Word: hartman
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...side, Hartman is a spiritual and political adviser to Shimon Peres, the once and would-be Prime Minister, to Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek and to a host of other politicians, philosophers and journalists, both in Israel and abroad. "The most important commodity in life, which I apparently lack, is wisdom," says Peres. "David has it. How different things would be if everyone were like him." Think of Hartman as a "philosopher therapist," says the New York Times's Thomas Friedman. "One goes to him as to an oracle. He is the Israeli we wish they all were...
...Hartman was born and raised in America, in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. He was dirt poor -- in the Jewish sense: the Hartmans had little furniture but a great many books. Still, young David "couldn't do puzzles," was terrible at math and was left back twice in elementary and high school. Carpentry or plumbing were the careers advised for him. Or basketball. Hartman was a local legend on the court. From what is now known as three-point range, his two-handed set shot was deadly. For pocket change, and the chance to play, Hartman spent summers...
...Brooklyn, says Hartman, he "learned pluralism" by playing with blacks and Italians in the streets. Finally, at Yeshiva University, he bloomed intellectually. Becoming a rabbi at 23, he then spent five years knocking heads with the Jesuits at Fordham University. It was there that he encountered the great Roman Catholic philosopher, Robert C. Pollock, and there that he abandoned religious absolutism. Under Pollock's tutelage, Hartman developed the respect for religious tolerance that infuses his beliefs, and came to appreciate the American pluralistic experience as expressed in the writings of William James and John Dewey. After Fordham, Hartman doubled...
With his wife and five children, Hartman emigrated to Israel in 1971. "When he left Canada," says the writer Charles Krauthammer, a former Hartman student, "it was like losing Wayne Gretzky" -- and when he landed in Israel, his luggage was stolen. "A perfect metaphor for the transition between dreams and reality," says Hartman. "But I didn't care. I was a deep believer. I thought I was going to participate in a great spiritual renaissance. What I have found instead is that a traumatized psyche has combined with a self- congratulatory ethos to distort the true meaning of the Jewish...
...take the Bible back from those who would use it as a club: that is Hartman's mission. Ironically, had the great nation-building Labor Party leaders better appreciated what makes Israel special, Hartman's mission might not have been necessary. "Our founders saw religion as the enemy of progress," says Hartman. "They wanted to create an indigenous, secular Israeli. Religious concerns were ceded to the ultra-orthodox, who have never understood the need for Judaism to incorporate democratic values." Because Israeli society failed to develop a compelling spiritual option to replace the victim-oriented philosophy of the East European...