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The Dynamic Reformer
Netty C. Gross
David Ellenson, Reform Judaism�s energetic new leader, is an expert on modern Orthodox halakhah who wouldn�t dream of imposing it on his flock.
Rabbi David Ellenson 54, the newly appointed president of the 125-year-old Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, sits in a small coffee shop across the road from the institution�s Jerusalem campus on King David Street. Clad in an open-necked white shirt and jeans, Ellenson, loquacious and friendly, talks about his childhood in Newport News, Virginia, his �relaxed Orthodox� parents and the unusual origins of his interest in Reform Judaism.
His voice fills the small cafe. His speech is warm and authoritative, with a tinge of a Southern drawl, peppered with expressions like �having said that� and �all things being equal.� And his enthusiasm for his subject matter is so all-consuming that, two hours later when we finally leave, Ellenson forgets to pay the bill as he briskly exits the cafe.
The bewildered waitress comes out running. He's very apologetic, practically thrusting his bill-filled wallet in her face and giving her a generous tip. �I just can't believe I did that,� he laughs aloud. �Where's my head these days?�
Ellenson�s head is in many things, and this has been a jam-packed few days. Last night, two rabbis were ordained at HUC; tomorrow, he�s participating in a seminar at the liberal Orthodox Shalom Hartman Institute where, exceptionally for a Reform rabbi, he is a fellow.
The rabbi is the eighth president of the HUC-JIR, the Reform Movement�s Cincinnati-based premier study institute, which trains rabbis, cantors, educators and community service professionals at four campuses in Los Angeles, Cincinnati, New York and Jerusalem. In addition to the day to day administration of this international university with its 475 students, Ellenson is expected to set the theological tone throughout the movement and help define its mission.
His election, by the movement�s governors, reflects the new face of Reform Judaism. In the early 90s, Reform was beset by problems of intermarriage and dwindling membership, as its spirituality-seeking baby-boomers turned away. In response, it switched course, abandoning its stiff, Episcopalian-style High Reform flavor. More traditional Jewish content was injected into temple services and Sunday school curricula. Reform rabbis started to wear yarmulkes and speak Hebrew. The result has been positive � with an influx of new members and a deepening of commitment.
A professor of Jewish religious thought at the Los Angeles campus, an institute he's been affiliated with for 30 years, Ellenson is respected by a wide range of theologians including some in the modern Orthodox world. The rabbi, who lives in Los Angeles with his wife Jacqueline (also a Reform rabbi and chaplain in a local school) and their five children, is firmly committed to Jewish literacy and unity, and to Zionism, and declares himself to be �politically more right-wing in my views than some� in the Israeli Reform movement.
He also advocates some degree of increased ritual observance � although he would be very reluctant, he says, to tell any sincere Reform Jew what to observe.
The only area where Ellenson says he�s �probably more radical than many of my colleagues� is on homosexual and lesbian marriages. Last year�s carefully crafted statement by HUC�s sister organization, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, left it to individual rabbis� discretion whether to perform such marriages or not. For his part, Ellenson would happily officiate at Jewish gay and lesbian huppahs. �We have no right to tell anybody what their sexual orientation should be,� he declares.
Ellenson says one of his goals is to �create a critical mass of more serious liberal Jews.� The best way to do that is to promote a Judaism which is �passionate about texts,� enthusiastic, relevant and as free as possible of guilt and angst. �Mine is an affirmative and positive Judaism,� he says. �It�s a humanistic strain with an interpretive tradition.�
So, for example, when asked about the Torah portion to be read in synagogues that Shabbat � God�s rejection of Cain�s sacrifice because it is not as perfect as his brother Abel�s, an act of divine hubris which sets in motion Cain�s humiliation and fratricide � Ellenson displays his disdain for the literal focus by declaring: �Ugh, I really dislike all that stuff. But we can get around it through creative interpretation.� As, he says, we can, of the commandment against homosexual relationships. And almost all the unpleasant stuff. �What�s the midrash,� he asks, �if not an attempt to explain things in a creative manner? Did you know what [former Tel Aviv Sephardi chief rabbi] Haim David Halevy wrote? �There is no flexibility as the flexibility of the halakhah.� Isn't that what Reform is all about?�
I raise my eyebrows. The late Halevy, who was thoroughly Orthodox, undoubtedly meant to encourage leniency in halakhic rulings, I point out, not to offer a blanket endorsement of non-Orthodox Judaism. Ellenson chuckles, then plunges ahead. �OK, but the fact is that Jewish tradition has always had an ongoing dialogue with itself. The interpreters have always sought to make Judaism relevant and speak to our lives. In this regard, Reform is a completely authentic form of Judaism.�
Ellenson�s knowledge of traditional sources distinguishes him from most Reform clergy. Extraordinarily for a Reform rabbi, his academic expertise is in the evolution of modern Orthodox halakhah. His doctorate was on Rabbi Azriel Hildesheimer, the 19th-century founder and head of the Orthodox Rabbinerseminar in Berlin, and the creation of modern Orthodoxy. He says he knows as much Talmud as �any scholar studying at the [Jerusalem ultra-Orthodox] Mir yeshivah.�
Indeed, a packet of his articles Ellenson gives me includes two pieces which examine differing Orthodox applications of halakhah. One lengthy piece written in 1983 for a Conservative journal charts the changing attitudes of 17th, 18th and 19th century Orthodox German rabbis to issues of conversion and intermarriage. The second discusses Orthodox views on whether rabbis should be allowed to engage in dialogue with Christian clergy.
