IJII

Jeremy Rosen is a graduate of Cambridge University and Mir Yeshivah Jerusalem. After a career in the Orthodox Rabbinate and Education in the UK he has retired to New York where he dabbles in both and has time to write. He blogs at www.jeremyrosen.blogspot.com.

Urim and Tumim
We live in times when the demands on intellectual conformity are increasing to the point where to challenge is to offend and to think in an unusual way is to court charges of heresy. This article is an invented midrash that presents uncertainty in a positive rather than a negative light.

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Rabbi Jeremy Rosen is a graduate of Mir Yeshiva in Jerusalem and Cambridge University. He has been the rabbi of Orthodox communities in Glasgow and London, Principal of Carmel College in Oxfordshire, and Professor and Chairman of the Faculty for Comparative Religion in Wilrijk, Belgium. He currently lives in Manhattan where he lectures, writes, and serves the Persian community on the Upper East Side. This article appears in issue 9 of Conversations, the journal of the Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals.

 

The very term “Spirituality” has in recent years acquired negative connotations. In Judaism, it is often associated with an expression of religious fervor devoid of halakhic content or commitment. It conjures up New Age pseudo-religion, unreliable, inconsistent, flaky sentimentality. To borrow a Christian bon mot, “Mysticism,” it is often asserted, “starts in a mist and ends in a schism.” Nevertheless both rationalism and mysticism are equally integral elements in Jewish, indeed all, religious life. It is the relationship between them that I want to explore in this essay.

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Rabbi Jeremy Rosen is a graduate of Mir Yeshiva in Jerusalem and Cambridge University. He has been the rabbi of Orthodox communities in Glasgow and London, Principal of Carmel College in Oxfordshire, and Professor and Chairman of the Faculty for Comparative Religion in Wilrijk, Belgium. He currently lives in Manhattan where he lectures, writes, and serves the Persian community on the Upper East Side. This article appears in issue 6 of Conversations, the journal of the Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals.

Do not say that earlier days were better than these!

-Kohelet 7:10

 

My late father, Rabbi Kopul Rosen died in 1962, at the age of 49. He was a remarkably charismatic personality, tall and elegant, an orator and public speaker of a type and style no longer to be found. He was arguably the most influential and certainly the most popular rabbi in the Britain of his day. But he was also the symbol of a kind of rabbi and a style of Orthodoxy that has all but disappeared.

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