Being Jewish, conservative and academic at ABC Religion

By the time I joined the ABC’s Religion Department in 1992, at the suggestion of its Head, Father Paul Collins, and not before being grilled by a phalanx of senior RN producers, I had spent twenty years in the study, university lecturing and publishing on religion in Canada, Britain and Australia.

Collins, a Harvard trained theologian with a PhD in religious history from the ANU, knew how vital was scholarship in understanding the nuances of religious life and thought. He believed that after five years in a joint appointment at the University of Sydney’s Religious Studies and Semitic Studies Departments, I was ready to take the plunge, although I was chary of trading the academic life for the media.

Academia is often smug about its superiority to all other forms of knowledge, which brings to mind the Talmudic sage, Rabbi Zadok, who was descended from Zadok the high priest, known to both the Jewish and Christian biblical tradition for his faithfulness to God, loyalty to David and his anointing of Solomon as King in the period of the First Temple in Jerusalem. Rabbi Zadok lived in the Second Temple period and was also known to Jews for his extreme faith (he fasted for 40 years during the Roman occupation) as well as for his dictum in the Talmudic tractate, Ethics of the Fathers: “Do not wear your learning like a crown, or use it as a spade to dig.” In other words, learning should deepen faith and enlighten the world, not bring glory to yourself or be used as a tool for profit.

The proposition put to me by Collins, that religion could be intellectually robust and sensitively presented to a broader public with ears to hear and a willingness to listen, proved irresistible. Already used to field research, where I ventured into the ‘lived religion’ of various groups, churches, sectarian enclaves, cults and temples, I accepted that my intrepid skills, empathy and keen observation would easily translate to the work of producing and presenting programs for the Religion Department at the ABC.

An impressive array of programs was already offered by the department, a great tribute to the ABC’s constitutional commitment to religion and the dedication of my colleagues. While some of them and their programs came and went over the years, the enduring flagship half hour Religion Report was the best “immersion” experience by which to commence my 26 years of programming, producing and presenting. The sheer volume and complexity of religion stories quickly unsettled my academic crown of learning, and I soon realised that scholarship was not only proved in peer reviewed journals and academic tomes but was tested in the currents of living faith, the clashes and conflicts, discoveries and triumphs, fads and fears, personalities and politics that religion was subject to in Australia and around the world.