COMMENTARY: Celebrating Eugene Borowitz

c. 2004 Religion News Service (Rabbi Rudin, American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is Distinguished Visiting Professor at Saint Leo University.) (UNDATED) This year Rabbi Eugene B. Borowitz reaches his 80th birthday, the biblical four-score years. A longtime professor at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York City, Reform Judaism’s rabbinical school, Borowitz […]

c. 2004 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin, American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is Distinguished Visiting Professor at Saint Leo University.)

(UNDATED) This year Rabbi Eugene B. Borowitz reaches his 80th birthday, the biblical four-score years. A longtime professor at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York City, Reform Judaism’s rabbinical school, Borowitz has been called the dean of contemporary Jewish religious thinkers.


He earned this accolade the hard way by teaching, writing and talking about God to two generations of rabbis and lay people _ even when they didn’t want to hear about it.

The only Jew to have served as the president of the American Theological Society, Borowitz has been a major influence on both Jews and Christians. In addition to HUC-JIR, Borowitz has taught at Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, City University of New York, and Woodstock, the Jesuit School of Theology.

My rabbinic daughter, Eve, and I are among Borowitz’ many students who admire this brilliant teacher. But Gene Borowitz is more than a beloved professor, although that is sufficient reason to rejoice with him and his family on a milestone birthday.

He was ordained as a rabbi in the years immediately following World War II, and served as a U.S. Navy chaplain. He was fully committed to the cause of social justice (he was arrested during the 1960s civil rights struggle), but also was among the first post-Holocaust religious thinkers to reject the belief that human beings are the source of ultimate good in the world.

For years Borowitz had to force-feed theology to his rabbinical students who were still wedded to a bland ethical monotheism. He compelled Jews to take seriously the concept of a religious covenant and he downplayed the seductive promises of modernity, the enlightenment, and the worship of humanity as substitute deities for the traditional God of Israel.

He wrote: “It is not that we have lost faith that humanity can do some things to mend the world, or that we do not believe that it is terribly important that humanity do the good it can, but we no longer believe it can do everything on its own. I think what we are saying is that humanity is not deserving of our ultimate faith, as God is.”

For many Jews and Christians, especially in the heady days following World War II, this was almost heresy. America, after all, was the “can-do,” “We’re No. 1” nation where everything was possible.


And for Jews like myself it was difficult to accept Borowitz’s sobering critique of humanity’s limitations because as a youngster I absorbed the theological hope of ethical monotheism, a universalism that primarily demanded prophetic behavior from its followers. Incredibly, the bubbling Jewish cauldron of those tumultuous years _ the Holocaust and Zionism, the national movement that led to the creation of Israel _ was not addressed by ethical monotheism.

Surprisingly, Borowitz, who grew up in Columbus, Ohio, the heart of optimistic Middle America, and graduated from Ohio State University, knew better than identifying Judaism with the modern belief that men and women are the center of moral authority sufficient unto themselves.

But he was no enemy of modernity: “The problem of modern Jewish thought is one of how we affirm the best of what the modern world has taught us while simultaneously maintaining our commitment to the conventional tradition that is at the base of genuine Jewish belief and practice _ how can we be `modern’ and `authentically Jewish”’

Despite the horrific Holocaust, Jewish universalism did not disappear easily. It was simply recast and appeared after World War II in a different form. Religious leaders enthusiastically spoke of humans as “co-partners” with God in the laudatory task of “tikkun olam,” the Hebrew term for mending a fractured world.

In the 1960s during one of his many public lectures, Borowitz was asked how a person might live in covenant with God. “That was a signal to me that something had changed,” he said. “Some people were now ready to take on belief and apply it to their lives.”

Forty years later, even as they bask in today’s American Dream society, many Jews and Christians are echoing Peggy Lee’s musical lament, “Is That All There Is?” They are hungry for something called “spirituality.”


Happily for us, at 80, Borowitz remains active, and he has once again accurately described what is needed at this unique moment in history. “We will have a more realistic sense of our postmodern traditionalism when we have the strength to confront the (Jewish) texts that disagree with our Americanized values and lifestyle; we will gain fresh insight into what we most deeply believe.”

DEA/JL END RUDIN

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