Yann Boissière is a rabbi at the Mouvement Juif Libéral de France (MJLF), alongside Delphine Horvilleur and Floriane Chinsky. Converted to Judaism in the mid-1990s, ordained a rabbi in November 2011, he looks back, in this interview, on his unusual path.
N. Vasseur: Yann Boissière, you were born in 1962 into a non-Jewish French family. How would you define your family background?
YB: My family belongs to what one might call the provincial bourgeoisie; I grew up in Montargis. My father was an engineer, my mother held various jobs, including that of chartered accountant, but she was also very sensitive to literature, whereas my father was above all a rationalist. The values upheld at home were those of education, of meritocracy… I can say I had an extremely happy childhood — as Anatole France said: happy people have no history. I played football, I made music, I did well at school; in short, all was well.
NV: Did spirituality have a place in your family?
YB: No, none. If there was a religion at home, it was that of education. My father was agnostic, even atheist. My mother had been raised by nuns during the war, but that was above all because her parents had sent her to the countryside to shelter her from the bombings. She was not a believer — at any rate she did not practice any particular religion — but she had a great appetite for spiritual and, more broadly, intellectual questions. Religion, as such, was absolutely not present in our home. As a child, I never set foot in a church, except for cultural-type visits.
NV: In a forthcoming autobiographical text, you say that in your youth the word “God” scraped your lips — which means, then, that religion existed for you all the same, even if in a repulsive way.
YB: I mean that God simply was not part of my vocabulary. That doesn’t mean I never spoke of it, but religion was not my “language game,” as Wittgenstein says; I formalized things otherwise. It’s true that in churches, when I happened to visit them, I felt rather ill at ease; they had something dark, damp, clammy about them, which I didn’t like. This is a very superficial feeling… Let’s say that I defined myself as rational, which did not prevent me from having a great curiosity toward spiritualities. Indeed, I read enormously, about a bit of everything.
NV: What did you study?
YB: My studies were very zigzag. I took a science baccalauréat, then I studied Anglo-American civilization and linguistics; I also did history and musicology, I studied directing at a film school — all of it in parallel! In short, a merry mix. At twenty, decked out with degrees of every kind, I ended up working in cinema, at the time as an assistant director. I was also writing…
NV: And so in 1989 you attend a lecture by Pierre-Henri Salfati, an intellectual close to the Lubavitch movement, on the Song of Songs, and there comes the “revelation.” But can one speak of revelation — isn’t the concept rather a Christian one?
YB: A friend had persuaded me to come: “You’ll see, this guy is brilliant, he talks about philosophy, he talks about Judaism, he talks about all kinds of things.” And indeed, that’s what he did, in a remarkable way. He would set out from one or two verses of the Bible and journey through thought far, wide, high. And it really was a kind of revelation. His vocabulary was completely foreign to my way of formulating things, and yet I immediately recognized myself in what he was saying — it was exactly what I thought, it was me. Suddenly I had no difficulty admitting statements that were the reverse of my usual formulations; the word “God,” all at once, was no longer a problem. I don’t know what made me buy all of that so easily! I like to use the image of the thirty-point shot, as in basketball: everything that was thrown landed in my basket without any difficulty. I was as if turned inside out, like the positive and the negative in photography, with no value judgment on the positive and the negative. I found myself being the inverse of what I was, without thereby ceasing to be myself. I had the very strange feeling of a total reformulation of things, and therefore, in spite of everything, of a very profound revolution.
NV: Still, it is above all intellectually that you are overwhelmed. For the moment, God hasn’t yet got much to do with all this.
YB: I think he does, actually, for I draw no distinction between the intellectual and the spiritual. The intellectual is not, in my view, something one grasps simply with one’s mind; it is an adherence of one’s whole being. Where does the dividing line lie? The intellectual seduction I felt was, from the outset, deeper; it concerned me wholly, and so I define it as spiritual. The spiritual, in a certain way, is simply the intellectual pushed all the way through. Take the phrase “2 + 2 = 4, thank God”: you don’t need “thank God” to understand it. The rationalist stops at 4, before the comma. But without denying this equation — rather, by completing it — one can also have a broader vision of it: there really is something miraculous in the fact that 2 + 2 equals 4! How is this type of rationality possible? One can always go further in one’s questioning, and it is in this that spirituality connects to the intellect.
NV: While listening to P.-H. Salfati, you say to yourself — you write — “Is this what it is to be Jewish? Is this Judaism? But this is me!” What exactly do you feel?
