Gordis, Robert
GORDIS, ROBERT
GORDIS, ROBERT (1908–1992), U.S. Bible scholar, author, and rabbi. Gordis was born in New York City. He wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on Masoretic qere and ketib at Dropsie College, where his primary teacher was the renowned textual critic Max *Margolis. With prospects of academic employment curtailed by the Great Depression, Gordis decided to become a Conservative rabbi and was ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1932. He served as rabbi of Temple Beth El of Rockaway Park, n.y., from 1931 until his retirement in 1968, and while there established the first Conservative day school in the United States. Gordis did not abandon academic life. Invited in 1937 as an annual lecturer to the Seminary, Gordis served as professor of Bible beginning in 1940. Gordis also taught at Columbia University (1948–57), the (Protestant) Union Theological Seminary (1960), and Temple University. He served as editor of the periodical Judaism, president of the Rabbinical Assembly and of the Synagogue Council of America, and consultant to the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions.
Gordis' biblical scholarship has been in three major areas: Wisdom literature with special emphasis on the Books of Ecclesiastes and Job, to both of which he composed book-length commentaries; the forms of rhetoric and biblical poetry; and aspects of the masorah and the preservation of the biblical text. Gordis employed his considerable knowledge of rabbinic literature as a tool in biblical lexicography. Within the Conservative movement he was a spokesman for the centrist position, advocating change within the framework of the law. He also wrote on the relationship of Judaism to contemporary problems, on the pertinent insights of the Jewish tradition to the issues facing Western civilization, and on the status of Judaism in the modern age. Among his books are Koheleth: the Man and His World (1951), Judaism for the Modern Age (1955), Faith for Moderns (1960) Root and the Branch (1962), Book of God and Man: A Study of Job (1965), and Judaism in a Christian World (1966).
add. bibliography:
S.D. Sperling, in: dbi, 1;456.
[Jack Reimer /
S. David Sperling (2nd ed.)]