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‘Finding Faith Without Fanaticism’ is mantra of a ‘Top 50’ rabbi
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By Cynthia Dettelbach
Editor
You Don‘t Have to Be Wrong for Me to Be Right: Finding Faith Without Fanaticism. By Rabbi Brad Hirschfield. Harmony Books. New York. 2007. 248 pp. $24.95.
Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, who will speak in Cleveland at The Mandel JCC’s Festival of Jewish Books & Authors, Nov. 23, thinks of himself as a storyteller. So not surprisingly, the best part of his inspirational, let’s-build-bridges-to-each-other book is the stories he tells.
The stories in his You Don’t Have to Be Wrong for Me to Be Right: Finding Faith Without Fanaticism focus on watershed events in Hirschfield’s 44 years of life. The central (and most compelling) event relates to Hebron.
When he was a senior in high school, the future rabbi, scion of a comfortable, middle-class Chicago family, decided he wanted to live in Israel and study Torah. “Although my parents were fiercely supportive of Israel,” he writes, “they would not have jumped for joy to learn that their 17-year-old son wanted to be a militant, ultra-religious Zionist warrior in the Holy Land rather than going to college.”
In fact, Hirschfield became that militant, ultra-religious warrior, entrenched in battleground Hebron, the West Bank.
Hebron is home today to approximately 500 Jews, living surrounded by over 500,000 Arabs. In 1981 it was a magnet for young, right-wing Jewish zealots like Hirschfield to move in and flaunt their biblical “mandate” to be there. No matter the cost.
For two years, Hirschfield was part of the militant arm of the settler movement: “We danced in the spot where recently (six) settlers had been murdered. …”We danced on the stones where our blood had been spilled, proclaiming … YOU CAN’T KILL US. WE WILL NEVER DIE.”
But one day, settlers, whom Hirschfield knew, fired bullets into the Hebron Islamic College, killing two Palestinian girls. “The deaths of those children,” he admits, “crossed some internal line in me.”
From that time forward, Hirschfield found himself “outside the fold. I stopped going to Hebron.” Or as he told me recently in a phone interview from his home in New York, “The fact that you have an ideal and it is legitimate (Jews’ claim to the biblical land of Israel) doesn’t mean it’s free of cost. In Hebron I grew up and admitted the price.”
Twenty years after the Hebron experience, Sept. 11, 2001, to be exact, when the planes slammed into the World Trade Center, Hirschfield first began to talk about his Hebron years. By then, he had finished college and graduate school in the U.S. and had been ordained an Orthodox rabbi.
“Religion had flown those planes into the Twin Towers, and I had practiced a form of that religion,” he writes. “It is the religion of pilgrims, of people who see no way but their own way and treat people who do not support them as mistakes that need to be erased.” Both groups of people (militant Jewish settlers, Islamic terrorists) “shared an absolute sense of our own way of being right that made everyone else wrong.”
In September 2001, Hirschfield was an intern at CLAL, The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership. Fortunately for him, he was at the right place at the right time. At CLAL, he writes, “I felt the kind of deep commitment to truth and leading a spiritual life that I had felt in Hebron (but) with a new openness and sense of inclusion.” Today, Hirschfield serves as executive director of CLAL, teaching inclusiveness, celebrating diversity, and delivering messages of acceptance … often in the most un-rabbinic places.
For example, Hirschfield (who is also a radio and TV host) broadcast his TV program “Building Bridges: Abrahamic Perspectives on the World Today” from inside a mosque. On that première program in 2006, his special guest was the imam of the Islamic House of Wisdom in Detroit. The event, he writes, “created an uproar … I was called a traitor. My love of Israel was questioned.”
The day before Hirschfield was invited to speak at another Islamic center, his two Muslim hosts invited him to join them at afternoon prayers. Rather than watch his hosts pray “as if they were exotic animals in a zoo,” this Orthodox rabbi got down on his knees and also prayed … in his own tradition.
In Oswiecim, Poland (home of the infamous Auschwitz death camp), where Hirschfield took part in the groundbreaking for a reclaimed synagogue, the local bishop announced a special mass in his church. Since the mass was “in memory of victims of the Holocaust,” Hirschfield decided to attend, knowing he would be “stepping on a lot of toes.” (Most Orthodox Jews won’t set foot in a church, to say nothing of one near Auschwitz.) Hirschfield goes on to lionize this plain-speaking bishop as an example of “faith without fanaticism.”
Named one of the Top 50 Rabbis in America by Newsweek magazine, Hirschfield writes for venues like Newsweek and The Washington Post. He also posts a daily blog on Beliefnet.com, the Web’s busiest spirituality site.
His rabbinate, he explains, “has been about more than the Jewish people. It’s about bringing the full wisdom of 3,000 years of Jewish life and thought to the human race.” The goal of being Jewish is not to make more Jews, he insists. “It’s to make a better life and world” … even if that were to result in his (still young) daughters marrying gentiles.
Asked about the response to his often-unorthodox statements and adventures, Hirschfield admits, “I have heard both wonderful and critical things from rabbis of every denomination.”
I rarely if ever pick up a determinedly uplifting, accepting-of-everyone, celebration of diversity kind of book like You Don’t Have to Be Wrong … Finding Faith Without Fanaticism. Fortunately, Hirschfield writes very well and intermittently tells some very engaging stories. This literary sweetener helped some of the good-for-you medicine go down.
