DAVID HARTMAN: Sage In a Land Of Anger

At a place in Jerusalem where sanity reigns, David Hartman fights for the soul of Israel. In a single question he connects the future of his nation to the matter that haunts modern Judaism: “How can we educate our children to imitate God’s love for all his creatures and yet deny national dignity to an entire people?” To many outside Israel, the answer is self-evident: it cannot be done. Inside Israel, however, elemental passions are unleashed by Hartman’s question, in part because the Bible teaches that only one son receives the paternal blessing; in part because the other son, the Palestinian, considers the very ground that is holy for Jews as equally central to his identity.

In a nation where state and religion are often indistinguishable, Hartman’s question transcends academic inquiry. And because it is David Hartman who asks it, attention is paid. For those who recoil from the ultra-orthodoxy that has captured so much of their country’s politics, Hartman is perhaps Israel’s paramount religious philosopher. For these Jews, Hartman is a rebbe, a particularly wise teacher. The measure of his impact is that right-wing scholars are truly frightened by his erudition. Most refuse even to discuss him. One who does, Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, nevertheless only murmurs cryptically, “Millenniums can pass before a true sage is revealed.”

Besides writing and lecturing, Hartman directs an advanced institute for Judaic scholarship, where — rare for Israel — orthodox and secular thinkers study together in an atmosphere of mutual respect. Appended to the institute is a high school, an expression of Hartman’s intention to transform Israeli religious thought from the bottom up. The students there insist (not unlike John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd as the Blues Brothers) they are on a mission from God. “At most places religious education is authoritarian,” one 17-year-old said recently. “Here we are encouraged to think for ourselves. When we graduate we will be ready to crush the religious right with the power of our argument.”

Most days Hartman is in the thick of it. Invariably dressed in a windbreaker and running shoes, he prowls the classrooms eager for combat. Heated debate is the norm at Hartman’s place. Eavesdrop long enough and you will likely hear an eclectic collection of world-class brains clinch philosophical arguments by telling one another they’re “full of it.”

On the side, Hartman is a spiritual and political adviser to Shimon Peres, the once and would-be Prime Minister, to Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek and to a host of other politicians, philosophers and journalists, both in Israel and abroad. “The most important commodity in life, which I apparently lack, is wisdom,” says Peres. “David has it. How different things would be if everyone were like him.” Think of Hartman as a “philosopher therapist,” says the New York Times’s Thomas Friedman. “One goes to him as to an oracle. He is the Israeli we wish they all were.”

Hartman was born and raised in America, in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. He was dirt poor — in the Jewish sense: the Hartmans had little furniture but a great many books. Still, young David “couldn’t do puzzles,” was terrible at math and was left back twice in elementary and high school. Carpentry or plumbing were the careers advised for him. Or basketball. Hartman was a local legend on the court. From what is now known as three-point range, his two-handed set shot was deadly. For pocket change, and the chance to play, Hartman spent summers on a Borscht Belt team that toured upstate New York. So fierce was the competition that a few Holy Cross Catholics were imported as ringers. Which is how, in one game in the late 1940s that he remembers as if it were played yesterday, David Hartman came to outscore Bob Cousy (Hartman 24, Cousy 18).

In Brooklyn, says Hartman, he “learned pluralism” by playing with blacks and Italians in the streets. Finally, at Yeshiva University, he bloomed intellectually. Becoming a rabbi at 23, he then spent five years knocking heads with the Jesuits at Fordham University. It was there that he encountered the great Roman Catholic philosopher, Robert C. Pollock, and there that he abandoned religious absolutism. Under Pollock’s tutelage, Hartman developed the respect for religious tolerance that infuses his beliefs, and came to appreciate the American pluralistic experience as expressed in the writings of William James and John Dewey. After Fordham, Hartman doubled as a Montreal rabbi and a McGill University philosophy instructor. He didn’t publish until he was 41 (he is now 58). “All that time I was just thinking,” says Hartman — which was just as well. His books and monographs are models of clarity. He writes “like Jacob wrestling with the angel,” says the philosopher Michael Walzer. “He holds that experience no less than tradition can be a valid source of theological inspiration and that one need not be religious to be ethical.”

With his wife and five children, Hartman emigrated to Israel in 1971. “When he left Canada,” says the writer Charles Krauthammer, a former Hartman student, “it was like losing Wayne Gretzky” — and when he landed in Israel, his luggage was stolen. “A perfect metaphor for the transition between dreams and reality,” says Hartman. “But I didn’t care. I was a deep believer. I thought I was going to participate in a great spiritual renaissance. What I have found instead is that a traumatized psyche has combined with a self- congratulatory ethos to distort the true meaning of the Jewish tradition. Hardly a day passes without my wondering if we will ever progress beyond the ghetto mentality that repudiates dialogue with the best of human thought and culture. Retaining one’s sanity and belief in the future is a constant challenge here.”

