Harmonizing the rabbi and the academic within

By Michele Alperin

June 6, 2008

Jim Diamond was born under the sign of Gemini and likes to think of himself as having twin personae within -- the rabbi and the academic. Although the two sometimes get along, often they are not on speaking terms.

"I live in a zone between tradition and change, belief and non-belief," he explained, "and it's not a recipe for sleeping well at night."

In his new book, "Stringing the Pearls: How to Read the Weekly Torah Portion," Diamond has achieved at least a temporary symbiosis of his two sides. In fact, all the pieces of his background -- rabbinical education at the Jewish Theological Seminary; Hillel work, most recently as head of the Center for Jewish Life at Princeton University; doctorate in comparative literature at Indiana University; and university teaching -- have come together in this guide to exploring the familiar or unfamiliar ground of the Torah.

Diamond will be sharing some thoughts from his new book at the Tikkun Leil Shavuot at the Jewish Center in Princeton, Sunday, June 8, 9 p.m.

Looking through his academic lens, Diamond sees the Torah as part of the literary canon. "The literary part of me approaches the weekly Torah portion as a text," Diamond said. "I approach it the way I would approach reading Faulkner, Hemingway, or Dostoevsky."

As with any text, the experience of reading the Torah is interplay between three parties -- the literary text, the author and the reader. "It's all about interpretation," Diamond observed. "Does the author determine the meaning of the text? Does the reader?"

Under his academic side as well as his rabbinic training at the Jewish Theological Seminary also comes acceptance of the documentary hypothesis that acknowledges different historical sources for the Torah text. "I accept all that," said Diamond. "The academic accepts a critical treatment of the text."

But his other persona clamoring to be heard, and although as a rabbi he may accept source criticism, he does not see the Torah as just another book. "Sof kol sof, in the end," said Diamond, "this is Torah." Therefore in writing his book he also wrestled with rabbinic questions: "What makes this Torah and not Shakespeare? What makes it holy, and how does it speak to us?"

You could say Diamond has been gestating the idea for this book over his whole lifetime.

When he was a kid, he used to be shlepped to shul every Shabbos morning, at his mother's behest, by his maternal grandfather. Weekly, he recalled, he would try the stomach-ache routine because he didn't want to go: "It was a bunch of old men, and I had no idea what was going on," he explained.

But he also realized that he wasn't the only person at the shul who was uncomfortable. "In the middle of the morning everyone cleared out. It was a mass exodus, because that's when they took out the Torah to start reading," he said. "I realized that everybody was bored and had no idea what was going on."

As Diamond got older, he began to understand that avoidance was the exact opposite of what people were supposed to be doing, because the Torah reading is so central to the Saturday morning service. But even before this realization Diamond had made a resolution, at some inarticulate level, that he would do whatever he could do to help people move from boredom to appreciation and understanding.

Some more recent experiences have also spurred Diamond to write his new book. One has been Diamond's involvement in the egalitarian minyan at the Center for Jewish Life at Princeton University, a group that takes the discussion of the Torah portion very seriously. Another has been his experiences teaching the Bible module of Meah, an intensive adult education program out of the Hebrew College in Boston. These two affiliations, Diamond said, "sharpened my perception of what people need in terms of helping them make Bible, and especially the weekly Torah portion, accessible."

As he would observe people trying to wrest meaning from the Torah as a member of the minyan and a teacher for Meah, Diamond came to realize that some kind of instruction manual might help non-specialists to make sense out of the Torah portion.

But life got in the way, and he was unable to bring this project to fruition until he had time to think and write. Diamond had come to Princeton in 1995 to build a fledgling institution, the Center for Jewish Life, and by 2004 he felt he had given it a sense of stability and coherence. Although he loved the work and could happily have continued, he noticed that "the academic in me was making a lot of noise." It kept asking him, "When are you going to give study, reading, and writing the full attention they deserve?" Finally, he was ready to respond in the affirmative when he retired in 2004 from the Center for Jewish Life.

Diamond grew up in a home that was very Jewish but not observant, and as a child he attended the secular Yiddishist Arbiter Ring School. "I always had a profound love for Jewish culture," he recalled, " but I didn't get into the religious dimension of Judaism till high school." That's when he got very close to a Conservative rabbi in his hometown of Winnipeg, studying with him and eventually taking him as a role model.

"I saw how he lived," said Diamond, "and I thought, 'I'd like to do that -- you read, study, teach, work with people, build community' -- that really appealed to me, more than medical school or being an English professor." He also found the Jewish tradition and its texts to be unfailingly fascinating.

He wanted to go to the Jewish Theological Seminary for college, but his parents wouldn't let him. It was far away, and in those days, when the world was so much bigger, moving to New York from Winnipeg, was like falling off the face of the earth. So he went instead to the Chicago Yeshiva, which had a joint program with Roosevelt University, where he majored in English.

After college, he moved to the Jewish Theological Seminary, where he studied with the great luminaries of modern Judaism. "On a given morning I could go into a class with Heschel and be studying Maimonides' 'Guide for the Perplexed' for an hour and a half, have a 10-minute break, then go to Mordecai Kaplan and get exposed to God as process and the case against religious supernaturalism," he said. "It was heady and amazing."

About five or six years after leaving the Seminary, Diamond went into Hillel work at Indiana University. Realizing then that he wanted to study literary texts in a deeper way, he also completed a dissertation in comparative literature. His dissertation was a study of Baruch Kurzweil, one of the major critics of modern Hebrew literature. Then he moved to Washington University in St. Louis, where he was Hillel director for 23 years.

 In his new book Diamond suggests that groups holding a weekly Torah discussion should not lock themselves into a single approach that is repeated for years on end. "If any group, minyan, community, or havurah is rehashing, it is not digging deep enough and needs to expand its interpretive horizons and this book will help them to do that," he said.

Taking as an example the flood story in Noah, Diamond proposes a number of possible approaches: understanding the flood as a historical event that might reflect a flood in antiquity; looking at the relationship between the Hebrew version of the flood story and its Mesopotamian counterpart in the Gilgamesh epic; reading midrashic or rabbinic interpretations; or looking at the story from a philosophical, theological perspective -- What does it mean for God to destroy the world and start all over again with a covenant? How does the covenant fit into the larger story of Genesis?

Within the realm of rabbinic interpretations is a huge range of possibilities, most available in English -- from modern commentators like Nechama Leibowitz or Aviva Zorenberg, to feminist, existential, and Hasidic criticism, and stretching back to Rashi, Nachmanides, Ibn Ezra, and Rashbam.

The heart of his book is a four-part methodology on reading a Torah portion that has its roots in a statement from Talmud:

1. Read it once at home: Scan the weekly portion and see what kind of text it is: narrative, poetry, law, genealogical lists, or census figures. Get the context -- what book is the portion in and what comes before and after? Then read through and make notes of issues and questions that occur to you.

2. Read it again at home: Later in the week, read the portion again, paying closer attention to issues you noticed on the first reading.

3. Look at commentaries.

4. Go to shul and hear the portion read communally.

In writing the book, Diamond has brought together a lifetime of both academic and rabbinical learning to create this guidebook for the Torah. In his effort to enable the learning of others, Diamond has picked up a thing or two himself. He has learned that the weekly Torah portions are almost inexhaustible in their richness and implications; that he can take complex academic ideas, mediate them, and make them accessible to non-specialists; and, perhaps most satisfying, that he can integrate his two personae, academic and rabbi, and let them coexist in peace.