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Why (as in yaverbaum)
was academic, was explaining my religion’s cores to me. (Judaism had not been explained to me theretofore or, as we shall see, thereafter, even though I was in constant contact with its customs.) Professor Pemberton also led me through, among other thickets, the numerous and conflict- ing historical and contemporary theological approaches to Christianity, which I found fascinating, and even more fascinating when I considered that the distinctions were not just academic: people killed because of differing views concerning the relationship between Jesus and God that, to an outsider, would appear to be meaningless—or, if not meaningless, then at least not sufficient to cause one person to set another on fire.
Completely new to me was religion viewed through the lens of existentialism, the study of which led to what I view as a very special occasion. The two most famous existentialist Western theologians are Martin Buber, a German Jewish theologian who authored Ich und Du (I and Thou) and who left Germany to settle in Jerusalem in 1938, and Paul Tillich, a German American who, having left Germany in 1933 after coming into conflict with the Nazi regime, wrote a three-volume work called Systematic Theology. Tillich’s best-known popular work was the far more accessible and very famous The Courage to Be, which we were read- ing in Professor Pemberton’s class. One day, while we were examining the “ground of being,” Tillich’s concept of God, John Ward, a fraternity brother who was also taking the class, became aware of the fact that Til- lich would be visiting Sarah Lawrence College. John’s father was then the president of Sarah Lawrence—and it seems that he would be host- ing Tillich for dinner the very next evening! It also seems that I had a car; John did not.
John and I had drinks and dinner with Professor Tillich the next night, and Tillich spoke to the two of us with great energy and warmth. He was particularly interested in the fact that I was Jewish, and, although I am sure that he knew more about Judaism than I did, he acted as though I were the teacher and he the student as he questioned me about my forebears’ religion. An ineradicable memory was formed for me when, to sum up his views concerning what I had explained, he moved his open hand straight up from his lap to a point above his head and said,
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