Letters, Fall 2025

Candles and Canines
By coincidence, I was reading S.Y. Agnon’s very short story, Ha-hadlakah, before seeing Shai Secunda’s fine article (“Visiting the Graves of the Righteous: Inns of Molten Blue,” Summer 2025). He describes the hordes of people arriving there on Lag BaOmer, during an unspecified historical era, to visit the grave of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai. These people included visitors from the lands of “Edom and Ishmael.”

At the end of the story, after a long period when Jews couldn’t visit the site, they make a joyous return on that holiday. Local Arabs greet them warmly, saying that they themselves lit candles at the grave during the years the Jews hadn’t visited. The Arabs invite the Jews to light candles of their own.

This sounded too idyllic to be true, but your article tells of Galilean Muslims not only guiding Jewish kabbalists to old graves but demonstrating methods of communing with spirits of the deceased. Your article was a pleasure to read and a terrific companion to the Agnon account.

Joel Leeman
via email

As always, I enjoyed the wit and erudition of Shai Secunda’s article about visiting holy graves in the Galil. It reminded me of the case of the “grave of Rav Assi” at Mitzpeh Hosha’ya. A local resident named Zvi Cohen, frustrated by the authorities’ failure to fix a drainage problem, sarcastically put up a sign renaming his road Nahal Ha-Kohanim (“the stream of the Cohens”). As a savvy influencer, Cohen whimsically published an elaborate backstory of how the name evolved from priestly associations in ancient times. He also buried the beloved family dog there, leaving a rock etched with its name in Hebrew: Lassie. Some misread this as “R[abbi]’ Assi.” This misreading was repeated online, and, to this day, some credulous pilgrims still come to visit the grave of the great talmudic sage Lassie/R’ Assi at Nahal Ha-Kohanim.

Eliezer Segal
Calgary, Alberta

Satellite Control
Having closely followed the public career of Elliott Abrams, and after reading Ted Sasson’s recent article (“The Cost of Immersion,” Summer 2025), I get a sense of a man who possesses not only moral clarity but even rarer moral courage. In his attempt to craft a strategy to reach unaffiliated Jews, however, Mr. Abrams is stuck in his own nostalgia by turning to models that have failed. Day schools and summer camps are wonderful assets; however, with the unaffordability pointed out in the article, there will never be sufficient availability—even with the generosity of donors—to have any measurable impact on the problem. This in fact reveals an even deeper problem. How is it that Chabad, having impacted the big cities and many large universities, is starting to succeed in small towns across America on shoestring budgets? It would make one think that the solutions aren’t in the delivery system but rather in the message and the messengers.

Judah Lerer
Monsey, New York

I am grateful to Ted Sasson for his thoughtful review of If You Will It. That said, I do not share his concern that “the central role Abrams proposes for Israel” may lead to “the American Jewish community becom[ing] a mere satellite of Israel” that will “have little to offer beyond diplomacy and philanthropy.”

First, the word “satellite” does not appear in my book, nor I would suggest does the concept. I wrote that “engagement with Israel is the most vital building block of future Jewish identity for non-observant Jews throughout the Diaspora” and that “nothing seems to be more powerful not only in creating a lasting connection to the Jewish state, but in awakening a sense of peoplehood among average, non-Orthodox American Jews.”

Nothing would more quickly make American Jewry a satellite or dependency of Israel than a serious weakening of the Jewish community here—a weakening of Jewish identity and the sense of peoplehood. The proposals I make in the book are precisely aimed at strengthening the American Jewish community, which would tend to prevent it from becoming more dependent on Israel.

Second, Mr. Sasson worries that this “mere satellite” status may bring other political effects because “Israel has in the past drawn on a vibrant liberal American Jewish community to help strengthen its own liberal political institutions.”

I worry more that what Mr. Sasson calls a “vibrant liberal” community is being replaced by a community increasingly hostile to Israel. And I worry more about attempts from the Left to intervene in the political life of Israel, a democracy whose people are more capable of discerning what is good for their country than American Jews whose lives are not on the line (and whose understanding of the complexities of Israeli life is often quite limited). Our societies, histories, political cultures, and geopolitical situations are too different to make me sanguine when “liberal” American Jews try to “strengthen” Israel’s “liberal political institutions.” In fact, I wonder if Mr. Sasson has it upside down: When liberal Jews in the United States or left-wing Israelis attempt to foist American political ideas (for example, about separation of religion and state or the role of the Supreme Court) on Israeli society, they are acting as if it ought to be a “mere satellite” of the American Jewish community.

Elliott Abrams
Washington, DC

Ted Sasson Responds:
Mr. Abrams’s book makes the case for a major investment in immersive educational experiences for Jewish youngsters and young adults, including experiences in Israel. I support that vision, as I tried to make clear in my review. But Mr. Abrams focuses in his letter on other matters. He writes that the word “satellite” does not appear in his book and quotes a line (“Israel is the most vital building block”) that he believes better captures his meaning. Here’s the rest of the section from which that line is drawn—the reader can decide whether “satellite” is an apt descriptor of Mr. Abrams’s vision of the relationship between American Jews and Israel:

The American Jewish community, like all Diaspora communities, will not thrive outside of a deep engagement with the first Jewish state for 2,000 years. To imagine that it can, as a sort of rival for influence in the Jewish world and as an alternative model Jewish community that can survive and strengthen without embracing Israel, is folly. . . . Like Australian or French, Canadian or British, Brazilian or Mexican Jews, our community must also realize that Israel is the center of Jewish life.

