The following article is from the 5783/2022 Edition of Havruta Magazine.
TELL ME ABOUT YOUR JOURNEY TO ALIYA IN 1970.
I’m a typical third-generation American Jew. My Russian-born grandparents arrived in America as children at the turn of the 20th century. There, they rebelled against their religious upbringing. As a result, my parents received very little Jewish education. They did belong to a Conservative shul and sent me to Hebrew school, but it was minimal. Yet somehow, as a teenager, I got some kind of religious bug. Though my parents weren’t enthusiastic about it, they allowed me to go to Camp Ramah, and that was decisive.
As a student, I came to Israel several times, first as a volunteer to pick potatoes in a kibbutz, which was not terribly rewarding. I returned right after the Six-Day War for a year at Hebrew University, which wasn’t great either. Next, I came as a counselor for a group of American teenagers in a Ramah seminar, and that was a real turning point for me. I saw the American culture they represented, and I saw the Israeli world to which I was introducing them, and I realized that I identified more strongly with the latter.
I decided I would look for an opportunity to come back and try actually living here. After a year in a Jewish religious commune in Boston (Havurat Shalom), I came here in 1970 and have never regretted doing so. I found a sense of meaning, of making a difference, of being a privileged participant in something historic and unique. And that’s only gotten stronger over the years.
WHAT LED YOU TO FOUND PARDES?
I had been lucky enough to study at the University of Chicago, with its broad, coherent, liberal-arts undergraduate curriculum. It was exciting. But when I graduated, I realized something significant had been lacking. My education there hadn’t included anything Jewish. Even the Bible, undoubtedly the most important book in the Western tradition, was never even mentioned! So I set about looking for a place to fill that gap.
A yeshiva, with its Orthodox agenda and mindset, would be spiritually serious but confining. And academic study of Judaism, available then at only a few universities, would be intellectually open but inhospitable to questions of a spiritual nature. I decided to sit at the feet of the great scholars then at the Jewish Theological Seminary, which seemed to offer a middle way. However, it turned out to be, in a sense, the worst of both worlds: both dry and religiously restrictive. Nevertheless, I persisted there for six years, until ordination.
After making aliya, I met many young people who had come here in a search similar to the one I myself had embarked on seven years earlier. Israeli universities offered Jewish studies that were intellectually open but merely academic, and the yeshivot were religiously oriented but prescriptive and intellectually confining. So I decided that a framework was needed that offered the best of the two systems. And that’s really how it came about.
HOW DOES A RECENTLY ORDAINED 29-YEAR-OLD NEW IMMIGRANT START A NEW INSTITUTION?
Well, being young, you have a kind of chutzpah. If we all waited until we felt perfectly qualified to do something, many important things would not get done. That’s number one. Second, I was not exactly new to questions of Jewish education, having already been involved in them for some years as a teacher. Most important, though, was that the institution I had in mind would, in its very essence, have to reflect the aspirations and concerns of the learner and seeker, such as I still was, rather than those of the educator.
The process started in 1971. Fortuitously, my first job in Israel was in a department of the World Zionist Organization headed at the time by a remarkably able, broad-minded man, the late Mordechai Bar-On z”l. Moraleh, as he was known, had formerly been the Chief Education Officer of the IDF but was also an intellectual and, later, a historian and political activist. Though not formally religious, he had a deep commitment to the future of the Jewish people and its heritage.
I went to him with my idea, seeking advice. He listened carefully for half an hour and then said, “This is a good idea, and I want to help you.” It so happened that the department was just then planning to vacate several buildings in Jerusalem. One was on Rehov Gad, not far from where Pardes is today. He said we could use it, with the WZO covering the overhead and my salary. There would not even be a need to publicly acknowledge this help. All we needed to do was charge tuition to pay the teachers. “So drop what you’re doing now and go for it”— that’s pretty much how he said it. That arrangement lasted for ten years, until Pardes became a fully independent institution.
HOW DID YOU GET FIGURES LIKE ADIN STEINSALTZ Z”L AND DAVID HARTMAN Z”L TO TEACH?
Approaching teachers was actually not difficult. I had a clear idea of what I wanted, and I did some research to identify gifted teachers—famous or not—who were likely to be responsive to it. Everyone I approached warmed to the idea of teaching highly motivated students Torah lishmah—for its own sake—in a completely open-ended setting, quite unlike the institutions where most of them were then working. It wasn’t a hard sell.
