“Not Just a Symbol”: Neil Gillman’s Theological Method and Critical Realism

In my fourth year of rabbinical school at the Jewish Theological Seminary, I finally had the opportunity to study with Neil Gillman. For the three previous years, Neil had been the Dean of The Rabbinical School and was considered “The Man.” Having him as a teacher changed my theology and, consequently, my life. I had come into JTS with a strong background in Jewish history and Bible, but not much philosophy or theology. The class Neil taught was, in the curriculum at the time, a “Level 3 Methodology Class” in which we were to learn advanced Jewish theology. It was a class unlike any other I had taken at JTS. The final assignment was to write our own theology in some form, so I reformulated Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles of Faith. Neil urged me to try to have it published in Conservative Judaism and, when it was, my subsequent theological writing and deep interest in theology began.1 During the class, we were studying what has since been called “Gillman on Gillman”: a method for recreating Jewish theology between the Scylla of literalism and the Charybdis of secular humanism. One particular topic we discussed was Paul Tillich’s concepts of symbols and myths from his book Dynamics of Faith. I made a comment about how something was “just a symbol,” expressing the idea that, if a ritual or a term for God or a theological concept was “just a symbol” or a myth or a metaphor, it does not hold any deep meaning or truth. Neil whacked me on the shoulder and shouted at me, “Not just a symbol!”2 It was like being in a Zen koan and, if enlighten-