Rabbi Brad Hirschfield speaks Sun., Nov. 23, at 7:30 at The Mandel JCC. There is a fee. Dessert reception. For tickets, 866-546-1358 or www.clevejcc.org.
cdettelbach@cjn.org
Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, who will speak in Cleveland at The Mandel JCC’s Festival of Jewish Books & Authors, Nov. 23, thinks of himself as a storyteller. So not surprisingly, the best part of his inspirational, let’s-build-bridges-to-each-other book is the stories he tells.
The stories in his You Don’t Have to Be Wrong for Me to Be Right: Finding Faith Without Fanaticism focus on watershed events in Hirschfield’s 44 years of life. The central (and most compelling) event relates to Hebron.
When he was a senior in high school, the future rabbi, scion of a comfortable, middle-class Chicago family, decided he wanted to live in Israel and study Torah. “Although my parents were fiercely supportive of Israel,” he writes, “they would not have jumped for joy to learn that their 17-year-old son wanted to be a militant, ultra-religious Zionist warrior in the Holy Land rather than going to college.”
In fact, Hirschfield became that militant, ultra-religious warrior, entrenched in battleground Hebron, the West Bank.
Hebron is home today to approximately 500 Jews, living surrounded by over 500,000 Arabs. In 1981 it was a magnet for young, right-wing Jewish zealots like Hirschfield to move in and flaunt their biblical “mandate” to be there. No matter the cost.
For two years, Hirschfield was part of the militant arm of the settler movement: “We danced in the spot where recently (six) settlers had been murdered. …”We danced on the stones where our blood had been spilled, proclaiming … YOU CAN’T KILL US. WE WILL NEVER DIE.”
But one day, settlers, whom Hirschfield knew, fired bullets into the Hebron Islamic College, killing two Palestinian girls. “The deaths of those children,” he admits, “crossed some internal line in me.”
From that time forward, Hirschfield found himself “outside the fold. I stopped going to Hebron.” Or as he told me recently in a phone interview from his home in New York, “The fact that you have an ideal and it is legitimate (Jews’ claim to the biblical land of Israel) doesn’t mean it’s free of cost. In Hebron I grew up and admitted the price.”
Twenty years after the Hebron experience, Sept. 11, 2001, to be exact, when the planes slammed into the World Trade Center, Hirschfield first began to talk about his Hebron years. By then, he had finished college and graduate school in the U.S. and had been ordained an Orthodox rabbi.
“Religion had flown those planes into the Twin Towers, and I had practiced a form of that religion,” he writes. “It is the religion of pilgrims, of people who see no way but their own way and treat people who do not support them as mistakes that need to be erased.” Both groups of people (militant Jewish settlers, Islamic terrorists) “shared an absolute sense of our own way of being right that made everyone else wrong.”
In September 2001, Hirschfield was an intern at CLAL, The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership. Fortunately for him, he was at the right place at the right time. At CLAL, he writes, “I felt the kind of deep commitment to truth and leading a spiritual life that I had felt in Hebron (but) with a new openness and sense of inclusion.” Today, Hirschfield serves as executive director of CLAL, teaching inclusiveness, celebrating diversity, and delivering messages of acceptance … often in the most un-rabbinic places.
For example, Hirschfield (who is also a radio and TV host) broadcast his TV program “Building Bridges: Abrahamic Perspectives on the World Today” from inside a mosque. On that première program in 2006, his special guest was the imam of the Islamic House of Wisdom in Detroit. The event, he writes, “created an uproar … I was called a traitor. My love of Israel was questioned.”
The day before Hirschfield was invited to speak at another Islamic center, his two Muslim hosts invited him to join them at afternoon prayers. Rather than watch his hosts pray “as if they were exotic animals in a zoo,” this Orthodox rabbi got down on his knees and also prayed … in his own tradition.
In Oswiecim, Poland (home of the infamous Auschwitz death camp), where Hirschfield took part in the groundbreaking for a reclaimed synagogue, the local bishop announced a special mass in his church. Since the mass was “in memory of victims of the Holocaust,” Hirschfield decided to attend, knowing he would be “stepping on a lot of toes.” (Most Orthodox Jews won’t set foot in a church, to say nothing of one near Auschwitz.) Hirschfield goes on to lionize this plain-speaking bishop as an example of “faith without fanaticism.”
Named one of the Top 50 Rabbis in America by Newsweek magazine, Hirschfield writes for venues like Newsweek and The Washington Post. He also posts a daily blog on Beliefnet.com, the Web’s busiest spirituality site.
His rabbinate, he explains, “has been about more than the Jewish people. It’s about bringing the full wisdom of 3,000 years of Jewish life and thought to the human race.” The goal of being Jewish is not to make more Jews, he insists. “It’s to make a better life and world” … even if that were to result in his (still young) daughters marrying gentiles.
Asked about the response to his often-unorthodox statements and adventures, Hirschfield admits, “I have heard both wonderful and critical things from rabbis of every denomination.”
I rarely if ever pick up a determinedly uplifting, accepting-of-everyone, celebration of diversity kind of book like You Don’t Have to Be Wrong … Finding Faith Without Fanaticism. Fortunately, Hirschfield writes very well and intermittently tells some very engaging stories. This literary sweetener helped some of the good-for-you medicine go down.
Rabbi Brad Hirschfield speaks Sun., Nov. 23, at 7:30 at The Mandel JCC. There is a fee. Dessert reception. For tickets, 866-546-1358 or www.clevejcc.org.
cdettelbach@cjn.org
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