Sadly, all five members of the original senior faculty are now gone. Adin Steinsaltz was then only in his late thirties but was already well known as a talmid hakham. Eliezer Schweid was a prominent professor of Jewish thought. Aryeh Toeg was a promising young Bible scholar. (We lost him, unfortunately, a year later in the Yom Kippur War.) David Hartman, a new oleh from Canada, had a reputation as a philosopher and charismatic rabbi. Mike Rosenak was a well-known educator.
They were all learned, enthusiastic teachers. But also important to me was that, personally, they represented a broad spectrum of diverse Jewish models for the students: Steinsaltz and Schweid, native Israelis from “secular” backgrounds who were devoting their lives to the study of Jewish texts; Hartman from the East-European and American yeshiva world but unconventional in his religious thinking; Rosenak from a liberal-Orthodox German-Jewish background; Toeg from an Iraqi family that had migrated to the Far East before settling in Israel.
The teaching assistants—I called them tutors—were a diverse group as well, and several subsequently became prominent as scholars, educators, and leaders too, among them Dov Berkovits, Aryeh Strikovsky z”l, and Menachem Froman z”l.
WHERE AND HOW DID YOU RECRUIT STUDENTS?
I had a lot of friends in the Hillel network, and I sent out a poster to put on bulletin boards.
We started in the fall of 1972 with 27 students, nine women and eighteen men. Most came from the US and Canada. Some were living here. Most were graduates of elite universities. But from a Jewish and religious point of view, they, too, were very diverse.
WHY THE NAME PARDES?
The word actually comes from Farsi, meaning garden. It’s similar in Hebrew: an orchard or grove of fruit trees. It crept into the Indo-European languages as the word “paradise,” the Garden of Eden. But in Rabbinic tradition, pardes was given a metaphorical meaning: the inner world of Jewish knowledge. Also, the four letters of the Hebrew word were said to represent four levels of interpreting the Torah: the plain, literal meaning; the allusive meaning; the homiletical meaning; and the esoteric, mystical meaning. Again, diversity was an essential part of the Pardes idea.
DESCRIBE THE IDEOLOGICAL ORIENTATION AT THE OUTSET
On the second-year recruiting brochure, there was a significant heading, “Our goal is Jewish learning.” It’s not what you do with what you learn. That’s open-ended. Come through the door and we’ll show you the texts and teach you to read them. But what you do with them is up to you.
Rabbi Maurice Pekarsky z”l, who was a mentor to me as an undergraduate, once said that we need to look at our students as human beings with their own aspirations and life trajectories, not just as means to a larger institutional or collective end. We have to start with their needs, not ours. That was one of our major principles at the start, and I believe it is still the case. The agenda is the students’ agenda.
WHEN YOU LOOK BACK OVER THE 50 YEARS AND THE IMPACT THAT PARDES HAS HAD ON JEWISH LIFE, HOW DO YOU PROCESS THAT?
Obviously, it’s tremendously gratifying. What else can I say? It was unexpected. The beginnings were extremely modest.
A small group of students and a small building. It was totally obscure. Almost no publicity. Only one full-time employee (yours truly). Teachers who gave only one class a week. It was very small scale. But now there are thousands of Pardes alumni, contributing to the Jewish future as rabbis, educators, communal leaders, parents. One of those alumni [Leon Morris] is sitting here next to me.
The growth is not a tribute to me. It’s a tribute to devoted, long-serving teachers; cohort after cohort of wonderful students; fifty years of outstanding people, energy, and enormous effort. It surprises me over and over again. And to see the construction site…it’s thrilling. I was shown the site recently. I was actually in tears. That’s a tribute to all of you, and your predecessors who contributed so much. And I have every confidence that it will continue.
WHAT’S YOUR BRACHA FOR ALL OF US ON OUR 50TH ANNIVERSARY?
Pardes stands for a certain way of thinking about plurality and diversity, and about mutual respect, which is such a rare commodity in the world today, including within our Jewish communities. The Torah belongs to every Jew, to all kinds of Jews. That should be the motto of the Jewish world, not just of Pardes. That’s going to be an ongoing struggle, but Pardes will, I hope, continue to foster that ideal.
Read more articles from the 5783/2022 Edition of Havruta Magazine here.
