Hartman 2026
It is one year short of 18, my favorite Jewish number. However, for this purpose, 17 will do.
Tomorrow Wednesday June 24 2026 I will attend my tenth CLP at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. The first time I walked into the Hartman campus was the summer of 2009. I was only 51 years old and eager to find an alternative discourse to the Jewish conversation back home in Montevideo, Uruguay. I certainly did.
Seventeen years later, my wife and I have attended CLP at Hartman together six times. Except for family reasons, a pandemic, and war, we always came. That discourse, that alternative Jewish conversation I was looking for initially, became our Jewish conversation at home.
We have gone even further: we have introduced, or at least tried to with relative success, the Hartman discourse into our congregation and our Jewish community at home. As Donniel Hartman told me in a Zoom interview during the pandemic, he trusted we could translate it into the appropriate language for our fellow Jews. He was not referring to translation from English to Spanish.
It is well known that American Jewish life is a world in itself, and no other community in the world can compare to it in scope, power, and identity values. Maybe the community in Argentina comes close, but even then, not quite… Our tiny Uruguayan community is a completely different game. Even so, we have managed to highlight the words of Torah that come out of Hartman for our specific use at home.
To put it in simple terms: the Jewish conversation in our community has traditionally focused on Halacha, denominations, and Rabbis; the Hartman conversation focuses on values, aspiration, and vision. We are grateful that our congregation at home has had, over the years, the disposition to listen and learn, and to even think in terms of the Hartman discourse. I suppose you can always end up shouting into the ‘sounds of silence’, but our fellow Jews at home were eager to listen. We were eager to share.
The last three years have been highly and unexpectedly challenging for Jews all over the world. All of a sudden, the Jewish conversation has shifted to antisemitism, from NYC to Montevideo. As it usually happens, antisemitism tends to unify. #Oct7h hit us all: Israelis first and foremost; but Jews all over the world have felt the waves of the shock in different ways. As Antisemitism unites, our different ways to cope with the aftermath of that tragic day and its consequent wars face us, again, with our differences.
Be it Trump, Mamdani, or a left-wing government in Uruguay, the menaces are there for all of us to see if we just look enough. However, at the same time, the need for an alternative discourse is essential if we want to be more than just victims. History tends to repeat itself, but times have changed. We have power like never before in history, but we have come to learn that it is not all about strength. There is a wisdom we have to turn back to, from our sages onward.
As we start this new week at CLP at Hartman, we are sure we will find wisdom and hope. At the same time, we hope to find a renewed sense of purpose, new roads ahead, a new Torah that helps us pave the road for our grandchildren. As much as aspirations, ideals, and values matter, the outcome will depend on how each of us can act in his own community. Be it in Israel through voting, be it at home coping with the new challenges with daring wisdom.
After all, Judaism is built on words (sacred and otherwise), but at the end of the day the proof is in the action.