; this element was inspired by the works of his teacher Nahum Glatzer in particular. The target audience is primarily Jewish, but by no means exclusively so. Indeed, Green’s first two books of translations were published by the Paulist Press, a Catholic publishing house interested in devotional literature and spiritual texts at a time in which no Jewish publishers were printing such works.27 Contemporary Theology Green’s theology may rightly be described as a mystical and monistic panentheism. He is committed to many elements of traditional religious language, but he is ultimately a monist, understanding the Jewish faith in one God as pointing beyond itself toward the ultimate oneness of all being. His ideas are deeply informed by the teachings and symbolic world of Jewish mysticism, which he reads intensively but selectively.28 As a neoHasidic thinker, he is attracted to the philosophical underpinnings and spiritual psychology of Hasidism as well as the mythic structures and language of Kabbalah. Green’s project builds upon the work of Martin Buber, Hillel Zeitlin, and Abraham Joshua Heschel, who creatively reinterpreted the legacy of the Hasidic masters in order to share them with modern Jews. As we shall see, Green is decidedly not a rationalist theologian; he has little interest in adducing arguments and proving logical theorems. He has come to understand that religious argumentation is spiritually arid and ultimately unconvincing; it is the soul that must be exposed to religious 25 Arthur Green, ed. and trans., Upright Practices and the Light of the Eyes (New York: Paulist Press, 1982). That volume contained only the homilies on Genesis. He is now at work on a complete translation of that text. 26 Arthur Green, ed. and trans., Language of Truth: The Torah Commentary of the Sefat Emet (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1998). 27 See his foreword to Ariel Evan Mayse, From the Depth of the Well: An Anthology of Jewish Mysticism (New York: Paulist Press, 2014). In recent years many of Green’s works have either been originally published or reprinted by Stuart Matlins’s Jewish Lights, a press entirely devoted to the dissemination of Jewish spiritual and devotional literature. 28 Specifically, one might say that he is a devotee of the Zohar (but not the Idrot), R. Meir Ibn Gabbai and R. Moshe Cordovero (but not Luria and the whole Lurianic school), the SHeLaH, the school of the Maggid of Mezritch (especially the Me’or ‘Eynayim, and R. Aaron of Starosselye), R. Nahman of Bratslav, and the Sefat Emet.

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truth, not the mind. By this he means to say that the power of religious language lies in addressing a level of human consciousness other than that of logical argumentation, a current that runs deeper not only in its emotional appeal but in its ability to call forth truly binding human commitment, engaging both individuals and communities. The discourse of argumentation that characterizes much of philosophical writing, both medieval and modern, ultimately falls flat. He accepts that the spiritual seeker cannot prove anything, but may indeed bear witness to the Divine through the testimony of his life and religious quest. In this sense Heschel, both in his distinction between theology and depth-theology and in his personal witness, remains crucial for Green, even though he departs from his teacher in some other important ways. Green insists on the distinction (partly learned from Paul Tillich) between emunah as the life-commitment to faith demanded by R. Nahman of Bratslav and the dogmatic assertion to verities characterized by the same term in Maimonides’ Thirteen Articles of Faith. Green’s theology is deeply influenced by the ideas of religious existentialism, humanism, and studies in myth and symbol from the realm of comparative religion. He does not long for a nostalgic return to the shtetl of Eastern Europe (whether real or imagined), and throughout his writings Green reiterates that the modern reader and theologian must be critical of certain elements of the Jewish mystical tradition, including both the grand claims of Kabbalah regarding metaphysical truth, and the wonder stories of miracle-working Hasidic masters.29 Kabbalah may not be “true” on the discursive level, but its poetry and profundity speak to Green and lead him beyond where the existentialists would allow him to go. From existentialism Green has inherited the notion that ours is an age in which grand systems of truth, whether kabbalistic, Hegelian, Marxist, or Freudian, have failed us. He frequently uses the rabbinic rubric of “Both whole and broken tablets were placed in the ark,”30 claiming that ours is an age of broken tablets, when truth can be derived only from fragmentary sources that we struggle to piece together, each in unique fashion. Both the inspiration and essential linguistic/symbolic building-blocks of a modern Jewish spiritual theology for this very different age can in this way be drawn forth from the noblest and most insightful elements of the Jewish mystical tradition. But existentialism proved inadequate because Green is in search of the unitive and the mysterious, and perhaps even the transcendent, though not

29 For example, see Green, Ehyeh, 16–18, 92. 30 b. Bava Batra 14b.

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in the usually understood sense of a transcendent deity. The existentialist focus on the here and now and the utter insistence on the denial of metaphysics were too limiting for Green. He was so inspired by Zeitlin’s writings precisely because they hinted at a veiled metaphysical truth that could not be proven but that was so rich in its symbolic expressions that he found himself drawn to it. The fact that it was presented in poetic imagery that always stayed short of firm ontological claim gave it a special palatability. Green’s earliest published works of theology are a pair of short essays written in 1968 and 1971.31 These highly provocative articles are clearly influenced by the ethos of the 1960s youth culture, but they already contain many of the core themes of his theological project spelled out over the next forty years. These two essays are a call for radical liberation from older forms of religious thought and practice. Green draws upon the language and theology of Jewish mysticism, combining it with the empowerment and freedom of modern writers like Nietzsche and Kazantzakis. He argues that while some Jewish rituals may indeed still be meaningful, a vibrant Jewish life will depend on a radical and bold reimagining of both Jewish theology and praxis. The first of these essays, “Notes From the Jewish Underground: Psychedelics and Kabbalah,” was published under the pseudonym Itzik Lodzer.32 Green explores the ways in which psychedelic drugs can offer the religious person a different perspective on the world. Careful use of such substances may help to release a person from his ego and ordinary consciousness, thus opening the possibility of seeing the world “with God’s eyes.” Green writes that, with their aid, “one can catch a glimpse of what the Kabbalists must have experienced as Eyn Sof: expanded consciousness seems to have no limit, except of the degree of intensity that the mind can stand.”33 But he reminds the reader that drugs cannot truly provide inspiration; they only have the power to confirm experientially descriptions of mystical insights widely found in the teachings of prior generations. Here we first see Green as revolutionary turned reinterpreter. In this essay we also find Green already reflecting upon the relationship of the infinite Divine and the world 31 These essays, “Notes From the Jewish Underground: Psychedelics and Kabbalah” and “After Itzik: Toward a Theology of Jewish Spirituality,” were republished in The New Jews, ed. James Sleeper and Alan Mintz (New York: Vintage Books, 1971), 176–92 and 193–203. All citations refer to this version. 32 The great-grandfather for whom Green was named was called Avraham-Itzik and he lived for some years in Lodz. The editor of the new journal Response, which first published the essay, was wary about publishing an article that endorsed using illegal substances. 33 “Psychedelics and Kabbalah,” 184.

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of the sefirot, the progressively self-limiting expressions of that ineffable One. The possibility that human experience can replay and embody this process lies at the heart of the mystical devotional life and the seekerfriendly Judaism that Green has sought to articulate throughout his later theological writings. Green wrote a somewhat more conservative response to “Itzik Lodzer” a few years later, this time publishing it under his own name. In this second essay he describes the feeling of living in two worlds at once, locked in an eternal struggle with God but at the same time trying to hide within the relative safety of academic scholarship. The young Green is drawn to the Divine, but he is tempted to flee from the intensity of this encounter, and certainly from the restrictions of classical Jewish observance. He speaks of a transition away from a spiritual life defined by rigid constancy, toward a path in which the ebb and flow of divine presence is seen as the creative rhythm of movement between worlds. Here we already see Green defining Israel as those who struggle with God, an important claim found in his later works as well. The closing footnote holds many of the theological goals that Green sets out for himself: Desideratum: A Judaism that allows, even accentuates, its mystical selfunderstanding, while at the same time radically denying the Hellenistic/ Gnostic body-soul and matter-spirit dualisms which have so deeply infected us. Handle carefully and avoid Frankism.34

Green seeks to create an empowered Jewish life infused with the teachings of mysticism, but one that will draw upon the kabbalistic tradition selectively. The older models of self and cosmology inherited from Neoplatonism and Gnosticism create psychological rifts, leading to the rejection (and hence the ultimate disenchantment and secularization) of the natural world and the physical self. Green longs for the integration and healing found in a more world- and body-embracing spiritual path. He has seen aspects of Eastern spirituality (at least as presented for Westerners!) that are more holistic in their fusion of soul and body. But Green also knows very well that embracing the physical world could lead to the hedonistic religious anarchy typified by the eighteenth-century Frankist movement. There are dangers, to be sure, but the goals are too important to be abandoned. The mature Green has reflected upon these writings, and though he expresses

34 Green, “Toward a Theology of Jewish Spirituality,” 203.

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some trepidation at their naïve radicalism and overblown language, he affirms the importance of those experiences and writings as holding much of what would come later. Green’s greatest contribution to contemporary Jewish theology is his three-part series, written over the course of several decades. He offers his understanding of what it means to write a contemporary spiritual language in the introduction to the very first these books, Seek My Face, Speak My Name: A Contemporary Jewish Theology (1992):35 Theology is also an attempt to articulate that intangible we call ‘religious experience.’ It seeks to use the best of human thinking and the deep reservoir of religious symbols to create a framework within which we can understand this vital and currently much-neglected aspect of human life. Religious experience is the starting place of all theology, the most basic datum with which the theologian has to work.36

In other words, theology is drawn forth from combining the water of two wells, those of ancient symbolism and personal religious experience. Each enriches and lends meaning to the other, without which it could not be sustained or would be of little value. Green is aware of the complex relationship between the inner life of one nourished by the language and symbols of a particular tradition, and the “choice” of that language as a way of expressing such experiences. The shaping and influence proceeds in both directions: from the tradition to the individual mystic or thinker, and from the individual, through writing and teaching, back to the ever-enriched tradition to be passed forward. Green has charted the evolution and development of Jewish mysticism’s symbolic language in his historical and phenomenological studies, but in his theological writings he creatively expands and reimagines this spiritual vocabulary. To some degree he incorporates the findings of history and science, but Green also seeks to move the theological conversation beyond their limits. He has no interest in reconciling the accounts of Creation given in Genesis and those offered by science. They are two different perspectives, one ancient and mythic and the other scientific and contemporary, ever changing. But at times the two paradigms coexist in Green in an uneasy way, which will be discussed at greater length below.

