At the end of August, the Times ran a story about a Harvard chaplain named Greg Epstein, an avowed atheist and “humanist rabbi,” who had been selected by his fellow-chaplains at the university (there are more than thirty of them, of diverse faiths) to serve as their president. Here was an ivory-tower man-bites-dog tale that elicited some context about the ascendancy of secularism, both at a particular institution (one founded, almost four centuries ago, essentially as a seminary) and in the culture at large. “We don’t look to a god for answers,” Epstein told the paper. “We are each other’s answers.”
In response to this relatively mild provocation, readers aligned themselves according to their own cosmologies. In the comments online, nonbelievers, generally, expressed versions of “Right on!,” while believers tended toward “How could they?” For the former, it was good to encounter an affirmation that a godless earthling could pursue spiritual and pastoral paths. To the latter, it seemed absurd to apply the word “chaplain” to a nonreligious, chapel-less counsellor, and to elevate such a figure to a position of authority over people of faith; would the College of Cardinals elect a nihilist Pope?
Other outlets, including the Boston Globe and NPR, took up the story. Some suggested, erroneously, that Epstein had been tapped to head the divinity school, while the Daily Mail seemed to imply that Harvard had empowered Epstein to lead the entire university. Religious leaders took offense. Of the Times piece, the Harvard Christian Alumni Society stated, “It seems written in a way to prompt secular triumphalism and to provoke Christian outrage.” An “auxiliary” Catholic bishop in Los Angeles, in a column in the Post, lamented “the complete and abject surrender on the part of the presumably religious leaders at Harvard who chose this man.” All predictable enough, in year whatever of the culture wars.
Some of the other chaplains at Harvard were put off by the coverage, and by the implication that Epstein’s gain was faith’s loss. The chaplain who preceded Epstein as president, Rabbi Jonah Steinberg, the executive director of Harvard Hillel, sent Epstein a letter and cc’d the other Harvard chaplains. He described his missive as a public rebuke, which he justified with references to Leviticus, Maimonides, and the Talmud, but it also served as a supple denunciation of self-aggrandizement—a plea for humility in a look-at-me age and in a don’t-look-at-me line of work.
Steinberg wrote, “A story has been told that has promoted you beyond any status our body of Harvard Chaplains has remit to confer, causing misunderstanding and distress and bringing about damage to colleagues’ reputations and to communities’ trust in their pastors and advisors. Let me suggest—if there has been a degree of self-promotion in this course of events, there must now be a matching degree of remediation on your part.”
The rabbi granted that the outrage of some of their colleagues would be justifiable if, as he wrote, “the role of President of the Harvard Chaplains were as the journalists who have reported about you in recent days have taken it to be—but I believe the failure there may be on your part in allowing or encouraging a journalistic perception without correcting the public story yourself.”
Steinberg did not seem to think, or want to think, that Epstein’s appointment had much to do with secularism or with a decline in faith. The position of president, as Steinberg, having occupied it, understood it to be, is more point person than director, it being a matter of convenience to have a liaison between the dozens of disparate chaplaincies and the university’s administration. And yet when the Harvard Catholic Center also downplayed the position as purely administrative, the Crimson scoffed. Its editorial board wrote last week, “Epstein’s presidency is indeed significant, a bit of a shock, and—most importantly—cause for celebration.” The a-religious, heavily represented in Cambridge but hardly at all in, say, Congress, had a champion.
For Steinberg, the greater indulgence was that of self-assertion, in a reputation economy that encourages it. “The most striking and disappointing headline to me was the one you gave your own email message sharing the New York Times article with our body,” he wrote. “ ‘I’m in the NYTimes Today.’ ”
Epstein, the author of a book called “Good Without God,” has been the humanist chaplain at Harvard since 2005 and serves in a similar role at M.I.T. For a time, he was an ethicist-in-residence at TechCrunch. He grew up in Flushing, Queens, as a self-described “assimilated and disinterested Reform Jew” and discovered Buddhism and Taoism in high school, at Stuyvesant. He’s a graduate of Harvard Divinity School but has no connection to it in his current role.
Perhaps, in the midst of the High Holy Days, Epstein, having digested the rabbi’s rebukes, offered some private remediation—but all he’d say, last week, about Steinberg’s letter was “I appreciated it and thanked him for it, and I look forward to continuing to work closely with him.” Steinberg, for his part, declined to say anything more, citing Rosh Hashanah. He also, true to his dispatch, expressed a reluctance to “center myself further in these recent events.” ♦
