A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life & Thought
Issue 172 | Volume 43 | Number 4 | Fall 1994
From the Editor:
Colleagues and friends with whom I have been talking about Judaism have reminded me of the revived interest in matters Jewish evident throughout the country. We have differed upon occasion about what it means and how best to explore its ramifications, as well as the right ways to second it. The common ground we share is a commitment to an intellectual endeavor that promises to address our concerns as Jews and citizens. We join in the shared understanding that without the latter we cannot fully be the former. But how to dance at two weddings? That, the Yiddish proverb reminds us, is an experiential and a political problem--and yet that is what we Jews have been doing at least since the beginning of the modern era.
My introduction to its possibilities came in 1938 when I was born on a ship sailing via Rotterdam and Curaçao to Panama. We were fleeing Vienna, Eichmann, Hitler, and Anschluss. Drawing from the past to create a future in spite of the efforts of these modern-day Amalekites, my parents joined with their refugee friends to build a synagogue and community center in Colon. They were encouraged by the already established Sephardic Jewish community in Panama City, whose members had arrived in the 1920s, many as refugees, from Aleppo. When I was five, an itinerant melamed arrived from Cuba, and the small Ashkenazi community gathered its children into a class so that they might be united not only by the common experience of escape, rescue, and refuge but the ongoing conversation, the nigun and nusach of Jewish learning. We were not, it seems to be, the victims of the past after all but the soldiers of a new, perhaps more hopeful, Jewish and modern history. All this we began with Hebrew.
In that bare room in the Centro Israelita Cultural, whose windows welcomed the breezes of the Caribbean, we journeyed across millennia. To encounter the conversation initiated by Abraham in his discussions with God, to discover Hannah's prayer, David's psalms, and the call of the prophets was to be initiated into new dimensions of experience--it was to uncover a heritage and recover a place in the human family. Even then and in that place this conversation of dialogue, rabbinic dialectic, liturgical, philosophical, and artistic expression was not a private but a communal matter--part of my generation's re-inscription in traditions that bind together the Jewish people across continents and generations. It is also part of the Jewish effort to articulate the responsibilities and opportunities of citizenship in the modern world.
My colleagues also remind me that our current revival has foregrounded the effort to join and reconfigure what has been separate. The impulse to bring together the concerns we have as Jews and as citizens continues in the new generation, and is among the important subjects being raised by contemporary voices within this ancient Jewish conversation. As the editor of Judaism, working from an established format, I hope to advance a process by which this journal can serve as a bridge to a younger generation uncertain how to connect to the past in defining a twenty-first century Jewish future.
I thus anticipate that these pages will include discussions of the problems of Jewish study and Jewish life on our campuses; of the new interest in Yiddish; the rethinking of attitudes to the Jewish past, be it in Russia, Europe, Australia, America, or the many lands of Sepharad; of the reshaping of Zionism and its repositioning in a changing political landscape; the personal impact of these responses to the contemporary crisis of belief, identity, and place; of what suburbanization has done to the vital intersections and multicultural interactions of American Jewish city life.
In this situation it would be inappropriate to ignore the work of translation of important, often rediscovered, texts that flourishes today. Similarly, these pages need to be open to the striking and original midrashim, fine poetry, and important fiction, written in many languages, that participate in the religious, moral, and philosophical discussion and exposition of the current streams of Jewish conversation. And articles on classical Jewish texts, themes, and rites will continue to center and punctuate these pages.
As the essays attest, I expect to welcome previously unheard voices and engage issues sidelined by more pressing concerns, as part of the affirmation and elaboration of the continuing power of Jewish learning. Whatever the subject under discussion, these pages will be open to time-honored modes and newer methods of analysis and scholarship. My intent is to bring the insights and habits of scholarly inquiry to bear on current areas of concern. My aim is to make Judaism not only informative but evocative and even provocative--informed by technique but not technical in orientation. Though engaging political issues, it will not strive for the provocations of political posturing. Rather, engaging issues through exploration and analysis of the reasons and purposes informing choices, including political ones, it will articulate the complex values of Jewish cultural study. For Judaism is not only conversation but practice--and a community practicing in, by, and through its conversation--thus shaping our discourse and thereby our future.
I am honored to take part in this ongoing conversation. As editor I owe a great deal to the work and achievement of my predecessors. To Dr. Robert Gordis, the founding editor, his successors Rabbi Felix Levy and Dr. Steven Schwarzschild and Dr. Ruth B. Waxman, for over twenty years the journal's devoted managing editor--zekher tzadikim livrakha--as well as the indispensable Maier Deshell, I extend heartfelt thanks. It is my privilege to carry on their work. They challenge all of us to continue to make Judaism part of the ongoing dialogue and communal binding of families and generations.
I also want to thank the Santa Cruz campus of the University of California for providing the assistance making it possible for me to edit the journal here in California, though it continues to be published in New York by the American Jewish Congress. Perhaps this too is another indication of the changing possibilities wrought by modern technology and responsive dynamic institutions.
I hope the pages of Judaism--small like that Caribbean room but opening onto surprising vistas--will partake of the power of that saving conversation. I invite you to join me in its workings--as readers, writers, and participants.
Murray Baumgarten
Santa Cruz, California
Hanukkah 5755