35 Revised and republished as Seek My Face: A Jewish Mystical Theology (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2003). All citations refer to this version. 36 Ibid., xix.

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This trilogy is highly confessional and personal in nature; all three works are self-consciously written in an accessible style. These books are part of a single project, each offering a different voice and perspective. An important element of Green’s heterodox, seeker friendly Judaism is his rejection of the very idea of dogmatic theology. As he has sometimes remarked, Green “does not believe in believing.” Green writes from the heart of his own religious experience, using the storehouse of traditional teachings and rubrics to give it theological language and then sharing it with others. Seek My Face is poetic and especially personal, welcoming the reader into the depths of his heart and personal religious life in an evocative, almost experiential way. Originally a series of lectures offered at a Reconstructionist congregation in New York, it was an attempt to demonstrate to skeptics how a clear-thinking and intelligent person could find mystical language so attractive. It was prepared for publication, however, in the year following the sudden and shocking death of Rabbi Daniel Kamesar, a student to whom Green had felt particularly close, and that added to its personal and emotionally powerful tone. Green begins Seek My Face with a discussion of God, describing why he no longer finds classical notions of a theistic Deity viable. Green insists that the Divine is beyond all words and images, the indescribable Eyn Sof of the kabbalists. We are the ones who give the faceless One expression as “God” (though he much prefers the Hebrew term Y-H-W-H, around which the book’s four chapters are imaginatively structured) through our theological and religious language; the infinite number of “faces,” or names of the Divine, are those given by us. Of course, these conceptual structures are a type of projection, but this is something Green celebrates. The act of projection, in which we attempt to describe the mysterious and infinite Divine through structures and words, and then reflect upon it, is called theology. Thus we offer to the wordless God the human gift of language, and give to the imageless God the gift of a human face, one to which we can relate in intimacy. This understanding of the theological enterprise is key to what Green means in describing himself as a “religious humanist.” Green then moves on to a discussion of Creation. Building on the Jewish mystical mythology, he writes that Y-H-W-H withdrew some measure of the infinite divine light so that the world might have a place. In this moment the nameless One both gave birth to and was born into the diversity of the physical world. In Hasidic terms, the infinite divine consciousness is also making room for the human other, though this process may be viewed from either direction. This transition from the infinite (but inexpressible)

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divine unity into dynamic multiplicity37 is mirrored by the process of Revelation. Torah, the ever-flowing font of divine wisdom, was first expressed in language—which by its very nature both limits and reveals— on Mt. Sinai (understood metaphorically, as we shall see). But the capstone in this unfolding sacred drama, the ultimate goal toward which both Creation and Revelation are important steps, is the movement toward redemption. We will examine each of these at greater length in our thematic discussion below. Ehyeh: A Kabbalah for Tomorrow (2003) is the second entry in the series. In its tone and content, Ehyeh is offered as an answer to the need of Jewish seekers attracted to Eastern religion in its various manifestations. In a very different way, this book is also a reply to certain contemporary groups that claim the mantle of the kabbalistic tradition but totally remove its wisdom from the Jewish historical and devotional context. Green sees great opportunity in the revival of interest in Jewish mysticism in the past several decades. The question, he insists, is how that revival should take place. What elements of the kabbalistic heritage are useful to the contemporary seeker, and how might they be reread in a contemporary context? What elements of that tradition, he also dares to ask, might best be left behind? Ehyeh touches on many of the themes in Seek My Face, but specifically addresses the mystical tradition. Green spends more time showing how mystical themes and theological ideas are tied to the life of concrete Jewish praxis. It even offers a small number of devotional practices and specific exercises, something quite rare in Green’s writings. Both as teacher and theologian, Green generally demurs from prescribing how others should act in the realm of religious practice. The third part in the series, Radical Judaism: Rethinking God and Tradition (2010), is in many ways Green’s most mature theological work. Though the picture he draws is largely consistent with his earlier writings, Radical Judaism has a different tone than either of the previous two books in this series. It was written in a more sophisticated style, though still very much from a personal perspective. Here we find Green struggling with issues of intellectual honesty, wrestling with his identity as a postmodern thinker and a monistic Jewish theologian. This compels him to outline a Jewish theology that is still viable after the two great intellectual defeats of traditional religion in the twentieth century: the triumph of evolutionary biology 37 This is the transition from Eyn Sof to sefirot, which exist only from the perspective of humans. Here we see the influence of Hasidic thought, particularly that of R. Aaron of Starroselye.

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(and with it a host of other sciences, including astrophysics and geology, in describing the origin of our planet and the emergence of life upon it) over traditional views of Creation, and the wide acceptance of biblical criticism, with its challenges to the divine and mosaic authorship of the Torah. After a short introduction and an important excursus on Creation and evolution, Green turns to exploring the historical development of Jewish conceptions of God. The Hebrew Bible preserves mythic elements absorbed from the Ancient Near East, which were revived and given new life in the symbolic language of medieval Kabbalah. Green celebrates this rich mythos, and argues that modern Jewish theology must draw upon its vital, even erotic, energy. He then goes on to describe his mystical understanding of Revelation, but devotes even more attention to exploring the nature of Torah. He also tackles the question of “Who are the Jewish people, and what is their role in the world?” Thus Seek My Face and Radical Judaism are together subtly woven around the six core themes of Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption: Creation, Revelation, and Redemption in the former; God, Torah, and Israel, in the latter.38 This mystical trilogy is supplemented by an array of articles published over the past thirty years in Tikkun, The Reconstructionist, and elsewhere; many of these same themes echo throughout these shorter pieces. Green’s goal in all of these works has been to create an authentically Jewish spiritual language for modern religious seekers and to do so in an honest and accessible manner. Another of his books, These Are the Words, fulfills this task for the beginner.39 More than an introduction to Judaism or an effort to improve Jewish literacy, this book offers the spiritual vocabulary necessary for seekers turning or returning to Judaism as a language of personal religious self-expression. The philosophical landscape Green has painted in his public writings over the four decades is relatively stable, but some elements of his thought have changed and evolved. For example, we should note that in Seek My Face, which is subtly infused with a type of mystical devotion, Green mentions submission as an important element in the spiritual life. His later writings, as do his very early essays, vigorously emphasize human agency, freedom, and creativity; submission is noticeably absent from them. Yet it

38 At this time Green is at work on a Hebrew-language adaptation of Radical Judaism. It has changed sufficiently, he claims, that a revised second English edition is soon to follow. 39 Arthur Green, These Are the Words: A Vocabulary of Jewish Spiritual Life (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 1999).

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has begun to resurface in some of Green’s most recent writings, particularly in his ongoing project of a commentary on the liturgy.40 As noted above, there is a subtle but programmatic point of tension through Green’s works: his creative Jewish reinterpretation of mystical literature on one hand, and his reverence and attachment to the tradition on the other. Green is deeply invested in the symbolic language, conceptual frameworks, and the textual fabric of the Jewish tradition. He may protest, even frankly abhor, certain views found in the traditional sources, but he will not abandon them: Even in bemoaning the role of women in the Torah or in screaming out its wrongness in the murderous prescription for the Canaanites or its refusal to permit full sexual expression of same-gender love, we are finding ourselves and our own voices within Torah. We set our own lives, our own quest, into the ever-renewed framework of ancient Torah.41

While Green fully supports changes in our religious behavior and attitudes (both seminaries he has headed are based on full gender egalitarianism and embrace sanctification of same-sex unions), he insists that we continue in our struggle with difficult parts of our tradition, actively reshaping and reinterpreting texts, but not excising them. Green understands the evocative power of religious language, both as a scholar and a theologian. Understanding religious truth to belong more to the realm of art than that of science, his theology is an attempt to persuade the reader less by logic of argument than by grandeur of vision. Like Heschel, Green cares that ideas be beautiful and appealing to the imagination; that has more than a little to do with the “truth” of religion as he understands it. He sees both the world and the tradition through a mythopoetic lens, lending an aura of profundity to his teaching echoing that of his kabbalistic and Hasidic sources. He also has the rare talent of being able to occasionally break out of that mode of speech, explaining to the reader what he is saying, without entirely breaking the poetic spell. Let us now turn to some of the recurrent themes in Green’s writings.

40 Arthur Green, “Personal Theology,” Reform Jewish Quarterly (Spring 2014): 6–19; and “A neo-Hasidic Life: Credo and Reflections,” in Personal Theology: Essays in Honor of Neil Gillman, ed. William Plevan (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2013). 41 Green, Seek My Face, 159.

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God The quest to know the One lies at the heart of Green’s philosophical and spiritual path. He admits to having been attracted to the radical “death of God” theology in the twentieth century, and his works do not affirm a theistic God as classically understood. The cover of Radical Judaism defines him as “neither theist nor atheist.” Green’s personal religious vocabulary includes “God,” but he uses it only with great hesitation. This imprecise term is a hopelessly inadequate way of describing the Divine, and it is heavily laden with baggage of Western theological tradition. He much prefers to use Y-H-W-H, a biblical name of God that the Torah itself derives from the Hebrew root “to be.” Y-H-W-H refers to far more than the usual notion of a supreme Being or even the origin of all creation. Y-H-W-H, Green avers, is Being itself, past, present, and future united in one, the infinite and ineffable One that is the essential unity behind the mask of the world’s multiplicity. Divine unity refers not only to the conception of one God, but rather to the affirmation that all existence is One. All apparently multifarious reality is a levush (“garment”), a term used by Green (as by the Hasidic sources he reads) with great frequency. Y-H-W-H dwells within the human heart and within all existence as well. Every extant form is one of the infinite expressions of Y-H-W-H, one of the endless “faces” of the Divine. Here we must distinguish Green’s theology of panentheism from pantheism, or the belief that God is the sum of all reality; divinity and the world, universe, or cosmos, are identical. In Green’s mystical panentheism, Y-H-W-H is the totality of being and yet infinitely more as well. The Divine infuses the world and is expressed through the cosmos, but nothing—not even the name Y-H-W-H—can adequately convey the infinity of the One. In short, the ontological underpinning of Green’s thought is monistic. Reality as we encounter it is the self-expression of a singular force, one that has always been present within the universe and, in a way almost entirely opaque to our perception, beyond it as well. This infinity is not comprehensible or even credible to the rational human mind that thinks in terms of measure, definition, and limitation. It is, however, perceptible to a different level of human consciousness, one that dwells deep below our ordinary consciousness and lives in subtle contact with it. It is to this level of the human mind that religious language, including both verbal and that residing in symbolic gesture, is meant to appeal. Much of religious teaching is meant to point us toward that level of discourse and open us to it. Here we may say that Green is best understood as a Jewish parallel to the approach to religion and mythology of a Wilfred Cantwell Smith or a Joseph Campbell.

