I email Rabbi Daniel Brenner:
As you are my new best friend, I thought I’d pose an additional two questions to you for my blog Lukeford.net.
* What do you think of that Newsweek list of the top 50 American rabbis? What did it mean to you to be included?
* I interviewed a Jewish intellectual Stephen Steinlight who’s been in the news recently. He’s against illegal immigration. He speaks at a lot of shuls.
I wondered if I could perhaps get a reaction from you to his critique of Reconstructionist seminaries?
1) My brother-in-law — he’s a Shaar Yashuv Yeshivah guy — made the best comment about the Newsweek list: "It depends on how you define influential."
That’s my feeling too. He wanted the Rabbi of the New Square community to be in the top ten. I wanted Reb Zalman to be in the top ten. What is influence? It depends on what issues matter to you, etc. Jeffrey Goldberg from The Atlantic wrote what I think is a concise and accurate commentary on the rabbis on the list and their influence or lack of it.
What does it mean for me personally to be on the list? At the least, it is some recognition for the work that my colleagues and I are moving forward at Birthright Israel NEXT. It is more a vote on my work than on my personal influence I imagine.
Overall, I am uncomfortable with these sorts of lists — doing top rabbis is to me like doing top artists or top novelist or top musician — it is kind of ridiculous to rank them like NCAA sports teams or like American Idol. But playing brackets would be fun, no?
2) Is Steinlight talking about Reconstructionist and Reform seminaries or about Liberal education in general??? Sounds to me like the argument my brother-in-law (see above) makes about why there should be no funding for public universities. Liberal seminaries are Liberal -lots of Clinton/Gore bumperstickers in my day – but the institutions acutally foster more critical thinking than you might imagine. At RRC, we had professors like Neil Danzig and Joel Hecker and others who were Yeshiva educated and intellectual heavyweights. They certainly did not reduce issues to party platforms or politically correct blah blah. It is true that I also had a Radical Lesbian teacher who had the idea that men should be limited in the time they are allowed to speak in class. I made a point of speaking and in the end she backed off. But that was an isolated incident in what was an exceptionally good educational experience. And to be honest, being in her class was a good educational experience because it helped me to see the schisms within the LGBT world.
On the particular issue he is harping about, I think that he and the supposedly homicidal- tendency Lesbian rabbi are equally unbalanced. If you are Shoshone or Souix or Cherokee and the year is 1760 then the illegal immigrants that have ruined your country are the Founding Fathers and their buddies. Do American Indians have to see Washington as great? That sounds like imposing one’s politically correct idea onto someone else. My sense is this: Steinlight is deliberately trying to upset people. He gets a kick out of it. If this is the case, he should not be shocked when he goes to a Liberal synagogue and ends up watching rabbis defend crying children.
That said, immigration is an issue that is incredibly complicated and does not fall into the same political lines as others do because of — unions, the Catholic Church, Agri-business — so therefore it is a mess. I credit those who are raising the issue for discussion.
