Golden Rule Poem by gershon hepner

To find oneself within another, while
another is within
oneself, is what defines the loving style
of games that are win-win.

Inspired by Lev.19: 18 and a paper that my nephew Alon Goshen-Gottstein dedicated to me for my seventieth birthday, citing Ps.90: 12 in a subtle wordplay. The paper, “Jewish-Christian Relations and Rabbinical Literature––Shifting Scholarly and Relational Paradigms: The Case of Two Powers, ” argues that perspectives on the relationship between rabbinic and early Christian literature are affected by contemporary mindsets and the authors’ emotional stances. He illustrates this with an analysis of the position of Daniel Boyarin, which replaces the polemical model adopted by previous scholars, notably Ephraim Urbach and Jacob Yuval, with one that validates each side, presenting the authors of both rabbinic and early Christian literature as legitimate heirs of an earlier stage of Judaism in they coexisted without clear borderlines. Goshen-Gottstein points out that Boyarin’s position emerges from the context of the American academy which “is based on a pluralistic ethos, where members, often representatives, of different religious traditions work alongside one another in a way that maintains their religious identity while sharing a broader framework of the humanities or of religious studies.” Citing Boyarin’s declaration that, “As long as I can remember I have been in love with some manifestation of Christianity” (Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity [Philadelphia,2004], ix) , Goshen-Gottstein describes the emotional roots of Boyarin’s position as “finding oneself within the other and the other within oneself.” He argues that since Boyarin finds himself in an ambivalent movement that seeks to establish identity and difference simultaneously, his scholarship is conducted in a context that is neither theologically nor emotionally neutral, and proposes a third model.


8/15/08