2026 McDermott Lecture: Rabbi Mark Gottlieb

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome. Welcome to the McDermott Lecture in this year of 2026. Since 1974, the University of Dallas has hosted distinguished speakers for the McDermott Lecture event. It is a really notable series of speakers, and this year will not be any different. We have a distinguished guest, Rebbe Mark Gottlieb, who will talk about the topic saving Western civilization one student at a time. Before we get started, we may want to think for a moment about that topic. So we talk about Western civilization. What actually is Western civilization? Oftentimes we crystallize what we mean by Western civilization with a conjunction of two cities, Athens and Jerusalem, right? So why these two? Why not Rome, maybe? Why not Berlin or London or some other city? Well, um, at the time when Jerusalem was the center of culture and Athens was a center of culture, none of those other cities even existed. Um, Europe and Western civilization are founded on the roots of the Jewish faith and culture that uh was the breeding ground uh for the Christian religion. Uh it gave us a respect not only for ritual, it gave us a sense of the one true God and an understanding of the importance of law that is not merely posited by human beings, but actually is divine. On the other hand, Athens, and by Athens we of course don't just mean the classical Athens of the time of Pericles, but Athens as the symbol of Greco, even Roman culture, um the contribution of that culture is our appreciation for literature, appreciation for art, and of course an ongoing dedication to the pursuit of wisdom and truth through philosophy. Any true philosophy will be drawing from the philosophy of Athens. Um just as I think any attempt to understand the nature of law and what the fundamental precepts of law are will be drawing on the Decalogue. So these are the foundations, I think, of Western civilization, and well, everything else goes from there. Never mind that, of course, in these days an understanding of Western civilization is endangered. If you talk to people, many will say, well, Western civilization maybe started with Descartes, right? Uh that is the Enlightenment, the period of separation uh of reason from faith, and uh the institution of a way of life that emphasizes the individual over the community, which is, I would hold, a wrong understanding of what Western civilization actually is. So that is the crisis that Western civilization is facing, not just in the United States, not just in Europe, but also in the United States. Sometimes we tend to forget that because we happen to be living in a blessed context, certainly on this campus of the University of Dallas. But um Western civilization is in danger uh also in the United States. So that's why it needs to be saved, if it is so important. All right. And how do you save a culture? Well, not by teaching grandma and grandpa, right? Um you save a culture by teaching the kids, by teaching the young men and women, who will be the future of the state of civilization they are growing up in. And that is where education comes in. And that will be the primary focus, I assume, uh of what we are hearing about uh this uh evening on saving Western civilization one student at a time from the perspective of Jewish and Catholic contributions to that topic. And with this, I close and I hand it over to President Sanford to introduce our speaker. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 4:28

Gottlieb, an eminent Jewish scholar, educator, um, culture former and dear friend of mine. Um Rabbi Mark Gottlieb was the chief education officer of Tikfa. He's now its senior advisor and founding dean of the Tikfa Scholars Program. Prior to joining Tikva, Rabbi Gottlieb served as head of school at Yeshiva University High School for Boys and principal of the Maimonides School in Brookline, Massachusetts, and has taught at the Frisch School, Ida Crown Jewish Academy, Hebrew Theological College, Loyola University in Chicago, and the University of Chicago. He received his B.A from Yeshiva College, his rabbinical ordination from the Rabbi Isaac Elkinan Theological Seminary, his master's in philosophy from the University of Chicago, where his doctoral studies focused on the moral and political thought of Alistair McIntyre. He's been published widely: Wall Street Journal, Public Discourse, the University Bookman. He has contributed to texts, most recently, Strauss, Spinoza, and Sinai, Orthodox Judaism and Modern Questions of Faith. We got to know each other because of our involvement in the Hildebrand Project. This is a project devoted to the thought and texts of Dietrich von Hildebrand. And that was maybe seven or eight years ago. And we both serve in roles of leadership at the Hildebrand Project. And we also share a competition that he is winning. We were looking at pictures of our grandchildren just before we came over here. But it it really is such a pleasure to have you with us, Rabbi Mark. We look forward to what you have to share in these remarks. Thank you for being part of the panels that we had yesterday. And thank you for joining us in this rich collaboration as as we we as Provost Forck was articulating the challenge, the crisis in Western civilization really effectively. And one of the things that I've always appreciated about Rabbi Gottlieb is we don't pretend that there aren't significant differences in our approach to our respective religious commitments.