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Green seeks to deconstruct the “vertical metaphor” in which God is referred to as “above” and we are “below” as His creatures. Instead, he describes God’s relationship to the physical world in terms of “inner” and “outer” reality. Y-H-W-H is the inner truth of all, the soul and the energy that animates the sum totality of existence. All outer manifestations thus garb and protect the radiant Divine within. As we shall see, there is room for an Eyn Sof (sacred endlessness) in Green’s theology, but it remains mysterious, the object of wonder but not of knowledge. Green reads the Lurianic tradition of tsimtsum, the myth in which the infinite Eyn Sof withdrew a measure of the divine light in order to make room for the world, like the Hasidic masters. Y-H-W-H made room for us, and our individual identities, through this withdrawal. A ray of highly contracted divine light reaches us in the form of religious language, developed by the minds of our great religious thinkers but subtly infused with an imminent divine presence as well. This contraction of divinity is illuminated by God’s message to Moses in saying hineh makom itti, “there is room here with Me” (Exod. 33:21): the all-embracing One allows the human self to exist as an individual and therefore as both partner and “other.” But this view of existence is ultimately an illusion, for the underlying unity remains, even as our perception has been both enhanced and obscured by the mask of tsimtsum. Green leaves open the question of whether Y-H-W-H knowingly and willfully withholds light to provide us with freedom or if tsimtsum is a metaphorical way of speaking about the unfolding of human individuation and our ongoing quest to understand more of the mystery. Yet tsimtsum is an expression of divine love, not a cruel game. It is given to us as the realm in which we are to live most of our lives, doing our essential spiritual work of uplifting and transformation so aptly described by the Hasidic masters and understood by Green in his own expanded form. Hillel Zeitlin once argued that Spinoza saw the world as a machine immutably governed by the laws of nature, but the Ba’al Shem Tov saw this same world as an ongoing work of art, with God as the Artist/Creator ever fashioning it anew.42 Green stands within this tradition of his Hasidic and neo-Hasidic 42 See Green, Hasidic Spirituality for a New Era, 186. The description of the world (and its eternal becoming) recalls a comment by Green’s teacher Abraham Joshua Heschel, who enjoined the next generation of Jewish seekers to “remember that the meaning of life is to build a life as if it were a work of art. You’re not a machine. And you are young. Start working on this great work of art called your own existence.” See Abraham Joshua Heschel, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, ed. Susannah Heschel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), 412.

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forebears, but he sees that constant re-creation as taking place within an evolutionary context, one that calls forth the talents of each individual human artist as the expression of that divine art. Green opens Seek My Face with Rabbi Nahman’s famous tale “The Portrait of the King,” which holds great importance to him. This is a tale in which each human being is tasked with creating a unique portrayal of the face of God. He has commented on this tale at three distinct stages of his career.43 Can one live with this non-dualistic, monistic consciousness at all times? Like the Hasidic masters he reads, Green understands that these moments are impossible to maintain, that this type of awareness is fleeting and subtle. Indeed, there is something quite frightening about this unitive vision, for it threatens to totally overwhelm our sense of individuated self. We exist as a part of it, and yet we are protected from becoming totally overcome by that type of expansive consciousness. However, when those self-protective mechanisms are given too much freedom, they become kelippot, “shells” that keep out the flow of divine light. We are present to cosmic oneness in sacred moments, either ritually determined or personal, in the context of human relationships, particularly in moments of shared silence. This very non-constancy of divine awareness is also what allows for freedom of choice and sacred deed, for the majority of one’s religious life takes place in that state of “diminished” consciousness. Y-H-W-H is ever-present, manifested in the infinite expression of being that surrounds us. But Green, as a religious humanist, does not understand God to dictate the course of history. The covenants of Abraham and Sinai, the Exodus from Egypt, Revelation, or the giving of the Torah, and the future redemption are all preserved in Green’s religious vocabulary without being seen as the doings of a personified God who acts on the stage of history. Each, however, is a human response to real and profound encounter with the One. In one passage Green calls this position religious naturalism, a term he usually avoids, preferring the sense that “natural” and “supernatural” reflect different human perspectives on the same events.44 But even if the Divine does not direct history, is there a personal God in Green’s theology? This depends very much on how one uses the term See also b. Berakhot 10a, where the words “there is no rock (tsur) like our God” (I Sam. 2:2) is interpreted as “there is no Artist (tsayyar).” 43 See Green, Tormented Master, 350–60; Green, Seek My Face, xiii–xxiv; Green, “Ga’agu’ey ha-Elohim el ha-Adam: On Rabbi Nahman’s Tale of the King and the Sage,” Ha-Hayyim ke-Ga’agu’a, ed. Roee Horen (Tel Aviv, 2010), 89–100 (Hebrew). 44 Arthur Green, “Neo-Hasidism and Our Theological Struggles,” Ra’ayonot 4, no. 3 (1984): 15.

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“personal.” Yes, the relationship with the One is entirely intimate and personal in the seeker’s life. All the personified images of God are understood as human projections, but this does not mean that Green eschews them. If believed in literally and taken as absolutes they can become idolatrous. But as a means of opening the heart to the presence of the One, personified ways of speaking both to and about God can be useful tools.45 It would be overly simplistic and distorting to say that there is no room for traditional theistic language in Green’s thinking. Indeed, the language of Jewish sacred narratives, such as Creation, the binding of Isaac, Exodus, and Revelation, as myth, is central to his philosophy.46 These ancient “histories” are important because they remain existentially compelling and nourish the religious imagination. Although not “true” on the factual plane, they give us a rich inheritance of theological structures and devotional rituals. Green does articulate a faith in “a God who seeks us out”47 and refers to the One who delights in each new expression of being.48 Y-H-W-H seeks to be known, and as such may be described as having a will in a highly abstract sense (expressed mostly through the evolutionary process), but this is not the classic divine will with well-defined objectives and desires. At times Green readily affirms the existence of a transcendent God, described as Eyn Sof (the endless One). This aspect of the Divine has no limit and no end, remaining utterly beyond human knowledge.49 But he is not thinking of a transcendent Deity who “dwells” or exists somewhere “outside” or “beyond” the universe. In Radical Judaism he offers a particularly striking understanding of divine transcendence: Transcendence means . . . that God—or Being—is so fully present in the here and now of each moment that we could not possibly grasp the depth of that presence. Transcendence thus dwells within immanence. There is no ultimate duality here, no ‘God and world,’ no ‘God, world, and self,’ only one Being and its many faces. Those who seek consciousness of it come to know that it is indeed eyn sof, without end.50

Thus, paradoxically, transcendence is also described in somewhat experiential terms, as an encounter with the One that is beyond words.51 This 45 See Green, “Personal Theology,” 6–19. 46 Green, Radical Judaism, 40–41. 47 Ibid., 159. 48 Ibid., 20, 172 n. 18. 49 Green, Seek My Face, 47. 50 Green, Radical Judaism, 18 51  Green’s youthful articles, mentioned above, spoke of “the experience of Eyn Sof.” Gershom Scholem, in a letter to young Green, argued with this, claiming that Eyn Sof

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indescribable moment defies logic; in casual parlance, it “blows” the human mind. It is precisely through the immanent, the expression of God within the dynamic multiplicity of the created world, that such an experience becomes possible. But even as Green describes Y-H-W-H in the language of transcendence, it is clear that this is not a God “who” actively bestows a law upon a people or demands that they obey it. The One’s transcendent dimension is nothing more, and nothing less, than the infinite totality of being. Green likes to say that Y-H-W-H is a transformative reversal of the letters of HaWaYaH (“existence”). The same being, when seen from a wonder-filled holistic perspective, reveals itself as “Being,” the mysterious underlying unity of all.52 In acknowledging the value of thinking about God in personal terms, as long as it is accompanied by the knowledge that this is a projection, Green adopts the Hasidic usage of the terms katnut and gadlut, alternating moments of ordinary and “expanded” consciousness. This projection is important for us in the majority of our lives, which takes place in katnut, because we cannot spend all of our time in radical awareness of the divine unity. But our personal theological language also gives something to God. Green writes, “We are created in the image of God, if you will, and we are obliged to return the favor.”53 Elsewhere, he claims that “we give to Being the greatest gift we have to offer, that of our humanity.”54 In Radical Judaism we read that, “the personal God is a bridge between soul and mystery, a personification of the unknown, a set of projected images that we need and use, rather than an ultimate reality.”55 In a Talmudic and kabbalistic image also invoked by Heschel, Green depicts theology as a human lens (aspeklaria) through which we gaze upon the Divine, a lens that also has about it the property of a mirror. Green is keenly aware of the tension between personal and abstract conceptions of the Divine, and what is at stake. Part of Green’s project is to build a bridge between the devotional life and abstract theology (as well as historical scholarship). He insists that spiritual experiences are available without an ultimate faith in a personified God, and he seeks to cultivate was declared by the kabbalists to be precisely that aspect of the Divine which is beyond experience. Green was not entirely convinced. 52 Despite obvious parallels between Green’s thought and that of A.D. Gordon, Green came to know Gordon’s work rather late in his career and was not significantly influenced by him. 53 Green, Seek My Face, 31. 54 Green, “Personal Theology,” 6–19. 55 Green, Radical Judaism, 158.

