The question: At the Rabbis Without Borders meeting, we asked:
What is a machloket l’shem shamayim – a dispute for the sake of heaven?
Rabbi Irwin Kula offered a tentative definition: a dispute over a question, a tension, a duality that will not go away — because human living raises it.
The entire team of teachers at our third Rabbis Without Borders meeting pressed us to explore the definition.
Public policy: Journalist Steven Waldman spoke about an example of such a tension from American communal life, the principle of “separation of church and state.” Does the principle help religion flourish by limiting government interference? Or does it make religion wither by withdrawing governmental protection?
The USA’s “Founding Fathers” acted on the best answer they could find: religious diversity depends on freedom from legal structures. But they knew that unpredictable situations would raise the question again. For the last 236 years, legislative debate, case law, and journalism have grappled with it.
Behind the dispute lies a shared spiritual principle: it is good for human beings to reach towards God through religious practice. From this shared principle, we diverge as we argue passionately about its implementation. Could you have a clearer example of a dispute “for the sake of heaven?”
Synagogue practice: Too often we forget the “heaven” for whose sake we invest our passions. We become attached to a solution specific to our time, place and employers. How can we look behind the partial answers on which we may have built our careers?
Rabbi Peter J. Rubenstein taught that it is possible to see the deeper questions even as one leads a large established synagogue. He shared his principles: (1) If it ain’t broke, break it and grow. (2) Try something before you veto it. (3) Recognize that you serve not just the narrow consensual circle of your members, but the entire Jewish people.
Self-reflection: Rabbi Rebecca Sirbu encouraged us to reflect on the source of our habits of political thinking. We spoke of our earliest political experiences, our upbringing, our education, and our work.
Rabbi Kula pressed us to try to look behind cherished partial answers. Choose a political position you disagree with and inhabit it, he said. What experiences and commitments make it plausible? Can you support it with a Jewish text, read against your grain? Can you dwell in the question, rather than in your habitual answer?
Philosophy: When it comes to machloket l’shem shamayin, the question expresses a deeper truth than any possible answer.
Rabbi Kula illustrated the idea with a Talmudic text (Eruvin 13b). Rabbi Meir’s name literally means “the enlightener,” because he could see forty arguments in support of every possible perspective. Beit Hillel wins every halachic dispute because they acknowledge the truth expressed in an opposite view.
I could not resist adding that Plato sees “truth” in the same way. Perfect truths, he writes, exist only in the realm of ideas. In our everyday lives, we grasp and implement truth imperfectly. Yet, guided by the ineffable ideas, we continually evaluate and update our implementation. Some students of philosophy imagine that Socratic method can discover perfect truth once and for all, but this is not Plato’s view. At the end of each of Plato’s masterpieces, (Republic and Symposium) an upstart with a story blows Socrates’ argument to pieces.
Homework: Why should we, Rabbis Without Borders, immerse ourselves in this teaching? Here are the first stirrings of my personal answer.
We live at the border between past, present, and future. The past is gone, the present is changing, and the future is unknown. As the social lives of Jews change, we truly do not know if our familiar answers will continue to make sense. We can prepare by learning to recognize the existential questions at the core of human community. If we can see through a debate to the spiritual question at its core, we will not go wrong.
We live in an everyday world, trying to guide ourselves by an eternal truth. We stand in a stream of time as we serve the Holy One of Blessing. We do not know the situations in which we will be called to serve. As Moshe says in Shemot 10:26: v’anachnu lo neida ma na’avod et HaShem ad bo’einu shama. We do not know how we will serve God until we get there.
Photos: by Laura Duhan Kaplan (1) Torahs at Central Synagogue, New York City; (2) Our rabbinic fellows in the sanctuary at Central Synagogue, home of Rabbi Rubenstein.
