The Return of a 60-Year-Old Dispute between Two of American Jewry’s Leading Theologians, and Why It Matters

In 1964, Eliezer Berkovits of the Orthodox Hebrew Theological College in Skokie, Illinois and Abraham Joshua Heschel of the Conservative Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan were two of the leading lights of rabbinic thought in America. Both men were born and educated in Eastern Europe (Berkovits in Hungary, Heschel in Warsaw) in the early 20th century, both attended the University of Berlin, and both were committed Zionists. That year, Berkovits wrote an essay in Tradition—then as now the flagship journal of Modern Orthodox thought in America, closely associated with Yeshiva University—sharply criticizing Heschel’s theology, and in particular his idea that God suffers in ways only humans can fix. To Berkovits, this approach came far to close to the Christian doctrine of Jesus suffering on the cross. Todd Berman, writing in Tradition, recently wrote an essay in in the same journal defending Heschel against Berkovits’s attack.

The revival of this 60-year-old dispute has provoked a number of responses. Although the controversy hinges on rarefied theological and kabbalistic concepts, it ultimately involves the limits of Orthodoxy, the legitimacy of the mystical tradition, and Heschel’s famous notion of “God in search of man.” It also reflects the gap between Heschel’s ḥasidic upbringing and Berkovits’s non-ḥasidic one. Berman writes:

In brief, Heschel created a theological interpretation of the prophetic experience, which he termed “divine pathos.” The construct incorporates three interlacing aspects: that God cares about the world, that the prophets experience and sympathize with God, and that, as a result, the prophets press humans to act in ways that impact God’s feelings towards the world. Berkovits challenged all three components of Heschel’s theology and argued that Heschel’s theology reflected Christian interpretation of the Bible.

Heschel claims that God communicates some sort of “feelings” and that the role of the prophet is to have sympathy with that emotion or, in other words, to share the emotional state of the Divine, to understand God’s aspirations for the world, and respond by helping to bring them to fruition. For Heschel, without the notion of pathos, there can be no prophecy. “The fundamental experience of the prophet is a fellowship with the feelings of God.”

For Berkovits, it is inappropriate to attribute any form of emotions to Him. Even if one claimed that God has an emotional stake in the world, how would the finite human bridge the gap and sympathize with Him? At Heschel’s hand God becomes too human.

Read more at Tradition

More about: Abraham Joshua Heschel, American Judaism, Eliezer Berkovits, Kabbalah, Theology

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF