In Memoriam: Rabbi Dr. Neil Gillman

Rabbi Dr. Neil Gillman died last November 23, having been ill for several years after treatment for cancer. Born in Quebec City, Canada, Gillman studied philosophy at McGill University in Montreal and then attended rabbinical school at the Jewish Theological Seminary, where he would spend his entire career, first as the dean of its Rabbinical School and later as a Professor of Jewish Philosophy. While raised in a traditional Jewish home, his path to the rabbinate and a career teaching Jewish theology was inspired by an encounter with Will Herberg, the noted Jewish social thinker and existentialist theologian, while at McGill. After completing his rabbinical studies, he continued working and teaching at JTS and completed a doctorate in Religious Studies at Columbia University, where he wrote his dissertation on Gabriel Marcel's religious epistemology, a subject that became his central philosophical concern.His early interest in religious existentialism and its emphasis on confrontation with personal belief and meaning became one of Gillman's core commitments as a theologian and as a teacher. Gillman insisted that modern Jews should clarify their own theological commitments in a personal way in order to connect to the teachings and practices of the Jewish tradition. The typical final assignment in almost any Neil Gillman class was the writing of a personal theological statement, a task to which he provided a guide in the final chapter of Sacred Fragments, the most significant statement of his theological approach. Under his influence the personal theological statement became and remains a standard part of the application to the Rabbinical School at JTS. The personal theological statement gave a generation of rabbis, cantors, educators, and lay students the opportunity to discuss their qualms and questions about classical Jewish theology, explore new possibilities, and renew their faith from the “sacred fragments” of traditional images of God.As a thought leader for Conservative Judaism, Gillman's theological work owed a debt to two of his teachers at JTS, Mordecai Kaplan and Abraham Joshua Heschel. Gillman followed Kaplan's theological naturalism because he did not think we could fully retrieve the pre-modern conception of God as a supernatural personal being. At the same time, he understood that for many, himself included, Kaplan's naturalistic theology did not capture the emotive or spiritual power of lived religious experience, both in traditional Jewish ritual and in the everyday world. Heschel's poetic writing and teaching taught him to appreciate the way that the images and metaphors for God in the tradition allowed us to experience the divine within the world, to “see God,” as Gillman often put in explaining his debt to Heschel.To strike a balance between these two aspects of his theology, Gillman drew on Paul Tillich's notion of religious language as a mythic, in the sense of a socio-linguistic pattern of thinking that expresses and shapes the commitments of a community. The concept of myth allowed him to weave the personal imagery for God of classical Jewish texts in his theology without the baggage of supernatural metaphysical commitments. He applied this approach the theological issue of resurrection of the dead, which he explored in his 1997 book, The Death of Death. Again driven by existentialist themes, Gillman noted that American Jews' discomfort with resurrection theology mirrored their difficulty discussing death itself. His own understanding of resurrection as a mythic concept sought to highlight the religious significance of the human body and return to an affirmation of divine power over life and death. As with all his teachings, he found ways to challenge a generation of American Jews and their spiritual leaders to grapple with, to use Tillich's phrase, matters of ultimate concern. His teachings live on in hundreds of students who learned with him and have responded to his invitation to find their own ways for speaking to God and about God.

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