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a Jewish religious life in a world without a Deity who commands particular acts of devotion. In the context of reciting a passage from the biblical Creation narrative preceding Kiddush (a benediction over the wine on Friday night, Green makes it clear that he does not intellectually believe that this is the way the world came into being. He then goes on to ask, “How do I affirm that which I do not believe? What is the nature of this affirmation in the face of my disbelief? How do we learn to live at peace with these two realities?”56 If we do not take the stories in the Bible to be literally true, and if we lack a traditionally anthropomorphic conception of God, are rituals meaningless and self-deceptive? Green insists that this is not the case. One can indeed have momentary encounters of great intensity with Y-H-W-H, which overwhelm critical consciousness and self-protective distancing. In such moments one may be overtaken by loving surrender to, and awe before, the One. Love and awe, the two great foci of religious devotion, do not stand and fall with the personified God. The classical commandments are traditional Jewish rituals that open up the possibility for such experiences, opportunities for living self-consciously in the divine presence. But they are not the only way. Green is attracted to the images of love between humanity and God. He often invokes expressions of longing and devotion, especially those taken from the Song of Songs.57 Instead of portraying humanity as servants to God, Green chooses to underscore another ancient but too often neglected Jewish metaphor: we are the lovers of God, locked forever in amorous embrace. He even daringly plays with Jacob’s all-night wrestle with the angel, wondering whether clear lines are to be drawn between struggle and embrace.58 The quest to know Y-H-W-H is one undertaken out of love. And this love is by no means one-sided. Y-H-W-H too has the capacity of longing; the mysterious One yearns to become revealed and known. This is a point of tension in Green’s theology, for the notion that Y-H-W-H has both a will that powers evolution and desire to be known with love, introduces what seems like an element of traditional theism into Green’s philosophy. Perhaps we 56 Green, Seek My Faith, 53. 57 The Song of Songs plays a key role in his academic scholarship as well. See Arthur Green, “The Song of Songs in Early Jewish Mysticism,” Orim: A Jewish Journal at Yale 2, no. 2 (1987): 49–63; Green, “Shekhinah, the Virgin Mary, and the Song of Songs”; Arthur Green, “Intradivine Romance: The Song of Songs in the Zohar,” in Scrolls of Love: Ruth and the Song of Songs, ed. Peter S. Hawkins and Lesleigh Cushing Stahlberg (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 221–27. 58 Green, Radical Judaism, 137.

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are meant to understand Y-H-W-H’s longing for expression as an innate drive or yearning, not as a self-reflective will. Indeed, the desire of Y-H-W-H to become known and manifest is the ultimate goal of Creation, to which we must now turn our attention. Creation Green laments that discussion of Creation has been largely abandoned in contemporary Jewish theology. Rather than allowing the opening chapters of Genesis to become relegated to those fundamentalists who read the story literally, Green calls for a new Jewish theology of Creation to fill this vacuum. But why is this narrative so important? Creation is the matrix of many profound existential questions: Who are we humans? Where did we come from? Where are we going? What meaning do our lives, both collectively and individually, hold? But Creation—reread as the ongoing narrative of evolution—is also the dynamic and ever-unfolding story of Y-H-W-H, seeking and finding expression through the physical world. Unlike some more traditional Jewish and Christian thinkers, Green avoids reinterpreting the seven days of the biblical Creation tale as time periods or stages. This story is rather a sustained meditation on the birth of multiplicity out of the original ineffable unity of the One, Y-H-W-H, the Source of all. In a very telling passage in Seek My Face, Green insists that the priority of the One to the many, or of Y-H-W-H to existence, is not necessarily one of time.59 The One that underlies the many, exists “prior” to it, now and always. It is only the force of narration, the way we tell the tale, that makes “God” come temporally first, thus “creating” the universe. Scientific claims, such as evolution or the dating of the universe, which have been vetted and accepted by the scholarly community should be accepted by the seeker as well. This is true even when they contradict religious traditions or biblical stories. It is our job to reframe them and offer new understandings of them. The first chapter of Radical Judaism represents Green’s fullest spirited embrace of the theory of evolution, a view that itself evolved over the course of several earlier iterations.60 His interpretation of evolution is still creative and selective, and he makes no attempt to engage with the varied nuances of Darwinian thought in a scientific manner. This would 59 Green, Seek My Face, 16–18. 60 See ibid., 47–94; Arthur Green, “God, World, Person: A Jewish Theology of Creation,” Journal of Theology (Dayton) 96 (1992): 21–32; Arthur Green, “A Kabbalah for the Environmental Age,” Tikkun 14, no. 55 (1999): 33–38; Green, Radical Judaism, 16–33.

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undermine his entire project of providing a mythic alternative that complements science rather than competes with it. Green describes the development of species and biodiversity as integral to the sacred drama of Creation. The expansion and unfolding greater complexity of species represent an inbuilt divine desire (or drive) for ever more diverse and complex self-manifestation. Y-H-W-H does not direct this process by saying, “this creature, and not that creature.” But the One longs to be known and to be embodied in the physical world. This inexorably leads to self-manifestation in creatures of higher consciousness, those who are able to absorb and reflect upon the evolutionary process, seeing it in all its dazzling beauty and complexity. The evolution of life, emerging as it has by means of the competition of species and their ongoing struggle for survival, needs to be seen as more than a violent, blood-drenched battlefield. It is most fully described neither by the Nietzschian “will to power” nor by a Schopenhauerian cycle of consumption, but a process of divine self-manifestation through the physical world, expressed in the variety and drive for multiplicity of life. Creation itself was a gift, a divine act of loving self-diminution so that the project of the world might come into being. As will become clearer in our discussion of Green’s approach to the question of evil, the complex vital processes of the living world certainly include elements of pain and suffering. Natural mortality, predation, the food chain, and natural extinctions are all a part of Y-H-W-H’s ever-growing self-expression.61 Classical interpretations of Genesis view humanity as the capstone of Creation. Green rejects this notion, which he sees as having given rise to environmental destruction and callous treatment of the world around us. Creation may well have a telos, but it is not humans. We are one step in the course of that ongoing sacred process, not its ultimate goal or even crowning achievement. Evolution, the ever-flowing river of divine self-manifestation, is by no means complete. It will continue into the future (assuming we do not destroy this planet!) and become more complicated, more beautiful, and more elevated, leading to greater vistas of consciousness than are presently conceivable to us. The development and evolution of the human mind is a part of this. This understanding that the One is the heart of Creation does not mean that human beings are unimportant. Indeed, as speaking and self-conscious 61 Green shares much in common with other Jewish ecological thinkers informed by the mystical tradition, such as Arthur Waskow and Zalman Schachter-Shalomi. He, like they, sees environmentalism as one of the necessary moral manifestations of his theology.

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beings humanity has a very special place. He writes that, “We humans represent a significant step forward in the evolutionary path toward the selfarticulation and self-fulfillment of the One.”62 Human self-consciousness and creativity lead us into a partnership with the ongoing unfolding of divinity. The development of religion and our ways of understanding God are part of that evolutionary process, but of course we (and our ideas) are just one more creature, another garb or expression of the Face. The telos of Creation, if there is one, is something much greater than the project of humanity. Contemplating the staggering beauty and sheer magnitude of Y-H-W-H’s constant self-expression through the acts of Creation leads us to a sense of wonder, a key term inherited by Green from both Heschel and Zeitlin, first inspired by the language of the psalms. Wonder has an aesthetic element in which we stand back and appreciate what lies before us, but it does not stop there. Such amazement allows us to transcend our ordinary consciousness and to be present to the infinite Divine. But part and parcel of Green’s new Jewish theology of Creation is an insistence that the Creation narrative, the new as well as the old, inspire us to action. He asks us to read the divine call to man, “ayekah—Where are you?” (Gen. 3:9), as an eternal call posed by the Divine: “The indwelling One asks this of every person, of every human embodiment of its own single Self.”63 Since Creation is a constant process, not a historical moment in time, God’s beckoning is perpetual as well. We are called to action in three realms: the intellectual, emotional, and physical, a translation of the classic triad of Torah, avodah, and gemilut hasadim. The human task is to hold the knowledge of God’s unity in the mind, opening the heart to this consciousness as well, and to act upon it in love, compassion, and generosity of spirit. These foundational principles, what Green refers to as “Jewish moral theology,” emerge from the old/new story of Creation, meaning a post-Darwinian rereading of the narrative through the eye of wonder, itself shaped by Israel’s ancient Creation tale. Part of our response to Creation is embodied in deed and ritual, such as Shabbat, the moment of sacred time at the heart of the Creation narrative. But according to Green, the ongoing self-manifestation process of Y-H-W-H needs human works. Here he draws on the kabbalistic notion of mitsvot tsorekh gavoha (commandments performed for the sake of the divine need). Green’s teacher Heschel saw his campaigns for social justice as an

62 Green, Radical Judaism, 27. 63 Ibid.

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outgrowth of this theology: in fighting for a more just and compassionate world, we fulfill one of God’s greatest needs and desires. Green argues that today’s most urgent call is to environmental action. He has become increasingly vocal about the current crisis and portents of environmental disaster. Shocked by what he sees as the gross irresponsibility of civic leadership, he feels compelled to speak out as a humanitarian concerned for the fate of our species and as a religious leader concerned for the fate of God’s project of creation on earth. He sees Westernized countries as primarily responsible for the scandalous overconsumption that has led us to the brink. This is a betrayal of our shared religious tradition, and an abuse of the story of Creation. A contemporary Judaism must teach us to honor the dignity and necessity of all species, affirming mankind’s special role in shepherding the ongoing process of existence, Y-H-W-H’s ongoing coming into being. Revelation and Language A number of early midrashim suggest that the Torah existed before Creation, and several of these texts refer to God gazing into the Torah in order to fashion the world. Building on later kabbalistic interpretations of these midrashim, Green understands them as referring to an infinite primordial divine wisdom that cannot be fully expressed in words. The Revelation at Sinai represents a moment in which the eternal and ineffable aspect of God’s wisdom was drawn into the vessels of language. Green affirms that sacred encounters with the Divine must take place through words; human beings have a deep need for language, even though we also have the capacity for experiences that take us beyond words. This leads Green to offer a radical—though to him quite obvious—way of looking at Revelation. The biblical account of Sinai is “a vertical metaphor for an internal event,” one not to be taken literally.64 The Revelation takes place within the mind of Moses, or whoever “Moses” represents within the biblical authorship. There was a moment, or collection of such moments, of transformative awareness, and this inner event is symbolically designated as “Sinai”—the humble height of understanding. The Torah as it has been passed down represents a human attempt to give articulation to the Revelation at that metaphorical Sinai. God’s call to man is translinguistic, and it is we who bring that divine message into words. In this sense there is little distinction between Written Torah and Oral Torah; both are human

