Leaving Hebron

“Making room for one another”: Rabbi Brad Hirschfield makes a point of traveling outside his comfort zone and meeting with people of all faiths.

by Sandee Brawarsky
Jewish Week Book Critic

Rabbi Brad Hirschfield’s Judaism is one of inclusion and pluralism, tolerance and respect; his is a Judaism that looks to the core, not the borders. He’s an Orthodox rabbi building as many bridges as he can.

It wasn’t always this way. About 25 years ago, as he tells The Jewish Week, he was a religious fanatic. After high school, he left his home in Chicago — where he had been a member of the Jewish Defense League — for a period of study in Israel. From Jerusalem, he made his way to Hebron, where he walked through the streets with a gun in one hand and a bible in the other, leading tours through the city, ever certain that the land belonged to the

Jewish people, given to them by God. For two years, he was involved in the militant arm of the settlers’ movement. He felt spiritually alive, full of passion and clarity.

When settlers fired into the Hebron Islamic College and killed two young children, most of his movement friends felt it had been a tragic mistake, but also the natural result of the violence against them, and they continued in their mission. Hirschfield found himself alone in questioning the wisdom of building the Hebron community in light of what happened. He realized that perhaps he didn’t have all the answers, that perhaps the beliefs that had been driving his life were deeply flawed. Soon he found himself outside of the fold.

Hirschfield then moved back to the United States, attended the University of Chicago where he studied religion and then graduate school at the Jewish Theological Seminary. He had no interest in becoming a rabbi, or so he thought, but when he began teaching Talmud to rabbinical students, he realized that he was “more interested in people than footnotes.” While continuing his graduate studies, he also enrolled in the rabbinical program of the Union for Traditional Judaism, where he was ordained. He joined CLAL, the National Jewish Center of Learning and Leadership as an intern in 1994, and now serves as the organization’s president.

Sitting in his Manhattan office last week discussing his new book, “You Don’t Have to Be Wrong for Me to Be Right: Finding Faith Without Fanaticism” (Harmony), the 44-year-old rabbi, with his long hair tied back in a ponytail underneath a colorful kipa, appears far from a militant settler.

While he’s no longer in touch with friends from his days in Hebron, he’s in touch with many whose politics reflect those commitments. The events of 9/11 inspired him to confront his past and examine it publicly.

“Religion had flown those planes into the Twin Towers, and I had practiced a form of that religion,” he writes, careful not to draw moral equivalencies. He recognizes that he once shared an absolute sense of being right that made everyone else wrong.

When he describes the faith he had during his years in Hebron, he sees it as narrow and limiting. As he writes, “I don’t think that this faith is true faith. In fact it may be precisely faith’s opposite, an extremity of doubt that boomerangs into strident belief.”

Rabbi Hirschfield now travels about 100 days per year, teaching and speaking to Jews of all backgrounds, including the unaffiliated, and he meets regularly with religious leaders and people of many faiths. A frequent commentator in the media on religion, he’s creator and host of a television series, “Building Bridges: Abrahamic Perspectives on the World Today.” About his work, he writes, “I have tried to help people discover that no one is ever one hundred percent right or one hundred percent wrong.”

“I love conversations,” he says. “That’s the most valuable thing we can create right now — the conversations between people who aren’t currently talking, and more inclusive conversations between people who already are.”

His penetrating book is a work of religious philosophy and practical applications, built upon his own story, and his study of Jewish texts, told with candor. He presents the code of openness by which he now lives, the ability to listen and understand the other’s point of view — even if he doesn’t agree — while maintaining a deep sense of self.

About the mix of autobiography and interpretation in his writing, he says, “I don’t know how to do it any other way. I think it’s really important for people to tell their stories. I’m hoping that if I’m willing to tell mine, it will evoke the abilities of others to tell theirs. Everyone has a story and there’s something to learn from every one of them.”

“The book is a kind of spiritual, intellectual compass of navigating an incredibly polarized world,” he says. He’d like people to take away the message that “it’s really possible to find passion and commitment and genuine openness—you don’t need to ever buy into the idea that it’s ever one or the other. It’s possible to really love yourself and be profoundly in touch with what you need and want most and to love another and be genuinely aware of what they need.”

Rabbi Hirschfield is a man who finds sacred places everywhere, whether an improvised synagogue, a lecture hall, or the inside of a taxi. For him, holiness is “that which you take with utmost seriousness and treat with greatest reverence.” In the book’s introduction, he recounts an unusual conversation with a taxi driver, a former addict who was saved by Christ, who has lots of questions for a rabbi. The book’s title comes out of their brief time together.

“I think Judaism’s ancient tradition can help all people find deeper meaning and greater joy in their lives, whether or not they are Jewish. I have come to believe that religious tradition exists not to serve the faithful, but to help the faithful serve the world.”

He takes Judaism seriously and lovingly. When asked whether there’s ever a downside of pluralism, he notes the possibility of “sliding into the paralysis of relativism,” explaining that misunderstood pluralism is making no choices because all possibilities seem the same.
In this time of heightened interfaith and intra-faith tension, Hirschfield’s book is particularly valuable. He suggests that all people, in order to achieve spiritual depth and religious growth, try extending themselves a couple times per year. In his own travels, he makes a point of stretching to the point of discomfort, both to the right and to the left, by spending sacred time in a different community than he’s accustomed to.

“The sense of the dignity and authenticity of what others are doing should be wider than a person is comfortable with,” he says, hopeful that people can learn to “make the most room for one another.”

About Hebron today, he says, “The only way things will get better is if the people who know we have to leave understand why it’s worth crying about, and the people who would cry about leaving appreciate that we can’t stay.”

Hanging above his desk is a framed photograph he found at JTS with Conservative Rabbis Saul Lieberman and and Simon Greenberg in conversation with Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan, founder of Reconstructionism.

“I love that photo,” he says. “It speaks to a moment in Jewish life, when three people who had vastly different understandings of the Jewish past, present and future could stand and smile at each other as they talked.”

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization