Jacob Neusner reflects on the state of Jews and Jewish learning By Judie Jacobson and Ricky Greenfield It is a cold and overcast afternoon in late February when Jacob Neusner and his wife Suzanne arrive at the home of their eldest son Eli in Brookline, Mass. Still, the more than three hour drive from his residence in Rhinebeck, New York does not seem to have ruffled the spirit of the 73-year-old professor, as he settles into an easy chair in the home's comfortable den. It is hard to believe that the soft-spoken and unassuming grandfather of nine is the same man whom the Encyclopedia Judaica describes as "a leading figure in the American academic study of religion." "In the study of Judaism," the Encyclopedia notes unequivocally, "no one in history can match Neusner's work." To be sure, Neusner's lengthy list of credits support the reference book's thesis. Considered by many to be the most published scholar in history, at last count the number of books and articles Neusner has published stands at an impressive 975, including "A Rabbi Talks with Jesus," which has been translated into several languages and boasts a book jacket endorsement by Cardinal Ratzinger, who has since been elected Pope Benedict XVI. Neusner has also translated and analyzed virtually the entire rabbinic canon, including the Mishnah, the Tosefta, the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds, and nearly every work of ancient rabbinic literature. Educated at Harvard, the Jewish Theological Seminary, Oxford, Columbia, and Hebrew University, which he attended as a Fulbright Scholar, Neusner is often celebrated as the founding father of the academic study of Judaism. He expanded upon that field of scholarship to impact the academic study of religion in general, which is considered to have enhanced inter-religious communication and understanding. Research Professor of Religion and Theology at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson in New York, and a senior fellow at Bard's Institute of Advanced Theology, Neusner has taught at several universities, including Dartmouth College and Brown University. Neither Neusner's affinity for Jewish studies nor his propensity for writing is surprising, considering his background. The son of Samuel Neusner, founder and publisher of the Connecticut Jewish Ledger, Neusner grew up in West Hartford. He published his first article in the page of his father's newspaper at the age of 13. Neusner celebrated his bar mitzvah at Congregation Beth Israel, and attended Hebrew school at Beth David Synagogue, then called Young Israel - an experience he remembers with great fondness: "I went for one year, five days a week, and I loved it." Today, Neusner continues to teach, to write - he recently completed an examination of how animals are treated in halachic and aggadic documents ("We had dogs for 32 years," he says) - and to think. Never one to stifle a controversial thought, the father of four (one son, Noam, is a former speechwriter for President Bush who currently serves as White House liaison to Jewish groups and an associate director of the Office of Management and Budget), Neusner recently shared with the Jewish Ledger his thoughts on a variety of topics. On the current state of rabbinical schools and the rabbinate "Rabbis need a message. The message they should be transmitting is out of the classics of Judaism. You can't find that message if all you can do is quote a sentence at a time. You need a sense of context and of wholeness. They're not getting that in rabbinical schools. They have good people on the faculty, but rabbis are coming out of rabbinical schools with bits and pieces of information, but without a sense of the comprehensive wholeness of what you could call Torah. "The recruiting mechanism of the synagogue has more influence on the shape of the rabbinate than the people realize. If they ask for rabbis who have a message they'll get them because the rabbinical schools will get the message and respond to it. "There are cases even in Connecticut that I know of where rabbis serve the congregation for 15/20 years and are let go. To a professor with tenure that's just unheard of. There's nothing wrong with keeping a rabbi five years and then deciding if you want to make a commitment or not. But to keep someone 20 years and then let him go is heartbreaking. There has to be some sense of humanity in dealing with the rabbinate. That's the beginning." On the rise of Chabad "I'm told that Chabad is now the largest single Jewish institution in the world. Having said that, you wonder how stable and enduring are the affiliations that go with it. That is to say, Chabad can gather 300 or 600 or 1,000 college students in a room for a meal, as they do very often. Or they can gather 1,000 young Israelis in Nepal for a Passover seder. These are spectacular activities. But what happens then? Are the people changed? Are they absorbed into an ongoing community and program? Some are. But many are not. "Chabad's central institutions are massive and they're raising and spending more money than anybody else as far as I can tell. But by what criteria do they measure their success? "Chabad is the first major Judaic religious