SPEAKER_08 8:05

I'm humbled and honored to be here tonight. Tonight, this happy duty is discharged with much gratitude and a fair amount of disbelief. When President Sanford called me last year to deliver the 2026 McDermott lecture, I wasn't sure quite what to think. J.J., likely feeling my discomfort over the line, reassured me that the honor was not being bestowed on me for my prolific contributions to academic life, but rather for my role in religious formation and education. That sounded much better. J.J.'s reassurance felt something of a relief, but even so, the question of dessert still remained. And while it's true that I may be one of the more philo Catholic Orthodox Jewish rabbis out there today, certainly that you've ever met, surely that fact alone shouldn't justify this esteemed honor. Let's just say that I'm more than humbled by this recognition, very conscious of the truly great men and women who have preceded me in this lectureship over the course of its venerable history. On a more substantive and urgent note, perhaps, the timing of tonight's talk is providential. Rabbis, priests, and preachers always talk about providence, never mere happenstance. Never before in my lifetime have I been more aggrieved by the resurgence of Jew hatred. Antisemitism is too clinical and anemic a term, really. In conservative or even perhaps even especially religious conservative circles, I won't rehearse for you what we all know from the news cycle. Instead, I want to share a story that took place almost 40 years ago when I was a much younger yeshiva student, a story that sheds significant light on our cultural moment. The story is not meant to shock or amuse, but merely to illustrate. One of my rabbinical mentors, a learned latecomer to Chasidism, born in Brooklyn during the golden age of Jewish secularism, returned to the faith in his early years, but not before discovering Chesterton, Belloch, and Lewis. He would pass along these literary preferences to his loyal students, engendering the puzzlement of many of his rabbinic colleagues. You could imagine that would puzzle many rabbinic colleagues. As you might expect, my rabbi, strictly adhering to the Maimonidean principle of accepting the truth from whoever you hear it from, had many diverse friends, including, wait for this one, the late then Father Richard Williamson, one of four Society of St. Pius X priests, consecrated by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and subsequently excommunicated by Saint Pope John II in 1988. The rabbi arranged a visit for his students, including myself, to the SSPX seminary in the United States, then located in Ridgefield, Connecticut. This is a true story. I did not make this up. It gets better, I promise you. The SSPX seminarians adored my rabbi, they loved this rabbi, having heard him lecture there earlier in the year on the beauty of the West, a talk that brought many of them to tears. The centerpiece of our visit was a volleyball game between the yeshiva boys and the seminarians. And much laughter and good cheer ensued. One of the seminarians, graciously but seemingly unaware of the cognitive dissonance here, showed me what he was reading at the time. It was an SSPX periodical rife with conspiratorial and other disturbing content, much of which focused on the purported connection between Jewry, world Jewry at that, and the Freemasons. When I asked the seminarian what he thought of the rabbi and his students, what he thought of me, really, what he thought of just me in conversation, he triumphantly replied that we were the good Jews, fighting arm in arm on the same side as they were, on the side of tradition and of God. It was the other Jews, the vast majority of them, you know, the Hollywood Jews, the Wall Street Jews, that they had a problem with. At the time, I didn't realize how surreal all this was. A yeshiva SSPX volleyball game in Ridgefield, Connecticut. I was so devoted to my rabbi and his idiosyncratic interfaith explorations that I didn't really give it much thought then. Forty years later, I'm still devoted to my rabbi, but to my great dismay, today I know exactly what is being peddled by the anti-Semitic podcasters on the right, having seen this same material all those years ago in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Who would have thought that the ravings of a fringe, traditionless Catholic group would become widely popular in our digital age, in some thankfully still marginal but increasingly mainstream religious circles? But people of genuine faith live by hope, not despair. The revengeist rhetoric and nihilistic metaphysic of many on the right today, even the religious right, must be combated by those walking on the royal road of reason and tradition. The power of mutual understanding and fraternity are mysterious things, the stuff of grace, but hard work too. Jews and Catholics today, more than ever, need to reclaim the best of the West from higher ground, the ground of our mutual traditions, the ancient and ever new Torah of the Jewish people and the magisterium of the church. And with all people of true faith, recommit ourselves to this task of civilization building. But it's precisely at this point that some in our well-meaning camp begin to stumble. For just as those foreign policy experts committed to nation building learned a powerful and humbling lesson about the prerequisites of culture, family, education, community, faith, our contemporary culture warriors often forget the pedagogical building blocks necessary to execute that larger civilizational pivot. And that's what I'd like to talk to you about tonight. The title of my talk, At least the first clause, Saving Western Civilization One Student at a Time, will no doubt sound vaguely familiar to some of you. Astute members of the audience will recognize the borrowing as the tagline of Memoria Press, the wonderful Catholic classical educational empire founded by the indomitable Cheryl Lowe over 30 years ago. This nod to the now juggernaut of homeschooling materials is purposeful. A grateful homage to the careful and sustained work of an impressive lady who, with a powerful vision and an even more powerful will, helped catalyze the classical Christian world of education for nearly the past half century. But behind the clever slogan, a deep theological truth animates this pedagogical imperative. And here I can't help but think of that great lay theologian, the one introduced to me by my rabbi mentor, the mere Christian, who never quite made it to Rome, but has nevertheless, nevertheless, brought much glory to the faith that accepts the divinity of the Jew from Nazareth. In C.S. Lewis's most consequential sermon, The Weight of Glory, preached in June 1942 at the very high church-sounding St. Mary the Virgin in Oxford, Lewis makes a claim critical as a spiritual antidote to the nationalistic and civilizational ferment so pervasive in times of war, but of course a temptation at all times. Here's Lewis in perhaps the most famous line of the sermon. There are no ordinary people. And then the key line for my purpose is tonight: nations, cultures, arts, civilizations, these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. And then again, in a lesser-known, but perhaps more explicit line from his essay on the second coming, The World's Last Night, any moralist will tell you that the personal triumph of an athlete or of a girl at a ball is transitory. The point is to remember that an empire or a civilization is also transitory. All achievements and triumphs, insofar as they are merely this worldly achievements and triumphs, will come to nothing in the end. In these two brief selections, but really throughout his writings, Lewis is imploring us to recall that it is the individual human person, not the collectivity, that is the stuff of cultures and civilizations, which must be our spiritual and educational focus. It is the individual human soul that is stamped with the Imago Dei, and of all Crete created things in the order of being, only that single solitary soul, a truth which dates back to the opening verses of the Hebrew Bible, and has been developed fully and systematically by 20th century thinkers like Rabbi Joseph Salovechik, Karol Wotia, and Dietrich von Hildebrand. This is what the theologically minded pedagogue knows to be true and which needs to shape our educational curriculum if we are to hope to recover those longed-for collectivities like culture and civilization. But there is no skipping steps here. First, we must shape the habits and thoughts of our beloved students with the best that our respective traditions have to offer. That is our last best hope for something more. But even if our all two human cultures and civilizations never return to form, the individual student lives on to be a husband, a parent, a friend, perhaps even a teacher. And maybe, just maybe, a member or leader of a much-needed confessional tribe that will shape the lives of a rich living tradition, a counter-cultural community that can withstand the American Babylon we've largely become. Such a place as the University of Dallas. A confessional tribe. So tonight, I'd like to take you on a brief pedagogical journey, a spiritual curriculum of sorts, with some of the most profound teachers that have impacted my theological and educational life. Teachings that every young man or woman today must know and internalize if we are to have any hope for a healthy, let alone holy, culture. This section is called Rabbi Joseph Salvechik and Dietrich von Hildebrandt on the irreducibility of the human person. In our contemporary culture, where friends are reduced to utilitarian interests and rivals are totally stripped of their humanity, the first and best teaching for our students is the irreducibility of the human person. Personalism, a tradition with an impeccable theological pedigree, including the likes of John Henry Newman, St. John Paul II, and Dietrich von Hildebrandt, always acknowledge the Kantian contribution to this enterprise, highlighting the centrality of the individual human subject within its larger philosophical system. And it is precisely here, in the distinctly modern period of philosophy and the Kantian, Neo-Kantian, and later phenomenological context of Catholic personalism, that a suggestive, perhaps even subterranean, connection is to be found with the Jewish theological tradition, an ancient teaching that also experienced a kind of inflection point, if not an actual renaissance, through a deep engagement with the sage of Königsberg and his many disciples. Standing astride the 20th-century theological landscape like a Jewish colossus, or by Joseph B. Salvaczyk, would go on to lead the portion of American Orthodoxy simultaneously devoted to the life of faithful Jewish observance and intellectual relevancy within the larger rhythms of Western life and thought. As a scion of the most distinguished rabbinical family in Lithuania and master Talmudist himself, plus a student of continental philosophy at the University of Berlin in the late 20s and early 30s of the last century, where he completed his doctorate on the epistemology of Marburg School Doyen Hermann Cohen, and read Brentano, Bart, Bruner, Husserl, and Scheler, among others. Rabbi Solovechik was uniquely qualified for his leadership. Rabbi Solvecich's contributions to Jewish religion life are considerable, ranging from innovative novelae on Tamudic on traditional Talmudic discourse through penetrating insights into prayer, the Jewish liturgical calendar, and post-Holocaust reflections on Jewish history and national identity. But arguably the unifying factor in Salvecic's entire body of work is the profound and far-reaching articulation of a theological anthropology, both fully modern and fully traditional. For Salvecich, the divine drama plays out in the corporeal, material life of the subjective human person through the comprehensiveness of the Halachic or Jewish theological normative system. Writing in his