'Tis! No, 'Tisn't!

Have you ever received a book as a gift, and shelved it, and then, on a whim, opened it years later, and found it so fascinating that you wondered why on earth you didn't read it earlier? Nah, me neither. Kidding aside, a book I received as a gift some years ago was "One People, Two Worlds: A Reform Rabbi and an Orthodox Rabbi Explore the Issues That Divide Them". (Incidentally, the edition I received was a Hebrew translation.)

As the title suggests, the book is a correspondence between a Reform Rabbi and an Ultra-Orthodox Rabbi, debating the issues that divide them. A random sampling of some of the issues they tackle:

• Whether there was any Greek influence on any of the Rabbinic customs;
• The age of the earth;
• Whether the presence of different streams of Judaism, including Orthodox and Reform, is desirable;
• The role of women in Jewish law;
• Whether all passages of the Pentateuch are Divine.

I leave it to the reader to figure out, for each issue, which Rabbi assumed which position. :)

As someone who really enjoys discussing religion, I found the book highly interesting. But the one aspect that made the book so exceptional for me has nothing to do with the actual contents of the book. What I found so utterly fascinating about the book is that the two Rabbis debate the issues back and forth and throughout an entire book, neither one of them is willing to concede that even the smallest point that the other has made is valid!

Now, as a Jew who has experienced different streams, I was certainly able to see where both Rabbis were coming from. Each of the Rabbis made some points which I completely agreed with, some which I disagreed with but could understand, and some which I thought had no merit whatsoever.

But each of these Rabbis, over 300 pages of dialog, read every single word that the other Rabbi had written, on issue after issue, and was not able to see even one of the points that the other was making! How do you read 150 pages of correspondence and, for each and every single sentence, your response is: No, No, No, No, No, No...?

But of course it is possible. Clearly, each Rabbi was so determined to ram his point of view down the other's throat, that they were completely blinded to the possibility that perhaps their rival had some reasonable points to make. They were so intent on proving the other wrong, that when they read the other's letters, the only way they were capable of approaching them was to look out for ways to attack them.

What a different book would have emerged if each of the Rabbis, still coming from their radically different respective positions, would have at least conceded the obvious reasonableness of some of the other's positions. At least that would have been a dialog. Perhaps they would have been able to learn what values they shared in common, and pinpoint where their paths diverge. As it happens, the book was not so much a dialog as two interdigitated monologues.