movement that lacks any kind of theology or intellectual program. And I say that knowing that they have their holy book, the Tanya. They repeat the sayings, or they quote, but they have no context or no intellectual structure. The upside is that they are reaching out to Jews who are neglected by everybody else. The downside is that until now they have yet to do something permanent and enduring with their massive turnout. What's the intellectual system that they are asking the Jews to affirm? The answer is really a mishmash of classical Jewish text, which they don't understand in context, and then their own very special traditions of their rebbes. Until the rebbe died and they had this messianic movement, they looked like a perfectly normal Judaic system within the larger framework of Orthodox Judaism. They then became sectarian...and that's why they raised questions in the minds of people who could accept them and admire them and respect them for their advocacy of mitzvot and ma'asim." On the relationship between Christianity and Judaism "When you deal with Christians who take the Hebrew Scriptures to heart, as the Old Testament, you have to challenge them on the foundation of Scripture itself, which yields no ifs, ands or buts as to the practice of the mitzvot. When I'm approached to convert - which happens fairly often - I say you people have got to stop eating pork and lobster...and that always shakes them. But in a serious way I say 'Where are the imperatives of Scripture taken to heart?' and the answer is 'in Judaism.' If you have a Christianity consisting only of the New Testament and the Book of Psalms, which is the way the American Bible Society distributes the Bible, than you can ignore Moses and Sinai. But if your Christianity consists of the Old Testament and the New Testament, you have to consider the possibility...deal with the imperative...about what God is saying when he spoke to Moses at Sinai. "I wrote the book 'A Rabbi Talks with Jesus,' explaining why, if I had been there when he gave the sermon on the mount, I would not have followed. I got a blurb for the book on the back cover from Cardinal Ratzinger, who was chosen Pope, who said that from the viewpoint of the Judeo-Christian dialogue this is the best thing in the past ten years. Because he understood that the dialogue between Judaism and Christianity has to be a dialogue where we are trying to persuade them and they are trying to persuade us...and that we have a case to make, too. I find the academic theologians understand and respect this." On his assertion that there is more than one Judaism "I think we've always had a variety of Judaic systems competing with one another. Within rabbinic Judaism you have it in the middle ages, for example, with Maimonides and his critics. And you had equal competition between the Caraites and the Rabbanites. There's been no point where there was a single option... when there was only one way." On women in the rabbinate "Women who are scholars of Judaism have made it on the basis of achievement. I have no question in my mind that there's an equality between men and women in the scholarly world. There's no affirmative action in play - they are simply talented people who are doing the work. In the Jewish schools, women are able to make their careers, where they are now principals and heads of programs. "So the question is now the pulpit. That's a separate issue from women as Jewish religious leaders. The shul that we go to in Kingston has an excellent woman rabbi who succeeded a woman rabbi. I don't have any doubts that women will succeed in the rabbinate. What concerns me is that the rabbinate now will be feminized. Where women become the norm, men don't practice that profession. We're seeing now in Reform seminaries where it's harder to attract male students than female students. The issue isn't the future of women, it's whether men will remain in the rabbinate. The Orthodox guarantee that they will." On Jewish studies programs at colleges "There are two ways of organizing (Jewish studies at colleges). One is Jewish studies as a subject matter pursued within different academic disciplines: history, religion, anthropology, literature, and the like. We have at Bard the study of Judaism in the religion and theology program, and the study of Jewish history in the history department, and the study of Jewish literature in the language and literature program, and the study of Hebrew in language and literature, and the study of the state of Israel in the political science department. There's a program in Jewish studies which allows for a major, but the instructional work goes on in the disciplinary departments, which is where it should. So the subject is integrated with other subjects treated by the same discipline. Jewish literature is taught in the same program as African American literature. That's been what I advocated right from the very start. The organization of the subject as a subject matter unto itself - as a department of Jewish studies which has history, but not history the way the historians do it, and religion isolated from the study of other religions, has not, in my judgment, succeeded, though it's very popular."