early phenomenological study, Halachic Man, in 1944, Salvechik captures the centrality of the this worldly dimension of the human person. Halachic man knows that there is no royal road leading to the transcendent to the transcendent realm. Man's whole being is stamped with the indelible imprint of corporality, concreteness, and sensation. And whither shall he go from their presence and whither shall he flee from them? Alak man does not believe that one who is held captive in the prison house of bodily existence can snap the fetters of the body and ride in his Majesty through the skies. It is hard to imagine a Jewish theologian voicing such a view outside of the concerns, context, and very vocabulary of modernity. It is just as hard to imagine such a portrait coming from a religious thinker not steeped in traditional orthodoxy or the rhythms of rabbinic teaching. Solvecich, perhaps unique in his generation, held this dialectic of tradition and modernity dynamically and tightly, a dialectic that ran through the heart of the human person. Solvecich's most extended meditation on Jewish theological anthropology is his 1965 monograph, The Lonely Man of Faith. In this philosophical exegesis of the first chapters of the Bible, Solvecich develops two typologies of the human person, corresponding to the two accounts of the creation of man in Genesis 1 and 2, appropriately designated Adam I and Adam II. Man as a created being is riven by an ontological split, one that embodies the creative, radically independent or majestic side of the human subject, the other expressing the covenantal or relationship-seeking side of man. While Adam I seeks to express his dignity through the conquest of nature and the chaotic forces that inhibit his flourishing, Adam too longs for companionship and is provoked by the metaphysical questions that plague the human condition. If Adam I asks what, what can I do to improve my condition? Adam II asks why and how. Modernity exacerbates this innate tension within man's very being by elevating individualistic dimensions, the individualistic dimension of human existence at the expense of covenantal relational man. Students of John Paul II's theology of the body will no doubt identify resonances in both method and content with Salvadic's biblical anthropology. The fact that Salvadic first delivered the lectures that formed the basis of the lonely man of faith at St. John's Seminary in Brighton, Massachusetts, suggests that Salvacic's aim was more universal than narrowly parochial, in keeping with the creation of man as a universal being and not the bearer of a particularistic charism or election. More work is necessary to carefully trace the personalistic synergies between Solvichik and Wotia, but the building blocks are present in the Lonely Man of Faith and the Wednesday audiences that form the centerpiece of his theology of the body. Both products of the philosophical anthropology Salvecic and Wotia develop from shared sources like Newman and Shaler. A little over 10 years after the publication of The Lonely Man of Faith, Salveciek delivered an address to the 78th Annual Meeting of the Conference of Jewish Communal Service in Boston, entitled The Community. And this earlier today, I had a wonderful opportunity to study this essay, The Community, with amazing Dallas students. So a lot to be proud of here. So this essay, the community, unlike many of Salvaciek's works with titles that highlight the singular transcendence seeking an anchor in the seemingly cold and indifferent world, the community formulates a dialectical Jewish theology of man as individual and man in community, rejecting the modern alternatives of corporate collectivism and radical individualism, embodied in the 20th century political-cultural struggle between East and West, respectively. Soloveciuk opts for another path, a third way. Both, and this is quoting Rabbi Salovechik now, both experiences, Salvechik avers, that of aloneness as well as that of togetherness, are inseparable basic elements of the I awareness. Solovechik continues by staking out man's true greatness, the inner contradiction, his dialectical nature, his being single and unrelated to anyone, as well as his being vow-related and belonging to a community structure. These are the core tensions that he uncovers, unpacks in the community. Before presenting this constructive account of our dialectically driven personhood, Solvecic returns to the eponymous title of his talk and makes the following observation: the community in Judaism is not a functional utilitarian, but an ontological one. The community is not just an assembly of people who work together for their mutual benefit, but a metaphysical entity, an individuality, I might say a living whole. In particular, Judaism has stressed the wholeness and unity of Knesset Israel, the Jewish community. The latter is not a conglomerate, it is an autonomous entity endowed with a life of its own. This might sound familiar to many of you in the audience as the mystical body of Christ. That's what Knesset Israel is for the Jewish people. A real entity, not just the sum of the parts of the Jewish people. However, strange such a concept may appear to the empirical sociologist, it is not at all a strange experience for the halakhist and the mystic, to whom Knesset Israel is a living, loving, and suffering mother. No, this is a mother, not a father. By highlighting the ontological nature of the community, Salvatic rejects both positivistic, reductionist, and radical historicist accounts of man so dominant in modernity. The community is not a constructed collection of atomistic individuals, a nominalist confection without real substance, nor is it merely a product of historically contingent factors, a ragtag group buffeted by history and other natural forces, free from a divine destiny, affecting all of mankind. In this respect, Salvachik is completely at one with the Catholic intellectual tradition, especially in its personalist incarnation. This metaphysical conception of the community also leads Salvachik to his next claim, a stunningly modern formulation of Jewish personalism that is rooted in our most ancient teachings. The personalistic unity and reality of a community, such as Knesset Israel, is due to the philosophy of existential complementarity of the individuals belonging to the Knesset Israel. This is Rabbi Salvachik again. The individuals belonging to the community complement one another existentially. Each possesses something unique, rare, which is unknown to the others. Each individual has a unique message to communicate, a special color to add to the communal spectrum. Hence, when lonely man joins the community, he adds a new dimension to the community awareness. He contributes something which no one else could have contributed. He enriches the community existentially. He is irreplaceable. Judaism has always looked upon the individual as if he were a little world, a microcosm. With the death of the individual, this little world comes to an end. With the death of a single person, a whole world of meaning of relationships ends and can never be returned. A vacuum which other individuals cannot fill is left. End quote. One's spiritual vocation is not a function of the most basic, universal qualities we share with other humans, but is instead premised on the very particulars that make you who you are, apart and radically distinct from all others. The moral meaning of human individuality and dignity is here premised upon the theological claim of Imago Dei, and even more the ontology of human persons prior to any question of agency or action, obedience or devotion. It is an axiology of the human person even more than an ethical system, which is the guarantor of human dignity. In other words, it's man in his very essence, in his being, an ontological question, even before we get to the realm of action or ethical behavior. And that's what Robert Salvaitchuk is saying, and that's what's so consonant with the Catholic personalist tradition. And inasmuch as every human being shares common features with every other human being, our deepest personhood is best understood in our radical incommunicability or unrepeatability, in what makes us different and distinct, even more than in what unites us. To put the point somewhat differently, and in the idiom of another great 20th-century Jewish theologian, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sachs, our dignity as humans is to be found in our very difference as persons, and cultures and civilizations too. Rabbi Sachs suggests that even cultures and civilizations have a real quality to them that makes them distinctive from others, not just on a sociological or historical level, but even deeper on an ontological level. Salvachik concludes his preamble for Jewish personhood by citing a teaching from the Mishnah, a rabbinic compilation from the late second or early third century of the common era, which suggests, which suggests the radical unrepeatability of the human person. Whoever saves one life, it is as if he had saved the entire world. Each person contains, or more precisely, is an entire world unto him or herself, perfectly expressing the principle of human person as microcosm. What comes next is as powerful a formulation of personhood as to be found in any tradition. Again, this is Rabbi Salvachik. Quote: The sensitive halakhic rules pertaining to mourning of Eilut are rooted in the Halachaz perception of the tragic singleness of man, in the awareness that man as a natural being exists once in an eternity. He has a supernatural dimension to his being, but in his natural standing as being, he exists only once in an eternity, once, never to be repeated. Because of that, because of that singleness, individuals get together, complement each other, and attain ontological wholeness. With Salvachik and Wotia, we must teach our students that their individual lives matter, that they are incarnations of something divine, and that what makes them unique and distinctive is what makes them more godly. Personal achievements are to be celebrated, of course, with dignity and decorum always. And people, even people with very different viewpoints from ours, are always to be respected, even learned from. They too are whole worlds, waiting to be unpacked and explored, not dismissed and reduced to ridicule, or perhaps worse, to inattention and apathy. This work of acknowledging the Imago Dei in each man and woman is best done not by instruction or lecturing, but by imitation and emulation. As the rabbis teach in that sublime moral handbook, The Ethics of the Fathers, Pirke Avot, who is wise, the man who learns from all men. Who is honored, the man who honors others. This next section is entitled GKC and C.S. Lewis, Talmud and Rabbi Salvechik on Chivalry. But as much as we need to teach our children the irreducibility of the human person, the preciousness of every soul, we need at the very same time to inculcate a perhaps sturdier, hardier virtue, what Rabbi Salvechik calls majesty and humility, opposing qualities that must somehow simultaneously reside in the same human heart. Chesterton captures something of this paradoxical spirit in his rightly acclaimed lyrical poem Le Panto from 1911. Don John of Austria is going to war. Lovelight of Spain, hurrah! Deathlight of Africa. Don John is riding to the sea. This dual quality of character, Lovelight of Spain, Deathlight of Africa, is best developed by Chesterton's spiritual protege, C.S. Lewis, in his 1940 essay, The Necessity of Chivalry. Drawing from Mallory's La Morte de Arthur, Lewis identifies Launcelot as the greatest knight of Christendom. His companion, Sir Hector, mourning La Salon's death, says the following: Thou wert the meekest man that ever ate in hall among ladies, and thou wert the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest. Lewis notes the double demand this ideal makes on human nature. The knight, and this is Lewis again, the knight is a man