A new read on Orthodoxy

In becoming religious, Prof. William Kolbrener bracketed parts of himself. His new book, ‘Open Minded Torah,’ is an attempt to acknowledge those formative experiences.

By ABIGAIL KLEIN LEICHMAN
Prof. William Kolbrener with five of his children (photo credit: Courtesy: Prof. William Kolbrener with five of his)
Prof. William Kolbrener with five of his children
(photo credit: Courtesy: Prof. William Kolbrener with five of his)
The black velvet kippa on Prof.
William Kolbrener’s head puzzles new students in his Bar-Ilan University classes. He can see the question in their eyes – “Who is this guy teaching us Sophocles and Shakespeare and John Milton?” Readers of his newly released book, Open Minded Torah: Of Irony, Fundamentalism and Love, may feel the same sense of bewilderment. Kolbrener’s essays reveal a man whose commitment to Jewish practice and study precludes fundamentalism and skepticism while allowing for insights gained from T.S.
Eliot, baseball, Denzel Washington movies and raising kids in an unnamed religious Jerusalem neighborhood (it’s Bayit Vagan).
“We’re all cultural hybrids with lots of affiliations and things that sustain us,” he explains in an interview with The Jerusalem Post. “Sophocles is a sustaining part of who I am. And my students get that – after they get over the surprise.”
The American-born writer and scholar, with degrees from Oxford and Columbia, previously wrote Milton’s Warring Angels, a work on the author of Paradise Lost, and numerous essays on literature, history, theology, psychoanalysis and cultural criticism, as well as Jewish topics.
He’s recently started writing a “Letter from Israel” column for The Washington Post.
“This column helps me think about issues I’ve spoken about in the book in a larger forum of Jews and non-Jews, and how these questions of commitment and pluralism can play themselves out,” Kolbrener says. “I get to write as an Israeli but to think about issues from an American perspective. I believe that Americans have much more to offer to Israeli public life than we’ve been giving, and I’d like to be part of that. We lack a place where people can exchange ideas freely, because of the different types of camps we put ourselves into.”
This is a man who refuses to be pegged.
“Part of the difficulty of living in Israel is that one is so beholden to sociological categories, and as much as they do serve a function, they often serve to separate,” he says. “We use labels not to get closer to people, but to separate from them...
and it’s time to move past that. Across the board, we are reaching the realization that we have more in common than we thought at first.”

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Polarization and vilification are alive and well, he admits, calling this the result of “a dance of codependence between those who control the media on the Left and the Right determining the conversations in the public sphere.
Beneath those public veneers there is a sense that people want to break away from that.”
He asserts that “life is not determined by one set of affiliations. Even in the haredi camp, where I have affiliations, there is a growing sense of citizenship and a desire for economic mobility. It could be that the things we’re most fearful about in other communities are things we may want for our own, such as economic mobility in haredi communities and a sense of connection in hiloni [secular] communities.”
Kolbrener says Open Minded Torah was written for an “intellectually sophisticated audience, perhaps just by accident more sophisticated about Western than Jewish culture. I’m picturing people who want to connect, without a religious agenda, without coercion. My writing this book was partly to write for the self I was when I started on my path [to greater religious observance]. I want to provide a voice that’s not overly academic or intellectual but presents the complexity of my own experience.”
Both he and his wife Leslie came to Orthodoxy post-college and “bracketed certain parts of who we were in order to become who wanted to be. Now, there’s an acknowledgment that those bracketed parts are more part of us than we may have acknowledged at first. It takes time to reach that sense of acknowledgment, and that’s one of the themes of the book. It’s a continual challenge to integrate those various strands.”
The couple has seven children: Elisheva, 21 and recently married; Moshe, 19; Avital, 16; Freidie, 13; Chana, 10; Shmuel, eight; and Pinhas, six. Several of Kolbrener’s essays explore the social and religious ramifications of Shmuel’s Down syndrome.
“Many parts of the community have an inability to deal with complexity and with otherness,” says Kolbrener, “whether it’s a perspective on Torah that’s different than mine or whether it’s my son Shmuel. The process of engaging in learning Torah requires learning in pairs, because one viewpoint is insufficient. When I learn, I really do have to engage in my portion of the Torah, but if it’s to the exclusion of others, then I’m missing out.”
In one of the book’s essays, “Oedipus in a Kippa,” Kolbrener outlines his scheme “for a public culture in Israel stripped of the competing extremist dreams. In this proposal, everyone loses something, but it may be one, in the end, where everyone wins. Ultra-Orthodox skepticism about the state means acknowledging Israel as a modern nation state in which one has obligations as well as rights. The national religious give up on their vision of the immediate realization of the divine promise of redemption in history. The secular forgo their sometimes exclusionary and intolerant vision of progressive enlightenment. What survives is a conception of Israel as a modern Jewish nation state offering not redemption, but providing protection and rights, a Jewish multiculturalism.” 
When he lectures in Israel, the United States and London along such lines, he finds sympathetic ears but also occasional hostility.
“In some communities, people get upset when I say these things,” he concedes.
“It comes from a certain anxiety.”
However, he persists, “Learning should have the effect of saying what I do know needs to be qualified by other perspectives. There must be a commitment to a shared set of texts and traditions that allows pluralism to exist.
From that comes a distinction between versions of postmodernism and the kind of pluralism we advocate, which is based on commitment.”

Open Minded Torah is available at Steimatzky and Pomerantz booksellers.