Practicing Imperfection: A Zen Rabbi and the Limits of Historical Inquiry Main Menu Alan Lew, Zen Rabbi Cracks in the Chronicle Archives and Autobiographies The Limits of Historical Inquiry?

Beyond Biography

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In the previous chapter, we discussed how the tools of historical inquiry – the selection, organization, and connecting – of past events, lead to the creation of narratives. Alan Lew might not have minded others applying such a process to his life. After all, he crafted his own stories about who he was based on how he understood his own past. But, historians do not just talk about individuals lives. By and large, they tend to shy away from an in-depth, and perhaps myopic, look at an individual life, electing instead to make arguments about social trends, cultural changes, and other large scale transformations that alter and create the world we live in.

Beyond Biography considers how the life of Alan Lew may help us understand changes to postwar American Judaism – specifically, the Jewish Renewal Movement and a turn towards spiritual practice among many practitioners of the religion during the latter portions of the twentieth century. As such, it places Lew’s life in broader context and attempts to articulate one way that we might think about his life’s historical significance.

By far, this chapter is the most “historical” in that, it will make an argument about the significance of Alan Lew’s life and actions. Throughout it, keep in mind our discussion of the historian’s role arranging facts and telling stories, as well as what a Zen Rabbi who once lamented that history reduces people to argument might have to say about our conclusions.
 

Contents of this path:

  1. Finding His Jewish Soul
  2. A Jewish Buddhist Community?