64 Green, Seek My Face, 9.

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responses to the transverbal divine wisdom, representing in humanized terms an “event” and a reality beyond words. These ideas are an important element of the way in which Green engages biblical criticism, which he identifies as the second of the two great battles fought by religious Jews that were essentially resolved in the twentieth century. Twenty-first century Judaism needs to move forward beyond higher criticism of Scripture, rather than attempting to disprove these theories and rehash old debates. Since the text of the Torah is in effect mankind’s response to a sacred encounter with the Divine, the Bible, both in terms of its laws and its theology, reflects the historical context in which it was written. This also accounts for multiple authorship and the fact that the biblical text has clearly evolved through editing and transmission over time. Indeed, like several other important modern theologians, Green argues that Revelation (like Creation) is not a single historical event, but rather an ongoing and continuous process.65 In this respect his theology shares some elements in common with the process philosophy outlined by thinkers like Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne. However, Green is adamant that his thought reflects his own personal encounter with the Divine and is drawn from radicalized neo-Hasidic reading of Jewish mystical sources; it is not a Jewish answer to process theology.66 The traditions of the Jewish people as they have evolved over time do indeed hold the presence of God within them, since they are manifestations of this eternal process of divine self-revelation within the human mind. But the implication for the personal devotional life is even greater. We re-create and relive the encounter with the Divine on Mt. Sinai whenever we attune ourselves to the infinite One coming into language through 65 See, for example, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Heavenly Torah: As Refracted through the Generations, trans. Gordon Tucker (New York: Continuum, 2005); Benjamin D. Sommer, “Revelation at Sinai in the Hebrew Bible and in Jewish Theology,” The Journal of Religion 79, no. 3 (1999): 422–51; Tamar Ross, Expanding the Palace of Torah: Orthodoxy and Feminism (Lebanon, NH: Brandeis University Press, published by University Press of New England, 2004). Rivka Horwitz’s treatment of Rosenzweig’s theology of Revelation in her essay for Green’s Jewish Spirituality was helpful in his own thinking on this subject. See Rivka Horwitz, “Revelation and the Bible According to Twentieth-Century Jewish Philosophy,” Jewish Spirituality, Vol. II: From the Sixteenth-Century Revival to the Present, ed. Arthur Green (New York: Crossroad, 1987), 346–70. 66 See, by contrast, Bradley Shavit Artson, God of Becoming and Relationship: The Dynamic Nature of Process Theology (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2013); and the studies in Conservative Judaism 62, nos. 1–2 (2010), an issue dedicated to engaging with and critiquing Artson’s work. See also Steven Kepnes, “God is One, All Else is Many: A Critique of Green and Artson,” Conservative Judaism 65, no. 4 (2014): 49–71; and Green’s response in the following issue.

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our Torah study, our seeking, finding, and creating words to embody that silent presence.67 In the context of this living process, Green insists that the only proper answer to the question of whether the Torah is a divine or human document is “Yes!” As our verbalization of an encounter with the divine Self, Torah is indeed both fully divine and fully human. This sacred meeting with God is part of what Torah offers the contemporary seeker, even though it is not the literal word of God. The Bible also gives us the language of sacred myths, such as Creation, expulsion from Eden, the Binding of Isaac, and the Exodus, which are no less powerful just because they are not historically true.68 Their truth resides in the realm of myth and symbol, a more profound truth than that of history. We might say that the project of Torah, including both the Bible and all subsequent Jewish literature, represents the sustained effort of the Jewish people to use words, narrative, and sacred forms of expression (mitzvot, halakhah) to describe and embody the subtle mystery of the ineffable Divine. Green is fascinated with an interpretation by the Sefat Emet of the blessing recited after the reading of a portion of the Torah.69 Blessing God as the one “who gave us the Torah of truth,” writes Rabbi Judah Leib Alter of Ger, refers to the Written Torah. “And who implanted eternal life within us” refers to the Oral Torah. Only together do they make God noten ha-Torah, the “Giver of Torah” in the eternal present. For Green, “Written Torah” refers to the historical connection we have as Jews to the mythic event of Sinai. But myth is never just myth, for it represents the deep truth embodied within it. “Oral Torah” is not a fixed body of teachings, but rather that which we create anew in every moment of study and interpretation. Together they comprise the giving/receiving of the Torah, a font of truth and blessing that never ceases to flow. Covenant and the Jewish People The idea of a chosen people presents a twofold problem for Green. First, it seems to predicate that God (either anthropomorphic or abstract) has a specific and differentiated will, expressed by the selection of one people from amongst all the others. Furthermore, the particularistic claim of a single chosen nation is in tension with Green’s universalist sensibility. “Can it be that the infinite Y-H-W-H longs for the service of only the Jewish people, or that above all others?” wonders Green. Does the divine seek to be 67 Green, Radical Judaism, 164. 68 Ibid., 41. 69 Ibid., 117; see also Green, Language of Truth, 71, 157, 272, 404.

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revealed to them alone? How should we respond to a God who is so bad a Parent as to choose only one among His many children for His special love? Is this a message we would want to carry forward? Green’s answer to the first difficulty is clear. The divine will is indeed expressed through the enduring self-manifestation of Creation, applying to all people and indeed embracing all creatures. It is we, the Jewish people, who have chosen to forge our particular covenant with God, understanding that Y-H-W-H has been revealed to us in a particular and collective way. He writes, “It is we who at Sinai declare our undying devotion to the universal ever-flowing and yet unchanging One.”70 In other words, Y-H-W-H did not “choose” in the way the term has been classically understood, since the covenant shared between the Jewish people and God was established at their behest. He cites Exodus 24 (and the lack of divine commandment of its covenant ritual) to show that Moses, not God, was the one who created the rite of covenant at Sinai. Thus, for Green, the second tablets given at Sinai are even more important than the first, which according to the biblical narrative were both spoken and inscribed by God. For this reason they were beyond the grasp of the Jewish people, who needed to create a molten God who would be closer to them. The second tablets represent a covenant in which both parties have agency.71 This commitment means that the Jewish people do have a particular committed relationship with God. The fact that the covenant was initiated by us does not mean that its terms are any less binding.72 From that day on, God and the Jewish people have been locked in an eternal dance of mutual responsibility. But if we are not a nation chosen and shepherded by God, who are the Jewish people? Here Green’s answers are quite nuanced. He offers three increasingly broad understandings of “Israel”: first is the historical people, linked by heritage and ethnicity, including its legacy of suffering and martyrdom; second, those non-Jews who identify with and relate to the Jewish spiritual and historic legacies (including many Christians) but are not prepared to convert; and third, the broader “community of seekers and strugglers” throughout the world, all of whom wrestle with Y-H-W-H.73 This combination of definitions allows him to accept a certain type of particularism without abandoning his universalist ethos. Green is aware of the 70 Green, Seek My Face, 115–16. 71 Ibid., 167–69. 72 Green, Radical Judaism, 164. 73 Ibid., 139.

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importance of defining religious boundaries, but he also worries about the dangers of insularity and parochialism.74 He readily admits to feeling spiritual fellowship with seekers and activists from other religious traditions, which he assumes to be authentic paths to the One.75 But his universalistic embrace of humanity is even greater than that. The Jews have a shared symbolic language and history, but the special relationship between God and Abraham must not be read so as to exclude others from being God’s equally beloved children.76 Yet Green writes in the shadow of the Holocaust and is committed to the survival of the Jewish people, “as a distinct human family among the nations.”77 Despite his kinship with those of other faith traditions, Green acknowledges an immutable bond he shares with other Jews even when they depart sharply on issues of politics or religion.78 But if all paths are sacred, and all peoples manifestations of Y-H-W-H, why should one be Jewish? Certainly it does not come from an obligation to a commanding deity who demands obeisance. Nor is commitment to Judaism justified as a matter of bloodline or ethnicity, or guilt after the Holocaust. Green’s answer to “Why be Jewish?” is grounded in the strength and power of the Jewish message and symbolic language; Jewish teachings are compelling, meaningful, and infinitely rich.79 Some elements of Judaism make sense for those who live within Jewish tradition and are committed to that particular covenant. But Jewish theology has universal messages and implications, and he explicitly addresses his books to non-Jewish seekers as well. Contemporary Jews live in a world in which they are less threatened or denigrated than ever before in history, and they are therefore free to share their tradition in new ways. Jews in the United States have opened themselves up to the culture around them, but they also have a unique opportunity to shape American values and culture. This potential influence on the broader society is particularly significant in a country that will greatly impact the collective human future. Green flirts with a seemingly surprising sense of providence in suggesting that this

74 Ibid., 136. 75 Ibid., 141. Green insists that as an existential outsider to these paths, he cannot be in a position to “validate” them. But he rejoices to see the sacred lives created by them, and to read and hear of profound religious experiences of those who follow them. 76 Ibid., 135. 77 Ibid., 133. 78 Ibid., 138. 79 His introductory summary of these ideas may be found in Arthur Green, Judaism’s Ten Best Ideas: A Brief Guide for Seekers (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2014).

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may be “why” such a thriving Jewish community exists in the United States. Green is a believer and active participant in interfaith conversation as well. He argues that this project should be grounded in a firm commitment to increasing mutual knowledge and understanding while at the same time maintaining a respect for pluralism and diversity.80 Halakhah and Religious Practice Judaism has a rich tradition of rituals and commandments defined in great detail by Jewish law, or halakhah. After a few years of rigorous observance in late adolescence, Green abandoned Orthodox practice while an undergraduate. His fascination with Kabbalah and Hasidism brought him back to a version of traditional practice, but never to a full commitment to normative halakhah. He affirms that Kabbalah is intimately bound together with Judaism and the life of praxis it entails, a response to those he sees as detaching Kabbalah from its Jewish moorings.81 His own personal predilection, however is to, in his own words, “wear the garment of halakhah somewhat lightly.” He is open to and clearly moved by the power of ritual, but insists that halakhah be translated as “path” rather than “law.” It represents a guide with which to walk through life, rather than a binding statute. There is an element of Green’s thought which claims that overconcern with details of the law tends to stifle the creative spirit of Jewish life. He writes, “I crave passion, not conformity; intimacy with God, not normative behaviors within the law.”82 Green frequently affirms the importance of the commandments, citing the Hasidic teaching that “mitzvah” comes from the word tzavta, or “a connection.” Indeed, “all mitzvot exist for the same purpose: the increased realization of divinity in the world through the agency of those who perform the mitzvah.”83 They open us up and attune us to the presence of Y-H-W-H. While all the specific rituals are of human origin, a part of the history of religion, they serve to frame our moments of illumination and insight, becoming vessels that connect those moments of awareness with

80 Green offers some reflections on what this might look like in “To Learn and to Teach: Some Thoughts on Jewish-Buddhist Dialogue,” in Beside Still Waters: Jews, Christians and the Way of the Buddha, ed. Harold Kasimow, John P. Keenan, and Linda Klepinger Keenan (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2003), 231–42. 81  Green, Ehyeh, 98–100. 82 Arthur Green, “Rabbinic Training and Transdenominationalism: Some Personal Perspectives,” in Synagogues in a Time of Change: Fragmentation and Diversity in Jewish Religious Movements, ed. Zachary Heller (Herndon, VA: Alban Institute, 2009), 163. 83 Green, Seek My Face, 73.

