Abstract

Every speech has a long ancestry, even if it was composed for a novel occasion. It may help to clarify my purposes in today’s speech if I say a few words about its genealogy and its genesis. Its lone ancestor was my undergraduate teacher, Simon Kaplan, a learned and a pious man. I recall vividly the day he admonished me in a thick Russian accent which I can’t mimic, “Mr. Lachterman, you spend all your time with the Greeks and none of your time with the Jews.” Although he prepared a reading list of traditional Jewish texts for me, it was many years before I undertook to read the books on that list. I was, however, able to repay a small portion of the extravagant debt that I owed him both as a teacher and as a friend, by helping him with the English translation of Hermann Cohen’s Religion of Reason, a book about which I shall have more to say later.