Neil Gillman
Encyclopedia
Neil Gillman is an American rabbi
Rabbi
In Judaism, a rabbi is a teacher of Torah. This title derives from the Hebrew word רבי , meaning "My Master" , which is the way a student would address a master of Torah...

 and philosopher, affiliated with Conservative Judaism
Conservative Judaism
Conservative Judaism is a modern stream of Judaism that arose out of intellectual currents in Germany in the mid-19th century and took institutional form in the United States in the early 1900s.Conservative Judaism has its roots in the school of thought known as Positive-Historical Judaism,...

.

Biography

Gillman was born in Quebec City
Quebec City
Quebec , also Québec, Quebec City or Québec City is the capital of the Canadian province of Quebec and is located within the Capitale-Nationale region. It is the second most populous city in Quebec after Montreal, which is about to the southwest...

, Canada
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

. He graduated from McGill University
McGill University
Mohammed Fathy is a public research university located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The university bears the name of James McGill, a prominent Montreal merchant from Glasgow, Scotland, whose bequest formed the beginning of the university...

 in 1954. He was ordained as a rabbi at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America
Jewish Theological Seminary of America
The Jewish Theological Seminary of America is one of the academic and spiritual centers of Conservative Judaism, and a major center for academic scholarship in Jewish studies.JTS operates five schools: Albert A...

 in 1960. He received his Ph.D.
Doctor of Philosophy
Doctor of Philosophy, abbreviated as Ph.D., PhD, D.Phil., or DPhil , in English-speaking countries, is a postgraduate academic degree awarded by universities...

 in philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...

 from Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

 in 1975.

In Conservative Judaism

He is a member of the Conservative movement's rabbinical body, the Rabbinical Assembly
Rabbinical Assembly
The Rabbinical Assembly is the international association of Conservative rabbis. The RA was founded in 1901 to shape the ideology, programs, and practices of the Conservative movement. It publishes prayerbooks and books of Jewish interest, and oversees the work of the Committee on Jewish Law and...

, and is a professor of Jewish philosophy
Jewish philosophy
Jewish philosophy , includes all philosophy carried out by Jews, or, in relation to the religion of Judaism. Jewish philosophy, until modern Enlightenment and Emancipation, was pre-occupied with attempts to reconcile coherent new ideas into the tradition of Rabbinic Judaism; thus organizing...

 at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, in Manhattan, New York City, USA.

Gillman was one of the members of the Conservative movement's commission which produced Emet Ve-Emunah ("Truth and Faith"), the first official statement of beliefs of Conservative Judaism.

Within the New York Jewish community, he is well known as the friend and intellectual sparring partner of fellow Conservative rabbi Joel Roth
Joel Roth
Joel Roth is a prominent American rabbi in the Rabbinical Assembly, which is the rabbinical body of Conservative Judaism. He is a former member and chair of the assembly's Committee on Jewish Law and Standards which deals with questions of Jewish law and tradition, and serves as the Louis...

; the two have held many friendly debates.

Teachings about Jewish theology

Gillman's primary field of interest is Jewish philosophy
Jewish philosophy
Jewish philosophy , includes all philosophy carried out by Jews, or, in relation to the religion of Judaism. Jewish philosophy, until modern Enlightenment and Emancipation, was pre-occupied with attempts to reconcile coherent new ideas into the tradition of Rabbinic Judaism; thus organizing...

. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that addresses questions such as: "What is knowledge?", "How is knowledge acquired?", and "How do we know what we know?" In addressing this subject the first issue to note is that the terms "knowledge" and "belief" are often used interchangeably by religious believers, but technically these are very distinct terms.

As a philosopher, Gillman asks about the difference between belief and knowledge. Given the philosophical definition that knowledge differs from belief (knowledge is often defined as a justified, true belief), Gillman's works explicitly analyze epistemological questions.

In the 20th century, religious existentialists proposed that revelation held no content in of itself; rather, they hold that God inspired people with His presence by coming into contact with them. In this view the Bible
Hebrew Bible
The Hebrew Bible is a term used by biblical scholars outside of Judaism to refer to the Tanakh , a canonical collection of Jewish texts, and the common textual antecedent of the several canonical editions of the Christian Old Testament...

 is a human response that records how we responded to God. One of the major trends in modern Jewish philosophy was the attempt to develop a theory of Judaism through existentialism
Existentialism
Existentialism is a term applied to a school of 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual...

. One of the primary players in this field was Franz Rosenzweig
Franz Rosenzweig
Franz Rosenzweig was an influential Jewish theologian and philosopher.-Early life:Franz Rosenzweig was born in Kassel, Germany to a middle-class, minimally observant Jewish family...

. His major work, Star of Redemption, gives a philosophy in which he portrays the relationships between God, humanity and world as they are connected by creation, revelation and redemption. Gillman takes the existentialist philosophy as Rosensweig as one of his starting points for understanding Jewish philosophy. Another influential philosopher in the Conservative movement
Conservative movement
Conservative movement may refer to:*Conservatism - Political philosophy*Conservative Judaism - A Jewish denomination, unrelated to political ideology....