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the physical world around us. Doing them thus reinforces the memory of such moments, even when we cannot attain those same heights. Created by the Jewish people as its way of responding to the universal sacred call of “Know Me!” and “Be aware!,”84 their very antiquity and the devotion placed in them over the ages give them a resonance capable of evoking profound religious feeling. Rituals that engage with sacred time, such as Shabbat and the holiday cycle, are particularly important to Green. This has become increasingly true over the past decades, as technology has encroached farther and farther, increasing the pace of our lives exponentially. The Sabbath, a day of rest and reflection, is a particularly important gift that the Jewish people have to share with the rest of the world. He has written his own “Ten Suggestions for a Contemporary Shabbat.”85 The belief in prayer as a fulcrum of the spiritual life is something Green inherited from the Hasidic masters, and from his teacher Heschel, who placed a tremendous emphasis on the centrality of prayer. In Seek My Face, he writes that, “religion begins not with doctrine, not with tradition, but with the need to pray.”86 Prayer is the greatest tool for cultivating the inner life. It is an opportunity to listen as well as to speak, opening the heart to the divine presence that can change the way we look at the world. Prayer is so powerful not because we can change God’s mind or alter our physical situation, but because it unlocks new areas within the self and offers a gateway to the inner world. Shared prayer in the context of authentic religious community offers a deep channel for sharing and mutual support among the devoted. Green predicts that we are seeing the early stages of another shift in modes of worship, like the first-century move from sacrifice to prayer, in which we will find more room for silent meditation.87 There is some tension, however, between Green’s theological self, which draws energy and inspiration from a radical panentheism, and his liturgical self, which is committed to the traditional language and patterns for worship. He is currently at work on a book on prayer, including an extended commentary on the traditional prayer book, which some readers of Radical Judaism will find surprisingly devotional. While affirming traditional liturgy for himself, he cannot prescribe it for all, and seeks to make room in Jewish religious life for those alienated from the traditional liturgy. Emending 84 Green, Radical Judaism, 97, 113. 85 Green, These Are the Words, 271. 86 Green, Seek My Face, xxiii. 87 Green, Ehyeh, 153–63.

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the text of the prayer book is something he does only with some trepidation, but occasionally Green feels that moral integrity demands changes to parts of the prayer service. These include changes in prayers that call for the violent destruction of the wicked, and those that are xenophobic or exclude women. Emblematic of Green’s view of prayer, and perhaps of his theological position altogether, is his reading of the Shema‘ (Deut. 6:4, “Hear O Israel, Y-H-W-H our God, Y-H-W-H is One!”) as standing at the heart of Jewish liturgy. The Shema‘, he notes, is really not a prayer at all, but a declaration. It is addressed to Israel, both the people and the human community of those who struggle with God. In several places he quotes a statement by the author of Sefat Emet that offers a monistic reading of the Shema‘. “God is one” means that only God exists, that there is nothing in which the divine presence cannot be found.88 Throughout the rest of the prayer book, a dualistic religious language is used, the human self addressing God as “You.” But this language is intended to lead one to the pinnacle of truth, the awareness that there is no other. Therefore the Shema‘ is encircled from both sides by proclamations of love, God’s love for Israel and Israel’s for God. The highest point of I/Thou dialogue is the declaration of love, the language of the “holy of holies,” the Song of Songs. Love, in other words, leads one into the oneness of the Shema‘, and again leads forth from it, back into life in the “real” world. But that love points toward its own self-transcendence, the place beyond self-and-other, the moment when all we can do is to call out “Y-H-W-H is one.” Study is perhaps the central commandment in Green’s religious path. Learning Torah is a sacred encounter with the divine word shimmering within the text. Here lies a certain sense of mystery within Green’s theology. The words of Torah, and surely of its many commentaries, are of human origin. And yet somehow he retains the sense of the Hasidic masters that the Torah is infused with the divine presence, is indeed nothing less than divine presence crystallized into language. To use a somewhat complex Hasidic metaphor, the “garments of skin” (Gen. 3:21, but here referring to the parchment of the Torah scroll) are also garments that contain the divine light.89 Constant engagement with Torah through studying its words and 88 Green, Language of Truth, xxxvi–xxxvii; These Are the Words, 108–9. 89 Rabbinic tradition records that the words “garments of skin” (kotnot ‘or, Gen. 3:21) were written as “garments of light” (kotnot or) in R. Meir’s Torah scroll; see Bereshit Rabbah 20:12. Following an interpretation offered by many Hasidic homilists, Green takes this to mean that while the ineffable Torah is currently embodied in a linguistic “garment” of

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traditions allows seekers to develop the vocabulary necessary for their own spiritual quest. Thus the universal quest becomes Jewish, by taking on the language of Torah and coming to see the divine presence refracted through it. This value is clearly reflected in Green’s theological commitment to both scholarship and teaching. Green envisions a future halakhah that is flexible and inclusive, embracing a pluralism of approaches.90 He seeks to appeal to a wide range of Jews, and takes pride in the fact that some of his close students and devoted readers are much more observant than he, and others somewhat less. Rather than abandoning the category of halakhah as an important one, Green calls for its radical transformation and revival. He affirms the deep relationship between halakhah and aggadah, or our sacred narratives (both biblical and postbiblical), writing that, “a new, though much less rigid, halakhah will emerge for Jews in the new era that is just beginning, a halakhah that we are not yet ready to define.”91 Over time halakhah has lost much of its boldness, and we have not had the courage to make it live up to the ethics and morality of the cultures from whom we have learned so much. The role of women, including the laws of marriage and divorce, the treatment of homosexuals, and regard for reduction of animals’ pain in the context of ritual slaughter are examples of traditions that must be updated. Where he feels no ethical imperative for change—as in most calendar-based ritual forms—Green is highly traditional, though not preoccupied with fulfilling legal obligation. At times he is impatient with the system of halakhic precedent and thinks the basic Jewish truth of tzelem Elohim, the recognition of the divine image in each person, should suffice to enforce a change in praxis. Regarding the last example, Green (though “not yet” a vegetarian) suggests vegetarianism and concern for ecological sustainability as a complement—or perhaps a coming replacement—for the laws of kashrut.92 He yearns for a more significant restructuring of Jewish practice when needed, based on a sense that each generation is capable of returning to the moment at Sinai and being faithful in its own way to the truth of that encounter. Green understands this as part of the inner truth of Hasidism. He is frustrated by the stories and laws, the discerning student may indeed perceive some of the infinite divine light within it. 90 Green, Radical Judaism, 166. 91  Green, Seek My Face, 72. 92 Green, Seek My Face, 85–88; Arthur Green, “A Kabbalah for the Environmental Age,” in Best Contemporary Jewish Writing, ed. Michael Lerner (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001), 124–25.

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belief that those who hold the reins of halakhic change have become overly weighed down by the precedents of tradition and have lost the moral courage of their early rabbinic forebears. Evil The origins and nature of evil present a problem for all panentheistic mystics, who see everything around them as a manifestation of God, as they do for monotheists who see world created by a God of goodness. Classical kabbalists devoted much energy to developing a rather dualistic conception of evil. Some even described it as an independent force, warring with the Divine, reminiscent of ancient Gnosticism. The Platonist trend within Kabbalah associated evil with the exterior material form, whereas goodness and purity are manifest in the inner world of the spirit. These two readings eventually became intermingled in the history of Jewish mysticism, where the “shells,” the “externals” and such mythic figures as Samael and the primordial snake became entirely interchangeable. Hasidism, however, offered a very different perspective. The Hasidic masters sought to break down this dualistic paradigm and frequently underscore that evil is simply a different expression of God, “a platform for the good,” and that the divine energy found even within evil can also bring the mystic closer to the Divine. Evil is thus combated by a paradigm shift, breaking through the externalities and being carried by them to a new and reinforced inwardness. Green is attracted to the holistic paradigm offered by Hasidism, although the postHolocaust consciousness he bears makes the dualistic alternative tempting. Green distinguishes suffering from evil, which he defines as being driven by malice or depraved indifference.93 The forces of nature, including both cancer and tsunamis, are not in this sense “evil.” Green rejects any sense that transgression of the ritual commandments is a source of evil, and affirms that the Divine is present in both sin and suffering. Of evolution and the ever-changing patterns of life in the natural world, he writes: This process . . . is not one of a perfect wise creator who has all the answers, but rather of a spreading life-energy, moved by eternal quest. It engages in that pursuit by the method of trial and error. There have been great blind alleys in evolution, and progress toward higher consciousness has then proceeded in other, more fruitful directions.94

93 Green, Ehyeh, 140–43. 94 Ibid., 149–50.

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Thus God is behind all processes of natural extinction, and the suffering implicit in the food-chain and the web of life. The aggressive and violent instincts we have within us, often manifest in human anger and competition, are marks of our evolutionary heritage. As noted above, Green nevertheless ultimately seeks to view the ever-evolving world not as a violent conflict of wills between different forms of life, but as an organic multifaceted expression of the One. This holds true for human suffering as well. In some cases he invokes the Hasidic motif of yeridah le-tzorekh aliyah (“descent for the sake of ascent”) as an answer for what to do with the experience of suffering. We are called to uplift difficult experiences and transforming them into “light.”95 In theory, everything may be uplifted and redeemed. Yet Green recognizes his place as a post-Auschwitz theologian, and he frequently refers to the challenges and tragedies of the Holocaust even though he never treats it systematically.96 The question of how the Holocaust could happen is painful but not theologically impossible, since God does not exercise control over human history. In fact, the Divine needs human deeds. Therefore God did not “cause” or even “allow” the Nazis to murder the Jews of Eastern Europe. The Holocaust is the greatest example of human depravity in light of the freedom given to us by God, a violation of the divine image in both perpetrators and victims. Green’s theology has been shaped by his struggles with theodicy as something that challenged his personal faith.97 The tragic death of his mother when he was an early adolescent, and growing up in the 1940s and 1950s in a Jewish world surrounded by Holocaust survivors made it difficult to imagine a God responsible for the horrible suffering and evil found in the world. He found himself attracted to the absence of God described in the teachings of R. Nahman.98 God has withdrawn the divine light from the physical world, thus allowing for both goodness and evil, even though there is an even deeper truth in which God is still present. Divine absence is not just an illusion, but a true reality that we experience. Faith is refusing to believe that the world is only darkness, and asserts that there is ultimate meaning beyond absurdity. But this does not deny or invalidate our

95 Green, “Neo-Hasidism,” 15. 96 Green, Seek My Face, 13, 30, 49, 87, 118; Green, Ehyeh, 104, 121, 138. 97 Green, Radical Judaism, 2. 98 Arthur Green, “The Problem of Evil: A Conversation,” Reconstructionist 57, no. 3 (1992): 15–20.

