Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Hebrew University of Jerusalem is the institution that frames Judah Loeb’s formative encounter with Israel and with Chaim Lerner. During Judah’s year in the One Year Program, the university is where he attends Lerner’s theology class, meets Michal, and eventually becomes involved in Lerner’s intellectual world. Its significance lies in this convergence: the university is an academic setting, but it is also the threshold through which Judah moves beyond the protected assumptions of his American student life.

Campus as a Cultural Border

At the beginning of Judah’s stay, Hebrew University of Jerusalem is divided by an informal social boundary. The One Year Program creates an English-language bubble populated mainly by American and Canadian students, with a wider circle of British, South African, and Belgian acquaintances. The students can negotiate practical encounters in Hebrew—shopping, doing laundry, speaking with bus drivers, asking directions, bargaining in the Arab market, or arguing over shared facilities—but socially they remain largely among English speakers. Judah admits that he does not cross this border. Israeli students speak with a speed and confidence that intimidate him, and he is more willing to explore Bethlehem or Hebron than to initiate a friendly conversation with an Israeli student in his own dormitory.

Michal exposes the limitations of that arrangement. Judah first notices her around the campus: alone at the Frank Sinatra cafeteria, arguing with the registrar in Hebrew, working energetically at the library kiosk, and moving between Israeli and international social circles. Her light-blue Italian ten-speed, which she pedals up Mount Scopus through Wadi Joz, makes her conspicuous in early-1980s Jerusalem. More important, her trilingual ease allows her to speak Arabic with Palestinian cleaning workers, Hebrew with Israeli students, and unaccented English with the Americans. Through Michal, the university’s divisions become visible as permeable rather than absolute, and Judah’s sheltered foreignness becomes newly apparent to him.

Lerner’s Classroom

Judah meets Michal when she chooses the seat beside him on the first day of Chaim Lerner’s course, “Theologies of the Holocaust.” The class attracts only a little more than twenty students despite Lerner’s reputation, the subject’s importance, and the room’s capacity for fifty. Lerner appears with a stack of books nearly half his size, limping and favoring his left knee. He stumbles near the desk, but the books slide into a neat pile while he catches himself and hoists himself onto the desk, swinging his feet as though dancing to unheard music. His physical difficulty and his unusual grace arrive together, preventing Judah from reducing him either to a frail survivor or to an abstract public intellectual.

Lerner greets the students as “Kinder,” immediately establishing an atmosphere closer to familial intimacy than formal academic distance. Judah experiences him as a charismatic, grandfatherly figure whose warmth invites both agreement and argument. The classroom therefore becomes the first place where Judah encounters Lerner’s characteristic mixture of humor, vulnerability, theology, and performance. The course title initially attracts Judah because he is curious about religion, although he does not fully understand what “theologies” means. The university supplies the institutional form for a question that will later govern his work: how can Jewish thought confront God, evil, and the Holocaust without surrendering either intellectual rigor or emotional truth?

From Student to Apprentice

The university also becomes the setting for Judah’s movement from observer to participant. After Michal tells Lerner about him, she and Lerner wait outside the classroom for Judah the following day. Lerner grasps Judah’s hand in both of his warm fists and tells him that he is honored to meet him. He invites Judah to dinner on Friday night, an invitation that carries Judah out of the lecture room and into the Lerner household, where he meets Zehava Lerner and sees the private world behind the public teacher.

Judah’s relationship with Lerner develops into employment and intellectual apprenticeship. When Judah later works for Lerner as a student, he is still unable to read Aramaic or Hebrew and barely speaks or understands Hebrew. Lerner treats this ignorance as an interesting limitation rather than a disqualification. In one academic exchange, Lerner explains a passage from the Zohar concerning the divine name “Mi,” or “who.” His interpretation turns a grammatical question into a theological principle: God’s name is inseparable from inquiry, and spirituality consists in searching for an answer rather than possessing one. The university thus mediates a transfer of knowledge that is also a lesson in method. Lerner does not merely give Judah conclusions; he teaches him to treat questions as a form of religious and intellectual life.

The University’s Expanding World

The institution’s physical and social setting places Judah close to the competing communities that shape Lerner’s thought. From campus and Jerusalem, Lerner takes Judah to Pisgat David, a West Bank settlement whose suburban houses, green lawns, garages, and children playing American football contradict Judah’s expectation of tents, guard towers, prefabricated buildings, and barbed wire. Lerner speaks there to a theater filled with roughly one thousand people, winning the audience first through jokes and then through a quiet, emotionally charged account that draws tears. The journey from the university to the settlement extends Judah’s education beyond theology: Lerner’s classroom method is tested in the political and religious spaces he once described as belonging to people he hated and who hated him.

At another public talk, Lerner addresses Modern Orthodox rabbis at the Rav Kook Institute. Many are former students, and Lerner greets them with the warmth of a small-town politician. Although his worsening limp makes the physical effort painful, he speaks in English, begins with jokes, praises Modern Orthodox rabbis, and then turns to Holocaust narratives. The university’s influence is therefore not confined to a campus curriculum. Lerner’s teaching travels outward through students, religious institutions, settlements, and public audiences, while Judah learns to understand the connections among academic authority, religious identity, political conflict, and collective memory.

Lasting Consequences

Hebrew University of Jerusalem remains decisive after Judah leaves Israel because it is the origin point of his ties to Lerner and Michal. The student who arrived unable to cross the social boundary between American and Israeli life leaves with access to Lerner’s household, ideas, and unresolved history. Years later, when Judah rereads Lerner’s Our Imperfect God in rehab, memories of the university period return with Lerner’s voice and with nearly all of their conversations. That recollection eventually leads to Judah’s book proposal about Lerner’s life and death.

The university also indirectly shapes Hannah Loeb’s later religious development. After returning to Israel years later, Hannah receives religious books from Rabbi Kaplowitz, including Returning for the Answer: A Guide to Coming Home for the Young Jew. She eventually enters rabbinical school and identifies the book as a major religious influence; in her senior sermon at Hebrew Union College, she presents Lerner’s theology of a God with infinite love but limited power. The intellectual questions first encountered by Judah at Hebrew University of Jerusalem therefore continue across generations, changing from a student’s hesitant curiosity into Hannah’s confident religious vocation. The institution’s deepest narrative function is to make such transmission possible: it is where personal relationships, academic inquiry, Israeli social divisions, and post-Holocaust theology first meet.