Harvard professors: Being Jewish isn't a religious thing

At Harvard University, the Hillel is celebrating a week-long "Jewbilation". One of the events invited three Jewish Harvard faculty to discuss what Judaism means to them. The answers are saddening:

For the roundtable discussion called “Jewish in 2007,” some 60 people gathered at Hillel to hear Law School Professor Alan M. Dershowitz, former Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71, and Professor Stephen A. Marglin talk about how they have merged their intellectual and spiritual lives.

In Dershowitz’s case, the famed law professor claims that he hasn’t.

A self-described “agnostic at best,” Dershowitz was the first to explain the nuances of his “secular, perverse, and confrontational” Judaism.

“I am absolutely sure that there is no God who writes Bibles and answers human prayers,” Dershowitz said. “The God I don’t believe in is very much the Jewish God.”

Organizer Asher A. Fredman ’08 said he hoped the discussion, part of a week of events called “Jewbilation,” would give students a chance to reflect on the role of Judaism in their lives.

During the talk, Marglin reinforced Dershowitz’s emphasis on personal choice in religious practice.

“We all have to make our own decisions in light of our own histories and exceptions,” he said.
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Marglin also considers himself to be culturally Jewish, but his beliefs make him a “secular humanist.”

He added that he continued to practice Judaism for the sense of community it provides.

“Through Judaism, I learned that I could be something other than a self-interested individual, that I could be a member of a community, a link in a chain that went from family to clan to village,” Margolin said.

“This was something that nothing had prepared me for: not my upbringing nor my work at Harvard,” he said.

Gross echoed Margolin’s words, saying, “What I feel most powerfully about being Jewish is being a member of a community.”

“This community has sustained me throughout much of my life,” Gross said.

What these esteemed academics are saying is that while it might be important for them personally to identify as being Jewish, for all their intelligence they have absolutely no answer to tell their children if asked why they should remain Jewish.

They belong to a Judaism of superficiality, of convenience, and, in Dershowitz' case, of redefinition.

It is telling that the Jewish campus organization couldn't find a single professor who actually subscribes to basic Jewish beliefs.