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experiences of divine absence or life’s absurdity. While valid and authentic, they are an incomplete portrayal of the cosmic picture. Redemption Our world is one of great fracture, deeply in need of healing and redemption, both cosmic and personal. But Green’s theology places much more importance on the quest than on actually achieving ultimate perfection; many of the “rewards” of the spiritual life and smaller measures of healing are to be found within the search itself. The messianic age, a time of restoration, may indeed be the telos of Creation, for Y-H-W-H is born into multiplicity, which then seeks to return to unity. Yet Green often reminds his readers that Judaism offers no single vision of this time or process. What does redemption mean? Green harbors no fantasies about the advent of a divinely ordained messianic figure who will rebuild the Temple and gather the exiles in a historic process. Redemption, he believes, must come from us. Indeed, Green writes that “redemption is essentially a human task, that wrought by our living in active and engaged response to revelation.”99 Just as the voice of Revelation at Sinai was spoken by Moses, so too are we the agents of  Y-H-W-H in the ongoing process of redemption.100 Our yearning for the spiritual quest and awareness of the divine presence has been dimmed over time, dulled by exiles both physical and spiritual. Part of our redemption entails recapturing this longing, thus rekindling the flame of inspiration and action. But this leads us into a paradox. The same constriction of the Divine that allows for evil and makes our world in need of redemption is what enables us to exist as individuals. Green’s answer is that while some withdrawal on God’s part is necessary, we humans are called upon to increase the visibility of the divine light and transform the darkness into light. In a broader sense, redemption means a process of returning home and restoring balance to the land of Israel, to our inner selves, to the tradition, and to gender (including an understanding that both “male” and “female,” or giver and receiver, lie within each of us). The return of the Jewish people to their ancestral home and their empowerment as a sovereign state in the twentieth century means that our physical exile is over. But the spiritual exile is still quite deep. We remain outside of the Garden of Eden, or perhaps more precisely, outside of the Edenic consciousness and intimacy

 99 Green, Radical Judaism, 163. 100 Green, Seek My Face, 173.

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with the Divine we once enjoyed. Green even suggests that Adam and Eve were not banished but chose to flee from Eden, a symbolic expression of the continuing human flight from the divine presence.101 The process of return, like that of flight, is constant; redemption will mean the triumph of the desire to return and rediscover the One over the terror, shame, and self-preoccupation that drive us from it. Israel’s covenanted existence means that we see our collective exile as an embodiment of this universal human situation. Green’s ultimate redemptive dream is, not surprisingly, a monistic one. The day when “earth will be filled with knowledge of Y-H-W-H” (Isa. 11:9) is best described for him by certain pages in Jewish mystical literature in which both time and space are reduced to nothingness and where all distance and separation between the One and its manifestations is swallowed up.102 Green as Teacher and Convener of Community Some parts of the sacred quest to know God must be undertaken alone, and Green’s writings frequently underscore the importance of individual and inward search. But the destiny of the Jewish seeker is intertwined with the fate of the community. Unlike religions with a strong monastic tradition, Jewish mystics rarely conduct the devotional life in permanent solitude. Building upon this, Green underscores that all Jewish learning must lead to the creation of human community, in which the presence of God is to be sought and celebrated, where the integrity of one’s religious life is tested. In this, Green’s lineage both as a student of Hasidism and as a disciple of Heschel is quite clear indeed. For Green, communities are united by a shared commitment to learning, good works, and the spiritual quest. These qualities, not the degree to which each observes the ritual laws, constitute the sort of Jewish community that emerges around him. This “post-denominationalism” is a very important part of Green’s identity and thought. Green has twice held tenured positions at major universities, and each time he left to serve in a leadership role at a rabbinic

101 Green, Seek My Face, 160. 102 See the passage from R. Nahman translated and discussed in Green, Tormented Master, 320–22; and Haviva Pedaya, Nahmanides: Cyclical Time and Holy Text (Tel Aviv: Am Oved Publishers, 2003), esp. 207–437 (Hebrew).

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seminary.103 Over the past forty years he has thus been committed to training two kinds of Jewish leaders: academics and rabbis. His commitment to textual scholarship demands excellence of all his students in both settings, but his personal religious commitments have repeatedly led him away from the university setting and toward one incarnation or another of the ideal of ḥavurah.104 Invoking a striking interpretation of Genesis found both in one of Kafka’s stories and a commentary by an early Spanish kabbalist, Green writes that the primordial sin was not that of eating of the Tree of Knowledge, but of separating it from the Tree of Life. Knowledge without life can be dangerous, promoting not only arrogance and insensitivity, but also a detached intellectuality intentionally diffident to the fate of real human beings and their lives. Talmud torah, Green has argued, demands that we return to a mode of learning that is not purely intellectual, but engaging of the whole person and demanding involvement with others, the building of community. Ḥevruta, or the paired way of engaging in Talmudic discourse, also means “friendship” or “community.” Thus study of Torah and life in religious community are inexorably bound together. Green has sought to share this lesson, first expressed in the context of Ḥavurat Shalom, with students and colleagues in many contexts. In an age when both the future of Judaism and the fate of humanity hang in the balance, it is no longer sufficient to be comfortably stockpiling an expertise in ancient lore. Knowledge and personal commitment must join together to foster the creation of a vibrant modern Jewish life, based on true community. Because of these commitments, Green has been more comfortable teaching within Jewish institutional frameworks than in the secular university. Green is both a scholar of mysticism and a mystic, though he claims the latter only with serious trepidation. His books of confessional theology often cite the same sources explicated in his historical writings. He avoids compartmentalizing the academic and religious parts of his life, and, like his teachers Alexander Altmann and Abraham Joshua Heschel, he seems to be comfortable living between both worlds. He writes: Over the decades I have come to see myself as a builder of bridges between the scholarly ivory tower, with its great skills in deciphering difficult, obscure 103 Although he held his first position in a rabbinic seminary at a Reconstructionist institution, Green never considered himself fully committed to the Reconstructionist movement or exclusively bound to its doctrines and ideology. 104 Arthur Green, “Jewish Studies and Jewish Faith,” Tikkun 1, no. 1 (1986): 84–90; Arthur Green, “Scholarship Is Not Enough,” Tikkun 2, no. 3 (1987): 37–39.

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sources, and the community of seekers who want to know if there is any value or wisdom in those sources that might still speak to people who live in a very different age from those in which the texts were written.105

The cadre of Green’s closest students, both past and present, tend to join with him in this attempt to bridge the worlds of scholar and seeker, to infuse greater passion and commitment into the intellectual encounter with Jewish sources, while bringing to seekers and newcomers to the tradition a sense of the depth and breadth of Jewish learning. Reception and Influence Arthur Green’s quest to create a seeker friendly Judaism has been an important force in shaping the liberal Jewish American community. As an institution builder, his impact was first visible through Ḥavurat Shalom, which inspired a great number of others throughout the United States. These eventually grew into an entire (mostly spontaneous) movement, but not a denomination, which had a profound effect on American Jewry; for many the ḥavurah is still an attractive alternative (or complement) to the traditional synagogue. He has trained hundreds of future rabbis over two decades, first at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and more recently at Hebrew College. He has also taught already ordained rabbis in many settings, particularly the Institute for Jewish Spirituality and the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. His published works are widely read and often taught by other rabbis as well. It is thus fair to say that a large portion of the liberal rabbinate has been exposed to and influenced by Green’s teachings. Green has devoted several decades of his life to training Jewish leaders, and he is often included in lists of the “most influential rabbis.” But he is one of the few individuals included more for the impact of his ideas than for positions held in the denominational or communal structure. Green’s writings have played a very important role in shaping the world of Jewish life in America. In the 1960s and 1970s the very existence of any kind of authentic “Jewish spirituality” was underappreciated, or even denied, by the vast majority of American Jews. His project of reinterpreting the legacy of Jewish mysticism has helped to correct this imbalance, developing a new

105 Green, Ehyeh, xi.

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form of spiritual language to several generations of rabbis, teachers, and seekers. Green’s reception in the Orthodox community has been more complicated. While his scholarship is respected and his translations of Hasidic sources are widely used, Radical Judaism in particular was met, perhaps unsurprisingly, with opposition from some Orthodox figures.106 But the very fact that Orthodox scholars felt compelled to write reviews suggests that Green’s theology is taken seriously as a challenge to their intellectual world. Though perhaps unacknowledged, his influence has extended to the Orthodox community and rabbinate. Green’s scholarly works have had an impact on the way Jewish mysticism is studied in the academic community. Tormented Master was an influential book, and his many other historical and philological studies of Hasidism and early Kabbalah are highly regarded by scholars in these fields. Some academics have been suspicious of Green precisely for the close connection between his theology and his scholarship. His more universalistic understanding of mystical phenomena puts him at odds with scholars who emphasize the contextual nature of all spiritual experiences. While Green does not have an essentialist view of religious experience, he is more open than some others to the parallels between spiritual phenomena across religious lines. He has been open as a scholar to the possibility of influence of non-Jewish religion upon Judaism, and as a contemporary theologian he especially welcomes East/West interreligious dialogue, believing that Judaism has much to gain from such an encounter and should not fear it. Here too he is at odds with some other voices in the Jewish community. Green is primarily an American Jewish theologian, but his influence reaches beyond the Unites States. His books have been translated into several languages and his ideas have been embraced by more liberal elements of the international Jewish community. Several of his works have been translated into Hebrew and now enjoy a significant readership amongst Israelis. Tormented Master, available in Hebrew since 1981, has long been a best-seller in Israel and was the first exposure many young Israelis had to serious encounter with spiritual questions. Seek My Face, Speak My Name was harder for Israeli readers, as it did not seem to fit into any of the categories the Israeli reader was able to digest. In more recent years, however, as the post-army journeys of many young Israelis to the Far East

106 See Daniel Landes, “Hidden Master,” Jewish Review of Books (Fall 2010): 20–22; Green’s reply in the Winter 2011 issue; and their subsequent exchange in various online forums.