YB: It is, rather, an adherence to a style of questioning, to a general rhythm, rather than to a content about which I had already read a great deal. What I liked was a way of questioning things — at once linguistic, spiritual, intellectual — a general way of being, of going toward things.
NV: Between being seduced by a religion, by an intellectual approach, and converting, there is nevertheless a gap. Was your desire to convert immediate?
YB: It was fairly quick. The intellect, as I’ve already said, plays a fundamental role in my life, so such an intellectual seduction could not remain without effect on my life; it shook my bearings and pushed me toward a general redefinition.
NV: Had you already heard of people who had converted to Judaism?
YB: No, but I made inquiries fairly quickly. I wrote to the Consistoire, which sent me back a terse three-line letter by way of a flat refusal. I could have taken advantage of a sort of special favor for an Orthodox conversion, thanks to a friend who was posted in Budapest, but the idea didn’t appeal to me. So I did a bit of benchmarking, and I finally turned to the Liberal movement. Liberal Judaism has a rather negative image in France; it is seen as a Judaism-lite, a half-measure, something not really serious. So I went toward it without any particular enthusiasm. In retrospect, I measure the weight of the clichés, and how much my place could only have been here. I frequented, on several occasions, various Orthodox circles, and it is obvious that this Judaism could not have suited me, whether in terms of values or of one’s place within society. Orthodox Judaism can be marvelous, can offer a form of fullness, but it is at the price of a social separatism. It cannot function otherwise. Indeed, historically, that is how the Orthodox position took shape in nineteenth-century Germany. As for me, I am a child of the world, I need to travel through every space of society, I could not have lasted very long in that kind of milieu.
NV: You note in your text that this process of conversion came after your mother’s death.
YB: Yes, of course; it is an event such as occurs in everyone’s life, which shakes the usual foundations of life all at once and perhaps makes us more sensitive, which sometimes creates a fault line through which a light passes. But at the same time, I really cannot establish a cause-and-effect link. I do not think my conversion is the answer to a lack, a compensation…
NV: A way, perhaps, of recovering a foundation?
YB: Yes, but then it’s a foundation that isn’t very stable! There exist, I believe, more obvious and easier foundations. I don’t think conversion is a foundation that provides, in a quick and obvious way, compensation for a lack. No, for me it was, I think, a total redefinition.
NV: And your father?
YB: My father — it’s fantastic — he took it in his engineer’s way. He made inquiries about kashrut, he made his little index cards… He was extremely supportive.
NV: You speak of kashrut; religious Judaism is not only an intellectual approach, it also requires observing all sorts of rites, of practices — one must observe the Shabbat…
YB: Yes, of course, but there are nonetheless sliders, between the maximum and nothing at all! At the beginning, I was seized by a real appetite and I observed all of it very seriously; then I did, all the same, evolve in my practice. The rites, as it happens, are indeed very structuring! At the beginning, I put on the tefillin every day; today there are mornings when I don’t. As for kashrut, I adapt. I don’t eat forbidden animals, I don’t mix milk and meat, but neither do I buy food stamped by the Beth Din. I don’t think I was ever in excess, but rather, at the beginning, in the desire to learn. Afterward, there are all sorts of circumstances that make you evolve — family life, the people you spend time with…
NV: After your conversion comes an additional stage, since you will quickly become, within the MJLF, deputy director and then director of the Talmud Torah.
YB: When I joined the MJLF, it’s true that I quickly became active. I have this tropism of being very active in life, so I took on small responsibilities — I led services, I wrote, I taught classes… The president at the time must have noticed that I wasn’t one to drag my feet, and that’s how I became deputy and then director of the Talmud Torah. It was a great change for me, because it was a big position and I was not at all accustomed to that kind of work. I had always been freelance, whether as a screenwriter in cinema or as a creative in marketing, so it was a real challenge. The result is that I spent ten wonderful years; I fully realized myself in that position, beyond anything I could have imagined.
NV: To direct the Talmud Torah is to have responsibility for religious teaching. Did your name never pose a problem in that context?
YB: It’s true that my name arouses curiosity; Boissière doesn’t sound very Jewish. And Yann even less so, for that matter! But in the end I had rather few remarks, at least in my presence. Behind my back, perhaps — which I couldn’t care less about. If I’m asked the question, I’ve learned to answer it as directly as possible. Besides, I don’t necessarily find it to be an unhealthy curiosity. In any case, it’s my life, it’s my path, I’m not going to reinvent my history.
NV: This issue of Plurielles is about “The Jews and the others.” By virtue of being a convert, of coming from elsewhere, do you feel today entirely inside Judaism, or always a little other, both inside and outside?
