Page 251 - WhyAsInY

Mass revival
Prior to returning, I was leaning toward switching my major from English, probably to philosophy, a subject, you might recall, that had initially attracted my attention when I was a freshman. To be on the safe side and to keep in touch with English, I signed up for Modern Poetry and Romantic Poetry. And, so as not to overload my schedule, I took four courses, rather than my usual five. I chose to add the following to the English courses: American Government, a course that would be given by one of my favorite teachers, Professor Ziegler (an experienced student takes the professor as much as he takes the course), and Religion 49, called Contemporary Religious Thought, a course taught by Profes- sor John Pemberton.
I wish to clarify at the outset that neither Mrs. Mandelbaum’s inces- sant “Aharon, sheket buhvakashah” nor Rabbi Halpern’s finger-wagging admonition at my bar mitzvah (see Chapter Nine), explains my motiva- tion for taking that course (I think). I confess (how’s that for clever use of a religious concept?) that when I read Professor Pemberton’s course description in the catalog, I felt that it would be a filler that would be the key to success at whatever cocktail parties awaited me in my adulthood. Why? Because the description referred to readings from a skein of writ- ers with whom one should have more than a nodding acquaintance if one aspired to be regarded, in the haze of alcohol induced by such social events, as an “intellectual”: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Faulkner, Sartre, Eliot, Freud, Eliade, Kant, Bonhoeffer, Tillich, Barth, Otto, Schopen- hauer, and others. One other, probably better, reason: the course, I thought, had “gut” (easy) written all over it. That evaluation was, how- ever, somewhat misguided.
The materials used in Religion 49 were actually difficult if you cared, and I found myself caring. They were also fascinating. Pemberton was a fine lecturer, and the papers posed well-thought-out questions. Religion 49, if you forgive this indulgence (yes, that’s a word relating to religion as well), proved to be somewhat of a salvation (oops) for me. It was not just the readings of the authors referred to above that got to me. Someone who wasn’t invested in Judaism, an outsider whose approach
• 233 •