of blood and iron, a man familiar with the sight of smashed faces and the ragged stumps of lopped-off limbs. He is also demure, almost maiden-like, a guest in hall, a gentle, modest, unobtrusive man. Lewis comments, he, the knight, is not a compromise or happy mien between ferocity and meekness. It's not some caricature of Aristotle's Golden Mien that he's after here. He is fierce to the nth degree, and he is meek to the nth degree. That's what the knight is able to bring together in his single person, these two opposing qualities of majesty and humility. This double demand is precisely what our students need to cultivate today, now more than ever. The natural state of man is for those forces of majesty and humility to be siloed off, never the twain shall meet. The knight, on the other hand, is the living instrument of these two opposing qualities wed together. It is the only way to defend civilization, alternately plagued by apathy and docility on the one hand, and brutality and vanity on the other. Again, Lewis, if we cannot produce Lancelots, humanity falls into two sections: those who can deal in blood and iron but cannot be meek in hall, and those who are meek in hall but useless in battle. And the third kind are awful in battle and terrible in in hall. And he doesn't even want to talk about those, folks. The man of Christian chivalry, this work of human artifice, decidedly not nature, this is not a natural occurrence. This takes effort, discipline, character building, it's not natural, has its origins, as you might guessed by now, in the Hebrew Bible, in the person of the greatest warrior poet of all time. If you look carefully at Europeans' cathedrals, places like Chartrey or Mont Saint-Michel, you will often see the heroes of the Hebrew Bible alongside the heroes of the pagan world and later the world of Christendom. And the greatest hero of the Hebrew Bible is, of course, King David. King David, this is what the Talmud says about King David. The rabbis of the Talmud wrote this about 2,000 years ago. King David, like many biblical figures, had multiple names. One of those names was Adeno Haetzni, which the Talmud midrashically reads in the following fashion. He was Adeen. Aden means gentle in Hebrew. He was gentle as the smallest creature when he was studying Torah, but he was also an Ats. An Aits is the bark of a tree. He was strong as the bark of a tree when he went out to battle against his enemies. Our age desperately needs to rehabilitate the figure of the knight, at least the way that Lewis portrays him. Those paradoxical qualities of majesty and humility, developing this dual demand in our students. For without it, Lewis warns that we condemn ourselves to, and this is Lewis again, to a world divided between wolves who don't understand and sheep who cannot defend the things which make life desirable. Let me say that again. That if we don't produce the night, we are condemning ourselves to a world divided between the wolves who do not understand and the sheep who cannot defend the things which make life desirable. My last section is entitled Between Authenticity and Authority, Mimesis and the Rehabilitation of the Role Model in Rabbi Shlomo Volbe and Father Luigi Gisani. So, you know, educators always have to be on the lookout for moments to leverage an unplanned comment or insight from students or colleagues, what we colloquially call, we call an audible, you know, that's what that would be called. And we depart from the playbook that we had set up as the teacher. So one such moment occurred to me earlier this year, and this final section of my talk is the fruit of that opportunity. So in 2012, I created something called the Tikvah Scholars Program. It's a program for elite Jewish students located on generally Ivy League campuses. We've been on Yale, we've been to Princeton more recently, and we conduct seminars for high school students. It's kind of like a Jewish Witherspoon, I mentioned before. A seminar that I've been giving the past few years is called A World Shattered and Restored: Jewish Education and the Crisis of Contemporary Civilization. What I do is I piggyback off her wonderful book by Alan Jacobs from Baylor, not that far down the road, somewhere that way, called In the Year of Our Lord 1943. It's an amazing book. If you're an intellectual historian, you love culture, it's really worth reading. He looks at five Christian thinkers, including Louis, Jacques Maritan, T. S. Eliot, and he collects their thoughts on what the world should look like after World War II is over and how do we renew Christian civilization through education. And I try to do a spin on this on Alan Jacob by taking five Jewish thinkers of the post-Holocaust era, including Rabbi Joseph Salovechik, Rabbi Shlomov, Leo Strauss, Chaim Grade, the Yiddish author, and try to compare what the Jewish response in the wake of the of the Shoah of the Holocaust and World War II. So I think in reading these these uh these five Jewish thinkers, I was struck by the problem of authority and authenticity, this tension in today's world that really tries what I would call our liquid modernity to solve it as a solvent, this kind of distills or or really evaporates the bonds of authority, the bonds of tradition. We don't really have such a a place in our cultures today for the role of authority. Places like Dallas, notwithstanding, different kind of thing, but the world, the broader world. And I was fascinated by this tension of authority and authenticity. So I started looking at some of the readings that we had of Mari Tan and Rabbi Salvejik. And here I would say that this challenge of articulating an educational stance that both cultivates the student's individual agency and meaning while preserving the normativity and persuasive power of our inherited of our inherited traditions of thought, feeling, and action, generally channeled through an adult teacher or mentor, arguably remains the linchpin of our community's continued flourishing or its continued challenging or challenges and frustrations. Can we create authority figures that don't let us down? That are not, they're not gonna blow up the structures of authority that really are so desperately necessary still. So I thought if we can identify and somehow clinically categorize some of these key elements in this pedagogical dynamic, we'll be better equipped to model these successful practices in our classrooms and communities. In our seminar together, we arrived at the selections from the Musar Mashkiach or the spiritual dean and moral psychologist Rabbi Shlomo Volbe on day three of our seminar. It was nestled between readings from the French neothomist Jacques Maritan and the great modern Orthodox thinker Rabbi Salvechik. The common thread we were exploring in all these three thinkers was the identification and elevation of experiential forms of learning over purely cognitive or textual ones. In his 1943 Terry lectures at Yale University on education at the crossroads, Maitan would conclude his catalog of educational misconceptions with the seventh misconception: everything can be learned. Here is Maitan on the limits of traditional book or purely cognitive learning. This is Maritan here. The teaching of morality with regard to its intellectual bases should occupy a great place in school and college education. Yet, that right appreciation of practical cases, which the ancients called prudentia, and which is an inner vital power of judgment, developed in the mind and backed up. By well-directed will, cannot be replaced by any learning whatsoever, nor can experience, which is an incommunicable fruit of suffering and memory, and through which the shaping of man is achieved, be taught by any school or courses. You need life for that. There are courses in philosophy, but no courses in wisdom. Wisdom is gained through spiritual experience. And as for practical wisdom, as Aristotle put it, the experience of old men is both undemonstrable and illuminating as the first principles of understanding. If Mauritan here makes a modern case for the rehabilitation of the Aristotelian virtue of Phronesis, practical judgment, through the experience of old men, Ravolba places the value of Shimush Tamid Hachamim, apprenticeship or mimesis in the company of a Torah scholar at the very center of his educational worldview. Ravolba's own education and life's journey immediately struck a chord with the students for its breadth of experiences and relatively unconventional trajectory for a Haredi or ultra-orthodox Torah personality. Born to a secular Jewish family in Berlin, with an erstwhile academic for a father and a formerly more observant mother, the young August Wilhelm Volbe celebrated his barmitsa in one of the city's many reformed temples. During this time as a student in university, and we're not exactly sure if he went to the University of Berlin or another university in Berlin, he started to frequent meetings of the Orthodox Student Union, where he eventually became an observant member of the Orthodox community. But a chance encounter with a young visiting rabbi from the East would change Rabbi Volba's life forever, inspiring him to travel to the famed yeshiva in Mir, Poland, spiritually led by its Mashkiach or Dean, Rabbi Yoruchim Levovitz. The first reading we examined was the opening selection of Rabbi Volba's classic work on character formation for the aspiring Torah scholar, Alej Shur. Rabbi Volba's prose is sharp and trenchant, a cri de corps on behalf of quality over quantity in learning and divine service, and authenticity over mere mimicry, both of which can only be cultivated at the foot of a living Torah personality. Here's Rab Vulba. A thick barrier separates the world of Torah from the world that is outside it. For the one standing outside, even if he is faithful to Torah and commandments, no picture or concept of the wondrous things taking place inside are afforded him. Conversely, there are those that sit within the walls of the study hall that are like a one from whom the real reasons of the Torah are hidden, such that they are considered as if they are standing outside the walls. This is the one who does not truly appreciate, apprentice, rather, with genuine Torah scholars and wise ones. In our very generation, students of Torah are developing and increasing, thank God. But alas, few are those who are privileged to apprentice with true Torah scholars. Few are the rabbis that are compared to the angel of the heavenly hosts from whom one is to seek Torah from their mouths. Since so many of them and their students went up on the pyre, may God avenge them. He's talking, of course, about the Holocaust. And only a few remnants have escaped that resemble the last survivors of the great assembly. And the students of Torah in our generation thus accustomed themselves to the study of Torah without real engagement with Torah personalities, until the point where it doesn't even occur to them that they are standing outside the wall themselves, even with the vast Torah knowledge they've acquired. Outside they stand. In other words, they haven't reached the inwardness of the Torah or the inwardness of themselves. Of this group, some have no idea that they are deficient. There are also those who have merited to good standing in Torah scholarship. They're great scholars, but they're missing something, each according to their ability. These precious ones are looking for a pathway, a derek. They absorb a statement here, a practice there. In place of education comes imitation, and in the place of true apprenticeship comes a superficial understanding, third or fourth hand. Now this is very powerful, because this is an orthodox, an ultra-orthodox rabbi commenting on his own community, on the deficiencies in the ultra-orthodox Jewish community, that they're missing inwardness, they're missing authenticity, they're missing that, and he's attributing all these deficits to the fact that they've never really studied at the foot of a great