In this edition of his Search for Meaning podcast, Stephen Wise Temple Senior Rabbi Yoshi Zweiback hosts writer, educator, and human rights advocate Rabbi Michael Marmur, Ph.D. Until 2018, Rabbi Marmur served as the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Provost at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. Before that, he served as Dean of HUC-JIR’s Jerusalem campus, where he hired a young Rabbi Yoshi Zweiback to be the Director of HUC-JIR’s Year-in-Israel Program in 2009.

A published author, passionate educator, and inquisitive historian, Rabbi Marmur thinks critically about the evolving role of spirituality and what it means to be religious in modern Jewish life. With his wry British sense of humor and a quick wit, Rabbi Marmur is an expert storyteller, using anecdotes and keen observations to illustrate philosophical ideas. A board member of Rabbis for Human Rights, Rabbi Marmur also shares what spurred him to become such a tireless advocate for human dignity. Would you believe it has something to do with Armageddon? Once you start listening to this episode, you won’t want to stop.

About Rabbi Marmur

Rabbi Marmur was born and raised in England, the son of two Polish immigrants by way of Sweden. His father, Rabbi Dov Marmur, was proud of the family’s working-class background, particularly his own father, who served as a factory foreman. It wasn’t until after World War II that the elder Rabbi Marmur pursued a career in the rabbinate. When the elder Rabbi Marmur, a renowned educator, was asked if he came from a distinguished rabbinical family, he would answer, “No, but my children do.”

Michael knew he wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps for as long as he can remember. He wound up doing so in more ways than one.

Taking his bachelor’s degree in Modern History at Oxford, he married his natural affinity for theology with a passion for study. In 1984, he moved to Israel, where he completed his studies in the Israel Rabbinic Program of HUC-JIR in Jerusalem while studying for his master’s in Ancient Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

For six years after he was ordained in 1992, the younger Rabbi Marmur worked as rabbi and teacher at the Leo Baeck Education Center in Haifa, where he began to delve into the writings of Rabbi Abraham Heschel as he pondered a subject for his doctoral thesis. As Rabbi Heschel became somewhat of a fascination for the younger Rabbi Marmur, he discovered that his father, too, had read Rabbi Heschel with great interest, carefully annotating his own copies of Rabbi Heschel’s works.

“Since then, he’s been a major part of what I think about and what I do,” Rabbi Marmur says. “Heschel has been a major intellectual, spiritual, religious preoccupation of mine for many, many years.”

In 2016, he wrote his first book: Abraham Joshua Heschel and the Sources of Wonder (2016), an exploration into how one of the most significant Jewish thinkers in modern times read, interpreted, and used traditional Jewish sources.

“Heschel is a remarkable figure,” says Rabbi Marmur.  “Heschel did not put himself in one of the two great camps which delineate certainly the Jewish North American experience, which I would call the tikkun olam/social justice camp or the Jewish spirituality camp.”

Rabbi Heschel rejected the notion that the spiritual and social/political were separate and distinct, and did not believe that religion should be confined to one’s own home. He cited Biblical prophets who advocated for the widow, the orphan, and the poverty-stricken, and the fact that God repeatedly demands justice. Not surprisingly, Heschel actively mobilized for the Civil Rights Movement and voiced his opposition to the Vietnam War.

“Heschel is a good bridge … [between] my current theological project and my involvement in Rabbis for Human Rights,” says Rabbi Marmur.

Rabbis for Human Rights is group of about 150 Israeli rabbis from across the Jewish religious spectrum that promotes and protects civil rights of all who live in Israel and beyond. They do so not despite their identities as rabbis, but because the imperative to protect human dignity is part of why they joined the clergy. Rabbi Marmur’s journey to becoming part of the organization ironically started out in a jail.

Rabbi Marmur describes himself as “Israel’s least significant soldier throughout its entire military history.” Having made aliyah after the age when most Israeli citizens are required to serve, and with a baby at home, his service lasted just four months. During those four months, he was briefly stationed as a jailor in an infamous location: Megiddo.

“Megiddo, you should know … is where ‘Armageddon’ gets its name from,” Rabbi Marmur says. “It’s the place where the great, sort-of cataclysmic battle between good and evil is, according to some apocalyptic visions, at some point in the future. As I sat in that prison, perspiring at a rate you could only imagine, I was reading Eugene Borowitz’s theology, called Renewing the Covenant, and that’s a book that asks the question, ‘How should a liberal Jew think about commitment, obligation, and duty?'”

The premise touched on the same themes and concepts he had read in Rabbi Heschel’s writing, and the irony of where he was reading that particular book was not lost on him.

“I was reading it as a jailor in Megiddo Jail, sitting in the synagogue not for religious reasons, but because the air conditioner worked better there than anywhere else,” Rabbi Marmur says. “I found the contrast of reading this philosophical book about Jewish duty I was doing my army duty as a good metaphor for that: What are the moral implications? What are the political and social realities? What happens to Judaism when it is reintroduced to political sovereignty after a small gap of some 2,000 years.”

Rabbi Marmur serves on Rabbis for Human Rights’ board and was its Chair for three years. RHR has been invited into many Mechina programs, pre-army preparatory programs that Israeli youths can take part in as they postpone their army service for a year. Mechina programs typically include learning, leadership, and service components. RHR invites these future soldiers to grapple with existential questions of human rights, and what it means to protect the rights of those around them, including those on the other side of the battle lines.

Now focusing on writing and teaching as an Associate Professor of Jewish Theology at HUC-JIR/Jerusalem, Rabbi Marmur recently published an anthology, American Jewish Thought Since 1934, a collection of writings on identity, engagement, and belief he co-edited with HUC-JIR chancellor emeritus David Ellenson. His next project is compiling a theological periodic table of ideas. The finished work will arrange Jewish moral, ethical, and spiritual/religious words, ideas, terms and concepts according to the Hebrew alphabet. It will invite readers to play with, combine, and investigate these various elements of conscience to understand their own concept of Judaism.

“One of the chapters asks what it means for us to live alongside each other, knowing that we all have our own kinds of perceptual equipment,” says Rabbi Marmur. “We all see the world in different ways, and we process that which we experience through different means. Then, the question is: What happens when I or you are occupying the same space, but employ … different ways of seeing?”

This work, influenced by Rabbi Heschel, has bearing on not only the current American political climate, but on the situation in Israel at this historic moment, as well.