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has opened them to a spiritual quest, there is a potential greater openness to his approach. The Hebrew edition of his Jewish spiritual vocabulary list These Are the Words is dedicated to dor shavey Hodu, “the generation returning from India.” A Hebrew translation of Radical Judaism is currently under way. Green visits Israel regularly and is in close touch with the scholarly community there. He has long identified with the left flank of the Zionist movement, and though a deeply religious Jew, he refers to himself as a secular Zionist. Green supports a democratic, liberal Jewish state, but attributes no messianic importance to its existence. Since 1967 he has criticized the decision to build settlements in the territories occupied following the Six-Day War, and Green has pointed out that the noble ideals of early Zionism and the reality of modern Israel have drifted farther and farther apart over the past decades. Green laments the way modern Israelis have belittled the Diaspora, though he sees some progress on that front in recent years. He maintains that the liberal American Jewish community can offer Israelis creative new ways of relating to their traditions without having to accept all of them uncritically. Green’s decision to remain in America reflects his conviction that Judaism has much to say to the American and world communities, Jewish and gentile alike.107 The Essays That Follow The four essays included in this volume demonstrate the breadth and scope of Green’s theological writings. In each of these works we see the different ways in which he has sought to fulfill the task he set out for himself in the early 1970s: reclaiming the Jewish mystical tradition. Over the past forty years Green has done so through writings that span history, constructive theology, and personal devotion. The first essay, “Three Warsaw Mystics,” was originally published in a memorial volume for Rivka Schatz-Uffenheimer, professor of Jewish mysticism at the Hebrew University. Though this essay is an academic study, it offers a glimpse into Green’s quest for intellectual lineage.108 He compares the thought and theology of R. Judah Leib Alter of Ger (author of the Sefat Emet), Hillel Zeitlin, and Abraham Joshua Heschel. All three 107 Green, Radical Judaism, 150–51. 108 See his remarks in “What Is Jewish Theology?” in Torah and Revelation, ed. Dan Cohn-Sherbok (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), 1–11.

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of these important figures, who lived in Warsaw in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were what Green calls “experiential mystics.” That is, they used the rich symbolic language of Jewish mysticism to articulate the profound, nearly ineffable wellsprings of their inner spiritual lives. They articulate a powerful unitive vision in which the divine presence is immanently expressed in the world, accessed through moments of intense devotion. Each of these three mystics adds something special to the project. Green sees R. Judah Leib as an authentic Jewish mystic who was deeply influenced by the language of Kabbalah but who moved beyond the limits the hypercomplexity and obsession with details found in its later expressions. The boundaries of R. Judah Leib’s theology were to some degree determined by his role as a leader of a traditional Hasidic community, which tempered his universalistic inclinations. In many ways Green’s religious quest has mirrored that of Hillel Zeitlin. Both grew disenchanted with traditional theistic religion, turning to Western philosophy and religious studies, and then returned to tradition by developing a formulation of Jewish theology inspired by a reinterpretation of Kabbalah and Hasidism. Abraham Joshua Heschel was in many ways Green’s most important teacher. Though Green has since moved away from elements of Heschel’s theology, particularly Heschel’s conceptions of a personal, transcendent God, Green carried forward his project of translating the sources of Hasidism and Jewish mysticism into a theology for the contemporary American community. In fact, the sensitive reader will see that Green has striven to embody parts of all three of these important figures. The next two selections come from Green’s theological trilogy. The essay “Jewish Theology: A New Beginning” first appeared as the introduction and first chapter of Radical Judaism. Here Green offers his fullest reading of Creation as a sacred drama, embracing the theory of evolution as a way of describing the Divine’s endless quest for expression through the fullness of all life. Green moves to a description of his understanding of “God,” a term that he employs only grudgingly because of its personified and theistic connotations. As a mystical panentheist he prefers to refer to the Divine as Y-HW-H, a name which signifies nothing less than the totality of Being itself. Though at times he does embrace mythic and personalist language, Green’s philosophy aims to transcend the more dualistic and theistic conceptions of the Divine. Encounters with Y-H-W-H are moments of overwhelming awareness of the immanent presence, to which we are called to respond with sacred deeds.

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The third essay, “Road Back to Sinai: The Post-Critical Seeker” was originally the third part of Seek My Face. In this essay Green discusses the central questions of Revelation. While this piece is less concerned with incorporating the finds of biblical criticism than his later writings, here we find a mystical reframing of Revelation. Green describes the events of Mt. Sinai as an encounter in which divine wisdom was drawn forth from the innermost realm of silence into the world of language and speech. The text of the Torah is our response to the ineffable sacred encounter with Y-H-W-H. But the biblical account of Revelation, rather than being read literally, serves as a mythic description of an uninterrupted process in which we are called to take an active role. In Torah study, and indeed through Jewish theology, we continue to give verbal articulation to the ongoing self-revelation of divine wisdom. The life of the commandments is our daily embodiment of that revelation. The final essay, “A Neo-Hasidic Life: Credo and Reflections,” was published in a Festschrift dedicated to Rabbi Neil Gillman, a theologian at Green’s alma mater, the Jewish Theological Seminary. This piece was written in Green’s seventies, and it is the most recent work included in this book. Green reflects upon his personal journey of some fifty years. He describes the thrill of finding a Jewish language in which to describe the spiritual quest of his youth, and the long task of articulating it over the succeeding years and decades. Green offers a series of ideas that are the cornerstones of his personal religious life; some are theological points, while others are devotional practices. He then comments upon each of them in turn. “Three Warsaw Mystics” and this concluding piece may be seen to serve here as bookends. The former is Green’s quest to establish his intellectual heritage, and “A Neo-Hasidic Life” is his intentional contribution to the ongoing and future-oriented project of revitalizing and reinterpreting Hasidic mysticism for the contemporary Jewish seeker. Epilogue Green has been a collector of early American glass for many years. This is a part of his deeply American identity, but it also reflects his profound appreciation of aesthetic beauty and the mysterious qualities of glass. He will permit me, then, to conclude this introduction with a brief text attributed to the eighteenth-century mystic R. Moses Hayyim Luzzatto that employs a metaphor he will appreciate:

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ARTHUR GREEN: AN INTELLECTUAL PROFILE The principle is as follows: if you cover the window to a room with a glass of many different hues, the sun will strike it just as it is, without any differentiation. Yet a great many colors will be visible in the room. These come from rays of the sun itself—as if it too is polychromatic. This [vision of the colors] is all you can see when you are in the room. It is impossible to understand the ray of light in any other manner. The blessed Infinite One works in a similar way. The veil of tsimtsum has been placed before Him, and all the many colors depend on it. These are the laws of nature, from beginning to end. Of course, all of these things are quite different for the Infinite One, and we cannot ever understand them. But this we do know: the things we see in our reality are not the things as they truly are, for that is something much more sublime. They only appear thus because of the glass covering the sun . . . Understand this well.109

We see the world around us in all of its multiplicity and distinction. While many elements are in need of loving repair, it is also true that this imperfect world is suffused with a radiant and beautiful divine light expressed in many different hues. But only in those rare, fleeting moments of heightened sensitivity do we remember our perception is based on the light flooding through a stained glass window. The polychromatic illusion of tsimtsum holds back Y-H-W-H’s infinite light, granting us the blessings of free choice and individual identity. Beyond this veil, or window, there shines an overwhelmingly brilliant light, which forever seeks out new hues and forms of expression. But perhaps Green would ask us to take this metaphor one step further. We are active partners in the projects of Creation, Revelation, and Redemption. It is not enough for us to study the contours of the stained glass window and thus come to realize that there is a hidden unity expressed in the polychromatic light. Through our quest, our deeds, and our theology, we become the glaziers of the Jewish tradition in each generation. We are charged with the task of recasting the glass window through which the sacred light of Y-H-W-H enters into our world.

109 Moshe Hayyim Luzzatto, Sefer Adir ba-Marom, vol. 2 (Jerusalem, 1988), 150–51. I have rendered this passage in the second person, as Green has often done in his own translations. Luzzatto’s description reads almost like a post-Lurianic version of Pardes Rimmonim 17d–18a; see Daniel Matt, The Essential Kabbalah: The Heart of Jewish Mysticism (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), 38.

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Arthur Green

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Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers Editor-in-Chief

Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, Arizona State University Editor

Aaron W. Hughes, University of Rochester

VOLUME 16

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/lcjp

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Arthur Green Hasidism for Tomorrow Edited by

Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron W. Hughes

LEIDEN ᆕ BOSTON 2015

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Cover illustration: Courtesy of Hebrew College The series The Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers was generously supported by the Baron Foundation. Green, Arthur, 1941– author.  Arthur Green : Hasidism for tomorrow / edited by Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron W. Hughes.   pages cm. — (Library of contemporary Jewish philosophers, ISSN 2213-6010 ; volume 16)  Includes bibliographical references.  ISBN 978-90-04-30840-4 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-30842-8 (e-book) 1. Green, Arthur, 1941– 2. Jewish philosophy. 3. Judaism and philosophy. I. Tirosh-Samuelson, Hava, 1950– editor. II. Title.  BM565.G676 2015  296.8’332—dc23 2015034873

This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 2213-6010 ISBN 978-90-04-30840-4 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-30842-8 (e-book) This hardback is also published in paperback under ISBN 978-90-04-30841-1. Copyright 2015 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

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CONTENTS The Contributors  .............................................................................................

vii

Editors’ Introduction to the Series  ............................................................

ix

Arthur Green: An Intellectual Profile  ........................................................  Ariel Evan Mayse

1

Three Warsaw Mystics  ...................................................................................  Arthur Green

53

Jewish Theology: A New Beginning  ............................................................  Arthur Green

105

Road Back to Sinai: The Post-Critical Seeker  ...........................................  Arthur Green

135

A Neo-Hasidic Life: Credo and Reflections  ..............................................  Arthur Green

169

Interview with Arthur Green  .......................................................................  Hava Tirosh-Samuelson

191

Select Bibliography  .........................................................................................

257

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