My Fifty Years at the Jewish Theological Seminary

by Rabbi Neil Gillman

I walked through the black cast-iron gates of the Jewish Theological Seminary for the first time as a rabbinical student in October of 1954. Those black gates are long gone, replaced by the elegant glass entryway into the Kripke Tower. But I am still here. I never left.

If someone had told me in 1954 that 50 years later I would be serving as professor of Jewish philosophy at JTS, I would have laughed. I wasn’t so sure that I would be admitted to the seminary. In fact, throughout the various interviews that preceded my formal admission to the school, the mantra, repeated again and again by my interviewers, was, “Mr. Gillman, you’re a nice guy – but you don't know anything.”

I did not need to be told that. I had had a minimal formal Jewish education. The Jewish community of Quebec City into which I was born in 1933 numbered about 135 families. We attended one all-purpose synagogue and I attended a one-room synagogue school. But my parents took Shabbat, the festivals, and kashrut seriously, and my maternal grandmother, who lived to see me enter rabbinical school, regaled me with stories of her early years in Bukovina. I was familiar with the smells, the sounds, and the tastes of Jewish life, but apart from the Shabbat service I had never studied a Hebrew text.

I entered McGill University in Montreal in 1950 and left most of those smells, sounds, and tastes behind. McGill was wonderful. I majored in philosophy and modern French literature, and I loved the work. I had no clear professional or academic career in mind, but who cared? Plato and Aristotle, Camus and Sartre were my constant companions, and what fun they were!

That late in my second year at McGill I wandered into Hillel House to hear a lecture on Jewish philosophy by Will Herberg must, in retrospect, be attributed exclusively to God’s doings. I had rarely been to Hillel, and I had never heard of Herberg until that day. But his lecture, a 50-minute précis of his new book, Judaism and Modern Man, constituted my very first exposure to serious Jewish thinking. I learned many things during that hour: first, that there was a field called Jewish philosophy; second, that thinkers such as Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Mordecai Kaplan had written on issues that were not only intellectually engaging but even existentially significant; and third, that I really did know nothing about this entire Jewish tradition.

I shadowed Herberg during the remainder of his stay in Montreal, and then sat down with the late Rabbi Samuel Cass, director of McGill Hillel, for a long conversation about my Judaism. That conversation led me to begin some informal studies in Hebrew and Torah with a tutor – there were no courses in Jewish studies at McGill in those days. I became active at Hillel, visited Israel during the summer after my junior year, returned to kashrut and to Shabbat, and began to consider my post-McGill plans.

I had never heard of the Jewish Theological Seminary, nor of Conservative Judaism, until my senior year at McGill. Sam Cass had been ordained at JTS, as had two other Montreal rabbis whom I had come to know, Maurice Cohen at Shaare Zion and Wilfred Shuchat at Shaar HaShamayim. Both are, gratefully, still among us, though Sam Cass, his wife, and their son were killed in a traffic accident some decades ago. (Their graves are in the Shaar HaShamayim cemetery, next to those of my parents, which allows me to pay tribute to him whenever I visit my parents’ resting places.)

One day Sam Cass mentioned the seminary. “What’s the seminary?” I asked. “It’s a school for training Conservative rabbis.” “I don’t want to be a rabbi. I want to study Judaism. I want to do Jewish philosophy.” “It’s the same thing. You can’t do Jewish philosophy until you know Hebrew and all the classical texts.” Then the mantra: “Neil, you don’t know anything!” Whereupon he took me into his office, took down his JTS diploma, and asked me to read the names of the faculty who had signed it. I began with the top name: “Louis Finkelstein.” “Stop!” He walked to his bookshelf and took down all of the books authored by Dr. Finkelstein and laid them on the table. “Go on!” “Louis Ginzberg,” I read. “Stop!” Down came the Ginzberg books. Then Alexander Marx, Shalom Spiegel, H.L. Ginsberg, Mordecai Kaplan, and on through the 20 or so names that constituted the JTS faculty in those days. Soon the shelves were empty and the table was filled.

Rabbi Cass gestured to the table. “That’s the seminary, and that’s why you have to study there.”

My decision was sealed following a conversation with Professor Harry Austryn Wolfson of Harvard, then the acknowledged giant in Jewish philosophy. I got to Professor Wolfson through Rabbi Cohen, a Harvard grad and a disciple of his. After an hour with Professor Wolfson in his office in the bowels of Harvard’s Widener Library, he echoed Rabbi Cass. “The seminary is the only school that can give you a comprehensive Jewish education – which you’ve never had,” he reminded me. “After that, come to talk to me again about doing Jewish philosophy. But there are no jobs in Jewish philosophy, so you’d better plan on becoming a rabbi.”