scholar. They know the facts, but they don't know that experiential learning, they don't know that apprenticeship. This opening salvo from Ravolbe sets the tone for his entire pedagogical project, pulling no punches and identifying a troubling trend in the world of post-Holocaust Haredi education, a superficiality, even a crassness in one's learning and divine service that comes from limited to no exposure with living, breathing exemplars of the sacred tradition. While this phenomena of surface or quantitative learning is a potential problem, is a perennial problem in religious communities, at least since the days of the prophet Isaiah, Rabbi Volbe is reacting to a particular uptick in this trend due to the devastation of the Holocaust and the dearth of living scholars who can bridge the gap between theory and praxis, the world of the European yeshiva and community, and the new generation of young students in Israel and America. The resulting religious superficiality from the absence of paradigmatic practitioners cultivates a new class of ostensibly devoted students of Torah, ones who specialize in mimicry and imitation instead of true understanding. Before the work of unpacking Voba's use of Shimush or apprenticeship as a form of practical reason which fosters rather than frustrates authenticity, something that had only been latent for me in the first introductory text until my student made the connection. The seminar examine, my student was the one who said, is he really consistent in his teachings? On the one hand, he's insisting on an apprenticeship, but on the other hand, he's criticizing, condemning even the absence of authenticity. And that on the surface seems like a tension, right, between authenticity and apprenticeship. And I think Rabbi Volbe has a way out of this problem, and I think he he articulates it beautifully here. The source is starker in its communal critique of post-Holocaust Kharedi culture and only compounds our question of the tension between authority and authenticity in Rabbi's educational theory. The proof text for Rabbi Volba's pointed commentary is the passage in the Talmud which uses various images to depict the judgment accorded to man on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. And here, this is Rabbi Volbah. In comparing the three images used by the Talmud for the God's judgment of man, we find a common denominator. The matter is clear. When a person stands in judgment before his creator, he is totally alone, an individual in splendid isolation. Let us picture for ourselves when someone comes to an earthly judgment and they ask him why he has done such and such an action, and he responds, just because. And if they question him further, he says, Everybody does it, so I do it too. This is unreflective Jewish practice. I think it probably happens in the Catholic tradition too, sometimes. I don't know. If he is questioned about the commandments he has performed and what caused him to perform them, and he says that the tzitzit, the ritual fringes, his mother gave it to him when he was a little boy. His mother put the tzitzit on him. He didn't do it. And then his father gave him the phylacteries to pray. He didn't do it. Where is the self in all of this? Where is the true self in this whole picture? After examining additional traditional sources, including the Mishnah in Sanhedrin, which we discussed earlier about the irreplaceability or the irreducibility of the human person, that sense of uniqueness, Rabbi Volva poses the following rhetorical question. Can anyone have a legitimate claim to say that it is enough to be just a person? In the Hebrew, it's even better. Stamha'adam. Just you're just a person. You don't have any depth to you, you don't have any real intense intentionality. What are you? While the focus until this point in our passage is on the personal and individual consequences of losing or never even cultivating, in the first place, one's true identity, Rab Volba concludes the section with a blistering cultural critique, something you might expect from an academic or so-called subject objective observer outside the walls of the study hall, rather than a revered figure of Haredi aristocracy. Rabbe Vulba. This is the great malady in the yeshiva world for the boys who are regularly educated for long periods of time in dormitories. In a yeshiva, you're 16, 17, you go and you study, you studied late at night, and you go, you have a dormitory, like college students for that matter. Without a moment of solitude, the dormitory, it's so active, it's so busy, no time for solitude. And this absence of privacy and solitude causes them, the students, to totally destroy whatever independence they might otherwise have and to totally forget their development as an individual human personality. How depressing it is to see these precious sons of Torah that don't have a unique point to their personality, who literally, mamash, who literally are human beings without a history. They're human beings without a history. They're simply cogs in a machine. They have no uniqueness, no interiority, no intentionality. They're just part of a machine. The entire course of their lives has been mapped out by others, by their rabbis, by their mentors, by their parents sometimes. May Hashem preserve us from this kind of existence. He's very serious about this. I want to now turn to another great pedagogue, someone that you all may be more familiar with than Rabbi Volba. I'm guessing. And that is Father Luigi Gisani. So this is called, this is the last section of the last section. A movement with a method. Father Luigi Gisani, Communion and Liberation, and the Pedagogy of the Proposal. So it happens to be that Father Luigi Gisani was nearly an exact contemporary of Ravelba. They almost totally overlap in their chronology, with Gisani shaking off his mortal coil just two months before his slightly older fellow clergyman from the Mediterranean. Italy, Israel, sort of the Mediterranean. Importantly, both Gisani and Rabbi Volbe taught university and high school age students and felt called to respond to a crisis in their respective communities. The single English language biography of Jisani is over 1,000 pages long. You've seen it, the Savarona biography, it's thick. By contrast, Rab Volbet has not yet received any full biographical treatment. It's a shame. So I'll be very selective here and simply provide the basics to provide, to properly contextualize Gisani's significant pedagogical gifts. Gisani was born in Milan to an art to an anarchist artist father and a devout Catholic mother. Similar pattern. In the sixth grade, he earned the diocesan seminar, he entered the diocesan seminary of San Pietro Martiri, but then transferred for high school to the Venegono Seminary, where he completed the equivalent of an undergraduate degree. I should go to the Rome campus, I think, brush up my Italian. Upon ordination in 1945, he soon discerned a call to teach high school students, which he did from 1951 until 1967. He even left an academic post at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan to return to high school teaching, where he saw the greatest need for theological education in both a traditional and new key. In his preliminary comments to the risk of education from 1995, Gisani provides some cultural context to his theological educational project. A problem of method, Italy in the late 1950s, and intuition is born. And this is just a large quote from Gisani. At first sight, Italy in the 1950s seemed to enjoy an ideal situation for the spreading of Catholic thought and ethics. The parishes were efficiently run and offered catechism courses for all seasons. Religion courses were required in all grades. Tradition was kept alive, at least formally, in the values transmitted by the family. There was still a reluctance about accepting an indiscriminate criticism of religion or irreligious information. There was still a fair attendance at Sunday Mass, and so on. And yet, an observer would have been struck by at least three factors in his first contact with Italian high school students that cause him concern. First, there was no profound motivation for belief. There was no deep commitment to belief. Second, faith was irrelevant to social behavior in general and to behavior in the schools in particular. There were no social mechanisms of supporting the faith. They weren't, you know, mutually fructifying or supporting. And its irrelevance was taken for granted. Third, there was a general climate that favored skepticism and left the field open for some teachers to attack religion. In light of the above, a radical either-or seemed inevitable. Either Christian religion had lost all strength of persuasion and was no longer a guiding force in the life of young students, or one had to acknowledge that Christianity was not suitably presented or offered to students. Accepting the first theory meant acknowledging that the Italian philosopher Gramsky's Marxist judgment that Christianity had become historically obsolete was correct. But the clarity and purpose of a truly lived Christian faith could not accept such a historicist reduction. It was clear that the problem lay in the method of transmitting and developing the contents of the Christian tradition. This intuition was too pronged, and its first statement was theoretical. Since the contents of faith had to be accepted by reason, faith had to be presented as potentially capable of improving, enlightening, and enhancing authentic human values. The second element was practical, in that the contents of faith had to be tested in action. Rational evidence could lead to faith only from within the experience of a human need. And further, this need must be confronted from within a lived Christian reality, an involvement that would treat Christianity as a social communal event. And you could see the beginnings of communion and liberation here. As it has to be a movement, it has to be a social force. These trenchant observations are what animated Gisani's formation while teaching at the prestigious Lycio Classico Berket of the student group he formed the first his first student group, Giovanento Studenteschia, or student youth, in 1954, the forerunner of the worldwide Catholic lay ecclesial movement, Communion and Liberation, which boasts several hundred thousand members in Europe, North, and South America, and elsewhere. A lot. Gisani's thought has been said to have influenced several recent popes, and in 2007, Communion and Liberation opened a cause for Gisani's beatification. While Gisani has made many significant contributions to the nexus of theology and education, I first encountered Gisani through my dear friend R.J. Snell on the topic of reason and reasonableness, a mode of understanding reality through an expanded sense of reason, a way of constituting reason beyond the merely empirical or quantifiable. Our focus here for the next few minutes will be on his tripartite method of proposal, experience, and verification, developed most fully in the risk of education. For Gisani, a tradition that one consciously believes in can offer a complete look on reality, a hypothesis of meaning, an image of destiny. Lest the reader assume that Gisani is exclusively sketching a cognitive stance towards reality and the given subject matter, he goes on to clarify: if we possess tradition, we can enter the world with an image of destiny, a hypothesis of meaning even before we read it as an argument in philosophy books. It comes from the heart. The educational and spiritual dangers of neglecting to cultivate tradition in our students are steep. In order to educate, this is again Jisani, we must present the past in suitable form. Unless young people are taught about the past and tradition, they will grow up either unbalanced or skeptical. If young people have nothing to guide them in choosing one theory, one working hypothesis over another, they will either invent skewered what skewed ones or embrace