IsraelPalestine: Progress Begins Here

One of the most stunning realizations we as the Progress4IP team had while in Israel/Palestine was the variety of views the State of Israel functions on. Some Israelis believe that with the creation of Israel political involvement is as religious as synagogue. Others, we came to find out during election season, are so violently opposed to the formal state and its government they campaigned against participation in elections, warning that those who did were in danger of condemnation from God. A Jewish state, these Ultra-Orthodoxs Jews believe, cannot be man-made and they as a people must wait for direct divine instruction and guidance before going forward with the new Israel.

Twenty years ago, New York Times reporter Thomas Friedman turned to his trusted friend Rabbi Professor David Hartman for an explanation on this confusion and recorded it within his book From Beirut to Jerusalem. 

Four months ago, members of the Progress4IP team found direction and guidance at the hands as we met at Rabbi Hartman’s “Shalom Hartman Institute.” 

The institute’s motto, as recorded by Friedman, “in effect, is: Not only must Jews physically leave the ghetto, but their whole intellectual and spiritual heritage must leave it as well” (313). 

Hartman’s institute is, in his own words, “trying to find ways in which classical Orthodox Judaism can absorb [liberty, democracy, autonomy, and personal conscience] into itself without destroying itself” (318).

At a theology conference that began right around the time Thomas Friedman and Rabbi Hartman were sitting down to discuss Jewish pluralism, three members of the Progress4IP team participated in its 22nd annual event, engaging in a similar conversation which is Holy Envy as presented by Rabbi’s late friend and colleague Bishop Krister Stendhal.

About his friend and about holy envy Rabbi Hartman said, “His very most important point to me was his notion that religious people understand themselves differently when they are in the presence of the other. The presence of the other should lead towards a much deeper sense of self-criticsm, a deeper sense of religous humility.”

There were about fifty to sixty in the polished lecture room when Rabbi Hartman said this, some with kippas, some with Muslim headscarves, and others with small crosses hung on thin chains on their necks. Rabbi Hartman wore a kippa himself which sat slightly askew in his thinning, white hair. There was calm; there was reverence. And with this spirit of mutual respect and admiration the small community spent the evening in building greater understandings of one another, which invariably led to greater respect. 

While its possible and probable that the government’s gridlock on so many of its most important issues spring from its diversity of people all standing beneath and sharing the same umbrella entitled “Jewish,” people like Rabbi Hartman are a reminder of the power of an open mind both within one’s own religious family, and without.

In Hartman’s mind the land of Israel is necessary in” ’saying that Judaism was never meant to be just a synangogue-based framework’ ” (319). He is, afterall, a religious Zionist. Boundaries, however, are not the most important thing to Hartman saying, ” ‘For me, the land, the stones, are not what will create the redemptive quality for this society. ‘The important thing is what kind of human love and what kind of daily life I live’ ” (Friedman 320).