JERUSALEM — Rabbi David Hartman, an American-born Jewish philosopher who promoted a liberal brand of Orthodoxy and created a study center that expressed his commitment to pluralism by bringing together leaders from all strains of Judaism, died on Sunday at his home here. He was 81.
His son Donniel said the death came after a long illness.
Rabbi Hartman, who was a professor at Hebrew University for more than 20 years, was a leading advocate of the idea that Jews are partners with God in a covenant, and that they should therefore adapt religious observance to modern values in a multicultural world.
A charismatic teacher and prolific author, he encouraged students to question tradition and urged people of different backgrounds and ideologies to pore over Jewish texts together, a practice more common in his native United States than his adopted country.
“At the center of his thinking was a kind of counter-religious idea, where religious life is a life of affirmation, not a life of denial,” said Moshe Halbertal, a professor of philosophy at Hebrew University and Rabbi Hartman’s former son-in-law. “If human life is not denied by the force of revelation, but it’s actually a participant in revelation, then human life has to come to its full fledge, with its moral convictions, with its encounter with the world.”
The Shalom Hartman Institute, which Rabbi Hartman founded in his father’s name in 1976, has become a theological and cultural landmark, particularly for the thousands of Diaspora Jews who attend frequent conferences or spend summers studying there. With an annual budget of $18 million and a staff of 125, the institute has sponsored two Jerusalem high schools, runs a research center, opened a branch in Manhattan and trained more than 1,000 Israeli military officers. In the last year, according to the institute, more than 5,000 people across North American participated in a Hartman learning series called iEngage.
But Rabbi Hartman’s progressive, universalistic approach was embraced more in the United States than in Israel, where some challenged his status as Orthodox and shunned his open-mindedness as heresy. He received honorary doctorates from Yale and Hebrew Union College, a Reform institution with three branches in the United States and one in Jerusalem, but not the coveted Israel Prize. His never receiving it was a source of painful regret, several people close to him said.
In recent years he had been highly critical of the growing influence of the ultra-Orthodox on public life. He described as “insane” an ultra-Orthodox boycott of a military ceremony in which women sang.
“What is happening today with religion is more dangerous than what’s happening with the Arabs — the Arabs want to kill my body, the Jews are killing my soul,” Rabbi Hartman said in a 2011 interview with the Israeli daily Yediot Aharanot. “I want to return the Torah to the Labor Party, to the entire people of Israel. I don’t want religion to be the private property of certain people. I don’t want the length of the sidelocks to be the determining factor.”
David Hartman was born on Sept. 11, 1931 in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, one of six children of Shalom and Batya Hartman, Hasidim who had moved to New York from Israel. Donniel Hartman said that the family was poor — Shalom peddled sheets and pillowcases door to door — but that the four boys became rabbis and the two girls married rabbis.
Rabbi Hartman was ordained by Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, perhaps the most important Orthodox thinker of the 20th century, and received a doctorate of philosophy from McGill University in Montreal. He was a pulpit rabbi in the Bronx and Montreal before moving to Israel in 1971 as part of a generation of Zionists inspired by the Israeli victory in the Arab-Israeli war of 1967.
Rabbi Hartman published several books in English and Hebrew, including two about Maimonides, the Torah scholar of the Middle Ages; one on the theological legacy of Rabbi Soloveitchik; and two about his own spiritual evolution. He was an adviser to Ehud Olmert, the former prime minister; Teddy Kollek, the longtime mayor of Jerusalem; and Zevulun Hammer, Israel’s education minister from 1977 to 1984.
“He was a public philosopher for the Jewish people,” said Michael J. Sandel, a professor of political philosophy at Harvard who has written about Rabbi Hartman’s work. “As Maimonides drew Aristotle into conversation with Moses and Rabbi Akiva, so Hartman renovated Jewish thought by bringing the liberal sensibilities to bear on Talmudic argument.”
Jonathan D. Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University, described the Hartman Institute as “a little island of pluralism amidst a sea of what was often religious fanaticism,” but noted that “he had to establish his own institutions precisely because, unlike Soloveitchik, he was not really welcomed” by Israel’s religious establishment.
Avi Sagi, a professor at Bar Ilan University and a Hartman fellow who edited a two-volume set on the rabbi’s work, said of him, “He gave me the opportunity to think without any limitation.”
Besides his son Donniel, who replaced him as president of the Hartman Institute, Rabbi Hartman is survived by four other children, including a daughter, Tova, who helped found Shira Hadasha, a feminist Orthodox congregation in Jerusalem; 16 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. He is also survived by his former wife, Barbara; the couple had married twice and were divorced twice.
Yedidia Z. Stern, a law professor and vice president of the Israel Democracy Institute, said Rabbi Hartman’s charisma and curiosity were apparent even a few weeks before his death, during a Sabbath meal at Donniel Hartman’s home.
“He was ignoring the adults at the table; he was talking to my kids,” Professor Stern said. “He was asking them about school: Do they like the curriculum, what do they think should be different? Even when he was very sick, you can see the life coming out.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 11, 2013
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this obituary misstated the number Hebrew Union College branches in the United States. Hebrew Union College has three branches in the United States and one in Jerusalem, not four in the United States.
Rabbi David Hartman, 81, Champion of an Adaptive Judaism
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