skepticism. The latter is as much is a much easier route because skepticism does not even require consistency with one's initial hypothesis. But it's Gisani's constitutive account of the working hypothesis that forms the basis of his most important pedagogical contribution. In other words, the proposal, what he calls the proposal. For in Gisani's model, the teacher or authority, including the student's parents, is both the agent who proposes, never imposes, the hypothesis, and the very embodiment of that hypothesis himself, itself, a living, breathing hypothesis in human form. But the authority of the teacher or parent is an extension of the student's own search for meaning and desire to know, not some act of violence done to a simply passive recipient as might be understood in postmodern or structural traditions. As E. Tyler Graham observes, for Jasani, proposing the truth of tradition is not an imposition of one ideology against another, as if a Catholic school were intellectual boot camp in the Catholic party line. You guys are not that, I don't think. Rather, the role of the hypothesis of meaning guaranteed by tradition, necessary for the student to go forth and learn, is rooted in nature itself, evident in the observation of childhood. The initial hypothesis is the view of the world we receive from our parents or from those to whom our parents have entrusted our education. These are anthropological and epistemological assumptions in Gisani's exposition here, ones which very much align with the traditional view, whether classical or theistic, of man as a being naturally disposed to seek meaning. Whether this set of assumptions requires a natural law model can safely be debated another time. Suffice to say, for Gisani, nature demands that tradition is a precondition of our existence and thus offers our hypothesis to explain our existence. In short, we can begin to affirm reality when we affirm the existence of its meaning in an ever-widening or ever-increasing comprehensiveness, a meta-account that has explanatory heft and scope. Here, Graham helpfully cites the Princeton Theological Semine professor Margarita Mooney, who glosses Gisani as describing tradition as an initial explanatory hypothesis. This beginning point becomes the grounds from which a student can explore and test new information. Tradition gives meaning and coherence to information as it is learned and tested. But before moving on to the role of the school as the authoritative body that proposes, again never imposes, Jisani introduces the ideal of coherence in his pedagogical plan, a thread that will link teacher and school in a unified manner. Jassani, again. The educational role of a person with true authority is first of all one of coherence, a continual reminder of ultimate values and of our commitment to them, a steady standard for judging all of reality, and a stable safeguard of the constantly renewed link between the students' shifting attitudes and the ultimate total sense of reality. From the experience of authority comes that of coherence, the continuity of life, an effective stability stretching over time. In a patiently evolving process like that of the introduction to reality, coherence is an indispensable factor. Unless this original certainty can continually repropose itself within a coherent development, it will seem an abstraction, something to which we were subjected, but that which we did not actively embrace. Unless accompanied by true authority, a hypothesis remains just that. It would either crystallize or be nullified by any further initiative. Yet a coherence that shows the steady presence of a total sense of reality beyond any fleeting liking or superficial opinion of the individual becomes a powerful factor that teaches us to be dependent on what is real. There's a lot to unpack in this dense paragraph, but I challenge anyone to find a more insightful analysis of the so-called slide to the right, both in the modern Orthodox community and in certain trad Catholic circles, that continued to grip us for better and worse. The desperate search for role models who genuinely propose, not impose, from a position of strength, a position of a working hypothesis that enjoys the further nurturing and corroborative stages of experience and verification is something that everyone in this room and well beyond is acutely aware of. Gisani goes to the deepest levels of analysis because. Because he saw a similar set of conditions in Italy of the 1950s, and his mostly tomistic realist training taught him that when tradition is not presented through proposal, experience, and verification, students will grow up either unbalanced or skeptical. Welcome to our world, Father Luigi. A final word on schools. Gisani, as we've seen, spent most of his life working in high school, leaving his seminary teaching to join the faculty of one of the most important classical schools in Milan, tells us much about Gisani's sense of vocation and relevancy. How many of us today would make such a move? But there's nothing naive about Gisani's take on schools. On the contrary, he is acutely aware, more than most, that schools can be complicated, frustrating, and petty places. Here's Gisani's concluding comments on the section entitled Authority, an existential proposal. Clearly, the school also has a position of authority insofar as it claims to develop and carry on the education received at home. There's a strange conception in our time that the ideal school is one where teaching resembles the action of a tape recorder. In this type of school, the teacher-pupil relationship has been stripped of its properly human dimension, which is the unique value each teacher offers. In an agnostic or neutral school, the fact that the teacher no longer offers meaning strips him of his quality of being master and turns the pupil into his own master, leaving him to codify all provisional impressions and reactions. He will do so with the presumptiveness, impertinence, and ironclad prejudices that so often cloud the open, frank attitude proper to youth. Sometimes, when the absurdity and impossibility of such a system becomes obvious, the solution is to expose the student to the widest possible range of conflicting authorities in the belief that he will spontaneously and maturely select what is best. I believe this is the diseducational method par excellence. It eliminates coherence from education, making authority and therefore nature useless, with the result that the student's very development is literally denatured. Such an approach distorts from within the evolutionary and continuous features necessary for the educational process as they are for all of life's phenomena. The result is irrationality and anarchy. End quote. But the relational dimension of teacher and student is the linchpin of educational proposal, the educational proposal, the ambient context where souls and minds interpenetrate. In the intellectual method of Father Luigi Gisani, it's hard not to hear echoes of Rebecca Volba's theological reconciliation of the ideals of authenticity and authority, which we examined earlier. In the Italian prelate's discourse on proposal, experience, and verification, we inhabit the world of philosophy more than theology. But for Gisani, one is never too far from the other. Still, the mutual identity between student and authority is presented by both religious leaders in a modern theological anthropological key, with language that speaks in equal parts to head and heart, to students, professional educators, parents, and religious role models. Outside the Jewish tradition, we Jews should be open to mining the rich veins of educational theory and practice from thinkers that struggled with similar challenges as our community does, all of us children of modernity. Towards the beginning of the risk of education, the text that we were studying from Jisani, what a rich probing title. Isn't that a great title? The Risk of Education? Seeing that we all risk something when we educate as proposal, not insistence. Gisani remarks on the common path of educator and student, the first steps. We don't take the first step alone, for we move together with the revealed presence, the word of God. God is what ultimately defines us, and we mean this in the full sense of the word, not only in the sense of finality, but as the very definition of who we are. We read in Genesis, and God said, Let us make mankind in our image. God is with man in that relational stance, the authority, but also wanting free will and agency from us, that authority and authenticity being developed and cultivated through the tradition. Putting Rabbi Volbe and Father Jisani, two 20th-century pedagogically rich religious thinkers on the curriculum for educators separately and together is likely to yield many dividends in our age of apathy, anomie, and distraction. We've only just scratched the surface. Go online, turn on the TV, read the newspaper. But people of genuine faith live by hope, not despair. Hope in its deepest, fullest, truest sense, is a more mature virtue. It needs to be cultivated over time. It needs traction and the rough ground to really clarify it as deepest and truest hope. But hope is also something that comes more naturally, more instinctively to the young, to people that are young. Think of St. Theresa Lousseau's Little Way. The child's capacity for wonder and goodness, for purity and passion, creates the ideal conditions for hope, to see beyond the disquieting images of the age and to point to something better. One of the great Hasidic rabbis of the 19th century put this point so beautifully in a creative bit of biblical exegesis. You all know the story of Joseph and his brothers. Joseph is sent down to Egypt, eventually becomes the vizier, the viceroy to the Pharaoh, and his brothers then come down to fetch some food. They're in a famine in the land of Canaan. And through a little ruse, Joseph is able to keep his brother Benjamin back and essentially does this to see what will the brothers will do. This is like a retelling, a repetition of the earlier story, with, but now Benjamin is in the place of Joseph, both the children of Rachel. And Judah stands up and says, No, I can't let you keep Benjamin. You must understand, I cannot let this happen. And the rabbinic commentators say that Judah rose up like the lion of Judah to combat all the forces of Pharaoh. Pharaoh had commanded the greatest civilization to that day in the ancient Near East in Egypt, but Judah wouldn't let him go. And there's a verse here in Genesis chapter 44, verse 34. And I'll read it to you in Hebrew and then I'll translate. How can I go up to my father? Meaning Jacob, Father Jacob, and the young lad, the boy Benjamin, is not with me. And a Chasidic rabbi of the 19th century reads this in a tripical Hasidic way. How can I go up to my father in heaven and the youth is not with me? The young lad who is within me is not worshiping God in the manner of a youth of purity, of passion, of innocence. How can I do that? It's impossible. I need to preserve that youth. This is an allegorical reading. But I think it's so powerful. And we've seen tonight several expressions of the power of youth in overcoming the maladies of our modern age. The first we saw was this notion that despite the fact that the modern world wants to strip people of their humanity, enemies, friends, it doesn't matter. We need to constantly preach and teach the irreducibility of the human soul. But that's not enough. We need to be ready to fight for our traditions. And we need the virtues of majesty and humility, humility and majesty, the virtues of the chivalrous knight of Lewis, of King David, of Dino Haetzni. And finally, we need to get right that balance, that dialectic between authenticity and authority. The organization that I represent is called Tikfah, which means hope. Hand in hand with our brothers and sisters of the Catholic faith, we preach.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:22

