Meir Soloveichik and Shai Held - Debates in Jewish Theology
The Tikvah Podcast
Tikvah
4.8 • 658 Ratings
🗓️ 12 January 2015
⏱️ 117 minutes
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Summary
Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove wrote a provocative article in 2007 titled “Where Have All the Theologians Gone?” This is the question Shearith Israel rabbi Meir Soloveichik and Mechon Hadar rabbi Shai Held begin with: Why is there so much less public argument about Jewish theology than there was in the middle of the last century? What does this say about contemporary Jewish life? About our synagogues? About our universities? About our interfaith relations? The conversation moves from the sociology of theology to Jewish theology itself. Soloveichik and Held each reflect upon a theologian whose ideas have been a fixture of their own work: Michael Wyschogrod for Soloveichik and Abraham Joshua Heschel for Held. Audience questions then move the discussion through topics metaphysical and political.
The event was recorded on July 30, 2014.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Good afternoon, everyone. It's great to see you back in our seminar room, our heart and soul of the summer fellowship and the institutes. |
| 0:15.2 | I'm Mark Gottlieb, senior director at the Tikva Fund, and we're here to post this afternoon's conversation |
| 0:23.8 | on debates in Jewish theology. |
| 0:30.5 | Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, |
| 0:33.7 | a colleague of ours and someone that you'll all see, |
| 0:36.7 | or most of you will see, |
| 0:38.3 | next week in conversation with Eric Cohen on the future of American Judaism, |
| 0:44.5 | published a small, provocative piece about seven years ago entitled, |
| 0:51.1 | Where Have All the Theologians Gone? |
| 0:54.3 | And the thesis of this piece was that in the 50s and 60s and 70s, |
| 1:00.9 | America saw a renaissance of public theology. |
| 1:05.5 | Will Herberg, Arthur Cohen, Emil Fackenheim, |
| 1:10.5 | Eliasur Berkovitz, Abraham Joshua Heschel, |
| 1:14.3 | by Joseph Solvecich. |
| 1:16.7 | These were names that became commonplace |
| 1:19.4 | in the canon of contemporary Jewish thought, |
| 1:23.1 | and that by contrast, our era is bereft, is lost. |
| 1:31.3 | It's a doer ye tommim, an orphaned generation when it comes to the public discourse around Jewish theology. |
| 1:41.7 | And he challenges his readers in the opening lines of this little piece to name five Jewish theologians that are contributing something of worth to contemporary Jewish thought that have written a book after, that have written a major book after 1990. |
| 2:01.6 | Well, in our room today, I think by anybody's lists, we'd find the two individuals sitting to my left. |
| 2:15.6 | Part of what we have to understand |
| 2:18.2 | is why this exercise |
... |
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