In praise of Dr. Leon Kass

T. Belman. From the sixties onward, I was subscribed to Commentary Magazine and not only read every issue, cover to cover, but I saved them all and brought them to Israel when I made aliya.  One of the great intellectuals it introduced me to was Dr. Leon Kass.  If you are not familiar with his work, you are missing an intellectual treat.

TIKVAH

This month at Mosaic, we have published a magisterial essay on “the people-forming Passover” by my teacher, mentor, and friend: Dr. Leon Kass.

Read Now: Leon Kass | The People-Forming Passover
Mosaic, April 2020<
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The essay is the second down-payment from his forthcoming book (I’ve read the whole manuscript; it’s remarkable) called Founding God’s Nation: Reading Exodus, to be published by Yale University Press in January 2021. In our excerpted Mosaic essay, Kass focuses on the events of the night before and the morning of the Israelites’ departure from Egypt—the events rehearsed each year at the Passover table—and on their significance in the formation of the Jewish people and nation. Read it here.

Since Kass’s Exodus book won’t be out for a little while, this gives you plenty of time to prepare by ordering and reading his life-changing commentary on Genesis—The Beginning of Wisdom. It is my official recommendation in a new symposium, just published this week, in the Spring 2020 issue Jewish Review of Books. We ask some of the leading thinkers in the Jewish world to highlight the best Jewish books of the last decade (or any modern decade). I owe a great debt to Dr. Kass, as I explain in my short JRB piece:

In 2001, I went to work for Dr. Kass as part of the executive staff of the President’s Council on Bioethics. My Jewish life, Jewish commitments, and Jewish knowledge were all fairly limited at the time. But here we were considering some of the most fundamental moral problems of the modern age—cloning and stem cells, memory-altering drugs and genetic engineering, assisted suicide and organ markets. And there was our chairman—Dr. Kass, armed with an MD and a PhD in biochemistry—hard at work finishing his magisterial commentary (20 years in the making) on the book of Genesis. This was no accident. The questions we faced (and still face) about how to use our technological powers for good—and how to resist the high-tech dehumanization of our lives—can only be confronted wisely by having a moral understanding of human nature. This means, in truth, a theological anthropology, an account of who we are: neither beasts nor gods but God-seeking mortals created in the image of God. And for this, Genesis was the best guide, and Kass’s book The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis is the best guide I know of to that best guide.

It was only later that I came to appreciate Kass’s commentary as a Jewish book: a window into the distinctly Hebraic understanding of justice and injustice, human reason and human pride, sexuality and family life, sin and commandment—seen in contrast to that of its Canaanite, Babylonian, and Egyptian rivals (and, in a different way, in contrast to the Athenian vision of human excellence and human tragedy). What I eventually realized, after years of helping to run Tikvah programs for students, is that Kass’s book is the best such book for Jews of all backgrounds. Reading Genesis with Kass deepens the faith of the already-committed even as it challenges them, and it invites in the open-minded and perhaps (as it did for me) helps them discover for the first time the committed Jew they want to be.

With best wishes,

?Eric Cohen