I was. I was. Let me ask you this question. Here at the University of Dallas, as in many other places that cherish a proper education, we read Plato's Republic. So when you talked about chivalry and the conjunction of the fierceness on the one hand and the gentleness on the other, I mean, quite obviously the Platonist that I am, uh think of the Republic, right? Where the philosophical nature is, in fact, that kind of combination of the gentle element that is friendly to the friend and the fierce element that is hostile to the enemy. So I wonder then whether that kind of understanding of what it means to be educated, to be a genuine human being, you know, could play a role here too. Platonic understanding of education and of the human being has often been qualified as aristocratic. I've once in a project of pedagogical reform been really rebuked for saying, I want an aristocratic education in our institution. That is an education that aims for the best for every single student to be the best, for every professor to be his or her best in what he or she is doing. So I'd like to hear a little bit about the Platonic side of things. In Plato was no personalist, although looking at the description of Socrates, okay, that's a different topic.

SPEAKER_08 1:16:54

Thank you, Provost. I think there's an egalitarian dimension to modern life that frowns upon the aristocratic, but it's no coincidence that Lewis's model and the Talmud's model of this exemplar of majesty and humility are both aristocratic figures. One is a king, one is literally a monarch, and one is a knight. And Lewis actually speaks about in another essay called Equality, his his fear that politically he's a liber politically he's a liberal. He's a Lockean politically, but culturally and theologically he's an anti-liberal. And so he tries to wed these different traditions of political liberalism. He doesn't want to go back to the medieval period. It's like, you know, we have a lot of my friend R.J. Snell was talking about the danger of certain integralist, you know, rhetoric or thought. And the idea that you can go wholesale back into the medieval period is not an idea that Lewis would share or endorse. But he does say that's for the legal dimensions of the human condition. But from a cultural and theological point of view, he says we need to have these rituals where you can be naked in the bedroom, but clothed outside. It's a very powerful image that the idea is that in the privacy of your own home or the privacy of your own cultural life, you can rely on human excellence and human and sort of natural aristocracy or or cultivated through virtue and intellectual excellence. But in the world of others, we have to maintain those those rights that even pertain to the least qualified or the least worthy in that sense of dessert. So I think I think there is something about an education, the aristocratic education, that produces this type more more likely than a flat egalitarian education. Because if you're not aspiring to some form of excellence, some definition of excellence, it's hard to imagine where you'd have the courage or the refinement to be anything like this figure that he that he sees as as sort of the paradigm of human excellence.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:26

Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_08 1:19:28

Pleasure.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:28

With that, I open the floor for further questions.

SPEAKER_04 1:19:32

Yes, please.

SPEAKER_08 1:20:19

Yeah, that's a great qu I love that question. I think the best response is to cultivate a sense of first understanding and then being understood. In other words, the student should always first attempt to understand the other, the teacher, primarily, but others, students like him or herself, and only then be understood. So it's a it's a sequencing of the order, the priority of your understanding of others to what you want to project. You'll also listen better. If you try, if if you if you try, often in a seminar, for example, everybody's waiting to ask that brilliant question. And they're not listening to the other people in the seminar very much. They're waiting to sort of get their turn and then to ask that, you know,$64 million question. But it could have been answered had you been listening with that sense of, I want to understand what people are saying before I jump into the fray and give my. So I think it's a very simple, it sounds almost simplistic, but it's a great practice for a seminar-style classroom or I think relational um principles in general to always always understand before you seek to be understood.

SPEAKER_07 1:21:36

There's a lot more to say, but that's a good starting place. Thank you.

SPEAKER_08 1:23:21

They are modern thinkers and modern pedagogues, but infused by the truths of tradition, but looking to advance the tradition. Uh I forget who said this. I think it was Yaroslav Pelikan, a professor of of early Christian history at Yale, that tradition is the living faith of the dead, and traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. I think that's exactly why you need authenticity. Because if you don't have authenticity, you'll wind up with traditionalism, the dead faith of the living. Because people will just be repeating and regurgitating, mimicking. That's what Rab Volbe uses this great phrase, Rab Volbe in the Hebrew. It's very powerful. Khikui vlochinoch. They sound alike. Khikui is imitation, khinuch is education. And I think that's precisely where authenticity needs to be brought into the conversation, not as a critique of tradition, but as a way of advancing tradition, moving tradition forward in a healthy, organic, natural way, like what Burke speaks about, that there's a there's a natural evolution tradition. It's not just what the past was. It's not that's just convention. That's that's bet you know, the philosophers talk about that's just that's not a meaningful construction of life. So I think you need the authenticity, and maybe that was the great contribution of modernity to some degree. That Reb Salvaitic would say it was, and I think John Paul II would say it was. John Paul is a modern philosopher. Maybe that's why people don't like John Paul sometimes.

SPEAKER_04 1:24:53

Too modern.

SPEAKER_08 1:25:27

That's why it's a nihilistic metaphysic as much as if it's a rejavinist, you know, um kind of rhetorical move that many of the integralists or you know, on the right, let's say, today, on the you know, new alt right or the new right. But yes, because I think at at base, Josh, there's a relationship between radical individuality and nihilism. You've lost any principle that can stand apart transcending time and place. I think it's sports has a standard of excellence, sports has a sense of of right and wrong, the rules, good good sportsmanship. Um I it can't just be cognitive. That's just not gonna cut it. It has to be more experiential, and I think you know, sports is a good way of of bringing out whether they say that um Waterloo was one on the on you know in the playgrounds of Eton or something like that.

SPEAKER_07 1:27:12

I think there's something true to that.

SPEAKER_04 1:27:19

Maybe maybe I'm gonna be able to do that.

SPEAKER_08 1:27:50

But there's a lot of truth to that because it's much it's much harder to teach these virtues than to see them lived in praxis and cultivated before. Or, you know, before you're in a shared enterprise or a project together, but looking for the qualities that your particular institution is looking for, like what the mission of your institution, finding the people that are ready to share elements of that mission and that you think could be good comrades and good colleagues. And then you should work on, you know, professional development, reading the right, reading the right things together, meeting together formally and informally. I mean, it's it's real work to create your team, but through the highest principles of a life of the mind as well as a serious moral life. But I think it starts with identifying the people that you already have some intuition are are with you or and then understand what you understand and what what that mission that that you're jointly focused on. You know, Lewis has this great in the four loves that you know, romance is looking face to face at one another, but friendship is shoulder to shoulder at some common value, at some common ideal. I mean, that's what it is. If you find your people that already have some intimation of that shared ideal, but then work it through shared learning. I think it's great to learn with your colleagues, like study, do book clubs, do workshops to develop that shared language, that shared vocabulary of your institution, of your mission, and then do fun things where you know you're playing sports or you're going out hiking, just things that bring the team together, but in really nitty-gritty, corporeal, like physical, realist ways. I don't live on the strip and I wouldn't want to live on the strip. So I can't imagine that you know there would be a good case to be made that a casino in the magnitude and the scale and the scope of of what you have in Vegas would be a neighbor to a re you know, a a kind of residential area, a university, a Catholic school. It's not it it's not something that you need me to to weigh in on. It's it's sort of like just common sense.

SPEAKER_07 1:31:37

Um so I I don't have anything more to add than than that.

SPEAKER_08 1:31:43

I think I I don't even know the details of what the the casino is supposed to, you know, look like or but casinos in general are not places for young people. They shouldn't be places for young people. And I understand that. And you know, when when Professor when President Sanford shared with me, you know, his his stance, totally understood it, of course. So I don't I don't have anything unique or esoteric to add here. I'm not in the casino business. I've never been I've never I've never gambled once in my life. Nor do I plan to.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:23

That's what a true nitro too.

SPEAKER_07 1:32:40

Can we go further? I'm prepared, I'm ready. I'll go where you go.

SPEAKER_01 1:33:08

What room there is for public policy on this front. Um, not to make it a uh completely about public policy, right? I'm at a private university, not at a public university. But um many of us in the future will be faced with this question, right? As we've been fighting over education policy over the past several decades, and as a switch back and forth um your experience, but an antiqua fund or by yourself, um, but just what what things might help on a more industrial scale with this.