YB: I came from elsewhere, and of course I always have this software in my head. I have my own definition of Judaism, my own feeling as a Jew, a very idiosyncratic feeling, fairly original, I believe. And in fact, within Jewish communities or Jewish discussions, I find that I have a horizon perhaps broader than the average person’s, precisely because I come from that elsewhere. I know what people who are in another system of thought can think. This is the case in particular on a subject such as antisemitism, which is unfortunately very topical, in renewed forms. But I do not give in to certain failings I have observed in certain Jewish circles — namely, that any lack of interest or any misunderstanding derives from antisemitism. No, that’s not true; it’s simply that people don’t give a damn, or that they don’t know. And that I know, if only by taking as my reference my parents, who were cultivated and benevolent people. But to return to the question: I did not become Jewish in opposition to what I was before. I have kept within me this field of alterity; it is part of my personality and I experience it, rather, as a strength.
NV: Becoming a rabbi is — if I may say so — yet another kettle of fish.
YB: It’s true that I pushed the button very hard! It’s also true that the question came up very quickly. Since I was investing a great deal, since I had a certain knowledge, a certain dynamism, very quickly I was told: “You have to be a rabbi.” I refused for a long time, in the name of a certain idea of freedom; for me, a rabbi must, after all, embody a kind of model, and I feared that this would restrict my freedom. I said to myself, “And if I feel like going clubbing at 3 in the morning with friends — as a rabbi, I won’t be able to do that anymore!” — or other situations, all rather fantasized, for it’s the kind of leisure I haven’t really practiced. And then, all the same, it kept coming back, and after ten years in that wonderful position at the Talmud Torah, one day it became obvious. Because it meant a continuity, a deepening; it was an additional responsibility and, of course, a fairly radical change of status. In the ecosystem of Judaism, the rabbi is the one who holds the authority. This is something I had already had occasion to observe, and which, moreover, troubled me. When a rabbi says something not always supremely intelligent, the pull of authority is so strong that people listen to him. There is a phrase by the psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller that goes: “It’s amazing how much people need to suppose that someone knows.” For me, to be a rabbi, in a deeper sense, is to be the guarantor of the community’s spiritual evolution. People come to you, it is to you that problems and questions are submitted, and it is your role to settle them. Fortunately, there are three of us rabbis in this community, and we can also count on the board of directors.
NV: And then, in 2015, you found the association Les Voix de la paix (The Voices of Peace). Wasn’t it enough for you to be a rabbi?
YB: The community is something very absorbing, humanly very strong, very dense, but the danger is to become somewhat a prisoner of it; this is true even in communities very open to the city, like this one. Always this matter of freedom and this need for broad horizons… And then came 2015, and the context of attacks, of post-attacks, of a difficult community climate. I wondered what I could do, and I had the idea of founding this inter-conviction association — that is, one that brings together all the religions, all the spiritualities, and beyond them philosophers, people from the business world. We are not only in the symmetry of the rabbi, the priest and the imam. Everything I do, of course, I do as a rabbi, but there is a great difference between being merely the rabbi of a community and, as a rabbi, going to speak about problems of ecology, of business, or of women’s rights. The contexts are different, the audiences are different, and so the spectrum is much broader.
NV: One often hears that Judaism doesn’t have much to do with faith…
YB: It’s a somewhat peremptory thing to say, but it’s not inaccurate. It is the great genius — so poorly understood in Western culture — of the Law, on the subject of which I have, by the way, written a book. The Law, without my being able to enter into all the complexities of the subject, is, almost in the psychoanalytic sense, that which establishes limits to thought, limits to being. Not everything is possible. The Law — and this, moreover, is a principle of spiritualities in general — erects the limit as a constructive principle. We find this idea even in the word “holiness,” whose root means separation, that is to say, again, limit. Judaism was the first to have the intuition that it is limits that give the price of life, the value of the human. There is a thinker, one of the forebears of the thought of Moses Mendelssohn, who puts it very well: “Judaism is not a revealed faith, it is a revealed law.” He also demonstrates how much the law grants an infinite freedom of thought. On the social plane, limits give rise to rites, to practices. A rite — what is it, if not a technique for arranging to meet people so that they do things together? Therein lies its strength. And that is why many people can be within a Jewish sociality without necessarily adhering to a whole system of thought. There are people who come to the synagogue simply because they are happy to find other Jews. That kind of belonging seems to me, in truth, more important than a faith defined in terms of adherence to a precise content, over which people tear each other apart on the subject of this or that detail, or this or that interpretation.