To the Editor:

I appreciate Jon D. Levenson’s many positive and perceptive comments about my book, The God I Believe In (conversations about Judaism with fourteen eminent Jews) [Books in Review, May] and wish to correct not matters of opinion but several misleading statements, such as the comment that the book exhibits a “tendency to read like a questionnaire rather than a set of sustained theological inquiries accessible to laymen.” The fact is that to keep the conversations focused on the issues of faith dealt with in the book, it was of course necessary to raise many questions which prompted the interviewees to clarify their beliefs, but the text has no resemblance whatever to a questionnaire. It is precisely what the subtitle says, a book of conversations or dialogues about Judaism.

Mr. Levenson, moreover, regrets that “implications are seldom drawn out. Haberman is continually hurrying to the next question on his check list.” The reference to a check list is a fantasy of the reviewer. All conversations were completely spontaneous. The interviewees and I faced each other without any notes whatever, ready to let the conversation flow wherever it might. As the reader may readily see, each interview is marked by a different emphasis according to the person’s deepest convictions or attempt to cope with doubts. The “sustained theological inquiries” for which Mr. Levenson is looking may be found in every interview, though not to the point of an “anthology of essays,” which Mr. Levenson would prefer to the conversational format.

I share his regret that I could not “follow up” with further questions on deeply personal accounts of religious experiences, but the same regret could be voiced about all the other themes in the book. Each of the fourteen interviews might well have been lengthened many times, creating not one but fourteen books. Mr. Levenson, however, entirely misses the object of my book in his suggestion that I should have challenged the position of certain interviewees, e.g., Cynthia Ozick’s rejection of all notions of immortality, which, he argues, “would not only have added drama to the dialogue; it would also have imparted a sense that the great issues of Jewish belief were being engaged and not merely reported on.” Challenging the interviewees to theological debates might not only have “added drama” but also abruptly ended some of the dialogues. The object of my book was to report what a representative group of eminent contemporary Jews believe, not what they should believe. I was not looking for “textbook theology.” If Mr. Levenson contributes another book of that genre, I will read it with interest.

Meanwhile, my advice to him is to quit fighting windmills. It is pointless to rail at the “extreme individualism of contemporary American Jewish culture.” Personal autonomy, the free determination of one’s beliefs and values, is here to stay. Free choice in religious matters is not necessarily bad for religion. On the contrary, it challenges the believer to make the best possible case for his faith by precept or example.

[Rabbi] Joshua O. Haberman
Washington Hebrew Congregation
Washington, D.C.

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Jon D. Levenson writes:

Joshua O. Haberman’s list of questions can be found on p. 5 of his book. Neither the list nor the judgment that he adhered to it fairly well during the actual interviews is a fantasy of mine.

I never said that he should have “[c]halleng[ed] the interviewees to theological debates” or reported “what they should believe.” What I did suggest is that he too often missed “a chance to put forward opposing considerations, thus forcing the respondent into deeper reflection.” Some of his interviewees might perhaps have been too insecure for this, but I doubt that many would have “abruptly ended . . . the dialogues,” especially if Rabbi Haberman had succeeded in posing his follow-ups in a less confrontational manner than his term “debates” connotes. Given the wide and laudable diversity of his interviewees, there is no chance whatsoever that the probing I missed in his book would have yielded anything so dry and so uniform as “textbook theology.”

I am also unable to find the “rail[ing]” that Rabbi Haberman detects in my mention of “the extreme individualism of contemporary American Jewish culture” in the concluding sentence of my review. Lacking the gift of prophecy, I cannot determine whether he is right that this condition is “here to stay.” I do know that recent experience has not been kind to notions of historical irreversibility and that the ideal of the unencumbered, autonomous self has been under attack of late from several directions.

In his use of the words “here to stay,” Rabbi Haberman seems to me to imply that the individualism in question is not one of the “age-old doctrines” of Judaism that he thinks—erroneously, in my view—his interviews found to be more or less alive and well. And in writing that the new situation “challenges the believer to make the best possible case for his faith,” he seems to be joining me (and others) in the belief that Judaism must be based, as I put it in the review, on something more corporate and more public than the individual’s “preestablished personal values and private preferences.” If so, then here, too, we are in agreement.