To take the Bible back from those who would use it as a club: that is Hartman’s mission. Ironically, had the great nation-building Labor Party leaders better appreciated what makes Israel special, Hartman’s mission might not have been necessary. “Our founders saw religion as the enemy of progress,” says Hartman. “They wanted to create an indigenous, secular Israeli. Religious concerns were ceded to the ultra-orthodox, who have never understood the need for Judaism to incorporate democratic values.” Because Israeli society failed to develop a compelling spiritual option to replace the victim-oriented philosophy of the East European ghetto, Labor’s present leaders are constantly beholden to a religious perspective antithetical to all they value. As a result, they regularly lose both religious and electoral battles. “They are wonderful when talking to Barbara Walters,” says Hartman, “but miserable when it comes to touching tradition-bound Israelis.”

It is this vacuum that Hartman seeks to fill. The core problem, as he sees it, is biblically based. “The Bible is full of passion, zealousness and extremism,” says Hartman. “You don’t learn tolerance there. Joshua didn’t convene an international peace conference. He just drove the pagans out. We must find a different way. Our task is to become rooted in the land without having to repudiate those who are religiously and ideologically different.”

Hartman’s ally is Judaism’s oral tradition, the Talmud, which itself mediates, or “corrects,” biblical literalism. But then the question becomes, Who says what the tradition is? The answer is, Anyone who can make his interpretations stick. Too often authority is gained through raw political power, or compelled by blind allegiance to a religious sect. But sometimes, as in Hartman’s case, interpretive validity is achieved through the simple force of intellect.

Of Hartman’s many interpretive “moves” (as he calls them), several are central to his argument. One is simply to remind Israelis that they themselves were once strangers in Egypt. Another is to recall that Moses enjoined the Jews to be a holy people — rather than declare that they already were. Most important for Hartman is the story of Creation, the Bible’s very first tale, the one that precedes God’s designation of Israel as His chosen people. “God created every human being in his image,” says Hartman, “including Palestinians. Creation is what takes the Jews out of their own story and places them in the cosmic drama. The Bible begins with creation to teach us that God is not Jewish, that there is a world that has a dignity not defined by Jewish history. We were very good at supporting minority rights when we were powerless. Now, as the majority, we have the opportunity to create a morality based on strength: ‘Our place’ need not mean that the other has no place.”

For Hartman, then, nothing is more destructive to human growth than the + mistaken belief that if a people does not have everything (i.e., all the land), it has nothing. The issue for him is whether Jews can say grace without being totally satisfied. Even more important, the question is whether religious loyalty requires believing that there is only one way. Or does Judaism affirm that no human community has access to the total truth? In responding to these questions, says Hartman, “the most profound Jewish values are at stake. Israel cannot claim the allegiance of Jews everywhere if the spiritual content of Israeli life is not what a Jew living anywhere would want to emulate. If all Israel is about is developing into a nation that will be like all other nations, there is no reason not to live more comfortably in California.”

Hartman’s own life in Israel is quite comfortable. Women study at his institute — something the ultras would never allow — but if he has ever pushed a broom at home, his wife cannot recall when. He does jog three miles daily and is a lifetime private in the Israeli army’s education corps, although he has never shot a gun. Most of his travel is work-related, but he escapes annually for a month in Switzerland, a country he loves because “even the trees aren’t Jewish.” Hartman is still a basketball fanatic, and he rarely misses the American games broadcast on Israeli TV. A bad back precludes even a casual lay-up, but Hartman doubts he would test reality even if he could. “My fantasies suffice,” he says. “In my dreams I play with Cousy for the Celtics.”

On the matter currently of greatest moment in Israel, Hartman is anything but a dreamer. “I am not Gandhi,” he says. “I know many Palestinians would prefer me dead. Nevertheless, I can live with a demilitarized Palestinian state because a Palestine without military power can satisfy Israel’s security needs.” But real peace, Hartman knows, will be impossible until the Palestinians realize that the Jews have come home permanently, that they are indigenous to their land, that they are more than a post-Holocaust phenomenon imposed out of the West’s guilty conscience. This is why Hartman is so dismayed by the Palestinians’ opposition to Soviet Jewish immigration. “The first step on the road to our believing that they understand why we are here,” he says, “is for them to welcome more of us. Until they see us as we see ourselves, our traumatic suspicion of them will never be healed.”

Reality — or “facts on the ground,” as Ariel Sharon would say — has , mellowed Hartman. Impatient by nature, he now knows that his hopes for a radical change in national attitudes will require decades, perhaps centuries to be realized. But unless Judaism, Islam and Christianity discover new foundations for pluralism in their respective traditions, a paper peace will offer scant solace. The shabby state of Israeli-Egyptian relations teaches that a treaty grounded in political calculation rather than moral awakening is worth little (and can be abrogated easily). “If an Egyptian-style peace is all we ever get,” says Hartman, then “I will forever walk scared in my home, wondering when the enemy will come out.”

Almost everything in the Middle East argues for pessimism. The old animosities reach out of antiquity and recast themselves in modern terms. Yet Hartman presses on. With a sure sense of history but no fear of it, he is guided by an old Talmudic saying: “It is not up to you to finish the work, but neither are you free not to take it up.”