My first day in the rabbinical school began with the annual faculty-student morning minyan and breakfast. I walked into what we now call the Stein Chapel, then the Seminary Synagogue. I paused as I surveyed the faculty ranged along the front rows of the room. “My God!” I exclaimed. “They’re all here!” By “all,” I meant the list of names on Rabbi Cass’ diploma – with the exception of Louis Ginzberg and Alexander Marx, who had both died in the interim. I had been accepted into the rabbinical school’s preparatory program for students like me, who were “promising” but “knew nothing.” That meant I was to study for six years – most entering students would graduate in five or four. I was later advanced to the five-year program, but I ended up studying for six.

Those six years were an unalloyed joy. I was highly motivated, I was apparently a competent student, the school was unbelievably generous with its financial support, and my father gave me pocket money so I could spend all my time on my studies. I soon stopped hearing that that I knew nothing. As the date of my ordination – June 1960 – approached, Dr. Finkelstein suggested that I remain at JTS as a part-time adviser to rabbinical students. That became the first in a series of administrative positions, culminating in my appointment as dean of the school. At the same time, I was pursuing my doctoral studies in philosophy at Columbia. The administrative work soon was supplemented by some teaching assignments. Eventually, teaching outweighed administration, until Chancellor Ismar Schorsch suggested that I had paid my dues as an administrator and I joined the full-time teaching faculty.

Ismar Schorsch was the third of the chancellors under whom I served. Each of the three played a pivotal role in my career here. Dr. Finkelstein persuaded me to remain at the seminary after ordination and gave me my first opportunities to teach. Gerson Cohen urged me to complete my doctoral studies by reminding me that if I remained without a doctorate, there would be no room for me in his faculty. It was under Dr. Cohen’s leadership that I became dean of the school. Finally, Dr. Schorsch “liberated” me from administrative work.

As I began to do more teaching, I also began to publish. My first two published articles appeared in the periodical Judaism and were written at the invitation of its editor, Robert Gordis. Dr. Gordis was a statesman for the movement. He served as both a congregational rabbi and a professor of Bible at the seminary, one of our very few teachers who knew what the congregational rabbinate was all about. Those two articles dealt with the role of the Jewish philosopher. I recall Dr. Gordis going through my manuscript, word for word, in my presence. Everything I know about scholarly writing I learned from that experience.

Dr. Gordis was later to serve as chair of the commission that in 1988 published Emet Ve’Emunah, the movement’s first statement of principles. However ambiguous the eventual fate of that document, the two-year experience of joining an elite group of academicians, rabbis and laypeople in writing it was exhilarating. I shall long treasure the memories of the heated theological debates between Dr. Gordis and the seminary’s vice-chancellor, Rabbi Simon Greenberg, both veterans of movement wars.

Gerson Cohen suggested that my Introduction to Jewish Philosophy course should become a book. Sacred Fragments: Recovering Theology for the Modern Jew was rejected by nine publishers before it was picked up by the Jewish Publication Society. Academic publishers considered it too popular and popular publishers considered it too academic. Apparently it was right on target, because to my amazement it continues to be my bestseller, used both in undergraduate courses and in adult education programs.

Once I began to publish, in the early 1980s, some kind of internal block was broken. Since then, books, monographs, countless occasional pieces, book reviews, and encyclopedia articles later, not to mention my Sabbath Week columns, published for over 20 years in the Jewish Week, New York’s Anglo-Jewish weekly, have followed. I am now working on four different projects, pre-eminently a theological commentary on the Passover Haggadah.

As I began to teach at the seminary, I also began to receive invitations to teach adult education courses in congregations first in the metropolitan area and later throughout the country. Weekend scholar-in-residence assignments in Conservative and scattered Reform communities constitute a significant part of my teaching responsibilities to this day. I taught whatever it was that I was teaching at the seminary but as I taught I also learned what was troubling our laypeople. That perspective, in turn, informed how and what I taught my rabbinical students. If I single out the courses that I taught for many years in Women’s League Institutes in New York and Philadelphia, it is because more than most, these incredibly loyal and patient students were subjected to the twists and turns of my evolving theology. They invariably came back for more and I invariably emerged from those classes reinvigorated.

In my 40-plus years here, I’ve taught generations of students in all the seminary schools. Many of them are now serving as rabbis in congregations and many of them invite me to lecture to their communities. Invariably, in introducing me, they tell anecdotes of encounters they had with me during their student years. Invariably, I have no recollection of any of these anecdotes.

What I do remember vividly, however, are my teachers, the fabled seminary faculty of yore.

