FOCUS
Rev. Moon's Rabbi
The strange odyssey of Richard Rubenstein,
whose views on God and the Holocaust
have led him to the inner circle of the
Unification Church's leader.
ARTHUR J. MAGIDA
Special to The Jewish News
INI o apologies come
from Richard
Rubenstein.
Not for pio-
neering what
most people say
was the Jewish
equivalent of the
1960s' "Death of God"
movement.
Not for calling God a
"Nothingness," an idea and
a phrase closer to Buddhism
than to Judaism.
Not for being associated
with a man who calls himself
the Lord of the Second Ad-
vent and Son of God — Rev.
Sun Myong Moon, the foun-
der of the Unification
Church, which has been
charged with kidnapping,
brainwashing, influence-
peddling, covert operations
against Nicaragua and
working with the South Ko-
rean CIA.
For the last two and a half
decades, Richard L. Rubens-
tein has had a peculiar and
somewhat disjointed j our-
ney. In his 1966 book, After
Auschwitz, he pondered
where God had been at the
Nazi deaths camps, and es-
sentially decided God had
been nowhere because there
was no God. Branded a her-
etic, he was, in his words,
"bureaucratically excom-
municated" from the Jewish
community. A few years
later, he was taken into Rev.
Moon's inner circle, and now
heads a Moon-funded Wash-
ington think-tank and the
advisory board of the Moon-
bankrolled Washington
Times.
Still an outcast in much of
the Jewish world, Rabbi
Rubenstein, 68, says he is
not resentful toward those
who made him persona non
grata. During a 90-minute
interview at the Washington
Institute for Values in Pub-
lic Policy (his office is just
down the ha from a framed
photo of Rev. Moon), he
said, with some courtliness,
"No one mistreated me, and
no one was unjust in rejec-
ting me. Communities define
the limits of what they con-
sider to be acceptable.
60
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 1992
"The dilemma," he said,
"is that if you really believe
God has chosen us, don't
you really have to believe
that He is the author of
Auschwitz? Especially since
the rabbis said that He was
the author of the destruction
of the second 'Temple in 70
fB.C.E. J. . . When you put
people in that position,
where they can neither give
up their belief nor can they
really affirm it in their guts,
then they're liable to act
with anger toward the bear-
er of bad news."
Much anger, indeed, was
directed toward Richard
Rubenstein. He now knows
what it means to be beyond
the pale, to be a "pariah," a
word he doesn't like, but
which — especially, in the
world of Jewish institutions
in which he once trafficked
— clearly applies to him.
But whether or not
Richard Rubenstein violated
the tacit bounds of the Jew-
ish community, Michael
Berenbaum, the project di-
rector of the United States
Memorial Holocaust Muse-
urn and a long-time friend of
the rabbi's, noted that "no
one can deny that Rubens-
tein set the agenda for Jew-
ish thought. He wrote irrev-
erently about a past that
others wanted to write
about romantically."
An Outcast
I
n the mid-1960s, many
Jews were shocked by the
credo that Richard Ruben-
stein outlined in After
Auschwitz: The God who
had led the Jews out of
Egypt, who had been the
guardian and the strength of
the people of Israel, was no
more. That God was a victim
of the Holocaust, a casualty
of the death camps and the
genocide.
If God had chosen the
Jews for whatever destiny
He had in mind for them,
then, concluded the rabbi,
Hitler was an agent of God,
a vehicle for God's in-
scrutable and terrible wis-
dom.
And this Richard Rubens-
tein could not accept.
After Auschwitz, which
Johns Hopkins University
Press has just published in a
revised second edition,
punctured the Jewish com-
munity's theological silence
— whether from guilt or
moral confusion — about the
Holocaust.
After After Auschwitz,
Rabbi Rubenstein was an
outcast to the Jewish estab-
lishment. A friend who ran a
major Jewish organization
told him, "... Every attempt
will be made to isolate you.
Formal expulsion would run
the risk of a story in the New
York Times or Time. Heresy
trials have gone out of fash-
ion. There is something ugly
about inquisitions. Besides,
they are unnecessary. The
same result can be accom-
plished without publicity
and without allowing you a
chance to defend yourself..."
Mr. Rubenstein was
squeezed out as rabbi of the
Hillel at the University of
Pittsburgh, and was essen-
tially blackballed from any
position in a Jewish univer-
sity or a university where
Jews had influence. He later
became a professor of reli-
gion at Florida State Univ-
ersity in Tallahassee.
Starting in 1976, he be-
came involved with Rev.
Moon after attending the
Moon-backed International
Conference on the Unity of
the Sciences.
"I liked what I saw," he
says. "It was a first-rate
conference. I got to know
Rev. Moon and came to a
fundamental conclusion •
about him: Instead of worry-
ing about our real enemies,
Jews were worrying about a
guy who wasn't our enemy
and didn't want to be our
enemy."
Many — Jews and other-
wise — disagree with the
rabbi. The American Jewish
Committee has tagged the
Unification Church "a
breeding ground for foster-
ing anti-Semitism."
The Divine Principle, the
church's Magna Carta, calls
CyJ