February 23, 2012

A Review of Hillel: If Not Now, When? By Joseph Telushkin

by Gerald Sorin

February 18, 2011

 

That Joseph Telushkin has written an unconventional biography becomes apparent in the opening pages of his compelling new book, where we are immediately confronted with an attention-grabbing 21st century conversation between two rabbis about the high rate of Jewish-intermarriage and the question of religious conversion. This is an apt way to begin a biography of Hillel. Anyone with even a smidgen of Jewish literacy has likely heard the story of the gentile soldier who comes to Hillel and asks to be converted to Judaism on the condition that the great philosopher teach him the whole Torah while the soldier “stands on one foot,” a figure of speech meaning “in an instant.” Hillel, apparently a man of great patience, unlike his contemporary Rabbi Shammai who had earlier chased the soldier away with a stick, obliges, capturing the essence of Judaism in just four sentences: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to others. That is the entire Torah! All the rest is commentary! Now go and study.”

 

Quoting the sage whose rabbinic leadership ran from about 30 BCE to 10 CE is also an apt way to focus on the contemporary debate within the Jewish community about how open it should be to prospective converts. Telushkin, in his subtitle, “If not now, when,” yet another of Hillel’s aphorisms, tips his hand that this will be a book unabashedly present-minded. And it is; but it is not ahistorical. Telushkin does not put our (or his) own values, morals, and world-outlooks into the minds and mouths of people who lived thousands of years ago. Instead he shows how ancient Jewish wisdom can speak to us across the centuries in meaningful and enriching ways, and even be a guide for Jewish “renaissance,” a word and an idea, preferable I think to “continuity,” for Hillel and Telushkin both.

 

That Hillel was one of the greatest and most influential rabbis of his era, a man of extraordinary compassion, who emphasized inclusiveness and “repair of the world,” and whose humanistic, pragmatic interpretations of Jewish law helped inform and shape rabbinical thought for two millennia, we know only from the Talmud, which is not big on “biographical” detail. In any case, Telushkin, unlike the traditional biographer is less interested in Hillel’s vital statistics or work history than he is in his intellect, vision, and spirit. The author’s goals here are to spark new analysis of Hillel’s quotes and directives, which are well-known, but more honored in the breach than in the observance. He asks what they mean for our time, and how they can be adapted to contemporary conversion as a way of “rescuing” and growing the Jewish-American and Jewish Diaspora community generally.

 

Like Hillel, Telushkin is not saying that conversion should be quick and easy. By “All the rest is commentary,” Hillel did not mean mere footnotes or irrelevant speculation. His last piece of advice to the gentile seeker was, after all, “Now go and study.” All comers, Hillel was saying, whatever their initial motivation, ought to be encouraged and given the opportunity to learn what it means to be a Jew. One might think that if one of Judaism’s most important intellects presented his summation of what it is to be a Jew in so forceful and pithy a manner, it would continue to influence how Jews understand Jewish religion even unto today. But as Telushkin demonstrates, the key tool used in most places, most of the time, to determine who is “a good Jew,” is ritual observance, even if the individual in question behaves in unethical ways. And we judge the person born, raised, or converted as a Jew, who is kind, fair, and consistently helpful to others, but does not keep kosher or light Shabbat candles,  not “really” Jewish. There are rich and striking examples of this phenomenon throughout this probing little book.

 

Rabbi, ethicist, novelist, and playwright, Telushkin is explicit about his and Hillel’s preference for defining Judaism by its core ethical principles, rather than by ritual observance or even by faith in God, whom Hillel rarely mentions. All of this might have been dealt with in a stunning article, but Telushkin’s book is necessary for its detail and analysis of Hillel’s approach and its consequences, actual and potential. There is much here to ponder.

 

Telushkin doesn’t pay much attention in this book to the fact that Hillel’s ethical pronouncement, “Do not do to others...” appears to some Christian scholars as a negative version of Jesus’s “Do unto others…,” who claim thereby that the New Testament is more morally proactive than the Hebrew scriptures. These scholars, however, neglect the Torah’s most important commandment, “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” and they fail to tell us that Jesus’s message of love comes straight out of the Five Books of Moses, particularly Leviticus.  Jesus was, after all, born and raised a Jew.  And he preached among his own people, vowing to uphold the law of the Hebrew prophets down to the last jot and tittle (yud and vov?).

 

Some of these same scholars also neglect Hillel’s explicitly proactive statement, “If I am for myself alone, what am I.” But Telushkin points out that Hillel’s “what am I,” which logically ought to be “who am I,” implies that if one is for oneself alone, he or she has become dehumanized – a “what,” not a “who.” Telushkin also explains that “Do not…” is less negative than it is specific. It is all very well to say affirmatively, “Be honest,” for example, but that command can be variously interpreted. On the other hand, “Do not covet thy neighbor’s wife” is harder to fiddle with. Last, but hardly least, and requiring more attention than Telushkin gives it, Jesus’s religion morphed into a question of faith, whereas Judaism remained rooted in acts. In any case, Hillel’s insisted that one of the key elements of the Jewish religion is “repairing the world” -- or at the very least, interpreting Jewish law in such ways that individuals and communities are not harmed by literal ritual observance. All of this makes the argument with Christian scholars moot.

 

The central question for Telushkin, however, addresses the question of conversion. Hillel’s openness to, indeed, his encouragement of potential converts is contrasted with his adversary Shammai’s stricter and less inclusive teachings. Why Shammai’s teachings began to be favored over Hillel’s (and this book is as much a “biography” of Shammai as of Hillel) is addressed by Telushkin, but we really need another, longer study to make that historical process and victory clear. In the meantime, and perhaps more importantly, Telushkin succeeds in showing us that “Hillel is so open to non-Jews being Jewish, that when someone approaches him with an interest in Judaism,” for whatever reason, “his inclination is to convert the person, or certainly to ease the process for doing so.” Telushkin argues clearly and persuasively that bringing Hillel’s perspective and approach to bear on the contemporary Jewish world is one good way to assure that there will continue to be a Jewish world, a reshaped and re-emergent Jewish world in the Diaspora, with numbers, significance and moral influence.

 

 

 

Reviewed in this piece: Hillel: If Not Now, When? By Joseph Telushkin.New York: Nextbook, 2010.  244 pages. $24.00 US.

 

Copyright Gerald Sorin/The New Vilna Review 2011.