Richard Rubenstein: Biography from Answers.com

Richard L. Rubenstein (born 1924) was an American Jewish theologian and writer who defined the agenda of post-Holocaust theology for Christians and Jews.

Richard Lowell Rubenstein was born on January 6, 1924, in New York City. The eldest son of an assimilated, educated, poor Jewish family, he did not have a Bar-Mitzvah, the traditional rite affirming a 13-year-old as an adult member of the Jewish community. Educated at the prestigious Townsend Harris High School, as a teenager Rubenstein considered converting to Unitarianism and becoming a minister. When the pastor advised him to change his last name, Rubenstein began his slow journey back to Judaism.

Ordained as a Rabbi

In 1942, during the height of the Holocaust, Rubenstein entered the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati (Reform Judaism's rabbinical seminary) and simultaneously continued his studies at the University of Cincinnati. While millions of Jews were being slaughtered in Europe, Rubenstein was taught an anti-Zionist theology of religious liberalism, which spoke of the evolving perfection of man and enthusiastically welcomed modernity. Increasingly disillusioned, Rubenstein left the Hebrew Union College for the Jewish Theological Seminary. He was ordained a Conservative rabbi in 1952, prior to which he had also studied at an Orthodox yeshiva. The death of his infant son on the eve of the Day of Atonement triggered a personal and theological crisis for Rubenstein.

After ordination, Rubenstein worked as a pulpit rabbi and began a Ph.D. program at Harvard, completing his dissertation on a psychoanalytic understanding of rabbinic legends. Rubenstein served as the chaplain to Jewish students at Harvard (1956-1958) and later at the University of Pittsburgh (1958-1970), where he also was the Charles E. Merrill Adjunct Professor of Humanities (1966-1970). He subsequently moved to Florida State University, where he was the Robert D. Lawton Distinguished Professor of Religion and co-director of the Humanities Institute.

Literary Works

In 1966 Rubenstein published his first book, After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism. An innovative, controversial work, it suggested that no Jewish theology could afford to ignore the twin revolutions of modern Jewish history - the Holocaust and the reborn state of Israel. Rubenstein argued that the Holocaust overturned traditional Jewish teaching regarding the God of history. To portray history as an expression of God's will is to maintain that God wanted Auschwitz - an idea which Rubenstein dismissed as thoroughly obscene. Like his teacher Mordecai Kaplan, Rubenstein rejected the concept of Jewish chosenness. Jews must recognize, Rubenstein argued, "that we are, when given normal opportunities, neither more nor less than any other men, sharing the pain, the joy, and the fated destiny that Earth alone has meted out to all her children."

Influenced by Freud's psychoanalytic theory, Rubenstein nevertheless affirmed the priestly functions of religious life. Religion is the arena in which people celebrate the joys and vicissitudes of life, its tragedies and triumphs. Though he denied the God of history, Rubenstein did not abandon the idea of divinity. He offered an ultimately tragic theological vision: "omnipotent nothingness is the Lord of all creation."

After Auschwitz took the Jewish community by storm. It was widely considered the Jewish contribution to the "death of God" theologies popularized in the 1960s. Yet, unlike other death of God theologians, Rubenstein viewed God's death not as an event in the divine life but as a mournful statement of the human condition. "We live in the time of the death of God," he wrote. After Auschwitzset the theological agenda of the Jewish community for the next period. It forced Christian theologians to confront the Holocaust but also reinforced Rubenstein's growing estrangement from the Jewish establishment.

Over the next eight years Rubenstein wrote four books: The Religious Imagination (1968), a psychoanalytic study of rabbinic myth which won the Portico d'Ottavia Literary Prize in Rome in 1977; Morality and Eros (1970), an examination of ethics in a permissive society; My Brother Paul (1972), a psycho-biography of Paul's struggles with Jewish tradition and his relevance for contemporary religious life; and Power Struggle (1974), Rubenstein's autobiography detailing his formative years, his failed first marriage, his happy remarriage to Betty Rogers Rubenstein, and his relationship to his three children. The memoir also deals with Rubenstein's struggles with Jewish tradition and authority.

In 1975 Rubenstein published The Cunning of History, in which the Holocaust is portrayed not as an aberration from Western tradition but an extreme expression of the deepest tendencies of civilization - demographic, religious, political, and economic.

According to Rubenstein, Western societies have been producing superfluous populations - people who could not find a place within the economic system - for the past 350 years. For most of that time, superfluous Europeans went to settle the new world or colonize Asia and Africa. Once the gates of the new world were shut, the Nazis undertook the next logical step: they murdered the people they deemed superfluous (Jews, Poles, Gypsies, homosexuals, and the retarded).

He felt that Christianity believes that it has superseded Judaism, a relic religion that will disappear in time. The Nazis took Christianity's target and sought to make the world Judenrein, free of Jews. On a political level, Nazism represented the perfection of bureaucracy. The Nazis could successfully destroy millions because they employed a highly disciplined bureaucratic system. Economically, I. G. Auschwitz, the corporately-sponsored slave-labor camp adjacent to the death camp, represented the perfection of human slavery. Human beings were reduced to a consumable raw material expended as a by-product of manufacturing. In The Age of Triage (1983) Rubenstein further developed the theory suggested in The Cunning of History and expanded his discussion of modernization. The Cunning of History had marked Rubenstein's transition from a Jewish theologian into a major theoretician of modernization and its consequences.

Rubenstein's works have been translated into Dutch, Swedish, Hungarian, Italian, and Japanese. As the president of the Washington Institute for Values in Public Policy (a conservative think-tank that explored religion and politics in the 1980s), Rubenstein traveled extensively in the Far East and Europe lecturing and consulting. Later he wrote on the crisis of modernization in the East and West.

In 1986 Rubenstein co-authored with John Roth Approaches to Auschwitz (1986), a scholarly and diverse text on the Holocaust. It is methodologically eclectic, incorporating history, ideology, theology, literature, philosophy, and the social sciences from a humanistic perspective. Other publications include Modernization: The Humanist Response to Its Promises and Pitfalls (1982); The Dissolving Alliance: The United States and the Future of Europe (1987); Spirit Matters: The Worldwide Impact of Religion on Contemporary Politics (1987); The Dissolving Alliance: The United States and NATO (1987); and After Auschwitz: History, Theology and Contemporary Judaism (1992).

Rubenstein retired from Florida State University in 1995 and became the president of the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut. He was a bold, innovative thinker whose approach to Judaism and religion was informed by the social sciences and then transformed by a fertile imagination.

Education

Rubenstein began his tertiary education at Hebrew Union College, which is an institution within the Reform Judaism tradition. He graduated from the University of Cincinnati with a B.A. degree. He then was awarded the Master of Hebrew Literature from the Jewish Theological Seminary (Conservative tradition) and was also ordained as a rabbi by that institution. He then studied at Harvard Divinity School and was awarded a Master of Sacred Theology degree. Finally, he pursued doctoral studies and received a Ph.D. from Harvard University, in 1960.^[1]

In addition to his earned degrees, Rubenstein has been honored with two honorary doctorates: Doctor of Hebrew Letters (Jewish Theological Seminary) and Doctor of Humane Letters (Grand Valley State University).

Career

Following his ordination in 1952, Rubenstein was the rabbi of two Massachusetts congregations in succession, and then in 1956 became Assistant Director of the B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundation and chaplain to the Jewish students at Harvard University, Radcliffe and Wellesley, where he served until 1958. From 1958 to 1970 he was the Director of the B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundation and chaplain to the Jewish students at the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie-Mellon University and Duquesne University.^[1] At the University of Pittsburgh he also taught an upper division course on French Existentialism to famously packed lecture halls. Rubenstein taught in religious studies at Florida State University from 1970 to 1995 and held the professorial chair. He then became President and Professor of Religion at the University of Bridgeport, where he served from 1995 to 1999.^[2]

In addition to his role as an educator, Rubenstein has been a newspaper columnist for a Japanese newspaper and has written many books concerned with the Holocaust, theology, Jewish-Christian relations, ethics, and politics.

Holocaust and Death of God

Rubenstein emerged in the 1960s as a significant writer on the meaning and impact of the Holocaust for Judaism. His first book, After Auschwitz, explored radical theological frontiers in Jewish thought. In Rubenstein's argument, the experience of the Holocaust totally shattered the traditional Judaic concept of God, especially as the God of the covenant with Abraham. In the covenant, the God of Israel is the God of history. Rubenstein argued that Jews could no longer advocate the notion of an omnipotent God at work in history or espouse the election of Israel as the chosen people. In the wake of the Holocaust, he believed Jews have lost hope and there is no ultimate meaning to life.

"[A]s children of the Earth, we are undeceived concerning our destiny. We have lost all hope, consolation and illusion."^[3]

In After Auschwitz, Rubenstein spoke of the "death of God" and that the covenant had died. He did not mean he was now an atheist, nor that religion had to be discarded as irrelevant. He tried to explore what the nature and form of religious existence could possibly comprise after Auschwitz. Rubenstein suggested that perhaps the way forward was to choose some form of paganism.

When his work was released in 1966, it appeared at a time when a "death of God" movement was emerging in radical theological discussions among Protestant theologians such as Gabriel Vahanian, Paul Van Buren, William Hamilton, and Thomas J. J. Altizer. Among those Protestants, the discussions centred on modern secular unbelief, the collapse of the belief in any transcendent order to the universe, and their implications for Christianity. Theologians such as Altizer felt at the time that "as 'Death of God' theologians we have now been joined by a distinguished Jewish theologian, Dr Richard Rubenstein."^[4]

During the 1960s, the "Death of God" movement achieved considerable notoriety and was featured as the cover story of the April 8, 1966, edition of Time magazine. However, as a movement of thought among theologians in Protestant circles, it had dissipated from its novelty by the turn of the 1970s.

Unification Church

Rubenstein was a defender of the Unification Church and served on its Advisory Council.^[1] He said about the church's founder Sun Myung Moon:

"I especially appreciated Rev. Moon’s commitment to the fight against Communism. From his own first-hand, personal experience and out of his religious convictions, he understood how tragic a political and social blight that movement had been. I had been in East and West Berlin the week the Berlin Wall was erected in August 1961 and had visited communist Poland in 1965. Unfortunately, many of my liberal academic colleagues did not understand the full nature of the threat as did Rev. Moon. I was impressed with the sophistication of Rev. Moon’s anti-communism. He understood communism’s evil, but he also stood ready to meet with communist leaders such as Mikhail Gorbachev and Kim Il Sung in the hope of changing or moderating their views."^[5]

Other writings

Rubenstein has undertaken a psychoanalytic study of St. Paul of Tarsus in his book My Brother Paul. He has also continued with Holocaust themes in later writings and has adjusted some of his earlier views about God in light of the Kabbalah.

References

^ ^a ^b ^c Richard L. Rubenstein Papers, American Jewish Archives
^ "A Brief Biographical Note", University of Bridgeport website, June 2003 Accessed 2008-09-14
^ After Auschwitz, p. 70
^ John Warwick Montgomery and Thomas J. J. Altizer, The Altizer-Montgomery Dialogue: A Chapter in the God is Dead Controversy (InterVarsity Press, Chicago, 1967), p.7
^ Peace King:Essays on the Life and Work of Rev. Dr. Sun Myung Moon

Autobiography

Power Struggle: An Autobiographical Confession (New York: Scribner, 1974; Lanham: University Press of America, 1986).

Bibliography

After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966).

Morality and Eros (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970).

My Brother Paul (New York: Harper and Row, 1972).

The Cunning of History: Mass Death and the American Future (New York: Harper and Row, 1975).

Age of Triage: Fear and Hope in an Overcrowded World (Boston: Beacon, 1983).

The Religious Imagination: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Jewish Theology (Lanham: University Press of America, 1985).

Dissolving Alliance: The United States and the Future of Europe (New York: Paragon, 1987).

ed., Spirit Matters: The Worldwide Impact of Religion on Contemporary Politics (New York: Paragon, 1987).

and John K. Roth, Approaches to Auschwitz: The Holocaust and Its Legacy (Atlanta: John Know, 1987; 2nd ed., Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2003).

and John K. Roth, eds., The Politics of Latin American Liberation Theology (Washington DC: Washington Institute Press, 1988).

Assessments

Zachary Braiterman, " "Hitler's Accomplice"?: The Tragic Theology of Richard Rubenstein," Modern Judaism, 17/1 (February 1997), pp. 75-89.

Zachary Braiterman, (God) After Auschwitz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

Jakob Jocz, The Jewish People and Jesus Christ After Auschwitz (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1981).

Michael Morgan, Beyond Auschwitz: Post-Holocaust Thought in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

Betty Rogers Rubenstein and Michael Berenbaum, eds., What Kind of God? Essays in Honor of Richard L. Rubenstein (Lanham: University Press of America, 1995).

External links

Richard L. Rubenstein Papers at the American Jewish Archives (includes a biographical sketch)

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

Donate to Wikimedia

Richard Rubenstein

Contents