Why Hartman Is Important

So why am I going gaga over David Hartman?

What I'm about to present is an idea that has possessed me for a long time, though I've not yet been able to articulate it. It may still remain, at this stage, plenty pre-articulate, but I take my inability to quickly encapsulate it as a sign of its intellectual size and importance.

Why spend so much time, one might ask, examining who we are and who we're becoming as a people and a religion? Rather just become, and let the details attendant sort themselves out. Why intellectualize the process?

By our nature as human beings we are unprepared for the future. The human soul God created is, more than anything else, a mass of infinite potential. It isn't that we can become anything - there are limits upon us - but that we can become an infinity of things. מה רבו מעשיך יה - how many are the things You have created, God. And it is a mistake to regard the future as a line that stretches out before us - the branches of what could be are uncountable.

The art of living, then, is the art of embracing what could be. The art of selecting from the many roads that lay right ahead of the now. So living well demands a consciousness of the manifold choices born in every moment. It demands understanding. This is why Torah is eternal - it is not that it doesn't change, but that it is forever designed to help us understand as we change.

והיה כעץ שתול על פלגי מים אשר פריו יתן בעתו ועלהו לא יבול וכל אשר יעשה יציח - תהלים א
And that person is like a tree planted by pools of water (that's the Torah) who gives its fruit in its own time, and whose leaves never with, and all that she does will succeed. Psalm 1