Thursday, November 17, 2011
A Short Entry
In rabbinical school I had a brilliant professor of medieval Jewish philosophy. He was hard, demanding and incredibly knowledgeable. He simply knew about everything. He used to say that he would run away from relevance as if he were running away from the plague. I feel so differently. If it is not relevant to the challenges of life, faith, hope, honesty, humor and the ability to have fun-- I find that I am not interested in it. I want everything I study and read to be relevant to the lived life.
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What bothered him so much about relevance?
ReplyDeleteI think I understand R. Zemel's teacher -- especially as "relevant" was employed some decades back. Remember when "relevant" meant whatever the "older generation" had failed to emphasize?
ReplyDeleteWhen I was a philosophy student (undergrad, a long time back), I loved the most abstract stuff for its own beauty. Cheered when Prof. Robert Weinstock (z"l) -- who taught modal logic, my favorite subject, at Rutgers -- called a then-current effort to apply the logic of necessity and possibility to ethics a "whack-o enterprise."
I was worried by philosophers (and students) who thought they knew what philosophy had to do with anything in real life, found them dangerous... Bachya ibn Pakuda, brilliant as he was, "proved" that a child's death was God's punishment of a parent (rather than the innocent child), e.g.; the _Tanya_ logically sets out a belief system based on the idea that non-Jews have only animal souls. Overtly political philosophy was even worse, in my estimation.
OTOH, deciding what is and is not "relevant" is a huge challenge today, with so much information and opinion coming at us all day long....
look forward to hearing what really bothered the professor, though.
Relevance is key to me in my life and the work. The question for me is - How do I make this relevant to me, to where I am in my life, or in how I am working to impact others? Relevance brings about meaning and purpose. Another way to speak about relevance is - For the sake of what am I doing this or learning about this or being this way? And this doesn't have to be heavy. One can bring lightness and play to relevance.
ReplyDeleteGlad to finally be part of this congregation!