University of Chicago New Dean Welcome

University of Chicago New Dean Welcome

March 28, 2017 | Swift Hall

Thank you, President Zimmer, and thank youProvost Diermeier, for a lovely introduction. Your passion for this university, your excitement about leading it, and your clear support of the centrality of the Divinity School to it are some of the defining reasons that convinced me to come to the University of Chicago.

It is the honor of my academic life to come here as professor and dean, and I am extraordinarily grateful for your trust in me. It is a privilege to teach in this great city, at this great university, in a field of global inquiry so deeply important in our time. I am also thankful to the devoted search committee. Our discussion that first winter day was a wonderful introduction to the rigor, the integrity and the excellent scholarship of this school and to the care with which you each attend to it, and to the serious intentionality of your thoughtful participation. Thank you for writing my favorite description of the Divinity School: A place that pays “attention to the existential, moral and practical claims of religion not to the bracketing of them.” You all do so much for the Divinity School. Thank you to the faculty and the staff who took the time to be a part of the search process, for your generosity and your engagement. I cannot wait to meet everyone and learn more about your work. Your work has made this Divinity School the most interesting and important center for research and teaching in my field. I thank you all for the challenge you presented to me, and to your welcome when I accepted that challenge. Of course, I also celebrate the historic nature of my deanship—the first serious Cubs fan to serve as Dean.

Let me begin, as dean, by considering a section of the Talmud Balvi. Tractate Shabbat 114a. Let me begin in the middle of the conversation, as most Talmudic debates do.

What are banna'im, builders, they ask?

Said R. Johanan: These are scholars, who are engaged all their days in the building up of the world.

R. Johanan also said: Who is the scholar to whom a lost article is returned on his recognition alone?

That [scholar] who is particular to turn his shirt.

R. Johanan also said: Who is the scholar that is appointed a leader of the community? He who when asked a matter of halachah, in any place can answer it, even in the Tractate Kallah.

R. Johanan also said: Who is the scholar whose work it is the duty of his townspeople to perform? He who abandons his own interest and engages in religious affairs; yet that is only to provide his bread.

R. Johanan also said: Who is a scholar? He who is asked a halachah in any place and can state it.

What is going on in this discussion? We are in the Amoraic period, around 270 CE. We overhear a discussion that begins with a definition, like all good philosophical discussions: what are builders? The word is fairly clear, builders are, well, builders of things. But the discussion turns: scholarsare the builders of the world. The rabbis of the Talmud are having a sartorial discussion, and at first, the bar is set fairly low: Don't go into the marketplace wearing torn shoes or with stains on your clothes or the saddle of your horse. But then: Because, you are building the world, you scholar, a hubric claim, the bar set high. Who is the scholar that we can trust, they ask, whose word alone is trustworthy? Well, somebody answers, perhaps mockingly, perhaps seriously: he is the guy who wears his shirt right side out. So much for world creation. But who is the scholar who is a leader, asks Rabbi Johanan, again? It is someone who can answer a question of law, from anyplace in the canon of law, even the most obscure one. And the question is asked a third time: who is a scholar? This time, it requires much more: abandon your work, study, we will support you. And again: who is the scholar? And the fourth time, the answer is repeated: the one who can answer from anywhere. Of course, the repeated phrase creates a doubled possibility: answering a question from anyplace in the canon, and answering the question from anyplace one inhabits? From the marketplace, from the city? A scholar who would build the world must live in the world, must do work that the people in the city think is worth supporting. The rabbinic imagination does love that obscure tractate, to be sure, but they have deeper goals. In the social imaginary that is rabbinic discourse, scholars have serious duties.

Who is a scholar and who is a leader? It is an enduring question for us. Our beloved academy, how are we in the world, how do we build a world? Is our scholarship worthy? I believe that the Divinity School is the place for that sort of transcendent scholarship. For generations of American scholars of religion, Chicago has been the place that can answer “from everywhere.” Both from every obscure canon, and from every public location.

