Sacks and Putnam – an unusual ‘havruta’
Pis the first volume of Edward Kaplan’s biography of Rabbi Professor Abraham Joshua Heschel. In it, he tells of a meeting between Heschel, then a doctoral student, and the young Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson. Both were living in pre-Nazi Germany and were students at Berlin University.
Kaplan tells of a Shabbat meal attended by the two future leaders of American Jewry along with a Jewish couple. The husband was praising his wife, who as a convert, kept a kosher home and was managing to bring up their children in a proper Jewish way. When the husband mentioned who the converting rabbi was (the Reform Rabbi Jacob Sonderling), the future Lubavitcher Rebbe responded vehemently that the conversion was invalid and declared that a child of his would never marry into such a family.
As it turned out, the seventh Lubavitch Rebbe, as he would become, never had any children. The couple was humiliated and disheartened, and Heschel found it necessary to rebuke the young Schneerson – “No Jew, especially not the scion of such a holy family, should ever humiliate a person publicly.” Kaplan sums up Heschel’s philosophy on this matter: “While meticulously following halacha, his reverence for people remained absolute.”
DARWIN AND DE TOCQUEVILLE
I was reminded of this story during the question and answer section of professor Robert Putnam’s keynote address at the Bar Ilan conference on the ideas and writings of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks. The Sunday Times called Putnam “The most influential academic in the world.” He was described by Sacks as “The man who has done more than anyone else to chart the fate of social capital in modern times.” In his seminal book Bowling Alone, Putnam uses the decline of bowling leagues as a symptom of a disintegration of some of the basic societal building blocks, rotary clubs, guilds, associations, etc.
As you would expect from such an eminent intellectual, the address was both informative and enlightening.
He focused on the parallels between Charles Darwin and Alexis De Tocqueville, a topic Sacks referred to on multiple occasions over the years.
One of the insights that Putnam and Sacks agreed on was that contrary to those who hold by social Darwinism, that in humans, too, the survival of the fittest is a key evolutionary force, Darwin actually held that in humans, the instinct to act as a group and for the individual to be altruistic is a key evolutionary force for survival and societal progress.
Putnam is at a loss to understand why Darwin remains a character that is used to promote political ideas around the survival of the fittest when it has been discredited for so long, and especially, how certain religious groups seem to be so focused on the “I” of social Darwinism and the not the “we” of communitarianism. Perhaps not unconnected to this is a conversation that Putnam had with Sacks over a decade ago as part of Rabbi Sacks’s New Year broadcast for the BBC.
In it, he responds to the concern that religion can be a force for bad, rather than good, “Religion is a powerful medicine in social terms and it has powerful effects but taken in too high doses, it can also be lethal for the civic community.” Clearly, a concern shared by both.
During the discussion following the lecture, Putnam shared some personal thoughts about his interactions with Sacks. He mentioned that he had converted from Methodist Christianity to Judaism via a Reform conversion. In response to an audience question, Putnam responded, “I consider myself to be fully Jewish, but strictly speaking, Rabbi Sacks did not consider me a Jew.” It was something they had even discussed together.
It did not stop Sacks from signing a copy of the Tanach and sending it to Putnam’s grandson as a bar mitzvah present. “We bonded, actually, over being Jews, in a strange way, even though he didn’t recognize my conversion. I am fully, wholeheartedly a Jew, because Judaism is such a communal religion.”
TRADITION AND ORTHODOXY
Sacks and Putnam connected because of their academic and philosophical beliefs reached separately and in parallel, but Putnam’s moving and passionate testimony is that they bonded so deeply because they were Jews, even though Sacks’ Orthodox beliefs would say otherwise, a fact that they were both fully aware of and yet it did not get in the way.
It is perhaps easier to understand how Heschel took a more liberal approach to other streams of Judaism. He was always strict in his Jewish practice, in many ways remaining loyal to his Warsaw hassidic roots, but spent most of his career at liberal Jewish institutions, like progressive Judaism’s Hebrew Union College and the Conservative flagship Jewish Theological Seminary of America.
The part that I cannot really explain is how Sacks, a former chief rabbi and someone who had a more pluralistic view of other religions than he did of other streams of Judaism, could form such a deep and personal Jewish bond with a Reform convert, an odd sort of havruta (study partner) for a chief rabbi.
In Traditional Alternatives, Sacks quotes one of his intellectual heroes and moral philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre, “A living tradition is a historically extended, socially embodied argument, and an argument precisely in part about the goods which constitute that tradition.” Traditional thinking alongside Orthodoxy allows a more fluid accommodation for those who see themselves as part of the tradition, if not fully within the confines of Orthodox halacha.
Ultimately, we do not need to solve the paradox, just as Sacks did not, but learn the lesson of showing basic menschlichkeit toward his fellow man, in his passion for walking the fine line between caring for the individual before him and his own firmly held religious beliefs.
Sacks and Putnam profoundly understood the “we” overcoming their respective “I” to promote moral and ethical ideas to the world. This is not a compromise but a beautiful Jewish synthesis carefully allowing us to navigate between law and practice.