SPEAKER_08 1:33:39

See, once you use the notion or the term industrial scale, you kind of undercut the personless roots that I think any human and humane public policy can really take. I think public policy has to be grounded on the dignity of the human person. And if you for if you lose that in a conversation, in a specific legislation, then you're then you're losing who you are as a Catholic leader. Um so I I think you know, it makes the job of the of the civic leader that much more challenging and and definitely much more at stake, but can't lose those basics. You cannot lose those basic commitments to the irreducibility of the human person, to the dignity of the human person. You know, I'm ahead of school and and I have to I have to deliver bad news, I have to deliver good news, I have to comfort people that are in pain. You have to do so many different things. But you also have to do with an integrity. Like there has to be some unifying principle that if a person would look at your behaviors over the course of a week, they'd be able to say, I see there's a unifying principle here, that all the behaviors, all the legislation, all the interactions, all the conversations, all the meetings, I see something that is grounded in a principle and that's pure as best as possible, and that's consistent, that's integrity. So I think that's the test. Can you, if someone were looking, if you were looking at your own life, you had a recorder, or you know, you were able to review your behaviors, could you find that principle and identify it and say that's something that that is consistent and that's something that reflects who I am as a Catholic leader committed to you know dig the Imago Dei? I think that's what you have to do. And hope that when you do that, you get the right answer.

SPEAKER_04 1:35:48

What do you see to be one of the biggest purveyors of modernism?

SPEAKER_08 1:35:53

Um I mean a lot of universities, frankly. I think media. I mean, I again this is not nothing novel here. I think the entertainment industry, I think the major universities, I think the centers of of news, so-called news.

SPEAKER_05 1:36:19

How do we just some recommendations after all this? How do you what would your recommendations have been how resist those?

SPEAKER_08 1:36:28

Look, I I I still believe that my friend Rod Dreer got most of it right in his Benedict option. And that's what you guys are doing at the University of Dallas. You're creating, it's a fine university, but it's definitely not your typical university. And it it's it's its own confessional tribe of a sort. So, you know, build your family. That's the best advice I can, you know, or the best thing I can say. Build your families so that you're you're perpetuating the faith, perpet perpetuating the moral traditions that that you adhere to, to to the next generation. Um, I come from a modern Orthodox community. I I live in a in a town. I walk to my synagogue. Um, I don't travel on the Sabbath. I think observing some kind of Sabbath is really, really important. Disconnecting from your devices, you know, I do it one day a week, 25 hours a week. Don't, you know, I wish I could do more. I'm pretty, you know, tethered to this, to this, to this device, but not on Chavez. So these are like the practices of a community more than the civilization. That was what I was, in some ways, trying to nod to by saying, I don't want to talk about civilizational rehabilitation. I want to just talk about the student, the family, the community. Those are things that I think are more both more tangible and real realizable, and just better, frankly, just better.

SPEAKER_06 1:37:59

Thank you, Rabbi, for your lecture. I hope I'll pronounce this right. I was fascinated by the concept of knessed.

SPEAKER_07 1:38:06

Yes, sir.

SPEAKER_06 1:38:07

I think at one point you compared it to the mystical body of Christ. I was listening to later in the talk where you were talking about the sort of ontological character of people or of a community.

SPEAKER_07 1:38:24

Yep.

SPEAKER_06 1:38:24

And that's a powerful idea with a lot of implications. A couple things I was wondering about. What would be sufficient for a community to have that kind of ontological character? Um can one belong to more than one community?

SPEAKER_04 1:38:47

Classic problem for Christians.

SPEAKER_07 1:38:53

Right.

SPEAKER_06 1:38:56

Um But I was also thinking that some of the difficulties that we are dealing with that that Dr. Parents mentioned earlier may also just have to do with the very dangerous notion that uh that at bottom certain communities formed around various kinds of identification, right, ha have a kind of integrity that must be protected at all costs, right? So, I mean, there's a quite a lot of white nationalism, for instance, that would do something like that idea. Yeah. False conception of it. Yeah. How do you parse?

SPEAKER_08 1:39:33

Yeah, no, that's a great question. And it sort of, you know, you get into questions of you know, Heideggerism and what you just said, identitarianism. For me, the safest ground to distinguish these more genuine forms of uh real entities or real essences is our tradition. In other words, the Jewish tradition, the Catholic tradition clearly believes in the reality of a Knesset Israel on the part of Jewish tradition and the mystical body of Christ in the Catholic tradition. I didn't invent that. I would be much on much flimsier ground if I said, well, you know, any ethnic group or any um, you know, linguistic group could just assume that that identity and make claims on a metaphysical level about the reality of this group. I I would be on much weaker ground to do that. So I think the tradition kind of keeps us um healthy and that it limits it to, you know, to the Jewish people and to the Christian church. And doesn't really it doesn't give a lot of sanction to other, you know, other more modern forms of identity that that may be more suspect in terms of their metaphysical integrity or genuineness, um, their ethical or you know moral valence. So I think it's just safe to keep to the tradition on this account. And you know, people don't like it. People, even within the Jewish tradition, people maybe are uncomfortable with it because then there are questions of, you know, does the convert enter this? And the answer is yes. But the fact that you could even ask the question may put somebody off and see, you know, that Judaism, you know, the Jewish religion is too ossified, it's too, it's too limited to its ethnic makeup. But thank goodness the answer is a good one that we embrace convert. We don't see converts, but we embrace converts, and they could be part of the mystical body of the Knesset Israel. So I think the safe answer, because these are questions that I enjoy thinking about from I always like the German romantic tradition and Volksgeist theories, and all and and they're found Rabbi Salovechik, there was an article by a fellow Michael Fagenblatt, who wrote on the Heideggerian elements of Solovechik's thought, precisely on this, on these teachings on Knesset Israel. So if you want to see this further, you can Michael Fagenblatt is the name. But I think tradition is is the safe harbor here. The royal road of tradition keeps you keeps you more safe.

SPEAKER_04 1:42:26

Maybe a last question.

SPEAKER_05 1:42:29

Um so thank you for your talk. Um I enjoyed it very much. One of the things that um I found especially engaging and feeling about it was um the implications for the dignity of of each student. And across the whole project of education, um a topic that that's been interesting me a bit is the question of the student with intellectual disabilities or the student who is just less capable um of engaging with what is traditionally understood to be the project. And I I was interested, especially in the the ages that you work with, which is great diversity. Um if you could offer any um experience or thought about how you approach maintaining the high intellectual standards that are a part of your while also having a project.

SPEAKER_08 1:43:32

The first educational principle in Judaism, and I suspect this is true for Catholicism as well, is from Proverbs, Chanoch Lenar al Pi Darko, educate the child according to their way. That there's no one size fits all. Even in the classical model, I think there has to be a recognition of the unique set of gifts or the unique set of challenges, the particularity of the person in front of you, the student in front of you. And so it's it's almost never one size fits all. At the same time, a school has to have, to be a school and to have a certain integrity and a functionality and efficiency, it has to have some borders or or parameters with which it could either educate within or not. So like we at Allison, we have a we have a special needs division, a special support services division, which can extend the franchise, so to speak, you know, a little bit further out to what you know might be the more mainstream students. But someone who, let's say, has real language-based um liabilities or handicaps won't be able to function in in our school, but there are other schools. And hopefully for a Jewish educator, there's a hopefully a Jewish school that will have prayer and that will have Jewish teaching and learning, but will also be designed to support students of all needs and all backgrounds. So I think we try at our school to serve as many students as we can beyond, you know, we offer support and and special needs are taken seriously. At a certain point, though you can't service every student. There's just kind of an inevitability of that. And just it's it sounds maybe it sounds harsh. I don't know. Other businesses, we understand there are limits to what they can do. And but we want to make sure that they have what whatever they need, they have a Jewish education. And whatever in in the Catholic context, you'd want a school that would address a student's needs, but would have the right Catholic education, the Catholic formation, the catechesis that would be appropriate for that age, even if the student has different abilities and different um educational needs and competencies. So it's with love and and it's not, it doesn't have to be, well, you we can't educate you, so you're out of the fold or you're out of the community. That, God forbid, that would be terrible. But it it shouldn't be assumed that every school can educate every single kid.

SPEAKER_07 1:46:18

That's just not healthy or realistic either. Sure.

SPEAKER_00 1:46:24

Thank you so much, Ramadi. You reminded us that uh persons are individual beings, uh embodied beings, and what all our unique unique uh individual human beings have in common is that we get tired, um, we need rest, we need to eat and drink, and so we have a little reception prepared outside after this rich feast of thoughts, of words, of your sharing um your person with us um the way you did uh so generously. Um thank you for being our McDermott lecturer. Thank you for organizing the seminars uh related to the lecture tonight. It was a real pleasure to have you with us. It's going to be also outside. Uh we're not done yet. And uh I hope you'll spread the word of the University of Dallas with our education as we uh will spread the word of the wonderful relationship we have with you.

SPEAKER_08 1:47:41

Thank you, Matthias. Thank you so much. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 1:47:43

Okay, all invited. Thank you so much. Thank you.