Arthur Hertzberg: An Appreciation for a Rabbi, Teacher, and Friend

By Rabbi Alan Yuter
Posted Monday, May 1, 2006

It was my privilege to study with Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg for four years during which he taught modern Jewish history and thought at New York University. His reputation developed as articulate gadfly, a pious heretic, and as a man who put into practice what he taught and thought.

In a private conversation, Rabbi Hertzberg once told me that his spiritual world was formed by three spiritual giants. His enlightened, Hassidic father, Rav Elimelech Hertzberg, the Talmudist and humanist, Prof. Levi Ginzberg, and the social historian, Prof. Salo Baron. From his father R. Hertzberg learned that without questioning, there can be no authentic belief. This notion of sacred subversion finds its in the writings of the Hassidic thinker, R. Mordecai of Ishbitz and in the thought of Rav Kook. R. Elimelelch gave a copy of Spinoza's work in Hebrew to his son with the advice, "I know you are a skeptic. Be skeptical with learning."

After receiving for Semicha, Orthodox rabbinical ordination, from his father, R. Hertzberg went to the Conservative Jewish Theological Seminary where, because of his father, he mighty study with the eminent Prof. Louis Ginzberg. Note well that Rav Elimelech Hertzberg felt believed that the method and synthesis of Torah and modern academic tools would empower his son to greater intellectual heights This religious sensibility is found today in the enlightened modern Orthodoxy of Bar Ilan University. And at Columbia, R. Hertzberg learned under Salo Baron, who taught social history, the history of Jewish life and people as opposed to political the history of the high and mighty. R. Hertzberg's dissertation focused on French Enlightenment and the Jews and dealt with the problem of how to be a Jew in a modernizing world, how one remaining Jewish and retaining Jewish values in a world in which the secular state replaces the religious community. Anti-Semitism arose because Enlightenment rationalism was a false cover for romantic, small-minded nationalism that allowed no place for the Jew.

R. Hertzerg's intellectual findings informed and shaped, along with his father's piety, his own religious disposition. On one hand, he was observant of Jewish law, he learned Talmud and prayed every day. He also challenged the larger Jewish community to live ethically. His dovish Zionism, like the Israeli writer Amos Oz, argues that the Jews have a right to live in a Jewish state, but the Jewish state may not be blindly chauvinist—like the nationalism that could not allow for Jewish membership in the new national states. Similarly, R. Hertzberg believed the Arab claims. In his course on Zionism, R. Hertzberg explained that the Arab Israeli conflict might be solved only when the Arabs accept Israel on the basis of Hudna, a truce in the present, while Jewry waits for the Messiah to solve the problem of redemption in the future. In the present, Jews and Arabs must learn to live together or else they will continue to be buried separately.

I once asked R. Hertzberg why he never taught the Holocaust. He responded that the subject is too painful to him to discuss. After four semesters he conceded that whatever he teaches is, in part, a response to the Holocaust and the failure of the Enlightenment and Emancipation to keep its promise to the Jews. In the path of Pinsker, R. Hertzberg regarded Israel, the free homeland of the Jews to be the national response of Jewry to the problematic realities of exile. But he sternly cautioned that emotion, intuition, and faith not become chauvinism, fascism, and disregard for others.

Like his mentor, Professor Hertzberg came to his lecture podium without a note card and delivered, without fail or exception, a riveting, exciting, informative, and synthetic lecture which was structured, developed, insightful as well as insightful, and always thoughtfully profound. He shined when teasing meaning out of documents, which were for him precious windows into the mind of the author and tracings of by gone days which can be recovered by careful, painstaking scholarship.

R. Hertzberg spoke with love and respect regarding his family, he saw the good in those with whom he disagreed, and he was a profoundly ethical person. It became my practice to call him before every Jewish holiday in order to show him honor to a rebbe, a person who teaches Torah to both the mind and to the heart. His teaching was fervently pious as it was modern, his commitment to his historical craft was without compromise, and he had the uncanny knack of knowing how to speak to and how to chide both Orthodox and liberal Jews, to be the best that they can be.

I will remember R. Hertzberg's probing humor, his intellectual tolerance—he wanted me to be his student and not his clone, he taught his students how to read, think, and write as professional historians, and his synthesis of Torah belief and critical scholarship, which in turn informed the human and humane decisions that this brilliant, passionate, and generous man made throughout his long, productive, and wonderful life.

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