Fellowship at Harvard

Fellowship

Rabbi Reuven Leigh

at Harvard

I am sure that many of you can relate to how there comes a time when you need a break or a change of scenery from a familiar setting. After sixteen years here in Cambridge I had definitely reached that point. Don’t get me wrong, I thoroughly adore living in Cambridge and have absolutely no regrets, and most definitely want to continue living, learning, teaching and praying in Cambridge into the future, but I needed a chance to freshen up. So, it was my good fortune that I was awarded a short fellowship in Harvard for the fall semester, and whereas there are plenty of similarities between our Cambridge and theirs, I certainly got the break I was looking for. I found a nice small apartment just a stone’s throw away from Harvard Yard and the extraordinary library facilities. The extensive opening hours and comfortable working spaces, not to mention the huge Judaica division at the Widener Library puts our Cambridge to shame. It becomes immediately clear how these facilities are operated for the benefit of the students and researchers, making the job of research so much easier.

The main focus of my research during the semester was on a set of unpublished sermons of Rabbi Avraham Chein (1877-1957). Rabbi Chein served in rabbinic positions in Russia, Poland and France before arriving in Israel in 1935, where he emerged as a highly regarded thinker especially amongst the political and literary elites. He was extremely well versed in contemporary literature and philosophy and was a talented writer who garnered praise from figures such as Sholom Aleichem and Ahad Ha’am. His writings display a strong opposition to warfare and capital punishment and an all-round scepticism about the nation state. Notwithstanding the political nature of his articles he maintains an intense piety and spiritually rich tone throughout, resulting in an unusual example of Jewish theo-political writing. Rabbi Chein’s archive is housed in the National Library in Jerusalem and contains a large amount of unpublished material which I hope to examine further. For now, my time at Harvard enabled me to analyse