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Interview

January 26, 2010

An Interview with Rabbi Dr. Lamm (2010)

General Jewish Thought Combating Assimilation
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Speech

Judaism Confronts Secularism, Part 2: The Free Man (1969)

Second part of the "Judaism Confronts Secularism" series in which we are trying to measure Judaism's response to the challenge of secularism, the dominant mood or mode of modern man which. Secularism, as we pointed out last lecture, two weeks ago, tends to bypass religion not by opposing it, but by privatizing it, making it a private concern, by trivializing it almost, saying religion deals with the other world, with matters of the spirit. Go, do it if you wish, but as modern men, our concern is with this world, with the body, with the real world, with the sensate world. And therefore Judaism is off in the corner, or rather religion is off in the corner. We showed that this whole secularist trend was a reaction against Christianity, classical Christianity which tended towards an otherworldliness. In other words, stemming from an ancient religion or movement, Gnosticism, which tended to bifurcations, to breaking reality into two’s and into dualities. This world and the other world locked in eternal combat; they are antagonistic. Christianity therefore chose the other world. This world is only a shadow of the other world. Whereas secular man says: let religion take care of the other world, we are concerned with this world. The same thing with the bifurcation or the split of body and spirit. Christianity opted for spirit; secularism doesn’t knew what you mean by that. It opts only for body, for material, for trying to forge an ethical existence in a real material, physical world.We showed too, in the last part of our talk, that there was also a split as to whether to take an ontological view, which means, on the one hand whether we look for ultimate questions, to a weltanschau-ung, to a general worldview, or do we focus on specific, operational, functional problems^ and we said that Christianity tended towards looking at faith problems, ontological, philosophical problems, from a very broad perspective and rarely brought this wide view down toIf it did, religious prac…
General Jewish Thought Combating Assimilation

Correspondence

Exchange with Alan McCornick about Noah Feldman's "Orthodox Paradox" (2007)

Dear Rabbi Lamm: I read with great interest your letter to Noah Feldman (Jewish Daily Forward, August 2, 2007) admonishing him to fix the damage you suggest he inflicted on the Jewish community and on a certain Daniel of your acquaintance, in particular. I hope he will do as you did, write back, and make his remarks public. This is an issue of tremendous importance to Americans and to all people living in a modern pluralist democracy.Your differences line you up in the current culture war between those inclined toward one or another authoritarian tradition on the one hand, and those inspired by Enlightenment notions of universal human equality on the other. You may prefer to keep this Jewish, but as long as you are in America, the larger culture, I believe, will frame the questions and invite outside participation as well.Pope Benedict XVI’s recent call for Roman Catholics to renew their conviction that access to heaven is limited to his narrow gate will be rejected by most of us, Roman Catholics included, for the parochial view it is, and his prayers for your conversion, now that his Church has lost its teeth, will come across more as pitiful than insulting. How can your claim to have the keys to a narrow Jewish truth help but come across similarly?Just as you suggested Noah Feldman benefits from the orthodoxy he criticizes, you benefit, unless you close yourself off from it, from the fresh air of the Enlightenment. The freedom from Roman Catholic oppression which once created considerable misery for Jews and other non-Catholics is the same freedom Professor Feldman has sought and found from ways of being Jewish that shut out an embrace of the benefits of experience. He is not rejecting Judaism; he is exemplifying what makes it universal.Defining your tradition as Jewish Orthodox, but not as simultaneously Jeffersonian and Spinozan, is analogous to embracing your father’s wisdom and denying your mother’s. What a shame you should throw in your lot with authoritaria…
General Jewish Thought Combating Assimilation

Correspondence

Exchange with Moshe Decter in Response to R. Lamm's Shiur (1992)

Dear Rabbi Lamm: This is my first opportunity to write you about your splendid lecture, on Jewish creativity, at the Fifth Avenue Synagogue. The elapsed time has, however, provided me some additional space to reflect on your thoughts, rather than to react immediately. Let me say, at the outset, how great was the pleasure for me to be present at what was, in essence, really an old-fashioned Jewish exercise – to witness the play of a subtle mind over ideas, and to observe the application of wide-ranging erudition to their development. Such a refreshing and satisfying experience is all too rare today, outside the four walls of a yeshiva, and unfortunately even within the bounds of synagogues, where rabbis prefer (or are only qualified) to give current events lectures rather than a שעור of one sort or another. The subject is important enough – indeed, crucial – and the depth of your analysis serious enough to warrant my raising several basic questions about your approach and your conclusions.First, your general philosophical assertion that creativity requires freedom, and its obverse — that creativity cannot flourish under authoritarian rule.This is an attractive proposition ; it has a certain esthetic intellectual appeal, especially to those of the democratic political persuasion. But history demonstrates it's a fallacy.Take, for example, the case of Russia in the past two centuries, under both Tsarist autocracy and Bolshevik totalitarianism. One can make a very strong case that the greatest artistic — or, literary — creativity arose during that period.Pushkin, at the beginning of that era; the plaiedes of Russian 19th century literature -- Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, Turgenev. In the Soviet period alone, the three greatest poets of the Russian language (after Pushkin) --Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, Joseph Brodsky (all Jews, ironically enough, deracinated Jews, essentially) flourished under Stalinist murderousness and Brezhnevist brutishness. One could go on and…
General Jewish Thought