I had not as yet submitted an application to the seminary, but at the pleading of my Orthodox rabbi uncle I had spoken with the dean of Yeshiva University’s talmudists, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik. Not surprisingly, he told me that I could not possibly qualify for Yeshiva’s rabbinical program. I should find myself a tutor, study Talmud for five years and come back to him. I told him that I couldn’t do that. “What will you do?” “I’m being interviewed at JTS tomorrow.” “Don’t go to the seminary,” he cautioned. “There’s no serious talmud Torah at the seminary.”

The next day, I was introduced to Dr. Finkelstein, and with colossal chutzpah, I reported Rabbi Soloveitchik’s evaluation of JTS. Dr. Finkelstein smiled. “Actually, he’s right,” he remarked. “I’m a day person. I’m asleep by nine but I’m up at four and that’s when I study and write. But Dr. Lieberman” – the seminary’s notable talmudist – “he’s a night person. He works until two in the morning, and then he goes to sleep. Between two and four in the morning, there is no serious talmud Torah at the seminary.”

Dr. Mordecai Kaplan had assigned a textbook on ethics, edited by a professor at Texas A & M, for his course in Philosophies of Judaism. The book was boring beyond belief. We rebelled. “We didn’t come to the seminary to study ethics from a book by a Texas farmer.” Dr. Kaplan hit the roof. He slammed his notebook shut, turned beet red, shouted that he had never been as insulted, and stalked out of the room.

A week later, somewhat humbled, we awaited Dr. Kaplan’s arrival in the classroom. In he came, impeccably groomed as usual. We stood, recited our prayer – Dr. Kaplan was the only teacher who opened every class with a prayer – and awaited the explosion. Instead, he looked up. “Gentlemen, you’re right. The book is boring. Let’s drop it. Now, what are we going to do with the rest of the year?”

What we did was create a Great Jewish Books course, reading all those books that everyone said we had to read but no one taught. It was one of the great learning experiences of my career.

Abraham Joshua Heschel’s course met on Monday mornings at nine. Suffice it to say that we were not at our best at that hour. One morning, he caught me daydreaming. “Mr. Gillman. Did you see the trees on Riverside Drive this morning?” He knew very well that I had not. “No, professor, I haven’t been out of the building.” “Mr. Gillman, the trees on Riverside Drive are wearing tefillin. After class, you will go to the drive, take tefillin from the trees and bring them to me.”

After class, accompanied by all of my classmates, I dutifully marched up to the drive and looked at the trees. At the tip of each twig, I noticed a small light brown curlicue, prelude to the leaves which would eventually emerge. They did look just like tefillin. I brought them back to Heschel.

I recall Professor Shalom Spiegel, brother of the Hollywood producer Sam Spiegel of Lawrence of Arabia fame. Spiegel would transform a drab upper Broadway classroom into a Cinemascope production as he described the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem during the time of the prophet Jeremiah.

Or H.L. Ginsberg, of whom we used to say, he rewrote the book of Isaiah as Isaiah would have written it if he, Isaiah, had known Hebrew as well as Professor Ginsberg. Or chancellor-to-be, then professor of history, Gerson Cohen, who opened his lecture on the Ptolemaic dynasty with this announcement: “The Ptolemaic kings were interested in two things: sex and money.” We were all ears.

I must have participated in hundreds of rabbinical school admissions interviews, but the only one I recall is my own, with Professors Heschel, Greenberg, and Max Arzt, among others, sitting around the table. Professor Heschel opened the interview: “Mr. Gillman, talk to us about the difference between the Jewish and the Christian conceptions of man.” That question is about all I recall of the interview.

I have participated in two memorable ideological/halakhic/policy debates – on the ordination of women and more recently on the ordination of gays and lesbians. Both issues transformed the culture of the school and the movement, and both generated strong feelings among my colleagues and the student body. In both instances, however fiercely partisan the positions, the debates were conducted in a spirit of collegiality. My own sense is that both school and movement are enriched by the results of the debates.

My most recent and probably my final assignment was to serve as one of the five faculty representatives on the search committee formed to appoint a new seminary chancellor. The committee, composed as well of members of the seminary board and representatives of United Synagogue, Women’s League, and the Federation of Jewish Men’s Clubs, met for close to ten months. Our discussions dealt largely with the core values that both school and movement are to represent over the coming years. After much debate, including searching discussions about the future of the school and the movement, the committee chose Professor Arnold Eisen. I am genuinely excited at the prospect of Professor Eisen’s leadership and at the opportunity to serve in some capacity under my fourth chancellor.

I leave with an overwhelming sense of gratitude to the seminary and to the Conservative movement, which have served as my Jewish home for over 50 years. The seminary took me in, educated me, taught me all I know, and gave me priceless opportunities to teach and to affect the lives of others. The movement has provided me with what every teacher needs above all, students. There simply is no other place in the Jewish world where I would prefer to be than right here and right now.