As to the second point, Mr. Abrams flips the plain meaning of my words. I wrote that Israelis have in the past drawn inspiration from a vibrant American Judaism, not that American Jews should foist their ideas upon Israel. I wonder, though, what Mr. Abrams thinks about the prominent role of the Tikvah Fund, which he chairs, in arguing for Israeli judicial overhaul. Wasn’t that a case of American Jews foisting their (neoconservative) ideas upon Israel?

Trust the Process?
Shai Held’s engaging and insightful review of Arnold Eisen’s Seeking the Hiding God (“Reverent Unknowing,” Summer 2025) reveals the quandary contemporary Jewish theology seems unwilling and unable to truly confront. Who could argue with the need to foreground more “yearning and desire” for the concealed divine presence in our quotidian existence? After all, as the Ba’al Shem Tov once quipped: “True jouissance is never constant but always interrupted.” Despite the dialogical charm, acumen, and accessibility of Eisen’s earnest invitation to engage and share in his journey, his personal theology lies somewhere between Heschel and Kaplan in reframing theodicy as an existential question of divine hiddenness rather than a metaphysical puzzle.

Eisen intentionally avoids systematic metaphysics in what Held calls an attitude of “reverent unknowing” and reminds us that our task is to search and partner in acts of justice and compassion, not to map out God’s ontological structure. This is all noble, yet given that Held is an expert in Heschelian theology who has attempted to recover love as Judaism’s animating force in Judaism Is About Love, he is at one with Eisen in his aim to restore a narrative theology that situates God’s love at the core of Jewish life, rather than to give a philosophical account of divine power or temporality. By staying rooted in the textual and affective dimensions of Judaism—prayer, story, moral imagination—rather than constructing a metaphysical schema, both of these remarkable theologians offer contemporary seekers a redux theology situated between Heschel and Kaplan that is ultimately nostalgic, since that theological paradigm has already crashed against the irreducible reality of evil and the implausibility of addressing (or finding) God as a person. So, what is the next paradigm of Jewish theology we urgently need? Process theology. Recall how Mordechai Kaplan nobly attempted to translate Alfred N. Whitehead’s process theology into a God that is the process that makes for salvation. This is a radical shift from God as person(ality) to God as process—less a noun and more a verb. Such forays into a Jewish process theology remain an underappreciated attempt at a robust metaphysical remedy to theodicy, yet we ignore its potential for renewing a more sublime theology at our own peril.

Rabbi Aubrey Glazer
Beth Abraham Synagogue
Dayton, Ohio

Shai Held Responds:
I am grateful to Rabbi Glazer for this thoughtful letter. However, I do not share his conviction that process theology, which is already past its heyday, somehow represents salvation for Jewish theology. Like many philosophers, I have never been sure what Whitehead or Kaplan meant by “God as a process,” and in any case I cannot imagine worshiping a process, let alone addressing it as “You.” To do so is nostalgia pure and simple, and to my mind, at least, liturgy has to be about much more than that.

Glazer is of course right that it is difficult to reconcile evil and human suffering with divine goodness, and harder still when we are committed, in some robust sense, to the God of Torah. I nevertheless stand with Eisen and others across a broad theological spectrum in our commitment to stay—in Rabbi Glazer’s oddly dismissive description—“rooted in the textual and affective dimensions of Judaism—prayer, story, moral imagination.” This is, it seems to me, what the life of Torah is and has always been about—and no, it doesn’t preclude a “metaphysical schema” (though it does commit to such schema only with a great deal of humility and tentativeness).

As I understand it, the God of tradition is personal, but not a person. In other words, the coherence of Jewish tradition rises and falls with a God with whom we can enter into relation. As to whether a God devoid of will and consciousness can represent a positive theological development, let alone constitute a “sublime” theology, I have my doubts.

Jewish Central
Jacob Savage’s critical reading of David Denby’s Eminent Jews (“Lost Eminence,” Summer 2025) seems to me to miss the forest for the trees. Despite Denby’s failure to provide new or insightful analyses of the four American Jews he has chosen to present—Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, Norman Mailer, and Leonard Bernstein—and despite the fact that there are also other American Jews at least as “eminent” as these, the four subjects of Denby’s book together mark the remarkable centrality of Jews across the wide spectrum of American culture. These four figures led and even transformed the fields of cinema, social justice, politics, and music. Actually, the very fact that Denby’s choices invite readers to consider whom they would choose instead reveals Denby’s main thesis—that many Jews of the previous generation were centrally important in defining American identity and character. What a loss to America that woke ideology has pushed us aside.

Rabbi Jonathan Gerard
via email

Scholarly Numbers
Dan Rabinowitz’s article “Golden Ledgers” (Summer 2025) offers a fascinating glimpse into the history of Vilna’s Strashun Library through the surviving ledgers of its patrons. We also have more systematic overviews of the Strashun’s famously diverse readership. In the period around World War I, the library served about one thousand readers per week, of which 40 percent were “lomdim” (religiously learned men), 25 percent students, 20 percent scholars and writers, and 15 percent workers. By the mid-1930s, the number of daily visitors had increased to 230, of which 75 percent were men and 25 percent women. While workers continued to comprise 15 percent of readers, a majority (60 percent) were now students, and Yiddish- and Hebrew-language materials were equally in demand (45 percent each of the total, with the remaining 10 percent in other languages).

We have these figures thanks to the dedicated work of Khaykl Lunski, the longtime head of the Strashun Library. During World War II, Lunski was forced by the Germans to take part in the plunder of the collection he had so lovingly cared for. Like Rabinowitz, I have had the privilege of holding in my hands documents that survived the Nazi and Soviet occupations of Vilna, and I share his gratitude to Lara Lempertienė and her staff at the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania, who today oversee these materials with skill and devotion.

Cecile E. Kuznitz
New York, New York