By Marshall Weiss, The Dayton Jewish Observer, December 2009

Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, co-president of New York-based Clal: The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, visited Dayton on Nov. 4 and 18 to lead sessions with students at United Theological Seminary.

Rabbi Brad Hirschfield

Hirschfield’s presentations mark the third year of a Clal presence at the Methodist seminary, at the invitation of Dr. Lisa Hess, UTS associate professor of practical theology and contextual ministries.

Clal’s other co-president, Rabbi Irwin Kula, lectured at UTS in October 2007 and presented a 12-week course at UTS in the fall of 2008.

Hirschfield has made Newsweek’s list of America’s “50 Most Influential Rabbis” three years in a row.

Seminary students in two classes have been assigned to read his 2008 book, You Don’t Have To Be Wrong For Me To Be Right: Finding Faith Without Fanaticism.

“We’re going to be talking about the underlying principles of You Don’t Have To Be Wrong For Me To Be Right,” Hirschfield said in an advance interview with The Observer, “and what it really boils down to is: what does it mean to be deeply committed to a particular tradition and genuinely open to other views that lie beyond that tradition?”

His talk on Nov. 18, he says, occurred during the seminary’s Evangelism Week, which concerned Hess. Hirschfield thought the timing was fantastic.

“The truth is, a segment of that population (of students and faculty) is evangelical,” he said. “And so I think the question is not how to make people stop being evangelical, because that would be like asking us to stop being Jewish. That’s who they are. I said, though, it would be great to ask two questions: What does it mean to be evangelical in a pluralist democratic context, and more importantly, since classically evangelizing is an act of love, what is the place of being understood as a loving act by those you’re evangelizing?”

An Orthodox rabbi, Hirschfield writes in You Don’t Have To Be Wrong that as a teenager, he was “a religious fanatic.” In the early 1980s, he left his parents’ “upscale North Shore Chicago home to join a group of settlers in the West Bank city of Hebron.”

After terrorists attacked the Jewish settlers, “three of the settlers fired into a school and killed two Palestinian children.”

Stunned by the deaths, a disillusioned, alienated Hirschfield returned to the United States. He went on to pursue a career of building bridges among people of various faiths.

Following the publication of You Don’t Have To Be Wrong last year, he said he met resistance to its basic tenets from Jews and non-Jews of the political and religious left and right whom he describes as “absolutists” who “can’t handle pluralism.”

“Ironically,” he said, “this is one of the ways I feel I’m doing my job. I’ve had some pushback saying, ‘No. The other side is wrong and that’s how you know you’re right.’ Though even there, that splits 50-50 right and left.”

Hirschfield said that people assume that those with more traditional or conservative perspectives are apt to be the least pluralist.

“But it’s not true,” he said. “You could be an anti-pluralist liberal just as easily as you can be an anti-pluralist conservative. Just ask Keith Olbermann. Even if some people like more what they hear at Msnbc, to assume it’s any less dogmatic than Fox is silly.”

He’s also received pushback from relativists for his willingness to hold on to his beliefs.

“There are things that I believe and there are things for which I would fight,” he said, “and there are core values. Too often the alternative to absolutism is relativism and I’m not a relativist. I do think things matter, and I do think decisions have to be made. The most deeply religious position in the world — and the character trait for which Moses is most noted by our own rabbis — is that humility is actually sacred. And what I’m hoping will happen with these ministers is we will be able to explore the delicate balance between passion and humility.”