I am dazzled by your scholarship. Coming to Chicago means working with, thinking with and teaching with the scholars to whom I have turned my entire academic life, whose books are on my shelves, and whose ideas matter in the long, excellent project that is the study of religion.

We—and now I can say that, we—have the very best divinity school in the country, one of the very best in the world. This is all because of you, and especially thanks to the two deans who proceeded me, MargaretM. Mitchell and Richard A. Rosengarten. It is this excellence that calls us to the work before us. I think we live at an hour in which the work before us is urgent. In our country, in our city, we are called to attention in what many have argued is a newly critical time for democracy, civility and urbanity. It is not, I think, a unique time in our country. But what makes it a distinctive time for scholars of religion is that our field: the texts we study, the practices we encounter, the scriptures, the literatures and the images on which we are focused, these are the languages of public discourse. The passions of politics are often inexplicable without understanding the arguments of faith. The ethical and moral dilemmas that surround us as we create the ideas that will shape the future, these too, are inexplicable, are opaque without the languages of faith traditions. We live in modernity, a modernity that we have been told since Weber is secular. But we know that the questions of the future: genetics, robotics, all of the promises of genetic technology, and all of serious threats to our future, the violence, injustice, ecological instability, cannot be fully answered without the arguments in the languages of religion.

We teach fluency in these languages. As scholars of religion and theology, we know ideas matter, we know that the words, sentences,and arguments, that emerged in and were preserved in these languages has been and should be some of the many heard in the public square, in the face to face encounters insisted upon by Levinas and Arendt, that make being and then civic life possible. I know you value what Dean Rosengarten has said is this “reciprocalconversation” –a conversation, he writes,“that is at its best truly when it is a practice of continual respect in which argument and evidence, informed by imagination, forge and sustain a collegiality with a vocabulary and syntax refined by an ongoing commitment to sympathetic listening.”

What a joy to be the newest member of that community.

I promise to listen to each of you carefully, with sympathy and imagination. I have much to learn, for all of you, faculty, staff, and students, you know so much about our University and its elegant traditions. And yet, I know we can be even more, even greater, although that is a freighted word. We will be greater at our school, we will continue to teach the next generation of complexly trained, dedicated scholarly leaders.For the University, in which we are first professional school and in which we are a central carrier of the ideas and values, pellucid and powerful—that are the drivers of excellence at Chicago, we will be an even greater partner, a site of truthful inquiry.We will do our part to answer the greatest questions of the academy: what does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be free? What must I do about the suffering of the other? In our field, where we can be greatly called, we will shape the contours of rigorous, scholarly research for a generation. For the good city in which we are privileged to live, amidst a plurality of communities and social locations where religion is the site of meaning, we can listen, even more carefully, to what faith might bring, and what service justifies our work. For our country, for all the publics that surround this University, we will insist that the world that is illuminated by intellectual inquiry can have a voice, can speak to our shared future.

What can the thoughtful, serious and engaged study of religion do? It can answer from every text, it can answer from every place. It can build the world.

I want to end by returning to the Talmud, this conversation about the City of Rome.

“There are three hundred and sixty-five thoroughfares in the great city of Rome, and in each there were three hundred and sixty-five palaces; and in each palace, there were three hundred and sixty-fivestories, and each story contained sufficient to provide the whole world with food. Simeon b. Rabbi asked Rabbi— For whom are all these other stories then? — They are for you, your companions and your friends…as it is said….for her gain shall be for them that dwell before the Lord. What means ‘for them that dwell before the Lord’?

— Said R. Eleazar:

They who recognize their colleagues’ place in the academy. Others state, R. Eleazar said: They who welcome their colleagues to the academy.”

Thank you so much for being such welcoming colleagues, and I hope, companions and friends. Let us build this world together.

–Laurie Zoloth, Margaret E. Burton Professor and Dean of the Divinity School

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