The issue was raised in 1967 by an Orthodox rabbi who had been invited to attend an interfaith dialogue. Ellenson's article discusses how the two giants of American Orthodoxy of that period, traditionalist Rabbi Moshe Feinstein and modernist Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, differed: Feinstein ardently opposed such meetings; Soloveitchik supported limited non-theological contact and refused to sign a Feinstein-initiated blanket ban.
Ellenson is the first to admit that his attraction to Orthodox polemics is not merely the result of intellectual curiosity, but has a powerful subtext. �Halakhah,� he reiterates, �is always evolving. The Orthodox know that.�
But, I counter, the Orthodox do not change the construction of halakhah, just the application. Is there any construction that he would not touch? Where are his red lines for Reform Jewry? The rabbi, who says he keeps kosher and won�t shop or go to a movie but does drive on the Sabbath, pauses. �Declaration of faith in another God would be my red line,� he says finally. �I don�t think you could be a good Reform Jew and believe in Jesus Christ at the same time.� Ellenson is a second-generation American. His grandparents were traditional Eastern European Jews whose religious and social identity were �like many Jews of that era, one and the same, something you were born into.�
The American dream came quickly to Ellenson's father, Samuel, who studied law at Harvard University. After their marriage, Samuel and Rosalind Ellenson moved from Cambridge, Massachussetts to Newport, a city of some 250,000 Christians, mostly Southern Baptists, and 700 Jews. And while Ellenson says he never experienced a single act of anti-Semitism growing up in the South (�I was a page in the Virginia State Senate�), he felt �an outsider. Very much so.�
Some of this had to do with his home, says Ellenson, which was �filled with a love for Jews, very Zionist. We were �relaxed Orthodox.� It was a form of Judaism which hardly exists anymore. Very Jewish but not so frum. I attended an Orthodox shul and loved davening, but I went to public school. Kids were nice and accepting but there was a distance.
Truthfully, the first time I ever felt inner peace as a Jew was in 1972, after graduate school, when I came to Israel to study at HUC and live on Kibbutz Mishmar Ha�emek. I don�t know why I ever left.�
Earlier, when he was a senior at New England�s William and Mary College, Ellenson says two courses, in Existentialism and in Christian Thought, changed his life. He felt challenged by the writings of S�ren Kierkegaard, in which the 19th century Danish philosopher details how he turns to God out of intense loneliness. �I wanted to know whether the Jews had anything to say on the subject of man's search for God. I'd never read anything by Soloveitchik or (Abraham) Heschel.�
As for the Orthodox rabbis of his youth, �their message, which implied that only proper emunah (belief) and a life marked by halakhic observance and zemirot (religious incantations) could mend the human or my own personal condition, I knew that this would not be my way.� Subsequently, enrolled in the graduate program in religion at the University of Virginia, Ellenson took a seminar in the sociology of religion which led him to conclude that �religion is embedded in culture and cannot be understood apart from it.� The course gave him the tools to �understand my existence and my own people. My searches were not to be mere academic exercises. They were to become the conduit to my soul.�
Then came HUC and the decision to become a Reform rabbi; he had originally intended to follow his father into law. After a year�s classes in Jerusalem, Ellenson found his place on the Jewish map studying with Reform theologian Eugene Borowitz in New York. Borowitz's assertion, that �modern Jewish thought represented the attempts of diverse Jewish thinkers to calibrate the relationship between modernity and tradition, struck me as simple and profound,� Ellenson has written. Ellenson is enthusiastic about his new appointment. He's a man, it seems, bursting with energy � a happy rabbi who wants to inspire and bolster the ranks of Reform Jews, �but without shoving ritual down anyone�s throat.�
Yet he doesn't pretend that his self-designated brief is an easy one. In a 1996 essay for Commentary on the state of American Jewry, he expressed pessimism about the �durability of Judaism in the lives of most American Jews. I do not predict a large-scale revival of Judaism. The most significant division in the contemporary Jewish community is between the minority of Jews for whom Judaism is at the center of their lives and the majority for whom it is peripheral at best.�
I ask Ellenson if it bothers him that so many of the classic Jewish texts he studies and writes about are by Orthodox rabbis. The Orthodox consider that for you, studying these texts amounts to nothing more than academic scholarship, I note, while to them, it�s lifestyle. Ellenson doesn�t agree. For centuries, he points out, all Jews were Orthodox; they had no choice. �But that was in the pre-modern period. Not now.�
Speaking of pre-moderns, I ask Ellenson if he ever ventures into the ultra-Orthodox precincts of Me�ah She�arim, a short distance from the HUC center. He shakes his head. �Never. I have nothing to do with them. It�s a form of Judaism I feel no connection to.� Your Reform movement, reluctant to emphasize ritual, is fighting to inspire its members, I tell him, while the ultra-Orthodox, who do highlight ritual, are growing in number all the time. Their libraries are thronged with students. Maybe, religion does require adherence to ritual?
Ellenson chuckles, but then firmly rejects the notion that ritual is key to Jewish survival. �You know, if that was true, most American Jews would be Orthodox today, because their immigrant Russian great grandparents were. The Jews didn�t just leave the ghetto,� he says. �They ran. And we're not going back.�
(December 3, 2001)
Jewish World
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