My Time at the GTU

Pinchas Giller Ph.D. ’90
Associate Professor of Medieval Jewish Thought at the Ziegler Rabbinical School of the University of Judaism, Los Angeles

I came to the GTU from Jerusalem, in flight from various kinds of orthodoxy. As an Orthodox Rabbi in Israel, I was a veritable mullah, able to help, serve and also mischievously complicate the lives of any citizens. Yet I had become suspicious of religious coercion as a value, and had begun to see, in the Jerusalem street, the aspects of spirituality that seemed common to the Western faiths. I also wanted to write about Jewish mysticism, but the Jerusalem school of Kabbalah studies was a daunting wall of straightened thinking. So professor Daniel Matt invited me to Berkeley, and I joined the History and Phenomenology of Religions area, which shaped me for all of my subsequent academic research.

Rather than schooling me in a rigid method of dissecting source material, the GTU allowed me to conduct an ongoing inquiry of my beliefs. If my sense was that Jungian psychology was the best methodology for analyzing the kabbalistic classic the Zohar, well, I didn’t need to hurdle a prejudiced or skeptical committee of historians—merely succeed in proving my point. I could adopt the post-structural methodologies currently in vogue, or follow my heart and sit at the feet of Robert Alter, a scholar whom I previously had revered from afar.

For my third book, I adopted an anthropological perspective, an act of chutzpah that could only have been enabled by my broad training at the GTU. I studied at the Institute for Buddhist Studies, and found in that institution the atmosphere that most resembled the study halls and prayer rooms of the Eastern European yeshivot that that had been my initial discipline. In studying with Lewis Lancaster, I was privileged to encounter a scholar in another field who was the counterpart of the enormous personalities who had roamed the Hebrew University. Professor Lancaster inspired the methodology that I employed in one of my first scholarly articles, on the veneration of sacred relics in Kabbalah.

And in the end, when employment possibilities led me to work at a small college, I immediately felt at home there. Anchored by my experience at a seminary in the hills above a California city, I knew how to act, and didn’t feel diminished by the intimate environment at all. My models in this were Huston Smith, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Father Hilary Martin, who moved gracefully among the seminarians and were available to anyone they passed in the halls. Today, I remain a nominally orthodox Jew in a Conservative seminary, and my model for gracious behavior is Bante Seeliwimala, the Theravada monk-in-residence at the Institute for Buddhist studies.

So it was that everywhere in the GTU I met individuals who had begun in one devotional frame of mind, and, like myself, were similarly moving on to another contemplative level. I found the cross-cultural empathy for which I had searched, and journeyed so far.

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