Orthodox rabbi and professor, David Hartman is without doubt one of the most interesting voices of contemporary Jewish thoughts. Founder of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, and director since 1975, Hartman dedicates his time to the study of classical sources of Judaism, to offer a new moral and a reopening of Judaism with modernity.

A Heart of Many Rooms. Celebrating the Many Voices Within Judaism is one of his most important texts and provides an interesting insight into the author’s mind.

Though belonging to the so-called “new Orthodox theology,” Hartman believes confrontation with modernity is inevitable. And modernity is the  celebration of the end, of the human who uses his intelligence critically, intended as a gift from God. It is precisely the Jewish tradition to teach this great freedom of interpretation, even of the biblical text,and that freedom is not diminished by the fact that sometimes you want to attack in the name of Judaism itself.
Living history can not mean to discover and interpret everything that happens to you, but you are fully human only if you live history this way

“For Hartman a fully spiritual and religious life is possible, and it is not based on absolute certainties and dogmas. He emphasizes for the same conditions of modern secular and democratic society, pluralist and liberal, that these represent an unprecedented opportunity to teach and learn the humility of worship. You can then belong to a religious tradition and subsequently to modernity”. (Raniero Fontana, D. Hartman’s Italian translator).

Judaism teaches that opposing views may be equally valid and that revelation is not always “pure and simple”, but can be rough and complex. Hartman’s thoughts can be summed up in one line: “Have a heart with multiple chambers” (t. Sotah 7:12). Become a person in which different views can live together in the depths of your soul. Become a religious person who is able to live with ambiguity, and which may prove religious conviction and passion, without the need for simplicity and absolute certainty.

The rejection of “simplicity” at all costs” becomes the ability to accept human limitations: “We must not transcend human finitude in order to feel worthy. We must not go beyond the concrete and the temporal in order to live an authentic life.” The truly religious life - and God himself after the Flood - does not ask to abdicate its concrete human reality in favor of an ideal: “Great expectations can transform in great hatred if they are not founded on an appreciation of human limitations (…). If you love too much the dream, you can destroy the reality due to the same dream”.

And the acceptance of human limitations is indicated by Hartman as the only path to follow in Israel, where the presence of ’different’ stands out as indispensable: “The presence of diversity in Israeli society, in terms of the dignity of the ‘other’ , are the “other” Christians, Muslims or Palestinians, who makes us aware of the fact that no person or spiritual community ever exhausts all its possibilities.”

by Claudia Milani

David Hartman,
Sub specie humanitatis. Elogio della diversità religiosa,
Aliberti Editore, Reggio Emilia 2004