The human condition is caught between two poles.

I'm part of the world, and I'm separate from the world.

But I believe philosophy becomes true when it's anchored in the intimacy of your life.

I think within the concrete, I remember my student saying to me,

Rabbi Hartman, I want you to know but don't get upset with me, I became an atheist.

I said, when did you become an atheist? He said Wednesday.

Oh, poor, that's a remarkable thing. What were you Tuesday? You were a believer, right?

And what happened on Thursday? I said, is there any difference between the way you lived

when you were a believer and when you became an atheist? And that's the criterion for me.

The champion of adaptive Judaism.

That was the headline of the New York Times obituary for Rabbi David Hartman,

who died a year ago this week. He was called a public philosopher for the Jewish people.

He was a charismatic and unusual figure in Israeli society,

an Orthodox Rabbi who both loved and challenged traditional Judaism from the inside.

He did this as a sacred obligation to his understanding of the core values

Judaism brings into the world for all of humanity.

He became an activist, for example, of the inclusion of women in Orthodox ritual and practice,

seeing this not as a matter of or for women, but about the character of the God one worships.

I'm Christa Tippett and this is on being.

Rabbi David Hartman led a modern Orthodox synagogue in Montreal,

before moving with his wife and five children to Israel in the aftermath of the six-day war of 1967.

And in Jerusalem over three decades ago, he founded the Shalom Hartman Institute,

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