, Rabbi Elliot N. Dorff
Elliot N. Dorff
Elliot N. Dorff is a Conservative rabbi. He is a professor of Jewish theology at the American Jewish University in California , author and a bio-ethicist....

, also bases his views on existentialism, and the works of Franz Rosenzweig
Franz Rosenzweig
Franz Rosenzweig was an influential Jewish theologian and philosopher.-Early life:Franz Rosenzweig was born in Kassel, Germany to a middle-class, minimally observant Jewish family...

. (Dorff and Gillman come to somewhat different conclusions, as is normal in philosophy, and religion in general.)

Viewing God as a "myth"

Among Gillman's more controversial teachings are his statements that essential elements of Jewish theology should be thought of as "myth
Mythology
The term mythology can refer either to the study of myths, or to a body or collection of myths. As examples, comparative mythology is the study of connections between myths from different cultures, whereas Greek mythology is the body of myths from ancient Greece...

s". His use of this term in both lectures, and in his book on theology, Sacred Fragments, led to discussion and controversy.

In Sacred Gillman writes that the traditional Jewish view of the Torah being orally dictated to Moses on Mount Sinai, and passed down to us today in an unbroken chain of transmission, is erroneous, and one that cannot be maintained in the light of modern Jewish theology and higher criticism of the Bible, such as the documentary hypothesis
Documentary hypothesis
The documentary hypothesis , holds that the Pentateuch was derived from originally independent, parallel and complete narratives, which were subsequently combined into the current form by a series of redactors...

. In regard to these changes he writes:
"Myths can be 'living,' 'broken,' or 'dead' . A living myth is one that works for us, that we embrace as "true," that makes sense of the world as we perceive it. A broken myth is one that has been exposed as our subjective, human construct. Sometimes broken myths die, dead myth; the contrary data have become overwhelming." So what is the Jewish myth? The Jewish Myth of the Torah as the word of God only works if we accept that it is the word of God. Once we realize that it was just some collection of stories, myths and history that was edited in the 5th century then it becomes a 'broken myth"....broken myths don't have to die. It is possible to embrace a broken myth as still living.


Gillman holds that the text of the Torah that we have today is not the original text that existed in the time of Moses, but rather has been edited together from an array of earlier sources. Further, he teaches that it is a cardinal error to hold that God literally speaks like a human, and that many traditional understandings of Revelation
Revelation
In religion and theology, revelation is the revealing or disclosing, through active or passive communication with a supernatural or a divine entity...

 are thus inadvertently idolatry
Idolatry
Idolatry is a pejorative term for the worship of an idol, a physical object such as a cult image, as a god, or practices believed to verge on worship, such as giving undue honour and regard to created forms other than God. In all the Abrahamic religions idolatry is strongly forbidden, although...

.

Gillman responded to the controversy with a clarification of his teachings; he holds that his views were widely misinterpreted.

Gillman uses the word "myth" in the anthropological sense of this term, and not in the colloquial fashion. In the academic and anthropological sense, a myth is an organizing group of thoughts that ties together a people's understanding of how the world works. In this sense, myth does not mean "fable" or "fairy tale". In an essay published in the monthly journal Shma, entitled "The Problematics of Myth", Gillman writes:
To this day, my use of the term troubles many of my students. The main problem is that, in American parlance, a myth is synonymous with a fiction, a fairy tale, or worse, a lie - as in the common practice of contrasting "the myth" with "the facts" or "the reality." That conventional use of the term haunts me whenever I use it....[I teach that] that the biblical account of the event at Sinai should be understood as myth. This is what I mean by the term.

There is no totally objective, human experience of the world. We construct reality from our simple perception of an apple to our most complex scientific theories....We perceive the world not through our eyes but through our brain, which applies interpretive structures to what is transmitted to us through our senses. Those structures are analogous to myths. Structural myths are often accompanied by narrative myths; the former describes the structure, while the latter tells how it came to be. Freudian psychoanalytic theory combines both, as does astronomy; Genesis 1 and Exodus 19 are classical narrative myths.

Myths, then, are not to be contrasted with facts. Instead, myths are the means by which we identify the significant facts. The more elusive the facts, the more the data elude direct human perception, the more inevitable and indispensable the myth (as in string theory, psychoanalytic theory, the biblical account of the Exodus, creation, and eschatology). In all of these cases, the myth posits an invisible world to account for what it is that we do see. Myths then inform the work of scientists, historians, and theologians.

Books

  • Doing Jewish Theology: God, Torah and Israel in Modern Judaism, Jewish Lights, 2008.
  • Traces of God: Seeing God in Torah, History and Everyday Life, Jewish Lights, 2006.
  • The Jewish Approach to God: A Brief Introduction for Christians, Jewish Lights, 2003.
  • The Way into Encountering God in Judaism, Jewish Lights, 2000.
  • The Death of Death: Resurrection and Immortality in Jewish Thought, Jewish Lights, 1997.
  • Conservative Judaism: The New Century, Behrman House, 1993.
  • Sacred Fragments: Recovering Theology for the Modern Jew, Jewish Publication Society, 1992.
  • Gabriel Marcel on Religious Knowledge, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1980.

External links

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